Tomorrow's Shade

The Gap Where the Tree Stood

Hartsmere. Late October, in the year two thousand and four.

There is a kind of bare ground that aches worse than any grave, and it is the place where a great tree used to be; I have been keeping the one in this garden swept clear of bramble for seventeen years, the way you'd keep a chair empty for someone who is never coming back.

I go out to it most afternoons the weather lets me, which at eighty-two is fewer afternoons than once it was. The path I could walk blind, and near enough do, for my eyes are going the way the rest of me is going, by instalments. Out the cottage door, mind the cracked flag by the water-butt, along under the south wall where the figs used to ripen and the brick still holds the day's heat into the dusk the way good brick will. Through the door in the wall. There was a green door there once, oak, with a thumb-latch worn to a shine by four generations of thumbs. Gone now, door and frame and all, and only the gap left, and through the gap I go.

What you'd see, coming behind me, is a wilderness. I won't pretty it for you. The walled garden at Hartsmere was four acres inside the brick, and there was a day twelve men kept every rod of it as clean as a swept hearth. The bramble has the borders now. It comes over the old box edging in long armed loops, rooting where it touches, the way bramble does, marching itself across ground that grew sweet peas up hazel sticks and onions you could have shown at any table in the county. The ivy has got into the glasshouses. You can make out the ribs of them down the far wall — the vinery, the peach house, the long range where Esme kept her tender things — and the ivy has gone in at every broken pane and dragged the glazing bars down soft as rot, so the houses stand there green and breathing and dead. The bothy — that's the little brick place we garden boys slept, the unmarried lads, two iron beds and a coke stove and the smell of wet boots forever — the bothy has lost its roof. Sky in it now. A young ash coming up through where the stove stood.

I tell you this not to make you sad. A garden gone back is only nature taking what was always lent. I tell you so you'll know what I am, which is the last man living who knew it the other way.

I stop where I always stop.

There is a swell in the turf near the middle of the ground, a low green rise maybe forty foot across, and at the heart of it a darker patch where the grass has never come right, and if you put a spade down you'd find it still — the root-plate, the great woody raft a big tree stands upon, half gone to a brown crumble but there, the print of it pressed in the earth. That is where the cedar stood.

Cedar of Lebanon. Planted seventeen sixty-one — I have seen the year set down in a hand two centuries dead, and I'll show you the very book it's in, by and by. Two hundred and twenty-six years it stood and made its shade. I worked under it the whole of my life. A boy came up the drive in nineteen thirty-six and there it was already old, already enormous, the one fixed thing in the world, and I was fourteen, and it had been holding up that piece of sky a hundred and seventy years before my mother bore me. You don't expect to outlive a thing like that. It isn't in the order of things. And yet. The night of the sixteenth of October, nineteen eighty-seven — the great storm, you'll have heard of it even if you're too young to have lost anything in it — it came down in the dark all in one piece, root and crown, with a sound I felt in the soles of my feet in the cottage two hundred yards off, a sound like the world clearing its throat. I went out at first light and there it lay, the whole green country of it laid on its side, and the hole where the roots tore free was deep enough to bury a horse standing. I'll come to that night. It's not a thing a man says quickly.

My name is Wilfred Coombe. Wilf. I was head gardener of this place for the working life of it, which is to say I was the last of them, for there was no garden left to be head of by the end and no man under me but the weather. I have buried, in the order they went, my father; and old Tarrant who made me a gardener and gave me his trade and his books and at the last his own daughter; and Sir Edmund Verrall, and Lady Honor; and the boy Julian, the heir, that the telegram came for; and my friend Sid; and Beatrice, who was my playmate when we were small and didn't yet know we weren't allowed to be; and my Esme, who was the love of my whole life and the genius of those dead glasshouses down the wall, and who died the same winter the tree did, near enough, which I have never settled in myself was a cruelty or a kindness. And I have outlived the cedar. When you have outlived a tree that was old before your great-grandfather drew breath, you begin to feel you've stayed too long at a do where they've put the chairs up on the tables.

