Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Such metaphysical speculations are not to everybody’s taste, of course, and evidently beyond the capacity of most things in this House. (One notices altensteinii’s head hanging a little lower this morning, does one not? Or is it pure illusion? So much is.) But tug on the wire, gardener! Hoist the poor old thing up! He can manage a little higher even though he’ll never make sixty feet and stand on equal footing beside – what were his phrases? – “a mere cliché of the exotic” and “a symbol of longing”. Thus spake Encephalartos!’

  Ten

  To his chagrin Leon was obliged to have the rest of his hair cut to match the missing chunks, which meant a style little different from that of a concentration camp survivor. He left the barber’s shop as though wrenched out of civilian life and back into a wartime world when half male Europe had its head shaved for convenience, discipline, lice. The angry shock gave him a confidence close to insubordination. Going back to the Botanical Gardens’ main gate office he said he must see Dr Anselmus at once. The secretary raised her eyes from a romance with a look of amazement as if she hardly recognised him, which further enraged him.

  ‘Doesn’t come in Thursdays, does he?’

  Since the enforced shutting up of the Society’s mansion, which until the war had furnished graceful offices for the Gardens’ director as well as for senior research fellows and administrators, Dr Anselmus had been obliged to work from home.

  ‘It can’t wait.’

  ‘It’ll have to. You can see him first thing tomorrow.’ The secretary, whose own hair had dulled over the years to a carefully supported heap of smouldering embers, gave his skull another look.

  Normally Leon enjoyed sparring with the Dragon Lady, as she was now universally known, but today he was too pressed and savage to dally. ‘I’ll just have to find him at home, then, shan’t I?’

  ‘Gee, sure,’ said the Dragon Lady, who was seeing American films and G.I.s with equal enthusiasm. ‘Why not, sugar? And when you’ve seen him you can stop by the Palace and have a chat with the King about his begonias. You might get a royal warrant. “Consultant plant doctor to the crowned heads of.” Gee.’ She waved a glittering hand. ‘Tomorrow.’

  Leon went for a walk beside a canal. Though indifferent to clothes he had changed out of his military remnants into the suit he kept for whenever he left the Gardens. Not a fancy affair, it was lumpy at the seams, especially around the edge of collar and lapels: the sort of suit an upholsterer might have run up for himself in hard times. What with that and the haircut he looked fairly indistinguishable from the demobbed soldiers wandering the city trying to find a door which would let them back into normality. The only difference was that he was older than most and not wearing a military greatcoat hopefully dyed to look like an overcoat. The curator of one of Europe’s most important surviving palm houses – genius, philosopher, communer with plants, visible companion of an invisible – wore against the cold a plaid ulster, a truly Sherlockian affair which a visitor in 1938 had shed in the heat and, bafflingly, never retrieved. Finders keepers, Leon had said proudly after a decent month’s interval. He had inherited in one pocket some small change and in the other a pair of orange pigskin gloves and a brand new mousetrap. Now, his head roaring with thought, he stood on a quay and gazed down at a family of kittens investigating the snow on their barge’s deck. With his cropped scalp, ulster and orange gloves – particularly the gloves – he was assumed by passers-by to be an NKVD officer engaged on an inscrutable Soviet surveillance mission.

  This was a wealthy district known locally as Little Venice, in common with several other such canalside neighbourhoods scattered throughout northern Europe. Nothing about it was particularly Venetian. The mainly seventeenth-century houses which overlooked the waterways, often through wrinkled panes of very clear, thin old glass, were those of well-to-do bourgeois merchants. Counts, margraves, princes and other exotics tended to roost elsewhere, generally in plain, gloomy houses with too many rooms and too little garden for the height of the estate walls. It was exactly the district where one would expect to find the director of a Botanical Gardens living, and was indeed where the young Leon had once come as an apprentice, bearing a message for Dr Anselmus. His thoughts stilled to a purposeful hum, Leon the cropped and sinister turned and crossed to the remembered house, read the copperplate script beside the bell-pull and was in due course admitted reluctantly by an old factotum.

  Once inside the door the visitor, surrounded by the panelled and carpeted vistas of gracious living, felt his scowl melt and fall away like slush off his boots. The factotum’s ‘Kindly wait here, sir’ and the glance at the grey half-moon clots of ice on the polished floor reduced him further. What idiotic temerity could have brought him here? He looked at the prints on the wall, at the tall, moulded double doors on either side leading to salons and dining-rooms, closed and mute. He listened to a morning silence only intensified by the slow, hollow-chested tick of an immense grandfather clock in walnut across whose decorated face a golden schooner rocked the seconds away. Far off in the depths a pan clattered. From closer overhead a door shut and feet returned to the shrill squeaks and detonations of ancient parquet. Leon was shown straight down the hall, along a corridor and into a wooden cabinet of a room overlooking a long, thin garden. Curiously he stared down. Given its owner’s profession it was a surprisingly ordinary plot, as far as could be judged from the shapes beneath the snow. Bulgy bits would be flowerbeds, the flat bits strips of grass, with between them the straggle of rose stems on trellis work à l’anglais. Horticulturally, it suggested a perfunctory state of health bordering on neglect, like that of a successful doctor’s own children. Presently Anselmus himself came in.

