Griefwork (2 page)

‘Drink the contents of a spittoon,’ came into Leon’s mind as he watched them approach. ‘That’s what I’d make anyone do if …’ This was the most repulsive image he could think of, no doubt prompted by the jar of deep brown reeking liquor he held.
‘If
anyone
laid
a
finger
on
her’
was what he meant. As she passed him the princess caught his eyes and fractionally inclined her head. Her equerry’s unsmiling look lasted rather longer on his face, as if the revenge of spittoons or worse were equally a
part of his scheme. The gardener turned his attention to where, far away off the central aisle, a candle had gone out.

Leading from the main walkways were subsidiary paths and alleys which appeared to be sunken, so high grew the plants on either side. In fact their height was partly delusory since the original designers of the Palm House had planned for them to stand on broad brick piers at low waist level, making their care less irksome. These piers had once slanted off the main aisle with precise regularity, like the spines of a fish’s backbone, with a gap between the end of each and the side walls. Over the years, though, they had been altered to accommodate growing plants, bequests and acquisitions, in some cases plinths having been added between spine and spine, making it necessary to go around by another route to reach the plants on the far side of these barriers. Meanwhile the old limewashed bricks had sprouted moss and ferns on their vertical surfaces, nourished by warmth and the moisture running down, while the level slate tops of the piers had become buried ever deeper beneath spilled mould and humus, potting shell and twigs, until the plots themselves had all but vanished and the fake tropical scene was rooted in an artificial ground level several feet above the gravelled paths. Once off the main walks, therefore, the visitor became mildly lost in a maze of sunken forest tracks, now and then brought suddenly to a halt. Only the central and outer passageways remained clear, though even here sprays of leaves had in places arched across and pressed themselves to the glass in blind obedience to light.

The candle, he found, had blown out. The area was distinctly cooler. Stooping, he wet the back of one hand at a tap and moved it across the panes until he found a gusty jet of black air. The usual place: the join between brick footing and the beginning of the glass wall, between mortar and ironwork. He returned to where he had stowed the jar of cigarette juice and
came back kneading a ball of putty. He moulded a thin sausage between his palms and stuffed it into the crack. Good enough for tonight. Such literal stopgaps aggrieved him, reminders of a general state of tattiness and disrepair. He wiped the steam from the glass in front of his face. For a moment it was as revealing as a slab of jet. Not a light showed anywhere outside. The entire Palm House might have been rushing through deepest space, an empty quarter of infinitude. Then he had the impression of slight, constant movement. He turned and relit the candle. By its glow snowflakes could be seen licking the panes with softly dabbing tongues.

There was a commotion away beyond the palms. The intervening plants and leaves swallowed up sound and the steamy air further damped it, the noise of exclamations and hurrying footsteps reaching him oddly, arced up and bounced back down from the high curved roof. He remained for one moment gazing at the glass and the silent crumble of flakes beyond, then sighed and made for the disturbance. Once around the stand of palms he came upon a group gathered about a drenched and sobbing child. Her hair was stuck flat to her face in streaks, the red wool dress clamped to her small body. A dark heap at her feet was her shed coat. There was a good deal of ‘I didn’t … I wasn’t …’ on her part and of ‘You did …’ and ‘Why were you …?’ from the various adult faces bent over her. The Italian chargé raised bachelor eyebrows expressively and reached automatically for his cigarettes, caught Leon’s eye and produced a slender gold pocket watch.

‘I’m so sorry, I’m afraid she fell into your tank,’ said a woman. ‘Stupid child. I can’t think what she was doing.’

The tank was one of several sunk in the floor, bricklined pits four feet deep which had once been used for watering and humidifying. That was before the Palm House had been plumbed for piped water as well as for a steam heating system.
Nowadays the tanks were seldom used and had become largely hidden behind ferns, nearly always kept full by the height of the water table hereabouts, for the Botanical Gardens unfortunately occupied one of the city’s lowest sites. ‘Do you like newts?’ asked Leon.

‘No,’ said the child. She sniffed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘All these tanks have newts living in them. Newts and frogs and South American toads. There may be a few Florida terrapins left. Quite harmless, the lot of them. You’ll have given them a nasty shock.’

The girl herself seemed uncertain whether this news might bring on fresh howls. There was a lull during which she dripped and hiccupped. Maybe the kindness of this gardener’s tone reassured her that he was not telling her about newts to cause her further distress but to interest her.