I am at the end of my own season. I can say it plain, because at my age sweetness is a waste of the daylight. I don't garden the way I did. I potter. I keep this one patch swept, and I wait, the way a man waits in November for the hard frost he knows is on the road, the one that'll black the dahlias overnight and tell him the year is over and he may as well lift them. That's the sort of line I'd have given a lady on an open day. The plainer truth is that I'm tired, and I am the only one who remembers, and a thing only one old man remembers is already half gone.

Which is when she comes through the gap in the wall.

I hear her before I see her — boots in the long wet grass, a quick young step, not a country step — and then she's through, and stops, and takes the place in the way the few who ever come will take it: the chin lifting, the eyes going round the four walls and the wreck they hold, and something setting hard in the face. She has a clipboard held flat against her chest and a yellow hard hat under one arm and a coat far too good for bramble. Dark. Thirty, I'd have said, or a shade more, and tired about the eyes in a way I know, the particular tiredness of a body carrying a grief and a job at the one time and not sure which weighs more.

"Mr. Coombe?" she says. "I'm sorry. I knocked at the cottage." A breath. "My name's Priya Anand. I'm with the trust."

The trust. I'd had their letter, on paper so thick you could near enough have struck a cutting in it. A heritage trust, it said, had found — against every likelihood, against everything I knew of money and old gardens and the way the world had decided places like this were finished — the funds to restore the walled garden at Hartsmere. I'd read it twice and put it behind the clock and thought: too late. Forty years too late. They let it die and now they'll spend a fortune on the corpse.

"I know who you are," I say. "There's a chair indoors, if you want it. Nowhere to sit out here. There used to be a bench under—" and I leave it, because the bench was under the cedar.

She doesn't sit. She's looking at the swell of turf, at the dark patch, for something in the way I'm stood by it has told her already. They're not stupid, the young ones. "Was that—"

"It was."

She comes and stands beside me, careful, the way you'd come up on a strange horse. And then she does the thing that settles it, though I don't yet know it's settled. She doesn't tell me her plans. No drawing, no grant, no five-year vision. She says, looking at the ruin and not at me:

"I can't do it without you."

I say nothing. Bramble has a way of filling a silence.

"I've got the money," she says. "I've got labour, in the spring. I've got the old Ordnance plans, and two photographs off a garden-open day in nineteen-twelve, and a list of varieties from a seed order. And it's nothing. It's a map of a country with the names rubbed off it. I don't know where the borders ran. I don't know what was trained up which wall, or what went in the pits, or which way the paths fell, or—" she stops herself. "You're the only living person who remembers where everything grew. And, Mr. Coombe, I'll say it, because somebody has to. You're eighty-two. If I don't get it from you, it's gone. Not lost. Gone. There's a difference, and you know it better than I do."

I look at her a good while. The light's going; it goes early this end of October, the sun barely clearing the south wall by three and the cold coming up out of the ground to meet the dark.

"You're asking me," I say, "to dig the whole place over again. In here." I tap my chest, once, with two fingers, and it isn't my heart I mean, or not only it. "You think it's a project. A nice piece of work. Get the old fellow to stand and point at things." I shake my head. "It's not a project to me, girl. It's a churchyard I happened to know when the people were still alive. You don't fetch the last mourner out to walk you round the stones for your records."

She takes it. Doesn't flinch from it and doesn't soften it, and I'll give her this to the end of my days — she didn't say she was sorry, which would have been a lie or a manner, and she didn't argue. She stood in my cold dead garden and let me be right.

"All right," she says, quiet. "I understand." And she means to go.

And because I am old and my legs have had their fill of the cold, and because — I'll be honest with you, it's what the whole of this is for — because I found, when it came to it, that I did not want her to go, I say, "There's tea in the pot gone cold, and I can warm it. Come out of this. You'll get your death." Which, from a man my age to a woman that young, is a joke, and she catches it, and the corner of her mouth shifts, and we walk back through the gap together. That is how it begins, though neither of us would have called it a beginning.