  ‘Leon!’ he greeted his curator affably, after a startled glance at the haircut. ‘It must be important to bring you here. Nothing serious, I hope?’

  The gardener thought that despite the friendliness of the tone the social lines had been quite adroitly drawn in a couple of short sentences.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you at home, sir,’ he said. ‘It is a bit urgent, yes. The fact is, I’m afraid I have to report some damage to two of the plants. Wilful damage.’

  ‘Damage? What kind of damage? Which plants? Who?’

  Leon explained. ‘I take full responsibility, of course,’ he finished.

  ‘No, no, my dear fellow. You can’t be everywhere at once. You’re a curator, an expert botanist, not a policeman. None of us will forget the immense debt the Society – indeed, the country – owes you for having brought our Palm House through the war practically singlehanded and looking better than ever. But tell me – and this is in complete confidence – whom do you suspect?’

  ‘It’s hard to imagine any of our visitors doing it, sir.’

  ‘Quite impossible.’

  ‘So really that only leaves the staff. Our assistants are … Well, you know how things are. These aren’t easy times and we have to make do with what we can get.’

  ‘I know, I know. We’ve all done our best to screen out the most unsuitable but really we’ve nothing much to go on except their own claims to have worked in greenhouses before. There may be some poor, twisted fellow with a completely unfathomable grudge in our midst. I’m afraid the casualties of war are by no means all lying in sanatoria and cemeteries, Leon. Well, well. Never mind. Banana flower, eh? That’s sad. Don’t get many of them to set, do we? It has to be an assistant. Unless –’ the director tried for a joke to lighten the gloom given off by his curator’s scowl and institutional haircut ‘– unless of course you’re doing it yourself and don’t know it. Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, eh? You saw the film, presumably? By day the man of quiet scholarship and learning, by night a crazed fiend stalking the Palm House and committing unspeakable acts.’

  The riposte took Leon as much by surprise as it did Dr Anselmus, so quickly it came and from an unguessed patch of his brain.

  ‘Or you, sir. I mean, if that could happen to me without my knowing, so it might to you.’

  �
��I … well, of course, I suppose you’re right.’ The director, smiled wanly and in that moment Leon could almost believe it himself, could imagine the pink, pettish sobriety of Claud Anselmus’s features melding and distorting at around midnight to remould themselves into those of the monster who slept within. ‘Of course it was merely a jocular theory I was advancing. This isn’t a film. No, it’ll be one of your men all right. Only thing you can do is keep your eyes peeled, I’m afraid, and just hope it doesn’t happen again. If it goes on we’ll just have to bring the police in. Very well, then. Carry on. I’ll drop in tomorrow as usual.’

  ‘There was one other thing, sir.’ Dr Anselmus’s “jocular theory” had tweaked Leon’s anger, and hence his courage, back. ‘There’ve been a lot of rumours recently about the Palm House’s future, even of moving the entire Botanical Gardens into the country so our land can be redeveloped. If I’m not being presumptuous the House’s future is connected with my own and I’d like to know what’s going on.’

  ‘Ah, of course, of course. Perfectly reasonable.’ Anselmus was all Jekyll now. A further glance at the shorn head of his most celebrated employee, the gaunt and smouldering features, increased the doctor’s emollient urbanity. ‘I was in any case intending to have a chat with you about that nonsense, knowing how these stupid rumours travel. Of course you’ve been worried, my dear fellow, but I hope not seriously? You surely can’t have imagined we’d even contemplate taking any such step without consulting you? Why, you are – or you would be – the lynchpin of any such move. No, no.’

  ‘No, no move? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anselmus testily. ‘That’s of course what I’m saying.’

  ‘There is,’ pursued his employee, ‘no plan being proposed, no intention of selling our land and moving out?’

  ‘Let me make myself absolutely clear,’ umbrageously offered Anselmus, whose administrative duties had brought him into contact with politicians. ‘This is simply a typical example of the sort of rumour which circulates at times like these. People look around and see all the damage and disruption – bombed-out areas and so forth – and they naturally wonder whether the old world can be restored or if instead it’ll be supplanted still further by change and decay. But from all those trying years – the occupation and the anarchy, pure anarchy, really – we’ve got back not only our beloved King safe and well but our country’s entire legal framework intact. In short, the status quo ante. The Botanical Gardens are not ours to sell, even if we wanted. They weren’t before the war, and nor are they now. They belong to the nation, held in escrow by the university. This is our lawyers’ professional verdict. There.’

