The Winter Children (10 page)

Oh my God. How will I stand it? Especially after Argentina.

She shivers, even though the day is warm. In fact, it’s more than warm. It’s properly hot. An English spring day and here she is, in this beautiful place. A dream. A dream house. A
fantasy home which is now, unbelievably,
her
home. The place where she and Dan and the twins live.

Easter has just passed, and now there are flocks of daffodils nodding their heads all over the garden, banks of yellow primroses, early camellias in palest pink opening their soft frilly
saucer faces to the sky. The cherry trees shake their pink and white blossom in the light spring breeze. Everywhere she looks bright green shoots are emerging. This is usually her favourite part of the year, when the work to be done outside starts to call to her and she is hungry to be out and doing. This is when gardens wake up, responding to the light and
warmth and the change of season. Old friends come back, new ones emerge from the earth. Already she’s thinking of dividing and replanting the bulbs of the early flowers that have come and
gone: snowdrops and crocuses. Now she should be thinking of her summer crop of fruit, flowers and vegetables, and preparing the ground for new growth.

But this is not her garden. She doesn’t know where the snowdrops and crocuses blossomed, because that happened before they got here. Everything about it is unfamiliar. Someone else has
done all the work. She doesn’t know this place, not yet. And anyway, she’s rusty. It’s been two years since she’s experienced a spring at home, and her eye is still reacquainting itself with an English garden, after being surrounded by the flora of an Argentinian
estancia
. She’s become used to hot pinks and purples, fuchsia and mimosa and heavily
scented roses, the rich dry green of the ombu tree.

All that lovely warmth. I really will miss it when winter comes back.

But by then, they will have made their bit of the house cosy and warm. The range will take the edge off the chill stone flags of the kitchen floor and begin to pump heat into the thick walls.
She thinks idly that she must buy some big old curtains from somewhere to hang over the doorways, particularly the doorway into the hall.

Imagine the gusts of freezing air that will fly through the cracked old doors, whirling in to nip at necks and fingers. Really, this place is completely unsuitable for us. But . . .
Dan
wasn’t terribly keen and raised all the practical objections, but she let her reason be overruled by the romance of the house and the opportunity it offered. And the truth was that,
whatever Dan said, they didn’t have a great deal of choice.

A wood pigeon begins to coo overhead, the sweet, soothing sound filling her with calm just as Dan comes out of the house with that particular air of drained fatigue that comes of persuading
someone else to go to sleep when one is dog-tired.

‘Success?’ she asks, though she’s sure that the answer is yes or he wouldn’t be here.

Dan nods. ‘Yup. Bea was as good as gold. I put her down in the cot and she just shut her eyes and went straight off to sleep. Stan was the tricky one today.’

‘He’s usually so easy. I think he’s still adapting.’ She nods at his cup of tea, cooling on the wrought-iron table next to the bench. ‘That’s yours. Bit cold
now, I think. I’ll do a fresh one.’

‘No, don’t worry, it’s fine. I quite like it cold. Stan was a real live wire. Finished off all the milk, even after that lunch. It took me ages to get him to stop chatting and
nod off.’

‘Perhaps it’s a growth spurt,’ Olivia says pensively. ‘I think he’s due one.’

Dan settles down on the bench next to her, stretches out his long legs and sighs. ‘Bloody hell. I’m bloody knackered. I never knew it was going to be this hard.’

Olivia laughs. ‘Well, we could have guessed!’

‘How?’ Dan says with a touch of petulance in his voice. ‘No one tells you what a relentless slog it is.’

‘Yes they do. We just don’t understand what it means till it happens. Besides . . .’ Olivia finishes off her own tea, now completely cold and metallic, leaving a film over her
tongue. ‘It all gets better from here on in. Look at Sam and Robbie.’

