The Physic Garden (12 page)

We were fortunate in the weather: it was one of those long, fine spells with which this coast is sometimes blessed. At such times, you can never imagine any other kind of weather, but fall into the way of thinking it will persist, which it never does. The skies were blue with skeins of thin, white clouds chasing across them from the west and if ever rain came, it seemed to leap right over the island, to fall on the mainland beyond. We walked throughout the days gathering specimens as we went, or simply observed what grew where. In the evening we were entertained by our hosts with good plain food. We ate well, more meat than I had eaten throughout the whole of the previous year I think: pies stuffed with mutton, venison haunches and stews, for the island is home to a great many deer. We drank French wine, sometimes
watered, sometimes not, and once or twice we were served tea out of fine porcelain cups, all of which must have been imported from the city. The lady of the house seemed inordinately proud, both of her cups and her tea, which she kept locked away in a little wooden box.

In one of the houses, the more crowded of the two, we were asked to share a big down-filled bed, with cool linen sheets, up in the attic at the very top of the old house. I think they would not have put us together had we been servant and master, but as they thought we were friends, they had assumed that we would not find the arrangement inconvenient. I confess I was embarrassed by Thomas’s proximity. Just at first. I had slept with my brothers all my life, but this seemed very different.

At some point in the short, summer night, I awoke and listened to the scurrying of mice, partying behind the walls, and to the eerie calls of some unknown seabird flying overhead. It was a lonely sound, a high double note that pierced the darkness and made my heart sink, without any discernible cause. It brought before my eyes a vision of endless seas and dark shores and the sadness of some creature seeking, but never finding, its mate. Then I became aware of Thomas’s even breathing beside me. He was fast asleep. I would only need to reach out in order to touch him. I could feel the warmth of him from where I lay, smell the faint sweat of his body, the peat smoke that clung to us both. I felt all unreal, as though I had been transported to some other universe where the normal laws of this one did not apply, so strange did my situation seem at that moment. I think I put out my hand towards him, but he sighed, stretched a little in his sleep and turned away from me. I lay on my back, counting his breaths until I too fell asleep.

On our daily excursions, he would stride ahead, and I would follow him. It was always that way round. He would lead, I would follow. He would talk, I would listen. But you must not think I resented him for it. I was entirely happy in his company. It was as though an enchantment had fallen on me, more surely than
on those old enemies of the MacDonalds, defeated by the Baul Molingus. My mother, my siblings, my work in the gardens, even Jenny, faded from my mind until they seemed impossibly remote. I believe that for those few summer days, as never before or since, I lived entirely in the present, with Thomas as my treasured companion. It was a glimpse of paradise and I existed, for that short space of time, entirely without regret for past mistakes or fearful anticipation of future sorrow.

As the week progressed, I found myself wishing that it would never come to an end.

I sat one night, rocking a little back and forth before the fire that our hosts had lit in our attic room.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘I wish we could do this more often. That’s all.’

‘But there will be more voyages and more excursions for us. Perhaps even farther afield. Why should there not be? We work well together, do we not?’

‘We do.’

‘We are good companions, we two. I always thought it might be so and now I know it for sure.’

As for the declared purpose of our visit, we found the Arran service tree. Thomas sketched and took specimens of its fine green leaves, its slender branches, its small, hard fruits. The day before we were due to leave, we dug up a sapling, from where it had been clinging to a cleft, on the side of a glen at the north end of the island. I advised him to take a little of the earth that had nurtured it and this he did, potting it up to preserve it for the journey.

The sailors said it was as well we were leaving, because the weather would break within a few days. How they knew such things I couldn’t say, but they were right, because by the time we were safely back in Glasgow, there were strong winds and rain blowing in from the west, and the voyage seemed like a dream, a magical, never-to-be-repeated experience.

Thomas had me plant his tiny specimen tree in a bigger pot, and it seemed to thrive, although I had half expected it, like the
fairy gold of the ancient tales, to wither and die, leaving only a handful of dried leaves. Later he took it off with him to Ayrshire, and I suppose it must have lived, because I think I recognised those few skeleton leaves slipped into his commonplace book, recognised them all too clearly. Fairy gold after all, and just as transitory.

