Chapter 1: Clearing the Ground

My new old anorak did not sit quite right. The guy in the charity shop had got me to cross my arms to ensure I had enough room, but it just did not feel like the anorak I had worn with such pride for so long. Not, of course, that I had worn the same garment for twenty or so years, but they all fitted in the same way, and they all bore the logo of ‘Brown’s Landscape Gardeners’.

It was handing over the old coat that had finally brought things home to me: I had been sacked, fired, booted out, given the elbow. I had joined the company straight from university, working alongside Charles Brown the founder, chief designer and sole owner. He had a reputation for being impossible to work with; a guy I knew who graduated the year before me lasted less than six months. I replaced him but not before another candidate had tried and failed.

I think the reason I succeeded was that Charles reminded me of my grandfather. Gramps was a martinet who lost his temper if he was opposed over the least thing. Over the years, I developed a strategy of ignoring his outbursts while persisting in what I was doing. Gramps would tell dad to do a job in a particular way, dad would argue, and the job would be left undone. When gramps told me how to do something, I nodded in agreement and then went off and did the job the way I had originally planned. Gramps never once commented on this, and the jobs got done.

Much the same method was effective with Charles, except that he would comment, with a chuckle, when I outwitted him in this way.

“I wish I could afford to sack you, Bill,” he would laugh when he had, yet again, accepted my proposal. “But you’re like family. What is it they say? You can choose your friends, but you’re stuck with your relatives.”

Only I was not family, although for a long time that did not seem to be important. When Charles finally retired, I was appointed chief garden designer, although everyone knew that I had been doing the job for years as the old man’s health failed. He had no children of his own and he often told me, especially when I had completed a big contract, that I was the son he never had and that he would see me right when he was gone. Sadly, it proved to be nothing but idle talk: when he died, he left everything to nieces, nephews and assorted cousins, most of whom he had told me he hated.

None of them had much interest in the business of landscape gardening except as a source of income. I was not unduly worried, because I had been receiving tempting offers from rival firms for the past fifteen years. When the family took over the business, I agreed to stay on until they found their feet. What they found instead was a buyer who quickly decided that I was surplus to requirements. I was not unduly worried: there were, after all, those tempting offers of jobs from our rivals and, if the worst happened, there was also substantial redundancy pay to come.

My wife took a less sanguine view; when I told her I was sacked, she left, pausing only to empty our bank accounts. We had been saving the deposit for a house of our own, an uphill task because of her fondness for shopping sprees. I was left with no savings, nothing in the current account and with rent due in less than a week. She proved a better judge than I; none of the rival companies were hiring in the aftermath of Covid-19. They all made extravagant promises for the future, once things were back to normal, but I needed bread today not jam tomorrow.

By the time I met the new managing director today, I was reduced to calculating my redundancy pay and whether it would carry me through until my prospects improved. I hung up my company anorak on his hat stand and took a seat across from him at his desk.

“You’ve only been with the company for six months, Bill,” he began, smiling rather like a shark finding himself in a swimming pool full of bathers. “We owe you ninety-five pounds in redundancy, although we’ve rounded it up to a hundred.” It was not difficult for him to read my face. “I suppose you were expecting more, but you’ll have to take that up with the previous owners. So far as we’re concerned you have been with us for half a year.”

I was leaving, stunned, reaching for my anorak when he told me to leave it where it was. I went out into the January chill, coatless, wifeless and penniless. The man in the charity shop was very helpful, going into their storeroom to find garments for me to try on. I was almost ashamed of myself for selecting an anorak that, but for the logo, could have been the one still hanging on the manager’s coat stand. I had a fleeting thought that it might already have been pushed into a bin, surplus to requirements like its previous wearer.

Should I have made a bold selection, perhaps a trench coat with a belt, to mark the opportunity presented to me? The problem was that I had been happy in my work. I had not sought, nor did I want, the opportunity that had been thrust upon me. I was more than a little disappointed in the reaction of my wife, but even there I would rather have her back than face living alone. I settled for my identical anorak, thinking it was appropriate that it should be priced at thirteen unlucky pounds.