‘I’m most terribly sorry,’ the woman was saying.

‘What can it matter? She couldn’t possibly have done any harm. It’s only water.’ What an amazingly dense creature, he was thinking; she hasn’t yet seen what it means. ‘So. Now what?’

‘We’ll take her home at once.’

‘Then I hope you’ve a good cure for pneumonia,’ Leon told her. ‘There’s some new American stuff on the black market, people say. It’s made from mould or yeast or something.’

‘Penicillin,’ someone said.

‘That’s it. The wonder drug. But I never heard tell it could resurrect the dead, which is what you’ll need if you take her home like that.’ He looked towards the night which pressed about the glass. There was a suggestion of swirling. It was now eight-thirty but this minor emergency implied that nobody was free to go home until it was over, a general feeling compounded by reluctance to consider forsaking the warmth for what lay outside.

‘It would be death,’ said the princess unexpectedly. She
had come up and was regarding the child with the friendly amusement of one perfectly used to seeing children put beneath a village pump or caught in a tropical downpour on their way home from school. ‘In this cold – impossible.’

‘Come,’ said Leon to the little girl. ‘We’ll soon have you dried out.’ And though he was speaking to the child his eyes – having first paused at the princess – did include the mother. He led the way along the nave to the far end of the building, past the double entrance to a door set in the end wall painted with the legend No Admittance. ‘Welcome to the stokehold,’ he said with an odd loud formality and rattled the knob, being first through the door. By the time the others were inside the child had only the faintest impression of quick movement beyond the pool of bright light cast by a shaded bulb hanging above the table, maybe also the sense of another door silently closing. But this notion was soon lost in the rough maternal flurry of being stripped. ‘Here,’ said Leon, handing the woman a fleece-lined flying jacket of greasy leather. For an instant the girl stood in a puddle of her own clothing, fish-naked in the brick room, then her mother wrapped the jacket around her. He indicated a burst sofa along one wall, picking up the clothes and wringing them out in one of three large stone sinks. He vanished briefly. There definitely was another door, for a wedge of light flashed in the gloom. Returning, he said, ‘I’ve hung them over the furnace pipes. You’re not allowed to go through there. Fifteen minutes or so. I’ll be back.’

He left, and the door into the Palm House closed behind him. Mother and daughter looked about them. The room was indeterminate, either a living room used by a gardener for his hobby or else a potting shed doubling as a habitation. It smelt not unpleasantly of leaf mould and bacon fat. The wall with the sinks also held a long draining-board or work-top on which stood a dozen shrubs in pots. On shelves above them was an assortment
of packets and bottles including three more of the cigarette jars, all full. From a nail driven into the end of one of these shelves dangled a great hank of bass or raffia like a palomino’s tail. On the wall hung a curled and dusty calendar still showing March 1938. That month’s maxim had read: ‘You cannot see Beauty with miserable eyes.’ The table was bare except for a teapot and a newspaper.

‘Are you still cold?’ Leon asked the girl when he came back. She looked silently up at her mother as for permission to nod, which she did, uncertainly. He went to a dark cupboard and pulled out a bundle of twigs like the head of a small besom. Having examined its label under the light he went back for another. Then he knelt before a grate which neither of his impromptu guests had noticed in his absence, having been frozen into a kind of silent paralysis preventing either thought or sight. With a pair of bellows the gardener blew up some guttering coals into redness, thrust the twigs in until they were alight and rose to his feet with this crackling brand. He waved it vigorously to extinguish the flames, continuing to flourish it in front of the girl as she sat so a bristle of red-hot streaks crossed her face rapidly from side to side, trailing behind them wafts of thick aromatic smoke.

‘What are you doing?’ asked the woman, anxious but in his hands.

‘Warming her.’

It was not cold in the room. Several stout, lagged pipes emerged from the boiler room and, hung with cobwebs and cloths, plunged through into the Palm House beyond. The roof overhead, though, was a great source of heat loss, being long rectangles of rippled glass of the kind which has a mesh of reinforcing wires embedded in it, pitched up in lean-to fashion against the Palm House’s end wall. The light revealed the underside of a grey dusting of snow. It was obvious that if
ever the furnaces next door were allowed to go out the room would become uninhabitably cold despite the grate. The girl, meanwhile, slumped drowsily, cheeks flushed.

‘What is that?’

