Nicer than the New-Builds

People always seemed to say, “Oh, you live in one of the nice new-builds then!” It made Tessa inclined to reconsider her opinion that the word “nice” was much-maligned. It wasn’t always possible to judge the nuance, and perhaps it was as well. Not exactly envy, not exactly contempt, and she supposed she could be reading way too much into it.

     She didn’t hate her little semi on Willow Way, but she was pretty sure she’d never love it either. It was a neat redbrick little house with a gabled roof and a paved drive on a close of other neat little redbrick houses with gabled roofs and paved drives. The doors and the windowsills and the little porches were white, and in sensible U-pvc that only needed to be wiped over with a damp cloth. Inside, she had to give the housing association their due, you were allowed to do more or less what you wanted. Within reason. Well, apart from the things that she really wanted to do. She hadn’t papered the walls. She was a bit – more than a bit – strapped for cash, and wasn’t a practical kind of person, so couldn’t do it herself, so she stuck some posters and pictures torn out of calendars and stick-on butterflies from the craft aisle on them. 

     At the same time the house seemed too big and too small. Oh, it was very energy efficient, and the neighbours were pleasant, but – oh well. It would do.

     Most mornings she walked into work. There were three basic routes you could take; one up the sea front, one through the industrial estate (which sounded horrible, but it was all clean industry and parts of it were, or at least she could half convince herself, almost like being in the countryside) and the shortest one, and best one to take if the weather was bad, or if she was in a bit of a hurry, up King Street and then up Nelson Street. The pattern they made on the map was like either a slightly tight letter “L” or a slightly loose chevron. 

     They were never going to win any beauty awards, and for the most part, certainly not contribute to the town’s chances of winning any “best kept” awards. But Tessa envied the people who lived on those streets where there were no neat and nice little new-builds, but houses like a child’s hurried line of sewing or the line on a lie detector – a bungalow next to one with 3 storeys, one painted a strange shade of turquoise next to one with grey slate walls. She was even prepared to be tolerant about the stone cladding (which was one of the things you weren’t allowed to do on Willow Way, not that she wanted to) that had been applied here and there. 

     Especially on Nelson Street, the one that led to the high street, the gardens were as varied as the houses. A neat lawn with a little water feature was next to a patch that seemed to be used for car repairs (except the cars never seemed to get repaired!) and a pocket-handkerchief patch with decking next to one that had run wild with nettles and ground ivy. 

     Sometimes she wondered if there was ever any tension and dispute about the gardens. 

     Every morning, unless she were really bowing her head against the wind blowing in from the North Sea and her thoughts were in even more of a swirl than usual, Tessa had to pause by the garden of Number 37, Nelson Street. The house itself was fairly ordinary; not as neat and orderly and symmetrical as the houses on Willow Way, but with nothing drawing especially attention to it. The front garden was encircled on three sides with a low brick wall, not falling to pieces as some were, but with a rather sad, self-effacing look, as if it knew it were only fulfilling a function, and not even sure if that function were strictly necessary. The grass was a bit overgrown, but Tessa had always been of the opinion that grass needs a few dandelions and a bit of clover. But beyond those two layers, grey and green, beds of bright flowers bloomed. Of course they didn’t really bloom. Tessa was pretty sure of that. True, climate change had brought with it roses in December and geraniums in January, but surely it did not – yet – make bedding plants, profusions of them, bloom all year round entirely unaffected, it seemed, by snow or frost or storm. And some of those flowers were flowers that Tessa had never seen anywhere else. It wasn’t because they were especially exotic, but there was both a randomness and a defiance about their colours – turquoise, orange, the vivid purple of a lavender-scented airspray container, a white that was too white, a pink like the colour of a chick-lit novel. True, at least it didn’t have one of the sprays of green tulips that the local pound shop had stocked last year. There are some things you can’t shift, even in a pound shop. They had to be artificial, for all they stood in soil, surrounded by grass. Tessa wasn’t one of those people who had issues with artificial flowers. She had some herself, and reckoned that if she had “year round” daffodils on her window-sill, that was her own business and nobody else’s. She had even toyed with the idea of getting a fake flower cascade for the hanging basket outside her house. All the houses on Willow Way had hanging baskets. They were part of the package, but since she moved in, hers had lain barren. She recalled that she had once stayed in a guest house that had fake honeysuckle twining its plastic tendrils round the door.  Well, it was called Honeysuckle House. 

     But for all that, there was still something wrong about the garden at Number 37. Not morally wrong, of course, perhaps not even aesthetically wrong (though she knew some would disagree) but it made you ask why. 

    The immediate answer was wanting colour and the illusion of summer time all year round. In itself, that was understandable enough and even endearing. But not many people would have carried it so far. And whilst it was true that in a sense the garden was low-maintenance, “planting” it must have been quite an undertaking. Tessa found herself wondering if it had been surreptitiously and gradually, or all at one go and blatantly, by someone who was immune to possible shouts of “Hey, Missus, you don’t need soil to grow those, you know!”

