Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Five

  Just as an overtired child may not be able to sleep when finally allowed to go to bed but grumpily kicks hot blankets as night wears thin and a new day shows through, so (one might fancifully think) there is a time for marriage which, bided over, slips past and turns into a differently dawning future. Within very little time the night denied, the pairing instinct cooled, are as one, unmissed. This was what happened to Leon, who was evidently not intended by nature to toss fretfully on a marriage bed. Once he had stopped being a gardener’s boy, a wheeler of dung, a mere stercorifer, he blossomed into a horticulturist accomplished enough by 1938 to step into the mildewed shoes of the Palm House’s old curator. That had been his ambition from the moment of first setting foot inside the Gardens, and the intervening years had been those of purposeful apprenticeship. They were also those of his potential hymeneal prime – if ever he had one, which in retrospect looks doubtful. In any case it remained unfulfilled. Instead he studied with singleminded zeal as though at the college he could not afford, and by night the cobwebby panes of his potting shed glowed to the lambent apricot of midnight oil.

  Not that he was erotically anaesthetised, though it remains a good question what might have caused him unqualified arousal. From time to time plenty of the strollers and saunterers in the Botanical Gardens glanced, were intercepted glancing, and left wondering what it was had been shot from the eyes of the tall, samphire-haired young man as he squatted with secateurs stilled in mid-snip. Nothing unquiet in itself though disquieting all the same, withdrawn yet longing, gentle but avid. A mad monk? they wondered, for Rasputin was still a recent enough figure to supply yellow press imagery. Not only had Rasputin been hypnotic and hard to kill but a demon lover as well. Or so they said. It might be worth finding out. Nothing serious, of course; just a dangerous little dalliance. To trifle with a strong young gardener would be a welcome respite from the Biedermeier gallantries of yet another dentist. Such thoughts passed through several brains of both sexes.

  What, though, passed through Leon’s? Plants, for one thing. Plants in their kingdoms, divisions, classes, subdivisions, subclasses, orders, families, genera and species. By dint of much study he was making himself at home in the beautiful Linnaean edifice, the vast echoing palace down whose succession of halls, corridors, rooms, chambers and antechambers one could track a particular cupboard wherein, on a particular shelf, would be the very specimen one sought. Far from cramping the natural world into labelled boxes the system allowed it to proliferate endlessly as fresh cupboards were built, new shelves installed. He was surrounded suddenly by a universe of knowledge with himself at the centre, a universe whose tendency was centrifugal and seemed to flee him as fast as he tried to master its details. It filled him more with wonder than despair.

  This fascination did not in any way eclipse or thrust into abeyance his emotional life. It was his emotional life. Into it, and into the crystalline goal of the Palm House whose swinging weathercock glittered ever in his upturned pupils, he poured all his unhappiness and longing and private language. Deep within, like the embryonic plumule clenched in the heart of a seed, lay the folded outlines of his boyhood resolution to be true only to the one who walked a beach and talked to the sea. It would always be there. If ever it were allowed to shoot and grow fully one might imagine a lofty and gracile tree of unknown species burst through into upper air and unwreathe its gleams against an azure sky. Heraldic, unique, it would stand alone and quiver to a celestial wind, shedding the soft husking of eternal voices. Or something of the sort. The god which slept within was not to be expressed in any human syllable. Ssiiih, it whispered to him late at night when his eyes watered with yawns and set afloat the oil lamp’s teary flame. Shuuuff, it eased itself through chinks in the shed roof to comfort him. You are not alone. I shall never leave you.

