The Man in the Garden

The cottage came with very specific instructions, and not one of them mentioned a man. Mara read the instructions twice on the train down, because reading instructions twice was the kind of person she was trying to be this summer — careful, contained, a person who did not improvise her way into trouble. The cottage was called Thornlea and it belonged to a woman named Diane, a friend of a friend of Mara's aunt, and Diane was spending three months abroad and wanted someone reliable to mind the place. Water the garden. Feed the cat, who was elderly and opinionated and named Captain. Take the bins out on Thursdays. Do not, the instructions said, twice underlined, let Captain into the front bedroom because of the rug. There was nothing in the instructions about a garden studio. There was nothing about the garden studio being occupied. Mara found this out at half past six in the evening, having let herself in with the key from under the third flowerpot, having met Captain — who assessed her, found her adequate, and left — and having walked through the small warm rooms of a stranger's house feeling the particular guilty pleasure of borrowing someone else's life for a season. Her own life, the one waiting for her back in the city, had recently developed a crack straight through the middle of it, and the plan for the summer was simple: come to Thornlea, be quiet, water things, and let the crack do whatever cracks did when you finally stopped putting weight on them. She had just made tea in a stranger's kitchen when she looked out the window over the sink and saw smoke coming from the garden studio. Not alarming smoke. Chimney smoke, thin and domestic, rising from the little flue of the timber outbuilding at the bottom of the garden — the outbuilding that, according to her twice-read instructions, did not exist as a thing she needed to think about. Mara put her tea down and went out into the long gold evening and walked down the garden, past Diane's tomatoes and Diane's washing line, and the studio door was open, and there was a man inside it. He was sitting at a desk with his back half to the door, and he had clearly been there a while — there were books, a kettle, a jacket over a chair, the unmistakable settled clutter of occupancy — and when her shadow fell across the doorway he turned, and they looked at each other with the identical expression of two people each discovering that their summer had a stranger in it. "You're not Diane," he said. "You're not in the instructions," said Mara. For a moment neither of them moved. He was perhaps her own age, mid-thirties, with ink on the side of his hand and the slightly unfocused look of a man pulled out of deep work. He had the bearing of someone who had also come somewhere quiet on purpose, who had also been counting on the emptiness, and she watched him arrive at the same dismaying conclusion she was arriving at, about thirty seconds behind her. "Diane's my sister," he said. "I'm Felix. She said I could use the studio for the summer. To — work. She did not —" he ran the inky hand through his hair — "she very much did not mention sending a house-sitter." "She hired a house-sitter," Mara said. "Me. She did not mention a brother in the garden." "Right." Felix looked at the studio around him, the books and the kettle and the settled clutter, and then out at the cottage glowing in the gold evening, and Mara could see him doing the same arithmetic she was doing, and arriving at the same total. Diane, abroad, unreachable for a season, had double-booked her own summer. She had promised the same quiet to two different strangers, and now the two strangers were standing twelve feet apart in a garden, each of them holding a plan that depended entirely on the other one not existing. "I can't leave," Mara said. It came out more honest than she'd intended, more bare. "I'm — I needed somewhere quiet. Quite badly. I don't have a back-up summer." Something in Felix's face shifted at that, recognition rather than annoyance, the look of one refugee identifying another. "No," he said slowly. "I rather gathered. Neither do I, as it happens." He gestured, a small wry motion, at the studio, the books, the work she couldn't see. "I came here to finish something I haven't been able to finish anywhere with people in it. So that's — that's us, then. Two people who each came to Thornlea specifically to be alone, and have instead been issued each other." The cat, Captain, chose that moment to walk down the garden between them, tail up, supremely unconcerned by the territorial crisis, and sat down precisely halfway, as if to mark the border. Mara looked at the cat. She looked at the man. She looked at the cottage and the studio and the long impossible gold of the borrowed evening, and she felt the careful contained summer she had planned tilt quietly off its axis. "Diane said not to let the cat in the front bedroom," she offered. "Because of the rug. It's the only firm rule I've got. I'm happy to share it." And Felix laughed — surprised, reluctant, real — and the laugh did something to the standoff, loosened it, and Mara thought, with the first flicker of something that was not dread: well. It was going to be a borrowed summer either way. Perhaps it could be borrowed by two.