Griefwork (26 page)

The chargé raised an amused eyebrow at the dead stub of his cigarette which, lost in the throes of his oratory, he had smoked down to the holder.

‘But she wasn’t like that at all,’ said Leon. ‘She would never have sold off a city park for development. She had this extraordinary plan –’ He couldn’t complete the sentence. He suddenly had no desire to throw titbits into the gossip pool, to give away anything of his princess. The diplomat’s account was shocking, delivered with that worldly nonchalance which always made hearsay sound like fact, conjecture like truth, knowingness like knowledge. What did these people know? How? And why did they always make it appear as if they knew yet more? The chargé was still watching him with his odd kindness. He detached the cigarette stub and offered it gracefully.

‘This really ought to be framed or mounted,’ he said. ‘It’s the very first I’ve been allowed to finish in this enchanting place. I believe you’re slipping. And this extraordinary plan of hers?’

Leon only shook his head, candlelight glinting on his hacked fur. The story he had just heard had done something savage to her presence. In any case mentioning a job offer by someone who no longer had the power to appoint would perversely suggest a failure of his own.

‘Nobody’, said the chargé obscurely, ‘is proof against the past. Not her, not you. Nor even I,’ he added with a quick smile at his young companion.

That night Leon’s wretchedness wrapped him in a sheet of flame. He burned on the mattress beside Felix in the spilled light of the half-open fireboxes. Everywhere he looked he encountered the same falling away. Several times he reached out and laid a hand on the gypsy’s shoulder, left it there until it grew to feel as heavy as a toad. Only when he tried to turn him over was there any response. Then the unyielding rigidity of the boy’s body, as if bolted through the mattress and into the brick floor, was so eloquent he lost heart.

‘I’m ill,’ he remarked, but more to himself. He had lived on his own for too long to have acquired habits of demand. His chest scalded him. He got up and drank feverishly from the tap, selected an infusion from the cupboard, drew off a cupful of hot water from a spigot on the boiler, sipped it. ‘I’ve failed,’ he said. Then, remembering, ‘I’ll read to you.’ He got up again and searched the pockets of his trousers draped over a chairback. He found the envelope, slumped on to the mattress with it and ran a nail beneath its flap. Absently he inspected the thumb as if for scale insects, then took out a single cream sheet.

‘“Cher Maître,”’ he read aloud, ‘“for that is how I think of you. In my country we have holy men, some of whose qualities I see in you. I had not expected to find any such thing so far from home and perhaps I allowed my pleasure and relief to show too obviously. For this I apologise.

‘“The snow is coming down and I have heard terrible
news. His Serene Highness my father has been taken ill and I must fly to his bedside at once, even before saying goodbye to you. As I believe I hinted, our country did not have an easy passage through the recent war and in the present circumstances it becomes impossible to predict what will happen. Our plan together – or at any rate my own dream – will have to wait a little before going ahead. I believe I may have been guilty of rushing you the other day. This was improper and I am sorry if it seemed I was applying pressure. It was nothing more than my own eagerness. You are a great man, I am sure of it, and will find your own way.

‘“And so I must bid you adieu for now, with the greatest sadness and sincerest thanks for all you have taught me, only part of which you will know about. Your beautiful exotic poem in which you live and work will remain the happiest memory of my first diplomatic posting and an inspiration in whatever upset the immediate future holds for me. Once I, too, had hopes of being a poet. Maybe one day I shall be after all. Whenever it happens, and wherever we both are, it will have been as much your doing as mine. Plant something for me. Tahassa, HRH The Princess Imluk.”’