The cottage is two rooms and a scullery and has been since the Flood. She stands in the doorway while I see to the kettle, and I know she's found the books before ever she speaks, for they take a whole wall — the planting books, the garden ledgers, generation on generation of them in their cracked spines, Tarrant's hand and his master's hand and then my hand, every variety and every frost and every loss this garden ever had, written down where the rain couldn't have it. She'll come to those. But it isn't the books she asks after.

It's the windowsill.

"Mr. Coombe," she says, "what's this?"

I don't have to turn to know what she's found. There's only the one thing on that sill worth a question of anybody. A clay pot, a long-tom, the tall narrow sort we struck cuttings in, and in it a leggy little tree near three foot high, drawn up and lopsided from reaching at the light through the same glass year on year, the way a thing will when it's kept too long in a pot it has outgrown. Dark blue-green needles in little tufts. A poor, cramped, starved, leaning thing. And the most precious object I own in this world.

"That," I say, and my voice has gone careful on me, "is a cedar of Lebanon."

She turns. "Like—"

"The same. The very same blood." I bring the tea, two cups, and set them down, and I go and stand at the sill with her, because some things you have to be near to say. "When the big one came down in 'eighty-seven, it had cones on it. A cedar doesn't give up its seed easy — you can wait years on it. But it carried a crop that last autumn, as if it knew, though trees don't know; that's the sort of fancy I've no patience with. My wife and I gathered what we could off the wreck before the trust's men came and sawed it into cordwood and sold it. We raised the seed. Esme was clever past telling with seed. We got a dozen and more came up, little blue threads of things, and we grew them on between us, the two of us, that last winter she was—" I stop. I drink some tea I don't want. "They went, over the years, one way and another. Frost. A wet bench. Neglect, after I stopped being able to care for much. This is the last of them. Seventeen years it's been in this pot or another a size up."

She looks at it, and then at me, and she asks the one question, the question I have been not-answering for seventeen years.

"Why haven't you planted it?"

There it is. I open my mouth to give her the easy thing — that the ground's not right, that a cedar wants room and a hundred years, that an old man's no business planting trees — and none of it will come, because she is looking at me dead straight and the kettle's ticking as it cools and I am very tired, and she has just told me out in that ruin the truest thing anyone's said to my face in a decade, which is that when I go, it's gone.

"Because I never could say where it belongs," I tell her.

And it's true, and it is the whole of it, and I've never said it aloud to a living soul. You'd think a gardener would know where a tree belonged better than where his own grave should lie. But the place it was born to is a hole in the turf I keep swept. The family it was raised for is dead, the last of them four years in the ground. The wife I raised it with is dead. I couldn't put it back where the great one stood, for that felt like writing over a name on a stone before the stone was cold; and I couldn't put it anywhere else, for everywhere else was wrong; and so it has sat on that sill, year on year, leaning at the light, neither planted nor thrown out — the way I have sat in this cottage, neither one thing nor the other, waiting.

Priya doesn't fill the quiet with talk. She waits. She's good at waiting; I'd come to learn that of her. And in the waiting I find that the thing shut up in me has come off the latch, just from the saying of it, and what wants out is not the answer to her question at all. It's further back. Much further.

"You want to know where everything grew," I say.

"Yes."

"And I've told you it's a churchyard." I set down the cup. Out the window the light's gone to that grey that's nearly nothing, and the gap where the tree stood is out there in it, swept and bare. "But I'll tell you a thing about a churchyard, since you're a girl that takes a plain word. It's also a record. Every stone is somebody who was loved enough that somebody else cut their name in rock so the rain couldn't have it. And I am the rock, do you see. I'm the last stone left standing with all the names still on it, and you've come knocking just ahead of the frost."

She starts to say it over — I can see her gathering it, will you help me — and I put my hand up to stop her, and then I do a thing I hadn't known I was going to do until my hand was already doing it. I reach and lay my palm round that clay pot, round the side of it the day's last warmth is still on, the way you'd set a hand to a child's head.

