The Knot. Jane Borodale

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СКАЧАТЬ about the crooked tooth that juts out a little over her lip, though it is the kind of countenance that will not age well, and of course he knew her mother. He prefers to hire local girls like her, they stay for longer, ask fewer questions, and he doesn’t think she can have heard anything of what happened. The misunderstanding will all simmer down and be forgotten. He hopes that Frances herself will never hear what people have said of him. It is just a matter of time. People forget so easily; memories are flimsy, friable things that get buried and mulch down into the past like vegetation. A few will stick, of course, inevitably. His memory of what happened is already concentrated to a few sparse images that he cannot shake off. One can be forgiven for forgetting a detail here or there – even though details, the little unimportant daily things amassed together over time, are what makes up most of living. What does his own life add up to, he suddenly wonders. In forty years, a hundred years, three hundred, what will be left of him?

      He recalls a distinct, disturbing sensation he had once in his early days as a student a long time ago, in one of Oxford’s many bathing houses. It was not the sort of place that he was to frequent very often, but he was a young man missing home, missing his mother, and had gone for comfort, a little bit of human warmth that could be bought straightforwardly with sixpence.

      A pretty doxy by the name of Martha was rubbing at his back with oil, plying her knuckles to his spine, to the very bones inside his muscles, and smoothing backwards and forwards across his shoulders in a shape like a figure of eight, her breathing ragged with exertion. There was a good savour of flowers or resin all around. Afterwards she was friendly to him, and didn’t seem to mind that he had fallen asleep.

      ‘How was that?’ she’d asked, prodding him gently and pouring a drink from the jug. He’d thought carefully, yawned and sat up. He examined the back of his hands, turned them over as if seeing them for the first time.

      ‘It was like … being rubbed out,’ he’d said eventually. It was the only way to put it.

      ‘Out?’ she’d queried, her brow wrinkling up as if she hadn’t heard this one before, and pouring herself a measure too, just to take the edge off. She had a busy night lined up.

      ‘Like being erased,’ he’d said, ‘quite worn away into nothing. No trace of me left at all, not a bump or ridge to show I’d existed.’ As if it were his history that was being smoothly abolished with her accumulating, efficient strokes, in just half an hour. He had an image of himself face down in the earth, being slowly flattened and absorbed into its clayish mass, and it had felt inevitable, nothing out of the ordinary, as though this was what happened to everyone. Which it does in the end, of course, for who gets remembered? Almost all of us go back to the earth to be worn away into nothing again.

      She hadn’t laughed, he recalls, but pursed her lips as though it was not at all the answer that she’d wanted. She stood pinning up her curls and ducking in front of the polished plate that served as a glass to catch her reflection. ‘You should go to church more if you want that kind of talk.’

      ‘I don’t mean my soul,’ he protested, confused that she was so offended. ‘I mean my presence on this earth as we know it.’ But she had a customer waiting, he could hear his shoes scraping outside on the boards, and she’d gone to the door and held it ajar for him to depart.

      Chapter IV.

      Of CELANDINE. The small celandine bringeth forth his fleure betimes, about the return of Swalowes in the end of Februarie. It remayneth flouring even untill Aprill, and after it doth so vanish away.

      IT HAD BEEN SHORTLY AFTER THE DEATH OF ANYS that he’d begun planning his Knot garden in earnest. On paper at first, endless sketches and discarded ideas that he would pore over by candlelight in the evening when it was too dark to see anything outside. He made occasional visits to costly gardens in London, and drew on recollections of aromatic, unattainable gardens in Europe that he’d seen as a youth. The ground itself here needed preparation. There was a lot of dross to get rid of on the site, including a defunct fallen-down building where his father had reared pigs before the new sties were built. This was removed, piece by crumbling, splintery piece. It is always surprising how small the footprint of a demolished building appears. How could so little space have enclosed so much?

      ‘Much faster to take down a building than to put one up,’ one of the labourers had informed him, as though Henry had no sense of practical matters. It took little more than an afternoon to do. There was a lot of other debris to clear away, an old trough, piles of inexplicable rotting logs and branches, crawling beneath with worms and woodlice.

      ‘Look at that. A garden is teeming, isn’t it,’ Henry had said, brimming with cheerful purpose in the fresh air, as he squatted to examine a yellow centipede, rippling in kinks against the damp earth. ‘The very stuff of life itself.’

      ‘If you’re lucky,’ his gardener Tobias Mote remarked, straining to lift something into the barrow to take to the bonfire. Henry looked at him to check he was joking. ‘Seeing as the job of nature is to feed on death.’

      Sometimes Henry wishes that Mote’s voice wasn’t so dry, so opposite to what he hopes for.

      The pegging-out of the borders and the Knot, however, had been one of the most exciting moments so far in this process. The simplicity of unwinding each ball of twine in the hand and walking backwards, squinting, squaring up and measuring sideways with the feet, pushing in the stake like a New World explorer with his claim. Mote worked alongside him, scratching his head, making unhelpful, tardy suggestions where none was wanted, because everything was decided now in terms of form and symmetry. The garden was like a grid for days from the upper windows before they took the twine away, making last-minute adjustments to the guidelines they’d whitewashed. It was a sheer delight to see it stretched out down there. What had existed previously only on a small piece of paper as the final meticulous inked plan for the structure has now been unravelled from inside his head, squared up and made manifest.

      Now he has the shape out there, but what he will plant is still to be decided upon. Roses, definitely roses. He also has a master plan for content, and marks in his choice of plants and herbs as they occur to him. This plan by contrast is chaotic, filled with crossing-out and scribbled re-inking. He paces about outside making mental lists to write up later, checking up on the bricklayers putting up the new walls course by course which will shelter his tender specimens from the winter harshnesses that they will have to suffer, looking over the work of the men he has hired in for the week because there is more digging than he and Mote can manage if they are to get it over with in time for planting. Today the four of them work steadily across the earmarked areas; Thom Pearson from over at Tuck’s Cary Manor just a stone’s throw from the stables here, William the oldest son of Hunt of Podimore who leases the windmill, Ralph Let, and some other man from Devon who was passing through and had asked for work.

      ‘Lucky to get Ralph,’ Tobias Mote says with a wink. ‘He’s good at that, being parish gravedigger he’s had a lot of practice, brings his own spade, just never mind what that spade iron’s gone through; very full that graveyard is, a lot of folk dead these days, begging your pardon. Just don’t turn your back on him – he’d nimble you in.’ Mote laughs with his face like a weasel’s, his eyes closed to slits.

      The diggers have broken the persistent turf all down what will be the raised border. It’s coming along. To anyone else the scene looks like chaos, but Henry Lyte is beginning to have it all mapped out in his mind’s eye, the raised square beds, the enclosing walls, the espaliers, the roses, the medicinal herber. And close to the house, this garden will have at its heart a perfect Knot; green, intricate, fragrant, a convergence of senses.

      Henry is not in favour of the kind of closed Knot currently fashionable that he has seen so many times in London, laid out to weedless, barren segments of coloured sand СКАЧАТЬ