The Physic Garden (24 page)

That last tissue of truth and falsehood is the version of events my wife had always known and I’m sure she continued to believe it until the day she died, some five years ago now. It feels as though it were last week and I still miss her. I still go to the kirkyard from time to time and find myself unable to believe that she is lying down there, where I too will follow her in due course.

But it was not the whole truth. And I have waited this many a long year to come to the whole truth of the matter. How can I explain? Until that moment, when I saw Jenny lying upon the dissecting table, the whole of my life for many years past had been concerned with growing things, with the care and nurture of plants and trees. Well, my green time ended with Jenny. Since then, I have worked with books and dusty manuscripts and the truths contained therein, the wisdom of words. And sometimes, I have found myself following a perilous path indeed, for words and books and pamphlets can lead you into trouble as surely as affairs of the heart. I have often found myself negotiating that narrow pathway between my principles and the safety of myself and my family. They hang men for their beliefs, for their writings and even for their thoughts, but not, I think, for tending their gardens.

Do I regret the loss of that green time? Of course I do. I sometimes think I would give half my life to be back there, wandering
through the countryside, gathering plants for Thomas with the prospect of meeting Jenny on the way home. Or to be back upon that hillside on the Isle of Arran, carefully loosening the earth from around the roots of a tiny whitebeam that clings to life on the edge of a precipice. But perhaps because of all that I have read and learned since, perhaps because of the dangers and the injustices I have known in my life, there is that in my mind that baulks at the prolongation of lies and half truths any longer.

I did not, of course, go to Ayrshire to work for Thomas’s uncle. How could I? How could we be on any kind of footing ever again, not servant and master, not friend and friend, not even remote acquaintances? All that was at an end, and I could not even bring myself to think about him, let alone mention his name. Whenever he came into my mind – and during those first years it was more often than was either comfortable for me or conducive to any kind of peace – whenever he came into my thoughts I would deliberately swerve away from the very idea of him. At last I thought about him infrequently, and that was a relief to me.

I remained in the city, and although I would hear about him from time to time, because he was fast becoming a man of some
consequence
, I did not see him. This was something of a miracle, but then Glasgow was growing quickly over those years, we moved in quite different circles, as we always had done, and our paths never crossed. It would have been easier for him to seek me out than vice versa, but he did not do it and so I must assume that he never wanted to do it. But some years later, I heard that he had left the college and had moved to his uncle’s house in Ayrshire, where he was amassing a great collection. This hurt me for a while, all unreasonably, until somebody told me that his collection was not of plants and trees, but of fossils, the petrified remains of ancient life forms.

For myself, I was despairing of ever finding suitable work, but at last, perhaps because of my love for books, rare in a young man of my station, I got work with a printer of somewhat radical persuasion. The position came to me through Mr Caddas who, being a man of great good sense and widely read too, had many
connections in that line. Besides it was in his best interests that I should flourish, because some time after Jenny’s death, I found myself keeping company with her sister Anna.

It was not my intention. It began as a simple continuation of our friendship. We were both grieving and I think we were a comfort to one another. We wanted to remember happier times, wanted to talk about the Jenny we remembered, full of life, full of ideas and skills and small but wonderful ambitions: to create beautiful things, to sew flowers and grow flowers and to make people well. In talking about Jenny, we were healed, after a fashion, and through this quiet healing we drew closer.

I had known Anna since she was a child and thought of her like that, until one day I looked at her and found that she had become a woman. I saw that she was looking at me as a woman looks at a man she loves. And then, having waited a decent time, we were married, with the blessings of my mother and her father. I flatter myself that the match gave both of them a certain amount of pleasure, although Sandy Caddas was never quite the same again. Even though he seemed happy enough with Nancy, sometimes you would find him weeping for no obvious reason. Once, when I had made a clumsy attempt to comfort him, he had told me, ‘Just leave me be for a while. If you find me in tears, just leave me be, lad. The thought of her comes into my head and I miss her. But it will pass. It aye passes!’

Many of my brothers and sisters are gone now and I miss them too, Johnnie most of all. Johnnie grew up and went away to sea like his uncle, and never came back, like his uncle. He never made old bones, and I think it broke my mother’s heart, because she was not the same after and didn’t survive him by many months. The night he died, she frightened us all by waking us with a great shriek,
wailing
, ‘Johnnie’s gone, Johnnie’s gone!’ and so he had, taken by some foreign fever. When she came to her senses, she said that she had seen him. He was standing at the foot of her bed, shaking his head as though regretting something, and then she knew, even though it was a good long while until the news reached us in a letter.

