There once was a young and beautiful woman called Isabella who married an English engineer called Ralph. Isabella was Italian and homesick, and she missed her family all the more when she fell pregnant and had no bustling aunties to fuss over her and instruct her as to what she ought to do. As a child she had been fed on fresh vegetables from the garden and she was determined that her child would be too.

They had met just one year earlier, at a dinner organised by a well-meaning mutual friend, who wedged them together with disingenuous nonchalance; the only singletons at a table of ten. They stumbled over each other until discovering, in rapid succession, a mutual hatred of sherry and that they had both been in London for exactly six months. Isabella felt that everyone she met had been in London forever, and so did Ralph, and when he called her up the very next day to ask her to dinner, no sherry and if she took the wrong tube and was late it was fine, she said yes, noting with surprise how her heart leapt at the prospect of seeing this funny, balding, diffident, Englishman from Keithley in Yorkshire, again.

She asked her husband to build her a greenhouse big enough to grow lettuces, fresh bulbs of spring garlic, courgettes, aubergines, peppers, basil for her pesto and chillies for her puttanesca. He decided to design and build one from scratch, and together they pored over plans, debated extensions and door sizes, and so on. Many times they agreed on a shape only to tear it up and start again. It was February and the baby was due in September so they hastily compromised on a design they both found acceptable but neither loved, an elegant cube that swallowed up half their garden.

Most of all she wanted tomatoes. Real, juicy, flavoursome tomatoes from Italy, not the insipid watery imitations that were sold at the supermarket. Even their 'finest', sold in unnaturally symmetrical packets on the vine, would not have dared show their painted faces in her mother's kitchen.

Ralph worked on his creation every hour that he could spare from work, rigging up lighting from the house mains supply so that he could carry on into the night. Isabella brought him fresh pots of coffee and innumerable delicious snacks, and all the while spoke to him of the delights she would prepare when their first crop was ready. The greenhouse began to take shape and her belly began to tauten.

Her mother sent her seven packets of seeds. Some varieties were best for sauces, others for salads or drying in the sun. The pictures on the packets showed tomatoes that were egg-shaped, or gigantic, tomatoes that were almost yellow or a deep purple. She spent hours looking at the packets while her husband was at work, committing the growing instructions to memory.

Ralph the engineer stood back and admired his creation, incredibly proud of what he had built in so short a time. It had been a while since he had built anything – his job consisted of making drawings for buildings he rarely saw, and he never got his hands dirty – and he had feared that he would fail and Isabella would be irrevocably disappointed. He was waiting for this, this disappointment, and the inevitable falling-out of love that would follow it, and it terrified him. But the shine in her eyes when he led her out, and the smile as she cut the extravagant yellow ribbon, reassured him that he had staved it off, at least for a while.

In the Radio Times he noticed that a programme was to be broadcast that evening on Channel Four about organic growing methods. He suggested they sit down to watch it together.

This turned out to be a terrible idea. The programme implied, with devious cuts between fields of wheat and smoke-belching factories, that what with global warming and industrial development and GM and increasing car use and POPs and PCBs and so on and so on, the air inside cities was now so polluted that it was impossible to grow truly organic vegetables there; in fact, it was impossible to grow them anywhere except the Scilly Isles, and then only under glass.

Isabella watched the programme with mounting horror. She insisted that Ralph find some way of protecting the greenhouse from the noxious fumes that passed for air in this country. Anxious to reassure her he looked into installing an air purification system. It would cost as much as the greenhouse itself. He tried to persuade her that they could order excellent produce over the internet.

Ralph had to seal every join between glass and frame in the greenhouse with a special tape, so that the air purifier would be effective. This was not construction; this was forced, tedious, manual labour. He also had to bin the catalogue with the speedboat he had imagined piloting around a beautiful lake with his beautiful wife and child. He received her pots of coffee and delicious snacks in studied silence.

When the greenhouse was finally ready she set to work with a feverish energy. Layers of broken plates for drainage and organic mulch were laid, rows of seeds sown, each with a stake with a label fixed to it that stated the variety and Latin name in careful handwriting. Sometimes she drew a little sketch of the vegetable next to the words. Outside it was a damp London March but in her greenhouse it was bursting spring.

One night, before they had finished supper, she took her husband by the hand. Both their hands were callused, rough from the work they had done. She kissed their hands and led her husband up to the bedroom. Isabella lay back as Ralph went down on her, joy spreading from her groin into her belly and up and down her spine, and thought of her garden, and of that which was growing inside her, a translucent being with a heart that threatened to beat out of its chest. She became so distracted by her vision that she didn’t notice she was coming until she did.

As summer came on the garden flourished. No-one could question the care that she was taking with everything. She had perfected a single fluid motion where she opened the greenhouse door, slipped inside, and closed it behind her in a moment. Ralph had drawn the line at the prospect of an airlock. Every day she spent hours pruning, checking for weeds (although there were hardly any) and spraying for pests with an organic solution she mixed herself. She got the recipe from a farmer from the Isle of Wight whom she had befriended at the local market.

She called her mother almost every day, babbling happily about the developments, refusing all offers of help, praising the NHS and the beautiful fat maternity nurse from Ghana who was showing them how to breathe every Wednesday at seven.

