The Garden Plot Page 20

  She paused as she walked the route toward the Thames at a point where she could look west more or less straight toward the Wilsons’, trying to picture some tiny tributary running underground all the way through the bottom of their garden—and Malcolm’s—making the soil so wet a few feet down. She wondered why the mosaic was on soil instead of that raised area called the hypocaust that she’d seen at Chedworth. The Romans were excellent engineers, using natural waterways and making their own for everything from industry to bathing. Had they incorporated the seepage into some … some what? Her mind could go no further in imagining. Nothing seemed likely or possible or at all to do with a Roman mosaic.

  Pru was in bed by ten o’clock Saturday evening with only a book to keep her company when the phone startled her.

  “I wanted to hear your voice,” Christopher said, “and to find out how your day went.”

  Incredibly pleased that he phoned, she still couldn’t help saying, “And are you checking up on me?”

  He paused. “I might be. Are you staying at Jo’s?”

  “As it turns out, Jo is in Edinburgh this weekend—but I didn’t remember that until she reminded me last night. So I’m on my own and doing quite well.” And before he could say anything, “Are you back in London?”

  “I’m on a late train. I won’t be back until almost midnight.” His voice got quieter—she thought there must be other passengers near him. “You know I only want you safe.”

  “Yes, I do know that. I’ll see you tomorrow, right? You can tell me all about parents day.”

  “I’ll give you a ring in the morning.”

  The prospect of spending the whole day with him, wandering the sights of London, gave Pru both pleasure and pain. The pleasure was obvious, but she had to examine more closely the little stab of pain—and then she realized that the day would be a sort of farewell tour for her. Goodbye, London. Goodbye, Christopher. She knew she wouldn’t be able to tell him that. Not yet. Let them have a lovely day, and she would worry about goodbye later.

  She stood in front of the closet Sunday morning staring at her meager collection of clothes: two pairs of corduroy trousers, three pairs of khakis—one lined with flannel—the black suit that she used only for interviews, rarely worn during her London year and much too boring for a day out. A wider variety of tops, but mostly just what she could layer for warmth or peel off if she heated up while working or riding the Tube on a particularly stuffy day. Several sweaters had holes from getting caught by thorny roses on days she had forgotten to wear her canvas coat. She chose the same rose-red sweater she’d worn in the country and the better pair of cords.

  Really, she thought, there ought to be a law forcing gardeners to buy some decent outfits, so they weren’t caught out when invited to do something other than dig a planting hole in the rain. At least, she thought, she wouldn’t drag along her giant canvas bag, but instead got out a tiny shoulder bag and transferred a few essentials.

  Just past nine, she’d made herself a second cup of tea when Christopher rang and asked if she was ready for the day.

  “I thought we’d visit St. James’s Park,” he said. “We could watch the pelicans being fed and after that go to the organ concert at Westminster Abbey.”

  “I love St. James’s,” Pru said.

  “But before that,” he said, “we’ll go someplace you might not have seen. How soon can you be ready?”

  Pru put her cup down. “I’m ready now.”

  “Good, I’ll be there in a quarter of an hour.”

  When they rang off, she saw the day spread out before them in luxury. She had only one second of hesitation, the small voice of reason in her head. Reason told her she shouldn’t begin something she couldn’t finish, that it was better not to complicate her life at this point, that she would be wiser to stay on cool, friendly terms with Christopher. She gave reason the day off.

  Ten minutes later, she perched on the edge of a chair in the kitchen, wearing her coat and waiting for his knock.

  When she opened the door, they stood smiling at each other. He reached for her hand and she closed the door behind her, but got no farther as he pulled her close and rested his face against her hair. Remembering where they were—and remembering what happened last time they stood on a doorstep—she looked up and kissed him softly on the cheek. “Where are we off to?”

  “Yes, right,” he said and looked around him as if taking stock of their route. “We’ll take the Circle line.”

