Griefwork (19 page)

Absently his thumbnail resumed running up and down the flap of bark, squashing the powdery scale insects and leaving a brownish pus.

‘Very closely,’ she repeated. ‘And I think you’ll find there’s less standing in your way than you’d imagine.’

When he half turned to answer her with a piercing suspicion he found she had gone. Instead, shocked, he saw Felix lounging in the doorway of No Admittance only ten or twelve feet away. There was nothing in the boy’s stance of the timid night creature caught by daylight. This sudden unilateral betrayal of their secret, the casual boldness, nonplussed and frightened him as much as if he had heard the first bulldozers starting up outside. Hidden things were advancing, slightly beyond his present horizon. More immediately, the men would see, the assistants nearby. Wasn’t one of them up in the clerestory with a panoramic view of the House? Arms outstretched, extending
the concealment of an imaginary cloak, he began a lurch towards Felix, a gauche shooing, at the same time hunching himself as though his own body were the boy’s, willing it into invisibility. But the breath he drew to whisper a fierce command caught in its own phlegm and set off a fit of coughing which stopped him in mid-step. Pain in his chest hacked and racked while his indrawn whoops filled the House. Convulsively he pressed the insides of both arms to his rib cage, a hand glistening briefly, wet with burst pests or spittle. The familiar crazed reds and blacks filled his eyeballs as he sank to his knees at the feet of the gypsy who remained in the doorway, looking down at his fallen befriender as he rocked and fought for breath.

When at last the spasm subsided Leon slowly raised his face. His forehead was stuck with chips of gravel and his cheeks were wet with tears. Weakly he drew a sleeve across eyes and nose. Then for the first time Felix smiled. He put out a hand and helped the gardener to his feet. As he did so the princess spoke from somewhere behind Leon.

‘We really must do something about your health. You’re much too young to be ill. Besides, you’ll be needing all your strength.’

Her footsteps crackled daintily away and at last he heard what he faintly knew he had missed hearing before: the familiar double squeak of the entrance doors closing behind her.

Outside,
the
dark
day
dosed
and
drew
down
its
snows.
Once
the
assistants
had
left
Leon
bitterly
set
about
preparing
for
his
night
visitors.
The
boldness
of
Felix’s
treason
was
too
wounding
for
him
to
dwell
on.
He
seemed
hardly
able
to
think
coherently,
aware
only
of
a
fatigued
dread
of
sooner
or
later
having
to
confront
the
gypsy.
Bending
to
pick
up
a
horned
nut
beneath
a
Strophanthus divaricatus
he
was
arrested
to
hear
a
monologue
startlingly
congenial
to
his
own
mood:

‘Our princess may be desirable but she’s touchingly ignorant all the same. Did she really think this place was built by the Romans? Still, we’re all foreigners here, and how much do we know of her own land? Nothing.

‘Do we want to? It feels like a myth: the forests and butterflies all dreamed, so that as long as we can believe in them we go on planting and coddling and growing their counterpart here, this yearning effigy. But imagine if we actually went, the terror of the journey! Imagine if the dream began fading when we were halfway there while behind us were abandoned ruins! We should be left with nowhere to alight, like a mournful giant albatross cruising the tradewinds for ever above a wrinkled ocean.

‘Why this, why that? Why can’t she take us in her arms? It’s all slipping away for lack of clarity. Maybe after all she has a Chinese husband. The heart’s like a nut: the beginnings of a forest crammed into a shell, celestial butterflies and all. We carry it for years. Sheer loyalty. Between our fingers every other damn thing sprouts, bursting up under the constant patter of warm drops. Only the nut with its stupid clenched dream sleeps on, hardening as time passes. Once it was enough to know it was there. Suddenly there’s wrecking in the air and now it all feels too long ago to help, too private for such public events.

‘We ought to break her. We ought to give her something she won’t forget. Going away, is she? They all do. One after
another, they go. What’s that if it isn’t betrayal? If it’s not being continually abandoned? All that Paris scent and gliding around in furs. Actually, we wouldn’t mind just once seeing her face pushed into the mould, her lovely nose forced to breathe peat dust. Not revenge but justice. And what, instead, do we give her? Lectures. Lectures! The first resort of the self-taught, the last resort of the lame.’

