The Greenhouse in October

The greenhouse stood at the bottom of the garden, where the ground fell away towards the river, and in October, when the rest of the garden had gone brown and given up, it was the only place that was still green.

Joan went down to it every morning after breakfast with a mug of tea in one hand and the cat behind her. The cat’s name was Moss. He was grey, and large, and old enough to have opinions, and the chief of these was that the greenhouse belonged to him and that Joan was permitted in it on sufferance, as long as she did not move the sacking on the bench by the door, which was where he slept.

It was cold outside now, in the mornings. Not frost yet, but the sort of cold that made the grass wet and the air smell of woodsmoke from somewhere, and made the breath show, just, if you breathed out slowly. Joan had a cardigan on over another cardigan. The path down through the garden was slippery with leaves and she walked it carefully, the way she walked most things now, and Moss came behind her at his own pace, stopping to look at things she could not see.

The greenhouse door stuck. It had always stuck. She put her shoulder to it and it went with a shudder and a small shower of dust from the frame, and she stepped in, and the air changed. It was not warm, not yet, the sun had only just got over the hedge, but it was still, and it smelt of earth and tomato leaves and the green particular smell of a place where things are growing, and it was hers.

There was not much to do. That was the thing about October. The tomatoes were finished, all but a few green ones on the top truss that she was leaving to see what they did. The cucumbers had been pulled out a fortnight ago. What was left was the geraniums she had brought in from the pots on the terrace, to see them through, and a tray of lettuce seedlings that she had sown out of stubbornness, and the big old vine along the back wall, which was older than she was and had been planted by whoever had lived here before the people before her, and which dropped its leaves one at a time onto the staging with a small dry sound like a page being turned.

Moss got up onto the bench by the door and turned round three times on the sacking and lay down. He did this every morning. It was one of the fixed points.

Joan put her tea on the staging and looked at things.

This was mostly what she did in the greenhouse in October. She looked at things. She looked at the geraniums to see if they needed water, and they did not, and she looked at the lettuce seedlings to see if anything had eaten them in the night, and nothing had, and she looked at the green tomatoes on the top truss, and they were still green. She picked up a vine leaf from the staging and turned it over and put it in the bucket. She picked up another.

The sun came over the hedge properly and lit up the glass.

It was an old greenhouse, wooden framed, with panes that had been replaced at different times by different people and did not quite match, so that when the sun came through it came through in slightly different colours, a little greener here, a little bluer there, and the light lay on the staging in uneven squares. Dust hung in it. A late fly woke up somewhere in the vine and bumbled against the glass, once, twice, and gave up and settled.

Moss opened one eye at the fly and closed it again.

“Quite right,” said Joan.

She drank her tea. It was still hot, just. Outside, through the glass, the garden looked further away than it was, the way things do through old glass, and the river at the bottom was a line of brightness between the alders, and beyond it was the field with the two horses in it, standing nose to tail, doing nothing at all. One of them flicked an ear. That was the morning’s news.

She did water the geraniums in the end, not because they needed it but because she liked doing it. The can was the old galvanised one with the brass rose, and it was heavy when it was full and so she filled it only half. The water went in with a small hiss into the dry compost and the smell came up, that smell, damp earth in a warm place, and she stood with the can in her hand and breathed it.

Then she sat down.

There was a chair in the greenhouse, a kitchen chair with a cushion on it that had gone flat years ago, in the corner by the vine where the sun got to first. She sat in it with her second cardigan pulled round her and her hands in her lap and did not do anything.

The greenhouse made its sounds. The glass ticked as it warmed. The vine dropped a leaf. Moss, on his sacking, breathed in and out with a small whistle on the out breath that he had had since he was a kitten, and that she had once worried about, and now would have missed. Somewhere up the garden a blackbird was turning over leaves under the hedge, tossing them aside with a flick and a rustle, and getting nowhere much.

She thought about the green tomatoes. She had decided, in the summer, that she would leave the last of them on and see, and she had been seeing for three weeks now, and they were still green, and it did not matter. If they ripened she would eat them. If they did not she would pick them one cold morning and put them on the windowsill in the kitchen with a banana, which was what her mother had done, and they would ripen there, or not, and either way it would be November.

Moss got up.

He did this without any warning, as cats do. One moment he was a grey heap on the sacking and the next he was on the floor, stretching, first the front and then the back, with his tail up straight like a question, and then he walked across the brick floor and jumped up onto her lap, which was the other fixed point, and turned round once, and settled.

He was heavy and warm and he smelt of sacking and of the outside. Joan put one hand on him and he began, after a while, to purr, which in Moss was less a sound than a small engine running somewhere below the floor.

They sat.

The sun came further round. The light on the staging moved from one square to the next. The fly tried the glass again, without conviction. The horses in the field had turned so that they were facing the other way, though she had not seen them do it.

Her tea was cold. She did not mind. There would be another one in the house, later, and the house would be warm, and there would be the wireless and the paper and the rest of the day, which was a Tuesday, and did not need much from her. But that was later. This was now, and now was the chair, and the cat, and the light coming through the old uneven glass in its old uneven colours, and the smell of wet earth, and nothing to be done.

A leaf came down from the vine and landed on the staging beside her. Page turned.

Moss purred.

The glass ticked.

Out past the alders, the river went on going wherever it went, bright and slow.

Joan closed her eyes, not to sleep, only to listen, and the greenhouse went on around her, green and still, doing what it had done every October for longer than anyone remembered, which was very nearly nothing, and doing it well.

The cat breathed in, and out, with his small whistle.

And the morning stayed exactly where it was.