"I'll do better than help you," I say. "I'll give you the whole garden, the way it was given to me — every wall and every border and every name, and the books off that shelf, and what's in this pot when the time comes, if you're still here and still mean it. The lot. It's no good to a dead man, and I'm the last that has it."

Her eyes have gone bright; she blinks it down, being a sensible woman, and she says, "Where do we start?"

And I look at the little leaning tree, seventeen years from its raising and not yet in the ground, and I think of old Tarrant, who told me the one thing about gardens ever worth the knowing, and I say:

"To know where a thing belongs, you have to know where it came from. So we'll not start with where the borders ran. We'll start with a boy at that gate, in nineteen thirty-six, with his belly empty and his cap in his hand, and the whole place blazing in front of him like the open door of a furnace, fit to frighten the life clean out of him. That boy was me. Sit down. Drink your tea. And I'll take you in."

The Boy at the Gate

My father came home from one war with no lungs to speak of and spent twenty years dying of it slowly in a back bedroom, so that the first lesson I ever learned about time was that it takes things from you on the instalment plan; the garden taught me the rest.

He had been a big man once. There was a photograph on the mantel — him in his collar before the call-up, broad as a barn door, his hand on the back of a chair as if he could lift it and the house with it — and I used to look from the photograph to the bed and not be able to make the two of them into the one man. The man in the bed weighed nothing. You could hear him before you reached the stairs, the long climb of his breath, the catch at the top of it, then the slow surrender down again, and after that the cough, which was a sound I will not dress up for you. It came from somewhere a man oughtn't to have to go. The Germans had loosed their gas into a wood in France in 1917 and it had taken him eight days to walk out and twenty years to finish the job, and that is what I mean about the instalment plan. They never sent a final demand. They just took a little each winter, and a little more, and you got used to the smaller and smaller portion of father that was left until there wasn't any.

We were six in three rooms and my mother took in washing. I can shut my eyes now and smell it — the wet sheets steaming on the rack over the range, the green soap, the blue bag, her hands red to the wrist and cracked along the knuckles all the year round. She was not a woman who wept where you could see her. She fed us in the order we could earn, which is a hard thing to write and was a harder thing to live, and it meant the little ones ate and my father ate what he could keep down and I, being fourteen and the eldest and strong, learned to be hungry in a quiet, mannerly way that doesn't trouble anyone at the table. I am told it shows on me yet. Esme said once, years on, that she could always tell a man who'd been hungry as a boy by the way he cleared his plate as if it might be argued with. That's the sort of thing she'd say, and be right, and go back to her seedlings before you'd finished being stung by it.

So there was never any question of what I'd do, only of when. The when came in the March of 1936. My mother turned my collar for me with her own cracked hands, and gave me bread and dripping folded in a cloth, and walked me to the end of the lane where it begins to climb, and there she stopped, because she had washing on, and the rest of the hill I went up alone with my cap in my hand. Hartsmere stood on the shoulder of the down with its back to the wind and its face to the valley, and the great-house garden lay below it like something spilled out of a richer century. I had seen it from below all my life, the way you see weather. I had never been inside the wall.

I will try to give it to you as it came to me, because you were not there and the wall is down now and the thing itself is gone, and an old man's saying it was beautiful is worth nothing to you. Here is what there was.

There were twelve men. I counted them that first week the way a starving man counts loaves. Twelve men and three boys for the gardens alone, not reckoning the foreman or the women in the still-room or the lad who did nothing but the boilers. The double borders ran the length of the long walk, two of them facing across a strip of mown grass, and in March there was not much in them yet, but you could see by the staking and the labelled ground the size of what was coming, and by July I will tell you they were a painted sea — six foot of delphinium and the bees drunk in it and a heat coming off the colour as though colour had a temperature. The glasshouses stood in a long range against the south wall, and when you opened the door of the vinery the air met you like a hand on the chest, green and wet and sweet, the grapes hanging in the gloom under the glass with the bloom still on them that you were never, ever to touch with your fingers. There was a peach house and a fern house and a stove house for the tender things that would die if they so much as remembered the cold, and a pit, sunk and heated, where they grew pineapples — pineapples, in an English county where the chalk runs down to clay, in the reign of a coughing king — and the man who could draw a pineapple out of that pit was reckoned a sort of magician, and rightly. Beyond the borders, through a door in the brick, lay the kitchen garden, four square acres inside its own warm walls, and it fed the house and the staff, forty mouths and better, the year round: the cordon apples crucified flat against the brick, the asparagus beds, the forcing pots over the rhubarb like a regiment of red clay helmets, the long rows you could sight down like a rifle. Nothing was wasted and nothing was out of place. A weed in that garden was a kind of blasphemy, and was treated as one.