When he had finished Leon fell silent. Fuel collapsed in a boiler with a cindery rush and the glow intensified for a moment, lighting up the letter he held. Beside him Felix lay like a stone bolster. He seemed not even to be breathing and, leaning aslant, Leon saw his eyeballs’ staring gleam. His own fever was affecting him like alcohol: not enough to blur but, on the contrary, enough to sharpen the emotions. Under its influence her words were not those of someone announcing an unforeseen journey and the separation of two people whose relationship appeared to be based more on the admiration of one party than on the shared allusions of friends. Instead her letter had left him with the distillate of farewell, of valediction,
speaking for his whole existence with the fatuous punctuality which pretends to significance. He could not for the moment have uttered a word without at once falling into tears. Why had she described the Palm House as a poem? Or had she meant his life, his vision? It was unfair of her to write on a page, with easy strokes of her cultured hand, something he himself had surely never thought, could never have thought, but which now stood as a humiliatingly truthful proposition. Unfevered, sober, he knew how gruffly he would dismiss such pretentious nonsense, in public at least. ‘I’m a gardener. I dig the ground and plant things and hate wireworm and spider mite. I worry constantly about the shitty boilers and the shitty assistants and the shitty coal they send me whose smuts drift down and stick to the shitty glass I’m given to work with. Otherwise, of course, it’s a right little sonnet we’ve got here. Seen the paintwork? The putty on the south side of the lantern? It’d break the heart of the fellow who built this place.’ Now, with the fever on him and the scent of loss disguised as ‘Cuir’ drifting up from the writing paper, a capitulation occurred and he was forced to admit there might be something else beyond the bare profession thus crudely sketched. Was it this which had gone wrong? His expertise betrayed by a dreamy flaw? And what did she mean by ‘exotic’, anyway? Hardly the plants, since palms were as workaday in southeast Asia as plane trees in the municipal park across the way. Didn’t exoticism simply depend on being outside or somewhere else? Maybe she meant he always was somewhere else, always would be; that even the place which most reeked of him and his labour was no structure of putty and glass and iron ribs but rooted entirely in his mind where it glowed and brooded and festered and hung its unsettling fruit. Living out a dream rather than in one? No, that was far too explanatory. There was a vulgarity about the whole idea. He wished she hadn’t mentioned poetry at all. He quite wished she had returned the lotus, too. It
had been blighted by events, having progressively fallen from the category of outright gift through that of ‘indefinite temporary loan’ and was now unrecovered property.

‘Oh Felix,’ he murmured, swaying as he sat, ‘what are we going to do? How did all this happen? It was the war, wasn’t it? The damned, bloody war.’

The thought gave him some comfort but not enough. He was still ambitious. To grow plants was not the same as watching plants grow. He could almost see how he wanted things to be: almost, but not quite. The princess’s departure had unaccountably muddied the view.

‘Who was she, this princess of ours? Perhaps after all what the newspapers call a raven-haired temptress? Enticing us with opportunity – “name your own salary”, that’s what she said. Can you believe that? Enticing me to selfishness, to abandon you and rush off to a country which for all I know may be completely imaginary. Do you feel as I do sometimes?’ he laid a hand on the immobile figure’s hip. ‘As if everything takes place in a far country? We’re a little ill, I think. That’s all it is. Hungry, too. Tomorrow I’ll go down to the market for a bag of snouts and we’ll rig up a fine stew. Strange things we’re expected to eat nowadays. Butcher’s shops selling whalemeat! I know, and what’s more they still snip coupons out of your ration book for it. A few years ago we wouldn’t have touched the stuff. Reindeer, too. What are we, bloody Eskimos? And that horrible fish from Africa somewhere, what do they call it?
Snoek.
No, tomorrow we’ll have a good old stew, I promise. Potatoes, carrots, and a proper set of teeth grinning up at you from the bottom of the pot as if to say “Oh yes, we’re the real thing.”’

At this point he broke into coughs which were finally eased with a draught of tarry substance from a bottle.

‘Let me tell you about my plants, my Felix,’ he resumed when able. ‘It may be a discovery of my own or it may not,
but I’ve never read it in any book. It’s about their juxtaposition, which means which plant is placed next to which. They used to say that shrubs in tropical houses ought to be placed according to region. So you’d get New World shrubs all up one side and Madagascan in a little group over there and those from Malaya and Sumatra and other southeast Asian countries up the other side. Then they said no, they should be arranged according to the order assigned them by botanists. So you’d have the cycads in one place, no matter where they were from, and near them all the Gnetales – only three surviving genera of those, though. Like that. Then still other people thought the arrangement should be entirely aesthetic. How will this look with that? Will this area balance the damned palms which really have to be stuck under the lantern, most of them? Will these leaf colours go well together? Will that tree’s aerial roots obscure this bush? I still think aesthetics are important and I admit I’m not yet happy about how we’ve arranged all our night scented varieties, are you?

