Griefwork (18 page)

‘A palm house, you mean?’ He was clearly surprised. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t. It’s an antique. It’d be like building a new Gothic cathedral. These places belong to the last century; you can’t rebuild the past. What would be the point?’

‘What was ever the point? Propagation, you said.’

‘Ah, but propagation for what purpose? Are you talking about social fashions or scientific requirements?’

‘I really hadn’t imagined –’ she began; then as if annoyed by her own ignorance said ‘Science. Of course, science.’

‘I’ll show you,’ Leon said with one of his abrupt walkings-away, leaving her to an instant’s ruffling that she had been on the meek point of following his purposeful figure. She listened instead to the rattle of his House’s perspiration on gravel and leaf until she heard his galoshes returning. On to a slate work surface he plonked several dogeared books, two of them lacking covers or spines, their outer pages brown from mid-work consultation.

‘J.C. Loudon,’ he said, picking up a volume. ‘Luckily in translation. We have to turn to the British, you see, because they were the great pioneers of glasshouses. Loudon travelled all over Europe in the early 1800s looking at other people’s orangeries and winter gardens. He was obsessed with glasshouse design, especially with curved shapes because physics told him that was the best way of getting as much light falling at as vertical an angle as possible. He had a vision, a dream.’ The pages turned noiselessly as rags. ‘Here we are. This was written in 1817, say a hundred and thirty years ago. “Perhaps the time may arrive when such artificial climates will not only be stocked with appropriate birds, fishes and harmless animals, but with examples of the human species from the different countries imitated, habited in their particular costumes, and who may serve as gardeners or curators of the different productions. But this subject is too new and strange to admit of discussion, without incurring the ridicule of general readers.” It was a marvellous, vivid idea. Just imagine, I ought to be African or Malay. Somewhere else he calls the glasshouse “entirely a work of art”. Not science, you see. It was to be a sort of paradise, a whole artificial world under glass. Look,’ again he searched for a book and found a reference. ‘A
description of the St Petersburg winter garden – not a proper glasshouse, it’s true – in 1827: “The genial warmth, the fragrance of the nobler plants, and the voluptuous stillness that prevails in this enchanted spot, lull the fancy into sweet romantic dreams.” Not much science there.’

‘I’d no idea it was all so fanciful,’ she admitted.

‘Oh, very. For a while the whole of northern Europe was in the grip of this dream. The more industrialised and urbanised things became, the more people yearned for their little gardens of Eden. They even started putting them in their own houses. The middle classes, at least. No proper home was complete without its heated conservatory full of potted palms and ferns and orchids.’

‘But what about the science?’

‘Oh, the science. That was carrying on in the background. Thousands of exotic specimens were brought back and classified, often with ulterior motives. Those eighteenth-century voyages of discovery had been commercial as much as purely scientific, of course. Several European powers had colonies in the tropics and trade had given the people back home a taste for exotica. So they established botanic gardens out in the colonies which to begin with weren’t much more than collection points for specimens brought in from up-country, but soon turned into research centres in their own right.’ He shut the book he was holding with the confidence of a bore and began ‘If I remember rightly’ with the bore’s implicit challenge to summon the energy to prove him wrong. ‘Calcutta Botanic Gardens, 1787. Peradeniya in Ceylon, 1810. Buitenzorg Garden in Java, 1817. They were the beginning of the scientific propagation of exotic species for export and trade generally. It all came down to money eventually. The classic example was that of the Englishman, H.A. Wickham, who brought rubber seedlings from Brazil in the 1870s back to Kew where they were propagated
and re-exported to Ceylon and Malaya. It virtually destroyed Brazil’s rubber trade. They were ruthless, the British, like the Belgians; ruthless and inventive. At the start of this century our own King came here to these Gardens and stood in this very House to make a speech about the grand purpose of such places. He really came to see the new heating system he’d paid for. That’s the system I’ve still got,’ added Leon, ‘so you can see the problem. Boilers nearly half a century old. Small wonder we limp from one crisis to another. Anyway, you’ve presumably noticed the plaque.’

‘Plaque?’

‘On the wall by the main door. That bronze thing. Needs a good clean, of course, but I haven’t the men to waste on details.’