The passive, the windguided who – like Leon – move at a slow drift through whole clutches of years are most likely to fake up, retrospectively, a narrative to cover themselves with spurious intent. The career landmarks of
And
then
…
And
then
don’t adequately describe their lives. Had Leon been obliged to look back over his thirty-three years and describe their course, there might only have come to him the moods associated with certain events if not the events themselves: whatever indelible indigo had welled out of endless wanderings along a solitary shore, constant planting to see what might grow, his head all the time coming up and his eyes fixing on nothing as thought walked away from him down a familiar corridor and he unresistingly followed. What might characterise such repetitions? Neither a hunt nor a chase, maybe: more methodical than the one, in slower motion than the other and altogether less gallant than a quest. And the object sought, the ostensible Cou Min so often summoned? How could she not suffer a marvellous fate, a transformation like that a sapphire undergoes when it emerges from the ground looking for all the world like a dull chunk of gravel but which, trundled round and round in a tub, loses its irregularities and becomes smooth, taking on lustre and its own colour? Finally the craftsman cuts and polishes until a
gem sits on a piece of velvet, the diminished but sublime ghost of its crude ancestor.

When Leon thought of Cou Min, as he frequently did, it was the jewel he mostly saw, a hallowed thing made smooth by constant handling. Very occasionally she ambushed him in a raw manner of her own, provoking a jarring discontinuity. At those moments her figure sidestepped the tragic tameness he had assigned her as if his great passion had happened to another person entirely, or maybe to the same person but in a different life. Even eighteen years later a trap could still spring and drop him out of the diurnal world of stove house gardening into a melancholy pit. It happened one day when he was sowing five trays of assorted spices, three of which he planned to turn over to a colleague for raising in the Temperate House. The cumin seeds’ dry rattle in their packet, the fleeting image of a live organism encapsulated in a husk ready to be awakened, the play of names which could mean nothing to any but one man, precipitated that man through a hole where he was caught and held a long moment, seeing another world and another time, his deserted hands frozen above a tray of leaf mould. Now and then he yearned to be free of her, to slough off her memory and escape. More often he adored her abiding centrality: the unseen attractor around which his life could revolve. It is some people’s luck to find a way of remaining true to their first passion, a hidden faithfulness which survives, that endures even happy marriage to a stranger and a lifetime’s displaced love. There are others who, having survived the scald, can never put it out of their minds and are forbidden all compromise. Like anyone they may be plastic in their daily affections, opportunist in their desires, but they grip at their heart something which renders all else casual, temporary, unreal; and sooner or later – in the nick of time or, painfully, not – it surfaces like a deep sea creature and lovers break up and marriages are annulled. Leon’s case was
simple: better no-one than not-her, a proposition that extended itself into a more general idea which ruled his days, that Nothing was preferable to anything on the wrong terms.

Thus the windguided, the passive man: who neither hunts nor chases but maybe searches in the patient doleful manner of one hoping he will recognise what he was always looking for if ever by chance he were to find it.

The evening of his uneasy conversation with the princess and of Felix’s melodramatic self-revelation dragged interminably. For the first time he saw the night people as intruders and wished they would leave him to his House and plants, to his provocative lodger on the other side of No Admittance. He thrice confiscated the chargé’s cigarette, eliciting, with his claimed need for nicotine as a pesticide, a dandyish and acerbic ‘Oh nonsense. My dear sir, it piques you to be punitive. Terribly exciting in its way but if you really wanted nicotine so much then instead of gathering it in tiny amounts – one slapped wrist at a time, as it were – you could surely have grown tobacco by the bushel. You could grow anything in here. Opium. Hashish. Babies, probably, if you knew how to sow them.’ Laughter, not all of it easy. In darkest manner Leon informed him that until the war the Customs and Excise people used to give the Gardens regular bales of impounded tobacco for burning in fumigators. It was the war which had upset the supply. Furthermore, it was as much as his job was worth to be caught growing illicit or dutiable plants in any but specimen quantities. This ponderousness raised a wilted eyebrow but no riposte. Eventually the door gave its last squeak and he shot home the bolts even while the yellow candlelight still showed a hunched back skidding away beyond the windows along the glassy path. The man fell heavily but he didn’t reopen the door, listening instead to the sounds of friends rallying around. The stray beams of their torchlight outside pattered randomly across
the tropics within. Soon these too disappeared and he was left to do his ritual nightly round.