  As they walked to the station, her phone rang. After the Romilda incident, as Pru had labeled it in her mind, she felt the need to hold on to Jo, however odd some of her moods had been lately, and so she grabbed the phone out of her pocket, explaining to Christopher, “Jo said she would phone today—so we can arrange a time to talk tomorrow. She’s been acting weird lately, especially about the mice …”

  “Mice?”

  “In the basement—really, it’s nothing.” She looked at her phone. It was Lydia. Oh, no, Lydia, she thought, not now, I’m sorry, but I can’t answer now. She wanted to spend this day, just this one day, free.

  “Don’t you want to answer?” He had seen the caller ID, too.

  She put the phone back in her pocket and said, “No.” When it stopped ringing, she took a breath and said, “It didn’t take you long to get to my door—you didn’t sleep on my front step, did you?”

  “I believe I’d be arrested for sleeping on a doorstep in this neighborhood.”

  Standing on the platform at the station, Pru remembered about the Westbourne. She looked up, searching for the black iron pipe. “There.” She pointed it out to Christopher. “That’s the Westbourne, the river that runs from Hampstead Heath. It goes all the way to the Chelsea Embankment.”

  “Are you interested in waterworks now, in addition to gardening?” he asked.

  “I did a little research, because of the wet soil under the mosaic. I wonder if there could be a tributary, some stream that runs along the bottom of the Wilsons’ garden.” She caught herself as this bit of reality crept in. “We shouldn’t talk about the case today, should we?”

  “We can try not to,” he said. “Let’s see how far we get.”

  They got off at Barbican, and as they walked Pru asked, “Are we going to the Museum of

  London?”

  “No,” he replied. “We’re headed for Postman’s Park.”

  “I don’t know it. Is it really a park for postmen?”

  “It’s near the General Post Office, and so they take advantage of the space. I’m happy I can show it to you,” he said.

  They passed the museum and turned into a gate and up a few steps. The small park, in a sort of fat cross shape, fit between two streets and was surrounded by tall buildings; the green space offered huge relief to all the concrete, brick, and stone. It was a bit of a busman’s holiday, but Pru couldn’t help herself as her eyes scanned the plantings and layout—Tasmanian tree ferns and other Southern Hemisphere plants stood testament to the mild London climate. She stopped when Christopher did and saw they stood in front of a wall that had a roof over it.

  Large blue-and-white tiles set into the wall listed names and events. “This is the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice,” Christopher said. “It was started in 1900. The tiles commemorate people who died while trying to save someone else’s life.”

  Drowning, fire, bombs—terrible deaths were recorded for people who had thought not of themselves in a time of crisis, but of others. “It’s beautiful,” Pru said, “and sad.”

  “It always reminds me of my dad,” Christopher said, keeping a light tone to his voice. “I’d just gone off to Oxford when it happened. A mother and a child just barely able to walk were on a footbridge across the river. It was after a heavy rain, and the river was high. The child tumbled in, the mother screamed, and my dad, driving down the road, didn’t think twice. He jumped in, got the child, and was able to make it back to the bank. But he had a heart attack and died there.”

  Pru looked at
him without speaking. He returned her look, smiled, and put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter how long ago it was,” she said, “we can still miss them.” She thought she understood where his great sense of duty came from. “What about your mother?”

  “She did all right,” he said. “She died just six years ago. My sister took care of her at the end.”

  “You have a sister? That’s wonderful,” Pru said, always delighted to hear about siblings and always wishing she had one of her own. “Where is she?”

  “Claire lives in Plymouth. Married with three children, two boys and one girl. Almost grown themselves now.”

  They read many of the tiles and walked through the rest of the park. With the sun, such as it was, behind the buildings, the air felt chilled, and so back to the Tube they went, deciding for lunch at the National Gallery café, as that would be near enough to the pelicans.