Upon our return to the city, seeing how hard it was for me to obtain books, Thomas said, ‘Would you like to have the use of my library, William?’

‘I’d be glad of it,’ I told him, frankly, still basking in the ease induced by our voyage to the west.

I was free to browse there from that day on. He would even have let me take books away with me, although I was reluctant to do so, since I felt that our house was too smoky and too thronged with lads and lassies, my siblings and sometimes their companions, to be a safe haven for the precious printed word.

Besides, I enjoyed my occasional snatched hour, seated beside the fire in his house, with the luxury of being able to take down and read whatever book I wished. I was much taken with his many volumes on botanical subjects, Gerard’s
Herbal
and the works of the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus, chiefly his
Materia Medica.

Thomas’s wife, Marion, was very kind to me on those occasions when she found me in her library. The servants were less so. I think his housekeeper was very conscious that she had a common gardener in his dirty boots, however diligently I might clean them before my visits, cluttering up one of the most important rooms in the house, and I sensed her unspoken animosity whenever she came into the room and found me there. It was in every clearing
of her throat, every flounce of her skirt, every hostile glance. I would have removed those same boots out of respect for Marion’s carpets, but was always torn between shame at my boots and shame at appearing in my much-darned woollen socks. In short, I did not know what I should do and nobody seemed to want to tell me. The housekeeper might have advised me, but she was too respectful of her employer to go against his wishes in any way, and Thomas had obviously told her to treat me with every politeness. All the same, she found many small ways of demonstrating her disapproval: banging doors, rattling drapes or sending servants up the back stairs and into the room to rake out the fire, filling the place with noise and clouds of ash while I was reading.

There came a day when Jenny suggested that it would be a good thing if I met her father. After all, as the college gardener, with friends among the gentry, I was a lad o’ pairts and I had prospects. She felt her father might approve of me as much as anybody who had come courting her, although he could perhaps have wished for a more prosperous match for his Jenny, one of his fellow weavers who might in due course set up his own weaving shed, and make a good life for her. A gardener would be a poor comparison with such as these.

‘I chose my moment well,’ she said. ‘I waited until he had finished his evening meat and ale, and then I told him that I had met a nice young man and had some conversation with him. I asked him if I might invite him to the house and he said I could.’

I sometimes think, now I am older and wiser, that he must have known all about us and been simply biding his time until Jenny should pluck up the courage to tell him of our friendship, which was clearly beginning to verge on courtship. Perhaps he had made enquiries and found out who I was and what I did. It is most certainly what I would have done myself in the same circumstances. I have read my
Romeo and Juliet
and am well aware, even without my wife’s wise words on the subject, that forbidden fruits taste the sweetest. And what gardener doesn’t know that seeds germinate best in the dark, struggling to reach the light?

He was a wise man, Alexander Caddas, taciturn and a wee thing cautious, not a man to make friends too readily but not a man to let them go either, once made. The more I knew of him the more I found to like about the man, although I’ll confess that the first time we met I was tongue-tied and racking my brains to think of something to say to him that might win him to my side.

I sometimes wonder if Jenny’s sister, Anna, didn’t let slip something about my visits, although she always denied it. Or perhaps jealous Gilbert had seen fit to mention it, although I can’t imagine Sandy Caddas paying much attention to any such tittle tattle on the part of his young apprentice. Whatever the real story, he was cautious of me just at first but by no means as disapproving as he might have been. He shook hands with me and welcomed me into the house, which was already very familiar to me, although I had to pretend otherwise. Because Jenny’s mother was dead and gone, the task of finding a suitable husband for his precious elder daughter had begun to weigh heavily on his shoulders. He was not in any way demonstrative, but I noticed the way he laid his hand on Jenny’s shoulder, the way he absent-mindedly stroked her hair, the way his gaze flickered this way and that between us, assessing me in the light of his daughter and all that he wished and hoped for her.

