Free Pulse by Julian Barnes

they had first met, she owned a window box in which she grew a few herbs; later, when they moved in together, they acquired access to a shared roof terrace. Here she kept a few terracotta planters with chives, mint, thyme and rosemary, some of which, they suspected, were stolen by their neighbours; also the bay tree her sentimentally interfering parents had given them as an augury of marital good fortune. It had been repotted a couple of times, and now stood immoveably outside their front door in a thick wooden tub.
    Marriage was a democracy of two, he liked to say. He had somehow assumed that the garden would be decided upon much as the house had been, by a process of reasoned yet enthusiastic consultation in which requirements were enunciated, mutual tastes considered, finances estimated. As a consequence, there was almost nothing he actively hated in the house, and much he approved of. Now he found himself silently resenting the catalogues of teakware that arrived, the horticultural magazines piled on Martha’s bedside table, and her habit of shushing him when Gardeners’ Question Time was on the radio. He would eavesdrop on matters of leafcurl and black spot, some new threat to wisteria, and advice about what to plant beneath an elder tree on a north-facing slope. He didn’t feel threatened by Martha’s new interest, just found it excessive.
    pH, he learnt, was a number used to express degrees of acidity or alkalinity in solutions, formerly the logarithm to base 10 of the reciprocal of the concentration of hydrogen ions, but now related by formula to a standard solution of potassium hydrogen phthalate, which has value 4 at 15 degrees centigrade. Well, sod that for a game of soldiers, Ken thought. Why not just get a bag of bonemeal and a sack of compost and dig them in? But Ken was aware of this trait of his, a tendency to settle for the approximate, which one irate girlfriend called ‘just being incredibly fucking lazy ’ – a description he had always cherished.
    And so he read most of the instructions that came with his soil-testing kit, identified several key locations in the garden, and proudly pulled on his new gloves before digging small samples of earth and crumbling them into the test tubes. As he added drops of liquid, inserted the corks, and shook the contents up and down, he occasionally glanced towards the kitchen window, hoping that Martha would be tenderly amused by his professionalism. His attempt at professionalism, anyway. He left each experiment the required number of minutes, took out a little notebook and recorded his findings, then he went on to the next location. Once or twice he retested when the first result had been dubious or unclear.
    Martha could tell he was in a jolly mood that evening. He stirred the fricassee of rabbit, decided to give it another twenty minutes or so, poured them each a glass of white wine, and sat on the arm of her chair. Looking down indulgently at an article about different types of gravel, he played with the hair at the nape of her neck, and said, with a cheery smile,
    ‘Bad news, I’m afraid.’
    She looked up, uncertain where his remark might fall on a scale from gentle tease to full critical objection.
    ‘I’ve tested the soil. In places I had to do it more than once before I was confident of my findings. But the surveyor-general is now ready to report.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘According to my analysis, madam, there is no soil in your soil.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘It is impossible to address deficiencies in the terroir , because there is no soil in your soil.’
    ‘You’ve said that. So what is there instead?’
    ‘Oh, stones mainly. Dust, roots, clay, ground elder, dogshit, catcrap, bird-droppings, stuff like that.’
    He liked the way he had said ‘your soil’.
    On another Saturday morning three months later, with the December sun so low that the garden would be lucky to get the slightest warmth or light, Ken came into the house and threw down