A House in Order (6 page)

Suddenly, all my changes of six weeks before arrived outside too. Four men came – the first I had seen in daylight for four months, except my guards – and carried away the shutter-boards round the verandah. The last snow ran away down the gravel path and hordes of sparrows ran behind it, pecking the thawing surface. Down the steps, driving the sparrows to left and right, ran the young officer, looking as trim as any soldier could and almost shining in the sun, and as he sped down the path with his lively step, he glanced in my direction and gave me a wave and a grin. This put me in such good heart that I felt like a new man all of a sudden, and what with that cheery wave and the wonderful warmth
of the April sun I began to feel that a whole new life was starting. I was washed and clean from head to feet; my plants were going ahead as if their whole life had been one long sunny day; my hands and feet were back to size and my losses came to exactly two fingernails and four teeth. My guards not only appeared without their greatcoats but seemed not to despise me any more, as if I was on the establishment now and an acceptable part of life: they grinned when I took my exercise, walking briskly up and down my ten-foot length between doors. Everything seemed lax and easy suddenly: even down at the camp, they sang all day. And one day the ‘student of character’ himself appeared, with a visiting officer beside him and his usual escort laughing at his jokes, and they all started down the garden path to the road, where a car was waiting. But suddenly the Colonel noticed me and, touching his visitor on the elbow, turned him up to the greenhouse. The interpreter followed, and the three of them came in, while the rest stood amiably outside.

The country’s first agronomist gave me a polite bow and began a grave inspection of my plants. I knew from the
first pot he picked up that he was not a fool: he knew what to look for in a plant. How extremely clever he was, in fact, I saw when he came to the one pot that was puzzling me, guessed that it was doing so and, after showing me with his fingers where and how to pinch it out, murmured ‘Magnesium’ in a soft voice. He gave careful attention to my little collection of storksbills and cranesbills, which certainly included at least three connoisseur’s pieces. But when he spotted the house-leek, he looked at it very closely indeed, and at last raised his eyebrows to me in surprise.

The Colonel listened to this with a pleased look, as if in keeping me alive in a greenhouse he had done something very clever and was pleased to see his skill confirmed by an expert.

This was said with the door ajar, so the juniors outside were able to grin as usual at their witty Colonel. But the visiting expert didn’t smile at all: he only nodded his head gravely, as if the Colonel’s joke was a statement of what might be done. He then gave me a bow in a friendly manner and went off to his car, talking quietly to the Colonel.

As soon as they were gone, I picked up the house-leek to admire it myself, as one does, in a foolish way, when a possession has been admired unexpectedly by a stranger. I saw then for the first time what I had never dreamt of before – that the shoots from the base were not leaf-shoots but flower-stems, so that what I held in my hand could only be a plant that had not been seen for at least a century – the
Sempervivum
Melitense
that was brought into flower each January in tribute to the Grand Masters of the Knights of Malta. This discovery so astonished me that I lost all the decency that marks the true grower and felt myself bursting with jealousy to think that I must share the glory, first, with the sluttish family that had brought the treasure here, and, second, with the clever visitor whose eyes had proved so much sharper than my own. But when this humiliation passed, I was ashamed at having felt it and got back to my better nature, because sooner or later all who love precision, conscientiousness and hygiene must swallow the toad of admitting that the slovenly and the carefree have virtues too, and that the eye of the casual visitor catches the very things that are missed by the daily attendant. It was easier to feel better, too, when I reminded myself that within a week at most, I, too, would have spotted the budding miracle, and that as for the grubby family, they had never known that they were restoring an extinct glory to the gardens of the world.

Next day, a corporal came to my door with an old but good uniform, boots, and comb and scissors. The day after, the interpreter came:

Some days later, the corporal who had brought the clothes handed me a packet with an official label. Half of it was full of dozens of very neat collapsible pots that folded flat. I have attacked this sort of pot ferociously in peacetime, but I am ready to defend it when there is a war. In the other half were insecticides, seeds, bottled concentrates of fertilizer and an excellent brass-barrelled spray – the only kind I would ever recommend. On going away, the corporal spoke to the guard, who came and opened my door and, pointing to the hands of his watch, waved me out for my hour of liberty. So I stepped out in my new uniform and boots, with my beard and my hair cut and combed, but trembling all over under my spruceness and so bewildered by so much sudden luck that I hardly knew how to choose where to walk, or what to look at and what to do. The only ground my feet recognized by now was the ten-foot strip in the greenhouse, and the whole world seemed out of place without glass between us. After half my time, I started back to the house, but the guard, pointing to his watch and looking indignant, made me stay out, and when at last he let me back into my snuggery, gave me an angry look, as if to say: ‘People like you don’t deserve liberty.’

