Griefwork (10 page)

‘Best assistant I ever worked with,’ he said. ‘I’ll miss you badly, young man. Take this book – no, go on. From time to time you may want to refresh your memory about some of the fish we’ve seen. They’re all there. The herrings, especially, would merit your earliest attention. And here’s my card. If ever you’re passing through The Hague be sure to look me up. I should be back there by next summer. Well,’ he paused and glanced at the sky over the harbour as if for inspiration. ‘Don’t waste it. I mean your gift. You notice details. You appreciate difference. You like discriminating. It’s a rare thing at your age. Perhaps you can make it pay. Something scientific, I’d suggest. Go off to the capital and get yourself an education.’

With this breezy farewell the doctor sped away. Leon never saw him again, nor any of his entourage. Later that day, flicking listlessly through the book he had been left, he discovered wedged between the pages describing the
Clupeidae
four rosy banknotes whose value together was more than his uncle
earned in six months, enough (before his uncle found and stole three of them) to get him to the capital and enrol in some sort of course, had he chosen. And so that fateful summer ended. His own traitorous memory added an ironic postscript, for he found that no sooner had the Koogs left than he could visualise Cou Min entire, standing, sitting, squatting, running, looking at him and smiling from the other side of nowhere with that smile reserved for the dead in photographs.

Eighteen years later he watched the princess walk the length of the Palm House with her hair burnished as the sun’s rays fell through the golden ice-frieze high above her, and heard her speak Cou Min’s own words: ‘I may be going away.’ They produced a distant pang, an echo revived, precursor of loss, inevitable bad news, endings. ‘But,’ she went on, ‘first I have a most serious offer to make to you. You don’t believe me?
Je
vous
assure.’
Yet once again they were interrupted by the timely appearance of her lance-eyed shadow.

That
night
Leon
blew
out
the
last
candle
and
instead
of
going
to
bed
lingered
for
a
while
by
the
lovelorn
tamarind.
On
hearing
it
speak
he
sat
sympathetically
on
the
brick
pier
beside
it,
know
ing
that
eavesdroppers
seldom
hear
good
of
themselves
but
also
knowing
it
was
his
duty
to
listen.
Tamarindus indica
spoke
softly,
however,
almost
so
as
not
to
be
overheard
in
its
self-communing:

‘Did I once accuse our gardener of anthropomorphism, of tainting us with human ills? I think I’m tainted anyway, with that fatal unrest which takes over when mindlessness has run its limiting course and one is free to suffer. At any rate he touched me this morning and I understood at once. Oh, not because it was me: it was quite absentminded. It wasn’t a caress but something more wistful. Hardly a week goes by without somebody touching me but it isn’t the same. The visitors like to touch – despite the notices – because we’re rare to them, tokens of the exotic. The assistants have to touch, we’re part of their work. They vary from brutal to considerate. But our gardener’s like none of these. His is the gently musing touch of an unhappy man. If suddenly we could all burst into flower for him I believe we would, in blithe disregard of seasons and genes. The dark truth of this place is –
wasted
love.
Scents and fruitfulness and all manner of budding and burgeoning: wasted. None of it goes any further, no matter what he says about sending seedlings hither and yon through the world. I sense it in his touch. The fruit drops and no seed germinates. The flower opens in futile splendour, the leaf falls. We writhe inside our glass.

‘What I learned today is that he’s little different from us. In a sense, are we not his flowering? Do we not speak for him? (And what comes of it? Dumb growth.) Nor is there hope for him outside. The sea wind blows across the dunes and marshes of Flinn, the world unlocks itself from war and finds nothing tender surviving. So much has been lost, and too much loss leads to this: to a gardener’s gestures or a priest’s, acts of succour and generosity which began long ago and with something quite else in mind. Though what should we care? The skills work none the less. His motivations are no-one’s business but his own. It may be that nobody else even notices; quite possibly I wouldn’t myself had I not felt his touch and seen his face. Such love! but of another time and still animating him, like the light now
reaching us from a long-extinguished star. However, I mustn’t get sentimental on his behalf: I’m no doubt wrong in reading all this into him and, in turn, committing my own vulgar error of botanomorphism.