  Not alone in the potting shed? Draughts apart, no, not on a few occasions in his eligible years. There was, for example, Greta, the wife of the owner of Geller’s, the city’s largest and oldest department store. The day? The wind? The gleety seep of gland? Maybe the look on her face as he finally snapped shut the secateurs and rose from his crouch. He didn’t know who she was then, of course. Bourgeoise, a good ten years older than he and with the faint down on her cheeks which by the time she was sixty would be a uniform fluff. She had with her two facially pretty but bodily plain little boys with plump corduroy bottoms and expensive model motor cars on strings which banged and crashed among boulders of gravel on the path. Incredulously, Leon found himself letting her through the wicket gate into the nightbound gardens at nine o’clock. It was clear that the first glimpse of the potting shed’s interior by lamplight acted on her like sunshine on morning-glory. A bloom of hidden fantasy opened its unnatural petals before his eyes as she visibly checked out the props and assembled them into a tableau. Excited by the detailed nature of her requirements he obeyed each of her nearly articulated demands that she be stripped and spread ungently over a bale of peat, her face buried in it, pegged beneath fruit-cage netting. He had found himself standing naked but for gardening gloves, in manly state and tearing an access in the net, for the mesh was fine enough to keep out little birds. Her cries were soon muffled by peat. They went on a long time and only acquired a despairing edge when he paused for breath. Much later she was sprawled on the cold brick floor, limp, her mouth and face smeared with peat crumbs like an infant’s with chocolate. Within minutes she was back in her tweed armour, shaking scraps of three-thousand-years-dead vegetation out of her hair.

  ‘My God,’ she said hoarsely. ‘You’re a sheikh, you know that? I demand a return match and I shan’t accept a no.’

  She came back a few nights later, but although the anticipation initially kept Leon aloft he never managed to soar as he had. This second time round the identical playlet appeared too contrived, on a third night too silly. That part of him ineluctably surfaced which didn’t want to grind people’s faces into bales of mould and grapple through netting a tergo, O Greta. When she had left he raked and patted his dishevelled bed in whose lignin and fibres he could smell her scent. He lay in the dark listening to the owls and was swept with an old sadness, unable finally to see any connection between what he had just done and what he had longed for that lost summer at Flinn. A semi-resolution evolved that he wouldn’t do it again, though he broke it on a handful of occasions for lust of an experimental nature. Excitement came mainly from the hope that he might find whatever it was which would satisfy him; like many people he never did. The nearest he came to liking a participant in these investigations was in the case of a young male student at the University studying botany who was destined to die seven years later in the park a couple of hundred metres away, strapped to a plane tree in front of a firing squad, protesting in vain that he be allowed to keep his spectacles on. (Whom, then, did the obligatory blindfold protect?) But over and above all these diversions, or behind and beyond them, stood the Palm House and Leon’s dormant internal tree ready at any moment to sprout, untouched by casual nocturnal goings-on. The owls hooted and a fox barked in the frosty air, each sending up a tiny cloud which unravelled in the same breeze that swung the galleon, with a scrawny sound, under full canvas towards fabulous lands.

  It was a cold blustery March day when the old curator failed to report for work, victim of an overnight stroke. He died the following morning at almost the exact moment when, hundreds of miles to the southeast, the new Austrian chancellor Artur Seyss-Inquart announced the Anschluss. Leon, who had been the curator’s assistant for two years and for most of that time had largely run the Palm House, was sent for by Dr Anselmus and told the job was his if he wanted it. He responded with a decorous show of reluctance, for he had been fond of the old boy, but within the week had outlined to Anselmus various plans which were obviously not the fruit of a few days’ hasty thought. They included reorganising the House the better to display its treasures; the installation of a new heating system; closer links with similar establishments abroad for the
exchange of specimens; the creation of a seed bank for tropical species; and more consideration given to the general public, who might even make contributions in exchange for being allowed to take home cuttings of some of the hardier plants and grow them themselves. This was, he said, calculated to excite interest and participation. Dr Anselmus, who had never heard anything like it, said such a proposal would need careful evaluation.

  ‘This is primarily a learned society,’ observed one of his fellow board members, a man whose waking hours were largely devoted to the task of trying to breed a black hyacinth. ‘We have centuries-old connections with the University here as well as with the larger scientific community. The public are welcome to see the Gardens – our founders expressly desired that they should. But they are no place for showmanship and flim-flam. One of our own salaried experts rearing cuttings for ignorant people to let die in overheated sitting rooms, indeed. Never heard such a thing.’

  Neither had the others. That aside, they were generally in favour of Leon’s energetic approach. It was still too soon to say it but his predecessor had let the place sag a bit over the last few years. It was widely agreed that Leon alone had kept it in some sort of order, noticing cracked and broken panes which the old man’s rheumy vision had missed and showing an instinctive grasp of the boilers’ vagaries. Above all he had the gift. Things sprang into life beneath his hands. At his behest stands of bamboo whisked upwards, trembling with vigour.

