While still cosseted by mutual spousal existence, she’d scanned with indifference bitter first-person articles about how fiercely people avoid the bereaved—a revelation her own friends had amply illustrated for a year or more. She didn’t blame them. Unintentionally, she and Wyndham had fallen into the heedlessly hermetic unit of two that’s so off-putting from the outside. If she didn’t need friends then, she’d no right to demand their solicitations now. Besides, she’d grown less compelling to herself. A widow of fifty-seven had both too much story left, and not enough. It was narratively awkward: an ellipsis of perhaps thirty years, during which nothing big would happen. Only little things, most of them crap.
The big story that was over wasn’t interesting, either. Pancreatic: swift and dreadful. Yet the pro forma tale did include one poignant detail. Two years ago, she and Wyndham took early retirement, he from private biochemical research, she from her job as a buyer for Debenhams. Some colleagues had quietly disapproved, and soon no one would be allowed to stop working at fifty-five, but to Jeannette and Wyndham that argued for a leap through the closing window. They’d not found each other until their forties, and had made extravagant travel plans for while they were still in rude health. The reasoning was sound; the arithmetic, not. The diagnosis arrived a mere ten weeks after Wyndham’s farewell party.
She hadn’t kept track of whether fifty-seven was the new forty-seven, or thirty-five, or sixty-four—but in any event whatever age she’d reached was not the age she was. Not long ago, she and Wyndham had mourned his every strand that clogged the plughole, each new crease in her neck when she glanced down. Now? She could not get older fast enough.
Convinced that a garden took care of itself—it grew, bloomed, browned and without prodding renewed the cycle—other than hiring a boy to mow, for the year following Wyndham’s death she left the back to its devices. In truth, she missed the sharpness of those first few months, whose high drama would have been impossible to maintain without its sliding into a humiliating fakery, a performance for herself. While still free-flowing and unforced, the grief had been so immersive, so rich and pure and concentrated, with the opacity of Cabernet, that it verged on pleasure. Yet from the start the anguish had been spiked with an awful foreknowledge that the keenness of her loss would blunt, leading to a second loss: a loss of loss. Some soft, muffled bufferedness was bound to take over, as if she were buttressed by excess packaging. Unlike the searing period, with its skipped meals and feverish lie-ins, a bufferedness could last forever, and probably would.
Sure enough, the stab ebbed to ache; a torturous residual presence gave way to absence. Jeannette took refuge in self-sufficiency. She would take nothing (besides that reduced-rate pension), and expect nothing. There must have been millions of such Britons: perfectly neutral social quantities, mutely shopping and tidying up. She would take care of herself, as the garden did.
So late this April, she was surprised to note on an aimless stroll beyond the slug-trailed patio, simply to escape the house—which had never felt suffocating when she shared it—that flowering shrubs past their prime were pooping mounds of rotting pink blossoms, under which matted grass skulked, dying or dead, a urinary yellow. Ineffectually, she raked the piles of petals with her fingers off the moribund lawn, in idle amazement that flowers could kill. The silky mulch had a nice heavy wetness, reminiscent of her cheeks after an inadvisable third glass of wine. Its original perfume mixed with an aroma deader and flatter, like sweet but fading memories intermingling with her present self-sufficiency.
She surveyed the beds on either side. Pooping flowers were the least of it. Unafflicted by Wyndham’s “superfluous” attentions, the ceanothus had bushed out in scraggly extrusions like an unbarbered Afro, blocking the stone path to the tool shed and poking her in the eye. Ivy had choked the herbs; the ferns drooped with snails. Weeds snarled around Wyndham’s languishing plants. The lawn had bare patches from peeing foxes, vermin she’d been too apathetic to shoo. She couldn’t speak for the human sphere, but apparently in the botanical world, without the constant intercession of a benevolent higher power, evil triumphed.
