How Does Your Garden Grow?

My efforts in my new home were starting to bear fruit. If only I was as lucky with the boy next door!

WE all know the cliché about the boy next door, don’t we? Floppy hair and freckles, never happier than when putting up a shelf or tinkering with the car. Perfect husband material once you’ve got all those more mysterious men out of your system and seen what was under your nose all this time.

But what do you do when your boy next door is traffic-stoppingly handsome, with a voice so silky that it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, yet seems to regard you as his funny little sister?

I loved this garden flat at first sight. I didn’t care that the wallpaper was peeling, or that the cupboard doors were hanging off their hinges.

It didn’t matter that the bedroom window was stuck shut, and I’d soon take a bottle of bleach to the rusty old loo.

I saw the high ceilings, the coving and doors thick with decades of expertly applied paint, promising a stylish first home, complete with magical, if overgrown, garden.

It was summer when I moved in, so after a deep clean of my new living space I decided to put refurbishments on hold and start on the garden.

As my building was at the end of a terrace I was lucky enough to have the shelter of a wall on two sides, with a privet hedge between me and next door.

It was over the hedge that the velvet voice first addressed me.

“Hi, there. I’m Spencer. You look like you could do with cooling down. May I offer you a cold beer?”

I swung round, and suddenly I didn’t feel like a budding architect with letters after my name, a super-mini and a mortgage. I was reduced to a tonguetied teenager.

“Hi, Caroline,” I stuttered. “I mean, I’m Caroline. Hi.”

I was conscious that my first impression upon this gorgeous man was not enhanced by my grubby T-shirt, jogging bottoms, filthy wellies and my red, shiny, soil-smudged face.

And when I say he was gorgeous, I’m not kidding. Film-star gorgeous. I may actually have gasped.

As he disappeared, I wiped my cheeks on the hem of my T-shirt and tried to breathe deeply.

“Here, drink this. You look like you need it,” Spencer said, reappearing. He tossed an icy beer can over the hedge. Thankfully, I managed to catch it.

The beer tasted icy cold and sharp and, parched as I was, I was glugging it all down in one go when I saw he was watching me in amusement.

“Remind me to be on your team at the next yard-of-ale contest!” he said, a twinkle in his eyes, which did not make me feel I’d stamped my femininity on this first meeting.

Luckily, Spencer had enough charm for both of us, and before I knew it, he had invited me to a barbecue at his place later that evening.

Just because someone’s out of your league, it doesn’t stop you trying, does it? I tried on everything in my wardrobe, looking for the right thing for my venture next door.

Eventually, I settled on a pair of white trousers with sparkly flip-flops and a pale pink shirt which I hoped would set off any excited flush in my cheeks.

“Hello, again,” Spencer purred as he met me at his front door. “Come through and grab a mojito.”

I knew as soon as I stepped out on to the patio that I’d got the outfit completely wrong. All the other girls were dressed up to the nines, all tall and tanned atop six-inch heels.

I saw myself reflected in the patio doors – short and shapeless. How could I have imagined I’d stand a chance with Spencer?

Not knowing anyone, I stood beside the privet, trying not to look too lonely, sipping my

cocktail and wondering how soon I could sneak off home.

After a while, a friendly faced guy approached. “Hi, I’m Josh.” “Caroline,” I replied, and took another sip.

“I don’t live round here,” Josh went on, “so I don’t know anyone apart from Spencer. How about you?”

I’d no wish to waste time on someone who was an outsider like myself. I wanted to talk to Spencer or, if that didn’t happen, to go home and brood.

“I’ve just moved in next door,” I told Josh reluctantly. “I met Spencer today, over the hedge.”

“I expect you’re in love with him already, then,” Josh said, sounding rueful.

“What makes you say that?” I asked sharply.

“Oh, because every girl who’s ever met him feels the same.”

After five minutes of pretending to listen to Josh while actually watching Spencer play the perfect host – a hand in the small of someone’s back here, a little murmur in the ear there – I made my excuses, saying I had to go home and let out my cat.

I don’t have a cat . . . You might wonder how an independent, professional woman could become such an airhead over some bloke just because he was gorgeous. How could I be so shallow?

Well, all through school and college I’d been the brainbox, the hard-worker, the best friend and confidante, but no-one had ever thought of me as sexy.

Spencer had so much sex appeal that a little bit of it seemed to rub off on anyone near him – even me. Plus, he made you feel that you might actually have a chance. And just once, I wanted to be swept off my feet by someone with Spencer’s style.