James worked in the gardens for a few years more – my exclusion evidently did not include him – and lodged in the college, so that he should be close to his work. Later, he got work out at Gilmorehill, in the gardens of a big house there, married, and had a large family. They all lived in a certain amount of cheerful squalor and he died there a few years ago. His surviving children are all grown and he had a great number of grandchildren as well, at least some of whom have become gardeners in their turn. In due course, one of them came to the house and presented me with a fat pineapple and I found myself shedding a tear in memory of my father, even as I tasted the sweetness of it, and laughing at the absurdity of life in general.

The two younger girls seemed to be well settled, for a while at least. Then Susanna ran off with a footman and was never seen again, although many years later, a short and somewhat
travel-stained
letter arrived from the Carolinas. In it she said that she was well, was married and ‘as happy as can be expected’, whatever that meant. I wrote back to the direction given on the letter, but she never replied. It hurt me a little to think that of all of us, it was clumsy Susanna, who could not even sew a straight seam, who had attained my ambition of exploring, Susanna who had smelled the scent of exotic flowers under foreign skies.

Jean followed her mistress as lady’s maid when that young woman made a good marriage and moved to her new home in the Highlands. A few years later, my sister married a highlander, a ghillie on the estate I believe, which was a good match for her, but she died in childbirth with her firstborn, which was a great tragedy for her husband and a sadness for all of us.

Bessie lives yet. She made the best of her opportunities, as my mother was always advising her and anybody who would listen. We expected her to become a cook, but instead, she became a lady’s maid and then a housekeeper. Her mistress had, it seems, made a good marriage, and Bessie prospered along with the family. She never married, which goes a long way to explaining her survival. Childbirth claims so very many of our wives, sisters, daughters, in
spite of all our medical men can do to remedy it. For many years she was housekeeper at one of the big houses near the Green and wore smart clothes over her well-corseted figure and preferred not to remember that she was once a scullery maid. Now she lives in a cottage provided for her by her employers, styles herself Mistress Elizabeth Lang, and acts as though she is a great lady in somewhat reduced circumstances. Her own ‘lady’ visits her from time to time, and then they squabble over their memories, like elderly sisters more than mistress and maid. I have heard them at it and envied them such lifelong friendship. You would never guess at her beginnings when you see her in the town, or in the kirk of a Sunday morning, with her stylish bonnets, even in old age, a new one for every season.

Rab and my mother came to live with me and Anna in my new lodgings, which consisted of two rooms over the printing business. After my mother’s death, Rab remained with us. To our surprise, he flourished in this new, bookish environment. He was always sickly and short of stature, but – in the manner of creaking gates that hang longest – he lives yet. He and my wife grew as close as brother and sister in time. She loved him and he confided all his troubles, such as they were, in her.

He worked in the book business with us for many years until, again somewhat to our surprise, but greatly to our pleasure, he married a pretty, capable and kindly widow called Euphemia, fathered two sons of his own to add to her three daughters and lives close by. I think all of this astonishes even Rab himself. He expected very little from life and life has heaped unanticipated riches upon him. He is very well respected as he goes about the town, always with a faint air of disbelief and his nose in a book. We meet often for a drink and a chat, mostly about the books that are his passion. I could not have predicted any of this. But life has a way of springing these surprises. When my master in the book business died, I took over from him and made a success of the business. We print, we publish, we buy and sell books. The very smell of books is in my nostrils and I think it is now in my bones as much as it is in Rab’s and I will never escape from it, nor would I want to.

Which is not to say that sometimes I do not have a hankering after the life I might have lived, after the possibility of travelling and exploring, of gathering plants and seeds and bringing them home. I have regrets too and they are very profound. I mind in the twenties and thirties, when they were planting up the town green with trees of many kinds, how much it hurt the heart of me, a sensation of envy and regret so powerful that it made my head ache. I have made the very best of what I have, you must understand that. But often, when I lie awake at nights, with the sounds of the city stilled at last, I sometimes get the strangest sensation.