  As soon as his appointment was confirmed he moved his quarters into the Palm House. For the first time in eight years the potting shed window ceased to kindle to the nectarine glow of learning. Within a month one of the panes was mysteriously broken and a thrush built its nest inside. And now it becomes a little clearer, that matter of not marrying, not pairing. He thought in a gardener’s timescales. Where he planted a nut he saw a tree, saw also how it would chime with surrounding plants in ten years’ time, how high the leaves would hang and what coloured shade they would cast. This peculiar fatidic talent overleapt clumps of years in a nimble act of aesthetic and botanic imagination. It was the extension of a habit of seeing the past similarly demarcated by episodes which threw long shadows across elisions of time. This was a life divided by important staging-posts, not one geared for diurnal domesticity. In the absence of a person the unifying thread was work, the vision, the thing glimpsed dimly or in flashes as though picked out by a lighthouse on a darkling sea. Even so, he sometimes lost sight of any future and a sentient malignity rose up between himself and his work. Then it became easy to understand a lighthouse as projecting fat wedges of darkness in between its blazing apertures, for the lens still revolved behind its shutter and the light was constant. Yet light withheld had a different quality to ordinary darkness. It would fill the room behind the No Admittance door, seeping down at night from the slanted panes overhead, distilled from the cosmos pressing against the glass.

  Maybe these occasional moments of nocturnal dolour were such as come to all those who of a sudden hear their own hearts in the dark and cannot forestall the chill arithmetic which leaps ahead, only to be brought up short like a guard dog on a chain. It sickens, this jerk of knowing trees planted now will never be seen fully grown; that a garden planned and sown will remain only a sketch, a landscape destined to be filled in by other hands and no doubt in the wrong colours. (The phantom of continuity hoots from a corner of the canvas.) The unwived man lies kithless in the dark and imagines his children, pretty and affectionate and talented, bearing away his seed for ever … No; it’s meaningless. A faint injunction in the blood, that’s all. Prettiness fades, affection becomes contaminated, ex-talents wear blue collars. The arithmetic is no longer simple, the melancholy multiplies. Leon moved his mattress into the boiler room so he should not have to face the stars. The glow of the furnaces, their chinkings and siftings and muffled internal collapses was comforting and reminded him that at his back, on the other side of a thin brick wall, lay a tropical forest. The black spots then, were no more than a sense of anticlimax breaking in. He was here at last, master of the very heart of the Gardens in whose crystal pavilion he now lived and reigned. Beside him in the semi-darkness he once more found his lifetime companion, true unto death even if given to temporary desertion in the cold starlight of the small hours. Here, said the furnaces, their calm slow pulse sending warmth to every part of the Palm House. Here, said the shrubs whose upturned hands supported their transparent bubble of unnatural, triumphant life lost among the galaxies and constellations. A sanctuary for the delicate and the fugitive, a bright glass bulwark against the brutish and the drear … These exalted ideas came and went fleetingly and were generally replaced by rather prosaic thoughts. He had the sudden fancy to go down to the fish market, buy a peck of herrings, rig up a smoke box and make bloaters. This notion was so satisfactory he never needed to carry it out.

  He began putting into effect some of his less controversial plans. He moved the showy Caesalpinia pulcherrima to a more prominent position. He also planted certain shrubs and trees – including the Balsam of Tolú, Myroxylon balsamum – whose resins had helped him breathe as a child. At the same time he put in a formal request to the Society for a new heating system which was shelved rather than turned down flat. We’ll see next year. Meanwhile I’m sure you’ll agree the place would look the better for a lick of paint. Leon thought this a strange decision. While not unwelcome it implied that the alternative to an expensive new heating plant was an economical cosmetic gesture, whereas in reality the painting of a structure like the Palm House was a complex and costly affair. Since the roof surfaces were curved they required an elaborate framework of scaffolding whose configuration needed constant altering as painting progressed. However, as the framework retreated downwards it revealed a spreading area of glass scraped of industrial grime and freshly polished, supported by an airy cobweb of white glazing bars and topped by a regilded weathercock. The effect was of such lightness and sparkle that he stopped worrying about furnaces and boilers. By the time it was finished three months later his palace appeared to float slightly off the ground, and when glimpsed from the other end of the gardens between trees in full leaf could have been an enormous dirigible of fantastic design beginning its ascent, bearing aloft a cargo of sweating greenery.