I flatter myself that he liked me well enough on that first meeting. He questioned me about my work, and seemed impressed that I had been made gardener at such a young age, but seemed more impressed when I said it was all down to my father. I added that I would rather have been working with him yet, and learning what I could from him, than having the whole of it on my shoulders, which was the plain truth. But I suppose I was canny too, because I was trying hard to impress him with my general worthiness. I don’t know quite what I aspired to. There was small chance of my marrying for some years. My father had married on less, right enough, but his own parents had been dead and gone by then, and he had but one elder brother, John, for whom my own brother was named.

My uncle John had been a sailor and a legend in our family. On the scant evidence of my voyage to the Isle of Arran, I could see that I had not taken after him in matters of seamanship. I remember him visiting us just the once, when I was very young. He had brought not only the aura of tar on his blue cloth jacket, but a plain grey parrot that sat on his shoulder and enlivened our house with strange utterances in a variety of languages, interspersed with the occasional cackle of mad laughter. My mother was terrified of it and thought it an embodiment of the devil himself, but I found it very wonderful. Its name was Apollyon, a name that I only later discovered meant ‘the destroyer’. It would climb down from my uncle’s shoulder and walk across the kitchen floor, its intelligent eyes roaming the room in search of human prey. It seemed to have a great fascination with feminine attire and would tweak my mother’s skirt up to show her petticoat if it got the chance, scandalising her and frightening her in equal measure. She blamed my uncle for teaching it such behaviour, but he said that it was very old, that parrots lived far longer than men, and he had got it from a shipmate who had fallen too ill to look after it. Who could say which previous owner was responsible for Apollyon’s execrable manners?

The scent of tar filled the cottage. I have only to get a whiff of it now, tar and wood and canvas, the scent of ships, you can smell it down the Broomielaw any day, and I’m back there, a young boy still, listening to my uncle John and my father talking, while John scratched Apollyon’s head and the bird seemed to be following the conversation, looking curiously from one to the other. I had seen nothing like John until that time. He swayed from side to side when he walked. His face and forearms were the colour of polished mahogany and he wore his hair in a pigtail. Apollyon would sit on his shoulder and peck gently at the plaited hair, which seemed to be a mark of affection with him.

John and Apollyon brought with them a breath of foreign lands and strange people and I remember being enchanted by both of them. Bessie was still at home when John came visiting but she
found him disturbing and the wee ones were frankly afraid of him. James was but a wean and barely remembered him afterwards. Johnnie and Rab weren’t even born, although I suppose Johnnie might have been on the way, which would explain my parents’ choice of his name. Uncle John sat and drank with my father and told stories of his time at sea, and we listened. He spoke of the constant noise, the creaking and groaning of timbers and the endless movement of the ship accommodating herself to the waves.

‘Were you sick?’ I asked him. Even then I knew that the motion of the waves could make you unwell.

‘Oh aye, I was sick right enough. But I soon got used to it. Most folk do!’ he said. ‘Just at first, when you step on dry land again, the earth moves under you like a restless horse. But as soon as it stops doing that, you know that your sickness will be over and done, and that’s always the way of it. I haven’t had the sea sickness since. But if you stay on land for too long, back it will come again, so I never stay ashore for very long!’

I questioned him closely, to the point where my mother tried to hush me, but he only said, ‘No, no. Let the lad alane. Why wouldn’t he be curious?’

He spoke of ship’s biscuits and weevils, which you had to eat or you would starve, of rats the size of dogs and cockroaches as big as your hand. I saw my mother flinch and turn pale, my father watching him quietly, with a wee smile, just as though he had heard this kind of thing before.

But he also spoke of the scent of exotic flowers and lush, loud forests where strange birdsong was to be heard and whenever he did that, Apollyon nestled close, as though he understood. He spoke of men who were enslaved, and how he would never sail on that kind of ship, because even a working man had his honour. He spoke of insects that bit and could kill you – a man might die, raving, only a few days later – and of stranger things yet, sea creatures that you saw when you were on watch by night, large, swimming creatures that you could put no name to, but which came to investigate the boat. Some of them were whales,
but some of them might not be, and God alone knew what they might be, these monsters of the deep. And he spoke of fire on the water, the droplets that shone as though there was light in them, even without the moon to illuminate them. And at last, he spoke of remote paradise islands, where the people were kind beyond kindness, and where nobody seemed to go hungry because the land supplied all that was needed in the way of food and drink, a land where the cold winds never blew, and where even the rain was warm. It was in places such as these – and here he hesitated, gazing at my mother – that the lassies were very bonny and wore flowers in their hair and ‘whiles not much else’.

