ELLE FICTION
The Self-seeding Sycamore by Lionel Shriver.
Jeannette had no idea that plants could inspire so much hatred. For years, she’d left the garden to Wyndham. Weekends outdoors provided an antidote to the windowless stasis of his lab. Though their plot was sizeable only by London standards, she’d humoured him. (Whatever was there to do? A little watering during dry spells, a 10-minute run of the hand mower round the lawn.) Having begrudged the dear man neither his solitude nor his superfluous pottering, she treasured snapshots of her husband in muddied khaki trousers, bent over a bed, doing heaven-knew-what with a characteristically intent expression. Now, of course, she knew exactly what he’d been doing. How much he’d spared her.
While still cosseted by mutual spousal existence, she’d scanned with indifference bitter first-person articles about how fiercely people avoid the bereaved – a revelation her own friends had amply illustrated for a year or more. She didn’t blame them. Unintentionally, she and Wyndham had fallen into the heedlessly hermetic unit of two that’s so off-putting from the outside. If she didn’t need friends then, she’d no right to demand their attentions now. Besides, she’d grown less compelling to herself. A widow of 57 had both too much story left, and not enough. It was narratively awkward: an ellipsis of perhaps 30 years, during which nothing big would happen. Only little things, most of them crap.
The big story that was over wasn’t interesting, either. Pancreatic: swift and dreadful. Yet the pro forma tale did include one poignant detail. Two years ago, she and Wyndham took early retirement, he from private biochemical research, she from her job as a buyer for Debenhams. Some colleagues had quietly disapproved, and soon no-one would be allowed to stop working at 55, but to Jeannette and Wyndham, that argued for a leap through the closing window. They’d not found each other until their forties, and had made extravagant travel plans for while they were still in rude health. The reasoning was sound; the arithmetic, not. The diagnosis arrived a mere 10 weeks after Wyndham’s farewell party.
She hadn’t kept track of whether 57 was the new 47, or 35, or 64 – but in any event, whatever age she’d reached was not the age she was. Not long ago, she and Wyndham had mourned his every strand that clogged the plughole, each new crease in her neck when she glanced down. Now? She could not get older fast enough.
Convinced that a garden took care of itself – it grew, bloomed, browned and, without prodding, renewed the cycle – other than hiring a boy to mow, for the year following Wyndham’s death she left the back to its devices. In truth, she missed the sharpness of those first few months, whose high drama would have been impossible to maintain without its sliding into a humiliating fakery, a performance for herself. While still free-flowing and unforced, the grief had been so immersive, so rich and pure and concentrated, with the opacity of cabernet, that it verged on pleasure. Yet from the start the anguish had been spiked with an awful foreknowledge that the keenness of her loss would blunt, leading to a second loss: a loss of loss. Some soft, muffled bufferedness was bound to take over, as if she were buttressed by excess packaging. Unlike the searing period, with its skipped meals and feverish lie-ins, a bufferedness could last forever, and probably would.
Sure enough, the stab ebbed to ache; a torturous residual presence gave way to absence. Jeannette took refuge in self-sufficiency. She would take nothing, and expect nothing. There must have been millions of such Britons: perfectly neutral social quantities, mutely shopping and tidying up. She would take care of herself, as the garden did.
So late this April, she was surprised to note on an aimless stroll beyond the slug-trailed patio, simply to escape the house – which had never felt suffocating when she shared it – that flowering shrubs past their prime were pooping mounds of rotting pink blossoms, under which matted grass skulked, dying or dead, a urinary yellow. Ineffectually, she raked the piles of petals with her fingers off the moribund lawn, in idle amazement that flowers could kill. The silky mulch had a nice heavy wetness, reminiscent of her cheeks after an inadvisable third glass of wine. Its original perfume mixed with an aroma deader and flatter, like sweet but fading memories intermingling with her present self-sufficiency.
