A Garden of Trees

by Nicholas Mosley

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It is all nonsense, I suppose, sticking our necks out and getting them chopped off and having to go dancing round putting them on again. I don’t know why we do it except that there is nothing else to do and every now and then something happens. When you’ve lost your neck you feel better and it seems to have been worth while. She didn’t give you a start, did she?”

  “I gave her twenty yards,” I said.

  “That’s not bad,” he said. He sat down on a wash-basin and crossed his legs. “Every now and then something happens. I had some men in the army, once, and we were very depressed, and then we were doing river crossings and I organized a boat race and we got so excited that we went out to sea. It was a beautiful blue day and we were all singing and we paddled right out past Portland Bill and bumped the people in front, and I am sure that then something happened. We were laughing and making those sort of jokes, you know, and it was a beautiful blue day and there were seagulls that followed us with their wild unearthly cries. There was a man on the shore who was waving and waving and we got into terrible trouble. I am sure something happened. We were never depressed, not really depressed, after that. Twenty yards in how many did you give her?”

  “About a hundred,” I said.

  “That’s very good. And then there was a man at Oxford, he was my tutor, quite a nice man, really, but he used to talk to me and I was trying to tell him what I thought and why I did things, and he just looked at me with that dreadful nervous calmness that dons have, you know, and he said, ‘Salvation by romps is not a credible concept,’ just that, and I knew he was wrong but I couldn’t tell him because he looked so sad. Are you feeling better now?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I am sure he was wrong because otherwise you cannot let yourself go, and that is what salvation is, I am sure, it is only when you have gone or at least are ready to go at any moment that you can hope to know about salvation. It is like being in a car going down a hill when the brakes fail, then you have got to jump for it and unless you have been ready for that moment all your life and are good at jumping then you will not jump and you will land up in a heap at the bottom. I think that everyone starts off their life in the seat of a car and there is always a time when the brakes do fail. When you jump I do not know where you will land, but at least you will not land in the heap of old iron. There is always a precipice at the bottom, you see. I am glad that you are in love with Annabelle.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  We went back to the party. Peter rejoined his group of guardsmen, and Annabelle was dancing with Freddie Naylor. I sat on a chair beneath a chandelier and the gilded room blinked at me. Pink and blue dresses and the old women with their powdered necks and the men slightly tufted like thistles. There was a nostalgia in the air like Christmas decorations. Fairy faces glittered above tinsel strings of lace, tasseled stars expanded into rings around the roof. Here the world was running downhill with all the elegance at its disposal. The band squeezed moisture from smoky eyes and stiff limbs jolted. Here the world came to forget and I to remember.

  The car that runs downhill (the talk like tossed coins) runs and you decorate it and you hang it with bells (the counterfeit phrases that do not ring) you take out of old boxes old bangles and bells you hang on a tree. You come to admire and little bulbs mutter and sometimes the lights fuse and sometimes they don’t. You do not know whether you have come to forget or to remember. Afterwards the bangles are put back into boxes and who puts them is forgotten. The car that runs downhill is always running and it is not easy to remember.

  A nostalgia of trees. In a forest of firs there is always memory. The dance is an autumn to disarm the eyes. In water there is memory. The band is a deepness to deceive the ears. The trees are on the roadside where you do not stop.

  When you jump you jump, but that has nothing to do with you, when you remember you remember there is something to be done. The tree on which tinsel is hung is an altar. What you do you do in memory, and when you have done it all things are possible and they are possible because you have done it. A garden of trees and a garland of tears. You come to put flowers on the altar and then the flowers of the garden will not die and in memory of the garland you can live. On the road there is the death and the suffering and the car that runs downhill and the trees have gone past you, the trees have gone past you, but still you can live. Only there is something to be done, which you can do, and then you can jump, which has nothing to do with you. You can offer your garland. At the centre of the garden is an aquarium and a tree.

  “Are you asleep?” Annabelle said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Will you dance with me?”

  “I must go and find Marius,” I said.

  She came with me to the door. The streets were wet and reflected in silver. I walked to Grosvenor Square and rang the bell of the flat. There was no one there. I went out into the square and sat on the parapet.

  The patterns of the day were reflected in water. It was very cold. A shape like an iceberg, with only a fraction visible. I withdrew into my clothes as into a shell. Beneath the surface the iceberg stretched and its bulk was enormous. The hospital and Marius and the hospital again. I could not see it. It was apart from me, beneath the surface, a receding opaqueness in the depths of the sea. Each time I searched for it, it disappeared and I saw only the image of my face in the waters. I waited. When I searched my face the waters broke it; when I searched inside me the cold deceived it. My clothes enclosing nothing like an empty shell.

