Griefwork (5 page)

‘Little sod,’ a vaguely official-looking man was saying to a red-haired woman sitting at a typewriter in the office. ‘We’re missing two hundredweight.’

‘You mean he’s nicked them?’ asked the woman incuriously.

‘Clean as a whistle. Imagine, two hundredweight of trellis straps.’

‘What on earth are they?’

‘Those nail things for driving into walls to hold plants up. They’ve got a lead tag on them which you bend over the stem to grip it. It’s the lead he was after. Any scrap merchant’d give him a good price for … Yes?’

‘I want to do your glazing,’ said Leon.

‘We’ve got a glazier.’

‘We
had
a glazier,’ the woman reminded him tartly.

‘There’s a lot of panes missing or broken,’ Leon insisted, adding truthfully, ‘I’m good,’ thinking of all the glass he had helped Wim replace. There was hardly a winter storm which hadn’t taken its toll.

Whatever wind had blown him here was evidently still blowing his way. Within half an hour he was engaged as a gardener’s boy for a pittance and with permission to sleep in a potting shed
where there were some bales of peat and a horse blanket. ‘Can’t think why I’m doing it,’ the man kept saying. ‘No references, nothing. And especially after all this. I suppose you’ve not got your eye on anything? There aren’t any trellis straps left but maybe you’re planning to start a black market in putty?’

‘I’m not a thief.’

‘No,’ said the man with a slight stare. ‘I don’t believe you are. I wonder what it is you are, though? Apart from being mysteriously punctual?’

‘A good glazier.’

Not only that but a willing and reliable worker. By the year’s end Leon had made a niche for himself in the Gardens’ hierarchy of labourers. True, it was near the bottom; but in some way he had made himself indispensable, or at least was off the list of those who might be dispensed with if the worsening economy made layoffs necessary. Wearing his leather jerkin and gaiters (obligatory for all staff members, a remnant of eighteenth-century uniform) he mastered various kinds of maintenance while learning all he could about horticulture. For the first year he was not allowed to have anything to do with the plants, many of which were rarities from all over the world. He asked questions and remembered answers, watched and watched. He lived in the potting shed, ate at workers’ cafés, bathed once a week in the Palm House boiler room, had his own key to the wicket in the main gates. This by itself was a measure of the peculiar trust he inspired.

‘Very odd boy,’ as the head gardener remarked to the Palm House curator. ‘Talks to plants.’

‘Not just to plants. Sits there in that tin tub in front of the furnaces carrying on to himself. I can hear him from the next room. Sort of nonsense full of squeaks and groans and things. You wouldn’t say he was potty, though, would you?’

They thought for a moment, warming their hands on the
mugs of tea they were holding. The dried mud on their palms husked over the glaze. ‘Not to talk to, no,’ said the gardener. ‘That’s what’s odd. Remember that painter they brought in? The one who’d been gassed in the trenches? Now there was a fellow off his onion. He didn’t just talk to himself. Went about shouting at people who weren’t there. Gave me the willies. But young Leon’s not like that. When he’s on his own he talks to himself, right, but when he’s with you he talks perfectly normal, doesn’t he? No, he’s not potty. And I’ll tell you what, that boy’s got the greenest fingers I’ve ever seen. You know when you’re losing a plant? You’ve tried everything short of sitting up with it at night? Point comes when you think sod it, that’s it, heave it up and put it on the bonfire. Old Leon’ll come by and say “Don’t pull him up, Mr Smy, don’t pull him up.” And he’ll mess about with it and make sort of hissing noises at it as if it was a horse and blow me, a week later there’ll be this little green shoot. Soon as winter’s over I’m having him off maintenance. It’s a waste. You could go out in the street right now and in five minutes find thirty men to put a washer on a tap or patch a water butt or dredge dead leaves out of the lake.’

‘And glad of the work.’

‘Exactly. No, I’m having him off that. The lad’s got something. Wants watching, though. A lot to learn. He will keep talking to visitors. Caught him at it only this morning. Willesz had put him to cleaning out that runoff tank at the back of the Orangery and he’d got this barrowload of sludge and muck, looked like a blackamoor, pushing it along a walk if you please, not even going round by the wall. When I came on him there he was, bold as brass, stopped out there in the middle talking to this young lady. “Since when”, I asked him soon as I could get him away, “does the Society encourage filthy dirty gardener’s boys to talk to ladies and gentlemen of the public? One, it’s against regulations and two, it’s a question of manners.” He knew better
than to give me any sauce but it’s not the first time he’s done it.’

‘Nor the last, probably. Not if it’s young ladies he likes chatting up,’ said the curator wisely. ‘I sometimes wonder if he’s not having quite a bit of fun on the side after hours in that potting shed of his.’

