‘He gave Sybil notice this morning on account of health.’
‘Could he be feeling faint, poor fellow,’ hazarded the vicar, ‘and putting his head between his knees?’ And after a moment, ‘I think I’ll go and see.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Verity. ‘I wanted to look at the rose-garden in any case.’
They went out by the french window and crossed the lawn. The sun had come out and a charming little breeze touched their faces.
As they neared the box hedge the vicar, who was over six feet tall, said in a strange voice, ‘It’s very odd.’
‘What is?’ Verity asked. Her heart, unaccountably, had begun to knock at her ribs.
‘His head’s in the wheelbarrow. I fear,’ said the vicar, ‘he’s fainted.’
But McBride had gone further than that. He was dead.
II
He had died, the doctor said, of a heart attack and his condition was such that it might have happened any time over the last year or so. He was thought to have raised the handles of the barrow, been smitten and tipped forward, head first, into the load of compost with which it was filled.
Verity Preston was really sorry. McBride was often maddening and sometimes rude but they shared a love of old-fashioned roses and respected each other. When she had influenza he brought her primroses in a jampot and climbed a ladder to put them on her window-sill. She was touched.
An immediate result of his death was a rush for the services of Mrs Black’s newly arrived brother. Sybil Foster got in first, having already paved the way with his sister. On the very morning after McBride’s death, with what Verity Preston considered indecent haste, she paid a follow-up visit to Mrs Black’s cottage under cover of a visit of condolence. Ridiculously inept, Verity considered, as Mr Black had been dead for at least three weeks and there had been all those fulsomely redundant expressions of sympathy only the previous afternoon. She’d even had the nerve to take white japonica.
When she got home she telephoned Verity.
‘My dear,’ she raved, ‘he’s perfect. So sweet with that dreary little sister and such good manners with me. Called one Madam which is more than – well, never mind. He knew at once what would suit and said he could sense I had an understanding of the “bonny wee flooers”. He’s Scotch.’
‘Clearly,’ said Verity.
‘But quite a different kind of Scotch from McBride. Highland I should think. Anyway – very superior.’
‘What’s he charge?’
‘A little bit more,’ said Sybil rapidly, ‘but, my dear, the difference?’
‘References?’
‘Any number. They’re in his luggage and haven’t arrived yet. Very grand, I gather.’
‘So you’ve taken him on?’
‘Darling! What do you think? Mondays and Thursdays. All day. He’ll tell me if it needs more. It well may. After all, it’s been shamefully neglected – I know you won’t agree, of course.’
‘I suppose I’d better do something about him.’
‘You’d better hurry. Everybody will be grabbing. I hear Mr Markos is a man short up at Mardling. Not that I think my Gardener would take an under-gardener’s job.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘Who?’
‘Your gardener.’
‘You’ve just said it. Gardener.’
‘You’re joking.’
Sybil made an exasperated noise into the receiver.
‘So he’s gardener-Gardener,’ said Verity. ‘Does he hyphenate it?’
‘Very funny.’
‘Oh, come on, Syb!’
‘All right, my dear, you may scoff. Wait till you see him.’
Verity saw him three evenings later. Mrs Black’s cottage was a short distance along the lane from Keys House and she walked to it at 6.30, by which time Mrs Black had given her brother his tea. She was a mimbling little woman, meekly supporting the prestige of recent widowhood. Perhaps with the object of entrenching herself in this state, she spoke in a whimper.
Verity could hear television blaring in the back parlour and said she was sorry to interrupt. Mrs Black, alluding to her brother as Mr Gardener, said without conviction that she supposed it didn’t matter and she’d tell him he was wanted.
She left the room. Verity stood at the window and saw that the flower-beds had been recently dug over and wondered if it was Mr Gardener’s doing.
He came in. A huge sandy man with a trim golden beard, wide mouth and blue eyes, set far apart and slightly, not unattractively, strabismic. Altogether a personable figure. He contemplated Verity quizzically from aloft, his head thrown back and slightly to one side and his eyes half-closed.
‘I didna just catch the name,’ he said, ‘ma-am.’
Verity told him her name and he said, ou aye, and would she no’ tak’ a seat.
She said she wouldn’t keep him a moment and asked if he could give her one day’s gardening a week.
‘That’ll be the residence a wee piece up the lane, I’m thinking. It’s a bonny garden you have there, ma-am. What I call perrrsonality. Would it be all of an acre that you have there, now, and an orchard, forby?’
‘Yes. But most of it’s grass and that’s looked after by a contractor,’ explained Verity, and felt angrily that she was adopting an apologetic, almost a cringing attitude.
‘Ou aye,’ said Mr Gardener again. He beamed down upon her. ‘And I can see fine that it’s highly prized by its leddy-mistress.’
Verity mumbled self-consciously.
They got down to brass tacks. Gardener’s baggage had arrived. He produced glowing references from, as Sybil had said, grand employers, and photographs of their quellingly superior grounds. He was accustomed, he said, to having at the verra least a young laddie working under him but realized that in coming to keep his sister company in her ber-r-rievement, pure lassie, he would be obliged to dra’ in his horns a wee. Ou, aye.
They arrived at wages. No wonder, thought Verity, that Sybil had hurried over the topic: Mr Gardener required almost twice the pay of Angus McBride. Verity told herself she ought to say she would let him know in the morning and was just about to do so when he mentioned that Friday was the only day he had left and in a panic she suddenly closed with him.
He said he would be glad to work for her. He said he sensed they would get along fine. The general impression was that he preferred to work at a derisive wage for somebody he fancied rather than for a pride of uncongenial millionaires and/or noblemen, however open-handed.
On that note they parted.
Verity walked up the lane through the scents and sounds of a spring evening. She told herself that she could afford Gardener, that clearly he was a highly experienced man and that she would have kicked herself all round her lovely garden if she’d funked employing him and fallen back on the grossly incompetent services of the only other jobbing gardener now available in the district.
But when she had gone in at the gate and walked between burgeoning lime trees up to her house, Verity, being an honest-minded creature, admitted to herself that she had taken a scunner on Mr Gardener.
As soon as she opened her front door she heard the telephone ringing. It was Sybil, avid to