Griefwork (21 page)

At which Felix’s struggles became galvanic with a non-swimmer’s terror, interspersed with whooshes of air and water coughs. Leon was struck by how cold it was by comparison with the ambient heat, but it was after all groundwater and reached the
Palm House from the freezing universe outside. Still grasping the handful of gypsy hair he smacked the face repeatedly into the surface until Felix’s struggles became weaker, then paused in his fury.

Kill or kiss? These are not human decisions when taken naked in a heated glasshouse in a delusory tropic beneath snow and in the aftermath of war. They are no longer even true alternatives for comrades in a shared prison. Strange indeed the land in which these comrades tracked each other to perform their spiteful acts of love, where playfulness might elide into murder without once leaving the same trancelike register and crossing no border on the way. It was then that half-starved Leon’s strength became effortless and cost him not a cough to haul the cold eel beneath his hands bodily out of the tank and cradle it in his arms amid the plants’ silence, in the heavy perfumed dark, while the slopping ripples died, leaving two thudding hearts. He walked with his burden to the newly turned earth at the foot of the tallest palm,
Cocos
nucifera,
laid it on the ground and stroked the water from its quaking back. Then, drenched in the scent of flowers he himself had sown, for the last time he vented his muddled love into Felix in an act which was indeed the last thing he should have done and for which, having done, he leaned his brow upon the trembling nape and weeping begged forgiveness. Later, and for the rest of that night, no drops fell more heavily from the Palm House roof on to the waxy leaves beneath than those the repentant gardener shed by the boilers’ hellish glow.

At
dawn
Leon
went
into
the
House
to
retrieve
the
hanks
of
his
hair
and
smooth
the
soil
at
the
coconut’s
foot
before
the
first
of
the
labourers
arrived.
As
he
raked
over
the
mould
his
ears
burned
with
guilt
to
hear
the
tree
–
evidently
similarly
unrested
–
let
fall
its
sardonic
remarks
from
on
high:

‘An intolerable night, quite intolerable, and culminating in a spectacle which prompted the thought that if one knew enough about it one would probably be disgusted. True of most things, no doubt. As it was, there was quite enough disturbance going on to make one positively cross. It’s bad enough anyway to stand with one’s head stuffed up into a glass cupola so that year by year the crick in one’s neck grows worse. But to be deprived of sleep into the bargain by hubbub and commotion simply won’t do at all. The militaristic excesses taking place outside this House until recently – of which I had, perforce, a grandstand (not to say perilously exposed) view – seem now to have been transferred indoors. This new, harebrained scheme of our gardener’s to allow members of the public in here after dark is simply not on. We’re not creatures in a zoo but a tender community which needs its peace and quiet. The dismal lindens and planes I can spy from up here lining the nearby avenue are presumably adapted to non-stop traffic noise night and day. They are low breeds with but rudimentary nerves. We are mostly not.

‘In particular one can’t imagine what our gardener thought he was doing tonight. They come and go, these people, becoming odder all the time. It was different in the old days. The one who planted me – Brunswik, did they call him? – was here until I was mature. He became old or sick or something and according to a conversation I overheard in 1913 they put him on a bonfire. Alas, poor Brunswik; we shall all come to it. But in the meantime one is disinclined to be hurried into an early grave by increasingly
bad behaviour on the part of the very people who ought to be looking after us. What are they after all if not servants? There’s been a good deal of rot talked since the turn of the century about egalitarianism, which as any fool knows is the thin edge of complete anarchy. It’s pure drooling lunacy to pretend that all men are equal, just as it would be to claim all trees were equal. Certainly none of the trees in
this
House believes that. Under normal circumstances one would be only too happy to leave that sort of jejune ideological wrangling to the human element, but unfortunately it affects us too. Egalitarianism leads directly to hooliganism, as tonight’s spectacle shows. It’s precisely what happens when natural hierarchies are allowed to break down.

‘I suppose if one is sixty feet tall disdain does come easily, but what is one to think when such things take place at one’s very foot? Our gardener appeared to be wrestling with that strange child who is alleged to creep about in the dead of night committing unprovoked attacks on members of this House with a horrible little knife. One’s first thought was that the gardener was inflicting some sort of punishment on him, though it’s unclear why they both felt obliged to take their clothes off. Apparently humans need to climb on top of each other in order to punish, and the gardener was pulling this other chappie’s head back by the hair so he was staring straight up at me. His eyes and mouth kept opening and closing and after a while it struck me as more a matter of enjoyment than punishment. But of course one never really has a clue about these creatures’ facial expressions. They seem to register pleasure and agony in pretty much identical fashion. Maybe they’re isomorphic forms of each other? It might be quite interesting to do a bit of speculative research on this:
Homo
sapiens
sapiens
is so inscrutable it might repay us to try and fathom him. At any rate these two worked themselves into a terrible state, completely wet and howling, all smeared with earth and whatnot. At last they went away, leaving me
with the distinct impression that the man was sorry for having punished the boy. One simply can’t imagine what goes on in these people’s heads, it’s so messy and unclear. In any case we all hope the little vandal learned his lesson.

