The latch lifts with a soft iron sound and the door drags a half-inch on the brick threshold where it has always dragged. Inside, the air is warmer than the garden by a few degrees, the kind of warmth that has been gathering since noon under a low autumn sun. Light comes through the glass already softened, already greened, filtered by a season's worth of pollen and rain-spot and the chalky bloom that settles on old panes. You stand for a moment on the bricks. A long staging table runs down the right-hand side, its boards bowed and pale where countless pots have stood. The smell reaches you in layers. Warm earth first, then the dry-sweet exhaustion of tomato vines, then dust.
You move along the staging slowly. The geraniums are in their clay pots in a row, leggy now, their stems woody at the base and bending toward the light with the patience of long-kept things. The leaves smell of pepper when your sleeve brushes them. A few flowers still hold, salmon and deep coral, the petals thinner than they were in July, edges curling. Below the pots, the boards are stained in faint rings, dark circles inside paler ones, a record of waterings that ended at the lip of the saucer and went no further. You touch one pot. The clay is warm on the sunward side and cool on the other, and grit lifts onto your fingertip, and you put your hand back in your pocket.
A bee finds the open vent above and comes through with a sound like a slow zipper. It circles once, twice, and settles on the inside of a pane to walk a few inches along the putty, then lifts again and finds the vent on its second try. The sound thins as it leaves and then returns, fainter, from somewhere outside in the asters. The greenhouse holds the silence the bee leaves behind. A timber creaks once high in the ridge. From the lane beyond the wall comes the muffled noise of rooks going over, a few notes carried on the cooling air, and then nothing for a long while except the small steady ticking of the structure as the wood gives back its heat.
On the lower shelf there is a galvanized watering can with a brass rose, the metal dulled to the colour of weather, a soft pewter grey with darker pits where the rain has been. You lift it. It is heavier than empty, lighter than full, and you can hear water moving inside, a quiet slosh against the seams. You set it down again on the brick floor. A trowel lies on the shelf where it was last set, its wooden handle worn smooth and dark on the underside from the curve of a palm, the blade rubbed silver at the tip and dull where the soil has not reached. The shelf beside it holds a paper seed packet folded twice, a ball of green twine, a pair of scissors with black handles, and a glass jar of small grey stones for the bottoms of pots.
Above the bench, a length of hessian hangs from a nail, its weave loosened, the lower edge frayed into a fringe. Behind the hessian, the back wall of the greenhouse is brick, soft red where it shows between the timbers, and the bricks hold a different warmth than the air, the slow warmth of mass. You put your hand flat on the wall. The mortar is sandy under your fingertips, the brick gritted with old whitewash flaking in patches the size of a thumbnail. A spider has made a small grey hammock in the angle where the roof timber meets the wall, empty now, the maker gone somewhere into the joinery. The smell along the wall is mineral, the smell of brick that has held many summers and many winters and given them back slowly through the seasons between.
A second bee comes in through the vent. This one is smaller, darker, and it tries the geraniums politely before drifting to the back of the house where a few late nasturtiums have climbed up through a crack in the brick path and put out three orange flowers and a scatter of round leaves. The leaves catch the low sun and the light passes through them so that the veins show, fine and pale. Water has pooled in the cup of one leaf from the morning's misting, a single bead held by the leaf's wax, and as the bee lands on a flower the leaf trembles and the bead shivers but does not fall. The bee goes in deep, comes out dusted, and lifts away through the vent without trying the glass at all.
You walk to the far end where the tomato vines have been left on their canes. The fruit is mostly gone, picked or fallen, but a few green ones cling at the tops, hard and pale, and one small red one hangs low, already softening. The leaves are yellow now, edged with brown, and they smell strongly when you brush them, that sharp green smell of the whole summer concentrated into a few last leaves. A spent truss has dropped its papery flowers onto the brick. You crouch and pick up a fallen tomato that has split along one side, set it on the staging, and stand again slowly. The canes are bamboo, weathered to the colour of straw, and the twine that ties them to the wires is bleached almost white where the light has reached it and still green where it has not.
The afternoon thins. You can feel it in the change of the light more than anything else, the green going greyer through the glass, the shadows under the staging deepening from brown to a soft blue. A wind moves outside, just enough to turn the leaves of the apple tree beyond the wall, and the leaves throw a slow shifting pattern onto the panes, the shapes blurred by the grime so that they are only suggestions of leaves, only the idea of movement. The greenhouse takes a long breath in its timbers, a series of small clicks as the wood begins to cool. From the lane the rooks come back the other way, fewer of them now, going to the wood. The bee at the vent does not come again.
You take the watering can to the standpipe at the end of the staging and tip a little into the saucer of the nearest geranium. The water darkens the clay quickly, soaks down, and a faint earth smell rises, sweeter than before. You move along the row and give each pot a measure, and the saucers darken one by one, and the room grows a degree more humid, the air gathering that close greenhouse smell of wet terracotta and warm leaf. You set the can back on the brick floor. Somewhere under the staging a beetle moves in the leaf litter, a dry small sound, and stops, and starts again, and stops.
At the door, you turn back. The low sun has dropped behind the wall and the panes have lost their green and gone the colour of weak tea. The geraniums stand in their row, the trowel on its shelf, the watering can by the bench. The hessian moves once where the air from the open vent slips down the back wall, and is still. The bricks of the floor hold the day's warmth in a thin layer you can feel through the soles of your boots. A last fly bumps once against the glass and gives up and walks instead. Outside, the garden is grey-blue, the asters dim, the apple leaves quieter. You stand in the doorway a moment longer. The latch waits, cold under your hand. The smell of warm earth follows you to the threshold and stays inside when you step out, and the door drags its half-inch on the brick, and the iron sound is softer this time, and the light through the panes goes on dimming behind you, slower than the dusk.