Mikey Jarvis’ previous job had been in the Royal Parks, and he was always comparing everything with those glory days: the equipment, the human resources. The human resources, meaning us. He was forever telling us about the time he drove his tractor down Piccadilly to Fortnum & Mason to pick up a vast pottery jar of something called Gentleman’s Relish for Her Majesty the Queen Mother (it’s fish paste), and the times that gracious lady in person toddled across the lawns of Clarence House with a glass of beer in her hands — a full pint, mind you, not a half — to say ‘Happy Birthday Mr Jarvis’. Apparently she’s a great one for those sorts of touches.
Of course since Mikey was always boasting about the past, we wondered what he could have done to end up in Lampton Park, which he clearly saw as a sort of Siberia of gardening where he would toil and die. We decided he must have arranged plants in some pornographic pattern, or used fertiliser to spell out obscenities on the lawns. We did that a lot ourselves, spelling out COUNCIL PAY IS SHIT in yellow tulips against red for the entertainment of passing helicopters. As far as Mikey’s disgrace was concerned, we wasted a lot of time trying to work out what message had got him into trouble. The idea that cracked us up the most was PRINCESS ANNE LOVES HORSES, spelled out somewhere it could be read from the Palace.
In winter gardeners work short hours, and then Ray’s rules affected me more. It was like a curfew only in reverse — not being allowed home until a certain time. But there was always Hounslow Library to spend time in, though you can’t spend more than an hour or two in a library without feeling that the staff see you as a borderline tramp. The bus connections were pretty good back them, though people still complained, just for the practice. And I could always visit Mum and Dad in Isleworth, in the house that I had a key to. Most of my books were there anyway. Ray allowed me half a shelf in Hampton for books, on condition that I took in exchange a pile of old martial arts magazines that he wasn’t yet ready to throw away. There wasn’t any spare shelf room, so that was the only way it could have worked, really, by our exchanging a block of books.
Ray could throw out my naff toiletries and keep me out of the house during the day, and he didn’t need to give a reason. That was just the way it was. So what if the cleaning lady had more privileges than I did, seeing as she could let herself in with a key every Thursday? Maybe I felt a little resentment of the cleaning lady and her key, all the same, resentment I wasn’t even aware of. One Thursday morning I left the bed unmade, thinking she was going to be changing the sheets anyway, so what was the point of putting myself out for no reason? That was one of the few times I ever saw Ray angry. He talked about how fucking inconsiderate I was being, till I wondered if maybe he had been brought up with servants, to be so concerned about their working conditions. After that first night I didn’t sleep in the bed anyway unless Ray needed me, but I was perfectly comfortable in the sleeping bag on the floor. I got good rest there.
If I’d wanted to delve into Ray’s belongings, I could easily have done that on a Saturday morning. His bike-cleaning routine was so unvarying and protracted. And yet my feeling for him didn’t include curiosity. I felt it was right that I should have no privacy, since I had no secrets from him. And I needed him to have his privacy, because I needed him to have secrets. His central secret for me, of course, being not why he didn’t give me a key, but why he let me stay at all. It was a question I didn’t want answered. It couldn’t be good for me to know.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have ordinary curiosity about ordinary things. When I was working in the chemist’s and I was alone for a bit, I’d work methodically through the photos waiting to be collected. I’d hold them carefully by the edges, anxious not to take the bloom off the emulsion. I don’t know what I was looking for, exactly, but it seems to be true that other people’s holidays are a blur of happiness, and the sun follows them wherever they go.
So if I wasn’t curious about Ray, there was a bit of philosophy behind it. In fairy stories, I know you’re supposed to sympathise with the person who can’t resist asking the fatal question, make the fatal discovery, but I never did. I mean, Mrs Bluebeard wasn’t really on the ball, if she thought she’d settled down with a man who had no secrets. If all the doors in the spooky castle had been unlocked, if she could wander wherever she wished, her husband would never have appealed to her. He would have been just another smoothie she met at a party. Another smooth duke with a house too big for two people, hard to keep warm in the wintertime.
When a year had gone by and I was about to be nineteen, I realised that Ray must have had a birthday of his own somewhere along the way, without letting on. He wouldn’t even own up to a definite age, a birth year, and he didn’t enjoy those sorts of questions. So I decided that my birthday would have to be his official birthday as well. In fact we needed to crowd three celebrations into a single day, since it was our anniversary to boot. I always played safe with my presents. I usually gave him a book, once I was confident that I knew his tastes. We spent some of our happiest times at the flat in Cardinals Paddock just sitting there, both of us reading. He even asked for a particular book about jewellery once, a big and expensive book, and it was a surprise because he never wore any. You couldn’t count the sort of half-bangles he had in summer, a band of tan on the upper part of each wrist, where the sun fell on the skin between glove-edge and jacket-cuff. He didn’t wear gauntlets — not even in winter. There’s always something overdone about bike gauntlets, they’re too obvious an armour, they make you look feeble somehow.
He’d have his feet up on a stool, and I would sit between his legs, knowing not to annoy him by propping my book on his boots. The creak of his leathers, so close, was like the creak of a ship’s rigging, so that I could believe I was on a journey. He’d squeeze my neck with those mighty legs of his just hard enough to keep me thinking of him.
There’d be music on the stereo, more often one of his big tapes rather than an LP. The sound quality wasn’t so good but he didn’t have to get up so often to change it. I didn’t know much about classical music before Ray, but thanks to him I broadened out quite a bit. Thanks to him I learned that the pretty tune I always thought went with the words I’ve Got A Ferret Sticking Up My Nose is actually the middle section of the Slow Movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata in B flat. Part of the funeral march.
I even learned to tolerate jazz, of the moody sort Ray liked so much, though it always bothered me that a nice little tune like ‘My Favourite Things’ out of The Sound of Music could last half an hour, if it fell into the wrong hands.
And what did I give him in return? Well, I taught him not to take books for granted, the outsides of books as well as the insides, their bindings. It was his only real bit of untidiness, and I schooled him out of it, just by example, not by saying anything. When I met him he would leave books open and face down, but inside a couple of years he was a reformed character.
I didn’t tell him how I learned to be so scrupulous with objects. It wasn’t from records, from my ‘collection’, and he didn’t let me touch his. What LPs did I have to protect from sticky marks except School’s Out and Nursery Cryme? I got into the habit of holding books gently, opening them only a little way, peering at the text as if I had no right, from sneaking peeks at people’s snaps at the chemist’s in Isleworth, knowing better than to leave smudges on their memories.