Griefwork (11 page)

He hatched another of his plans strictly in secret. It was not that he was as radical as the Society’s trustees feared, simply enthusiastic. To him the Palm House was no mere laboratory or extension of the University. It represented a mysterious world apart, full of wonders which otherwise would never be seen in a cold northern country. He wanted more people to appreciate it. He got in touch with the reptile house at the nearby Zoo and they sent over six pairs of little jade terrapins which settled down on the marshy margins of the tanks. But at the back of his mind was the desire for a project which would be individual enough to draw people into this world, and one day he had the solution. He would assemble a collection of night-flowering varieties so that if visitors wanted to see them in bloom they would have to come after dark. The idea excited him and he mulled it over constantly. It seemed like an inspiration. On a lower level was the thought that he might also set aside a small area for plants which yielded spices, believing it would surely interest people to see a pepper plant with its berries, a nutmeg tree, some members of the ginger family such as cardamom and turmeric, a clove tree. He thought he could prevail on the keeper of the dilapidated Temperate House to provide space for an extension of these culinary plants to include such things as a tea tree and also one or two of the umbellifers from closer to home like coriander, fennel and cumin. There already was a cacao tree hidden away in the Palm House so he moved it to a better position and painted a new label for it, beneath
Theobroma
cacao
adding the words ‘chocolate tree’. All these plans would take time to realise, obviously. He submitted a list of plants to
the red-haired secretary (now showing ash among the flames) and in due course seeds and cuttings began arriving from other botanical collections, from private and public sources around the world. One of the first things to come was a box of rhizomes from a Malabari importer in London, and it was not long before the first red and yellow cardamom flowers were opening in the steamy heat.

Good days, these were, full of energy. Within the freshly painted Palm House Leon reigned like a monarch or officiated like a bronchitic high priest, while all around his texts opened in the balmy dampness and spoke messages brought from afar. He understood their spiced and scented words and spoke back to them as he came and went fondly anointing, tying, pinching out, re-potting. The incense of regeneration, the calm satisfaction of growing things rose into the air and glittered. The spectral dust of a rainbow-spray caught by a shaft of sunlight through a pane could not have beguiled a visitor more than this authentic tropical reek. It had always been there, of course, but under Leon’s regime it had intensified and was now shot through with other things, subtleties of a melancholy which was now of listless afternoons, now of a nameless longing. A garden always speaks of its gardener in ways other than the obvious, and a stove house is no exception. Something of Leon’s character diffused throughout the building. In any case it enticed people in. They wandered and stayed longer than formerly, reading the labels or just sitting on the benches now provided in the central aisle. They noticed the quality of the silence, accentuated by the hollow pock of drops falling on to broad, tough leaves and by the sparrows which hopped in through the ventilation louvres up under the dome and fluttered and twirled in this indoor summer. Far from acting as a crystal drum to magnify the noises of the outside world, it seemed the glass skin was enough to exclude most sounds entirely. Just occasionally the faintest clanging of
a tram’s bell or the hooting of a motor-car horn penetrated as from a long way off, so that elderly ex-colonials who had sticked themselves over from clubs smelling of leather and gout to spend a quiet afternoon could dream they were once again overhearing Benares or Kuala Lumpur or Macassar, that the streets beyond the garden wall were thronged with rickshaw men and water carriers. Until Leon took it over the Palm House had always been closed on Sundays. Now at his insistence it was open the week round and it became something of a ritual to visit it, especially on grey Sunday afternoons when a cold drizzle fell from a low sky. Then it was a perverse pleasure to saunter through the tropical warmth,
endimanché,
exchanging glances among the leaves, some furtive, some frankly challenging. It was as if, sensing this as a place apart from the ordinary world, people were emboldened in ways otherwise reserved for intercontinental expresses, ocean liners and the beach at Biarritz. That time off could be snatched from between the sullen claws of northern Sunday piety was all the more piquant.

