Griefwork (27 page)

This
time
the
lotus
spoke
to
the
gardener
in
his
sleep:

‘They all left, carrying her suitcases. The front door closed and I could hear it being locked. Soon the radiators began to clink because they’d turned off all the heating. My water’s growing cold and I shan’t last long. I know I shall never see her again.

‘Here she is, writing a poem for you about distances. She looks down at things as she passes: at Arabia, that happy land, at the wrinkled sleeve of the sea. At the end of her journey are the forests whose canopies sag beneath the weight of butterflies. It’s a short poem because I’m dying, but I promise it will be strong enough to carry your heart to the princess’s land and thence to the person she knows all about. Too good to be true? But no. It was a fable, wasn’t it? A fairytale that turns out happily in the end.

‘But what a strange leavetaking, all the same. Dear gardener, dry your eyes or you’ll miss the final scene. Do you see it now? You’re watching a tiny aeroplane high in the sky, droning and receding. It seems to have snagged your sweater, for an end of wool is caught in its tailwheel and as it recedes so you unravel. High across the cirrus sky it goes and its propellers sparkle their spokes of light,
sprrixx,
sprrixx,
as you grow cold.’

Next morning Leon awoke frozen and alone. Felix’s side of the mattress was empty. He wondered where the boy was and why it was so cold. He thought the boilers might be low but almost at once he began to sweat and blaze so that he dragged himself off the floor and put his head under the cold tap, turning his face sideways and drinking as it ran.

He shook the drops from his furry scalp and made a decision. It hurt him to breathe. His left lung jabbed him as though he had broken a rib in his sleep. Very well, then, this time he would see a doctor. He blundered about until he had found a slip of paper with the name and address of Dr Anselmus’s friend, the famous thoracic whatsit at the Royal Infirmary for Palm House Curators with Collapsed Lungs. Give the man a bit of practice, he thought. What else? Stew. He’d promised to make some stew for Felix. Build the boy up. A fine bag of snouts, that was what Dr Leon prescribed. So, then: market first, then doctor.

On the way out he passed a habitual, affectionate hand over the leaves of the tamarind just inside the main door and threw a fond glance at its unofficial neighbour. This was a
Conium,
a common hemlock about two feet tall to which he had taken a sentimental fancy since it had no business in a stove house and ought long since to have been weeded out. He had first noticed
it some weeks before but had left it because of its determination to establish itself in an alien clime. It grew perfectly well all over Europe and he supposed a stray seed must have blown in from outside and casually taken root. It was odd it had survived at all in this tropical heat and in recognition of its tenacity he had left it and now couldn’t bring himself to grub it up.

‘Did you just see our famous Palm House curator tottering out?’ enquired the Dragon Lady of her fingernails in the office by the main gate. ‘Looked more like one of those poor people from the camps in the pictures, specially with that new hairstyle of his. Must be he’s caught a dose of this flu.’

‘Half the staff off today,’ agreed the gateman, who had already been on duty an hour. ‘None of his have come in yet. Reckon he’s on his own.’

‘I thought he looked worse than just flu. But then, our resident genius’s always acting peculiar, one way or another.’

‘Never really know what’s going on in the head of a man like that.’

‘A good deal more than goes on in yours, Albert, I dare say.’

‘How’d you know? T’isn’t heads you girls are interested in. Not in my experience.’

‘Saucy.’ This was the sort of repartee the Dragon Lady liked. It considerably leavened the drudgery of typing out the day’s quota of envelopes and the membership secretary’s dreary letters to go inside them. ‘It’s not even as if he’d got a nice wife to look after him.’

‘Who has?’ said Albert, whose own wife was something of a slut just as her husband was most of a cad. ‘You ought to ask Willesz about Leon. He and his gang are always in the boiler house for tea and that. Says it’s unbelievable how the man lives. Not dirty, mind, just basic. Nothing soft anywhere, no comfort at all. You’re always thinking you’ve overheard a bit of conversation, too. Willesz says it’s downright uncanny, exactly
as if he’d got someone hidden there who’s for ever vanishing a couple of seconds before you go into the room. Says it doesn’t matter how suddenly you go in, it’s like somebody’s just gone out in a hurry as if they were scared of being seen. They’ve all kept their eyes peeled but Willesz’s positive there isn’t anyone, it’s just the way the man behaves. Spooky, though.’