‘Blimey,’ said the head gardener. ‘Never thought of that.’

‘Well, he doesn’t seem to want to leave it. My wife tried to get him to lodge with us. You know how soft she is and she’s sort of taken a shine to the lad now that our two have left the nest. Doesn’t like the sound of his cough and he’s too thin – you know how they go on. Fine by me. Shove a bed up in the attic, it’d be better than kipping between peat and straw, but he wasn’t having any. Respectful-like but no, he was happy where he was. Perhaps that’s why. Ask me, he’s on to a good thing. Not many kids his age have a little private roof over their heads with their own key and nobody asking questions.’

‘Can’t have that,’ the head gardener said dubiously. ‘Not on the premises. Bring the Society into disrepute. Think of the headlines. Orgies in the Orangery. They’d have my head.’

‘You leave him be,’ said the curator, draining his mug and standing up. ‘He isn’t that sort. He’s not one of your tearaways. Been here what, a year? and nobody’s ever caught him doing anything worse than talking to ladies without washing his face. Don’t stir until you have to, my advice. We need kids like that. Boys nowadays, they come and go. Don’t want to learn a trade. Not like it used to be. Our generation, it was for life, man and boy. These days you need to encourage the good ones.’

‘Maybe,’ was all the head gardener would say.

If a dark figure ever was glimpsed accompanying the Gardens’ most junior employee as he stole at night between boulevard and potting shed, nothing further was said. And if in after-years Leon looked back at these times – which he seldom did, being no
common nostalgic – he could clearly recall only details about particular plants and an immense disseminated happiness. With its bowed, peg-tiled roof, its tiny grate and small-paned windows locked solid with generations of paint and cobwebs the potting shed was his first home, tucked into an Eden behind high walls which had a comforting hierarchy, customs and dress. The shed’s very smell was a source of contentment and was made up of creosote, hay, mice, winter wash, tarred twine and the linings of nests. Already the preceding years had blurred and run, infancy and boyhood, into a long self-loyalty beside an aching sea. The gilded galleon atop the Palm House, sails crammed and stays humming, tacked auspiciously into steady breezes, heading for foreign lands to bring back strange pods, seedlings, cuttings, tubers and corms for nurture and cultivation. It was the order that was so satisfactory, the artifice. The natural world’s abundance was too dissipated, too squandered. It was diluted and thinned by distance, by vagaries of climate, by accidents of geology and the wrecking hand of man. A botanical garden, though, could be a living museum, richly concentrating varieties which in nature might not even share the same continent. It was something to set against limitless polders sucked at by a limitless sea until all the flavour was gone. True, those tough maritime plants were subtle and beautiful in their hardiness. Yet the shivering spaces in which they clung and thrived, the marish grasses rooted in the seep and glitter of draining water, all told of something hollow and unquiet which he wished not to think about. Only now and then in winter or in stormy weather when the gulls drifted inland with their pained, angular cries did they bring with them a breath of the past, for a moment producing in him a sense of unravelling. It was marvellous the grief a mere bird could bring, crying and bent against a drab sky. Quickly he would turn back to hoeing around the
Crinodendron
hookerianum
or swaddling a clematis against
frost, rendering the gulls powerless and keeping at bay the sad chill they brought. With him at all times was his companion. Like a lone mountaineer who is so certain of a presence that he automatically halves each bar of chocolate, Leon knew he lived with an angel perched on his shoulder, his own familiar, guide and friend.

Sometimes at night, nested on peat or straw, he would stare up through the potting shed roof as if it were transparent. His being was sucked up by the stars like moisture in sunlight until there was nothing left and he was dispersed throughout the universe. Even in this grand revolve the Gardens remained in view, a patch of earth whose hallowed quality was emphasised by its being an island within a city. He could get no further than this simple perception. More often than not his vision would lose altitude and sideslip into nothing more than a banal aerial view, no doubt inspired by newspaper pictures taken from airships and aeroplanes. At night, at least, his home was a mysterious stain surrounded by the streetlamps and illuminations of a capital city stretching from harbour to zoo. His own dark island gave off only secret gleams as muted as brushed silver: from the lake which held the moon spellbound in its pane and the Palm House itself whose myriad facets glinted with suppressed power. A fox barked. All these images mingled and swirled while, sitting on the ridge tiles not six feet overhead, the barn owl which lived in the hexagonal turret of a summerhouse revolved its head soundlessly and coughed up a pellet of mouse fur and skull plates less thick than fragments of a ping-pong ball.

Not even the wind bore the faintest whisper as, many hundreds of miles away to the east, maniacal speeches were cheered by vast crowds in floodlit stadiums.