At first anxious about uprooting her husband’s beloved something-or-others, Jeannette soon mastered the gardener’s rubric: anything that grows fast and well is malevolent. Weeding, she was tortured by a cliché that circled her head like a successful advertisement jingle: Nature abhors a vacuum. She came to match each invader with a uniquely flavoured dislike. Burrowing into the mortar of the property line’s brick wall, a pretend-attractive plant with small devious leaves inspired an impatient disgust, especially when she failed to rip out the root system (more or less always): the crafty, low-lying wallflower would be back in a week. Allowed in the passivity of her grieving to rise six feet high, a gangling daisy-like species with disproportionately small, stupid yellow flowers had spread thick white ropes of lateral roots so quickly and so thickly that in another month’s time the towering, insipid plants would have taken over the world. This aversion was laced with fear; she pursued their extermination with the grim, stoical thoroughness of genocide. Indeed, through late-life gardening she discovered in herself a murderous side. In this laying of waste, the institution of her private scorched earth policy, she came closer than she had in seventeen months to joy.
Yet Jeannette reserved her most extravagant loathing for clusters of innocent-looking seedlings that seemed to erupt in concert on a single day, as if obeying a battle plan. Oh, on its own, a single sample of this anonymous item seemed innocuous and easily vanquished. A mere three inches high, two bright never-mind-me leaves splayed on a spindly stem. But when snatched from the ground, lo, the tiny flagpole had sunk into her property a good four inches below—and virtually overnight.
Besides which, any organism in sufficient quantity is gross. Bulging clusters of these seedlings, pushing against one another in their blind, ignorant bunching, sprouted en masse through the bark cover around the tool shed. The impertinent would-be trees cropped up in the lightless murk below the shrubs. They perforated the lawn every two inches. They penetrated the ivy that had killed the chives, and threatened the ivy, too.
Thus by May, her every hour in the garden was devoted to stripping out mocking bouquets that foisted themselves around the trunk of the wisteria, squeezed between the slats of the compost box, and prised the tool shed’s baseboards from its frame. Daily, she massacred seedlings by the thousands, creating whole burial mounds of the shrivelled fallen, and still they came. The slaughter recalled a certain kind of asymmetrical warfare, whereby a better supplied, more technologically sophisticated army is overrun by forces in rags with sticks, the adversary’s greatest weapon its leadership’s utter obliviousness to casualties on a staggering scale.
Any child soldier she failed to slay right away would stake a territorial claim. Within days an overlooked seedling jagged out in aggressive, multipronged foliage with the rough nap and variegation of real tree leaves. The fragile stem woodened to sturdy stalk; the taproot plummeted and grew clinging hairs. Her attempts at jerking these interlopers from the ground (the stem always broke) were no more effective than the Home Office’s feeble efforts to deport asylum seekers.
No mystery, the source of the assault. On the opposite side of the party wall, a monster of a tree rose three storeys high, its trunk only a few inches from the brick, ensuring that nearly half its branches extended over her own garden. It was a charmless thing, blocking light from the herb bed, and already grown pregnant with more seedpods, its branches sagging from the weight of their great ghastly clumps. Crazed eruptions of tiny fibrous pods outnumbered its leaves to such an extent that the tree looked shredded. So eclipsing did her antipathy for this verdant vandal grow that she failed to note: this was more than she had felt towards any living thing, one way or another, since Wyndham’s flatline.
A vastly more beguiling tree, to which Wyndham had been partial, their flaming Japanese maple was growing inexplicably lifeless and bare, so Jeannette booked an appointment
with a tree surgeon. He wasn’t much comfort—“The poor tree’s time has come, missus”—but so long as he was at hand, she pointed to the ogre overhead, obnoxiously thriving. “Speaking of trees whose time ought to have come,” she said, “what’s that?”
The surgeon grinned. “A self-seeding sycamore.”
The name rang a bell. Wyndham must have mumbled it once or twice. It pained her that her patient husband had eradicated half a million seedlings every spring with so little complaint. What other suffering had he disguised, especially in those last months?
“A volunteer,” he went on. “Nobody plants a self-seeding sycamore on purpose. It’s a pest tree.” He looked it up and down, as if measuring it for a coffin. “Three-fifty, and I’ll cut it down for you.”