The gardener observed these undercurrents eddying in and out of the little blind alleys ending in swags of leaves and branches. What better place for hormonal tweakings and discreet rutting than a palace enclosing that sensual languor which everybody said was the chief ingredient of the tropics? Some nights, restless himself, he would drag his mattress out of the boiler room and lay it on the gravel path, now in this place, now that. Then the stars were no longer the stony eyeballs of eternity but the prickly decor of a languid sky draped behind plumes and fronds. He was adrift in an unmapped world, on an equatorial islet. He would lie and envisage the trysts and assignations whose whisking hems he had caught in photographic glimpses. The curl of a garment, an eyebrow, a mouth’s corner; the whiteness of fingertips touching amid ruffled dark green. But there was nothing for him to concentrate on. No sooner had he called up one image than another
fell in front of it like a superimposed lantern slide. The vignettes of urban mating slithered and ran, congealing only into a general impression of other lives being lived but flirtatiously only, not intensely, not in the grip of passion. Unsleeping, he would get up and slowly walk his garden, pace out his domain, trailing whispers and syllables, the half-words of half-thought. Lonely? he wondered. Was that it, then? An ache for … But whenever he tried to put a shape or face to this lack it was never enough to make it solid or plausible. A rich woman in tweeds, a coquette with a parasol, a serious lad with rimless spectacles. Not enough, finally. Too much flesh, not enough of the intangible electric which shocked at the sight of a breaking bud’s first gleam of colour, the soft trudge of a heron across the sky at dusk, the noise of sea wind through rimy grasses in a winter’s dawn. What, then? Like the pink of a scalp declaring itself through sparsening hair, the subtext of a life rose inexorably to the surface. It was of lack; so be it. But lack fabulously dressed in sound and sight and colour and smell. It was a lack which never would have to contend with slow domestic clotting, which would stand in tears over no grave nor be wept over in its turn. Solitude’s dark beam might sweep round, over and over again proclaiming the land deserted, the sea empty, the earth flat. Yet what richness managed to thrive in the brilliant interstices, the revolving splinter that lit and ever rekindled sublime pleasures! He returned with a sigh to his mattress. The soft plop of terrapins lulled him to sleep.

Meanwhile, his secret project for assembling night-flowering species was taking shape. Since many of the monsoonal varieties were trees rather than shrubs this was evidently going to take time even though several were quick growing. The attraction of the plants themselves would be inseparable from the novelty of having visitors in the Palm House after dark. That the same Sunday afternoon strollers might return and become night
people was intriguing and provocative. Everything changed after dark. Something else began to show through, subtly, and people were no exception. From his first day as a glazing boy just after his arrival in the capital Leon had been fascinated by those who came to see the plants. How different they were from the fisher-folk of Flinn! They were positively exotic, these townees, with their peculiar refined accents, their witty remarks and sophistication. They might have belonged to a different planet the way they chattered and drifted and trailed scent and pomade. These were the people who had money and influence, who read books and could use the knowledge. They went to theatres, cinemas, operas, ballets and art galleries. It was not long before he knew he would always be excluded from their society. No matter how eminent he became, a gardener remained a gardener. On the other hand he might well be able to woo them on his terms. His plans therefore contained an element of seduction, just as he himself was considerably seduced. He had long supplemented his book learning with eavesdropping and his appointment as curator made this even easier. As an assistant he had scurried, always at the beck and call of his irascible and whimsical old predecessor. Nowadays, though, he could employ assistants of his own by day while at night he lingered and absorbed, from behind clumps of greenery, the talk of those he secretly courted. Nobody in his childhood had ever had conversations, he now realised. They had had exchanges: more or less terse, jovial, brutal, but never these relaxed and worldly discourses full of jokes and innuendo. Bit by bit in recalling the things they said his own inner conversations acquired something of the same urbane quality, the same slight detachment which accompanied ideas. They also had an autodidact’s mixture of learning and magpie knowledge. On his own subject he knew far more than he could express, so he expressed remarkably little; but when alone with his plants he would hear them voice outlandish, barely-formed
opinions culled randomly from visitors on politics, banking, gynaecology, the arms trade, perfumery and the role of Antonio in
The
Marriage
of
Figaro.

