The new gardener could go round the entire garden in four minutes.
He told Mara this on his first morning. He had used the stopwatch on his telephone, and included the narrow passage behind the greenhouse.
“Did you go through the gate?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“It sticks.”
“I lifted it.”
“Good,” she said, and gave him the keys.
Mara was retiring on Friday. Until then, he was to walk with her each morning and learn what needed doing.
At the first bed she stopped to turn a fallen flower face upward. It was already detached from the stem. He waited with the notebook open.
“Do we deadhead these?”
“Yes. There’s a pair of secateurs in the shed.”
She left the flower on the soil.
By the greenhouse, she put her hand against a pane, then opened the door. Inside, the air smelled of water that had been warm a long time. She showed him a tray of seedlings so small that he had mistaken it for an empty tray.
At the gate she lifted the latch, lifted the gate, and waited while a blackbird went through ahead of them.
He wrote gate: lift.
Under the pear tree was a chair with one short leg. Mara sat down.
“Is this part of the round?” he asked.
“It’s a chair.”
He remained standing for a moment, then fetched the other one.
On Wednesday he made a quick round before she arrived and found water bubbling up beside the shed. He shut off the supply and dug down to a split coupling.
Mara found him muddy to the elbows.
“I wondered where that was going,” she said. She fetched the box of fittings while he cleared the pipe.
On Thursday he timed the walk again, keeping his telephone in his pocket. Forty-three minutes. He wasn’t sure whether to count the chairs. Mara had asked him to move hers twice, once into the sun and once out of it.
On Friday she brought a paper bag for the things in her locker. There was less than he expected: gloves, a cardigan, a jar without a lid. She left the jar.
“For cuttings,” she said.
They made the round. At the greenhouse she let him decide whether to open the door. At the gate she stood back. The blackbird was elsewhere.
After she had gone, he discovered that she had taken the chair with the short leg. Its three deep marks and one shallow mark remained under the tree.
On Monday he went round alone. He opened the greenhouse, lifted the gate, and returned to the shed in eleven minutes.
Then he carried the remaining chair out from beneath the pear tree and put it beside the first bed.
He sat down with the box of fittings on his knees. The washers were mixed in with everything else.