Someone had once said that it was the hour when God walked in the garden. It was at any rate the time when everything begins to breathe again after the long hot hours in which life is suspended. Between the setting of the sun and the deepening of the twilight there is a brief moment when colours take on a strange resonance: the white flowers of the oleander are suddenly luminous, the straw colour of sere grasses stands out intensely, the browns and sepias and greys of tree trunks, branches and stones glow. Leaves which at noon were flat and one-dimensional now have a rich depth of greenness. It is as if all the bright light steadily absorbed throughout the day is being radiated back into the evening world. Then all too quickly these vibrations fade as light and colour drain from plants and rocks and walls; overhead the first faint stars can be seen, though the horizon still shades into pale turquoise. The giving out has become a gathering in, a pause before the life of darkness sets in. It was the time of day, she told him, when she usually walked a little in the garden.
 
‘Come and see it before it gets quite dark,’ she said and escorted him down the four broad stone steps from the terrace, their balustrade still warm to the touch. (‘The lizard steps,’ she called them, but Robert, feeling his way, wondering whether perhaps all this was not such a good idea, neither heeded this name nor questioned it.) When the house was in its heyday this would have been the hour at which servants started folding back the wooden shutters that had been tightly closed all day against the sun, carried cool drinks out on to the terrace on silver trays…These days though the paint was peeling off the shutters and most of them remained permanently fastened.
 
‘It is a large house for just myself,’ she had told him over the telephone. ’We can have a drink on the terrace,’ she said now, ‘but I’d like you to see the garden a bit first.’ Then, as if making polite conversation, ‘This is an old garden, you know’ (pointing to knotted trunks thicker than two hands could span), ‘those bougainvilleas were planted nearly a hundred years ago. They do rather need some attention, their weight is pulling the pergola down.’ And added, ‘I can no longer tackle them.’
 
Looking at her thin brown forearms and fragile wrists, Robert could see why. Ringless fingers, small bony claws with pale unvarnished nails cut short, rested lightly on his arm for a moment as they turned back towards the house.
 
‘Should have done it years ago, but never mind.’
 
‘She is something of a recluse,’ Anthony had said. ‘A slight reputation for eccentricity, keeps the gate padlocked, a lot of people would love to see the house and garden but she rarely lets anyone in, been living alone there for years. You hear some odd things about her locally – I have a vague idea there was once some dramatic piece of gossip or scandal – yet people seem to respect her all the same. She’s a bit of a grande dame perhaps but it might suit you.’
 
Chloe had replied promptly to Robert’s letter, cool and brisk. ‘I cannot offer very much in the way of salary, if that is what you are wanting,’ she declared firmly in confident black ink. ‘I can offer you bed and board, peace and quiet, hard work and half the amount that I pay my housekeeper. I could not possibly give you the same amount or she would be deeply hurt and jealous.’
 
The housekeeper did not appear to be overtly hostile, even if somewhat dour; black-clad and silent, she brought a battered silver tray with a decanter of wine and glasses. Robert fell back on the sort of placating smile and too profuse thanks that are commonly used with other people’s unknown servants or strangers whose language you don’t speak; the lack of any smile in response made him feel at the same time uncomfortable and annoyed with himself for this discomfort.
 
‘She’s suspending judgment on you,’ explained Chloe a few days later. ‘I sacked your predecessor, you know, and Maria’s waiting to see if you’ll go the same way.’
 
Robert, suddenly sensitive to cross-currents of feeling, wondered whether Maria might not perhaps have had some other candidate lined up for the job.
 
‘Clever of you,’ she said when he voiced this thought, ‘yes, as far as the garden is concerned she had various lads from the village in mind. If you decide you want to stay and I decide I like you, we may very well call on one of them in due course to come and help with some of the heavier work.’
 
‘I think I should tell you,’ he had said that first evening, ‘that I am not really a gardener. I would not want you to have any illusions. I like plants, I like trying to make things grow, but I have no special training or anything.’
 
‘I’m not sure that a gardener is quite what I want (she smiled faintly), ‘not even the harmless sort in a grubby vest and a battered straw hat. I certainly wouldn’t want someone who would prune and trim and cut back and try to impose on this garden. This is where Maria and I differ. She thinks that the garden is a disgraceful jungle and that I need someone to deal with it. What I want is a man about the house, someone who will take care of the garden, come to the dinner table with clean fingernails and provide me with a modicum of civilised conversation. A sort of sieur de compagnie if that is the male equivalent of the kind of respectable person who keeps company to elderly ladies.’
 
As a job description this left rather a lot unclarified. Robert sipped his wine and felt unsure. By now night had fallen. On the faded wall of the house fat pinkish-beige geckos of various sizes had come out to hunt the moths drawn by the lamp. Beyond the circle of its light the garden was dark, still save for an occasional mysterious rustle, quiet save for the trilling of crickets. From time to time the geckos chittered and squeaked. Chloe did not apparently feel the need to say anything further. And it was probably her silence, the strangeness of everything, some sense of tranquillity that made Robert agree to a trial month in spite of himself.
 
‘I don’t want neatness,’ she said as he started work in the garden. ‘I like it the way it is, I simply want it to be cared for. Minimal tidiness, yes all right, paths and hedges – but really what I need is someone who will appreciate the spirit of the place. And do precisely what I say.’ She smiled as if to take the sting out of the words. ‘I expect to be obeyed. There are two rules in this garden: nothing is to be done unless I say so, and nothing, nothing at all, is ever to be killed. If you have a problem with either of these things you’d better say so now’ (sharp tone reminding Robert he was on probation).
 
