Eve

She came to love England. It was so different from the place where she’d been born, better and worse, less flowers, more rain. She came to love the way that summer in England lost its shape, became hazy, all of its days spinning out, one into the other and all in the wrong order. Summer in England came and went quickly and nobody missed it once it was gone — no harm, no fuss, no thunderclaps or flame. She loved gentle things, by then. She loved him because he was gentle, his big hands, the way the light hit his dark skin. Her first love had been whiter than white but he hadn’t loved her nearly so well, or so gently. When she told him what she thought about summer, told him her grand thoughts with the tall windows open to the night, he laughed at her.

“You need everything to be more beautiful than it needs to be.”

“It isn’t possible for something to be more beautiful than it needs to be.”

He laughed again,

“You’re beautiful,” he said. He thought that she was Middle Eastern, Arabic, a barefoot daughter of a red hot desert. At night, in her little house wrapped in its big garden, they played guessing games, his heads against her shoulder, her legs around his waist, his fingertips against her heart.

“Istanbul,” he said, “Cairo…Dubai…Baghdad.”

Even the names of those places sounded like a song.

“As a woman, I have no country,” she said, quoting another woman, an Englishwoman, who’d known where her country was all along. Some women were just born lucky that way.

“Jerusalem?” That was usually when his voice cracked, when he pushed against her harder, when she arched under his weight and spread her arms across the bed or pushed against him with both palms, opening like the world to rain, welcoming him.

“My country was burnt away.” He thought that she was a wanderer, a nomad, a refugee. In a way, she was. In his body, she sheltered.

What she remembered most often, with her eyes closed, was the smell of the place, the lush after rain smell that made her feel like the world was open and ready and waiting…for what? With hindsight, she knew. It was waiting for the inevitable: for time to start and rush in and ruin everything. In the beginning, in the first place, there was Him and He said ‘let there be light’ and there was light on the surface of the deep and over everything. Light had already been spilling all over everything by the time she opened her eyes. Nothing had had names then, least of all herself. He’d named her first, her husband, her Adam. He’d been her lover but so had the world, the trees reaching for her with eager fingers, the grass aching to hold her. If Adam was the lord and master of what he saw, then she was a part of that, a part of creation and she blossomed and bloomed. She preferred to think of that world as spiral-walled and eternal, somehow wrapped in itself and preserving itself for ever. She scoured news reports for a glimpse of a topography that she’d known, once. Nothing. The world had moved on, but if she thought of it neatly closed within itself, she didn’t miss it so much.

“What are you thinking about?” he said, up early for work, dragging his shirt on over his head without unbuttoning it. He was older than he looked but still barely more than a boy, skinny and tall and fine with his beautiful smile. One man had been enough. He wasn’t just a pretty face; he was a reader, a lover, a talker. He knew plants and could make anything grow. She had thought of herself as so much dead wood, and then he’d laid hands on her and watcher her burst into blossom and fruit. Even his name meant ‘gift from God’. God probably owed her plenty, by then. He’d asked her to marry him again last night. She’d shook her head and kissed him.

“I had a husband once,” she said. “Why would I want another?”

He lent over her, ready to go out, and kissed her belly, the stretch-marks and silvered scars. There had been children once. Sons.

“What are these?” he said, touching her gently. She could see how his fingers could draw life out of nearly dead things.

“To the woman, He said, ‘I will increase your labour and your groaning and in your labour you will bear children.”

After he went to work, she lay in the warm hollow that his body left in the bed and she thought about him and Adam, and her sons. She picked up the phone and held it for a long time before she realised that she had nobody to call.

It was all such a very long time ago.

They watched her as she walked by and she didn’t care. At her side, his hand in hers, he murmured about the history of the place, Hampton Court, stolen by a king but built by a man who dreamt cathedrals. She walked through the crowd towards the display gardens and the sound of running water. The heat was oppressive. The English women drank tea on a sweltering Sunday afternoon, tutted and whispered as they walked by. How old did she look? Forty? Fifty? She had grey in her long black hair, twisted back from her face to leave her neck bare, any hope of a breeze. Let them tut at denim low on her hips and silver piercing skin…let them whisper about breasts above white cotton and a boy half her age, a bicep tattooed with a coiled snake (biting it’s own tail, symbol of the never ending world). Let them talk. Did my weeping lifetimes ago, ladies…did my sack cloth and ashes time.

She kissed him in front of them, in the end, her bonny boy, her young man and walked away from the English women, loving him wildly and wearing the grey in her hair with pride. He wrapped his arm around her waist and spun her. He made her feel like a girl again. He renewed her. She was older than she looked.

The thing which she loved most about England (apart from the summer) was that English people really loved their gardens. They had the right climate for that kind of love. He was American, but he saw it too; the little miracles that were roses and trees. Every year, she picked one; there were a handful of these shows, dotted around middle England. He liked them because they were English, quintessentially so, and so did she; she enjoyed watching old women haggling clematis and jasmine plants and middle aged earth mothers hoarding painted earthenware pots and glass ladybirds to put in bouquets. Every year, he’d come home one day with a pair of tickets and they’d take themselves off to a place cluttered with stalls selling ripe strawberries and compost and champagne.

“What do you want to see next?” he said, sat beside her, a strawberry distorting the slight concavity of his cheek before he chewed, his eyes flickering at the sudden burst of juice and light. “There’s a talk we could see on chrysanthemums or…”

“The show gardens,” she said, stealing one of his strawberries (even though she had her own, they tasted better from his bowl). “Let’s go see them next, before the judging. Before we have our minds made up for us.” He smiled. He was on the verge of laughing at her again.

“Your wish is my command,” he said, popping another strawberry into his mouth.

It was her favourite of the show gardens. It amazed her that something so perfect could have not exist at all a week before; could have sprung complete from a rough square of bare dirt. She fell in love with it, the long grass whispering to her, the honeysuckle and climbing rose creeping inside her, twining her heart in tendrils. It didn’t look fake, that garden…it was difficult to imagine it rendered down to its component parts. It felt created, not merely made. The name shouldn’t have surprised her.

“Eden,” he said, and she didn’t hear him after that. The garden had her in its fragrant arms.

“You look different,” he said, coming to sit beside her, his arm warm and heavy across her shoulders.

“I was just remembering,” she said, leaning her head against him, letting his smell, sweat and deodorant and youth, mingle with the garden’s.

“I feel like I’ve never seen you before,” he said, twisting his fingers around a loose curl of her hair, but she was silent, remembering that all gardens were the same garden, the way that all loves connected and seeing, for the first time in a long time, God in everything that moved.