‘You’re not kidding,’ said the Dragon Lady in her best Hollywood. She had forgotten her nails and was staring at Albert. ‘But he’s quite normal to talk to, isn’t he? I mean, certainly no odder than anyone else. Even quite witty sometimes. Lonely, that’s his trouble. If you ask me men like him live in their own world. He’s got no idea what ordinary people are thinking. It’s sad, really. Remember when he first came here? Scrawny kid. Not what you’d call conventionally handsome, but he had a real something about him. He always did.’ She shivered. ‘God, it’s cold in here, Albert. Can’t you scrounge us something to burn in this piddling little grate? Otherwise we’re going to freeze to death before lunchtime. There’s more important things to worry about than gardeners with flu, like us catching it. Plus ration books and petrol coupons and not even being able to get a bit of coal. I met this swell guy from Ohio last night. Great big blond. No shortages
there,
I can tell you.’

‘You’re a scarlet woman, that’s your problem.’

‘I can’t think what you mean,’ said the Dragon Lady with a filmic pout and shaking out her erstwhile flames. ‘I’m talking about Luckies, Camels, Hershey Bars, nylons … You name it, this boy can get it. It’s like there’s never been a war. The States,’ she said dreamily. ‘I think I might go to the States. They don’t know what gasoline rationing is. Bill – he’s Bill – says even the kids in his family have cars. His is a Hudson Terraplane.’

‘I’d be jealous of the Yanks if it wasn’t that they take slags like you off our hands and leave us with the nice girls,’ Albert told her as he went out, jingling his keys.

‘Still won’t do you any good,’ she shouted after him. ‘Nice girls like gentlemen, not spivs.’

It was settling down to being a good day.

Meanwhile with reckless abandon Leon blew two months’ meat ration on half a pig’s head wrapped in newspaper. He walked with it cleft side uppermost so the brains wouldn’t fall out. The wind cut achingly from the northeast straight into his face as he made his way coughing through the side streets skirting Palace Square and the Opera House to the Third of August Boulevard. There, behind leafless planes and sycamores, the Royal Hospital stretched its grey façade. The chill pierced his plaid ulster and cooled him pleasantly although it froze his chin. The pavements, which in this area of town were regularly cleared of snow and salted, nevertheless felt spongy beneath his feet and a long way off. ‘Didn’t I tell you, Felix?’ he muttered. ‘It’s all in a far country.’

It took a while for his identity to be checked for at first the great doctor’s receptionist was reluctant to believe he was who he said he was. Actually he looked like a murderer, what with the haircut and the newspaper-wrapped lump seeping blotches of watery blood. Once admitted he sat peaceably, leaning against a green-painted radiator reading creased back numbers of
Picture
News.
He even came across the feature about the girl whose disruptive powers had led her to be accused of witchcraft. There was a detail he’d forgotten: she had gone into the sitting room where her prospective brother-in-law was learning to play Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ on his Hammond organ. At once the tune had broken off and the keys had begun to skitter of their own accord beneath the terrified young man’s fingers. So frightened had he been that he couldn’t even take his hands from the keyboard and had to watch, paralysed, as some crazed automaton within the machine had given a groaning, vindictive rendition of the ‘Danse Macabre’ by Saint-Säens, complete with
rattling skeleton effects. At the end of this involuntary performance the poor fellow had collapsed and was even now (at the time of writing) under doctor’s orders while a priest had tried to exorcise both girl and Hammond organ. At this point in his reading Leon’s immoderate laughter set off an agonising coughing fit from which he recovered to find the consultant watching with concern. He was helped to his feet, ushered into a technical-looking room and examined for a long time. Then he was handed an appointment card for the X-ray department downstairs and told to report there at noon. By now there were only fifty minutes to go so he was brought a cup of tea and a bun and re-installed by the radiator. In due course the X-rays were taken and he was sent back upstairs to wait for them to be developed and for the consultant to return from lunch and read them. This time he was brought a plate of spaghetti and parsnips in gravy by an apologetic nurse who said it was all the kitchens would send up.

At two-thirty the doctor returned and delicately retired behind a screen to view the films presumably, Leon thought, to prevent his patient seeing the sad half-shake of the head and the pursed professional lips. The idea amused him and he was grinning horribly when the man emerged and told him (while fondling the coils of his stethoscope) that he was really rather ill and had to be hospitalised at once.

‘Oh no, I can’t. I mean, it’s quite impossible.’

‘I’ve already spoken to Dr Anselmus, if that’s your worry. As a matter of fact we’ve just had lunch together. I’m afraid I suspected what we’d find. Nothing to worry about, of course. But chest infections, especially in this beastly weather, are all potentially dangerous. You’re a valuable man, sir, a valuable man. Claud – that is, Dr Anselmus, stressed that we mustn’t take any risks with you. He says you’re unique, and I shouldn’t wonder. I’ve been to your Palm House many times, you know.
One of my favourite haunts. You may not know me but I recognised you at once this morning.’ The doctor glanced at Leon’s scalp. ‘Though I notice you’ve left your syringe behind today in our honour.’