  But the touch was there and was jagged against my hands. When you look inwards you see nothing except that which you have imagined, and when you look outwards you see only a fraction of what is real. But if you put out your hand to this fragment and touch it then at least you will have the feel at your fingers, and if you put out your heart to this fragment and love it then you will have the feel of your heart. This is a rarity. You do not have the feel of your heart by keeping it within you. “Who am I?” Marius had said.

  Your heart within you is what you can never feel; your heart outside you is what you know. What you are is a relationship between yourself and others. What I am is that which exists between the four of us, I thought, and thinking this I said it aloud, suddenly. The sound of my voice was like an explosion, frightening. I sat up and looked around me. There was nothing except the lights like icicles. What I am is that which exists between the four of us. The iceberg was there, in the darkness, and I could not need to see it.

  I closed my eyes. There was the sensation of spaces approaching and departing, the movement of machinery like the pumping of a heart. What is required, I thought, is a body to make love bearable. It is round us, outside of us, there are no veins by which the body might live. Man is inside the beating heart and the heart sends the blood of love pumping away from him and the blood gets lost on the floors of the sea. Man is a cell in a body that does not exist. Blood is on the sea and it calms it like oil, but it is lost, always lost, and the sea dilutes it. What is required, I thought, is a bubble to make love breathable. Love is outside a man, it is not inside him, and a space is required in which he may move. If the body is impossible because the body has been betrayed then a bubble is recreated to give air to breathe. Our bodies are at the centre, they are not the whole. A bubble that might form at the bottom of the sea a small loosening bubble silvering quietly straining upwards being held down tightly straining upwards silvering beautifully breaking free and shooting upwards and then the bubble is there. “Marius,” I called. “Marius!” I woke up. He was there.

  He was walking along the pavement towards the entrance to the flats, and when he heard me he stopped and stood still and waited for me. I went over to him and I saw him peering at me through the darkness. “Hullo,” I said. I was shivering violently with the cold. He was waiting for me. My teeth were shaking and I could not control my voice.

  “Hullo,” he said.

  “I was looking for you earlier on
.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I wanted to say something, but I am so damn cold.”

  “Let’s walk,” he said.

  I followed him in a fever, shaking like a maniac.

  “I went back to the hospital,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “I went there after you.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I am so damn cold.”

  “What is it that she wants from you? A tree?”

  “And some fishes.”

  “Let’s go and have breakfast,” he said.

  We went to an all-night café. It was fairly empty. The clubs had not yet closed and most of the people there were tired servicemen with nowhere to sleep. “They have very good sausages,” Marius said.

  “Yes. And chocolate.”

  “Do you often come here?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “They are very friendly. Do you eat the chocolate with your sausages?”

  “I drink the chocolate.”

  “Oh yes, I see.”

  A waitress came and took our order. It was marvelously warm.

  “People do eat marmalade with bacon,” Marius said.

  “Do they?”

  “Yes. They have a special instrument to spread it with.”

  “That doesn’t seem necessary.”

  “No. It is strange how quickly time goes and yet it is static at four o’clock in the morning.”

  “It is when the days change and nothing ever happens in a change.”

  “It is very exciting,” Marius said.

  Our sausages came and we ate them carefully.

  “All terrible things are done between breakfast and lunch,” I said.

  “We will go to sleep.”

  “When time goes so slowly.”

  “Some people can go to sleep at any time wherever they are. That has always seemed to me to be very dangerous.”

  “Generals and politicians do it, I suppose otherwise they could not bear it.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Do you think that something happens when there is nothing happening?”

  “Oh I think so,” Marius said.

  When we had eaten we sat for a long time drinking our chocolate.

  “We have been here half an hour,” I said.

  “Shall we sleep? There is quite a lot of time before we can see her.”

  “Yes. Do you remember how during the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day one always notices the birds?”

  “If you give her a tree it will be like that and then it will not be frightening.”

  “Come back and stay with me, there are beds in my room.”

  “I will,” he said.

  We went out into the night air where there was nothing happening, nothing happening at all, and yet there was something going on very quickly around us, the sun coming up and the sky lighting like a skin and the veins of the morning traveling static above our heads. There was an arm above the roof tops and a reach of air and the blood pumping quietly round the streets in which we walked. The world was a body and we breathed it, and we went to my room and slept till lunch time.

  10

  “Hullo,” she said. “You can put it over there.”

  “It has got the most tremendous roots.”

  “Oh Marius, you look like a chinaman.”

  “I really don’t know oh isn’t it splendid,” a nurse was saying.

  “Why do I look like a chinaman?”

  “With a box in each hand that is how I imagine them.”

  “There is water you see they are striped like silk.”

  “Oh mind good gracious oh very attractive.”

  “Where shall I put the tank, lady?” the workman said.

  “Just here, please, will you put them into it quick?”

  “Quick as rain, lady.”

  “By the window the birds will come and you will see them.”