‘But my discovery’s something else. I now see that certain plants actually dislike one another and never do well if they’re put side by side. I know what you’re going to say with that sharp little mind of yours – that it’ll have something to do with parasites or fungal infection or a plant changing the chemistry of the soil around it. Sound good sense and not only possible but likely in many cases. You’ll have heard of the mythical upas-tree of Java which poisoned everything for miles? The principle’s well established. But my idea is still that certain plants simply dislike each other and should never be put together. If you were a prison governor and wanted to run a quiet prison you’d make an effort not to put two men in a cell together who were bound to fall out, wouldn’t you?

‘You think all this is barmy, just your old gardener rabbiting on with his usual highfalutin ideas. Mystical harmony or something. No, you’re quite wrong. I’ve watched, I’ve seen, I’ve
learned. Did you know there are certain rare people who can blight plants? You can’t explain it and nor can you predict it. If a person like that touches a plant something goes wrong with it. It starts to wilt, or it sheds all its leaves, or it’s suddenly covered in thrips. Remember that piece in
Picture
News
a few weeks back? That one about the girl who wrecks anything electrical just by going into a room? Lights swing about and bulbs explode and perfectly good wireless sets blow all their valves. They say she’s bewitched, which is a pretty funny diagnosis for the middle of the twentieth century. Once she made an electric milk van crash. There’ll be a reason but it won’t be witchcraft, just as there’ll be a reason why some people can blight plants and some plants blight each other. Just opposite harmonics. I read somewhere that you can make light-and soundwaves cancel themselves out if the peaks coincide exactly with the troughs. All you get is darkness and silence. That’s very interesting.’

He talked and swayed and talked to the glacial figure beside him, perhaps hoping to calm the gypsy by irrefutable accuracy, via sooth to soothing. He became drowsy, then briefly agitated by an incoherent desire to extract any sort of recognition from the boy. He tried again to turn him over but this time felt his hands angrily thrust away.

‘Damn you, boy!’ he coughed. ‘Do I bore you? Do I stink? Do I stink worse than you did, matted with slum-juice? I took you in my arms then but you won’t have it now. You run amok in my House with a pruning knife and when I tell you I still love you you become stone. I even turn down jobs so I needn’t leave you. Of course I wanted to go! What future is there here? They’d pull down my House about my ears if they didn’t know I had connections … town councillors, diplomats, royalty, famous and powerful people in every country … And now all because of you I’ve lost my chance.’

In this way feverish invention became raving lies, which
in time blew themselves out. At this point there was a lull. Then he got unsteadily to his feet and disappeared next door. A cupboard door squeaked, there were sounds of rummaeing. He returned with a much creased manila envelope from which he shook a small cardboard box little bigger than a cigarette packet. Opening this he took out a piece of white fabric like a folded butterfly.

‘There,’ he said, laying it tenderly on the boy’s uncommunicative shoulder. ‘That’s just to prove she was real all along. You thought I’d made the whole thing up, didn’t you? But it really happened. This is her handkerchief. This is Cou Min. It wasn’t her fault she went away but oh how I wish she hadn’t. I know it’s silly, but not a day goes by that I don’t think of her. Sometimes I even pretend I might find her in the House, that suddenly an ordinary visitor will turn round and it’ll be her. “Just thought I’d drop by and collect my handkerchief,” she’ll say, sort of casually and mischievously. “I do hope you’ve been keeping it nicely. Since you stole it I’d think that’s the least you could have done. Did you really imagine I hadn’t noticed? Did you really think I hadn’t dropped it on purpose?” And then … But of course it’s all make-believe. I don’t seriously suppose it could ever happen; I just pretend for a bit. I don’t think about her being over thirty with an elderly Chinese husband and several children … Have I told you this? I never know …’

Gradually, his cheeks wet and his eyes closed, Leon toppled forward into a rasping sleep. Far overhead on the House’s lantern the golden galleon still headed briskly east into the prevailing chill, its rigging thick with ice.