The summer passed and I continued cultivating my garden, although now I did so wearing my best jeans and pretty little halter-tops, just in case Spencer should be outdoors on his side of the hedge, or looking out one of the windows.

From time to time I’d turn to find him leaning lazily on the privet, watching. I always felt that he was laughing at me. He’d say things like, “Looking luscious,” in that voice of his, then leave me to wonder whether he meant the garden or me.

“He’s toying with you,” my friend, Lou, pronounced. “You don’t want to be his plaything, do you?”

“I don’t?” I replied feebly. As the colder weather and darker nights crept in, I spent less time in the garden, so had less opportunity to see Spencer. By Hallowe’en I decided something had to be done.

My firm had recently designed the remodel of an old ballroom as a new nightclub, and we had all been put on the VIP list for opening night. This was to take the form of a fancydress party.

“Care to join me?” I asked Spencer, trying to sound casual. “It’ll be a hoot.”

“A hoot?” Spencer repeated, with another smile that made me feel about twelve years old. “In that case, I can’t refuse.”

I ordered a “Glamorous Witch” costume online. I started panicking when it still hadn’t arrived the day before the party, but at the last minute the parcel finally came.

I threw it on the back seat of my car and went to work. I’d change and do my make-up in the staff toilets at the end of the day, as there wouldn’t be time to come home before meeting Spencer at the club. Then disaster struck. “I can’t go. Say I’m sick!” I pleaded with Lou.

When I opened the box, there was not a “Glamorous Witch” costume inside, but a fat, golden pumpkin outfit, complete with livid green stalk to wear on my head, held in place with a string of elastic that went under my chin.

“No way!” Lou barked. “You’ve been talking about Spencer for months and now I finally get to meet him. You’re going through with this.”

It was less a look of amusement, more one of horror when Spencer, dressed as a roguish werewolf, spotted me outside the nightclub.

“You weren’t exaggerating,” Lou murmured in my ear. “Introduce me. Please!”

So I introduced my old friend, Lou, to my new neighbour, Spencer.

The two of them danced the night away while I shuffled about the floor a bit with old Mr Burden, our firm’s senior partner (who was supposedly a vampire, but looked more like an undertaker), and tried not to fall over or bounce into anyone in my hot, bulbous and completely unflattering costume.

When Christmas came, I wondered whether I should give Spencer a present. Nothing special, just a festive bottle of something or other.

He made up my mind by asking me to a drinks party he was hosting next door on Christmas Eve. Armed with an expensive merlot, I rang the doorbell.

It was Josh who answered – the outsider from the barbecue. “Oh!” I said.

“Hi, Caroline!” “Sorry, I’ve forgotten your name,” I admitted carelessly.

“It’s Josh,” he replied, looking a little crestfallen.

I didn’t even get a kiss underneath the mistletoe from Spencer and we both went off to our families for the holiday season, so that was that.

New Year came and went, with my resolutions including spending less time mooning over Spencer and more time sorting out the flat. But I didn’t make much progress on either front.

Spencer was more elusive than ever, and as for my home – well, I was beginning to think I’d made a big mistake. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite warm to the place.

Nothing I could put my finger on, exactly. It just felt like the flat and I were not a good match, after all.

Spring arrived. I decided to throw a party to see if filling my place with other people would cheer it up. Spencer was invited, of course, and turned up with the ubiquitous Josh in tow.

I didn’t know why he’d brought him, because he spent the whole time chatting up my female friends, abandoning Josh the minute they came through the door.

It was Josh who found me crying in the pantry at the end of the night. Before I knew it I had poured out my heart to him, about making a fool of myself over Spencer and knowing I’d saddled myself with a home I could never love.

I won’t say it happened instantly, but that was the start of it, when Josh didn’t argue with me, but put his arms tenderly around me and rocked me from side to side.

It was only a matter of weeks before we came up with the solution to both my problems. Having no luck with the boy next door? Well, move!

I am now happily ensconced in a little red-brick railway-worker’s cottage. It’s cosy and semi-detached, and my next-door neighbour is . . . Josh!

He has been endlessly helpful with my renovations, putting up shelves here, there and everywhere, and we have a good thing going where he washes the car at weekends and I cook Sunday lunch.

Sometimes we even invite Spencer – we don’t like to think of him being lonely!

I can’t say Josh has a voice like velvet, but he does have a knockout grin which lights up his freckled face. His gorgeous, freckled face.

Some day, I was always going to fall for the obvious charms of a Spencer. It was something I had to go through.

But I’ve left my airhead days behind me, along with that garden flat. n