Chapter 3 — Survey Flags at Dusk
TAMSIN
By the time Tamsin reached the night garden, the tobacco flowers had opened.
Their scent moved across the lower terrace in warm currents, sweet at first and faintly bitter near the box hedge. She stood inside the gate and let her eyes adjust. Ahead, nicotiana, moonflower and the old crambe held what little light remained.
Nothing in the garden looked disturbed from a distance.
That was how most damage introduced itself.
Tamsin put her bag on the stone bench and took out a head torch, a measuring tape and the inventory book she had begun at nineteen.
Her mother’s labels occupied the first pages in small blue capitals.
Tamsin’s notes began beneath them, darker and more compressed, recording divisions, losses and the addresses to which she had sent material.
She had come to establish what the launch film had used.
The aerial sequence had shown the crescent bed beside the rill, including the pale gravel she had laid after Graham’s father died.
No press photographer had been invited through the gate.
The company’s image library was not supposed to contain it.
At the first bed she crouched and touched the soil.
Dry for the top two centimetres, cool beneath. The western nozzle was still delivering less pressure than the others. The plants would wilt according to water, wind and root depth, whatever had happened at the launch.
A white triangle showed between the leaves of the cardoon.
Tamsin reached in and drew out a survey flag on a thin wire stem. The plastic was printed with a Calder Meridian subcontractor’s name and the number B14.
There had been three flags along the north wall in June, when Graham had said a surveyor needed to check the boundary. He had apologised for the unannounced entry and told her the work was complete.
This flag was new. Its wire had pierced the feeder roots of a young daphne.
She pulled it free and laid it on the path.
Beyond the cardoon she found B15, then B16 beside the rill. A smear of orange paint crossed two stones at the base of the wall. Sideways torchlight revealed a chalk arrow below the pergola, a nail in the mortar, and another flag behind the Japanese forest grass.
The line did not follow the boundary.
It crossed the garden.
She measured from the eastern wall. The line passed through the rill, the crescent bed and the veteran cestrum planted by her mother before she became ill.
Tamsin straightened too quickly. The beam of her head torch jumped across the wall and caught something pale among the ivy: a cable tie, newly cut. Below it, a heel print had dried in the soft edge of the bed. Somebody had stood there long enough to compress the soil, facing the garden.
Facing the angle used in the film.
She took out her phone. Graham would still be at the reception. A project manager would call the marks preliminary; Graham would give her a date by which the uncertainty would be resolved. Six weeks, perhaps. A number shaped to make taking something sound temporary.
Tamsin put the phone back in her pocket.
The first task was not to obtain an explanation. It was to reduce the amount that could be lost before morning.
She went to the potting shed. Her secateurs were on the peg where she had left them, but the propagation knife was missing from its leather sleeve.
A folded reflector leaned against the sink, silver side outward.
It belonged to a photography crew. There was dried mud on the floor and a heel mark matching the one under the ivy.
On the bench lay six clipped stems of night phlox.
They had not been cut at a node. Someone had sliced through new growth and abandoned the stems when they wilted.
Tamsin set both palms on the bench.
Her mother had taught her pruning on a blackcurrant bush. Look for where the plant can answer, she had said. Never cut only to make the shape convenient to you.
Tamsin filled the sink and tested the stems with a thumbnail. Two retained enough firmness to attempt.
She scrubbed a second pair of blades and carried pots outside. She mixed grit into propagation compost until it stopped clumping.
The cestrum needed more than cuttings. Its seed was unreliable, and the plant had resented every previous attempt at division. But the lower branches had layered themselves where they touched the soil. Tamsin cleared leaf litter from one and found a pale root mass under the bark.
Viable.
She sat back on her heels.
For several seconds, relief made her hands unsteady. Then she worked.
She cut above the rooted section at a slant that would shed water, loosened the surrounding earth with a hand fork and lifted the layer with as much soil as its new roots could hold.
Wet hessian went around the root ball. She tied on two labels: Cestrum nocturnum, east wall layer, maternal plant 1989 and Removed 31 August, T.L.C.
The initials looked corporate now. She nearly tore the label off.
Instead, she added the bed number.
She took softwood cuttings from the moonflower, semi-ripe wood from the daphne and divisions from the white geranium that had survived the salt winter of 2018. Each specimen received its maternal line, condition and date. The work demanded both hands.
At half past eleven, headlights moved beyond the yew hedge. A car turned into the drive and continued towards the house.
