A Garden After Rain

The rain stopped at about half past eight, all at once, the way summer rain does, as if someone had remembered to turn it off.

Nell stood at the back door with the kettle on behind her and watched the garden drip. It was a small garden, one wall of it brick and the rest of it fence, and after rain it always looked twice as full as it was. Every leaf had something to say.

“Come and look,” she said.

Sam came, in his socks, and stood beside her, and looked, and then went and found his shoes, because that was clearly where this was going.

There was one jumper on the hook by the door and it was nobody’s in particular. Nell put it on. It came to her knees. They went out.

The path was dark with wet and the air smelt of soil, that deep brown smell that only comes up after rain, and of the mint by the step, which somebody’s shoe had brushed. The light was going but not gone. It was the sort of light that makes everything green look greener and everything else look as if it is thinking.

They went slowly, because there was no reason not to. The beans had climbed another rung up their canes. The roses had let their heads drop under the weight of the water and one of them had shed half its petals onto the path in a small pink heap. The water butt was full to the brim and the overflow was ticking onto the paving, tock, tock, like a clock that had somewhere to be but not yet.

“Snail,” said Sam.

There was a snail on the path, right in the middle, making its way from one side to the other with the air of someone who had set out before the rain and saw no reason to change the plan now. They stepped round it, one to each side, and went on.

At the end of the garden there was a bench that had been a good bench once and was now mostly a place for the watering can to live. Sam moved the can. They sat. The fence behind them was still dripping in a slow, unbothered way, and a blackbird on the shed roof was singing the last of what it had, because blackbirds always do after rain, as if the rain had been about them.

“You’re cold,” said Nell.

“I’m fine.”

She took her arm out of one sleeve of the jumper and held the sleeve out, and after a moment he put his arm in, and they sat like that, one jumper, two people, looking at the garden with their shoulders touching through the wool.

Nobody said anything for a while. The light went down a shade. The neighbour’s cat came along the top of the fence, considered them, and thought better of it. Somewhere a window closed. The overflow on the water butt slowed to a tock, and a pause, and a tock.

“The mint wants cutting back,” Sam said.

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” he agreed.

The snail had reached the flowerbed. It had taken most of the evening. It seemed pleased.

They got up eventually, still in the one jumper, which made the walking awkward, and neither of them minded, and went back up the path in the almost dark, past the beans and the roses and the heap of petals. Nell stopped by the mint and pinched a leaf and smelt it and gave it to him to smell.

At the door they stood a moment longer, looking back.

The garden dripped, and settled, and went quiet.

Inside, the kettle had boiled and gone cold, and would have to be boiled again, and that was all right.

They went in, and left the door open a while, for the smell of the rain.