Her nephews are ten and twelve, and during the stay in Argentina they were hardly seen. When they weren’t at
school, they were outside playing or in the sitting room on their PlayStations, necks crooked at the TV screen, eyes wide, fingers and thumbs frantically moving on the consoles. They were called to
meals, ate without persuasion, went to the loo without being accompanied, cleaned their own teeth, washed themselves, read their own stories. Olivia can hardly believe that one day her own needy
little children will be as independent, but the day will surely come. Already she can’t really remember the hell of those early months: the blending of day into night, the desperate desire
for sleep; the milk-scented, nappy-filled, feeding-obsessed hours when she and Dan just seemed to pass the babies back and forth between them as they slept in what seemed like carefully planned
relays designed to prevent their parents from resting for more than twenty minutes. The best decision Dan and Olivia made was to go to stay with her sister and mother on the
estancia
. It was
like flying from darkness and stress into light and rest. Sunlight, welcoming smiles and comforting arms greeted them, and suddenly life became a little easier. The mad carousel driven by panic and sleeplessness slowed. She could nap in the afternoons, leaving the babies with her mother. Someone
else cooked and cleaned and returned the babies’ discarded clothes washed, ironed and folded. Voices of experience calmed and soothed her, and surrounded her and the twins with affection.
Slowly, she was able to return to something more like herself, and to enjoy the babies the way she had wanted to. And she had others who loved them to coo and cuddle and find them as infinitely
fascinating as she did.

The time slipped easily by. Their London flat was rented out, they had no jobs to get back to. There was room for them in the villa on the
estancia
, and life was pleasant and easy. Dan
could take all the time he needed to write, and Olivia felt she could breathe for the first time in a long while. She hadn’t realised how tired she was of London and city life. To see
sunshine and be surrounded by greenery every day soothed her deep inside, and she felt happy. Now she was able to see how hard the last few years had been, with the stress and strain of fertility
treatment, the long anxious wait of pregnancy and the trauma of parenthood. The sense of restoration was seductive. Suddenly a year had gone by, and then another. Then Dan began to be restless.
They had been away too long. He wanted to come home and at last she agreed. It seemed only fair, after she’d had two years with her family.

But, sitting on the veranda of the villa, under the soft blue sky, with the pampas grass stretching away into the distance, she felt a sense of horror when she imagined being back in their tiny London flat, with the small patch of green at the back and the endless traffic roaring past, the grey skies and the crowds
of people. She could hardly bear the thought of going back. But, as it turned out, there was no way they could return to the flat, even if they’d wanted to.

The children sleep for the usual two hours, and while the place is quiet, Olivia goes on exploring the garden. The grounds of the house stretch out for acres, but not all of it is cultivated.
Even so, there’s plenty of garden to get to know. She likes the bit outside their quarters best: it’s well looked after and mature, a garden that has been carefully nurtured for years
and is at its peak. Beyond that, there are maintained lawns mown into contrasting stripes, carefully tended beds without a weed in sight, a rose garden and a pretty formal garden with box hedges
grown in exactly symmetrical patterns, containing lavender and foxgloves and verbena within their borders.

Olivia walks the length of the garden wall nearest their door, examining the beds that run along beside it. The earth is still rather barren-looking after the long winter. Aside from the sheaves
of finished daffodil leaves and the fresh crop of hyacinth and bluebell poking through, there’s not a lot happening. She thinks it’s already past the time to mulch here, and to turn the
soil to make it a rich dark brown. Her hands itch for garden tools. Hers are back at the flat in the tiny shed. She hasn’t thought much of gardening for months – at least, not like this. She hasn’t been ready to get her hands dirty.

They’ve been too full of babies.

In Argentina, she studied the gardens around the villa but her Spanish was too bad to talk to the gardeners who tended it. She did some research online, visited the botanical gardens in Buenos
Aires, and was welcomed to some of the other great estates around the city, to look at their magnificent grounds. When the babies were asleep or being looked after, she started to draw up plans for
a book on the native plants and cultivated foreign species that were now thriving in the south east of Argentina, and imagined a beautifully illustrated guide to some of the finest gardens to be
seen in that part of the country. In the drier areas to the west, there were dusty stretches, with cacti and dry grasses, but she would concentrate on the lush, green areas around the famous city
with its strong European influence. There were gardens based on renowned French pleasure grounds and the landscaping of Italian palazzos, each blended with its own touch of native colour and
character. She took dozens of photographs – none good enough for a book but useful for her reference – and now she was beginning to write, though she wasn’t quite sure of the
structure yet. A year in an Argentinian garden? Or one garden studied with reference to others? It would come as she went along and discovered what it was she wanted to say.