She surveyed the beds on either side. Pooping flowers were the least of it. Unafflicted by Wyndham’s “superfluous” attentions, the ceanothus had bushed out in scraggly extrusions like an unbarbered afro, blocking the stone path to the tool shed and poking her in the eye. Ivy choked the herbs; the ferns drooped with snails. The lawn had dead patches from peeing foxes, vermin she’d been too apathetic to shoo. She couldn’t speak for the human sphere, but apparently in the botanical world, without the constant intercession of a benevolent higher power, evil triumphed.
At first anxious about uprooting her husband’s beloved something-or-others, Jeannette soon mastered the gardener’s rubric: anything that grows fast and well is malevolent. Weeding, she was tortured by a cliché that circled her head like a successful advertisement jingle, nature abhors a vacuum. She came to match each invader with a uniquely flavoured dislike. Burrowing into the mortar of the property line’s brick wall, a pretend-attractive plant with small devious leaves inspired an impatient disgust;
“IN ANY EVENT, WHATEVER AGE SHE’D REACHED WAS NOT THE AGE SHE WAS”
its roots remaining behind, the crafty, low-lying wallflower would be back in a week. Allowed in the passivity of her grieving to rise six feet high, a gangling daisy-like species with disproportionately small, stupid yellow flowers had spread thick white ropes of lateral roots so quickly and so thickly that in another month’s time the towering, insipid plants would have taken over the world. That aversion was laced with fear; she pursued their extermination with the grim, stoical thoroughness of genocide. In this merciless laying of waste, the institution of her private scorched-earth policy, she came closer than she had in 17 months to joy.
Yet Jeannette reserved her most extravagant loathing for clusters of innocent-looking seedlings that seemed to erupt in concert on a single day, as if obeying a battle plan. Oh, on its own, a single sample of this anonymous item seemed innocuous and easily vanquished. A mere three inches high, two never-mind-me leaves splayed on a spindly stem. But when snatched from the ground, lo, the tiny flagpole had sunk into her property a good four inches below – and virtually overnight.
Besides which, any organism in sufficient quantity is gross. Bulging clusters of these seedlings, pushing against one another in their blind, ignorant bunching, sprouted en masse through the bark cover around the tool shed. The impertinent would-be trees cropped up in the lightless murk below the shrubs. They perforated the lawn every two inches. They penetrated the ivy that had killed the chives, and threatened the ivy, too.
Thus by May, her every hour in the garden was devoted to massacring seedlings by the thousand, creating whole burial mounds of the shrivelled fallen, and still they came. The slaughter recalled a certain kind of asymmetrical warfare, whereby a better supplied, more technologically sophisticated army is overrun by forces in rags with sticks, the adversary’s greatest weapon its leadership’s utter obliviousness to casualties on a staggering scale.
Any child soldier she failed to slay right away would stake a territorial claim. Within days an overlooked seedling jagged out in aggressive, multi-pronged foliage with the rough nap and variegation of real tree leaves. The fragile stem woodened to sturdy stalk; the taproot plummeted and grew clinging hairs. Her attempts at jerking these interlopers from the ground were no more effective than the Home Office’s feeble efforts to deport asylum seekers.
No mystery, the source of the assault. On the opposite side of the party wall, a monster of a tree rose over three storeys high, its trunk inches from the brick, ensuring that nearly half its branches extended over her own garden. It was a charmless thing, blocking light from the herb bed, and already grown pregnant with more seed pods, its branches sagging from the weight of their great ghastly clumps. So eclipsing did her antipathy for this verdant vandal grow that she failed to note: this was more than she had felt towards any living thing, one way or another, since Wyndham’s flatline.
A vastly more beguiling tree, the flaming Japanese maple was growing inexplicably lifeless, so Jeannette booked an appointment with a tree surgeon. He wasn’t much comfort – “The poor tree’s time has come, missus” – but so long as he was at hand, she pointed to the ogre overhead. “Speaking of trees whose time ought to have come,” she said. “What’s that?” The surgeon grinned. “A self-seeding sycamore.” The name rang a bell. Wyndham must have mumbled it once or twice. It pained her that her patient husband had eradicated half a million seedlings every spring with so little complaint. What other suffering had he disguised, especially in those last months?