The house on her eastern side was owned by a man she gathered from misdelivered post was called Burt Cuss. It was an ugly name, like a one-two punch. Perhaps also in his fifties, he had a hulking, furious bearing, and either he seldom left the house or for extended periods he wasn’t there. Sightings were rare. In all seasons, she’d only spotted him in a black crew-neck tee, black jeans, neo-Nazi boots, and a buzz cut. She’d never spoken to him—which should have been unusual, but in London wasn’t. She and Wyndham had speculated about their neighbour—as one does. Given the biceps and hard stomach, her husband assessed the man as ex-Army. Jeannette surmised he was divorced. Soon after Burt moved in, he’d burned a pile of papers out the back, in which she’d spied photographs. Irrationally, she was a little afraid of him. If only because they hadn’t spoken, she rushed inside in the uncommon instance that he ventured into his own garden—if you could call it that.
Burt’s garden was subject to near-total neglect. It hadn’t been landscaped in the slightest. Other than the malicious sycamore right at the back, its only plant life was scrub grass, which grew a foot high before Burt, no more than twice a year, thwacked it to jaundiced nubs with a scythe. Nearer the house, bits of furniture slumped in the rain. Plastic bags that blew on to the long narrow plot would flap there for weeks.
Most Londoners would have sold their first-borns into slavery for fertile terra firma a fraction of that size, a canvas begging to be painted with azaleas, and in times past the dismal waste ground had aroused her dismay. From the master bedroom on the first floor, she had a panoramic view of this unsightly patch, which might even have dropped adjoining property values a tad. Yet now that she’d seized on the tree surgeon’s offer—to be spared that malignancy of seedlings every spring, £350 was a bargain—suddenly her neighbour’s obliviousness to horticulture seemed a stroke of good fortune.
In her retired, socially neutral incarnation, Jeannette had to steel herself to interact with anyone; she could go days without saying a word, and even the encounter with the tree surgeon had been draining. She’d lost the knack of small talk. But a firm purpose was fortifying.
It felt odd to knock formally on the front door when she gawked daily at her neighbour’s unkempt inner sanctum. The peephole cover swung. Multiple locks.
“Right?” he said gruffly, in the usual uniform. Up close, his eyes were green.
“I’m sorry, we’ve never been—”
“You’re in ninety-two,” he cut her off, jerking his head towards her house.
But of course: while you’re supposing about neighbours, they’re supposing about you. “Jeannette Dickson.” He nodded curtly, keeping his own name to himself. “I was hoping we might talk about your tree.”
“What about it?” It was astonishing Burt was even aware of having a tree.
“I hate it.” No self-respecting Briton had any business harbouring such ferocious feelings about a plant, and she feared she’d cast herself as a kook.
“What’d that tree ever do to you?”
“More than you’d expect,” she said, trying to sound reasonable. “Its seedlings. They erupt by the thousands. I spend hours and hours pulling them up.”
“Sounds terrible,” he said, and the deadpan grated.
“I grant it’s not like being strafed by an invading army”—martial imagery was fresh in her mind, and Wyndham’s conjecture that the man was ex-military had morphed from speculation to fact—“though I now have a feel for the experience of being taken over by aliens. The point is, I’d be willing to pay to have it cut down.”
“Sounds a bother. What’s in it for me?”
A matter to which she had dedicated too little preparatory thought. “You must have at least as bad a problem with seedlings yourself.”
“Problem I ain’t even noticed can’t be much of a problem.”
“Well, allowing me to eliminate that tree would be neighbourly. I doubt mine is the only property on this street to which your sycamore is exporting scads of unwanted seedlings, and other homeowners in the area would be grateful as well. We’d both have more light, and your own, ah, garden would feel larger and more open.” It was the best she could do, on the spot.
“No sale. Rather have my privacy.”
