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Fifteen years later and Joyce would still challenge anyone to show her a happier marriage than hers. Three more children had followed Joshua: Benjamin (fourteen), Jack (twelve) and Oscar (six), bouncy, curly-haired boys, all articulate and amusing. The I
The Chalfens had no friends. They interacted mainly with the Chalfen extended family (the good genes which were so often referred to: two scientists, one mathematician, three psychiatrists and a young cousin working for the Labour Party). Under sufferance and on public holidays, they visited Joyce’s long-rejected lineage, the Co
And yet, and yet… Joyce pined for the golden age when she was the linchpin of the Chalfen family. When people couldn’t eat without her. When people couldn’t dress without her assistance. Now even Oscar could make himself a snack. Sometimes there seemed nothing to improve, nothing to cultivate; recently she found herself pruning the dead sections from her rambling rose, wishing she could find some fault of Joshua’s worthy of attention, some secret trauma of Jack’s or Benjamin’s, a perversion in Oscar. But they were all perfect. Sometimes, when the Chalfens sat round their Sunday di
To fill long days left alone in the house (Marcus commuted to his college), Joyce’s boredom often drove her to flick through the Chalfens’ enormous supply of delivered magazines (New Marxism, Living Marxism, New Scientist, Oxfam Report, Third World Action, Anarchist’s Journal) and feel a yearning for the bald Romanians or beautiful pot-bellied Ethiopians – yes, she knew it was awful, but there it was – children crying out from glossy paper, needing her. She needed to be needed. She’d be the first to admit it. She hated it, for example, when one after the other her children, pop-eyed addicts of breast milk, finally kicked the habit. She usually stretched it to two or three years, and, in the case of Joshua, four, but though the supply never ended, the demand did. She lived in dread of the inevitable moment when they moved from soft drugs to hard, the switch from calcium to the sugared delights of Ribena. It was when she finished breast-feeding Oscar that she threw herself back into gardening, back into the warm mulch where tiny things relied on her.
Then one fine day Millat Iqbal and Irie Jones walked reluctantly into her life. She was in the back garden at the time, tearfully examining her Garter Knight delphiniums (heliotrope and cobalt-blue with a jet-black centre, like a bullet hole in the sky) for signs of thrip – a nasty pest that had already butchered her bocconia. The doorbell rang. Tilting her head back, Joyce waited till she could hear the slippered feet of Marcus ru
Thrips, common name for minute insects that feed on a wide range of plants, enjoying in particular the warm atmosphere required for an indoor or exotic plant. Most species are no more than 1.5 mm (0.06 inch) long as adults; some are wingless, but others have two pairs of short wings fringed with hairs. Both adults and nymphs have sucking, piercing mouth parts. Although thrips pollinate some plants and also eat some insect pests, they are both boon and bane for the modern gardener and are generally considered pests to be controlled with insecticides, such as Lindex. Scientific classification: thrips make up the order Thysanoptera.
– Joyce Chalfen, The I
Yes. Thrips have good instincts: essentially they are charitable, productive organisms which help the plant in its development. Thrips mean well, but thrips go too far, thrips go beyond pollinating and eating pests; thrips begin to eat the plant itself, to eat it from within. Thrip will infect generation after generation of delphiniums if you let it. What can one do about thrip if, as in this case, the Lindex hadn’t worked? What can you do but prune hard, prune ruthlessly and begin from the begi