Free Pulse by Julian Barnes Page A

his gardening gloves.
    ‘What have you done with the blackberry?’
    ‘What blackberry?’
    This made him more tense. Their garden was hardly that big.
    ‘The one along the back wall.’
    ‘Oh, that briar.’
    ‘That briar was a blackberry with blackberries on it. I brought you two and personally fed them into your mouth.’
    ‘I’m planning something along that wall. Maybe a Russian vine, but that’s a bit cowardly. I was thinking a clematis.’
    ‘You dug up my blackberry.’
    ‘ Your blackberry?’ She was always at her coolest when she knew, and knew that he knew, that she’d done something without consultation. Marriage was a democracy of two, except when there’s a tied vote, in which case it descends into autocracy. ‘It was a godawful briar.’
    ‘I had plans for it. I was going to improve its pH factor. Prune it, and stuff. Anyway, you knew it was a blackberry. Blackberries,’ he added authoritatively, ‘produce blackberries.’
    ‘OK, it was a bramble.’
    ‘A bramble!’ This was getting ridiculous. ‘Brambles produce bramble jelly, which is made from blackberries.’
    ‘Do you think you could check what we need to dig into the soil to help a clematis on a north-facing wall?’
    Yes, he thought, I might very well leave you. But until then, forget it, change the subject.
    ‘It’s going to be a hard winter. The bookies are only offering 6–4 against a white Christmas.’
    ‘Then we must get some of that plastic fleece to protect what’s vulnerable. Perhaps some straw as well.’
    ‘I’ll pop along to the nearest stables.’ Now, suddenly, he wasn’t cross any more. If she got greater pleasure out of the garden, let her have it.
    ‘I hope there’s lots of snow,’ he said boyishly.
    ‘Is that what we want?’
    ‘Yup. Proper gardeners pray for a hard winter. Kills all the bugs.’
    She nodded, allowing him that. The two of them had come at the garden from different directions. Ken had grown up in the country, and all through his adolescence couldn’t wait to get to London, to university, work, life. Nature for him represented either hostility or tedium. He remembered trying to read a book in the garden, and how the combination of shifting sun, wind, bees, ants, flies, ladybirds, birdsong and his mother’s chivvying made plein-air studying a nightmare. He remembered being bribed to supply his reluctant manual labour. He remembered his father’s vastly overcropping vegetable beds and fruit cages. His mother would dutifully fill the chest freezer with the superabundance of beans and peas, strawberries and currants; and then, each year, guiltily, while Dad was out, throw away any bags found to be more than two years old. Her kitchen version of crop rotation, he supposed.
    Martha was a town girl, who thought nature essentially benevolent, who wondered at the miracle of germination, and badgered him to go on country walks. She had developed an autodidact’s zeal in recent months. He thought of himself as an instinctive amateur, her as a technocrat.
    ‘More bookwork?’ he asked mildly, as he got into bed. She was reading Ursula Buchan’s Wall Plants and Climbers .
    ‘There’s nothing wrong with bookwork, Ken.’
    ‘As I know to my cost,’ he replied, turning out his bedside light.
    This wasn’t an argument, not any more; just an admitted difference. Martha, for instance, thought that it was only sensible to follow recipes when cooking. ‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking the spine of a cookbook?’ – as he had once, ponderously, put it. Whereas he preferred just to glance at a recipe to give himself ideas, and then wing it. She liked guidebooks, and used a map even when walking through town; he preferred an internal compass, serendipity, the joy of getting creatively lost. This led to various quarrels in the car.
    She had also pointed out to him that, when it came to sex, their positions were reversed. He had confessed to a lot of preliminary bookwork, whereas she, as she