He led the way to the entrance and the princess saw that what she had always taken for a black hatchway, an access to some arcane piece of plumbing, was no mere metal panel but a commemorative inscription fixed by four magnificent bolts to the brickwork. “A National Garden”, she read, “ought to be a centre for receiving stock and, in turn, for aiding the Mother Country by supplying everything that is useful in the vegetable kingdom. Medicine, commerce, agriculture, horticulture and many lucrative branches of manufacture can benefit from the adoption of such a system. Thus by care and diligence Man may multiply the riches of the Earth.”

‘A fine piece of mercantile and nationalist rhetoric,’ he agreed, watching her face as she read. ‘There you have the energy and spirit of the nineteenth century. And there you also have the end of the great era of glasshouses. The King didn’t know that, presumably, but they were doomed.’

‘But why?’

‘Partly they fell out of fashion. Mostly because the world was changing. They may still work as living museums but
they’re inefficient in terms of purely scientific work. Propagation needn’t involve growing palm trees to their full height. According to Dr Anselmus it was the First World War which really put an end to them. A good many glasshouses were in private hands but their owners couldn’t get the coal to heat them. A magnificent one came down not far from here at Marby. It was derelict, the plants all dead. Perhaps the best of all to go was in England, the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth. That was a wonderful building, wonderful. Its central dome was two feet higher even than the Palm House at Kew. Built in 1836, a whole decade before Kew, it was full of mature palms as well as bananas and ferns and orchids and an unrivalled collection of aquatic plants. Interesting construction, incidentally. Ridge and furrow design instead of smooth walls and roof. Like magnified corduroy. It was an old idea for using all the available light as the sun changed its angle. But it needed a ton of coal a day to heat and in wartime they weren’t entitled to have it. Preserving tropical flora was not a work of national importance – one of those bureaucratic phrases we’ve also become familiar with over the last few years. Different war, same problem. That First War, though: it ruined any pretence that there could be peaceful commercial competition between nations. All trade is war and glasshouses aren’t built for wars. Anyway, the British pulled down Chatsworth Conservatory in 1920. They say men wept as they did it. Forty-eight iron pillars each weighing three tons on either side of an aisle wide enough for a carriage and pair. I wish I’d seen it before it was too late.’

She watched as he stared out through the paned doors at the snow. How very differently occidentals acted when moved by something, she thought. Instead of bursting into laughter they became quiet and deliberately reduced themselves to a kind of elegiac nakedness. Still not used to it she was slightly repelled, or at least ashamed on their behalf. This man talking about a
long-defunct glasshouse might have been a child mourning its mother. It was quite unfathomably inappropriate to treat things as if they were people. Once again she saw a river choked from side to side with children’s bodies, the dead puffed up in the water’s face.

‘But we took in several of the Chatsworth plants,’ he was saying. ‘That
Encephalartos
you saw me hitching up the other day is the best of them. Ah, we’ve got plants here from all over Europe whose original houses are gone. And now this latest war. I’m told half the great German houses are down. Bombed or starved out. Times like these, it’s the civilising things which go to the wall. Gangs of children roam our cities like packs of dogs, you know. Stealing, black marketing, selling themselves to soldiers for food, living in doorways. Who’d dare to claim that keeping a lot of plants alive took precedence over feeding them? But if you look at history you’ll soon see that’s a false question because there are always the hungry and the homeless. The human casualties of the industrial revolution didn’t for a moment stop them building places like this.’

At length she said, matter-of-factly, ‘You know a lot.’

‘The history? Book learning. I’m interested. If I were an engine driver I’d want to know the history of steam engines. Aren’t you the same? You couldn’t do your job without knowing the history of your country, I suppose?’

She didn’t reply except to say, ‘Well, history. What about the future? Your own? You’ve just described the place you work in as obsolete.’

‘Only out of fashion. Not useless at all. As Loudon said, “a greenhouse is entirely a work of art.” He meant artifice: that it’s a matter of human ingenuity and aesthetics to create a completely artificial enclosed world. Nowadays people use the word artificial as though it always meant fake, something ungenuine, not real. What could be realer than this?’

