Notes from a Dirt Engineer - Lavinia Fairfax

'If you let my cat out, I'll kill you!'

It's a shame because she's a sweetie really, that's what one of her neighbours said. I have tried and tried to think of her as sweet but I cannot. Apparently Lavinia has lived a tragic life, knowing this doesn't make me warm to her, it just makes it easier for me to ignore her behaviour.

She's so posh that I wonder whether it hurts. It isn't the sort of new money posh that shows off with a large house, expensive vehicles and the like, no, this is innate, long established posh, it swears and drinks and doesn't wash. It knows no threat of poverty so feels no pressure to conform. I think she sees me as a sort of servant, vastly inferior, perhaps not even human in her eyes. And her eyes are dead, they shine as if pickled in a pool of brine, I've never seen them flash with the stuff of life. 

'And don't make A MESS!' she shrieks before hobbling on sticks back into her cottage.

A mess? You're a bloody mess, I think. Visitors come and go, middle aged ladies in Maxmara jackets. They smile at me on the way in and say things like, my friend loves her garden. All are her friends apparently but she is terrible company.  Perhaps they wait for her to expire. They want that enormous Ceylon sapphire that is stuck on her ring finger, locked in by a purple, arthritic knuckle; a burglar would have to cut off her finger for that ring, she would bleed, there would be blue blood everywhere. There must be a hundred grand's worth of Royal Doulton just in the lounge. Everywhere porcelain figurines stare at you; little men on horseback, ladies with coy expressions under bonnets, dewy spaniels holding dead ducks gently in their jaws. Sometimes they whisper, 'Smash us, put us out of our misery'. There is not an inch of surface to place a cup or glass. She must drink it straight from the bottle. Sometimes she comes out to yell at me before she has wiped her mouth on her sleeve, her lips are wet.

I prefer her garden messy. It's a cottage garden with a sweeping lawn, difficult to make stripes but she insists on them. There are flower beds everywhere, deep ones all around the perimeter and several island beds. They are filled with flowering shrubs, roses and lots of self-seeded herbaceous perennials; promiscuous Aquilegia is abundant, Campanula, Alchemilla, great clumps of Hemerocallis, there are many weeds among it all but I love the informality of it. Rather like Lavinia it has the feel of being rich and established but the confidence to be shabby and unkempt. Unlike Lavinia it smells wonderful.

There are many birdsnests in the thick hedges that separate the garden from neighbours and the road. She wants me to cut them, it's a big job and I really don't want to do it, I have told her it's the wrong time of year and that baby birds will die, this shut her up, made her think and grunt with defeat. Her lawn takes over an hour to mow and another forty minutes to edge and pick up. It doesn't matter how short I cut it she always comes out holding a cigarette and yells 'Shorter, you're not cutting it short enough!' I tell her the mower's on the lowest cut and she always responds by pointing towards her tumble-down shed and reminding me that if my mower isn't up to scratch I can use her 'better' one. The mower she refers to has fused blades and rots under a layer of rust and curtains of cobwebs.    

There's a large headstone in her garden engraved with the name Brinley. I once asked her, when she was in a more cordial mood, who Brinley was, she looked confused, shook her jowls and snapped something about how she's never heard of them. Weeds have grown tall around it; giant hogweed in front with cleaver scrambling through. I leave it covered. Whatever is buried there probably wants to hide from Lavinia as much as I do.

The job of doing her garden was kindly donated to me by another gardener who told me it wasn't worth his while driving out to her village once a week and that she was a lovely old lady. I am a sucker for a drive out into the country and I made the mistake of not looking a gift horse in the mouth. The cottage was easy to find with its thatched roof and her small, red Peugot under the carport lulled me into a false sense of security. I imagined a worldly, independent seventy year old in Peruna jeans. Lavinia is worldly in that she has travelled the globe, soaked up treasures of the commonwealth but she knows nothing of the real world. Her sufferings may have been acute but they took place in an opulent vortex and she is now nearing the bottom, approaching the general deathbroth where meat mixes with vegetables all seasoned with the salt of the earth. 

She comes out scruffy and ruddy-cheeked. I am reminded of a vintage sketch in the French and Saunders show about the two dirty old men who drink and think about sex all the time. I'm quite sure Lavinia's sexual embers are nothing but cool, grey ash but the the way she is dressed and her wispy strands of hair are very like the dirty old men. Lavinia flashes diamonds among the rags. Her voice is deep and she appears to strain as she speaks as if every word uttered takes enormous effort.

'Do you know what you're doing?' she asks.

This is a question she asks me during every visit, in fact it's the first thing she said to me when we first met. I usually dismiss it and change the subject since gardeners of all people know that none of us really know what we are doing at any one time, we're simply not on earth long enough to really know anything, let alone what we're doing.

'I think you've got a wren's nest in your gutter,' I say.

She bangs her stick on the ground and says, 'Have you cut?'

'Yes, it's quite damp still. I don't want to go too short, I might tear it.'

She looks around disapprovingly. I can smell whiskey. 'I'll get your envelope,' she says.

I follow her towards the kitchen door. The house smells of salmon and dill. Her neighbours bring food for her from Waitrose. It sits around in carriers bags and picked at rather than being moved into the fridge. The cat sits on the kitchen table next to a shiny copper vessel, a spittoon? The cat blinks and croaks a faint mew.

'Stay there Timmy,' she says as she removes a jar from the dresser and counts out notes. There's a bit of messing about and sighing. She has her back to me. I get the feeling she is confused about what she owes me so I ask her if everything is alright but she doesn't answer.

'There you are,' she says holding out the envelope.

I take it and she shuts the door if my face. I'm a chaotic worker and have left tools all over her garden. It takes me a good fifteen minutes to collect them all and get the mower back into the van. Another of her so-called friends arrives and flashes me a fake smile. The people in this village are very peculiar. It feels insular and very elite. In the van I open the envelope and count the money, it is twenty pounds short. I am exhausted, too exhausted to go back and confront her. She will argue, the friend will back her up and I will look like a predator, trying to rip off an old lady. I drink lots of water, sigh and drive away, trying to avoid all the potholes on the lane which will land me an expensive mechanic's bill if I'm not careful.