17 Alma Road
The seventeenth section...
XVII
“Did you ever paint the garden?” Owen is standing beyond the apple trees, left foot gently tapping against a plank on one of the raised beds, a plank which has managed to free itself from the nails that once held the end nearest him in place. It is now bent outwards, warped slightly by seasons of rain, as if seeking complete release from its bonds and make good its escape across the lawn. He glances to the other end of the bed where it remains fixed. “Didn’t you say you painted views from your bedroom window? But I can’t recall anything from out here, or” — he twists slightly — “looking back up to the house.”
He shivers again as the sun darts behind a small cloud. In the sky he notices a grey mass in the distance, approaching the town. George would have known such a cloud’s portent and, if rain, how long it was likely to take to get here.
“Of course I did.”
Owen notes a sense of dismissiveness in Maddie’s voice, yet it is a tone which seems filled more with assumption than certainty.
“Sketches for sure.” She rows back a little. “Mainly from up on the patio, sitting on the bench, facing one way or another. I think I remember something with the arch in it.”
He allows a brief gap before: “And?”
“And nothing. Not really my thing.”
“You never tried landscapes?” Owen thinks of the sketch of the beach now resting back on the bench and realises how daft his question is.
“Not in the sense you probably mean. I was never going to be another Constable was I? And anyway, rather than paint flowers where they grew I’d much prefer to put them in a vase juxtaposed against something obscure. Or contrary. For me there was more interest in tension, less so in beauty.”
To Owen her answer feels a little too ‘pat’, a pre-prepared platitude ready to be dished out to anyone who had proven themselves sufficiently ignorant to ask the question in the first place.
“If you were to go through my sketch books I dare say you’d find the odd thing or two — a bit like that beach scene — but never anything more substantial than that. Not really. I don’t think they appealed, gardens and such like. And anyway, I didn’t need to capture this place did I? It was ours, here for us; it didn’t need interpreting.”
“Is that what you did, interpret things?”
“You might say that. Some people talk about getting to the ‘truth’ beneath the skin of something, and that notion may have some validity; but this house never needed unpeeling like that. Or rather, I never felt the need to go searching for something hidden under its skin; it was just fine as it was.”
Owen contemplates the large brick building standing solid at the top of the garden. He too had never questioned it. It had always been there, reliable, immutable, behind every door a different realm — and one of them his own. And until this afternoon he had remembered it as a house filled with nothing but their truths. Perhaps that was one of the reasons it seemed such a stalwart in their lives, because of its constancy, because it never traded in falsehoods. Or never seemed to.
Yet now he finds himself knowing that premise is not as cast-iron as he had always believed it to be. He recalls again the conversations with Florence — her confession about Augustus’ first engagement and her own childhood sweetheart — and feels that his faith in the place has been slightly shaken. Secrets lurked everywhere it seemed, even in Alma Road. Indeed, hadn’t his pulling of the key from his coat pocket been one such deception — though of himself or of Maddie he isn’t sure. And in unlocking the front door, had he perhaps unlocked more than just memories and time? Was truth — like that board in the raised bed — also trying to make a run for it?
“Do you remember that conversation with Florence about uncle’s military ambitions?”
With Maddie’s question as a trigger, Owen returns to his aunt’s narration of George’s family history and tries to find a related thread.
“What made you think of that?”
“There in the veg patch, the trace of a trench, which I assume would have been for potatoes or carrots or something.”
He scans the surface of the bed, attempting to filter out the mass of weeds to see if doing so will reveal the undulations in the soil beneath. There is indeed a trench of sorts, shallow and short, but there nonetheless.
“Trench equals war? In a suburban back garden in England?” He smiles. “Marginally tenuous, don’t you think?”
But it is more than that. As he looks up, as if resurrected at Maddie’s whim, he sees Florence in her gardening attire, trug in hand, leaning on a fork.