The gravel shifts under your shoes with a sound like slow breath, and you let your hand trail along the top of the south wall as you walk. The stone is warm still, warmer than the air, holding the afternoon inside it. Brick and gritstone, patched here and there with lime mortar gone soft at the edges, rough under your fingers where lichen has taken hold in pale rosettes. A blackbird, hidden somewhere in the espaliered pear, makes one clean call, then another, measuring something out. The light has gone from gold to something thinner. Above the wall the sky is the colour of the inside of a shell. You walk slowly. There is nowhere to be but here, on this path, between these beds, while the garden lets the day down quietly into its roots.
The path curves to the left, past a low box hedge clipped unevenly, the way hedges look when the same pair of hands has shaped them for years without a string line. The scent of box rises, faintly bitter, faintly green. Beyond it, a bed of lavender leans into the path, and your knee brushes through the stalks. The oil comes up at once — that dry high smell, camphor and honey together — and stays on the cloth of your trousers as you pass. Bees have gone from the flowers now. The heads stand up grey-purple, gone to seed at the tips, the stems woody and silvered at the base. An old stone edging runs along the bed, each stone set upright and half-sunk, and the moss between them has darkened with the dew coming.
Further along, the gravel gives way to a stretch of brick laid in a herringbone, the bricks sunk unevenly, some tilted by the frost of old winters, some worn smooth at the centre by the line people take through them. You feel the change through the soles of your feet, the firmer bed of the brick, its small warmth. A little further, a stone bench set back into a niche in the wall, the seat hollowed by use, the back of it marked with the slow fret of weather. The wall behind the bench is cloaked in an old climbing rose, the leaves already beginning to spot and yellow, a few late hips coming red along the canes. One hip has fallen onto the bench. You do not pick it up. You simply walk on, hearing your feet find the gravel again on the far side.
The blackbird has gone quiet. In his place, from the top of the wall, a robin starts a thin looping song, the notes falling and looping back, falling and looping back. Somewhere further off, beyond the garden, a wood pigeon works through its slow five-note phrase and stops midway, as it always does in the evening, as if forgetting the rest. Water is moving somewhere too, very quietly — a small stone trough in the centre of the garden, fed by a lead pipe from the wall, the water lipping over the edge into a channel you cannot see. The sound is steady and small, a hair's weight of sound. A moth passes your face, its wings making the softest dry whisper, and is gone into the honeysuckle on the east wall. The honeysuckle is putting out its night scent now, cool and sweet, reaching further than it did an hour ago.
You let your hand rest for a moment on the top of the wall as you pass the old door. The door is oak, silvered to grey, the iron strap-hinges eaten back to a dark bloom of rust, the wood grain raised where the soft rings have weathered down around the harder ones. There is a latch but no key. The timber is cool on one side and warm on the other, and the warm side is the garden side, facing south still even in the failing light. Above the door, a lintel of the same gritstone as the wall, and cut into it, so worn you feel it before you see it, a shape that might be a date or might be a mason's mark, softened almost to nothing by two hundred summers. You take your hand away. The stone keeps the shape of your palm's warmth for a breath and then gives it back to the evening.
The path leads on to the kitchen beds, and here the air changes again. A row of mint has been allowed to run along the edge, and where the path brushes it the smell comes up sharp and clean, almost cold. Next to the mint, a stand of fennel, the yellow umbels gone to seed, the seeds dark now and ready to fall, the whole plant giving off its aniseed note when the air moves through it. A row of beans climbs a wigwam of hazel poles, the leaves beginning to dry at the edges, the last pods hanging long and pale. A few apples have fallen under the tree at the end of the bed, a russet, its fruit small and freckled, and the smell of the apples in the grass is cidery already, warm with the day that is leaving them. A wasp, slow now, crawls over one of them and does not fly up as you pass.
The light has gone further while you were among the beds. The sky above the wall is deeper, a blue with grey in it, and the first bat comes out from the eaves of the old glasshouse at the north end, flicking across the open air above the path and away. You hear no sound from it at all, only the sudden small shift of air. The glasshouse glass is dim now, the panes patched here and there with later glass of a greener cast, the iron frame painted white long ago and flaking. Inside, you can just make out the shapes of tomato vines on their strings, the fruit dull red in the half-light, and a watering can set on the bench with its rose pointing down. A slow drop falls from the rose of the can onto the flagstones, and then, after a long pause, another. The stone beneath is darker there, stained in a soft shape the size of a hand.
You come round the last curve of the path and the robin starts up again, closer now, from a stake in the onion bed. The onions have been lifted and laid out to dry, their papery skins catching what light is left, their roots still trailing small clods of the dark loam they were pulled from. The loam smells of itself — that deep quiet smell, mushroomy and mineral, the smell that is under everything else in a garden like this one. A snail has come out onto the gravel and is moving with its slow deliberate glide, its horns testing the cooling air. You step round it. The gravel is paler now against the dark of the beds, and the path shows clearly where it turns back towards the door in the wall that you came through, though you are not going back yet. You walk on, past the glasshouse, past the compost bays with their layered cool breath of grass and leaf, and round again to the south wall where you began.
The wall is still warm. Not as warm as it was. You put your palm flat against it and feel the day held there, slow, the stone giving off what it took in, a little at a time, into the evening air. Above you, the pear leaves stir once and settle. The blackbird, who has been silent a long while, makes one more call from deeper in the tree, softer than before, almost to himself. A single star has come out above the east wall, very faint, and the bats are crossing and recrossing over the vegetable beds now in their small untracked loops. The scent of the night stock has begun — that white sweet drifting smell you did not notice coming, that is simply present now, the way a temperature is present. You walk the last of the path slowly. The gravel sounds softer underfoot than it did at the start, or your ear has gone softer, or both. The light gives the garden one shape, and then another, and then less of either…