She stops by a laburnum tree that’s been espaliered against the wall. Bright green leaf buds are bursting from its dark branches. Soon they’ll be out, and then the buds will come. In another month or so, the tree will be bright with golden flowers. But then . . . She puts her hand out to touch the branch closest to her. When the flowers are finished and the bees
have done their work, this tree will produce pods containing rows of seeds, like small black peas. The pods will burst open and drop to the ground, and the seeds will be dispersed, ready to grow
new laburnum trees, and—

‘You want to be careful with that.’

Olivia jumps violently at the voice and turns around. A man is standing across from her in the garden, a mulish expression on his face. He’s wearing baggy jeans covered with mud and old
black gumboots, and a thick sailor’s jumper that was once cream with a loose tweed jacket over the top. His hair is grey and black, greased back with a small quiff at the front, and his face
is weathered and creased. It’s hard to tell exactly how old he is, but he’s not young.

‘What?’ she says faintly, still startled by his appearance.

‘You want to be careful with that.’ He nods towards the tree. There’s a kind of lilt in his voice that she can’t identify. It’s not like any accent she’s
heard before. ‘It’s poisonous.’

‘I know.’ She looks back at the blameless-looking trunk and the spreading branches. She is already aware of the toxicity of every part of this plant. Leaves, flowers, and seeds.
They can induce sickness, diarrhoea, convulsions and, in small children and animals, prove fatal. She has considered cutting it down, before the pods with their inviting row of small black seeds
fall to the ground where Stan and Bea can pick them, and where little fat fingers can pluck and transfer the poison from pod to mouth, and then . . . It’s too horrible to think about. Dizziness rushes through her.

‘You’ve got little ones,’ he says firmly. ‘You need to be aware, that’s all.’

‘Yes, thank you. I know.’

The old man looks her over keenly. ‘You settled in the house, have you?’

‘Almost—’

‘That woman’s done it up, hasn’t she? I saw them doing it. Weeks of coming and going. Noise and mess.’ He shakes his head. ‘Plenty of money spent on it, too.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg, though, isn’t it? Has she said when they’ll start on the main house?’

‘No. I don’t know, I’m afraid.’

‘The place needs it, but I can’t pretend I like it.’ The old man looks around and clicks his tongue. ‘I’ve got used to it just being me here – and the bloke
who comes to look it over from time to time. Mr Howard. It’s going to be mighty strange when it’s peopled again.’ He turns back to her, interest sparking in his faded eyes.
‘Your little ones – boy and a girl, is it?’

‘That’s right.’ Olivia is beginning to guess who she’s talking to.

‘How old?’

‘Just over two.’

He nods. ‘Thought so. Well, I like having some children about the place. They’re fine ones, too, aren’t they? Sturdy little chaps.’ Then he fixes her with a beady look.
‘Just you make sure you keep the gates and the doors closed. Don’t let them wander off. The garden is vast and the house is no place for little ones. There’s danger in there, understand?’

‘Yes,’ Olivia begins, torn between pleasure at his praise of the children and indignation that she might be so stupid as to let them get lost, but he has already turned on his heel
and is marching away, presumably the way he came in, through the door in the wall that leads towards the back lawn of the house.

She watches him go. He must be the gardener who has tended this place for years. What is his name?

She turns and heads back to where Dan is dozing in the sunshine. On the table next to him, a notebook lies open at a blank page, a pen next to it. He opens his eyes as she approaches and picks
up the pen with a faintly guilty air.

‘I just met the gardener, the one Francesca was telling us about. What’s his name?’

‘William,’ replies Dan, and taps the pen nib on the page. He writes it down:
William.

‘What did she say about him?’

‘Oh, just that they’ve had a hell of a time with him. He won’t be shifted. He’s been here donkey’s years and claims that as no one but him has bothered with the
house since it was left empty he has a lifetime right of tenancy here.’