Nearby, a man in shirtsleeves stood on a pair of steps and was sponging the undersides of a banana’s broad leaves. Not twenty feet away in another world a humped flowerbed lay like a corpse beneath snow criss-crossed by the tracks of birds.

‘It’s just very unlikely.’

‘Isn’t it?’ he agreed with pleasure.

‘But I’ve been hearing things. People say a new spirit’s emerging, that science and art must pay their way, that from now on places like this will have to justify the money spent on them because there are so many priorities. Food, housing, jobs, health, reconstruction everywhere. I’ve heard there’s even an argument about the future of these Botanical Gardens because the land should belong to the city. They say it’s old-fashioned and undemocratic to have a place of minority appeal taking up valuable land. They say.’

‘Utter nonsense,’ said Leon sharply. ‘Oh, I’ve heard the rumours, of course’ (how easy it suddenly became airily to dismiss the murmurs which, voiced by candlelight and among conspiratorial leaves, had so recently left him panicked and hollow), ‘everyone’s heard them. There’s nothing in it, I assure you. History again, that’s how I know. The whole history of city planning since the industrial revolution has been concerned with how to give people access to open spaces. Garden cities and city gardens. Parks are fundamental to cities. The Botanical Gardens aren’t the city’s to sell, in any case, and since this Palm House is the last of its size in the country and one of a dwindling number worldwide it’s a national treasure and couldn’t possibly be under threat. We’re incredibly lucky to have survived the war. We’re certainly going to survive peace.’

‘I’m told dirty air will be an increasing problem. The glass becomes filthy and the light can’t get in.’

‘Of course it’s a problem, especially when people use low
grade coal. But that’s a matter for government legislation, a clean air act or something. Stop people making smoke within the city confines. Don’t ask me,’ he said with sudden dismissive vehemence. ‘I’m not a bloody politician, I’m a gardener. I just want to get back to my plants.’ He turned away and lifted an edge of split bark with a thumbnail, looking for pests. ‘Mealy bugs,’ he said in disgust. ‘That’s what comes of talking instead of spraying.’

The sudden change in the conversational temperature apparently left the princess at a loss. Then, as if it determined her to be undiplomatically blunt, she said:

‘As I said the other day, I may be going away. A new job. Recalled home. So I’ll make my offer now. Thanks to this place, and thanks mainly to you, I’ve decided on a grand project. I want to build a glasshouse for my own city, but I want it to be of a completely new kind. Instead of a hothouse I want a cold house. My idea is to plant all the things which can’t live in the tropics – all those daffodils and little bulbs which like the snow, your soft fruits, the raspberries and redcurrants and – what are those hairy things called? – gooseberries. With the most modern refrigeration I’m told we can even make real snow. Wouldn’t that be piquant? Crocuses poking out of snow inside as mangoes ripen outside? It’s a … a delicious reversal. Real artifice, don’t you think?’

His back was still turned but she saw his hands were still. His jacket’s drape remained lumpily impassive but maybe (she thought of an expression in her own language) maybe ears were sprouting from his shoulder blades.

‘So,’ she persevered, ‘I want you to come and take charge of my dream for me. Nothing will be spared in materials and labour. Everything will be put at your disposal. Architects will work to your own design if you want. You’ll choose the plants, the layout, everything. The project already has our government’s
backing as a matter of national culture with educational and scientific significance. You can name your own salary within reason. There. Think about it and give me your answer soon. You admire this man Lyddon? Lyndon? Loudon. So now you have a chance to be Mr Loudon. I don’t think,’ she added softly, for one of the assistants had moved his steps closer to where they stood and was trying to unseize the worm gear controlling a system of rods which opened the clerestory louvres, ‘I don’t think such a future can be found indefinitely in your present position. Polymethyl methacrylate,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘My scientific adviser tells me it has been used with great success for aircraft windows. I think they call it “Perspex”. Maybe my cold house needn’t be a glasshouse at all but a thermoplastic resin house, properly up-to-date. Lighter, stronger, bigger. Fewer condensation problems. As you can see, where you’ve been thinking of history I’ve been considering the future. You and I will, of course, be working very closely.’