  “The leaves are like fingers I will watch them grow.”

  “That’s a rare old tree for your garden, lady.”

  I put the tree in its tub by the window and looked at it. It was a sad little tree, rather bent.

  “And what variety would it be?” the nurse said.

  “It is a fruit tree.”

  “A fruit tree, oh yes, they are very attractive fruit trees.”

  “A pond and all for your garden, lady.”

  “Is it heated and is there air?”

  “It plugs into the wall there is a light that lights.”

  “There is coral and a moonstone and a block of quartz.”

  “Oh Marius, how lovely.”

  “And a lump that looks like Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Oh very attractive very really most unusual.”

  “And are there bubbles that go on and on bubbling for ever?”

  “For ever, lady.”

  “I shall watch them,” she said.

  We put the sand and the stones in the bottom of the tank and there was a weed that seemed to grow as we filled it with water.

  “Do not touch them,” she said.

  “They swim out you see you put them like this.”

  “There is one with a face, I can see it.”

  “They’ve all got faces, lady.”

  “There is one very hungry, what do I give them to eat?”

  “I have a package I will give you.”

  “They eat oh yes certainly some food I believe.”

  “Do I sprinkle it on the top like seeds like snow?”

  “Just sprinkle it, lady.”

  “They will not eat they are frightened.”

  “An aquarium and a fruit tree are so unusual.”

  “They will eat, lady.”

  “Can you switch on the light then the bubbles will rise?”

  “Switch it on, lady.”

  “The bubbles I will count them they are warm I hope.”

  “They are warm when the light shines they think it is the sun.”

  We stood around while she sat up in bed and tapped at the glass with one fragile finger.

  “Does that tree really have fruit and can I eat it?”

  “Oh certainly, we’ll see, fruit is so quenching.”

  “Does it matter if I eat it?”

  “I do not think that it would matter if you ate it.”

  “They are eating now, lady, fishes always eat when you stop from watching them.”

  “They have eaten, then I can see their mouths.”

  “That’s enough, lady.”

  “Everything has eaten, I will eat my fruit.”

  “Hope it makes you better, lady.”

  “Oh we’ll be much better won’t we much more comfortable altogether.”

  “I remember about trees once you have eaten them you go on.”

  “The bubbles are like pearls.”

  “I have always eaten fruit I will go on.”

  “The bubbles are like eyes.”

  “I will watch them.”

  When the workman and the nurse had gone I stood at the end of her bed and Marius sat beside her and the fishes quivered like ghosts. “I want to thank you,” she said.

  “You have thanked me.”

  “Let me give you my hand.”

  I walked round the edge of her bed and she lifted the hand that was like a shell and she put it in mine. “You have given me back my garden,” she said.

  I looked at the fishes that were quite still as if there was no pressure on them and no time because nothing ever happened. Her hand was like coral. Only the square glass case and the light that was the sun and the bubbles that went on rising for ever and for ever.

  “What are you thinking?” she said.

  “I am thinking that for them there is no time.”

  “Nor for me,” she said.

  “They are floating and there is nothing to move them.”

  “I am in this room,” she said. She looked around it. “What will you be doing in six months time?” />
  “The same as I do now, I suppose.”

  “That does not often happen. Will you be together?”

  “Perhaps we will be together.”

  “I should like it if you were.”

  I looked up and saw for the first time that there was a crucifix at the head of her bed.

  “We shall be here,” Marius said.

  “Perhaps you won’t.”

  “We will have a Christmas of crystallized fruit.”

  “I want to know what you will do.”

  Marius said, “I suppose there are still some things we can do.”

  I said, “Do you remember saying that you and I were dead to the world? That for us there was no future?”

  “There are others,” Marius said.

  “You ought to be free,” she said.

  Marius was sitting forwards looking carefully at the fish. “You know all that nonsense about freedom,” he said.

  “It is not all nonsense,” she said.

  I was looking at the crucifix. I was sure it had not been there the day before. “Don’t we have to make sacrifices?” I said.

  “Sacrifices?”

  “That is what you said.” Marius looked at me.

  “You see,” she said, “whatever you do you will be children, and that is what I mean by free.”

  “Are we so like children?”

  “I hope so, yes, it is a proper thing to be.”

  “Children are so cruel.”

  “That is nonsense, they are not, they simply have a capacity for being practical.”

  “They have a capacity for being hurt.”

  “That is quite a practical thing to have.”

  She saw that I was looking at the crucifix but she said nothing about it.

  “Children . . . ” Marius began.

  “Of course you will get hurt,” she said.

  “I suppose so.”

  “I want to know what you will do when you are hurt.”

  Marius turned to me. “You can only do anything in the world where it concerns you. It still does sometimes.”

  “Often,” I said.

  “Children are free from responsibility like this,” she said.

  “Like what?” Marius said.