Surprise Me

I nudge Dan. ‘How exactly did you know about it?’

‘Oh,’ says Dan, yawning. ‘Well, in actual fact, I helped to create it.’

‘You what?’ I raise myself on an elbow to stare at him.

‘During university, the summer after my first year. I volunteered for a while.’ He shrugs. ‘It’s a community garden. They let groups in to study horticulture, herbology, that kind of thing.’

‘But … how come? Why a garden?’

‘Well,’ Dan says, as though it’s obvious, ‘you know I’m into gardening.’

I know what?

‘No I don’t.’ I peer at him in astonishment. ‘What do you mean, “I’m into gardening”? You’ve never been into gardening. You never garden at home.’

‘That’s true.’ Dan makes a regretful face. ‘Too busy with work, I suppose. And the twins. And now our garden’s basically a playground, what with the Wendy houses.’

‘Right.’ I pull my coat around my shoulders, digesting this. ‘My husband, the gardener. I never knew.’

‘It’s not a big thing.’ Dan shrugs. ‘Maybe I’ll take it up again when I retire.’

‘But wait.’ A fresh thought strikes me. ‘How did you know these sculptures were so … fit for purpose?’

‘I didn’t,’ says Dan. ‘But I always looked at them and wondered.’ He twinkles at me wickedly. ‘I wondered a lot.’

‘Ha.’ I smile back, running an affectionate hand over his shoulder. ‘I wish I’d been your girlfriend back then. But that year …’ I wrinkle my brow, trying to remember. ‘Yes. I was attached.’

‘Well, so was I,’ says Dan. ‘And I don’t wish we’d known each other back then. I think we found each other at exactly the right time.’ He kisses me tenderly and I smile absently back. But my brain is snagging on something. He was attached?

‘Who were you attached to?’ I ask, puzzled. My mind is already running through the roster of Dan’s previous girlfriends. (I’ve quizzed him quite extensively on this subject.) ‘Charlotte? Amanda?’

Surely neither of those works, timing-wise?

‘Actually, no.’ He stretches, with another huge yawn, then pulls me closer. ‘Does it matter who it was?’

My mind tussles with two answers. The not-ruining-the-moment answer: no. And the I-have-to-know-this answer: yes.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say at last in a light, breezy tone. ‘I’m not saying it matters. I’m just wondering. Who it was.’

‘Mary.’

He smiles at me and kisses my forehead, but I don’t react. All my internal radar has sprung into action. Mary? Mary?

‘Mary?’ I try a little laugh. ‘I don’t remember you mentioning a Mary, ever.’

‘I’m sure I told you about her,’ he says easily.

‘No you didn’t.’

‘I’m sure I did.’

‘You didn’t.’ There’s a hint of steel in my voice. I have all Dan’s former girlfriends logged in my brain, in the same way that FBI agents have America’s Most Wanted. There is not and has never been a Mary. Until now.

‘Well, maybe I forgot about her,’ says Dan. ‘To be honest, I’d forgotten about this place. I’d forgotten about that whole part of my life. It was only when you said, “something adventurous” …’ He leans over me again, his eyes mischievous. ‘It woke something up in me.’

‘Clearly!’ I say, matching his tone, deciding to leave the issue of Mary. ‘Come on then, give me a tour.’

As Dan leads me around the paths, gesturing at plants, I’m slightly gobsmacked at his knowledge. I thought I knew Dan inside out. And yet here’s this rich seam of passion which he’s never shared with me.

I mean, it’s great, because we could definitely do more with our own garden. We can turn it into a family hobby. He can teach the girls to weed … hoe … And presents! Yes! I have to resist a sudden urge to fist-pump. All his presents are solved for the next twenty years! I can buy him gardening tools and plants and all those witty items saying ‘Head Gardener’.

But I must bone up on gardening myself. As we progress, I’m realizing quite how inexpert I am. I keep thinking he’s talking about a shrub when he’s referring to a climber, or vice versa. (The Latin names really don’t help.)

‘Amazing tree,’ I say as we reach the far corner. (I can get ‘tree’ right.)

‘That was Mary’s idea.’ Dan’s eyes soften. ‘She had a thing about hawthorn trees.’

‘Right,’ I say, forcing a polite smile. This is the third time he’s mentioned Mary. ‘Gorgeous. And that arbour is lovely! I didn’t even notice it at first, tucked away there.’

‘Mary and I put that up,’ says Dan reminiscently, patting the wooden structure. ‘We used reclaimed wood. It took us a whole weekend.’

‘Well done, Mary!’ I say sarcastically, before I can stop myself, and Dan turns his head in surprise. ‘I mean … amazing!’

I link my arm in Dan’s and smile up at him, to cover the fact that all these little mentions of Mary are feeling like pinpricks of irritation. For a woman I’d never even heard about three minutes ago, she seems to be remarkably present in our conversation.

‘So, was it serious, you and Mary?’ I can’t help asking.

Dan nods. ‘It was, for a bit. But she was studying at Manchester, which is why we broke up eventually, I guess.’ He shrugs. ‘Long way from Exeter.’

They didn’t break up because they had a row or slept with other people, I register silently. It was logistics.

‘We had all kinds of dreams,’ Dan continues. ‘We were going to set up a smallholding together. Organic veg, that kind of thing. Change the world. Like I say, it was a different me.’ Dan looks around the garden and shakes his head with a wry smile. ‘Coming in here is strange. It’s taken me back to the person I was then.’

‘Were you so different?’ I say, feeling disconcerted again. He’s got a light in his eye I’ve never seen before. Distant and kind of wistful. Wistful for what, exactly? This was supposed to be a sublime and transcendental evening about us, not some long-ago relationship.

‘Oh, I was different, all right.’ He laughs. ‘Wait. There might be a picture …’

He searches for a while on his phone, then holds it out. ‘Here.’ I take it and find myself looking at a website headed The St Philip’s Garden: How We Started.

‘See?’ Dan points to a dated-looking photo of young people in jeans, clutching muddy spades and forks. ‘That’s Mary … and that’s me.’

I’ve seen pictures of Dan in his youth before. But never from this era. He looks so skinny. He’s wearing a checked shirt and some weird bandana round his head and his arm is firmly squeezing Mary. I zoom in and survey her critically. Apart from the frizzy hair, she’s pretty. Really pretty. In a wholesome, organic, dimpled way. Very long, lean legs, I notice. Her smile is radiant and her cheeks are flushed and her jeans are filthy. I can’t imagine her doing a boudoir shoot. But then, I can’t imagine Dan the gardener either.

‘I wonder what she’s doing now?’ Dan muses. ‘It’s crazy to think I just forgot about her. I mean, for a while we were—’ He breaks off as though realizing where this is taking him. ‘Anyway.’