12

Isaiah was having trouble with the rows again. The difficulty lay in trying to keep them straight. The first one had been easy enough, but then it always was. You just followed the fence, and since that was straight, the row ended up straight. It was the second row that did it. Miss Marriot had shown him. ‘Just so much, Isaiah. Put your hand down. Yes. That is how far apart they must be.’ He didn’t need to look back now to know that he had gone crooked. The little seedling he’d just put in was no less than three hands away from the corresponding one in the first row. Isaiah stole a quick look at the office window. He caught a blur of grey hair, so he pretended to be busy. But she must have seen him.

‘Everything all right, Isaiah?’

Could he pretend not to have heard?

‘Isaiah!’ Old man, white hair, stiff legs, can’t hear.

He planted away industriously, taking care to measure the spot for every seedling. If she’s watching, he thought, she’ll see me doing it right. He made a great show of measuring with his hand. He even went back on his tracks to measure those he had just planted so as to convince the eyes at the window.

Isaiah almost thought he had succeeded when he heard the door slam and her light footsteps coming towards him along the gravel path. He immediately thought of the strange, black, block-heeled, laced shoes that she wore and at which he always stared when she spoke to him. Isaiah sighed inwardly and prepared himself. He’d played it all wrong. He should have answered when she first called. Had he done that she might have been content with a few words from the window. Instead of which…

‘Isaiah, I was calling…’

He waited.

‘Isaiah!’

Great pain, long-suffering pain. She could sound it in a way that he had never heard from anyone else.

‘Isaiah! What—have—you—done?’

If you hadn’t got used to the white, powdery face and thin lips, and heard only those words, you would have thought tears were coming. Isaiah knew better. He got stiffly to his knees and took a quick look at the face before dropping his eyes. The same, complaining little smile was there that he had seen the very first day he saw her. Now he took off his cap, scratched his head and looked back along the row. The last six or seven, which he had planted with such a great show of measuring the right space, were correct; but after that there was a sudden bulge that tapered away to the start of the bed.

‘Isaiah!’ The smile was no effort on her part. It was there permanently. She looked at the elderly man with round eyes. ‘Yes, look what you’ve done. Now tell me, aren’t you a naughty boy?’

Isaiah smiled and looked up at the sky. She amused him sometimes.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A naughty boy. Now I did show you, didn’t I?’