And over all of it, on the lawn where the garden gave way to the park, stood the cedar.

I have no honest words for it that aren't worn out, so I'll tell you what a hungry boy thought, which was nothing clever. I thought it was a building. I thought somebody had grown a green cathedral out of the ground, the branches going out flat and layered, shelf above shelf, dark on the underside and silvered where the light caught, and a shade beneath it you could have stood the whole village in. On a warm afternoon it gave off a smell — resin, I learned to call it, a clean sharp sweetness — that I have chased the rest of my life and found nowhere else. I stood at the bottom of the long walk with my cap in my hand and my bread and dripping in my pocket, and I looked at that tree, and I forgot for a minute that I was hungry, which had not happened to me in some years.

"You'll be Coombe's boy."

I turned round too fast and dropped my cap. The man behind me was not tall but he was built close, like something grown slow in poor ground, and he had a face that had given up on weather a long time ago and made its peace with it — brown, cut deep, the eyes pale in it and not unkind but in no hurry to be kind either. He wore an old velvet jacket gone bald at the cuffs and he held a trowel the way other men hold a pen. This was Mr. Tarrant, the head gardener, and he had been head gardener since before my father went to France, and he would die in my arms twelve years on, but I knew none of that then. I knew only that he looked at me the way you look at a young tree that's come bare-root and travel-shocked, working out whether there's any life left in the roots.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Don't sir me. I work for my living." He looked me over once more. "You're thin."

"Yes, sir." Then, because he'd told me not to: "Mr. Tarrant."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth that on another man might have been the start of a smile and on him was more like the memory of one. "Pick up your cap," he said, and walked off, and I understood I was to follow, and I have been following, in one fashion or another, ever since.

He gave me to the bothy and the bothy gave me Sid.

The bothy was a long low brick room off the back of the stables where the unmarried garden boys slept, and the first thing it had was a coke stove in the middle of it, and the first thing I felt going in out of that March wind was the heat of it on my face, and I will be straight with you, I could have wept. There were beds down both sides and a deal table scrubbed white and a clutter of boots and a kettle always near the boil, and it was warm, it was warm right through, in a way our three rooms at the bottom of the hill had never once been in my life. A boy was sat on the table swinging his legs, and he had a face made for grinning and he was using it.

"They've sent us another scarecrow," he said. "Don't mind Tarrant, he bites but he's no teeth left. I'm Sid. Sid Halloran. You hungry?"

"No," I said, which was the hungriest lie I ever told.

He looked at me, and he was quick, Sid, quicker than me by a mile, and he saw it, and he did me the kindness of not saying so. He swung off the table and cut me a slice of bread off the loaf in the press and laid a wedge of cheese on it the size of my thumb and put it in my hand as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, talking the whole while so I wouldn't have to. He told me which beds had the worst springs and which boards in the path Tarrant could hear you on and how to wash a pot so it passed and how to look busy when you weren't, which he held to be the highest of the gardening arts. He had been there two years and he ran the place, in the way that the cleverest boy always runs a place under the noses of the men who think they do. I ate the bread and cheese in the warm with this grinning stranger talking at me, and I thought: I have come up out of the cold. I did not know yet what it would cost, the coming up; I did not know I would outlive every soul in that warm room, Sid first and youngest of all. You don't, at fourteen. You just eat the bread.