The same afternoon, the young officer came and I was taken up the verandah steps and to the room they had questioned me in the autumn before. Only the interpreter was there.

He then questioned me at great length and in great detail. Where and how I had been educated, the names of my teachers, the towns where I had judged flower and vegetable shows, the prizes I had won …

He then went through my map-making career with the same care, taking it all down patiently in his own hand. He had finished and was fastening the sheets together when the Colonel came into the room and was amused to find me there.

At which, the Colonel, looking me up and down in a calm way, said quietly in my own language: ‘Not to get too big for your boots,’ and left the room.

When I had my walk in the garden next day, I felt much easier and hardly afraid at all. I understood from what had been said and what had happened that just by luck there was a chance that I should be taken away to work in the horticultural branch, but that I wasn’t to suppose that this would make me important in any way: it would be just a sensible way of using me. I wasn’t happy at the idea of going somewhere else, because things were going so well where I was now and I felt sure that if I stayed in my den they would look after me better when next winter came. But I was still so afraid of them and remembered so well what they had done to the soldier who took me prisoner that I thought how much safer I might be in a government department, and how quietly I could work in one until the fighting had stopped. I was not such a fool as to think that I would ever see much of ‘the country’s first agronomist’, but he was the only person I had met since I was conscripted who spoke my own language and could send me seed-packets with their Latin names, knowing that I would understand what they were: this sort of thing counts for a lot when you are in the army. I was sure, too, that I would prefer living in a place where I couldn’t see the
prison-camp a few hundred yards away, because all my fear of getting put into it had come back, now that the weather was warm again. I guessed that all the questioning I had just had was to check on my credentials, so as to submit them to the agronomist, and I guessed, too, that they wouldn’t have warned me so coldly against feeling cocky if they didn’t believe that something to make me cocky was going to happen. I thought that the best thing I could do was carry on as if nothing had happened, behaving modestly, doing my work, and keeping out of harm’s way. It also struck me that I would make a good impression if I worked in the open garden during my daily hour out, so I plucked up enough courage a few days later to imitate hoeing, raking and forking to the guard and showing that I would be grateful if he could get me the tools.

He only shrugged his shoulders and frowned, but when he was relieved, passed on my message. A few days passed, as they do even for the smallest thing in the army, and then late one afternoon I saw a man being sent down to the camp and guessed that he would come back with my tools.

Standing at the staging, where I had been taking leaf-cuttings of the house-leek for the agronomist, I could see the man going down the path to the camp. The work-squads of prisoners were just coming in at the gate and checking in their tools at the shed inside. I saw our man talking to one of the guards and going to wait outside the shed, and when the prisoners had moved off, he was given the tools I had asked for and started back with them. My guard took them over from him when he reached the garden and stood them outside the greenhouse door for me to use next day. If I had known that they were going to come from the camp, I wouldn’t have
asked for them, because a lot of my old imaginary fears had begun to come back, and each time I imagined myself travelling off to my new government work, I invented pictures of the Commandant sending his men to take me off the train, or managing to intervene with the authorities to hold up my going, or even get me into his camp with the others. I began to hope so terribly that I would be sent away soon that I thought of all the signs that suggested I wouldn’t be – like the cutting I was taking, which couldn’t hope to be well-rooted for some months, and the uniform and boots I’d been given, which no part of an army is going to do if it expects you to be sent to another part. Luckily, I felt steadier whenever I looked round me and saw how well my work was going, and it pleased me to notice that when the guard who had threatened to cut my throat was on duty, he lingered and looked attentively at my way of working, as if he almost respected me now. When things are going badly in a greenhouse, one is very ashamed of it, but when things really go as they should, it is a great tonic and one is tempted to show off, like the gardeners on television, a breed I have always despised for pretending so hard to look and talk like ‘real’ gardeners, as if this excused their ignorance of grammar. But in wartime, one’s worse characteristics are brought out, and I remember how I held up my pots to the light when that wretched guard was looking, and even moved to and fro with the sort of slow walk and expression that are meant to suggest a cunning gardener: it was a long time since anyone had respected me.

