Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Meanwhile, I’ve been learning things myself from this new perspective of being up to my neck in a jam-jar. I’ve now been separated from my family an hour and I have to report that the original desolate feeling of separation has considerably faded. To be truthful, except as images in my memory they’ve effectively vanished. There’s a certain reckless bravery in being able to ask: do my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, my closest friend really exist? Or have I invented them to fill the role of parents, siblings, friend, which the world demands we supply in order to become socially visible ourselves? No doubt they’re still out there somewhere in that distant land beyond the door, but that part of my life’s clearly over. Now there’s only a face, chin on fingers, an unspeaking mouth, and dark eyes brimming with anguish.’

  Eight

  One afternoon the princess said:

  ‘Your lotus plant, your present to me: it’s doing well. Always in flower. It reminds me of home. We call it basimbun, which means calm or calming.’

  ‘Not very original,’ said Leon testily. ‘How many flowers are noisy or irritant?’

  ‘We have several of those,’ she said, undismayed. ‘In most cultures there’s a language of flowers, I believe. At any rate we have in our forests a thin, tall plant with a big, straggly yellow head which turns according to the sun.’

  ‘A sort of sunflower, I suppose.’

  ‘Only in a negative sense. This plant turns consistently away. Our name for it means “positively enraging”.’

  Leon was surprised by the adolescent thrill it gave him to discover he was being flirted with. Lately the princess’s mode had been confusing him more and more. What could she possibly want from him? She a beautiful foreign lady of the highest social caste, he a mere gardener. Rather a good gardener if he said so himself, even quite learned in his subject, but scarcely high-born. (Now and then he could still experience a fugitive olfactory vision, a nasal illusion when somewhere between nostril and brain a drifting corpuscle of scent lodged for a moment in the wrong hole or bumped up against the wrong terminals – that was how it felt – and he thought to smell again the reek of fish oil. As a scent it could scarcely consort with jasmine and ylang-ylang on equal terms.) Perhaps after all it wasn’t flirting but some innocently toying mode which came naturally to princesses? Yet there was about those tucked, oriental eyelids a sidelong knowingness, surely, which added a belated possibility to Cou Min’s glances of eighteen years ago. Doleful at this new suggestion of missed chances he could only think he would still miss them even if he recognised them as they occurred. It was all well and good to take a bull by its horns provided one knew what to do with it next. Wrench it on to its back and straddle it triumphantly? Or just steady its head in order to examine the tag in its ear or the touching whorls where its hair changed direction across the broad forehead? To become lost in such details for even a moment was to have lost the moment itself.

  Gloomily awkward, he lifted a mould-stained hand in a wordless gesture. No matter that the princess had come to him on one of her private visits, he didn’t really want this conversation, partly because he suspected it would be upsetting in some way but mostly because he was just now extremely preoccupied. One of his assistants had come to him that morning carrying the heavy purplish flower of a banana. He had found it, he told Leon, lying at the foot of the plant, severed. Miserably Leon had weighed it in his hands, sniffed its rubbery scent, peeled back a thick, tightly sheathed petal. Nearly a foot long, the flower looked like a heart and as he gazed at it he thought it might as well be his own. Who could have done such a thing? One of the assistants, presumably, since it would have needed a step-ladder, if not unnatural agility, to reach. But which of this riff-raff who had been foisted upon him? Possibly the very man now standing before him with a convincing display of concern on his unlikable features. What made everything worse was that it was the second such incident. Only ten days ago he himself had found one of his favourites, the Balsam of Tolú, with a nine-inch wide strip of bark cut from its circumference, bleeding copiously from a wound which might well prove fatal. He had done what he could: a liberal painting with infusion followed by a tar-paper plaster, but he was reconciled to the tree’s likely death. He had been bewildered, then angry. The mutilation had the precision of deliberate damage. His first thought, immediately suppressed, was that it was one of his night visitors. This was surely ridiculous. He simply couldn’t imagine any of them carving away with a pocket knife in constant threat of discovery. The middle classes didn’t vandalise things. A crazed bohemian might, under the influence of opium or absinthe or whatever crazed bohemians took, but on the whole the night people carried cigarette holders not knives. Besides, they had paid to get in … Leon had preferred to parcel up all further speculation even as he sealed the tar-paper. It was a horrible unexplained incident in a world of horrible unexplained incidents. Now this second act of vandalism suggested the matter was by no means closed. He ought to go at once to Dr Anselmus and report it but he would then have to explain why he had never reported the damaged Myroxylon. Still, far too much was at stake to worry about a small matter of face-saving. Why did this have to happen at the very moment when for all sorts of political reasons the Palm House needed to be a showcase, a prize asset? The least suggestion that it was an expensive anachronism with dubious staff, clapped out boilers and a vandalism problem would play right into the hand of. Of? Of whom? Dark undercurrents. With difficulty he turned his attention to the princess.

  ‘“Positively enraging”,’ she was repeating with a smile. ‘But nevertheless a flower of considerable, if difficult, attraction. I’m interrupting your work, I realise. Your duties are endless.’