How can I explain it to you? But I see that I must try, even if it seems like an old man’s folly. It feels at those times as though I have somehow missed my way. As though I have been a wanderer down all these years. Not unhappy with my lot, but still a wanderer for whom some other destination was intended, but who has lost his way. It is as though something was planned for me, some pathway I could not find, could not take. Perhaps some god frowned on me for an instant. Some pagan god of the woods, Pan himself maybe? A jealous god, for sure. But it also seems to me that there might be some other incarnation of myself, the man who followed that pathway among the trees, among the green and growing things, the world of plants and their magical, miraculous properties. Is he any happier than I am? Who knows? Perhaps not. For nothing stays constant. Everything changes in time.

I have no way of contacting that other me, of speaking to him, of seeing where he is and what he is doing. He is a stranger to me and I to him. I might have the odd pang of envy, but there is nothing to be done. All I know is that it is the strangest feeling and it makes me profoundly sad, a melancholy that lasts all the next day and sometimes longer, a nostalgia for some paradise lost, some door slammed shut and locked against me, some entrance to an enchanted garden that I cannot now find and will never see again, not in this life, at least.

But what of the letter that Thomas enclosed with the book? Well, I made myself read it, although I confess I waited several days before I could bring myself to take it from its hiding place, unfold it and spread it on my table.

Well, I did read it with a certain scepticism. But I also asked myself, was this not the very essence of the Thomas I had once fancied I knew well? We were three points of a triangle. And afterwards, when passion was spent and reality intervened, my poor Jenny would have presented herself and her condition to him as a problem that had to be solved to everyone’s satisfaction. The logical solution, as he saw it, was that I should marry her. Then
everyone would be happy, not least Thomas Brown. But he had reckoned without Jenny’s pride, Professor Jeffray, his chain saw and his dissecting rooms.

Thomas must have fallen ill, mortally ill, not long after he wrote that letter, or perhaps he was already feeling the first
stirrings
of whatever killed him. But he had written it, put it inside the book, parcelled up the whole and directed that it be sent to me upon his death. No sentimental deathbed reconciliation for Thomas. That was not his way. I could see that now.

And so I come to the end of my story. And I hope that you can understand why that terrible book,
The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus
, brings back such an agony of mind, brings back to me the image of the lovely soul that was Jenny, with the child, Thomas’s child – why did I not realise for so many years what a sudden and unimaginable horror that must have seemed to him? – still inside her, laid bare upon that table for all to see, for Jeffray to approach, wielding his chain saw, demonstrating its efficacy in such cases. It will not do. I cannot think about it, for even now, it makes me sick and angry and like to vomit. So instead I turn my attention to the book that Thomas saw fit to send back to me, the old gardening book that we had once pored over together and that I had returned to him in a rage. I read the lines that are obscurely comforting still.

‘Choose your seeds from the high, straight, young and well thriving. Choose the fairest, the weightiest, and the brightest for it is observed that the seeds of hollow trees, whose pith is consumed, do not fill well or come to perfection.’

Was he but a hollow tree? For he certainly did not come to perfection. But neither did I, so perhaps I was always overly cautious, never quite sturdy enough.

‘The black cherrie is a tree that I love well. There is a sort at Niddrie Castle whose fruit is preferable to any cherrie. I take it to be a soft heart cherrie but it’s a great bearer.’

A soft heart cherry
. That was what I was, back then when we used to recite the words as one might recite poetry with a friend.
I could remember it as if we had spoken the lines only yesterday, blithely, thinking of our old age as something so remote as to be unimaginable.

‘Gather their fruit when full ripe, eat of the fleshy part and lay the stones to dry a little.’

We were young and strong and full of hope for a happy ending, just as my grand-daughter Jenny is still young and strong, with a head full of dreams and possibilities for her own magical future.

‘Some trees there be that will not bear of themselves till they be old, but if you cut off the head of the shoots and then take out some great boughs, if you mind your time and do it with discretion, you may force your tree to put forth buds and bear.’

Our minds were so very much in tune. We were like two halves of the same fine fruit, Thomas and I. We had thought to plant trees, like weans, and watch them grow. We had thought, perhaps, to force each other to put forth buds and bear knowledge. And so we did. But as well as the knowledge of good, we found the knowledge of evil. And in the end, trees are no substitute for people.

There is a last great truth that comes to me now, as I sit here in the autumn of the year. It is a truth that has lurked at the back of my mind for a long time; one that I never wished to bring out and examine in the light of day. Untenable you see. I never thought to do it until now. At this time of life you feel, oddly, that everything matters but nothing matters very much.