‘Nevertheless, I do have to go a bit further. I’m an intellectual – through no choice of my own – and there’s no stopping thought. A saving grace if ever there was one for there’s not much to do but think in a place like this. What else do you suppose happens when you’re rooted in earth? I used to gaze down despondently at the antics of those in my vicinity but nowadays I daren’t let my fond and betraying glance slide over my little neighbour for fear I’m unable to tear it away and she – in all her touching hemlockian innocence – becomes baffled and dismayed. So I admire the architecture instead, which never stales, although in these last eight years the paintwork certainly has. I’ve a childhood memory of when they did it inside and out in gleaming white and the House seemed twice as spacious, the roof floating off among clouds on the far side of a bright gulf. Of course everything does look larger when you’re small but some new paint would definitely help. Even so, there’s plenty to admire right down to details such as the cast-iron pineapple finials everywhere which I love. It’s also impressive that such a slender ironwork skeleton should be so strong, as it obviously is. Especially now, in this overstayed wintertime, one can hear the wind at night clouting the glass and flinging hundredweights of snow at it so the whole building seems to stagger, yet the warmth goes serenely on. All that happens is a momentary change in pressure as the structure flexes, iron and glass bending in order not to break, which I can feel in my stomata since they’re acutely sensitive.

‘An eccentric thought has just struck me – a new way of looking at this caged world of ours. Mightn’t it be seen as a memorial? Our gardener may
think
it’s some sort of living
museum devoted to observing and preserving, but really it’s a memorial to a previous world. Maybe that’s what all museums are? Memorials to previous states? No; the thought’s gone. It was just a fleeting idea set off by his touch this morning and the contemplation of all this ironwork … Come to that, mightn’t grief quite efficiently frame the structure of a life? At once unbending and flexible, sombre yet airy, truthful in its inability to conceal itself? Its support would remain when all else had clouded or fallen away.

‘Too fanciful, no doubt. Just because for a weak moment I allow myself to be overtaken by melancholy there’s really no call to reinterpret everything in its purplish light. I’ve no doubt our gardener’s no gloomier than anybody else and this House is exactly what it purports to be – no more and no less. But how easy it is with time on one’s hands to slip into that parallel world of longing and sad fancies. Keeping my voice scrupulously low so not a whisper of sound can leak from a single stoma I need only say “Little hemlock. Oh, little hemlock”, and understand what moves him also. Feeble creatures, we are.’

Just as an overtired child may not be able to sleep when finally allowed to go to bed but grumpily kicks hot blankets as night wears thin and a new day shows through, so (one might fancifully think) there is a time for marriage which, bided over, slips past and turns into a differently dawning future. Within very little time the night denied, the pairing instinct cooled, are as one, unmissed. This was what happened to Leon, who was evidently not intended by nature to toss fretfully on a marriage bed. Once he had stopped being a gardener’s boy, a wheeler of dung, a mere stercorifer, he blossomed into a horticulturist accomplished enough by 1938 to step into the mildewed shoes of the Palm House’s old curator. That had been his ambition from the moment of first setting foot inside the Gardens, and the intervening years had been those of purposeful apprenticeship. They were also those of his potential hymeneal prime – if ever he had one, which in retrospect looks doubtful. In any case it remained unfulfilled. Instead he studied with singleminded zeal as though at the college he could not afford, and by night the cobwebby panes of his potting shed glowed to the lambent apricot of midnight oil.