It was one of those spring days when a balmy southeasterly breeze drifted up from Damascus and Constantinople still with enough strength after its long, scented journey to evaporate the last tatters of North Sea cloud and inflate over Europe a filmy marquee of blue silk. On such days it hardly mattered that everything was temporary, that gardeners were as evanescent as the blooms they tended. This morning the Botanical Gardens was a walled oasis of fertility full of the inaudible roar of buds splitting. The poignant rapture of the moment seized Leon as he went outside into the sunshine. There was contentment in the air. The few early strollers were well dressed and leisured. From beyond the wall came the dulled sounds of city traffic pricked now and then by a bell or a horn. All was calm and industrious. From the bare glazing bar of the broken potting shed window the fledgling thrushes were making their first flights. For an instant the Palm House sat with delicate immobility at the earth’s hub. Following the gaze of some children he looked into the sky and there, high above the golden galleon, a tiny monoplane was performing aerobatics over the city. As if its canting wings were shedding a happiness caught from the very air through which they winked and flashed he felt an inward soaring so that he, too, could watch the planet’s surface tilt like a plate, the sea’s grey wrinkled slab slither towards the edge like scree. He even thought he could just make out Flinn, a fleck of mould far away up the coastal map caught between sea and estuary on its long spit of polder. The aircraft’s mayfly gyrations went exuberantly on, accompanied, if one strained one’s ears to exclude local birdsong and voices, by a drone shaped like a distant line of mountains, sagging and climbing, dipping and peaking with short patches of bluish silence in between. Gradually, as
befitted its insect character, the machine drifted away on the breeze, engine popping, leaving across the marquee’s roof the lone aviator’s dark signature of exhaust.

Leon, no less exalted and no less alone, dragged himself back down to the Gardens and re-entered his Linnaean temple filled with lightness and energy. They would come to him, he vowed. Oh yes, they would come in their stoles of silver fox or their shapeless corduroys, with parasols and umbrellas, dainty gold watches and sturdy half-hunters. Housewives would come, and students, and old men with dandruff and cracked spats who loved butterflies. Famous actresses – why not? – and society ladies, moguls and diplomats, even – why not again? – the occasional dotty king. They would none of them be able to resist what he could offer: the ordered tropics in their midst, the spectacle of the dreamy and the exotic burgeoning in their hard-edged city. Once the right plants had been collected and had matured the heavy scent of night blooms would lure them … He took it for granted the Society would approve his scheme once they knew about it. It would bring regeneration not just to the Palm House but to the Gardens as a whole, in perpetual danger of becoming fossilised. Everyone was so old, that was the trouble, from the head gardener to most of the Society’s board. Anselmus was quite progressive but what on earth could be done with dim plodders like that cretin who spent his time trying to breed green roses or black hyacinths or something? As if almost anything in the Palm House wasn’t more interesting, more subtly beautiful than some monstrous hybrid. After all, why stop at black hyacinths? Why not spend your life trying to cross a snowdrop with a lupin? A snowpin? he wondered sarcastically (for he was soaring). Or maybe trees would be more of a challenge because of the time they took to grow?
Cocos
with
Hevea,
then, bouncing its rubber coconuts? No. In his view Anselmus ought to start purging the Society
of people like that and encouraging younger blood, enthusiasts who could share the vision of a true garden as something both scientific and aesthetic, vibrant with its own inventiveness and needing no trickery to succeed.

Thus he saw his own intoxicating future on a brilliant morning in spring. If there was something opaque, not fully declared, in this vision it was no doubt because few people ever managed to be wholly truthful about their own ambitiousness, least of all to themselves. And perhaps, quite without knowing it, he still entertained some fairytale fancy of attracting the one mate who could not resist him, the princess who could discern the princeling beneath the toad’s warts and pulsing dewlap. In any event his motives were more muddled than were others on that sunny day. From newspaper offices and broadcasting stations violent press and wireless campaigns were even then being launched against Czechoslovakia in general as Nazi troops began sidling towards the Sudetenland in particular.