It was mid-July before she realised that something was amiss. All of the other plants in her paradise were starting to develop except for her tomatoes. There were no tomatoes budding on her vine. The realisation poured into her like a stream of lemon juice curdling a churn of milk.

Ralph had been showing digital photographs of the greenhouse to his colleagues. These photographs invariably featured his beautiful wife. More beautiful than the wives of the company’s partners, more beautiful than all the girlfriends and dates and glances-across-bars he had had in his life. Their admiration (and, deliciously, a tang of jealousy; a pinch of cayenne in the stew) warmed him to the future; a future where he didn’t disappoint; a settled fatherhood, nappies and bottles, early nights in front of the TV, the occasional snatched dinner for two when he would gaze into the eyes of his beautiful wife and she would wordlessly kiss their callused hands, acknowledging the beautiful life they had made together, and lead him upstairs, and make love.

They were wordless for the next fortnight. Ralph walked into to a house that looked the same as the one he had left that morning but where every molecule had been shifted out of place by the waves of anger that his no-longer-beautiful wife was broadcasting, FM and long-wave, twenty-four hours a day.

He felt this anger as a personal assault. Why this change, this silence, these waves, with no explanation? Who was the steel-eyed demon inhabiting Isabella’s body, who demonstrated persistence in the field of fury he had never thought she was capable of? Normally her anger rose and subsided over him, to a quick resolution and bodies in contact. Now there was a great sea of bed between them. Disappointment he was ready for, he had many strategies for disappointment, but this anger confounded him utterly. He lay awake, looking out across the sea at his distant love, and thought of all he had done. After everything he had done!

He assumed it was a row with her mother, as her phonecalls were invariably met with a volley of harsh words and a slam. He ran over every thing that he had done in the weeks running up to the change, forensically dissecting every moment of their time together, and constantly came up with the result that he had done nothing to warrant this vicious incursion upon his happiness.

Ralph did not venture into the greenhouse. He felt that this was her place, the only place she had refuge. He had work to depart to every day, to pretend that all was well. And besides, it was up to her to explain herself, was it not? He had done nothing wrong. He had remained civil. It was up to her.

There were no tomatoes on her vine. Not a single one. No egg-shaped ones, no tomatoes for sauces, for drying in the sun. Every other vegetable in her paradise was an irrelevance without the tomatoes. Her pathetic English half-man, who muttered and came and went, neither knew nor cared. He would not ask, would not come and see for himself. Isabella occupied herself by seeing how rude she could be to him, how far he could be pushed. She could see him phrasing angry ripostes to her in his mind that he never spoke aloud. The agony in her back and legs, and the great, undismissable burden in her belly, constantly reminded her of how she had been tricked into love by this goblin. She read over all the books in the library, even asked the nice man at the farmers’ market, to no avail. They simply would not grow.

That night she dreamed that her greenhouse was filled with seawater, minnows and groupers, anemones and clams. She knew that she had to find something, a pearl, on the seabed. She strapped on a snorkel and took a deep breath. As she opened the door the water poured out, splashing her face and waking her in a cold sweat.

His parents were dead and his brother was building bridges in China. He had stopped showing pictures to his colleagues, but no-one had asked him why.

Her mother called in the daytime and said she had had enough of her nonsense and was arriving at Heathrow with her aunt Maria to find out what the problem was. They would pay for a taxi and expected to be at their house at noon.

That night after work, for the first time in months, he went for drinks. “The old ball and chain given you the night off, has she?” He laughed and said it was his round.

She stood in her no-longer-beautiful greenhouse, lit by autumn moonlight, sore, caged, and stared at the vines, willing them to bud before her eyes, to miraculously unfold their true state.

She picked up the nearest plant, pot and all, and swung it at the glass, shattering it. She thought she had cut her leg until she realised that the blood was running down the inside of her thigh.

He stumbled in, shouting for her, telling her he loved her and he did not care. Then he thought she had left for Italy, but her clothes, she would have had to have taken them, she was nowhere, there were her car keys – he ran to the garden, the only place left, in a no-breathed ice-panic. And she was lying among the shards of the greenhouse.

A mobile phone in his hand. Sirens. Doctors. His beloved through a tiny square of reinforced glass. Her belly smeared in orange paint, divided like a map by the squares of lead in the pane.

It is a hot day in September. The summer is refusing to end, and Londoners everywhere delight in al fresco coffees, in parks, in Frisbees. Men give thanks for summer dresses and pray for no winter. A bumblebee, sated from a honeysuckle, bumbles across a gigantic glittering insect eye, flashing the sunlight back to the heavens, and alights on a strong green perfect branch. There is much here to be discovered, rubbed, and processed. It hastens off to tell its fellow workers.

A white ceiling. Her mother. Her husband. Sleep. A white ceiling. Her mother. Her husband. A bawling purple thing. Sleep. Dreams of cages, and knives.

They return in early October, the summer still, unbelievably, not ended. Her mother is holding her overnight bag as they, holding hands, carry their perfect daughter over the threshold. In the garden, the glass still jags out at the prowling cats, the mint has throttled the basil and rocket and the aubergines have gone to seed, but a riot of tomatoes of every shape and hue are deepening from green to joyous red.