Lady Bathsheba Ottoline Lovecome insisted I (and only I) call her Bash. As if that closed the social gap between us. As if a girl called Bash was a salt-of-the-earth type, the type who could happily hang out with someone like me, her gardener.
I was just twenty when I became the gardener for Lovecome manor. The widower Lord Lovecome was disinterested in gardens and rarely at the big house so for a year at least I had the best job in the world. I even had free accommodation in the groundskeeper's cottage attached to their gothic pile. Then his daughter, Bathsheba, moved back home.
Bathsheba returned from her Swiss finishing school a lady. A hungry lady. I don't mean hungry in a lascivious way, well I do, but mostly she came back hungry for life. She wanted to go to university. Her dad said it wouldn't help her "marry well" so he wouldn't fund it, but she was free to live in the manor house until she found a husband. Instead, she did her best to piss him off. She raided the antique erotica he kept on the top shelf of his library, and insisted on re-enacting it. With me. Then she exaggerated it in her diary, which she left lying about on coffee tables and window seats. Her dad threatened to sack me. Lady Lovecome said she'd leave with me and tell the press about it too. Happy families.
Bash was small and round, where I was tall and wiry. She had jet black hair where I was blonde. She had wicked, deep, brown eyes, where mine are pale blue. I smile all the time, but Bash's pillowy lips were stuck in a pout. She even pouted when she laughed, swallowing it and shuddering as if to quash an underground explosion. The only time she smiled was when she came. Or when I came. Something she tried to contrive as often as possible because, as busy as I was, Bash was always bored.
While all her friends went to university she spent three years at home, alone. Years spent not reading law or history or economics but antique porn. Years spent minxing around barefoot, no knickers, teasing me while I tried to work. Years recorded in her diary-- her dirty-minded days so predictable she'd write it in the morning and then we'd catch up in the evenings. Like generations of her family, Bash was a woman imprisoned in girlish immaturity, wrapped in puppy fat, waiting to be married to replace father with husband. I could relate in some ways. As soon as I could heft an axe, like generations of my family, I was imprisoned by work. We were each other's only escape.
Still, we were on different tracks. On her 21st birthday she left home. I moved in with Jane, a woman who looked a lot like Bash, and set up my own, failing, landscaping business. Bash married a duke. I only saw her on the covers of celebrity magazines, and in the papers when her dad died.
Then one morning I got a postcard from their residence in Sicily:
"Thinking of you, Sweet William. My garden needs attention."
My name is Bill. Sweet William is what she calls my penis. Her garden is her name for her vagina. And I hadn't heard from her in ten years.
It's cruel of me, but I told Jane that Lady Lovecome had offered me work and that I wanted to do it. Sex was pretty bad between me and Jane, and I think I wanted to make her jealous. I wasn't really going to take the job. We were naked in bed when I told her and I hoped she'd get competitive and dirty. She got angry.
"You want to work for Lady cum slut?" She rubbed in hand cream with quick, stiff movements.
"She's not a slut."
"She used to practice blow jobs on you."
"Doesn't make her a slut."
"Why not?"
"I practiced on her too."
Jane folded her arms, wedging the duvet tight under them. "You never practice on me anymore."
"You don't like it."
"Still. A girl likes to be desired."
I smirked, lifted the duvet and hummed at her lovely chestnut bush. She crossed her legs tight.
I sighed, or growled, or both. "She's married to a duke. And I'm living with you. It'd just be for the money. And what's it you say? Sex is so immature?"
She harumphed and twisted away to lie with her back to me. "Whatever."
Whatever is the worst. Whatever is like, "This is what you've got, deal with it."
Bash was the first person to say this to me. I was ordered to chop down a cherry tree I'd tried to grow for years because Lord Lovecome thought it looked weedy. It did look weedy, not like the bushy cherry trees in Lovecome's neighbour's garden. But it was still alive. I refused to kill it. Bash got sick of me moaning about the tree and told me it didn't matter what I wanted. "This is what you've got. Deal with it." It took me two whole days to carefully dig out its roots and transplant it somewhere private.
Where it died.
So I find myself in Sicily. Or near it. The volcanic island of Stromboli where the Lovecomes have summered since they bought the villa from Queen Victoria.
The smoking peak of the volcano towers over the stucco and clay-tile villa, bubbling unnervingly. I crunch across gravel under an army of cypress trees to doors fit for a church. I'm not surprised when they swing open before I even get to them.
There she is.