  At lunch, Pru asked about parents day, and Christopher said Graham had been both slightly embarrassed and rather proud that his dad had made it. “He asked me to help him out next weekend on a soil-survey project for his studies that he’s doing up in the Lake District,” he said. “I thought it would be a good time for us, although we’ll just miss fishing season, and that’s too bad.”

  They were to go to the Lake District from Friday until Monday; it was a shocking turn of events, because it meant that Christopher would take two days off work, which was almost unheard of. Four fewer days she would have with him before moving back to Dallas. She banished that thought almost as quickly as it arrived. Enjoy this day, she told herself—just don’t make it count too much.

  “Here’s your chance to learn all about his environmental science studies,” she said.

  “He’s to take samples of river sediment and measure the amounts of cadmium and arsenic. I’m to hold the equipment.”

  “I once wrote a paper on the effect that the temperature in a compost pile had on the number of sow bugs present. Every night for a month, I put my headlamp on and dug out a cubic foot of compost and counted them.”

  “Sow bugs?”

  No, that wasn’t what they were called in Britain, she thought. “Pill bugs? Roly-poly bugs?” She laughed at his expression. “Oh, wait—wood lice.”

  “Ah, wood lice, yes. And that was your major study?”

  “My master’s thesis was a discussion on the influence that English landscape design had on the literature of the Arts-and-Crafts and post-Raphaelite movements.” She smiled at the presumption. “We’re so full of ourselves at that age, aren’t we?”

  “I read English literature at Oxford,” he said. “Quite useful in police work, as you can imagine.”

  “And what did you study?”

  “I wrote a paper discussing the eighteenth-century naturalists’ writings as literature. Do you know who Gilbert White was?”

  “The Natural History of Selborne—1780s? It’s still in print, isn’t it?”

  “I rather fancied myself a modern-day Gilbert White there for a while,” he said, and she could see a light color on his cheeks.

  “Did you keep a journal?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “May I read it?”

  “No, you may not,” he said with a smile. He picked up his glass and put it down again. “It’s been a very long time since I told anyone about that.”

  It was a still, quiet moment. She wanted to reach her hand across the table to him, but reason interfered and told her to back off before she got too close.

  In St. James’s Park, they sat on a bench to watch the afternoon event, feeding the pelicans, at Duck Island. Herons, geese, and ducks were also in attendance. Pelicans had been in residence—not these very same pelicans, Christopher pointed out—since 1664.

  “And sometimes they eat more than fish,” he said.

  “They don’t capture little children, do they?”

  “No, just the occasional pigeon.”

  Pru’s hand went to her throat. “I’m glad I don’t have to swallow my meals whole.”

  “So, you’ve been to St. James’s before?” Christopher asked.

  “I have walked through before, but I’ve never spent time watching the pelicans. I’ve walked through every royal park in the city in the last year—I had to do something on my days off.” She put a hand to her face. “I didn’t mean for that to sound so pathetic.”

  He put his arm around her. “I would’ve walked through them all with you,” he said.

  She closed her eyes briefly, fixing this moment in her memory. She opened them again and saw him watching her. “How about a cup of tea?” she asked.

  As they sat with their tea from the park’s kiosk, taken outdoors where it steamed in the air, Pru’s phone rang. They looked at each other before she pulled it out. It was Lydia again.

  Christopher saw it, too. “Go ahead.”

  Pru turned the phone over as it continued to ring, so that she couldn’t see the name. “No.”

  “Is she phoning about … your plans to go back to Texas?”

  How could the world turn from bright and kind and romantic to bleak and desolate and lonely with the ring of a phone? She must change the subject. “What do badgers eat besides raisins and peanuts?”

  They looked into each other’s eyes, and she silently pleaded for him to leave the topic of Texas alone and let them move back to a happier place. After a moment, he took her hand across the table, and said, “They have a varied diet. They eat earthworms and ground beetles, and in late summer and autumn, a great deal of fallen fruit along with acorns and mast—you know mast?”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “Beechmast.”

