Pulse by Julian Barnes Page B

the juices ran clear, Martha gave their guests ‘the tour’. Since they were never more than a few yards away, Ken heard all the compliments to Martha’s ingenuity. Briefly, he found himself a disaffected teenager again, trying to assess the sincerity or hypocrisy of each speaker. Then his trellises were admired – praise he took as coming entirely from the heart. The next moment, he heard Martha explaining that the far end of the garden had been ‘just a mass of hideous brambles when we got here’.
    The light was beginning to fade by the time they crouched over their pear, walnut and gorgonzola starter. Alex, who clearly hadn’t been paying attention during the tour, said, ‘Have you left a tap on somewhere?’
    Ken looked at Martha but declined to take advantage. ‘It’s probably next door,’ he said. ‘Rather a shambolic household.’
    Martha looked grateful, so Ken thought it would be OK to tell his story about the soil-testing kit. He span it out rather, elaborating his self-portrayal as mad chemist, and holding off the punchline as long as possible.
    ‘And then I came in and said to Martha, “Bad news, I’m afraid. There’s no soil in your soil.”’
    There was a gratifying laugh. And Martha joined in; she knew that from now on this was going to be one of his stories.
    Feeling himself in credit, Ken decided to light the garden candles, yard-high towers of wax which blazed away and made him think vaguely of Roman triumphs. He also took the opportunity to turn off what he would always, in his own mind, refer to as the water feature.
    It was now on the colder side of chilly. Ken poured more red wine, and Martha offered a move indoors, which everyone politely refused.
    ‘Where’s all this global warming when you need it?’ asked Alex cheerily.
    Then they talked about patio heaters – which really gave out a blast but were so unecological that it was antisocial to buy one – and carbon footprints, and the sustainability of fish stocks, and farmers’ markets, and electric cars versus biodiesel, and wind farms and solar heating. Ken heard a mosquito fizz warningly at his ear; he ignored it, and didn’t even wince when he felt it bite. He sat there and enjoyed being proved right.
    ‘I’ve got an allotment,’ he announced. The marital coward’s ploy of breaking news in front of friends. But Martha didn’t indicate either surprise or disappointment, merely joined in the raising of glasses to Ken’s laudable new hobby. He was asked about its cost and location, the condition of its soil, and what he intended to grow there.
    ‘Blackberries,’ said Martha before he could answer. She was smiling at him tenderly.
    ‘How did you guess?’
    ‘When I was sending off the Marshalls catalogue.’ She had asked him to confirm her arithmetic; not that she wasn’t competent to add up, but there were a lot of small sums often ending in 99p, and anyway, this was the sort of thing Ken did in their marriage. Like write the cheque too, which he had done after making a couple of additions to the order. Then he’d taken it back to Martha, because she was the Keeper of the Stamps in their marriage. ‘And I noticed you’d ordered two blackberry bushes. A variety called Loch Tay, I seem to remember.’
    ‘You’re a terror for names,’ he said, looking across at her. ‘A terror and a wiz.’
    There was a short silence, as if something intimate had been mistakenly disclosed.
    ‘You know what we could plant on the allotment,’ Martha began.
    ‘What’s this we shit, Paleface?’ he responded before she could continue. It was one of their marital jokes, always had been; but one apparently unfamiliar to these particular friends, who couldn’t tell if this was a vestigial quarrel. Nor could he, for that matter; he often couldn’t nowadays.
    As the silence continued, Marion said into it, ‘I don’t like to mention this, but the bugs are biting.’ She had one hand down by her ankle.
    ‘Our friends don’t like