  As a matter of fact at this particular moment all five of the assistants he commanded were variously watering, sponging down leaves and raking out dead material in various parts of the House. His main occupation at such times was supervision since all the staff were new, in two cases being little more than casual labourers. A sign of the times indeed. Such a thing would have been unthinkable before the war. It was one more of the countless hierarchies to have been destroyed and needing laborious reinstatement, since how could there be profession without apprenticeship? Meanwhile one had to muddle by as best one might until a more rational world emerged. Like many others beyond a certain age Leon had vaguely expected things to revert to a pre-war normality once hostilities had ended. That this clearly wasn’t happening had left him disgruntled – reactionary, even, with a smear of naivety.

  ‘I’ve just come from Dr Anselmus,’ she was saying. ‘He knows and approves of my intention to speak with you. You need have no fear on that score. I trust you don’t mind?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I don’t feel I can do you justice. What is there I can tell you? Everything I am is what you see here –’ he lifted his hand once more to indicate the steamy cathedral into whose silence fell the pit-pat of drops, the mutter of voices and stray clink of tools. ‘And I’m ashamed of it. Truly ashamed. Almost nothing is as it should be. I can’t get the right plants, I can’t get the right staff, I can’t get paint or my new boilers.’

  ‘The war,’ she agreed dismissively. ‘Your problems are no different from anyone else’s. Things will mend. Just at the moment what’s inside this Palm House is not as important to me as what’s inside your head. What I need is information. Perhaps I’d better explain that I’m my country’s cultural attaché. You knew that already? No, well, I am. We’re a poor nation though potentially very rich. We have great natural resources such as minerals and timber and tropical products so we’re eager to promote links with the advanced nations which will lead to trade and development … Do I sound like a diplomat?’ She laughed with surprising girlishness, a hand flying up briefly to cover her mouth. ‘I have to make speeches, you see. “Eager to promote links”. Our government’s policy is to select those aspects of Western culture and technology which can enhance our own …’

  What she really wanted was
to know about stove houses. They were, she had assumed, quite a new thing, a bright idea of modern science. Leon assured her that the notion of putting plants under glass to force or protect them went back at least to Roman times when they had first learned how to cast glass in sheets. The princess seemed vague about Roman times.

  ‘Say two thousand years ago,’ he told her.

  ‘But surely …?’ she looked about her and smiled blankly. It was only then he began to perceive how little idea she had of European history and, indeed, of chronology generally. With an autodidact’s relentless enthusiasm he began to set her straight. Of course this Palm House wasn’t Roman; it was actually built in 1860 …

  ‘You keep mentioning science,’ he said, ‘but even that’s quite recent, really, especially anything to do with plants or botany. These Botanical Gardens are only about a century older than the Palm House, you know. It wasn’t until then that botany became a separate discipline. Not long ago at all. Before that, this was a physic garden full of plants for herbal medicine, which was the only kind of medicine there was. There were dozens of physic gardens all over Europe by the seventeenth century, mostly attached to the medical schools of universities. You wouldn’t have found a gardener in charge of a place like this. He’d have been the professor of medicine.’

  ‘Like Dr Anselmus, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh, he’s not a medical doctor, he’s a proper botanist. Botanists began taking over when it became a real science and the first systems of plant classification were invented. An ordinary medical doctor wouldn’t have a clue about running a place like this. I’m a hangover from the past, really, since I’ve no formal qualification. It couldn’t happen nowadays, no matter how good you were. From now on you’ll need to be qualified before they’ll even let you pick up a hoe. But two hundred years ago it was a completely new science which more or less coincided with the great voyages of discovery to parts of the world like your own, when they began bringing back all sorts of weird and exotic plants and animals. Weird and exotic to us, I mean. Pineapples and coconuts and things. You’ll have noticed the weathervane up there? The ship? That’s to symbolise how dependent all botanical gardens were on supplies from distant places. Or so I’ve been told,’ he added.

  ‘So that’s why they built palm houses? To grow plants from hotter climates?’

  ‘It was a mixture of reasons, things which all came together. They’d already built orangeries back in the seventeenth century so they could grow Mediterranean fruit in northern Europe and that led to the idea of greenhouses, which consisted more and more entirely of glass. Obviously the next step was to install proper heating rather than just lighting a coke brazier on frosty nights. Then the new industrial technology began coming in, especially in England: boilers and cast iron pipes and so on, and the first efficiently heated greenhouses became possible. Until then they could never have built a place like this.’ As he indicated the curvilinear roof overhead ecclesiastical imagery deserted him for once and he saw the structure as the upturned hull of a huge, delicate vessel beached after its last voyage. ‘They couldn’t get the strength, you see. Not until they’d learned how to make ironwork of high enough quality. The central problem of glasshouse construction’, explained Leon with the pleasure of a hypochondriac asked to recount his symptoms, ‘is how to combine maximum light with greatest structural strength. The problem fascinated them in the early nineteenth century. They had this constant stream of tropical plants arriving and wanted to propagate them. Obviously, to grow palm trees indoors you need a pretty large building. Up until then they’d relied on wood for construction, but of course it rots in a hot damp atmosphere. It had to be either oiled teak or red cedar, and they were expensive. Now, if you have to use wood for your ribs and glazing bars they also need to be thick enough to support the weight of the glass, and the thicker they are the more light you lose. Even so, you could never build a place this size in wood. But once the English had discovered how to make light, strong structures in iron it solved the problem. You only needed quite thin supporting pillars inside, too, like those along the aisle there. And even they double as drainpipes. They aren’t solid, you know.