‘Palabrinus
astea,’
replied Leon, inventing syllables for the woman and waving. ‘It warms the innards. Don’t ask me how. It just does. Doesn’t it?’ The child nodded sleepily, shrunk into the flying jacket with her legs drawn up in the mound of springs, kapok and ticking next to her. He laid the smouldering twigs in the fireplace and went to retrieve her clothes. Again the dim wedge of light showed momentarily, then once more as he came back, shaking out the pipes’ indentations from the small garments. ‘Hem of the coat’s still damp.’ There was a smell of scorched wool. ‘Never mind. She’s warm now. Dress her and take her home at once. She’ll be fine if you don’t loiter.’

They emerged from this rathole of a vestry into the candlelit nave, the shrubbery piled up on either hand in dark banks with here and there the waxy glint of leaves catching the sheen of a vagrant ray. There were movement and voices from the far end, around and beyond the palms. At the entrance doors the mother rammed the wool pixie helmet over her child’s head with punitive zeal, the girl looking suddenly back at Leon as she did, so that a scalloped point meant for the centre of her forehead skewed across one eye. ‘What’s your dog’s name?’ she asked.

‘There is no dog.’

‘I heard him all right,’ said the child with mittened hands clapped to the sides of her head, twisting. ‘I expect he’s brownish.’ The doors squealed and banged behind them.

The continuing snow had turned the night people’s reluctance to leave into worry about further delay. Now began a general drift into the central Palm House, noses bidding flowers a last farewell, scarves and coats which had been opened or shed
rewound and rebuttoned. Within ten minutes the place was empty. Leon caught a knowing, salutatory glance from the chargé, then watched the princess’s retreating back as she leaned on her dark companion’s arm. In the light’s feebleness they had hardly gone half a dozen steps before being swallowed up in the whirling dark. He locked the outer door, shut the inner and began dousing candles. Light withdrew gradually, stealthily, to the sound of his softly crunching passage. Now and then a branch rustled as he stretched an arm between two plants to reach a hidden sconce. On galoshed feet the darkness spread and as it did the atmosphere thickened, the plants grew denser and taller until by the end, when he was walking back and putting out the last staggered flames on either side of the central aisle, a forest closed silently in behind him. This retreat of the light worked its nightly magic, acting on him as a melancholy balm. Many of the night-flowering species he had planted became more strongly scented the darker it was, diffusing their drowsy fragrance in hopeless expectation of the great silent moths whose pollen-dusted bodies they yearned to attract. The right kinds of moth were thousands of miles away, yet still the flowers drenched the air with their languorous frustration, filling his lungs with the perfume of endless possibility.

Not far from the entrance door he laid an affectionate hand on a tamarind of which he was especially fond, having inherited it as an unhappy sapling and coaxed it into a young tree nearly ten feet tall. He had felt a certain sympathy for it because tamarinds were displaced here, being native to the semi-arid regions of India and Africa. Yet with care they could also be grown in monsoon climates and this particular plant had been raised from seed sent by the botanical gardens in Singapore. He liked its long racemes of golden flowers and its feathery leaves but his real reward was its essential acridness, the strongly acid fibrous pulp inside its dusty brown pods. Was this not his own
nature too, a lone and difficult creature of both sweetness and forbidding acidity?

‘We’re in the right place,’ he told it, patting its trunk as a gust of wind sent flakes of frozen snow hissing against the panes. ‘We wouldn’t last five minutes out there tonight.’

For he talked to his plants, of course, even as he could often bring himself to say no more than a few gruff words to his visitors. ‘I thought you couldn’t speak,’ the chargé had said on his third visit when Leon had lectured him fiercely and at some length on soil acidity after he had caught the Italian pouring a bottle of white wine into a pitcher-plant’s tub. ‘Quite undrinkable,’ the diplomat had explained. ‘Quite unthinkable,’ retorted the gardener. ‘I suppose in somebody’s sitting room you’d simply tip it down behind the sofa.’ This sally had made him mildly famous and proved his fearlessness as a man apart. The sitting room image was apt and revealed why Leon never considered the building he lived in as ‘the Palm House’. In his mind, at least, the place was simply ‘the House’, neither glass-nor hot-nor palm-but his own unqualified habitation and focal point of being whose curved panes housed him as did his own skin. In chatting to his plants he was not so much addressing a collection of intimate house guests as communing with himself. It was often easier for him to put his thoughts into plant voices. He found it less inhibiting.