‘Oh, yes.’ Ruth laughed. Her voice was moneyed and sounded like a lifetime of polished floors. ‘No problem, darling. No problem.’
Dorothy didn’t think Hank had been at the funeral. Perhaps that was another reason for Ruth’s antsiness at the time, her stress. She resisted asking.
‘Hey.’ He arrived by the pepper plants wearing gym shorts, a tank top and a baseball cap. ‘I’m going for a run. Then we’ll hit the markets, et cetera?’
Dorothy loosened her nightie away from the middle of her body, where it slightly clung in the heat of the morning, and fanned her face with her hand. ‘Be careful on the roads round here. There isn’t much traffic so people drive like dicks.’
‘You drive on the left, right?’
They watched him jog away.
‘I have to go to work,’ Dorothy said. ‘Will you be OK here?’
Ruth smiled. ‘Of course.’
‘So is that your music?’
‘Oh yeah, take it off if you don’t like it.’
‘Maybe just Andrew. The distraction.’
Dennis opened the door in his dressing gown, surprised to see her. ‘It’s Tuesday. I thought you were coming tomorrow.’
‘Is it all right? We’ve got houseguests, I thought I’d give them some space.’ She blushed at this self-serving lie. A whole day with Ruth would have killed her.
He took the bunch of sweet peas with wavering hands and kissed Dorothy on both cheeks. ‘These smell divine.’ He inhaled the flowers. A petal dropped, gone, to the cool slate floor.
‘I’ll go straight through to the back.’
Dennis frowned. ‘The pool man’s coming today as well.’
‘Don’t worry. I won’t let any clippings fly in.’
Dorothy cut back the box hedges until her back and arms ached and the ridges of the secateurs’ handles were imprinted in her hands. The garden was full of exotics; this was how Dennis liked it, the anachronism, wearing his coloniser heritage with pride. She deadheaded roses and picked the flower heads off the last of the zinnias and marigolds and put them in her basket to store. An attack of breathlessness hit. She sat for a while beneath the umbrella of the willow tree, looking through the overhanging leaves at the sunflowers on the other side of the garden, ungainly freaks leaning against the fence. She stared at the sunflowers for a long time. The seeds would be ready to shake out and dry. A white sheet spread out on the grass. Cracked feet. Her father’s bewildered squint, Lee emerging from the bush, Ruth in Daniel’s arms.
The pool guy vacuumed the bottom corners of the pool and stroked the water’s surface with his long unwieldy poles. Dorothy waited till he was in the pool house before she crawled out from under the willow branches, so as not to startle him, or look like some kind of creature. She spread chopped leaf mulch under the new shrubs and found a small brown lizard on one of the potted plants and flicked it into the bushes. Some of the plants needed to be shifted indoors to Dennis’s conservatory. She checked the undersides of the leaves for bugs. The old terracotta pots were so crumbly it was hard to wipe dirt from their bases without gravel-sized pieces of orange clay coming away on the cloth.
‘Are you free tonight?’ she asked Dennis, who was sitting at his dining-room table eating a sandwich.
‘Yes.’ Dennis’s head swung side to side as though he was saying no. He grasped for the linen napkin that sat in front of him on the table, his hand batting the table twice before his fingers curled and gripped it, brought it to his pursed, trembling mouth.
Dorothy rode her bike slowly home along the unmarked road, suede hills on her right, that twinge in her knee shooting sciatically up to her hip. A vanload of German tourists stood where the tourists always stood, taking the necessary photograph of the sea nestled between those hills across the valley, hot blue in the afternoon sun. When they first moved here Dennis had talked about putting in a swimming pool at their place but then he needed more medical care and the expense was too great. Sweat ran down the backs of Dot’s knees.
She rested in the corner doorway of the closed butcher’s shop, where the blinds were drawn. The triangular junction was free of traffic. Two rental cars sat parked outside the deli and aside from that evidence of human life an atomising bomb could be dropped and you would know no different. A tree with polymer-lace bark like