  ‘So now you had your structure. The other problem was the glass itself. You’d be surprised how long it took them to discover how to make sheet glass of any size. They simply couldn’t make a really large pane of decent glass, and you need the best glass in a greenhouse. Any bubbles and flaws act like little magnifying lenses and burn the plants. They’re also weak spots, of course. You imagine the effect of a good clout of wind on an area the size of this roof. Tons of air suddenly loaded on to tons of glass. And there’s suction as well as compression, especially in those summer storms when the atmospheric pressure drops with a bang in between gusts. At that moment the pressure inside the house is much higher. If your glazing’s weak it can blow out half the panes. Even if it’s good glass but poorly cut, the lumpy edges can nip the glass unevenly and set up stresses which’ll crack it just like that in a decent breeze.

  ‘In those days what held up progress here, as in England, was the tax our government used to levy on glass. The makers were taxed on the weight of glass they sold but had to charge their customers according to its area, so of course they made their sheets as thin as possible. That meant it was too weak to be made in large panes. That’s why until the mid-1840s ordinary houses – and especially glasshouses – mostly had small window panes with a lot of glazing bars. When the tax was repealed the English built their Palm House at Kew Gardens outside London. You’ve seen it, I suppose?’

  ‘No, I’ve yet to go to England.’

  ‘I’ve no desire to travel,’ admitted Leon, ‘but I’d very much like to see their Palm House. I know it well from photographs and plans, of course. Every horticulturist in the world does. It’s the greatest of them all.’

  ‘No desire to travel?’ she took him up, casually muffled. ‘No curiosity? Still none?’

  ‘I stand by what I’ve already said. Not on my salary. There’s also a difference between being curious and being determined to go. If by magic I woke up one morning in India or Africa or your own country I should of course be interested to see things. I suppose I would on the moon, too. It’s the thought of such distances I don’t like. I should never be sure of coming back to the same place I’d left so long before. I mightn’t recognise it quite, or it might have moved a bit so I couldn’t find it again. Stupid, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m sure there’d be ways around such problems,’ she said, ‘provided you had enough incentive. So tell me, how would one go about building a place like this nowadays?’

  ‘A palm house, you mean?’ He was clearly surprised. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t. It’s an antique. It’d be like building a new Gothic cathedral. These places belong to the last century; you can’t rebuild the past. What would be the point?’

  ‘What was ever the point? Propagation, you said.’

  ‘Ah, but propagation for what purpose? Are you talking about social fashions or scientific requirements?’

  ‘I really hadn’t imagined –’ she began; then as if annoyed by her own ignorance said ‘Science. Of course, science.’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Leon said with one of his abrupt walkings-away, leaving her to an instant’s ruffling that she had been on the meek point of following his purposeful figure. She listened instead to the rattle of his House’s perspiration on gravel and leaf until she heard his galoshes returning. On to a slate work surface he plonked several dogeared books, two of them lacking covers or spines, their outer pages brown from mid-work consultation.

  ‘J.C. Loudon,’ he said, picking up a volume. ‘Luckily in translation. We have to turn to the British, you see, because they were the great pioneers of glasshouses. Loudon travelled all over Europe in the early 1800s looking at other people’s orangeries and winter gardens. He was obsessed with glasshouse design, especially with curved shapes because physics told him that was the best way of getting as much light falling at as vertical an an
gle as possible. He had a vision, a dream.’ The pages turned noiselessly as rags. ‘Here we are. This was written in 1817, say a hundred and thirty years ago. “Perhaps the time may arrive when such artificial climates will not only be stocked with appropriate birds, fishes and harmless animals, but with examples of the human species from the different countries imitated, habited in their particular costumes, and who may serve as gardeners or curators of the different productions. But this subject is too new and strange to admit of discussion, without incurring the ridicule of general readers.” It was a marvellous, vivid idea. Just imagine, I ought to be African or Malay. Somewhere else he calls the glasshouse “entirely a work of art”. Not science, you see. It was to be a sort of paradise, a whole artificial world under glass. Look,’ again he searched for a book and found a reference. ‘A description of the St Petersburg winter garden – not a proper glasshouse, it’s true – in 1827: “The genial warmth, the fragrance of the nobler plants, and the voluptuous stillness that prevails in this enchanted spot, lull the fancy into sweet romantic dreams.” Not much science there.’

  ‘I’d no idea it was all so fanciful,’ she admitted.

  ‘Oh, very. For a while the whole of northern Europe was in the grip of this dream. The more industrialised and urbanised things became, the more people yearned for their little gardens of Eden. They even started putting them in their own houses. The middle classes, at least. No proper home was complete without its heated conservatory full of potted palms and ferns and orchids.’