Not that he was erotically anaesthetised, though it remains a good question what might have caused him unqualified arousal.
From time to time plenty of the strollers and saunterers in the Botanical Gardens glanced, were intercepted glancing, and left wondering what it was had been shot from the eyes of the tall, samphire-haired young man as he squatted with secateurs stilled in mid-snip. Nothing unquiet in itself though disquieting all the same, withdrawn yet longing, gentle but avid. A mad monk? they wondered, for Rasputin was still a recent enough figure to supply yellow press imagery. Not only had Rasputin been hypnotic and hard to kill but a demon lover as well. Or so they said. It might be worth finding out. Nothing serious, of course; just a dangerous little dalliance. To trifle with a strong young gardener would be a welcome respite from the Biedermeier gallantries of yet another dentist. Such thoughts passed through several brains of both sexes.

What, though, passed through Leon’s? Plants, for one thing. Plants in their kingdoms, divisions, classes, subdivisions, subclasses, orders, families, genera and species. By dint of much study he was making himself at home in the beautiful Linnaean edifice, the vast echoing palace down whose succession of halls, corridors, rooms, chambers and antechambers one could track a particular cupboard wherein, on a particular shelf, would be the very specimen one sought. Far from cramping the natural world into labelled boxes the system allowed it to proliferate endlessly as fresh cupboards were built, new shelves installed. He was surrounded suddenly by a universe of knowledge with himself at the centre, a universe whose tendency was centrifugal and seemed to flee him as fast as he tried to master its details. It filled him more with wonder than despair.

This fascination did not in any way eclipse or thrust into abeyance his emotional life. It
was
his emotional life. Into it, and into the crystalline goal of the Palm House whose swinging weathercock glittered ever in his upturned pupils, he poured all his unhappiness and longing and private language. Deep within,
like the embryonic plumule clenched in the heart of a seed, lay the folded outlines of his boyhood resolution to be true only to the one who walked a beach and talked to the sea. It would always be there. If ever it were allowed to shoot and grow fully one might imagine a lofty and gracile tree of unknown species burst through into upper air and unwreathe its gleams against an azure sky. Heraldic, unique, it would stand alone and quiver to a celestial wind, shedding the soft husking of eternal voices. Or something of the sort. The god which slept within was not to be expressed in any human syllable.
Ssiiih,
it whispered to him late at night when his eyes watered with yawns and set afloat the oil lamp’s teary flame.
Shuuuff,
it eased itself through chinks in the shed roof to comfort him.
You
are
not
alone.
I
shall
never
leave
you.

Not alone in the potting shed? Draughts apart, no, not on a few occasions in his eligible years. There was, for example, Greta, the wife of the owner of Geller’s, the city’s largest and oldest department store. The day? The wind? The gleety seep of gland? Maybe the look on her face as he finally snapped shut the secateurs and rose from his crouch. He didn’t know who she was then, of course. Bourgeoise, a good ten years older than he and with the faint down on her cheeks which by the time she was sixty would be a uniform fluff. She had with her two facially pretty but bodily plain little boys with plump corduroy bottoms and expensive model motor cars on strings which banged and crashed among boulders of gravel on the path. Incredulously, Leon found himself letting her through the wicket gate into the nightbound gardens at nine o’clock. It was clear that the first glimpse of the potting shed’s interior by lamplight acted on her like sunshine on morning-glory. A bloom of hidden fantasy opened its unnatural petals before his eyes as she visibly checked out the props and assembled them into a tableau. Excited by the detailed nature of her requirements he obeyed
each of her nearly articulated demands that she be stripped and spread ungently over a bale of peat, her face buried in it, pegged beneath fruit-cage netting. He had found himself standing naked but for gardening gloves, in manly state and tearing an access in the net, for the mesh was fine enough to keep out little birds. Her cries were soon muffled by peat. They went on a long time and only acquired a despairing edge when he paused for breath. Much later she was sprawled on the cold brick floor, limp, her mouth and face smeared with peat crumbs like an infant’s with chocolate. Within minutes she was back in her tweed armour, shaking scraps of three-thousand-years-dead vegetation out of her hair.

