‘We need to get into bed and watch a really good Poirot,’ I said, for I had given him such a hard time I doubted anything else would fix it.
The builder boyfriend had cut down a tree I liked while he was working in the garden. This tree was no more than a fast-growing something or other and I’m not really a tree hugger. But I do get attached to certain sprouting things, for not always obvious reasons. We have a vast old twisted trunk in the round garden where the picnic tables are set up, for example, which I love so much, despite it looking half dead, that I have put my own personal Tree Protection Order on it. It is two trunks, in fact, departing from a round base and twisting off in different directions, so you can sit inside it. I have made its continued presence a bottom line for our romantic happiness.
We also have a eucalyptus tree that is the biggest I’ve ever seen, and an acer that I’m forever campaigning for as it takes over. The poor BB hacks away at the burgeoning undergrowth and overgrowth because to fail to do so would leave us living in six acres of wilderness. He works so hard, and all he got as thanks the other day was me walking down the long driveway, seeing the big gap where a small tree used to be, which framed a view across the horse fields, and letting out a blood-curdling shriek as I saw it had been cut in half.
I felt as though someone had cut me in half. I howled as though I had been mortally wounded and shouted ‘My tree! My treeeeeeeee!’ and I began some horribly hysterical screaming, which carried down the valley, so that everyone in West Cork must have called the police.
Quite how I got from a small tree being lopped in half to ‘there is no point to anything any more’ is a curious twist of my personality. But I did get there and in double-quick time.
It’s an interesting peculiarity, for students of gender, that those of us who were born a woman contain in our make-up a key difference to those who convert to womanhood, and that is the inability to stop ourselves unravelling suddenly with loud sound effects, often when a multiplicity of incidents have piled up.
The BB happened to be leading the two mares from the field to the stable yard when I let out these caterwaulings, and as Darcy the thoroughbred bolted, he began to be dragged. The two cobs, meanwhile, bolted across the fields, galloping from one end to the other, startling the mares further and making Darcy and pony drag the BB even faster into the yard. He must have been skiing on the end of those ropes.
I had been on my way down the drive to help him bring in the horses, but I now decided that what I really wanted to do was get in my car and drive to the beach.
This drive seemed to go on for much longer than normal, and all the way a reel played in my mind entitled: ‘All the things he has done wrong – ever.’
When I got to the beach, I pulled in and started texting him a list. It wasn’t very nice. He was quite restrained in response. He began his reply: ‘Now look here…’
He explained that the tree will come back bigger and stronger. Besides, the fencing was coming down. It was dangerous for the horses. I felt a bit silly. The poor chap, having to persuade me to let him do the gardening. He sweats buckets pushing that mower around, mending fencing, cutting back brambles and branches eating into fields. Once done, it grows so relentlessly that it’s freshly out of control within months and so begins the next negotiation.
I felt as though someone had cut me in half. I howled as though I had been mortally wounded
‘I’m never doing the gardens again,’ fumed the BB, when we finally found it possible to have a conversation face to face. He looked absolutely shattered, and was sporting a new limp courtesy of the bolting thoroughbred.
I had come back from the beach after a lovely cold swim to find he had gone to the Fen Fong Chinese takeaway and brought back my favourite, special chow mein.
We sat munching, me in my toweling robe, still wet from the freezing Atlantic, which does instantly cure most mental derangements if you can manage to submerge yourself in it, and I said: ‘No. I want you to go on doing the garden. I am just being stupidly sentimental.’
So we got into bed and watched a particularly good Poirot, with the dogs and cats all piled on top of us. And I only once said: ‘Where that tree used to be looks a right mess.’
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