The Second Mister (6 page)

Yes, there were scars too, many deep and long lasting.

One sunny Sunday morning, when I was five or six, I
was riding my tricyle on the footpath outside our house.
My father told me not to bother going to mass on the reasonable basis we would probably not see such sunshine for years again. I obeyed without question, which was in itself most unusual. Unfortunately, some teacher or other had squeezed into my head the idea that not going to Sunday mass was a mortal sin and that if I died in a state thereof I would burn forever. I do believe that this is not the sort of thing that should be taught to small children as, to say the least, it tends to keep them awake at night and may not be helpful with their potty training. It was a very long time before I was eventually able to blurt out my first confession and thereby avoid the excessively documented and lengthy flames of Hell.

Nobody said sorry.

Then again, neither did I.

( From THE BLACK SNOWMEN )

A
unt
Gethsemane* was my mother’s sister and for three decades had taught Latin in a secondary school. She was made redundant at the age of fifty-three as a consequence of the surprising discovery by the educational authorities that a sound grounding in Cicero and Horace is not an essential prerequisite to a successful career as a petrol pump attendant or a social welfare recipient. She was given a small pension and devoted the rest of her life, and most of her paltry income, to the development of her garden. As time went by she became more and more detached from reality which was in strange contrast to the strict logic that she applied to anything related to horticulture.

It was probably as a result of moderate myopia that she decided to abandon the usual arrangements of shape and colour that are the commonplace features of garden design, and to substitute for them a discipline that was unbending and that had its origin in the second great love of her life, the Latin language. She set about creating ‘
a grammatical garden’
. At the centre of the garden was a small lawn and this was almost completely surrounded by a deep border which was divided into five sections of equal size, one for each declension.

As one looked out onto the garden from the front door of the house the area of the bed immediately to the left contained nothing but flowers, trees, and shrubs that were described by nouns of the first declension and this was followed in turn by an area containing those of the second declension only. This scheme was continued throughout so that the border terminated on the right with plants of the
fifth declension.

The area allotted to each declension was, in principle, subdivided into further sections for plants that were respectively the bearers of names that were either masculine, feminine or neuter. A slight complication arose in this regard, due to the fact that my aunt, in spite of her age, held feminist views that were remarkably advanced and she re
fused absolutely to allow anything to grow in the garden
whose botanical name was of the masculine gender. This had the rather odd result that the area allotted to the fourth declension, (whose nouns are mostly masculine), was only sparsely planted whereas in the area allocated to the fifth (whose nouns are almost exclusively feminine) a multiplicity of varieties competed for the available space. The plants were arranged alphabetically within the sections assigned to the feminine and neuter genders.

Aunt Gethsemane was unyielding in her application of the scheme and had no regard at all for the considerations that one would expect to be foremost in the mind of a less imaginative gardener, such as soil composition or exposure to wind. The part of the bed assigned to plants with feminine names of the first declension was unfortunately a frost pocket where my aunt insisted on attempting to grow various species of the genus acacia which, having their origin in Australasia, are rather tender and not easily grown out of doors except in the mildest parts of the country. Each spring she planted at least six new samples which
never survived beyond the following Christmas, grammar fatally bowing to temperature.

As she got older her obsessions became even more intense. It had become her custom to give herself a special treat each year by visiting Kew Gardens on her birthday. When she reached the age of sixty-five she contracted a severe dose of food poisoning by eating moussaka in an
establishment called ‘
The Thucydides Takeaway’
. She was
released from hospital a few days later but immediately declared war on all plants whose names had a Greek origin. 
Several fine crinodendrons and fremontodendrons were cut down and burned on the basis that they were examples of “
Hellenistic degeneracy
.”

I had become increasingly reluctant to visit her. As her eccentricity intensified it had become more difficult to communicate with her. For several years she had been vehemently denouncing botanical Latin as being greatly inferior to the classical form, particularly because it lacked the vocative case, which in turn prevented her from conversing with her flowers and shrubs. She rarely spoke to me about anything other than horticulture but her sentences became increasingly difficult to understand as she insisted on using whenever possible, images and analogies drawn from the grammar book. Her plants never died but quite large numbers of them “
plunged into the perfect indicative
” and a shrub that was looking a little sickly was usually said to be
“shamelessly flirting with the subjunctive.”

Aunt Gethsemane’s insistence on confining our conversation to the botanical had one major exception: my interviews with her always ended with her haughtily informing me that she was cutting me out of her will. I was not in the least disappointed by this as I knew that she had no money due to the large number of plants that she continually purchased and I also knew that she had been left the
house in which she lived for her life only. I have never been
foolish with money but during my visits I always slipped a ten pound note under a potted aspidistra that she kept in her hallway; the money was always gone the next time that I called to her. A neighbour, however, told me that my aunt had once confided in him that she hid all her loose money under the pot whenever she saw me coming as she was convinced that the only reason that I came to visit her was to see what I could steal from her.

It is not easy to explain why I felt I had an obligation to warn Aunt Gethsemane that I was about to be charged with murder as the significance of blood relationships has always been a great mystery to me. After I had been released from the Police Station I went home and washed and slept for a couple of hours and then walked the short distance to my aunt’s house. When I arrived there was no sign of her but when I was halfway up her avenue the hall-door suddenly opened and she came running across the lawn waving a large lopping shears in the air. She hurried past me muttering something to the effect that the bat
tles of Salamis and Marathon were disasters from which civilisation had never recovered and then suddenly disappeared into an evergreen clump. Seconds later I heard a triumphant shout and Aunt Gethsemane emerged onto the lawn holding a tiny rhododendron seedling. She marched towards me like an old despot of Rome celebrating the annihilation of some hapless tribe of unarmed Gauls.

“The Achaeans are rebelling
,” she said, “
but not to worry, I’ve gone fully gerundive.”

I was about to express my relief and congratulate her on the aptness of her grammatical condition when she suddenly looked straight into my eyes and tried to clear her throat while still speaking to me. At first I thought she might have found some evidence of Hellenic botany in her oesophagus or larynx because her expression became extremely unpleasant.

“
What do you want?
” she asked. “
What are you looking for?”

“Well, I just called to see you,”
I said.

“You did?”
she replied incredulously and then threw the seedling on the ground and jumped on it several times. She then held the shears close to her chest ready for any eventuality either criminal or horticultural.

“
There is another reason actually.”

“Have you ever considered emigrating to New Zealand?”

“Well, not really,”
I replied.

“They say New Zealand is very nice and it’s very far away. You could grow lots of roses and cordylines and keep a pet kangaroo.”

“Australia, Aunt. Australia is where the kangaroos are.”

“They must have moved them.”

I shook my head and I could immediately see a cloud of disappointment cross her face.

“There is something else...I am about to be charged with murder.”

“
Murder? Not larceny?”
she asked, but her face looked a little more cheerful.

“Murder.”

“So at long last you have attained the future perfect in the passive voice!”

I was about to assure her that I would never, in fact, have to stand trial and that my innocence would become
evident in due course but it seemed a pity to intrude on her delight on a pleasant autumn afternoon; I have to admit however that I lost all inclination to leave ten pounds under her aspidistra.