‘My God,’ she said hoarsely. ‘You’re a sheikh, you know that? I demand a return match and I shan’t accept a no.’

She came back a few nights later, but although the anticipation initially kept Leon aloft he never managed to soar as he had. This second time round the identical playlet appeared too contrived, on a third night too silly. That part of him ineluctably surfaced which didn’t want to grind people’s faces into bales of mould and grapple through netting
a
tergo,
O Greta. When she had left he raked and patted his dishevelled bed in whose lignin and fibres he could smell her scent. He lay in the dark listening to the owls and was swept with an old sadness, unable finally to see any connection between what he had just done and what he had longed for that lost summer at Flinn. A semi-resolution evolved that he wouldn’t do it again, though he broke it on a handful of occasions for lust of an experimental nature. Excitement came mainly from the hope that he might find whatever it was which would satisfy him; like many people he never did. The nearest he came to liking a participant in these investigations was in the case of a young male student at the University studying botany who was destined to die seven years later in the park a couple of hundred metres away, strapped to a plane tree in front of
a firing squad, protesting in vain that he be allowed to keep his spectacles on. (Whom, then, did the obligatory blindfold protect?) But over and above all these diversions, or behind and beyond them, stood the Palm House and Leon’s dormant internal tree ready at any moment to sprout, untouched by casual nocturnal goings-on. The owls hooted and a fox barked in the frosty air, each sending up a tiny cloud which unravelled in the same breeze that swung the galleon, with a scrawny sound, under full canvas towards fabulous lands.

It was a cold blustery March day when the old curator failed to report for work, victim of an overnight stroke. He died the following morning at almost the exact moment when, hundreds of miles to the southeast, the new Austrian chancellor Artur Seyss-Inquart announced the
Anschluss.
Leon, who had been the curator’s assistant for two years and for most of that time had largely run the Palm House, was sent for by Dr Anselmus and told the job was his if he wanted it. He responded with a decorous show of reluctance, for he had been fond of the old boy, but within the week had outlined to Anselmus various plans which were obviously not the fruit of a few days’ hasty thought. They included reorganising the House the better to display its treasures; the installation of a new heating system; closer links with similar establishments abroad for the exchange of specimens; the creation of a seed bank for tropical species; and more consideration given to the general public, who might even make contributions in exchange for being allowed to take home cuttings of some of the hardier plants and grow them themselves. This was, he said, calculated to excite interest and participation. Dr Anselmus, who had never heard anything like it, said such a proposal would need careful evaluation.

‘This is primarily a learned society,’ observed one of his fellow board members, a man whose waking hours were largely devoted to the task of trying to breed a black hyacinth. ‘We
have centuries-old connections with the University here as well as with the larger scientific community. The public are welcome to see the Gardens – our founders expressly desired that they should. But they are no place for showmanship and flim-flam. One of our own salaried experts rearing cuttings for ignorant people to let die in overheated sitting rooms, indeed. Never heard such a thing.’

Neither had the others. That aside, they were generally in favour of Leon’s energetic approach. It was still too soon to say it but his predecessor had let the place sag a bit over the last few years. It was widely agreed that Leon alone had kept it in some sort of order, noticing cracked and broken panes which the old man’s rheumy vision had missed and showing an instinctive grasp of the boilers’ vagaries. Above all he had the gift. Things sprang into life beneath his hands. At his behest stands of bamboo whisked upwards, trembling with vigour.

