White Bodies(35)

“How?”

“Are you free this weekend? Do you want to come and do some gardening?”

“What? With you?”

“Of course with me. . . . Do you have Wellington boots?”

“Yep.”

He leaves and I’m astounded by the turn of events, amazed that Wilf hasn’t written me off. I look at Daphne, and she looks at me. “Don’t get excited,” I say. And she starts whistling the tune of “Love Is in the Air.”

“I had no idea that you can whistle.”

“I had no idea you could garden.”

? ? ?

On Saturday Wilf drives to my flat and picks me up. His car is a beaten-up Volkswagen, splattered with mud. He removes some old newspapers, cardboard coffee cups and other detritus from the passenger seat and tosses them into the back, where gardening equipment is piled up—spades, forks, trowels and bags of compost and gravel—and I get into the passenger seat. It’s a hot day, and I’ve dressed for gardening in an old cotton shirt with faded blue flowers on it, and shorts that used to be pink but have faded in the wash so that they’re kind of pig-colored. And, as instructed, Wellington boots.

“I like the way the car smells of dirt.” I smile, so he knows I’m not being sarcastic.

“I love dirt.” He grins back and glances down at my pale thighs, which are very much on show in the passenger seat. I look at them too, and wonder whether they could conceivably be thought luscious, rather than just big.

We arrive at the gates of a whitewashed mansion on Bishops Avenue, all pillars and portico. Wilf has to tap in a code for the ironwork gate, which opens electronically.

“I reckon the inside is made of marble and gold,” I say.

“You’re not far wrong. Big marble floor.”

“Russian oligarch?”

“Nope . . . Middle Eastern diplomat.”

Wilf says the garden is in the “preparation stage,” which means that we should spend our time cutting and clearing and digging. It’s heavy work, and I enjoy the physicality of pushing the spade in deep and shoveling out great mounds of black earth, which I sift with my fingers, pulling out weeds and bits of rubbish, and I’m reminded of the day, long ago, when I found the sheep skull buried under the bush. I want to tell Wilf about it but can’t find the words, and all I manage is: “There’s a whole world down here. Weeds and roots and snails—actually I’ve got a monster of a weed here, I’m not sure I can get it out.” Wilf comes over to help and digs all around my horrendous weed, then together we pull on it as hard as we can until it comes loose. Wilf throws it onto our pile of debris, takes a deep breath and says, “There’s nothing more sexy than a gorgeous woman covered in dirt and sweat, wrestling with the undergrowth.” I smile, and he goes back to his area of the garden while I watch a robin alight on a branch next to me, then dart down to snatch a worm.

Mostly, Wilf doesn’t talk while he works; he just stomps up and down the garden with bundles of sticks and branches, clearing out a corner in preparation for planting, and I’m struck by how, in life, he resembles so closely my daydreams of him: long strides, rolled-up sleeves, beads of sweat on his forehead. When we stop for a break, we sit on a low wall, passing his flask of tea back and forth, and he’s brought a packet of Hobnob biscuits. He congratulates me on my digging and talks about his plans for the garden, showing me a design sketched out in pencil on a creased piece of paper that he keeps in the back pocket of his khaki shorts. Somehow our conversation turns to Tilda.

“Are you still worried about her?”

I start to say no, but then spoil it: “Do you know how many women are murdered by their partners? It’s two a week. It’s normal.”

“You can’t seriously think Tilda’s going to be murdered?”

“No . . . but . . .”

He gives me no chance to elaborate, saying: “Grab your spade and get digging.”

Everything is fine in Wilf-world, and I go along with his positive mood, digging madly. I work up a rhythm for breaking the soil, forking and raking and sifting, and become immersed—enjoying too the sideshow of the robin, endlessly looking for something to kill. But after an hour I’m exhausted, and Wilf tells me to rest while he finishes up. “Let’s adjourn to the pub,” he says. “As a reward.” So we drive to the Albany.

It’s less crowded this time, and we sit side by side on a bench at a corner table, two manual workers with soil everywhere, under our nails, in our hair, all over our legs—it even feels gritty inside my mouth. “Is that it until next weekend?” I ask. “Or do you go back in the evenings?”

“I have a team.” He shrugs as if to say, It’s no big deal. But I’m amazed.

“A team! Like you’re an employer? Already an entrepreneur . . .” I feel myself shrink inside. If he’s this successful, why is he interested in me?

“Well, it’s two Romanian guys who work on contract,” he says. “And I go there most evenings to check that we’re on schedule, and to set the program for the next day. It’s a competitive environment—too many people doing what I do, and too few customers. But if you’re good, you can make it work.”

“How do you convince people to take you on?”

“Word of mouth mainly. I’m bad at the admin side, though, following up payments, sorting out the contracts . . .”