[ ...]The first day, looking for tools, she found that the door to the garden shed was secured with a sturdy combination padlock. It wasn’t rusty, which surprised her, as the wooden structure had grown into the damp and weedy tangle that had once been, Judith discovered as she began to work, a hedge well- planted to deliver colour each season, with crimson-stemmed cornus, winter jasmine, dark spiky juniper and red-hipped hawthorn. The threshold was trampled and the undergrowth less dense on the approach to the locked door; the small window, with its quartered pane, was curtained; she couldn’t see in.
The sodden mass by the door turned out to be bedding, and crumpled wet inside the cold matted sludge that had been a duvet, lay a nightie – with rotting lace insets round the neckline. Judith kicked a fold of the bedding over it and a stab of ammonia rose from the mess and caught her by the throat till she had to clap her hand over her mouth and nose and back off fast.
When Sean Barbett came back that afternoon, he found Judith still hard at work, stretching her back as she contemplated with satisfaction the enormous pile of dead plants, living weeds, cuttings and prunings which she had cleared.
‘We’ll let it settle and then, you can have a bonfire night, or, as I say, we’ll call the Council.’ She gestured to the gunge piled by the door. ‘You must have had a squatter?’
He didn’t answer. He was wearing a suit and he pulled the tie loose and drew it through and rolled it in his hands, and nodded approvingly at the heap she’d made.
‘Crumbs, you certainly get down to things.’
He sighed and turned, then turned back and asked her in.
Leaving her boots standing outside the back door, she asked him for the combination of the padlock.
‘Oh, you don’t want to go in there. If you think the garden’s a mess…’
‘I thought I’d keep my stuff there – save coming through the house.’ He’d shown her his garden equipment, such as it was, stowed in the broom cupboard under the stairs.
‘No need.’ He shook his head.
‘Well, I bring most of what’s necessary with me, I suppose.’ It wasn’t ideal, as she couldn’t come on her bicycle if she had to bring large tools and couldn’t leave them during the duration of the job.
‘I had a wife,’ he said. ‘They say ‘partner’ now, but I still think of her as my wife though we weren’t official, but even so. She lived here, and it’s her things in the shed, you see.’[ ...]


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