As soon as his appointment was confirmed he moved his quarters into the Palm House. For the first time in eight years the potting shed window ceased to kindle to the nectarine glow of learning. Within a month one of the panes was mysteriously broken and a thrush built its nest inside. And now it becomes a little clearer, that matter of not marrying, not pairing. He thought in a gardener’s timescales. Where he planted a nut he saw a tree, saw also how it would chime with surrounding plants in ten years’ time, how high the leaves would hang and what coloured shade they would cast. This peculiar fatidic talent overleapt clumps of years in a nimble act of aesthetic and botanic imagination. It was the extension of a habit of seeing the past similarly demarcated by episodes which threw long shadows across elisions of time. This was a life divided by important staging-posts, not one geared for diurnal domesticity. In the absence of a person the unifying thread was work, the vision, the thing glimpsed dimly or in flashes as though picked out
by a lighthouse on a darkling sea. Even so, he sometimes lost sight of any future and a sentient malignity rose up between himself and his work. Then it became easy to understand a lighthouse as projecting fat wedges of darkness in between its blazing apertures, for the lens still revolved behind its shutter and the light was constant. Yet light withheld had a different quality to ordinary darkness. It would fill the room behind the No Admittance door, seeping down at night from the slanted panes overhead, distilled from the cosmos pressing against the glass.

Maybe these occasional moments of nocturnal dolour were such as come to all those who of a sudden hear their own hearts in the dark and cannot forestall the chill arithmetic which leaps ahead, only to be brought up short like a guard dog on a chain. It sickens, this jerk of knowing trees planted now will never be seen fully grown; that a garden planned and sown will remain only a sketch, a landscape destined to be filled in by other hands and no doubt in the wrong colours. (The phantom of continuity hoots from a corner of the canvas.) The unwived man lies kithless in the dark and imagines his children, pretty and affectionate and talented, bearing away his seed for ever … No; it’s meaningless. A faint injunction in the blood, that’s all. Prettiness fades, affection becomes contaminated, ex-talents wear blue collars. The arithmetic is no longer simple, the melancholy multiplies. Leon moved his mattress into the boiler room so he should not have to face the stars. The glow of the furnaces, their chinkings and siftings and muffled internal collapses was comforting and reminded him that at his back, on the other side of a thin brick wall, lay a tropical forest. The black spots then, were no more than a sense of anticlimax breaking in. He was here at last, master of the very heart of the Gardens in whose crystal pavilion he now lived and reigned. Beside him in the semi-darkness he once more found his lifetime companion, true unto death even if given to
temporary desertion in the cold starlight of the small hours.
Here,
said the furnaces, their calm slow pulse sending warmth to every part of the Palm House.
Here,
said the shrubs whose upturned hands supported their transparent bubble of unnatural, triumphant life lost among the galaxies and constellations. A sanctuary for the delicate and the fugitive, a bright glass bulwark against the brutish and the drear … These exalted ideas came and went fleetingly and were generally replaced by rather prosaic thoughts. He had the sudden fancy to go down to the fish market, buy a peck of herrings, rig up a smoke box and make bloaters. This notion was so satisfactory he never needed to carry it out.

He began putting into effect some of his less controversial plans. He moved the showy
Caesalpinia
pulcherrima
to a more prominent position. He also planted certain shrubs and trees – including the Balsam of Tolú,
Myroxylon
balsamum
– whose resins had helped him breathe as a child. At the same time he put in a formal request to the Society for a new heating system which was shelved rather than turned down flat. We’ll see next year. Meanwhile I’m sure you’ll agree the place would look the better for a lick of paint. Leon thought this a strange decision. While not unwelcome it implied that the alternative to an expensive new heating plant was an economical cosmetic gesture, whereas in reality the painting of a structure like the Palm House was a complex and costly affair. Since the roof surfaces were curved they required an elaborate framework of scaffolding whose configuration needed constant altering as painting progressed. However, as the framework retreated downwards it revealed a spreading area of glass scraped of industrial grime and freshly polished, supported by an airy cobweb of white glazing bars and topped by a regilded weathercock. The effect was of such lightness and sparkle that he stopped worrying about furnaces and boilers. By the time it was finished three months later his
palace appeared to float slightly off the ground, and when glimpsed from the other end of the gardens between trees in full leaf could have been an enormous dirigible of fantastic design beginning its ascent, bearing aloft a cargo of sweating greenery.