Something
is
happening
to
me,
he told his plants as the candle-tongues sizzled between his licked fingers. I see now what I’ve made of this life, this one flash of light on a black sea catching me for an instant before it sweeps on for ever. All my passion’s in vain. I’ve never discovered what a satisfactory outcome would have been. To be loved in return as the rock loves the limpet for needing it? Dumb sucking? No; surely my purpose is altogether grander? Down on Palace Square (he told the night-flowering climber,
Nyctanthes
arbor-tristis
)
there’s a clockmaker – or there was, before the Nazis took him away and stole his stock – who made beautiful brass clocks. You could watch their works, how the little wheels whizzed and clicked. Instead of putting windows in the sides of the cases he used to place a glass bubble over the entire skeleton. At once this produced a different effect. It became a display. No more of the mechanism was actually visible but it set the whole clock apart as a self-contained world so that passers-by outside the shop window could reflect on it and be reflected in it. That’s also why the instruments in the Royal Science Museum are so fine. One way and another they’re all behind glass, either individually cased like clocks or together in cabinets: isolated, held up as examples of pure function which itself reveals the designer, the maker, the mind. Are the laws of physics universal? I sometimes ask the scientists who visit this House but they can’t agree, apparently, though most seem to think they must be. Look at a working clock beneath its glass dome, then, and you’re seeing a fragment of the universe, motion and energy and energy’s decay … Before they took him away they smashed his hands with their rifle butts. It pays to make sausages and shut up. The light sweeps on and never returns.

Are you still listening? In my Palm House we’re inside
the clock itself, watching the growth, feeling the affection of living, sniffing the decay. I can’t imagine why some people remain unmoved, but most respond. Even those who scarcely notice plants when they’re outside in the open air will pay attention once they’re enclosed in glass and properly arranged. It’s remarkable. Some things only become visible if you put glass over them, and the more ordinary they are the more this is true. What visitors see in here is the universe on display, the Earth’s history and their own evanescence, and they know it.

But (he stroked
Nyctanthes
’
leaves) something is happening to me. Now and then I lose sight of the universe and just see myself, a freak displayed like a specimen in this marvellous bottle. Now and then I know what the palms feel as they press their fronds up against the inside of the dome. I must break out if it kills me. But how? The obvious thing’s to accept her offer. Follow the princess to her fabulous land. Become her tame expert. Design a world for her where I could strut and cough in the artificial chill among beds of narcissi. My bank balance would grow with the crocuses, the snowdrops, the winter aconites like ruffed buttercups, the pear trees, the little grove of sallows I’d like to plant at the centre. If I were homesick I could construct a seascape in one corner – no expense spared, didn’t she say? – and try to get rock samphire, sea holly, thrift and spurrey to grow. And meanwhile she …? Would I become her servant, once on her own home ground? Her confidant? Her teacher? Lackey and lover? Or just lackey?

Nyctanthes
arbor-tristis
replied not a word. In the semi-dark Leon could hear only the dripping of water and his heart valves’ creak. Really, candlelight was the perfect illumination for a palm house. It was a surprise that enough light drifted upwards to sketch faintly the structure’s outlines: the cast iron spiral staircase which twirled its lacy texture of holes and patterns towards the gallery in steps and risers and balustrade, the arching
ribs far overhead on the edge of visibility between plumes and fronds and feathers. Warmth seeped up his trouserlegs from the gratings underfoot. This was his home, there could be no doubt. Anyone might wish for a home both benign and mysterious which comforted and sustained even as it enclosed a tendril of the raw universe.

I don’t want to see the real tropics – he confided to
Nyctanthes.