Her left cheek dimples as she tries to hide her grin behind her pout. She's lost her puppy fat but is still curvy. Fit looking. I can tell because she's wearing a bikini under a gauzy kind of beach dress that reveals rather than conceals. She's still got her shaggy, bellish bob. I recall us playing shadow puppets with spotlights, positioning ourselves so that her full-body profile matched the shadow cast by my erection.
"At last. Sweet William," she says.
I'd forgotten how deep her voice is. One rainy Sunday, she made me come just by humming Land of Hope and Glory on "Sweet William".
"Lady Bathsheba," I say.
She presses her cheek to both my cheeks. "Come. I simply must show you my garden. It's in such a state." Her eyes shine.
I laugh too loud.
She shows me into the national museum she calls a summer home. Her feet slap-slap-slap on marble and she swings her hips, leading me through the grand hall and out a glass wall to the back terrace. She has a tight waist and wide hips now. Her bottom is round as ever. She used to complain that it wasn't elegant. She called it her "sit-up-and-beg bum." I told her men adore it. She said, "But I'm not a man."
The villa's built on a volcanic beach. A swathe of black sand leads out to frothing breakers. In the middle of the beach a crimson Turkish rug holds two enormous teak loungers, set like thrones with a sweating silver champagne bucket between.
The sea breeze cools my face. It brings me Bash's powdery lemon sent. I sigh.
Bash stands on tip-toe, leans into my neck and takes a deep breath. "You smell delicious." I'd forgotten how it felt to sometimes share a thought. It's like holding hands inside our heads.
"Let's swim." She takes my bag off me and immediately drops it. "I've given all the servants the day off." She sashays toward the sea, pulling her beach dress off over her head and dropping that too. "So It's just us I'm afraid." She kicks a wave. "For miles!"
I strip to my boxers while she kneels in the surf, knees apart, peering at me. We're in Lovecome Manor again and she's watching me shovel, her hands up her skirt.
I know Bash's body as well as my own. It's like she's a part of me, another pair of arms and legs. And it seems 10 years is nothing between us. I can almost feel the frothy breakers lapping at her gusset.
The water's freezing. I dive in and come up howling.
She coils her arms around my neck and squeezes me very tight. "Fuck," she gasps into my ear. When she pulls away her eyes are wet and spilling. "I've missed you every day." Her hips are wedged to mine. Her front nudges me as if looking for something. I'm not hard. Yet. I don't know where to put my hands.
My eyes overflow, too. I wipe, pretending it's seawater. "I've missed you, Bash." I hug her. Her body is like a memory made solid. A treasured memory.
We muck about in the surf. She loves me to throw her over the waves. I love to see her spinning against the sky, eyes screwed shut, screaming. I love her spluttering, "Again!"
Once she's worn me out, she takes my hand and we retire to the loungers. Bash and I used to refer to each other as soul mates. This is how, in the twenty steps from water to carpet(!) we decide, without speaking, that this is not to be a polite afternoon.
She chucks me an insanely fluffy towel but lies down wet on hers where it's spread on the lounger.
I wrap the towel around my waist and drag off my soggy boxers. I like the secret air round my cock and balls. I lie on the lounger beside hers. Me on my back, Lady Lovecome on her front.
Bash and I rarely chatted. I mean what did a gardener have to say to a Lady? But our three years together was so physically intense, we didn't need to make conversation. Not the formal kind anyway.
She looks at me with her cheek pressed to the backs of her hands. Behind soggy strands of bell-bob, her eyes swell up bigger than the sky. Water droplets glitter all over her shoulders, down her back and legs. Like diamonds.
She squirms. "What?"
"You're a beautiful woman."
She dimples, gulps. "You too--no, I mean. Whatever. You're much beefier though. I like it."
This makes me laugh even though it isn't funny.
She reaches over, takes my left hand, but only to hold it up. "Hmm. Not married."
"Living with someone. You?"
She flashes me a diamond the size of a grape, then drops her arm like the ring's too heavy to lift. "Gaudy, I know." She leans up on her elbows. "Are you happy?"
I shrug.
Jane calls me Mr Sad. She describes me as a glass half-empty person. She even blames the lacklustre performance of my business on my own lack of lustre. And I don't get it. At the big house I couldn't get the grin off my gob.
Time must pass with us just looking at each other in silence because, suddenly, Bash's skin is dry. She reaches under the lounger, produces a bottle of sun lotion and throws it at me. She unfastens the back strap of her bikini top.