  He hatched another of his plans strictly in secret. It was not that he was as radical as the Society’s trustees feared, simply enthusiastic. To him the Palm House was no mere laboratory or extension of the University. It represented a mysterious world apart, full of wonders which otherwise would never be seen in a cold northern country. He wanted more people to appreciate it. He got in touch with the reptile house at the nearby Zoo and they sent over six pairs of little jade terrapins which settled down on the marshy margins of the tanks. But at the back of his mind was the desire for a project which would be individual enough to draw people into this world, and one day he had the solution. He would assemble a collection of night-flowering varieties so that if visitors wanted to see them in bloom they would have to come after dark. The idea excited him and he mulled it over constantly. It seemed like an inspiration. On a lower level was the thought that he might also set aside a small area for plants which yielded spices, believing it would surely interest people to see a pepper plant with its berries, a nutmeg tree, some members of the ginger family such as cardamom and turmeric, a clove tree. He thought he could prevail on the keeper of the dilapidated Temperate House to provide space for an extension of these culinary plants to include such things as a tea tree and also one or two of the umbellifers from closer to home like coriander, fennel and cumin. There already was a cacao tree hidden away in the Palm House so he moved it to a better position and painted a new label for it, beneath Theobroma cacao adding the words ‘chocolate tree’. All these plans would take time to realise, obviously. He submitted a list of plants to the red-haired secretary (now showing ash among the flames) and in due course seeds and cuttings began arriving from other botanical collections, from private and public sou
rces around the world. One of the first things to come was a box of rhizomes from a Malabari importer in London, and it was not long before the first red and yellow cardamom flowers were opening in the steamy heat.

  Good days, these were, full of energy. Within the freshly painted Palm House Leon reigned like a monarch or officiated like a bronchitic high priest, while all around his texts opened in the balmy dampness and spoke messages brought from afar. He understood their spiced and scented words and spoke back to them as he came and went fondly anointing, tying, pinching out, re-potting. The incense of regeneration, the calm satisfaction of growing things rose into the air and glittered. The spectral dust of a rainbow-spray caught by a shaft of sunlight through a pane could not have beguiled a visitor more than this authentic tropical reek. It had always been there, of course, but under Leon’s regime it had intensified and was now shot through with other things, subtleties of a melancholy which was now of listless afternoons, now of a nameless longing. A garden always speaks of its gardener in ways other than the obvious, and a stove house is no exception. Something of Leon’s character diffused throughout the building. In any case it enticed people in. They wandered and stayed longer than formerly, reading the labels or just sitting on the benches now provided in the central aisle. They noticed the quality of the silence, accentuated by the hollow pock of drops falling on to broad, tough leaves and by the sparrows which hopped in through the ventilation louvres up under the dome and fluttered and twirled in this indoor summer. Far from acting as a crystal drum to magnify the noises of the outside world, it seemed the glass skin was enough to exclude most sounds entirely. Just occasionally the faintest clanging of a tram’s bell or the hooting of a motor-car horn penetrated as from a long way off, so that elderly ex-colonials who had sticked themselves over from clubs smelling of leather and gout to spend a quiet afternoon could dream they were once again overhearing Benares or Kuala Lumpur or Macassar, that the streets beyond the garden wall were thronged with rickshaw men and water carriers. Until Leon took it over the Palm House had always been closed on Sundays. Now at his insistence it was open the week round and it became something of a ritual to visit it, especially on grey Sunday afternoons when a cold drizzle fell from a low sky. Then it was a perverse pleasure to saunter through the tropical warmth, endimanché, exchanging glances among the leaves, some furtive, some frankly challenging. It was as if, sensing this as a place apart from the ordinary world, people were emboldened in ways otherwise reserved for intercontinental expresses, ocean liners and the beach at Biarritz. That time off could be snatched from between the sullen claws of northern Sunday piety was all the more piquant.