  Leon was staring out into the director’s meagre garden even as his words blossomed unconvincingly inside the boxlike room. ‘I can see the attractions of a hundred acres in the country instead of fewer than ten in the city,’ he said musingly. ‘A far bigger collection laid out in a modern way. New, efficient houses devoted to specific regions or habitats. Impossible not to see the advantages. Better science so better funding. Room for a seed bank, especially of commercial varieties. Proper public subscriptions and membership. More visitors of the right sort, not just foreign diplomats trying to keep warm.’ And, nerved by having accidentally introduced the chiefest topic of all, the real reason for his presence in this humidor of a room, his eyes wandering between the garden and its owner’s fingers as they fiddled with a topaz fob (a large, faceted yellow lozenge which revolved around a golden spindle hanging from a golden chain) he added: ‘That princess, by the way. I imagine you already know what she wants?’

  ‘I’m afraid …?’

  ‘I know she’s spoken to you, sir, because she told me. So you must know that only yesterday she offered me a job in her own country.’

  Anselmus’s fingers paused as if finding his words for him. ‘Oh, that plan of hers. She did mention something of the kind. I can’t imagine how you’d have replied. With your usual pungency, I expect.’

  ‘It was left open.’

  ‘A curious, even misconceived scheme, I first thought. But on further consideration I found it did have merit. It’s really quite imaginative. As far as I know it would be the only thing of its kind anywhere. An international feather in your cap, certainly.’

  ‘Are you plotting behind my back, Director?’ Leon asked bitterly. ‘Do you want to get rid of me? Would it make things easier?’

  ‘Good gracious! How can you even think such a thing? My dear man, you of all people! What, you mean conspiring to let you go? Our most distinguished employee? The very idea.’

  ‘Perhaps not me, then. But the Palm House, yes, I think that’s possible. Just now it’s more of a liability than an asset, isn’t it? Or at least, a majority of the trustees and board think so. Why throw good money away on installing new boilers if the entire place is due to be scrapped? By modern standards the place is a museum piece and when funds are low museums seem like useless luxuries. Oh, there’s a lot of virtuous talk about national heritage and artistic patrimony and priceless educational and cultural value. But those are just phrases for public consumption, aren’t they? We all know the talk that counts goes on in bank and government offices and the finance departments of places like City Hall.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised you’d been brooding to this extent. I –’

  ‘What is hard,’ went on Leon unhearingly, ‘is convincing people that the Palm House has a future, especially when its own trustees don’t really believe in it any longer. They’re all rotted with this new egalitarian stuff the British are cooking up over there: free health, free education, free everything. Wonderful, this liberal democracy. You can do by money everything the communists have to do by force. But by God it’s going to take a lot of money, and that means ever more centralised economic control, ever more centralised powers to tax and organise and regulate and restrict and exploit. That’s not a scheme into which a palm house fits, according to their wisdom, is it?’

  ‘I’d really no idea you were so well –’ began Anselmus with breezy admiration, but his gardener had not finished.

  ‘Now I can see a future for our Palm House even if no-one else can. The board already know some of my ideas but they seem not to have paid them much attention. No,’ he waved away an encroaching ‘I assure you –’, ‘they just see schemes. They don’t understand the main idea behind them because they know almost nothing of the history of such places. They might know enough to say, “Oh, nineteenth-century utopias, enchanted shelters from industrialisation and urban grimness” or something of the sort, though why that mightn’t seem quite as valid today I can’t think. What could be grimmer than parts of this city? Bombed, run down, no jobs, no homes, no money about. People ought to be flocking to the Gardens and the Palm House at times like these, reminding themselves of what beauty and richness and fecundity still are. But they’re put off. It’s all too surrounded by an aura of dry learning and crankiness.’ Leon reached for an insult in his best lèse-majestic fashion. ‘They take one look at Professor Seneschal and get one whiff of talk about black snowdrops or whatever abortion he’s trying to breed, and they see a run-down Gardens full of what look like war criminals in gaiters not replanting the trees cut down for firewood, and not dredging and clearing the lake, and not restoring the Temperate House or the summer houses. And they stay away.’

  ‘While denying the least validity to your personal remark I agree there’s much in what you say. Do you think I’m not just as interested as you to bring the Gardens back to their former splendour? I might remind you’, the fingers twiddled wildly, ‘that I am currently the Director of the entire Gardens, whereas you are curator of the Palm House alone. It is, of course, the Gardens’ main attraction, but nevertheless your area of responsibility is a good deal more limited than mine. The fact is, our funding is still in an equivocal state. We’re awaiting a financial injection from the government.’

  ‘Which is not likely to be forthcoming. Or rather’, Leon tacked implacably on b
efore his passion’s stiff breeze, ‘it’ll be made dependent on our agreeing to move.’

  ‘I really can’t think what gives you the right to make these conjectures. Your job is to run the Palm House and not, I’d suggest, to speculate about policy matters which are hardly within the terms of your employment.’