I loved Jenny Caddas, that’s one truth. And I missed her. I miss her yet. But all the same, if you were to ask me what it was that made and sometimes still makes me wake in the night with a sense of regret that feels like an amputation, a lost limb that aches fiercely, bitterly, then I cannot in all conscience say that it is the thought of Jenny. My feelings for her have mellowed through
time. My grand-daughter, who looks more like her great-aunt than her grandmother, comforts me, brings her before my eyes, heals the thought of her.

I loved my wife. That’s another truth. We were absolutely faithful, throughout the long years of our marriage, and perhaps what’s more important, we were always kindly to one another, each making allowances for the other. I have nothing to reproach myself with, now that she has gone.

So it is not Jenny or Anna that I think of at those times. It is something quite different. And I tell you, without guilt or even very much surprise, that it is Thomas I think of. It is our friendship, the affection that lay between us once, perhaps most of all those days of intimacy and ease on the Isle of Arran or in the college gardens, among the trees. I think of the attachment, the fondness that was all lost, all wasted, like some exotic flower, trampled underfoot. It is the thing that he betrayed, as I could not. What pains me most is the absolute certainty, even now, that I would not have so betrayed him, no matter what the reason. I would have died first.

I think afterwards that he blamed me for my lack of forgiveness, for my persistent distrust of him. But he did not understand the full extent of the wound that lay deep within my heart. Or perhaps, as he tried to tell me in that last letter, he hardly thought of it as a betrayal at all, but as something that he was driven to do by his need to put himself in my place. Can I bring myself to believe that? I would certainly like to do it. The wound healed over, in time, but the ache of it is with me yet. Whatever motives and excuses he may have had, nothing can change that. He was a good man, even a great one, but I still think that my affection for him was stronger than his for me.

Or do I? Was it not simply different? What comes to me is the thought of what was lost, of all that we might have done, the places we might have gone, the work we might have achieved together. None of which is in any way to devalue what I have, which is very precious to me. You must understand that. We are like that, we
human beings. We can regret what might have been, even while loving and cherishing and holding fast to what we have.

So I confess, it is the thought of Thomas that sometimes makes me wake in the night with a sense of regret so profound, so bitter, that it is like a physical pain in me and I shift and squirm with it and must light a candle and bury my nose in a book so as to be rid of it. What’s for you won’t go by you, my mother would have said. Looking up at the night sky, you will maybe see a shooting star and sometimes it seems to fall to earth and sometimes it seems to hurtle past and travel on its way to another time and place. But I am not sure which is which, whether that star is myself, or whether it was Thomas, who hurtled past me, dazzled me, blinded me to all else and then travelled on his way.

And still he comes before my eyes. My dearly beloved friend. Not the crabbit old man he no doubt became. How would I know? I never saw him again. But tall Thomas, with his grey eyes, his strong limbs and his warm smile, as he walked into the garden in search of me, Thomas, talking to me of thistle and valerian and sweet honeysuckle. Thomas, admiring the wayfarer tree and laughing uproariously at the thought of the students trying to set fire to it, and the vision of me chasing them with a spade and swearing at them. Thomas, full of ideas and ideals. Thomas, who loved to teach, and talk, who loved, more than anything, the imparting of knowledge, which is not always the same thing as wisdom.

My Jenny has just come into the room.

She looks at me and says, ‘You’re sad!’

I tell her that I have dust in my eyes. Dusty old books just.

She loves books too, and often asks me to read to her, but I tell her that she must not devote all her life to them. No. I tell her that she must be out and about in the world, breathing the fresh air. She can enjoy her books if she wishes, but she must not elect to live life at second hand. Books are but a poor substitute for experience, no matter how painful. I do not think she understands me yet, but she will, in time, God love her.

Now she takes up my linen handkerchief and wipes my eyes with it, much as I sometimes wipe her own when she weeps over her small troubles.

‘There now,’ she says. ‘Is that better?’

And I tell her that it is. That all is well. That we will put the dusty old books away for the time being, and perhaps I will come down into the garden for a walk, before supper, for I may be in the winter of my years, but it is still a fine, golden autumn and besides, the very essence of spring is here beside me, tugging at my hand and, however much the city has grown, tonight the air out there among the trees seems very sweet.