Pulse

rest of her footwear with polish, brush, rag, cloth, elbow-grease, devotion, love.
    Ken had offered to waive presents this year, as his birthday fell only six weeks after they moved into the house, but she declined to be let off. So, this Saturday lunchtime, he gently palpated the two parcels in front of him, trying to imagine what they might contain. He used to do this out loud, but if he guessed right she was visibly disappointed, and if he guessed silly, disappointed in a different way. So now he addressed only himself. First one, soft: got to be something to wear.
    ‘Gardening gloves! Just what I needed.’ He tried them on, admired their mixture of flexibility and robustness, commented on the leather bands which reinforced the stripy canvas at key points. This was the first time they had owned a garden, and his first pair of such gloves.
    His other present was some kind of oblong box; when he was about to give it a shake, she warned that some bits were fragile. He unpeeled the Sellotape carefully, as they saved wrapping paper for re-use. Inside he found a green plastic attaché case. Frowning, he raised its lid and saw a line of glass test tubes with corks in the top, a set of plastic bottles containing different coloured liquids, a long plastic spoon, and assorted mysterious dibbers and wodgers. Had he been guessing silly, he might have suggested an advanced version of the home pregnancy kit they had once used way back, when they were still hoping. Now he knew not to mention the comparison. Instead, he read the title of the handbook.
    ‘A soil-testing kit! Just what I needed.’
    ‘They really work, apparently.’
    It was a good present, appealing to – what, exactly? – perhaps that small area of masculinity which modern society’s erosion of difference between the sexes had not yet eliminated. Man as boffin, as prospective hunter-gatherer, as boy scout: a bit of each. Among their circle of friends, both sexes shared the shopping, cooking, housework, childcare, driving, earning. Apart from putting on their own clothes, there was almost nothing one partner did that the other was not equally capable of. And equally willing, or unwilling, to do. But a soil-testing kit, now that was definitely a boy thing. Clever Martha does it again.
    The handbook said the kit would test for potassium, phosphorus, potash and pH, whatever that was. And then presumably you got bags of different stuff and dug them in. He smiled at Martha.
    ‘So I suppose it will also help us work out what will grow best where.’
    When she only smiled back, he assumed that she assumed he was referring to the contentious subject of his vegetable patch. His theoretical vegetable patch. The one which she said there was no room for, and anyway no need for, giventhe farmers’ market every Saturday morning in the nearby school playground. Not to mention the lead content likely to occur in any vegetables grown so close to one of the chief arterial roads leading out of London. He had pointed out that most cars nowadays used lead-free petrol.
    ‘Well then, diesel,’ she had replied.
    He didn’t – still – see why he shouldn’t have a little square patch down by the end wall, which already had a blackberry on it. He could grow potatoes and carrots, perhaps. Or Brussels sprouts, which, he had once read, sweeten up as soon as the first hard frost hits them. Or broad beans. Or anything. Even salad. He could grow lettuces and herbs. He could have a compost heap and they could do even more recycling than they did already.
    But Martha was against it. Almost as soon as they had made an offer on the house she started clipping and filing articles by various horticultural sages. Many were on the subject of How to Make the Most of a Tricky Space; and no one could deny that what owners of terrace houses like theirs ended up with – a long thin strip bounded by yellow-grey brick walls – was indeed a Tricky Space. The classier gardening writers tended to suggest that in order to Make the Most of it, you should break it up into a series of small, intimate areas with different plantings and different functions, perhaps linked by a serpentine path. Before and After photos demonstrated the transformation. A nook designed to catch the sun would give way to a little rose garden, a water feature, a place where plants were grown just for the colour of their leaves, a hedged square containing a sundial, and so on. Sometimes Japanese principles were invoked. Ken,