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By Root 241 0

what he lacked in words he made up for in his passion for plants and the assiduity with which he cared for them. He came three times a week, in his lunch hour, and she would leave his lunch on the kitchen table: she tried to tempt his appetite, worried about his white face, and although he longed for a cheese roll and a bottle of beer, he swallowed her careful delicacies, sensing that this was important to her, and taking it seriously. ‘I’m off then,’ he would call up the stairs. ‘Might look in Sunday.’ ‘All right, Terry,’ she would call back. ‘The money’s on the dresser.’ For the money seemed to them both a separate issue, hardly connected with the loving work of housekeeping to which they both, in their different ways, applied themselves.

The garden was only truly hers in the very early morning and in the evening, after her day’s work, when she simply sat on a rather uncomfortable wrought-iron bench – a kind gift from Geoffrey who had laughed at her old spreading creaking wicker chair – and watched the sun dip below the hedge and welcomed an increase in the sharpness of the scents. At this time, she knew, her neighbour’s child, a child of heartbreaking beauty whose happiness and simplicity were already threatened by a crippling speech defect, would come out to see if she were there (but she was always there) and would slip through the hedge to say goodnight. And Edith would watch her wrestling with the words, her thin little body juddering with the effort to unlock them, and she would smile and nod as if the words were perfectly intelligible, and would put her hands to the child’s jerking head to still it, and would whisper, ‘Good night, my little love. Sleep well.’ And would kiss the child, now calm, and send her off to bed.

The evenings were less interesting. A visit to Penelope to hear about the day’s events, a small meal, half of which Terry had had for his lunch, the plants to be watered, and then bed, very early. Sometimes it was still light when she went to bed, but as the light was of such very great interest to her she would put down her book just to watch it fade, and change colour, and finally become opaque and uninteresting. Then it was time to sleep. Her bed was white and plain and not quite big enough. Geoffrey Long, a sturdy man, had wincingly, but with his usual good nature, remarked on this more than once. As had Penelope, whose own bed would have accommodated four adults and which, when not in use, was heaped with all manner of delicate little pillows covered in materials which proclaimed to the world at large, ‘I am a woman of exceptional femininity.’ Some women raise altars to themselves, thought Edith. And they are right to do so. Although I doubt if I could carry it off.

In any event, the marital bed in Montagu Square, where Geoffrey had formerly lived with his mother, had already been installed, and soon she would take her place within the confines of a handsome bedroom, the colours of which she secretly found a little too insistent. She had chosen them herself but had, fatally, perhaps, invoked the aid of Penelope who had guided her expertly through a selection of department stores, while discoursing on the ways to please a man. ‘It’s no good being wishy-washy, Edith,’ she had said, several times. ‘A man can’t feel at ease in a cell. You have to recognize his needs.’ Edith, feeling faint in this airless world and apologetic because she found so little to arouse her enthusiasm, and because Penelope seemed so much more involved in the enterprise than she was herself, succumbed at last to her persuasions, and also to the terribly thin face of the poor salesman, whose lunch hour they were monopolizing, and chose a counterpane of dull marigold, with expensive marigold coloured towels to hang in their dark green marble bathroom, and some thick satin-bound blankets the colour of cinnamon. They were new and handsome, but it seemed to her that they absorbed the light and were stuffily authoritative. She could not see herself ever repairing to this bedroom after a day’s writing, or taking a nap on the