Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘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.

  Nowadays the voices he gave them had become quite sophisticated. Long before the war, when Leon had just arrived in the Botanical Gardens, plants had spoken to him using the elemental speech he had always bestowed on wind and waves. During his rise to curator he had been obliged to meet more and grander people – not simply administrators like the director, Dr Anselmus, but highly informed amateurs with conservatories of their own, visiting dignitaries from other gardens all over Europe, even social butterflies who, re-emerging from the war’s enforced hibernation, were beginning once more to flutter round his House as if it were a buddleia coming into bloom. From all these people he had caught new modes of expression, new voices. Recently he had noticed his plants adopting their own conversational tones. Since the coming of the night people, especially, several had taken on a brittle sarcastic quality which revealed unsuspected currents. What could only be described as bitchiness and rivalry was opening interesting fissures in what had once seemed the uniform dumb harmony of green and living things. These days he hardly even needed to walk his forest paths in order to overhear his plants. Long after he had gone to bed their discourse continued softly, whispers which he could distantly hear until the moment he fell asleep and again not long after waking. He had come to recognise distinct generic voices. The palms were overbearing, the Annonas by turns spiteful and tender. In their joint company he was drawn osmotically upwards and out of himself as if his very being were as fluid as sap. Sometimes these dialogues told him things he hadn’t known he knew. Not the least strange aspect of this odd man was that he was thus able to be unself-aware while providing a half-amused, knowing commentary as though he were standing a long way off from himself or as if it were all happening in a distant country.

  The last candle made of his bending face the ancient mask of a tyrant or a priest before it, too, winked out. Leon paused then as he always did, looking back on a world which only he ever saw. It spread away to every horizon, a tessellated land whose each plant was distinct yet thickly nested among its neighbours. Small water noises tinkled where voices had been muffled. Newt and terrapin nosed their way about invisible tanks while drops condensing inside an acre of cold glass pattered down on soil and leaves. Sometimes he could hear the tightly-wound shoots of bamboos and lilies squeak as they thrust upwards. As his eyes adjusted, dabs and dots of green light marked patches of luminous fungi whose spores had arrived with the plants in their Wardian cases (along with mites and pests and noxious insects) and had thrived in the congenial warmth. And, as he waited still longer, a directionless radiance seeped into his eyes. It was so faint as to be without colour, yet had an intensity of its own powerful enough to permeate the universe. This was starlight filtering through the thin layer of snow on the roof. Where was this place really, this sublime kiosk? Rushing through space? Sunk in the sea? It was here and everywhere and nowhere possible, and it always made him shiver with pleasure and humility, as one looking up at mountains. From his mouth issued gentle, unvoiced whispers, almost sighs: shuuuff … ssiiih … which, as soft as the starlight was dim, surely penetrated every corner of the cosmos. They were the repetitive gesture of someone who, quite without knowing it, lives in a state of constant sorrow.

  Already thinking of the Annonas he was going to re-pot first thing next morning, Leon slipped in through No Admittance, turned out the light inside and crossed the darkened room unerringly to the boiler room door. Inside, the dim 40-watt bulb was on, hung with cobwebs. To his eyes it dazzled with detail. Much of the floor space of this large room was taken up with the furnaces themselves, with bunkers full of small coal and logs and with heavily lagged tanks, pumps and pipes all set with gauges at strategic points. The floor was immaculately swept. On it in one corner lay a large mattress. Leon turned the light off and went over to kneel on it. By the red glow spilling out of the open firebox doors a figure became visible drawn up on its side beneath a sheet, a plane of face amid a tangle of gypsy tresses, an eyelash trembling in mock sleep. With the tenderness of someone opening a longed-for present the kneeling man drew down the sheet, exposing a naked back which he bent forward to kiss. ‘The happy land,’ he murmured. ‘Arabia felix.’

  During the night when he awoke with practised punctuality to feed the boilers a glance through the window into the yard showed it was still snowing. In the morning when he got up and went into the Palm House the light’s effect produced a tingle of remembrance, something to do with what winter means for northerners. So well did he know the smell of snow he thought he could sniff it even inside, in a temperature of 27°C, looking out at the Botanical Gardens lumpy and quilted in the grey early light. Not yet bright, the pallor nevertheless drove in through the glass from all sides, leaching out the plants’ subtle greens. Their extravagant shapes suddenly looked clumsy, the palms tattered, everything ragged and sprawling as if the nature of heat was to bleed away all rigor of outline, corrupt the purposeful and self-contained. The ashy light beat upwards from the wastes outside, the roof beneath its rug of snow darker than the sky itself. Over Leon there came the feeling, beginning at the base of his spine, which he remembered from childhood: a heavy thrill brought on by clouds black with snow massing and spreading overhead, shedding that bruised radiance, avatar of dislocation and extremity. />
  Meanwhile his favourite tree, Tamarindus indica, had spoken of him in the dark hours as he had lain on his shared mattress. The vocabulary was that of the night visitors and the books he had read. The tone – now tart, now mournful – was entirely his own. To his drowsy mind the plant’s gentle mockery was proof of its affection, while its longing expressed something which seemed as much a part of him as the blood sighing in his ears:

  ‘We’re all of us devoted to our gardener, of course, as he moves among us with his golden wand. However, those of us capable of thought – which is most of the species in this House with the obvious exception of the bananas, who are famously dim – object now and then to the ludicrous qualities he assigns us. We’ve come to the conclusion he can’t help his anthropomorphism, and leave it at that. Nevertheless I do think he ought to be more scrupulous before bestowing on us characters such as “lone and difficult creature” or however he describes me. My neighbour on one side, a very handsome African orchid tree called Monodora, will vouch for my being easy-going and companionable; or he will if he has any sense. He himself is due for an annual bout of the dumps which always happens when his flower buds start to form in expectation of spring. It’s worth it, for since he’s completely leafless when he does flower the blooms hang most spectacularly from his bare branches, at which point he becomes loquacious in a triumphalist vein which is quite insufferable. The rest of the year he’s an excellent listener and a good friend, giving off sympathy and a faint smell of nutmeg.

  ‘As for my “forbidding acidity”, this is a human palate speaking. What to our gardener is twelve per cent tartaric acid is to me an expression of the best in me, what honey is to a bee. Sadly, no-one will ever really appreciate it since the birds and animals who would happily feast on it and scatter my seeds never visit this House. It’s one of the minor moans I burden poor Monodora with. My chief complaint is far more serious and difficult to express and concerns – I may as well come clean – my neighbour on the other side. It is of course hopeless, and I accept it. She’s far younger and smaller than I. As if that weren’t enough she really has no business to be in here at all. If our gardener considers that I’m displaced I can’t imagine what he’d think of her; but by some wilful – and for me merciful – blindness he hasn’t yet noticed her. How she survives is equally mysterious since it ought to be far too hot for her in here. Yet she does, bravely and miraculously. Very well, as I’m going to have to say it sooner or later: she’s a hemlock. Yes, yes, I know. Ridiculous and unseemly. Grotesque, even. A mere baby. A biennial. Don’t imagine I couldn’t say your lines for you, and more eloquently at that.