She was getting flustered. He stood before her too squarely, blocking the door in an unfriendly fashion, arms folded, forearms rippling. The T-shirt was tight, his pectorals formidable. She wondered how a man who seemed rarely to go outdoors had got that tan. He was a brute, monosyllabic and sullen, nothing like Wyndham, who was tall and lanky, with a sly humour he saved for her; not big on exercise, beyond the pottering, but sinewy, with no waste on him, which made the end come faster, with so few reserves on which to draw. If also not a big talker, he was brilliant, they all said so at the lab, unlike this animal, and when Wyndham did say something he’d made it count.
“My tree surgeon says no one would deliberately plant such a ‘pest tree’—”
“Your tree surgeon?”
“Why’s that funny?”
“I don’t even have a GP.”
“What I meant was, that’s the opinion of an expert.”
“Darling,” Burt said. “I been through this rigmarole before, and you lot got your answer. Ask your husband.”
The surprises were two: that this neighbour had done only nominal supposing about the residents of number ninety-two, having failed to notice its population had halved; and that Wyndham had tried to negotiate this very solution, to no avail.
“I’m afraid my husband passed away, eighteen months ago.” Ergo, here I am, still grieving, and I’m spending all my time ripping up your flipping seedlings.
But Burt didn’t easily embarrass. “Tough luck,” he said dispassionately.
“Could you consider my proposal? I’d make all the arrangements. Please? As a favour. It would mean so much to me.”
“Lady, I spent seventeen years doing favours for a bird not so different from yourself, and in the end it didn’t mean nothing to her at all.”
He shut the door in her face. Confirmation: divorced.
The following few days, Jeannette spent more than one tiresome afternoon in a state of suppressed rage, grumbling about that prick next door while prising single sycamore seedlings from a busy cover of woodbine, something like plucking individual grey hairs from a heavy beard with tweezers. Meantime, incredibly, seedlings she’d already uprooted and left to wither were still struggling their wounded roots back into the bark cover and once again obeying their prime directive to become Earth’s most odious trees. Good God, it was like watching privates who’d had their limbs blown off drag bloody torsos across the battlefield and pick up guns with their teeth.
Yet when Jeannette peered discreetly over the party wall, she could not discern, in Burt’s foot-high scrub grass, any seedlings at all. The immunity was biologically infeasible.
Armed with a sheaf of printouts, she knocked on Burt’s door for Round Two.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “I’m to dismantle my upper floor, so you get more sun in your sitting room.”
“It’s all over the internet.” Jeannette brandished the sheaf. “On blogs, social media, on botanical websites. Everyone detests those trees. Even in forests, they
take over and destroy the habitat—”
“Speaking of trees,” he interrupted, giving her a once-over. “You’ve spruced up.”
She blushed. True, ever since Wyndham died she’d been rather careless in the sartorial department, and this afternoon had taken advantage of a snappy wardrobe from years as a Debenhams buyer who was encouraged to bring home samples. The hasty makeover was merely more strategy: to be presentable, to seem together and sane, a neighbour anyone would want to please. So, fine: she’d washed her hair.
“They’re not even native to Britain,” Jeannette carried on. “It’s an invasive species from the Continent. Sycamores have only been here a few hundred years.”
“The toffs on Downton Abbey have only been in Britain ‘a few hundred years.’ ”
Jeannette frowned. “You don’t seem like the costume drama type.”
“So what do I seem like?”
Awkwardness made her honest. “Someone who does loads of press-ups.”
That won her a half-smile, a first, perhaps a prelude to a full smile, which she precluded by pressing her case. “If you’d simply take a look at these . . .” She held out the sheets of A4. “There’s a uniform consensus . . . We’d be doing a community service.”
“You’re a terrier, you are. Know the type. Just wear you down. Don’t work no more, not on me.”
Before he had a chance to shut the door again, she burst out, “Nearly half of that tree is on my side of the property line. I’ve checked with the council: I’m within my legal rights to cut off any of that sycamore that’s sticking over the wall!”
He shrugged and said, “Be my guest,” perhaps missing her parting shot, “It’ll look ridiculous!” As if he cared.