Writer's Competition - Entry No 8

[Juan Aneiros]

Return From The Dark Season
By Timon Goode

According to my mail I would say retirement is a tedious affair. Letters come in, mine go out, very little is achieved. I have managed the affairs here in this house of apartment flats for many years. The exterior is newly-painted and on Friday all the scaffolding went. A singular achievement.

It is Sunday, October the first. A letter to young children is still my principal opportunity to entertain. No child lives among us. A residence of the well-to-do and of the retired does not cry out to hear children's voices. Too far set in our ways, and few come to visit. But my dear Madeleine and Louis, who pass through this uneventful residential square to school each day, are the notable exceptions. Occasionally I write to them: and I deliver a card with their comic paper.

I do not myself own the garden here at the back, but I do use it. Down from my third floor flat I attend the flowerbeds weekly in their growing season. I am well appreciated for this and cost the others nothing. I am a solitary gardener but no patient secretary to others' demands. The rear garden of number fifty-nine Saint James' Square is mine to upkeep, and mine alone.

This is simply how professional and public life has left me and I am rather sorry for it. My wife viewed with disrelish the rigours of neighbourliness. It was with considerable reluctance that we -- and now I alone -- took up officership of the house management committee. Since she died, and upon her insistent wish that I keep the garden going for myself, I have reburdened myself annually of the secretarial post and its workload. Yearly unopposed I oversee maintenance. More rewarding, in the council chamber I scrutinise the latest restoration phase of our great Regency square, here at the front. And this is precisely why I serve: for new railings, native English trees and flagstone paths have, at my instigation, been installed for the Square. Even in retirement as an architect, my own designs and detailings are looked upon preferentially.

This morning I became most impatient with writing, and for no good reason. My mind went, my wrists froze. My weekly card and delivery to the children would wait. To clear my head I took to a specific task in the garden. It is autumn, the fall, when more colours hang in trees than just old green, and in the mornings there is a lot of spider-webbing, with handfuls of dew. Madeleine and Louis will know how it takes longer for the day to warm up and get itself off to school, and quicker then to start back on its journey home and the darkness of night. The subject of their card, perhaps? So I thought.

It is not easy for me with so little eyesight to write. It is a little easier to use a trowel, shears, string. Blind in my left eye since the war and now close to losing my remaining vision in the right, I do not fear the dark season, which now most certainly approaches, although I dread complying with its inevitable rigours. The present season requires me to nurture things out there for better growth and longer flowering. Many other residents of Saint James' Square can be seen tiptoeing through their verdant verdure, carrying shears to top dead heads and prune out old wood, helping nature to be better the next time around, in the spring. Always we must have things better than before: we can't get away from that thought even in a garden! I do say and believe that my very best of times are surrounded by snapdragons and forget-me-nots, fishbone and bonemeal and statuary, when I sense my own perennial life.

I must say I've had a fair time to think about all this and that. Not everything that happens in a garden can I honestly describe as having happened. I might add, for the children, that I feel it could.

My task on this unseasonably sunny morning was to see into the centre of the largest flowerbed, while keeping balance amid high clumps and avoiding low tendrils. (That's a hard task in itself: if you stand still long enough feelers will wind up your leg and even flower behind your back without you getting the slightest clue. ...) I required to see exactly what had become of one great patch of rare, white aconitum, or monkshood, that had never before flowered, and was indeed by September's end my first candidate for digging in elsewhere.

Mr Wasyl Derisz, an elderly Pole and resident of the garden flat, came also at this time into the garden to sit in sunshine. Few enjoy having a pair of eyes on them while they work, and I can at times resent this fellow's presence. But he invariably remains quiet and such objections are foolish when voiced aloud. So quiet is this elderly man that in fact when he laughs he makes no sound at all. And curious to relate but true, one can only tell when Bill (as we took to calling him) finds a thing amusing because his face turns a bruised and incredible scarlet, and his mouth stretches as wide as a young bird's waiting to be fed. And occasionally he does make a noise, a small rustling in the throat, like dry papery leaves. To know Bill is happy is to note that bruise rising, perhaps detect the throaty rustle, and await his beaming, feeding look. Happiness. Undeniable happiness.

I cannot tell what caused the strangest change to take place in Bill Derisz. He sat in his spot beneath a tired wooden bower where, in late spring, wisteria greets honeysuckle and makes the senses reel with heady perfumes. Nearby are sharp-sweet herbs in a clay kitchen sink; and the Lilli Marlene rose kicks her boughs over the diorama rose trellised in the garden's walled and most sheltered hotspot. This is Bill's place on the lawn. For a dozen summers he has been content to be seated by a helper and stray no farther. A Polish visitor told me he is a good man for whom friends feel much love and loyalty: he is certainly well fed. I don't think he misses Poland. Shuffling on his walking frame from his flat with a loyal Polish girl helping him slowly across the lawn, he is left for an hour, perhaps wishing he was fit and well to move, but probably not, gripping his frame even though he is safely sitting, his mottled brown hands tanning as they have for ten years longer than mine, and watching my step, observing my tasks.