This note of medical humour signalled the start of some hard bargaining in which the patient pleaded for his liberty like a man condemned, eventually striking a deal which allowed him to be driven in the consultant’s own car back to the Botanical Gardens in order to collect some things and (though of course he didn’t mention it) warn Felix he would have to fend for himself. He was escorted downstairs, by now a little giddy with fever, while alarmed glances were shot at the bloody parcel tucked beneath his arm. Then the doctor’s chauffeur drove him sedately through the freezing streets as strengthening gusts whirled eddies of snowflakes beyond the car windows. He sank back in the aromatic leather, one paw upstretched and clutching on to the handhold’s silk-netted bobble like a very frail old invalid.

Most of the day had evaporated, he thought as he climbed stiffly out at the gate leaving the chauffeur to talk to Albert. That was the worst of hospitals or, indeed, of anything to do with doctors. Once you were in their clutches normal clock time disappeared and was replaced by a hallucinatory sort of calendrical time so that when you finally escaped you were surprised to find it was still the same day outside as it had been that morning. Such musings brought him to the Palm House door. It was locked. The Closed to Visitors sign was propped inside the pane. That was strange. He let himself in with his own key and at once felt the drop in temperature. Compared to the weather it was warm, but still far cooler than it should have been. The nearest thermometer read 11°C. He lurched through No Admittance into the boiler room. The fires were out, damped right down so they had choked on the
inferior fuel. This was incompetence amounting to sabotage. It was all the fault of Anselmus, sending him assistants too stupid even to be navvies. Where, though, was the boy? Only Felix was strong enough to get the fires going again.

He went back and stood helplessly. The House was silent. No drops of condensation pattered down on leaf and gravel. The air seemed brighter and bleaker as more of the insidious snowlight was admitted by the clearing glass.

‘Felix!’ he shouted. The sound vanished. He swayed as he stood, certain the air was cooling by the moment. He sensed the freezing northeasterly wind outside as if over his own naked body, scrubbing the heat from the glass as it rushed past. He could see it banging puffs of snow out of the leafless trees and bushes becoming visible over towards the Orangery. If only he weren’t so weak. It was perfectly simple to light the boilers and reverse things but it took strength. Help. He would go for help. That was it. ‘Felix!’ he called again. ‘I need you.’

A movement up in the clerestory distracted him and in that instant he knew something was about to repeat itself. He knew it as though it were not external to him but, on the contrary, a flaw of self at the edge of vision which ensured repetition, like the dumb stump of a tree to which a man lost in a fog involuntarily keeps returning. There would be the same ghostly figure flitting always off at an angle, mocking, seducing, destructive, leaving him to stumble through darkness back to the same beginning, beseeching, fond, ashamed. That sudden crash of glass! Had he not just broken something without raising a finger? He was surely responsible even though he couldn’t tell how.

So the hateful smashing began. High along the clerestory ran the figure, wielding what must be the long-handled coal hammer like a club, shivering the curved glass into glittering shards which blew away outside among the snowflakes. Within seconds there were great rents in the roof through which Europe,
so long excluded, greedily poured. Down below, as he vainly tried to coax his body into movement, Leon could feel it cold on his neck and hear the taller plants rattle their topmost leaves in alarm. And among the din of smashing and the whispering rush of wind and naked feet on iron catwalk he heard words being gasped out.

‘Enough! Finish and get out! It’s not natural! Just because (
crash
)
it doesn’t mean I’m not a man, you bastard.’ A long series of crystalline explosions progressed along the clerestory, paused, resumed on the opposite side. ‘Your reward for being a hero, right? Yours to do what you like with? (
Crash
)
and (
crash
) and (
crash
)
night after bloody night? Eh, mister spraygun?’

The left side of his chest was transfixed with a bright spear of pain, pinning Leon to the gravel where he had fallen.

‘But I thought you couldn’t speak,’ he said, his eyes wide. ‘I thought you couldn’t speak, Felix.’

(
Crash
)
‘law says I have to speak if I don’t want to? To you or anyone?’ (Running footsteps. Falling glass. Icy gusts.) ‘Gives you the right to treat me as dumb, then? No cock, (
crash
)
no balls, (
crash
)
no voice? That it, master-gardener? Just do what you like with the poor riff-raff gypsy?’

‘Felix, Felix. You’re wrong, boy. You were dying. And we were lonely, weren’t we? You can’t deny that.’

The wraith with the hammer had descended and now flickered across Leon’s vision. The smashing began again all around him, louder. The gasped words resumed.