How could one be rational when there was a suggestion of bulldozers and treason in the air? Dr Anselmus had never been other than a staunch ally who, Leon recognised, had championed him practically from his start as apprentice glazier. What could he be talking about with the princess? Of course it was true that, finally, Dr Claud Anselmus was Director and Leon was an employee, and directors and princesses could consort and chat and plan together where directors and employees could only exchange quite formal, technical opinions even though they had known each other sixteen years. That was how things were. But he made a vague, timorous resolution to have the matter out as soon as he could. Didn’t he have his own plans on the Society’s behalf? Wasn’t his Palm House becoming a popular attraction instead of the uneasy and virtuous cross between fossil and museum which it had been before the war?

Just then his attention was caught by a movement above him, framed by the banyan’s aerial roots. He froze, the candle he had snuffed sending up its greasy wisp of expiry between his fingers. Nothing moves in here, he thought. Only at the height of summer with all the louvres open do the larger leaves begin their wobble and single fronds whir like lone propellers. Tonight the windows were tightly shut, the muggy air unmoving. A sudden shower of drops clattered through the long leaves of a fishtail palm. Had a darker shape momentarily swung along the deep grey roof, up there where snow muffled such light as was reflected from the clouds above the city? Although capable
of rash acts of passion which might pass for bravery Leon had preserved much of his childhood timidity. Not afraid of the dark as such, in certain moods he was apprehensive about his own capacity to frighten himself. Now the lacquer of competence and authority, which the night visitors always applied to him in a shiny coat with their questions and banter, swiftly thinned to nothing and dripped away like sweat. Was it perhaps one of those same night people who had purposely hidden so as to be locked in? And with what stealthy design? The war with its street gangs and inventive brutalities was still too recent for survivors not to remain fearful out of sheer habit. He stayed, therefore, breathing as shallowly and quietly as lungs and chirruping heart would allow. A scuff of sound, a hiss as if skin were sidling through leaves reached him now from all parts of the House. Even acoustics conspired to deceive.

‘I know you’re there,’ he remarked, courageously offhand.

Silence. He hardly knew which to fear more: the arrested moment continuing indefinitely or a sudden blaze of electric light and roisterous cries of ‘April Fool!’ or similar joviality as a band of pranksters leaped out around him and burst into laughter. As the silence lengthened he began to have wilder thoughts. Some animal – a monkey, perhaps? A
panther
?
–
had escaped from the nearby zoo and homed in on this only other possible habitat. He had recently heard they were restocking the place with animals collected from wrecked German zoos. ‘Indefinite temporary loan’ was how the newspapers described it. There was also the shipment of plants he had ordered in 1939 and which had arrived just that afternoon. There were three of them, crated and swaddled in sacking for their long journey from Polynesia, and he’d only had time to unwrap the
Gnetum.
This was because Professor Seneschal had capered and dithered around it since like the conifers and cycads it was classed as a gymnosperm and so was apparently irresistible to the old idiot. But the other two
– the
Pandanus
odoratissimus
and the
Pritchardia
pacifica
were still unwrapped. Why mightn’t some snake or sinister monitor have awakened in the crates and even now be sliding its way towards him?

Without a sound the remaining few candles began going out. They did so in no obvious order and he was always too late to focus on whatever it was that extinguished them. All except the last, of course, which he watched with fascination as though his feet were clamped to the grating beneath. Much later he realised how easy it would have been to distract his attention from this last candle: a handful of gravel thrown a second before its flame could reveal the face. Instead he watched a bare arm emerge from the greenery, hand cupped like a cobra’s hood. It struck, and all was dark. And in that moment Leon knew the arm even as he couldn’t guess the purpose.

‘Felix!’ he called. ‘What is it? What are you up to?’ His words fell like pebbles. ‘Is this a game?’ When the question had echoed in his own skull long enough to irritate him he at last moved, impatient with further hiding. He walked back down the aisle to where the main light switches were. He felt for the teak box screwed to the end wall, opened it and smacked his palm down over the rows of toggles. Contacts clicked, relays closed, the dark remained. Had Felix, then, removed the fuses? These were in a similar box inside his own quarters. At that moment something struck him lightly on the shoulder blade and fell to the gravel. He turned and crouched in the faint monochrome, patting the ground until he found the missile: a round object the size of a golf ball, an unripe seed pod he could not immediately identify.