I spoke to him, and loudly too. One year, I call, One year I will get lost in this flowerbed, these hollyhocks and Himalayan balsam, it's all just too high, isn't it? I hope you'll see me from over on the lawn, I hope you'll come into the flowerbed and rescue me. I heard a rustling sound, and when I listened through rusty hollyhocks and a cascade of Japanese anemones I discovered that he laughed and laughed, and was going pink, and was bruising. And although nothing like a laugh emanated from his mouth, I heard a rustle like drying leaves on trees.

A small breeze got up and protested at my untied bamboo canes. Many other tasks there.

A voice called out my name. A rushing sound. Paul! Paul! And his face was laughing, still laughing and quite fit to burst. He was laughing? Surely nothing I had said was so hilarious. Unless how I'd joked about him rushing into the flowers to rescue me.

I stumbled, and slipped, then caught out, my hands hitting tall brittle spikes, snapping off a clutch of aconitums, the tall and head-bent monkshood in full white bloom. And beside it I regained a footing, immediately sharpened my wits, and spoke as if to a neighbour; I called out, HELXINE SOLEIROLLI -- it was more a curse. But a real voice, female, asked immediately of me, What had I said, what had I done. Mind-your-own-Business, I retorted. The voice had been my next door neighbour's concern. She took offence silently. And for that moment offence was meant. Then: No, no, I capitulated; that's what it's called ... the invasive weed beneath my feet! But she had gone. I knelt on mind-your-own business, and self-set sweet marjoram was there too, and a more bitter odour. It was rancorous, poison to the soul. As a boy I had sat with this stink in overgrown grounds of a mansion, between two thunderous wars, alone.

That boy had cried. He had tasted the bitter nightshade, touched the exotic flowers, fingered the forbidden berries that had smothered the abandoned home.

Why, I smile to myself now! And I laugh that Mr Derisz had witnessed my miserable mistake .. There has been no tragic outcome. After all, my rare white blossoms succeeded this year.

But blinded in the bed by a shroud of privacy, I began preparing in my mind for next year, planning all around monkshood, believing the promise of better plants, more vivid colours, and remembering the summers of other victorious plants in other grounds I had owned, designed, even shown. Memories of my wife followed, my eyes fell on lengthy tendrils of hot-scented nasturtium, past Michaelmas daisies (those blue asters of October) and I saw her treasures -- roses of the past -- the pink Scented Air, and red Fragrant Cloud, Summer Holiday, Dreaming Spires.

I looked up. Bill Derisz stood unaided, without his woman, without his frame, not gripping, his nut-brown fingers outstretched, and watching me and laughing, yes, still laughing. And roots had sprung from the old man's shoes, roots had left his legs, and he was rooting there to the spot, into the damp lawn, he was putting down roots like waving tentacles. And as I watched, his wide beaming face turned slowly into knotty bark, then into a tree with ancient leaves, and Bill's old green went yellow, into flame orange, to burnt red, and it died brown. The sun reached behind a cloud as he slimmed. And then his arms became small branches and extended symmetrically before they froze. His laughter became a sound of nature.

I returned from the scene to my flat. Even great plane trees in an English square can be shaken to their roots. I listen to catch the first fall of leaves in hefty gusts of warm wind. When the sun dashes out again our newly-acquired ornamental cherry tree will probably be bare of leaves. The children who come by might look more carefully at those tanned twigs. We might all watch together the black ants moving along its bark to the tips, where small inedible cherries resembling the old man's ruddy cheeks are firmly caught upon that spot where he laughed for the last time.

I telephoned my neighbour a while ago. She was of course happy to have the Go to Hell incident explained. I am, I know, I said, bad-tempered too often, being blind. But really I do not know what to say to these Polish women. They are such good people, now at their church. In spring Bill's green buds will break over brittle spindlewood and he will bask. Later he will be sheltered behind the tallest plants, the ones that grow quickly here, like montbretia with leaves like swords as tall as men, and fuchsia, with small sharp flowers that my wife hooked around as summer party earrings.

I will miss having eyes running over my hands, over my work, over my desk and over the words I write. He promised to rescue me. I hope his feet are not too rooted in the earth. Exactly as I rescue him he will rescue me. I am retired but I do not stop work. I will dig up that tree from the lawn and plant it at the better aspect. And then I have the restoration of our Square always in mind.

You see, I am too busy with my time to retire.