She had told me often enough, in our years together, to be more assertive. If I had been any kind of man, I suppose I would have headed for the station and spent the reminder of my redundancy on a ticket to - well, to somewhere that was not here, at least to start with. What I did instead was to trudge the familiar route from the company office to my flat, stopping as was my habit, to look at the market stalls selling flowers, fruit and vegetables. My cat would be hungry, and I was conscious of the fact that she was all that was left to me. It was not lost on me that the animal showed me very little affection, demanding food and shelter, while offering an occasional disdainful rub against my leg in return.

On one stall there was a plastic bag of hay for rabbits that was in danger of falling and my action in replacing it attracted the attention of the stallholder.

“Hands off,” she growled. She is a woman about my age, mid-forties, warmly dressed but disgruntled and looking, somehow, disheveled. “If you’re not going to buy the goods, leave them alone.”

I considered correcting her, explaining that I was only trying to help, but I decided it was hardly worth the effort, so I turned away with a wry smile to be confronted by a smartly dressed older lady who was grinning at me in a friendly way. She continued smiling but a little frown of concentration appeared on her otherwise smooth forehead. ‘Botox’, I thought.

“Do you remember me?” Her brow smoothed once again as she solved the puzzle.

“How could I forget such a charming, kindly person?”

“I was a total bitch to you, wasn’t I?” she chuckled.

About fifteen years before, I laid out the garden of a newly built mansion in a village about ten kilometres out of town. She was the trophy wife of the owner, and she was, as she said, a total bitch. The strange thing was that she targeted me; with the other guys in the team, she was demanding but fair. She would even allow them to use the downstairs cloakroom in the house; I had to hold on or hide behind one of the bushes we were planting.

“The problem was that I quite fancied you, and I was trying hard to stay faithful to that bastard I was married to at the time.”

Was she really saying that she would have made a pass at me if she had let me into the house to do a pee? I smiled at her again, this time genuinely amused.

“It worked too. I made my first million when I divorced him a couple of years later. Most of the money was tied up in that monstrous house, of course.” She now looked wistful.

“I was ready to have a fling, but you oozed integrity. If I had let you into my knickers, you’d have insisted on marrying me and, frankly, you couldn’t afford me.”

I seem to attract the nutters. She wanted me to believe that she could not treat me decently in case she lost control of herself and ravaged me. Pull the other leg, sweetheart, it has bells on it!

She stood lost in thought for some time, her eyes focused on something beyond the visible range. I wanted to get back to my cat, but there was no clear way out without risking the wrath of the stallholder by knocking against her precious display. She still had the thoughtful look when she returned from wherever her spirit had strayed to look at me again.

“Let me buy you a drink, for old times’ sake.”

She was smiling at me again. I had been remembering her: it was an autumn planting, and the weather was warm and dry after a summer of almost continuous wet weather. She spent most of her time inside until we completed the patio decking, after which she spent most of her time lying on a garden chaise or bending over to smell the flowers in the tubs we were placing around the periphery. Her normal attire was tight, brief shorts and a bikini top.

She was certainly a looker, with a figure that would have got a response from a marble statue. Now she was wrapped up against the chill of the January day, but her face was still small and elfin.

“No! Let me take you to dinner. I’ve eighty-seven quid left in the whole world, and I want to blow it before I go home to my damned cat. I don’t suppose you’re looking for a lazy, arrogant cat to boss you around?”

“I’m intrigued,” she laughed, taking my arm and leading me towards the hotel that dominated the Market Place. “I’m Belle, by the way.”

She threw that information over her shoulder as we entered the dining room where we were met by Gerry’s daughter, Jill or Jenny, or some name like that. He was one of the team when I joined the firm, a totally trustworthy worker without an ounce of initiative. He has made me his idol since I insisted on keeping him on the team when the nieces and cousins tried to introduce a youth policy.