I worked happily enough in the garden for a couple of days on my hours out, but always with the fork, because everything was very neglected. On the third day, I reached for the rake. to tidy what I had done, and saw a
wedge of paper where the shaft went into the head. On it was written:

I went on raking, holding this bit of paper against the shaft with my fingers. It broke off in my trembling and was caught by the wind and carried into the suckers of a big lilac, but I only looked after it in a dull way and kept on working the rake. The guard came up later and tapped his wrist with a frown, as if he was puzzled at my not knowing that my hour was up, and I went back into my house while he laid the tools under the verandah.

For the first time since I had been a prisoner, nothing I looked at in the house seemed to have a meaning any more: I might have been outside, seeing everything through panes of glass. It was the same with the bits of thoughts that came and went in my mind: they just came in a dull way and left without touching me. I didn’t even know how ill I felt until my food came and made me too sick to eat it. Then, just as it was getting dark and the guard had been changed, I saw everything in the house all at once, as one does in gardens in the evening light – my old paper pots, the smart new ones, the leaf cuttings, the yellow soap-bars, all my neat arrangements and the practical way I had placed everything – and I burst into tears, because there was no rhyme or reason in anything at all, and nothing to do and nowhere to go. As soon as it was really dark, I got into my shed and lay down on my blankets, where it was a relief just to lie and shake, knowing that nobody could see me or ask a question that I would have to answer. Only one strong feeling kept trying to come through to me, and I tried not to let it because I felt it
was too strong for me to face – this was the feeling of a wicked wrong being done to me, something evil in the way it meant to ruin me. I never thought to wonder who
MACKENZIE
was: just the name as I had seen it, in horrible black letters, was enough to plague my mind and make the whole of that night a misery of fright and indignation. Only just as it was getting light and I was thinking of getting up did I have another thought that was just as shocking in its way: I found myself saying: ‘You thought that you were watching them. But they were watching you.’

Stupid country people, the real yokels, judge every man by how early he gets up. The idiot who admired my greenhouse work was on guard when I came out of my shed before sunrise: the extra respect he showed in his face made me realize how dreadfully things had changed for me. I no longer had any heart to show off, and his admiration only reminded me that eight hundred pairs of eyes would soon be turned on me from the camp. ‘I’m done, I’m done’ was all I could think: how could I stand all day with my back to them, how could I get my privacy back again? This shock to my future seemed even more dreadful when I saw that it changed all my past too – all those blind figures trudging up the fields in their heavy coats and singing to themselves in the cold and snow, they had sung perhaps for me as they watched me dancing on the ice in my beard and my rags and saw me shaking my purple fists and screaming damnation. Their answer
BRAVO
!! showed how little they knew me: I had survived by myself with no help from them:
COCKY
was
MACKENZIE’S
word, not mine.

Indignation made me cool down in the end because I made up my mind that they had no rights on me and that the sensible thing to do would be just to carry on,
avoiding more than ever any behaviour that would get me into trouble. But I’d no sooner decided this and begun to feel calmer and stronger than I thought of that wretched scrap of paper and felt I must have been stupid with shock to have left it blowing loose for anyone to read. So my whole morning became another agony of imagining horrible things – of ‘the student of character’ sitting in his chair and reading
MACKENZIE’S
message, of their interrogating me, of everything going back to where it had been at the beginning, with their suspicion growing, their cruelty replacing their smiles, and so on to my glasses being taken off, a last walk down the path, the rifles, etc., but worst of all the brutal treatment they would give me first for having ‘pretended’ to be so harmless. I longed for it to rain and soak the paper, and I even saw the block letters being washed away to nothing in an April shower, but it was a fine day and put me in a sweat while I dreamt of rain. When the guard let me out for my hour and gave me my tools, I had no hope left of finding the paper, but I got it immediately, exactly where I had seen it last – only a tiny, dirty scrap, really, and not at all the bright, white object that I had made it into in my panic. Soon after I had put it in my pocket, the young officer came flying down the path and gave me and my work a grin, which scared me out of my life when I thought what would have happened if he had seen me a moment before, or if he chose to search me now. But I was much too frightened to pull the paper out again, so it went back into the house with me when my hour was up. As soon as dusk came I took it out and tore it to bits with my nails, but doing it so carefully made me notice every letter a second time, so that even when the paper was dust it hung in my mind like a scream. What’s more, the camp kept drawing my eyes, and the more I told myself: ‘You’ve no need to look; why pay any attention; what business is
MACKENZIE
to you?’, and so on, the more my eyes snatched looks, as if I expected to see 800 looking back at me and wanted to dodge them before they caught my eye. The sun stayed on me after it had left them, and it seemed hours before it set and left me staring at their lights through the dark, knowing that they could see nothing of me.