“A volunteer,” he went on. “Nobody plants a self-seeding sycamore on purpose. It’s a pest tree.” He looked it up and down, as if measuring it for a coffin. “Three-fifty, and I’ll cut it down for you.”
The house on her eastern side was owned by a man she gathered from a misdelivered credit card solicitation was called Burt Cuss. It was an ugly name, like a one-two punch. Perhaps also in his fifties, he had a hulking, furious bearing, and either he seldom left the house or for extended periods he wasn’t there. Sightings were rare. In all seasons, she’d only spotted him in a black crew-neck tee, black jeans, neo-nazi boots and a buzz cut. She’d never spoken to him, which should have been unusual, but in London wasn’t. She and Wyndham had speculated about their neighbour – as one does. Given the biceps and hard stomach, her husband assessed the man as ex-army. Jeannette surmised he was divorced. Soon after Burt moved in, he’d burnt a pile of papers out back, in which she’d spied photographs. Irrationally, she was a little afraid of him. If only because they hadn’t spoken, she rushed inside in the uncommon instance that he ventured into his own garden – if you could call it that.
Burt’s garden was subject to near-total neglect. It hadn’t been landscaped in the slightest. Other than the manically propagating sycamore, its only plant life was scrub grass, which grew a foot high before Burt, no more than twice a year, thwacked it to jaundiced nubs with a scythe. Nearer the house, bits of furniture slumped in the rain. Plastic bags that blew onto the long narrow plot would flap there for weeks.
Most Londoners would have sold their first-borns into slavery for fertile terra firma a fraction of that size, a blank canvas begging to be painted with azaleas, and times past the dismal waste ground had aroused her dismay. From the master bedroom on her first floor, she had a panoramic view of this unsightly patch, which might even have dropped adjoining property values a tad. Yet now that she’d seized on the tree surgeon’s offer – to be spared that malignancy of seedlings every spring, £350 was a bargain – suddenly her neighbour’s obliviousness to horticulture seemed a stroke of good fortune.
Sometimes going for days without saying a word, Jeannette had to steel herself to interact with anyone. Even the encounter with the tree surgeon had been draining. She’d lost the knack of small talk. But a firm purpose was fortifying.
It felt odd to knock formally on the front door when she gawked daily at her neighbour’s unkempt inner sanctum. The peephole cover swung. Multiple locks.
“Right?” he said gruffly, in the usual uniform. Up close, his eyes were green. “I’m sorry, we’ve never been...” “You’re in 92,” he cut her off, jerking his head towards her house.
But of course: while you’re supposing about neighbours, they’re supposing about you. “Jeannette Dickson.” He nodded curtly, keeping his own name to himself.
“I was hoping we might talk about your tree.”
“What about it?” It was astounding that Burt was even aware of having a tree. “I hate it.” No self-respecting Brit would confess to such ferocious feelings about a plant. She’d just cast herself as a kook. “What’d that tree ever do to you?” “More than you’d expect,” she said, trying to sound sane. “Its seedlings. They erupt by the thousands. I spend hours and hours pulling them up.” “Sounds terrible,” he said, and the deadpan grated. “I now have some appreciation for the experience of being taken over by aliens,” she said. “The point is, I’d be willing to pay to have it cut down.” “Sounds a bother. What’s in it for me?” “Well – you must have at least as bad a problem with seedlings yourself.” “Problem I ain’t even noticed can’t be much of a problem.” “We’d both have more light, and your own, ah, garden would feel larger and more open.” It was the best she could do, on the spot. “No sale. Rather have my privacy.” She was getting flustered. He stood before her too squarely, blocking the door in an unfriendly fashion, arms folded, forearms rippling. The T-shirt was tight, his pectorals formidable. She wondered how a man who seemed rarely to go outdoors had got that tan. He was a brute, monosyllabic and sullen, nothing like Wyndham, who was tall and lanky, with a sly humour he saved for her; not big on exercise, beyond the pottering, but sinewy, with no waste on him, which made the end come faster, with so few reserves on which to draw. If also not a big talker, he was brilliant, they all said so at the lab, unlike this animal, and when Wyndham did say something he’d made it count.