  “And small animals,” he continued, “occasionally even a hedgehog.”

  “No,” she gasped in dismay, “not the hedgehogs.”

  He laughed. She squeezed his hand and said, “Thank you.”

  Walking across Westminster Bridge to the abbey, they stopped on the west end by the statue of Boadicea, who drove the Romans out of much of Britain in A.D. 60, to admire the view to the north of Jubilee Gardens and to the south, the Houses of Parliament. Christopher put his hand on the back of her neck and massaged it gently, then wrapped his arms around her from behind. This was too much. It had always been relatively easy for her to keep an emotional distance in relationships, but she felt an unfamiliar pull here. Where had her reason gone now that she needed it? She held on to his arms, perhaps a bit too tightly, and tried to breathe normally. He touched his lips to her hair, but she turned and buried her head in his shoulder. He murmured something in her ear, but all she caught was “my darling,” which turned her to jelly.

  “Sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry, how silly of me.” She struggled to get hold of herself, wishing that he would say something, some bold statement that would … would do what? His face was full of concern for her. He probably thinks I’m cracking up, she thought. “Is it time for the concert?”

  For dinner, they stopped at a Spanish restaurant in Pimlico he had found and ordered several dishes from the tapas menu, her emotions back on an even keel at last. “Is this like the food you have in Texas?” he asked.

  Pru looked down at the assortment of small plates with a strong Mediterranean flair. “No, it’s quite different. They have more seafood along the coast, but really, in most of Texas, we’re strong on beans and rice.”

  “Did your mother cook English food when you were growing up?”

  “Fish and chips?” she asked. “Bubble and squeak? Bangers and mash? Spotted dick?” They both laughed. “Not very often.” She thought it was time for a small confession. “I’m not really much of a cook myself.”

  “Neither am I,” he said, “although I can toss a few things together for pasta.”

  “There’s one thing my dad made sure I could fix,” she said with some pride, “and that’s biscuits.”

  “Biscuits?” he said with a polite tone to his voice. “Shortbread, custard creams, ginger nuts?”

 
“No, American biscuits, not tea biscuits,” she explained. “They’re sort of like a savory scone. You put butter and jam or honey on them.”

  “Well, I’d be happy to try them out.”

  “I’d be happy to fix them for you.”

  He paused, watching her with that small smile on his lips. “Why do Americans ‘fix’ food? Is it broken?”

  “It is if I’ve made it.” She nudged his leg with her toe.

  They took a cab back from the restaurant. A light mist swirled around as they stood quietly facing each other.

  “I’ve had such a lovely day,” Pru said.

  “I enjoyed it, too.”

  “You enjoy showing off the city, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I enjoy being with you,” he said, and drew her close. She began to sink into such a delicious place, then reality yanked her back with the ring of her phone. Without meaning to, she tensed up, and Christopher pulled back slightly. She pulled the phone out, looked down, and saw Lydia’s name on the screen.

  Pru stared at the screen until Christopher said, “She’s persistent, and I don’t believe you can let this go. Go ahead and answer. I won’t come in. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” and he moved to leave.

  “No, come in, at least for a minute.” Talk about a mood breaker, she thought. They walked inside the front hall as Pru answered. “Hello, Lydia.”

  “Pru, I just wanted to check with you about your flight—do you know what day you’re coming home?”

  Misery wicked up through Pru’s entire being. “Lydia, maybe I could phone you tomorrow and we’ll talk.”

  Lydia knew her too well. She apparently sensed some hesitancy in Pru’s voice and thought she’d better close the deal. “Pru, I know you’re a little sad now, but it’s really better this way. You know we all look forward to you coming home. Do you have your plane ticket?”

  At Lydia’s use of the word “home,” Pru’s eyes welled up. Christopher had given her some space and stood in the doorway to the sitting room, studying the Constable print on the wall.