“Oh Bill, dad was gutted at what happened. He’s talking about getting up a petition for you. All the staff will sign it,” she gushed, as she helped Belle out of her fashionable coat, taking the discarded gloves and scarf. I was taking off my new, second-hand anorak revealing steel-toed work boots, khaki work pants and a long-sleeved woolen, plaid shirt, my normal winter working gear.

Belle’s figure, now revealed in a woolen dress stopping well above the knee, was every bit as good as I remembered. Jenny, as she chatted to me, showed us to a table; Belle and I looked like an illustration for Beauty and the Beast. Settled at the table, my companion took charge. We would have water while we considered the menu, Jenny; this was said with a warm smile at our waitress, adding that we needed to study the wine list.

“This needs careful thought,” she said, scowling at the menu. “When we knew each other before, I was so impetuous, but now I’m very conservative, ultra careful. We’ll plan the menu to keep it under eighty pounds; that will give us some leeway in case they put extra on the bill for sauces or peas – you know what they’re like.”

She was ready to order when Jenny returned with a bottle of water and two glasses.

“Bill will have the sirloin steak – men always love steak,” she confided in Jenny. “I’ll have the chicken - I’ve got my figure to consider,” she added, turning to me and thrusting her impressive bust out in case I had failed to notice it. “And we’ll just have a carafe of the house rose.”

After Jenny had left to pass the order to the chef, Belle whispered to me that the house wine came out the same barrel they charge twice as much for in a bottle with a fake label.

“Right! Jenny’s dad is gutted at something that happened to you, something that left you with nothing but eighty pounds and a cat – is it a good mouser? Your shoulders slumped when my idiot child Cherry growled at you for picking up the bag of hay. I want the whole story, Bill.”

“It’s eighty-seven quid and I don’t think the cat would recognise a mouse, unless it appeared as the logo on a tin of cat food,” I sighed. “So, what do you want to know?”

Belle proved to be a good listener, making appropriate noises from time to time but otherwise allowing me to talk uninterrupted. In normal times, I am the one doing the listening, making the odd interjection. Whether it is customers needing reassurance on the project or staff with a personal problem, I am there, solid, reliable Bill, his own life free from angst but wise enough to understand the worries of others.

This evening, from the moment the soup was placed in front of me until the bill had been presented, I talked about myself. I talked about my years of study, even confiding that my ambition was to develop hybrid plants that suited the clay soil of the neighbourhood. The job with Brown’s was, I admitted, never intended to be permanent. I knew the reputation that Charles enjoyed but all I needed was a stake so I could survive while I followed my dream. I explained to Belle that my experience with Gramps made me confident that I could survive the worst that Charles could throw at me.

“It was good practice for dealing with difficult customers,” I grinned at her; she grinned back, but did not interrupt.

Then I met Hazel, wooing her with castles in the air built out of my dreams of fame and fortune. I obviously did not make it sufficiently clear to her that I was looking far into the future. Hazel agreed to marry me and immediately began demanding the promised riches. At first, she was content to nag me to push for pay rises, but she soon settled for spending what I earned, leaving me to handle the supply of money.

I wanted a cottage with two or three children running in and out amongst the hybrid plants that I had developed. We could not, as Hazel pointed out, have the children until we had the cottage, and we could not have the cottage until we had saved the deposit. We agreed a target of fifty thousand but, every time we got within a few thousand, she discovered some essential that depleted our savings. Our married life was spent in more or less shabby, rented flats.

Hazel hated to live in squalor, and I was good with my hands, so I spent most of my spare time making the flats habitable. Early in our marriage, I had a council allotment where I experimented with crossbreeding, but I had to give it up when Charles began making heavier demands on my time. He did not increase my wages in line with the extra responsibility I was carrying. Looking back, I can now see that it was at that time he began telling me I was like a son to him and would benefit after he was gone.