“My tree surgeon says no-one would deliberately plant such a ‘pest tree’...”
“Your tree surgeon?”
“IT PAINED HER THAT HER PATIENT HUSBAND HAD ERADICATED HALF A MILLION SEEDLINGS EVERY SPRING WITH SO LITTLE COMPLAINT. WHAT OTHER SUFFERING HAD HE DISGUISED?”
“Why’s that funny?” “I don’t even have a GP.” “What I meant is, that’s the opinion of an expert.” “Darling,” Burt said. “I been through this rigmarole before, and you lot got your answer. Ask your husband.”
So: Wyndham had tried to negotiate this very solution, to no avail. “I’m afraid my husband passed away, 19 months ago.” Ergo, here I am, still grieving, and I’m spending all my time ripping up your filthy seedlings.
But Burt didn’t easily embarrass. “Tough luck,” he said dispassionately.
“Could you consider my proposal? I’d make all the arrangements. Please? As a favour. It would mean so much to me.”
“Lady, I spent 17 years doing favours for a bird not so different from yourself, and in the end it didn’t mean nothing to her at all.” He shut the door in her face. Confirmation: divorced. The following few days, Jeannette spent more than one tiresome afternoon in a state of suppressed rage, grumbling about that tosser next door while pulling single sycamore seedlings from a busy cover of woodbine, something like plucking individual grey hairs from a heavy beard with tweezers. Meantime, incredibly, seedlings she’d already ripped out and left to wither were still struggling their wounded roots back into the bark cover. Good God, it was like watching privates who’d had their limbs blown off shimmy bloody torsos across the battlefield and pick up guns with their teeth.
Yet unfeasibly, when Jeannette peered over the party wall, she could not discern, in Burt’s foot-high scrub grass, any seedlings at all.
Armed with a sheaf of printouts, she knocked on Burt’s door for Round Two.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “I’m meant to dismantle my upper floor, so’s you get more sun in your sitting room.”
“It’s all over the internet.” Jeannette brandished the sheaf. “On blogs, social media, on botanical websites. Everyone detests those trees...”
“Speaking of trees,” he interrupted, giving her a once-over. “You’ve spruced up.”
She blushed. True, ever since Wyndham died she’d been rather careless in the sartorial department, and this afternoon she had taken advantage of a snappy wardrobe from years as a Debenhams buyer who was encouraged to bring home samples. The hasty makeover was merely more strategy – to look presentable, like a neighbour anyone would want to please. So, fine: she’d washed her hair.
“They’re not even native to Britain,” Jeannette carried on. “It’s an invasive species from the Continent. Sycamores have only been here a few hundred years.”
“The toffs in Downton Abbey only been in Britain ‘a few hundred years’.” Jeannette frowned. “You don’t seem like the costume drama type.” “So what do I seem like?” Awkwardness made her honest. “Someone who does loads of press-ups.” That won her a half-smile, a first, perhaps a prelude to a full smile, which she precluded by pressing her case. “If you’d simply take a look at these…” She held out the sheets of A4. “There’s a uniform consensus… We’d be doing a community service.”
“You’re a terrier, you are. Know the type. Just wear you down. Don’t work no more, not on me.”
Before he had a chance to shut the door again, she burst out, “Nearly half of that tree is on my side of the property line. I’ve checked with the council. I’m within my legal rights to cut off any of that sycamore that’s sticking over the wall!”
He shrugged and said, “Be my guest,” perhaps missing her parting shot: “It’ll look ridiculous!” As if he cared.
Unfortunately, when she contacted the tree surgeon again, allowing that the actual owner of the sycamore was uncooperative, he turned the radical pruning job down by text, though he needed the work if he was still using a mobile without autocorrect: “Dodgy in evry wy. Physicly difficlt. + any idea hw ugly disputes ovr evn wee shrbs in ths cntry gt, btw neibrs? Rd th papr? Ppl gt killd ovr less! Stying out of it.”