‘Enough of these creatures. That envious and acrimonious old cycad,
altensteinii,
has recently put himself in the position of deserving a sharp retort. One might overlook some of his remarks about palm trees just as one physically overlooks his frowsty head and obscene professorial neck – gnarled and twisted as it is and needing the support of a collar and wire. The name
“Encephalartos”,
of course, derives from the Greek and means “bread-brain” – as unappetising a prospect as one can imagine. Certainly one is scarcely prompted to take sides on the question of his ancestry. That may safely be left to him and Seneschal with their conflicting theories of genetics, Mendelism, racial purity
et
al..
As to whether he might, in another universe, have become either palm or pine remains a matter of indifference rather than debate. Speaking as a palm of not inconsiderable pedigree I’m happy to say I can see no remotest family resemblance – certainly not to
my
family, who unquestionably run to height and can hold their heads up without recourse to prostheses. No, all that claptrap can be sidestepped as just one more of those areas which attract lunatics as a flower bees: a mishmash of pseudophilosophy and pseudoscience which brings out the Professor Seneschals with their trunk calipers, their leaf gauges and their dotty botanometry. They’re all as mad as each other. Linnaeus, de Candolle, George Bentham, Joseph Hooker … The presumption of these people! All ordering and reordering what they call Nature (note the capital) according to their own pet theories, with none of them the first idea. Humans! One despairs.

‘The point lies elsewhere: to begin with, in
altensteinii
’s
allegation of what he calls our “crude height” having led to a “Master Race complex”. It is indeed a small mind which resorts to such
ad
plantam
logic and then attempts to back it up by appeals to some kind of notional popular vote. “Anyone in this House would readily agree with this opinion.” If this is what longevity does to the intelligence one prays to die in one’s prime. Besides, who wants to be popular? The very word betrays its egalitarian allure. One’s interested in
thought,
not in worrying endlessly about being liked. Second, and far more important, is the issue of those tendentious quotations about how
Homo
turned coconut palms into objects of veneration – our supposed physical commonality with men’s bodies, the deities living in our heads and so forth. All these quotations, incidentally, were cribbed straight out of the gardener’s memory.
Altensteinii
never opened a book in his life. “Volume twenty-five, I fancy.” What a hoary old schoolboy ploy that is! None the less there’s ingenuity in the way he selected those particular passages. At first sight it might appear he was attacking
Homo
for what is, admittedly, preposterous and anthropocentric drivel. Gods in the hair, mystical emblems, men’s whole abject desire to discern tokens of themselves as well as pledges of their own immortality in every damn thing they lay their eyes on. Why aren’t they interested in anything other than themselves and their own deaths? It’s most peculiar.
Altensteinii
appears to cite this stuff to make the same point about
Homo’
s
foolishness but a second reading reveals his hidden argument, which is profoundly anti-palm. All that piousness about our noble bearing is undercut the moment one remembers that this is merely
man
’s
opinion and manifestly not that of old
altensteinii.
Moreover, by his quoting a list of the ways in which we are useful to man we palms find ourselves in the patronised position of the servant whose services are suddenly discovered to be indispensable and is thereby accorded the status of holy fool.

‘If it were harder to expose,
altensteinii
’s method might be described as cunning. Having bared it and left it where it lies, however, one draws oneself up with this noble loftiness for which we’re apparently so renowned and turns one’s gaze outward through the steam-blinded glass to speculate about more interesting things. The truth is that I’m a critic at heart, a didact, a lecturer, and it has taken me all this time to cultivate my skill. One more thing to guarantee my unpopularity.

‘Dawn has broken over a landscape which in my heart I know to be utterly foreign. That’s of no account; one’s used to it while becoming ever more apprehensive of the moment when one’s head bursts through the glass and out. Into what? That’s the main preoccupation: trying to decide the nature of the world we’re in as well as that of the world exterior to it. The first logically presupposes the second, but isn’t to say there might not be an infinite number of worlds out there. I can, for instance, easily see how the House could itself be subdivided by enclosing diminishing patches of soil under smaller and smaller glass shells. Indeed I can remember seeing just such a cloche arrangement used years ago to protect seedlings temporarily from the nicotine fumigations. But this raises a disturbing idea, which is that as one was able to look down at the seedlings under glass, taller than they by a factor of thousands, so it’s possible to suppose a palm many tens of miles high beneath a roof enclosing half the sky looking down on oneself at this very moment. It’s not a reassuring thought and leaves one’s position equivocal, to say the least. Nevertheless it could be so, and the mere fact that I can conceive but not perceive it is no hindrance to its possibility. All perceptions – and notoriously vision – are easily deceived, as dependent on learned habits and expectation as on neural activity. I don’t expect to see a greater universe
itself
enclosed
enclosing mine, therefore I don’t see it. I see only what convention tells me is the sky, dotted with points of light,
larger and smaller, brighter and fainter. “I don’t much want to see the real tropics,” I heard the gardener tell
Nyctanthes
only last night. But what
are
the real tropics, mister gardener? And where, if not at least partly rooted in Flinn? These exotic ladies of yours: where are they really from? Exactly. And knowing that, of course you don’t want to follow the bird of paradise to its nest and find a heap of twigs and shit.

‘Such metaphysical speculations are not to everybody’s taste, of course, and evidently beyond the capacity of most things in this House. (One notices
altensteinii
’s
head hanging a little lower this morning, does one not? Or is it pure illusion? So much is.) But tug on the wire, gardener! Hoist the poor old thing up! He can manage a little higher even though he’ll never make sixty feet and stand on equal footing beside – what were his phrases? – “a mere cliché of the exotic” and “a symbol of longing”. Thus spake
Encephalartos
!’