“He was an old goat,” Belle said, when I paused to ease my throat with a glass of wine. “He wanted me to move in with him, but he was offering nothing in return. All those nieces and female cousins he took into the firm had to pay for their jobs by servicing the old satyr.”

I knew or suspected that he had the morals of an alley cat, but I thought that there was a clear distinction between his lusts and his business. I knew he would say anything to a woman to get her into bed with him, and yet I believed him when he as good as told me that the business would be mine after he died. Why I believed that a man thoroughly dishonest in his private life would keep his business promises, I cannot imagine, but I did believe it.

Hazel saw through him, of course, but by that time our marriage was a sham. When she stopped nagging me about Charles, I suspected that it was because she had become his latest conquest, but I no longer cared. I had become numb. I went on working and saving although at some level I recognised that children were no longer an option and even the cottage was receding into the distance. As for my ambition to breed new plants, all that was left was a pile of notebooks, unopened for years, gathering dust at the back of my wardrobe.

Covid-19 ended Charles’ career as a Don Juan, his will leaving everything to his blood relatives, many of whom were or had been his mistresses, although there were a couple of nephews included. I took a massive pay cut and worked long hours to build up the business once the vaccine let us all return to work. There were plenty, including Jenny’s dad, who warned me that the nieces and cousins were looking for a buyer for the business. I was too busy to pay attention to the warnings.

Six months ago, when I was complacently admiring a full order book, Charles junior, one of the cousins, sidled into my office, flushed and inarticulate, to announce that the business had been sold to an investment company. My job, he assured me, was not in danger. However, he added, they would no longer be able to restore my full salary as they had promised to do when we were fully operational. The new managing director heard my case with great sympathy. They were conducting a thorough review of our operations, and my salary would be one of the first items on the agenda. Meanwhile, he was sure I would understand; my choice was to go on as I was or quit.

Then on Monday, I got home to find a torn envelope on the floor just inside the door and a letter discarded on the kitchen table. It was from the company solicitor terminating my employment. My last day would be Friday, when I should call on the general manager at ten o’clock to discuss redundancy payments. I should clear my desk before then, removing any personal items.

“They really stitched you up, didn’t they?” Belle reached across the table and gave my hands a friendly squeeze. “What did you do? What did your wife do?”

Hazel had already done. After she read the letter, she stayed in the flat long enough to pack everything of value. The neighbours told me that she had left in a Brown’s van about an hour after the mail had been delivered. From the description, Charles junior had been driving the van, and Hazel’s affectionate welcome suggested that he had inherited more than the business from his randy uncle. It was not until the following day, when my debit card was refused, that I learned they had paused their flight long enough to empty all the bank accounts.

While we were waiting for pudding to be served, I excused myself.

“I have to use the toilet – unless you still insist that I go outside and use a bush.”

“Oh God I remember that! I wouldn’t let you use the cloakroom – what a bitch!”

We were laughing together when I left the table. Belle was having a whispered conversation with our waitress when I returned; they stopped as soon as they saw me, with Jenny squeezing my arm in a comforting way as she returned to the kitchen. From then until the end of the meal, I told stories of gardens I had redesigned, especially the occasions when the owners were a bit hard to please.

“So, I wasn’t the only difficult customer,” Belle said, with an exaggerated sigh of relief.

“You were certainly the most memorable.”

The bill was for seventy-eight pounds, since Jenny had given us the bottle of water free of charge. It seemed only fair to leave her the other nine quid as a tip. I pulled out a handful of change from my trouser pocket, amounting to about a fiver, when we were walking out of the restaurant, to prove that I really was broke. Belle had insisted that we move to the lounge bar for coffee and liqueurs at her expense.

“I’ve a proposition for you,” Belle said as soon as we were settled on a curved bench seat in a quiet corner of the bar. “I’m the matriarch of a clan of women and we need a man. And you can get that gleam out your eye, Bill, for we only need you for work. You’ll have to make your own arrangements on how you spend your nights.”