I saw my mother frown at this, and my father raise his hand, and glance over at me, as though to warn his brother that young ears were listening, and no more was said about the lassies with flowers in their hair. Nevertheless there was enchantment in his every word, and I remember thinking, even then, that it would be a fine thing to travel, to go across the seas and feel those balmy airs, to smell the scent of as yet unknown plants and bring them home with you, even at the risk of dying of outlandish diseases.

He stayed the best part of a week with us and seemed to have siller in his purse all the time – something that was a great wonder to us, for we had grown used to counting every penny. He bought fruit for Apollyon, which the bird would hold in its claw to eat as a man will hold a piece of bread. He would fetch sweetmeats for us and posies of sweet violets for my mother and before he left, he presented her with a bonny silk shawl, which he said reminded him of the shawls he had seen on his travels. He bought a
second-hand
fiddle for himself in the town as well.

‘Perhaps some other sailor was forced to pawn it to pay for his bed and board,’ he told me, with a grin. ‘Ah weel, it’s found a good hame wi’ me! I’ll mak’ it sing! And it’ll soon be off on its travels once again.’

‘Did you never have a fiddle before, Uncle John?’ I asked him and he said, ‘Oh aye, but I broke it over some man’s head in the Carolinas, some man that was beating his woman in the corner
of a tavern. She was screaming blue murder and he was swearing and beating her with his fists and I brought the fiddle down over his head and knocked him clean out with it, but it broke into a dozen pieces. I thought it a good sacrifice to make, for all that I half regretted it back on the ship, on a long sea voyage, with naethin’ to play, and naethin’ to pass the time!’ He winked at me, a prodigious wink that screwed up the whole side of his face, and I thought he was very wonderful.

He played us a jig and something that he said was a hornpipe. Apollyon seemed to enjoy the music and jumped up and down as though he was dancing in time to the rhythm. But at the end of the week my Uncle John packed up his tarry canvas bag, took his fiddle and his parrot with him, and went down the Broomielaw in search of a ship. That was the last we ever saw of him and his wonderful bird.

He died a few years before my father. A laboriously written letter from a shipmate brought news of his death in some terrible storm in Biscay, when he had gone overboard, falling from the rigging. I mostly forgot about him, although I have to say I remembered his tales and his parrot, long after the look of his face had faded from my mind in all but the most general particulars: a pair of bright blue eyes in a sun-scarred face, a stranger who seemed more like a foreigner than a blood relation.

He had been my father’s sole surviving relative at the time when my father and mother were married, but I was in quite a different situation. I had my widowed mother, my brothers and sisters to provide for as well as myself, and there seemed little possibility of my being able to support a wife for some years to come. The best I could hope for would be to put the younger lassies into service somewhere, if I could find anybody foolish or tolerant enough to take them on, and to see what I could do for the younger lads as and when they reached working age. I was pretty sure that James would become a gardener like myself and I worried that Rab was so delicate that he might not live to make adult, never mind old bones, but most of the time my family were
the cause of a sort of general worry. All I could do was work to the best of my ability and hope that sooner or later, some solution would turn up that would allow me to marry, set up house and start a family of my own. But I had no notion of what that eventuality might be.

I do remember my first proper invitation to Jenny’s house, though, and I’m grateful to her father for avoiding those very obvious questions about my prospects and, instead, speaking of my brothers and sisters and my mother, with a good deal of sympathy at her bereavement. He asked me all about the college garden and what we grew there and why, so that I found myself on solid ground and could answer all his questions with knowledge and enthusiasm. I remember having to be very careful not to let slip that I had spent rather more time with Jenny than we were owning up to. Her blue eyes lifted to meet mine from time to time, with a mixture of warning and amusement, and Anna opened her mouth every now and then to say, ‘But William usually …’ and then stopped because her sister had administered a sharp poke in the ribs or a kick under the table. We thought we were doing very well indeed.