Susan hadn’t bothered to button her bedjacket; I couldn’t help looking at her breasts. I wasn’t pleased with myself for it, nor pleased with her when she put her hands over them and said in a voice which was almost a whine. “They’re nice, aren’t they?” I nodded; things were riding over me again. We hadn’t gone to sleep until four in the morning, we’d just come near a quarrel, and in any case Barbara was next door and fully awake. But if Susan made the signal, I knew what would happen. I got out of bed and pulled on my dressing-gown.
“I’m going to have a shower.”
“A cold one?”
I turned at the doorway. “I’ll come back to bed if you’re not careful.”
She giggled. “The child,” she said. “Remember Spock, Joety.” She took off her bedjacket.
“There’ll be tonight,” I said, slamming the door. Her giggle seemed to follow me down the passage.
After breakfast I went out into the garden. Spring had come late that year, making nonsense of last year’s grandiose plans; I was two Sundays of hard digging behind schedule. Harling Crescent was part of a new housing estate off St. Clair Park, or off Earl Road, depending on which way you wanted to look at it. (The estate agents generally called it the Park Development, the word Park having more cachet than Road.)
With the exception of a few big houses on Earl Road itself, there’d been no building in the district until after the war. We were the first occupants of Number Seven Harling Crescent, and the garden had been a wilderness when we moved in. Now, after three years during which I seemed to have done little else but weed and dig and add cartloads of lime and manure, it was beginning to look credible that in about ten years time it might be remotely like the garden in Hunlitt and Lesper’s brochure. It wouldn’t, I knew, boast quite as many roses and cherry-trees or have such a smoothly green lawn or such agreeably fantastic topiary work, nor could I ever hope for a limousine of anything near the dimensions (the bonnet, according to my calculations, being some fifteen feet long) to stand in the drive. I had few illusions left about my value to my father-in-law’s business. But it would be definitely a garden, and we’d have tea there in the summer and eat our own strawberries and there’d be a Wendy house for Barbara and, as she herself would put it, flowers. Barbara would come home and there would be flowers. Above all, the garden would be something I’d made, something which belonged to me. The poet who wrote about God walking in his garden in the cool of evening had got it all wrong; I valued my garden because it was about the only place in the world in which I, Joe Lampton, could walk as Joe Lampton.
And, since I’d been thinking of being two Sundays behind schedule, it was the only place where I didn’t live to schedule; in a garden one did things by season and weather, not clock and calendar.