‘What do you think about it? How does she seem?’ asked Anthony when they met for a drink after Robert had been at the Villa for a week. ‘Not sure,’ was Robert’s reply, but he was increasingly beginning to think that he could manage to work for Chloe (whether she would consider that he measured up to her standards being another matter: Robert possessed a nail-brush but feared that he had never been much of a conversationalist. ‘You don’t have to apologise for existing,’ Annie had once snapped at him).
 
He began weeding and raking the gravel paths nearest the house. They were more baked earth than gravel. ‘It’s getting a bit thin,’ he suggested tentatively one morning when Chloe came down into the garden to check on work in progress. ‘If you wanted to get in a load of new gravel I could spread it for you and it might stay weed-free longer.’
 
‘Yes, we could perhaps do that. I’ll think about it,’ she replied.
 
Robert wondered whether that ‘we’ might betoken some acceptance, although his trial month was not yet up.
 
Chloe said, ‘Wait, there’s a spider in your hair, bend down.’ He bent obediently, she caught the spider carefully in her two cupped hands, then shook it gently out at a safe distance from his rake. ‘I like carefulness,’ she said, and sat down on the steps. ‘What do people call you?’ she asked a few minutes later.
 
‘Just plain Robert,’ he replied and went on working.
 
She watched for a while. Then, ‘I got rid of the German – your predecessor – because he proved to be quite unacceptable,’ she continued. ‘I thought he might do because he played the piano, but it was an error of judgment on my part, he wouldn’t do at all. He offended three times so he had to go. Do you play the piano, by the way? I didn’t ask.’
 
‘No,’ said Robert, ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’ Not much liking the apologetic tone of this, he added, on what he hoped was a firmer note, ‘If you told me what he did that was so objectionable, I could perhaps avoid the same offences.’
 
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘well yes, perhaps… I’ll tell you the two lesser crimes anyway. To begin with, he urinated on the box hedges.’ (This was not at all what Robert had been expecting.) ‘Now of course I don’t mind if you have the odd pee in the garden, but the compost heap would be a better place, or the bare earth if you must, not the box hedges. It scorches them if you do it repeatedly.’
 
‘And the second thing?’
 
‘The second thing,’ said Chloe, ‘was sex.’ She frowned. Robert made polite noises of the ‘Oh dear, I see’ kind. ‘He had a rather crude encounter in the garden with a girl from the village. Six of one and half a dozen of the other I dare say, doubtless she’d been hanging round making eyes at him, very unlikely he was the first, but all the same I did not like it – he pulled her skirt up and her knickers down, pushed her forward over the parapet of the cistern till the wretched girl’s face was almost in the water and, well, let’s not mince words, fucked her rather definitively.’
 
This description was even less what Robert had been expecting; he felt more than a little uncomfortable. She noted his expression.
 
‘You don’t find my choice of language very ladylike, do you? As a matter of fact I can think of several much cruder terms to describe that act but I thought I’d spare your blushes. And one might as well be accurate. By the way, if you’re wondering how I happened to see them, the answer is binoculars, and though perhaps you may be the kind of decent person who would have averted his eyes as soon as he spotted what was going on I am definitely not, I watched from beginning to end, though I must say from beginning to end did not take more than a couple of minutes. As far as I could see there wasn’t a single word spoken. I did not like it at all. The whole thing had a sort of abruptness and brutality about it which was horribly wrong.’ A sudden brief wash of emotion clouded her face; Robert half-registered it as sadness. ‘I’ve embarrassed you. Forgive me. But perhaps this is an opportunity to say something a tiny bit impertinent – your private life is of course your own business but do please steer clear of the village. Get a taxi into town if you feel libidinous.’ Robert cleared his throat in even more acute embarrassment. She got up. ‘I’ll leave you now to get on with the gravel.’ She looked frail and tired. ‘Lunch in three-quarters of an hour.’
 
Robert felt slightly daunted at the thought of further conversations of this kind. At the lunch table, however, they spoke mostly of the Common Agricultural Policy and its effects on traditional farming. ‘Such a mistake to uproot all those centuries-old olive trees,’ she declared.
 
‘They were planted generations ago,’ she had said, ‘they’re more like trees now, my hands don’t meet around them,’ yet the four hands spanning the knotted and curving trunk of the bougainvillea met, two larger hands, pale and ringless, two smaller and browner, a black pearl on one finger, a plain gold band on another. And this is how it began perhaps, hands meeting on rough bark, fingers delicately brushing, tentatively as if by mistake, then once more, not by mistake, eyes meeting, nothing said, the sap surging and coursing in a sympathetic jolt through the old gnarled wood. The morning is a businesslike time to visit the garden; the cool of the evening, just before dusk, is the romantic time – to wander beneath the trees, maybe to show it off to guests; but in the burning midsummer noon hours the garden is usually left to itself. For this is the dead time, the dangerous time, the silent time, the passionate time; the haunting time perhaps when the joins – usually seamless – between this and other worlds strain and shudder for an instant. It is also the primitive time, the hour when small reptiles and insects once more rule the earth as birds and mammals retire to the shade to rest. The silent time is full of noise: the cicadas are remorseless – yet this is not a contradiction, for their repetitive, rhythmic, deafening rasping serves only to emphasise the essential quiet. Under the bougainvillea arbour the shade lies deep and still. In the bright light below, on the stone terracing, an emerald-green lizard basks, sunning itself, motionless save for the faintest pulse in its throat. She points it out to him. ‘You have petals in your hair,’ he says and puts out his hand to pick off the papery magenta and crimson bracts, one by one. He places them carefully in the pocket of his shirt. A faint pulse beats in his throat. The smell of his sweat: sharp and green and urgent.
 
 
© Petrie Harbouri 1999
 
This is the first chapter of the novel Our Lady of the Serpents by Petrie Harbouri, Recital Publishing 2021, originally published by Bloomsbury 1999.