I gestured to the space between us where she had piled her coat, scarf and handbag. I have noticed before how good women are at insinuating a physical barrier, gently warning a man to keep his distance. Belle nodded and smiled.

“I was widowed a little over two years ago, inheriting a huge Victorian farmhouse, two smaller houses, twenty chalets and a market garden. The gift didn’t come unencumbered: I have four middle-aged women and up to four useless men that are included in the deal. That stall where I accosted you sells our produce. Cherry, the woman who growled at you, is my younger twin daughter – and she’s probably the nicest of the four.”

She had been smiling, making light of the information, but now her brow furrowed. I revised my opinion on the use of Botox – Belle really does look younger than her years. She stared into space for several minutes before she swallowed her drink, signaling the waiter for refills, although I had done no more than sip my Glayva liqueur whisky. It was only after she had drunk half of the new glass that she settled to her tale.

Her husband had sold most of his farm for housing development, building holiday chalets in and around a copse of mature trees bordering a little trout lake. He had enjoyed growing things, so he also kept a few hectares close to the house which he cultivated as a market garden. As his health failed, he was less able to care for the ground and Belle took over the running of his business interests, including the garden.

“His last wish, on the morning he died, was to see the plants. It was spring and everything was thrusting back into life – everything but him, the poor old sod.”

Belle had to stop for a time to dab at the tears that had filled her eyes. There was a fierce look in her eyes when she eventually turned to me: “I saw the garden before he became ill, and I want you – I need you – to make it look like that again.”

“Hazel and I visited a stately home once, a long time ago when we were still trying to make a go of things. They had restored the house, but I had tears in my eyes when I saw their herb garden. You could still see the structure, but it had been neglected. It was like a seeing a once beautiful woman with her hair in tangles and her make-up smeared.”

“I knew you would understand!” Belle had her hands clasped and a look of joy on her face.

While her husband was still alive, her daughter Cherry turned up seeking sanctuary after her marriage failed. It was to be a temporary stay but, four years on, she was still there. She ran the market stall, Belle said, as penance for losing the driver, whatever that meant. Angie, the older twin, turned up at the funeral with her husband in tow, insisting that he be made the steward. They had moved into what had been the house of the farm manager.

Belle had been drinking steadily as she talked, although she had stopped buying for me since I was still sipping my first, with the second glass sitting untouched. It had surprised her when she was named the sole heir in the old farmer’s will.

“There was almost twenty years difference in our ages, but I loved him, you see. That was the thing that seemed so unlikely to everyone who knew me, but it was true. He had integrity and a kind of wisdom. He was shrewd in his judgement of people, but he never condemned them – not even me, although God knows I deserved it.”

She emptied her glass, called for another and drank half of that before she continued.

“I didn’t marry him for love, but I learned to love him. I still miss the old bugger, every single day.” She held up the half-empty glass and flourished it at me: “This doesn’t help but it scrambles my brains enough to let me sleep.”

It took a trip to the loo and another sip of whisky by me before she continued her story. Her husband’s daughters from an earlier marriage attended the reading of the will and made it clear that they were unhappy with the outcome. They were sitting tight-lipped until Angie demanded the post of steward for her Graham, at which point Audrey, the older daughter, lost her temper and there was an unseemly cat fight in the presence of the lawyers and a few more distant relatives. I could picture the scene, with them all sitting around the dining table. I imagined the room, paneled in dark wood, perhaps rather dank since it would seldom be used.

Belle would be sitting there in her widow’s weeds stunned as much by the realisation that she had loved the man they had just buried as by her grief at his passing. Ranged alongside her, the twin girls, presenting an image of their mother as a long-suffering angel who had devoted her best years caring for a sick, elderly man. Of course, she deserved to inherit everything. On the other side of the table would have been his daughters, representing their father as a gentle nurturing man who believed that blood relationships mattered more than anything. Belle, in their opinion, must have bullied and coerced him into disinheriting his daughters.