Very well. But she was not simply rolling over. The alternative was year upon numbing year, toiling away as an evermore elderly pensioner in the gardening equivalent of the salt mines, to strip away yet another crop of seedlings, budding with idiot hopefulness, perking and poking and flopping about with garish green naivety. Unless she took a stand, each year her futile Sisyphean extermination would be undertaken in a spirit of submission and impotence.
First off, she would demonstrate the extent of what Burt refused to label a problem. Thus after another mass murder of seedlings by the log store – an empty structure that made her feel wistful and remiss, for she hadn’t reordered fuel for the wood burner, around which she and Wyndham had lingered through many a toasty winter evening – Jeannette gathered the hairy pile of crushed blades and dangling taproots, marched to Burt’s front door, and deposited the gratuity on his step with a note: “Sorry, I believe these belong to you.”
Within minutes – he could have heard her scuttle away, and she was braced for a blast of effing and blinding – a belly laugh carried to her patio, round, resonant and loose.
Jeannette rifled the tool shed the next morning. Even if Wyndham had kept a chainsaw, which it seems he didn’t, she’d have been too afraid of the monstrosity to use it. But she did dig out a trusty handsaw, whose rudimentary technology she understood, and which in a moment of inattention was unlikely to amputate her arm. Yet the identifying “rip-cut teeth cross-cut” on its cardboard sleeve sounded suitably violent.
The sky-blue shorts with decorative pockets she wore for the project that afternoon were sensible for a warm spell in June, though they were nearly new, and showed off legs little veined and rather shapely for a woman her age. The crisp yellow crop top was also airy and cool; at Debenhams, she’d always maintained that good styling needn’t be impractical. Drawing the sword of vengeance from its scabbard, she climbed from bench to wall, then scrambled onto the roof of the log store (already shaggy with helicopter seed pods, lying in wait for next year). From here she enjoyed ready access to a fat lower branch of the sycamore, right where it thrust presumptuously across the property line. Gripping the branch with her other hand for balance, she traced a starter cut with the tips of the teeth. The blade juddered.
By the time she’d established a notch, she was sweating; the yellow crop top would soon be a write-off. The green wood continually grabbed the saw’s teeth and brought each wobbly stroke to a standstill. After half an hour of rasping, and stopping to catch her breath, she’d got not an inch through a branch whose diameter ran to half a foot. At this rate, she’d be sawing sycamore branches in all seasons for the next year. Already, her upper arm ached, and her right forefinger had blistered.
What she needed was the smallest symbolic satisfaction. That meant removing one full branch to start with – much more doable if she climbed further up into the tree itself to attack a higher, thinner limb. Aiming for a vulnerable-looking bough 10 feet overhead, Jeannette dusted off her climbing skills from a tomboy childhood.
Goodness, she must have been a brave little girl. When ascending many a tree to nearly its summit on family holidays in the Lake District, she didn’t remember feeling this terrified. Struggling both to pull herself up and to keep hold of the saw, Jeannette
“EVER SINCE WYNDHAM DIED SHE’D BEEN RATHER CARELESS IN THE SARTORIAL DEPARTMENT”
remembered from painting the loo ceiling during the first footloose fortnight of retirement: fear destroys balance. Only once she’d hoisted to within striking distance of the target branch did she get her confidence – or at least she stopped shaking.
Braced against the trunk, she got purchase on the bough. Her elbow kept running into a branch behind her, preventing a full stroke. The project grew so consumingly tedious that she lost all trace of vertigo. At long last, the cut opened up from the weight of the bough, which splintered off with a crack. What a pity that she’d been keeping steady by gripping the severed side of the branch.
***** He kept the sitting room dark, with curtains drawn, though on a long summer’s day it was still bright at 9pm. “I should really go home,” she said weakly from the sofa. “Rubbish, you can’t walk,” Burt said, bringing whisky. “Keep that leg elevated.”
There was the broken ankle, a cracked rib, a sprained right wrist, and naturally she was pretty scratched up. “Mortified” didn’t begin to cover it.