The work, though. I'll not pretend the work was anything but what it was.

A garden boy is set to the jobs no man will do and no man should, and that is the whole of the apprenticeship, and most of it is done on your knees. I barrowed. Lord, I barrowed — leaf-mould and rotted dung and broken pots and clinker from the boilers, up and down the long paths till my arms came out of their sockets and went back in changed. I washed pots, and there is no end to the pots in a place like that, thousands of them, and they must come up clean as a plate or back they go, and the water is cold and your knuckles split exactly where my mother's did, so that I'd look at my own red hands in the trough and see hers. I weeded. I weeded that kitchen garden on my hands and knees down rows that had no end, hours of it, days, the chalk soil grinding into my kneecaps until they bled and then scabbed and then, in the way of a body that's young, gave up bleeding and made me knees of horn that I have to this day. I was set to it from the dark of the morning to the dark of the evening, and at the end of that first week I lay in the warm bothy with my whole body singing one flat note of ache, and I made up my mind, as a boy will, that I hated it, and that the first chance I got I'd go for the railway, where a man stood up.

Then the cedar undid me, and it was Tarrant who did it through the tree.

It was a Sunday, the only half-day we had, and I had crept out to the lawn for no reason I could have given you, except that the tree drew me the way the warm stove drew me, and I stood under it on the dropped needles with my head back, gawping straight up into the dark of it the way I'd gawped that first morning. I didn't hear him come. He was a quiet man on grass.

I braced for the cuff. A boy idling in his own time was still a boy idling, and I'd been clipped round the ear by better men than me for less. But the blow didn't come. He came and stood beside me instead, and tipped his own head back, and for a while the two of us just stood there, the old man and the starved boy, looking up into two hundred years of tree.

"Cedar of Lebanon," he said at last, as if I'd asked. "Cedrus libani. Sir Edmund could give you the whole of it in Latin and the country it came out of and who first brought the seed to England, and one day if you're not a fool he'll tell you, for he loves it better than he loves most Christians." He paused. "It went in the ground in 1761. There's a man's name in the oldest of my books for the planting of it, and a price, and the day, all writ down." He nodded at the great spread of it over us, the shelves of green going up into the dark. "Now. You're a counting sort of boy, I've watched you count. Reckon it for me. Seventeen sixty-one to a tree that size."

I tried. I was no scholar but I could do my sums. "Long time, Mr. Tarrant."

"Long time." He let that sit. Then he said the thing, and he said it plainly, the way you'd tell a boy the time. "The man who set that in the ground died before it cleared the wall. Before it was higher than you are now. He never sat in its shade a day in his life. We're standing in his shade — you and me, this minute — and he never knew our names, nor we his till I went looking in a book, and that, boy" — and here he looked down from the tree to me, and the pale eyes had something in them I'd not seen in a grown man before, a kind of fierce and tired tenderness — "that is who you garden for. Not the master. Not your wage. Not even the folk you can see. You garden for them as isn't born yet. That's tomorrow's shade. Anybody can grow what they'll eat. It takes a gardener to grow what he'll never see."

He had no more to say after that. He was not a man who spoiled a thing by adding to it. He looked up at the tree a moment longer, and then he went off to whatever a head gardener does on a Sunday, and left me standing there in the wet under the cedar with the words gone into me like a label pushed into soft ground.

I want to set my boot on it, the way he taught me to set a boot on anything too fine. I want to tell you I was a starved boy who didn't understand the half of it, and that's true. I want to tell you the grass was soaking through my one good Sunday trousers and my mother was at the bottom of the hill with her hands in the wash and her hopes pinned to the shillings I'd send, and that's true and all. But I'd be lying if I made it less than it was. Something in me took root that afternoon, kneeling down at last to feel under the needles for the cones I'd seen fallen there, the resin of the tree warm and sharp in the air around me — something put down a root into that chalk and that creed, into a man's saying about a stranger long dead and the strangers not yet born, and in sixty years of trying I have never once been able to lift it out.