by Nigel Dennis
I am always warned of his arriving by the noises of his radio, after which he crosses the paddock and takes my wooden chair just inside the greenhouse door – always very spruce with his white-metal numbers and signs and his red face full of sturdiness. It is always a comfort to have him sitting there while I go on working with my plants, not only because he understands every movement but because he can talk, slowly and sensibly, about every sort and kind of plant – one would be a fool to think that because a thing is new or rare one could spring it on him as if he were an ignoramus. What’s more, his understanding talk makes me talk too – and sometimes I talk far too much, because as time passes and I look back I imagine ridiculous things that might, however, just be true – the space of garden, for example, that ran from the verandah to the gravel road and where I found the cranesbills – this now nags at me all the time and I think of a hundred and one rarities that were there for the finding, but never discovered by me and never likely to be by any other person. The policeman understands my distress at this, and my shame in not having discovered more: he also knows – only too well by now, I’m afraid – the fate of my three hundred plants, my leaving behind of the storksbills and house-leeks, etc., etc., and can appreciate the blow to pride and conscience. When I get angry, looking back, he knows why, and though he says always ‘I’d feel the same’, he encourages me to believe that it wasn’t just time lost, that opportunity will come again, that knowledge is never wasted – all things I know myself but come helpfully from him. He is also my greatest help in the public part of these days, because until the public can give itself a new war to amuse itself, it lives off stories of the last one and must always go on cooking them up again and re-telling them in fresh versions – for what reason, is unknown to me. So, MACKENZIE is a name to every man, woman and child, particularly because he never came home alive, and his famous escapes known to every fool – which is where they would like to bring me in, as if I had not answered questions enough. But my two visitors are famous too, and always singing my heroism for the refuge I gave them – and this, too, my good policeman understands when I confide the truth. ‘Perhaps you did better than you think,’ he says, crossing his legs, and once, pointing with a smile to his own war-ribbons: ‘Easier to win, when you’re not alone.’ He also says: ‘It’s what you allow to happen that counts too’ and ‘It’s how it worked out that signifies, isn’t it?’ – a question to which I have no answer, so go on working, always feeling ‘at home’ because it is like old times to have a ‘guard’.
In the end, his sharp ear catches his ORDERS from the parked scooter and off he goes, always leaving me better than when he came. Soon, I put away my tools, run my eye for the last time over my pots, adjust the ventilators for the warm night and check humidity. It is always odd to close the greenhouse door at last behind me and see the last light of the day in the sky, and summer dusk coming down. I have to cross the open paddock to my bungalow, and usually things go well enough. But sometimes as I walk over the grass, a little breeze comes up from the north-east behind me and I feel suddenly a big, cold hand pressing my shirt against my back – and with fifty yards to go, I run and run.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2014
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Nigel Dennis, 1966
The right of Nigel Dennis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–32094–3