I had to make that up because Belle cut straight to the chase. She somehow got everyone at the will reading cooled down enough to listen to reason. Now the drink was taking effect, and it was no longer easy to follow the story which had become more than a little rambling. Her telling argument was that an open dispute would enrich the lawyers, leaving both families broke; the four younger women agreed to compromise. All I was clear about was that the elder of the farmer’s children lived with her stepmother and step sister in the farmhouse, while the younger daughter with her husband lived in a dower house about half a mile from the farm.

Belle was clear enough on the qualities of the two husbands: they were neither use nor ornament, in her opinion. She could, she assured me, have forgiven them for knowing nothing about farming, but they should have been capable of doing simple maintenance on the properties. She was spending cash on an outside firm to care for and manage the holiday chalets, when there were men enough about the place to do everything that was needed. Cherry had been flitting from one worthless boyfriend to another since she settled with them while Audrey had become besotted with the lad she fancied at school thirty-five years before.

Describing the men hovering on the periphery of her life, exhausted Belle. She staggered to her feet and announced that she would take me to the farm there and then to see things for myself. I made the counter proposal that she should take a room for the night to sleep off the excess alcohol in her system. It was then that I became aware that my glasses of malt whisky were empty, and I was struggling to articulate some quite ordinary words. Whatever the reason, I am unable to account for what happened next.

One of us decided that Belle should accompany me to my flat; we both agreed that it was essential to go there to feed the cat. The following morning, I awoke in my sleeping bag on an air mattress on the living room floor. I sometimes slept rough when I was designing a garden, so setting up a camp while drunk was something I had done before. My first view, when I opened my bleary eyes, was an extensive vision of Belle, dressed in my one really good shirt, reaching up to get a jar of instant coffee from my kitchen cupboard. There was only enough in the jar for two rather watery cups of coffee which I suppose is why Hazel overlooked it. Belle is over sixty, but she has a great pair of legs.

“How can you live like this?” she wanted to know, when she turned to offer me the cup.

I did not answer, partly because I could think of no justification but mostly because there were quite a lot of buttons undone on my shirt when she turned towards me, showing that the upper slopes of her breasts were almost as sexy as her legs. When I finally looked high enough to see her eyes, they were twinkling. I would have to be very, very careful not to let the symbolism of this moment become my new reality.

I was on the floor, dressed only in yesterday’s boxer shorts, with a sexy older woman standing over me in a dominant position, dressed to excite the basest instincts of the human male. I was in danger of being towed hither and yon by my prick, and Belle was complacently aware of her power.

“Let’s get out of here, Bill. I’d rather not eat here, even if there was something to eat, which I seriously doubt. I haven’t met her, but I promise you that you’re better off without your sluttish wife. Even Cherry’s room is cleaner than this and she’s a slob.”

While I was shaving, I considered that statement. It was true that Hazel had never been house-proud, but I had not noticed just how much things had slipped in recent years. The clean pants I found in my drawer were frayed at the hems, just like everything else I owned; I put the boxer’s I had worn the previous day straight into the bin. I would have liked to do the same with all my other undergarments, but I remembered that I had no money to buy replacements. I had checked the day before, finding that charity shops do not sell second-hand boxer shorts.

I had been secretly hoping that the cat would go for a stroll while I left the flat for the last time. It had clearly sensed something and, suspecting that its own easy life might be threatened, it had shown unusual affection since we staggered into the house drunk the night before. Belle was happy enough to take the animal, remarking that while it would probably be another useless mouth to feed, at least it was smaller than the men hanging around the farm.

She waited in her car while I handed the keys to the landlord. He wanted to make a date for inspecting the property in my presence so he could honestly chisel me out of the deposit we had paid. I was tempted to fight him, citing all the improvements I had made at my own expense. I could sense that he was ready to fight for the few quid involved and I was suddenly sickened, so I told him to keep the lot.