Tamsin stayed crouched by the rill.
The garden gate opened five minutes later.
“Tam?”
Graham’s voice came from the upper path. He had taken off his tie, but he was still in the dark suit from the launch. In the low light, the white of his shirt appeared before the rest of him.
“Mind the pots,” she said.
He stopped. “Why are you working out here now?”
“Because a photography crew has been in the shed and the survey line has moved.”
His gaze travelled to the row of flags on the path. “Those shouldn’t be here.”
“They are.”
He came down one step. “I’ll speak to Harker in the morning.”
Tamsin pressed compost around a daphne cutting. “Who authorised the photography?”
“Brand commissioned location material.”
“Who gave them this location?”
His pause was brief, but it existed. “Sabine asked for visual continuity between the original principles and the new sites.”
“And you gave her the garden.”
“I approved a limited shoot.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“I didn’t know they would use the shed.”
She looked up. “You didn’t ask me.”
The scent of the tobacco flowers thickened as the temperature fell. Graham glanced towards the house, perhaps measuring how long this conversation should remain outside.
“We can set rules for future access,” he said. “Tonight was badly handled.”
“Was the survey line badly handled?”
“I haven’t seen this version.”
“What is being surveyed?”
“The options for the west parcel.”
“This is the east wall.”
“Then the marks may be wrong.”
He used the calm he kept for problems that still belonged to someone else’s spreadsheet. The orange paint crossed the stones without ambiguity. The line was not wrong. It contradicted what he had told her.
“Is there a plan that removes this garden?”
“There are feasibility drawings for several arrangements.”
“Is one of them approved?”
“No construction drawing is approved.”
Another different question.
Tamsin rose and stripped off her gloves. “I asked whether one arrangement had been approved.”
“The planning team has a preferred footprint. That isn’t an instruction to clear anything.”
“Does the preferred footprint cross this bed?”
He looked down at the wrapped root ball. “Why have you dug that up?”
“Does it?”
“Yes.”
The answer entered her more quietly than the scent, the flags or the damaged phlox.
A preferred footprint could acquire costings, a programme and a lender’s expectation before anyone admitted it had become a decision.
She had watched Calder Meridian do it on other land.
By the time residents were shown three arrangements, two had already been made unaffordable.
Graham stepped off the path. “Don’t strip the garden tonight. Let me establish what is current.”
Tamsin moved the tray beyond his polished shoe. “Don’t enter the beds.”
He stopped.
“I’m not stripping it,” she said. “I’m making sure its lineages don’t exist in one place.”
“Nothing is happening before I speak to the team.”
“Something already happened.”
She pointed to the cut stems on the bench, the heel print beneath the ivy, the run of flags across the rill.
Graham’s mouth tightened. For one instant she saw anger, though she could not tell whether it was directed at the trespass, the disorder or the fact that she no longer accepted his future tense as protection.
“I’ll have the crew removed from the property list,” he said.
“The garden is removed from every Calder Meridian image list now. No staff, photographers, surveyors or contractors enter without my permission.”
“It’s our property.”
“The plants and records are mine.”
“I didn’t say they weren’t.”
“You didn’t say anything. That has been useful to you.”
He drew a breath, then let it out. “We should discuss this inside.”
“Not tonight.”
Tamsin carried the first tray to the shed. When she returned, Graham was still on the path. He had not touched the flags or the wrapped plant. She counted that as compliance, not care.
“How long will you be?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll leave the kitchen door open.”
“Lock it. I have a key.”
The sentence landed between them with more weight than it deserved. A key was not independence. The house was still theirs, the bed still shared, his schedule still threaded through the rooms. But the garden no longer depended on the gate being closed.
Graham went back uphill. At the gate he turned as though he meant to say something else. Tamsin had already bent over the next plant.
After midnight, she lined twelve tagged pots along the cool north wall of the shed and opened the old address pages in her inventory book.
She had sent divisions across the city for years: a white geranium to a school caretaker, night phlox to an allotment holder, cestrum cuttings to three growers after the hard frost.
The first number was disconnected. The second belonged to a woman who said her father had died but the phlox still flowered beside his greenhouse.
“I gave half of it to the community yard last spring,” the woman said. “Was that all right?”
Tamsin looked through the open shed door at the survey flags lying in a row.
“Yes,” she said. “That was exactly right.”
She wrote down both addresses and called the next keeper.