He wasn’t ex-army, but a medic for the Red Cross, who flew out at a moment’s notice to Haiti or Sierra Leone. A medic certainly made for a more providential neighbour than a retired women’s clothing buyer who was a fool. The moment she fell, he had streaked out, then crudely splinted her ankle with duct tape and The Independent (not, as she’d have expected, The Sun). At a lope, he carried her several streets to their local clinic. Those expert administrations as she woozed in his overgrown grass were hazy, but she did remember the black T-shirt bunched under her head, its distinctive must, and the bumpy journey to the clinic was vivid. Jeannette hadn’t felt the clasp of a man’s arms for 19 months. Pain or no, the sensation was thrilling.
Burt interrupted her anxious internal reverie about the many daily activities a woman avowed to “take nothing, and expect nothing” would now have trouble doing for herself. “You’ll need help. Got kids?”
“No,” Jeannette said. “Wyndham and I did not self-seed.” The shorts were soiled, silly and too exposing, and she was grateful for the sheet he’d brought her, even in the heat.
“I feel part responsible,” he said, nipping at his drink. “Should have stopped you when I first spotted you climbing that wall. With a handsaw, for fuck’s sake. Figured I’d let you learn your lesson. Thought it was funny.” “I suppose it was funny.” “So what was the plan? You’d never have lopped more than a branch or two.”
“Over time, I was hoping to cut off enough to kill it.”
“But what’s so bloody important about a few little plants? You’re bigger than them.”
“Few?” She turned away, groping, unsure of the why of it herself. “I told you, I hate them. So mindlessly cheerful and impossible to discourage. Just starting out in life. Willing to give it a go, even in bark chips. Then the mess of them. They’re rioting, insane. Running roughshod over all my husband’s tending and discipline. Invading, uninvited, out of control. And I feel an obligation, to honour Wyndham’s creation, in memoriam, to not let the garden go to hell in a hand basket on my watch. I only found out recently how much effort a garden is, how much work he must have done, which I was blithely unaware of, or even scoffed at. Besides. Also. There’s something horrible. The replication. The burgeoning is grotesque. I can kill them in the thousands, but still I can’t win over them as a mass. I know they’re so much smaller than me, but together, as a profusion, they’re bigger, and they make me feel helpless and defeated all over again.”
It was the fatigue, and shock, and the blurring of the painkillers, but the plethora of personification must have verified the verdict: without question, a kook.
“And you?” she added. “What’s so important about that tree? I haven’t sensed any love lost.”
“Had my fill of female willfulness, I reckon,” he said. “Willfulness begets willfulness. Spirals, and never ends well.”
“Doesn’t it?” she asked with a smile, as he freshened a drink they both knew conflicted with the advisory on her prescription.
After sharing his takeaway, he insisted she settle for the night on his sofa. She slept hard and long, stirring only from a loud, high-pitched buzz outside. The council, ironically, must have been finally pruning the London plane trees along the pavement.
Rising midday with chagrin, Jeannette hobbled with her NHS crutch under her good arm out the back double doors. She knew her way around. The houses on this stretch were identical.
Right at the back, Burt was splitting the last of the big logs, using the stump of the self-seeding sycamore as a chopping block. In wonderment, she could see through the slats: rising on her side of the party wall, the log store was nearly full, its contents neatly stacked. An offering – or was it a proposal? As she approached, he remembered to put on his chainsaw’s safety catch. Off to the right, fat fluffy twigs of felled pod clusters piled bonfire-high.
After landing a decisive blow on the wedge with his sledgehammer, Burt announced gruffly, “Sycamore seasons fast, and burns hot.” “If Wyndham is to be believed,” she returned, “so do I.”
***** When he was not away treating cholera patients, they would recline in the glow of incinerating sycamore in her wood burner, watching the concluding Christmas special of Downton Abbey, and later the repeats – though Burt drew the line at Poldark, which he ridiculed as a sappy bodiceripper, and she accused him of being jealous of the lead. They would stay in separate houses; the arrangement maintained a courtliness, an asking, that they came to cherish. Every spring, the seedlings returned. According to the Royal Horticultural Society website, the sycamore lays a seed bed that will recrudesce for years. But it had laid her own bed also. Nature abhors a vacuum.