     Tessa had never seen the owner or the tenant (there were both on Nelson Street) of Number 37, but had heard that she was female, quite an old lady, “but not ancient” (which was pretty subjective and depended on conceptions and the speaker’s own age!) “kept herself to herself” but was friendly and (probably) harmless enough, and was called (there was some dispute over this) Mrs Bermondsey or Mrs Acton – some district of London, anyway – and her first name was Alice. Or Anne. 

     One morning in April when the real flowers were starting their spurt to profusion, Tessa was walking to work a couple of hours later than usual. The electrical appliances at the office were being checked, and they weren’t opening until 11. 

     King Street and Nelson Street weren’t transformed and didn’t take on a new aspect, but all the curtains were open now, and cars were not on drives or at the front of houses where they were earlier on, and some, presumably those of shift workers, were when, on her normal early morning walk, they were not. 

     Tessa’s normal walk was rarely solitary, and she was used to bidding dog walkers, and, on the right day, refuse collectors, a good morning, but today – she supposed she encountered roughly the same number of people, but most of them were different people. People she knew, sometimes, but who were not a part of her normal morning routine. God, I’ve become a creature of habit, thought Tessa, and was not entirely sure if she found the thought reassuring or depressing. 

     She noticed that someone was in the garden of Number 37. Well, so finally I get to see her, she thought, as she neared the low wall and the overgrown, but not too overgrown grass, and the boiled sweet colours of the flowers. “Good morning” she said. She generally did wish people good morning, but again, she supposed it was as much a habit as a particular act of friendliness or courtesy. Still, it never did any harm.

     There was something both reassuringly and disappointingly normal about Mrs Acton or Mrs Bermondsey or whatever her name was. Tessa, who was useless at guessing ages, reckoned she was probably in her mid seventies, and she looked it – her face was lined, and her hair, caught in a little knot at the nape of her neck was grey – but there seemed nothing frail or doddery about her. She was wearing a blue blouse and a beige cable-knit cardigan, a muted green and grey knee length tartan skirt, and a pair of well-worn wellington boots, even though it hadn’t been raining. 

     “Good morning, dear,” the old lady said. “Lovely day.”

     “It is,” Tessa agreed.

     “Could I be a terrible old nuisance and ask you to pick up my earring – it was a foolish thing wearing them while I was doing the gardening, and one of them fell off. They’re not worth much in money terms, but have some sentimental value. I can see it, but I have this horrible feeling that if I kneel down for too long I might not be able to get up again without having to ask someone passing to haul me up!” She said it with a wry smile, not making much of it altogether.

     “Of course,” Tessa said at once, though she couldn’t help wishing she hadn’t put on a pale blue pair of trousers. Still, it would be worth getting a grass stain on them to actually get into the garden of Number 37 by invitation!

     It took a couple of seconds to drink it in. Mrs Acton or Bermondsey actually WAS doing the gardening. She had a rake in her hand and a watering can stood a little to one side of one of the beds. And it wasn’t because she was – well – going a bit eccentric, as Tessa’s own mother gently put it when anyone’s mind wasn’t functioning quite as it should. These weren’t plastic flowers. Not one single one of them. They were real, and their roots were in the earth, and they were rather beautiful – a lovely scent, too, sweet and fresh but with the slight pungency of earth. She could see the earring – a little drop one, with a blue stone and some mother of pearl, shaped into a bell, and very pretty, too. To her relief, she probably wouldn’t need to kneel down at all, but could stretch out and reach it if she stooped.

     Oh, bother, she thought, as she realised she was feeling a little dizzy. She was never prone to vertigo, not even when she was in tall buildings or when she’d over-indulged in the boss’s deceptively innocent tasting fruit punch at the office Christmas party. And she couldn’t be hungry – for once, given the late start, she’d actually eaten a half-way proper breakfast, not just her usual couple of digestive biscuits with her coffee. This was borderline embarrassing.

     Then, (and she had the absurd recollection of hearing in one of those science programmes she wished she could understand something about quantum particles that could be in two places at once), she was still in the garden of Number 37, Nelson Street, but was also back on King Street, and an ashen-faced man was kneeling beside her, and a car was straddled across the road like an abandoned toy. “She just walked out in front of me,” he whispered.

     “I know, mate, we saw it,” someone else said. “The ambulance is on its way, but – it doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look good at all.”

     Tessa wanted to open her mouth, and wanted to speak, and tell them not to worry, but the words wouldn’t come, and it was a strange feeling, but not a frightening one. She supposed they meant well, but the truth was, she just wanted them to go away, because she was in such a beautiful, fragrant, effervescent, eternal garden. It was so much better than that neat little new-build.