Jacob’s Garden

Contributed by Andrew Cheverton on 18/11/08

Oliver Jacob worked for many years – a lifetime – as a labourer, and a foreman, then a site inspector and a part-time consultant, and he retired early, with some money in the bank and a wife in the ground, and lived what he might suppose to call a fair life, one that might only be bettered if his wife were there to share its small and frequent pleasures with him, on the occasions they arrived.

He woke early – as was his habit, too late to change now – and ate a simple breakfast of toast or cereal, a glass of juice and a cup of tea, and then he pleased himself with the rest of the day. He took to walking, and helped out part-time in a charity shop, and he kept up Margaret’s garden as she would have liked.

It was a good life, just the retirement he had expected, and if his heart sometimes pinched at the loss of his wife, he would leave the house and work on her garden until the feeling went away and he could feel – sometimes almost see – her smile at the work he did.

On his walks - a different route each time – and his shop work – with varying colleagues, depending on the day – Oliver met a lot of people. Some he passed in the street, always offering a smile and a hello – returned more often than he might have expected – and some he served in the shop. And the little niggles of rudeness that he might once have mentioned to Margaret, he kept to himself. There were children being taken home from school by busy parents who parked across the pavement, and those who pulled their children along like luggage, and some who shouted at them like dogs. There were customers who not only never spoke to him as he helped them, but didn’t even look up at him. There were litter-droppers, and pavement cyclists, and swearing teenagers and, in the middle of it all, Oliver, beginning to feel – for the first time – a little more than alone.

He tried not to think ill of people. He tried not to imagine the conversations he would have had with Margaret about the casual rudeness that irked him, but the mound of dirt in the corner of the garden – what he called the ‘dead area’, where he piled all the cuttings and the clippings – was now almost as tall as a man, and the arch that had fallen away at the base lent it the impression of an almost human shape, its arms, bent double at the elbow, pulled in at the sides, and the head bowed low into the chest.

Late one evening, as the sun fell behind a bank of darkening clouds, and the last smudges of sunlight scudded across the lawn and into the shadows of the evening, Oliver Jacob – who had tried so very hard not to think of the growing shape at the bottom of the garden, pulling itself out of the earth, a little at a time – walked to the darkest corner of the garden, bent ever so slightly at the waist and looked at the spot in the dark where its eyes might be.