The Physic Garden Read online

  ‘But once your professor has done that, once he has destroyed a body to see how it functions,’ I observed to Thomas during one of our all-too-frequent debates on the subject of surgery, ‘can he put it back together once more?’

  ‘In working order?’ he said.

  ‘Aye. Like a clockmaker.’

  ‘After a fashion. I think that is what he aims to do, eventually. As long as there is a little life in it still. It is one thing to mend a broken body and quite another to raise the dead!’

  ‘Well, you can pull a plant apart and it’ll whiles grow again. But if you pull the blood and bones and sinews apart, you cannot reassemble them any more than you can reassemble the swallow’s nest when you have howked it down from a barn wall. Or the laverock once you have taken her breath away. She will never sing again.’

  ‘Will, I think you’re a poet. And I can’t disagree with such passion,’ said Thomas, his hand on my shoulder. ‘And you may be right, of course. But all the same, I believe somebody might do it some day. The swallow’s nest is just that – a thing of clay, a shelter for a small time.’

  ‘And is that not what our bodies are?’

  ‘Aye they are that and more. But who knows better than you that when you cut yourself in the garden, the skin will generally knit together? Our bodies have that about them that allows them to heal. And so perhaps we can find a use for those properties to repair them inside as well as out.’

  ‘And do you believe he might do it, your professor?’

  ‘Well, it is his passion. But no, I think he just wants to see how it all works. And there’s a greatness about that, you must admit. A greatness about him. It’s just that people can’t see it yet.’

  ‘I can see that he’d no’ be above a wee bit of raising the dead from their last resting places at any rate.’

  ‘I don’t think he would go so far,’ said Thomas.

  ‘Do you not?’

  ‘He’s been a good friend to me and mine.’

  ‘Only because you’re saving him from what he most dislikes.’

  ‘That’s true enough.’

  We were walking in the gardens, looking at the newly planted trees and wondering whether they would thrive, in spite of the depredations of spotty wee scholars with bonfires. They were growing, after a fashion, those that were far enough away from the malign influence of the type foundry, but I sometimes felt that the whole college was becoming an island amid a sea of filth. The filth emanated from the manufactories and the rank jumble of houses that was creeping ever closer to the old buildings, like malignant weeds clustering around the base of some venerable tree.

  The trees and shrubs were one more thing that brought us together. I had little interest in growing vegetables myself – a strange confession for a gardener, I know – but I think Thomas felt the same. He was interested in the many different varieties of apples and pears which could be grown, especially since pears were said to have many medicinal uses, but the practicalities of supplying the college tables with the likes of seakale and spinach held no interest for him or for me either. There were hothouses in the physic garden where we attempted to grow vines, and I would set Johnnie to tend a plot for ourselves, to provide curly kale and so on for our own use at home. A great handful of curly kale and a loaf of bread will make a little meat go a very long way. But that, I think, was the sum of my interest in such things.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Pineapples

  My father had been a very fine gardener, although he was no botanist. He was, however, a member of the Free Gardeners, a brotherhood to which I never aspired, although there were some aims and ambitions of which I most certainly approved, and approved them the more, the older I grew. But I was never a great one for joining secret societies, no matter how beneficial they might have been for myself.

  I was somewhat surprised to find that Thomas was not a member of the Free Gardeners either. It was supposed to be – and largely was – a group of working men who had joined together, ‘for their mutual benefit and support’, as the constitution termed it. But I was uncomfortably aware that the gentry, the nabbery as I used to call them, before they became my customers (and I still do call them that in the privacy of my own home), were much inclined to join the Free Gardeners as well.

  It was supposed to be a magnanimous gesture, a sort of condescension to what they thought of as the lower orders, that the gentry would go along to meetings alongside their common gardeners. They were always made very welcome, even though, as my father once said in an unguarded moment, they could be ‘gey patronising’. It was the reason why I never availed myself of the opportunity while I was yet a gardener, although men who had known and liked my father had certainly issued me with more than one invitation.

  ‘Will you come?’ they would say. ‘You’d find it very helpful to you in all kinds of ways.’

  But I knew I would not be able to put a curb on my tongue in the face of such patronage on the part of the gentry, and it seemed foolish to go out of my way to make enemies, so I simply told them that I had too much work, which was true enough.

  As far as the gentry attending meetings went, there was much more to it than their supposed generosity. They liked to know what was going on. They liked to keep a finger on the pulse of the working man and the things that he might be about. They were terrified of revolution, at the tail end of a revolutionary century, and they would go to meetings and listen out for sedition. They were, all of them, well aware of what had passed in France only a few short years before and nightmares of the guillotine haunted their feather bed sleep.

  They seemed to have taken a collective decision to spy on the lower orders, lest any should be fomenting sedition. And who can blame them? I would have done the same thing myself in like circumstances. My father would probably have denied that it was the case, crediting his masters with more generosity of spirit. He was always respectful of his betters, although it did him little good in the long run. It was bred in the man, in blood and bone, much as a clever plantsman will breed certain qualities into a fruit or vegetable. And it must have been born in me too, except that something changed me and I don’t just mean later events. Even as a lad, I was aware that my father was worth ten of the men to whom he was forced to doff his cap like an underling, and I hated it. It was one of the reasons why I admired Jenny’s father. As Sandy Caddas once declared, the weavers would bow before nobody, not even the king himself, were he ever to come down among them.

  My father would go out to his Free Gardener meetings on a regular basis, but I never found out what he did at them, although I was very curious.

  ‘Ask nae questions and you’ll be tell’t nae lies,’ he used to say. And off he would go with his long apron, his talk of Jack in the Green, his book of ritual, laboriously written down. He kept that volume well away from prying eyes. After his death, I hunted high and low for it, fancying that at last I would find out what was written in it, but I could see neither hide nor hair of it. When I asked my mother about it she said that somebody had come to the door, offering her the sympathy of the Gardeners and a little money that had been collected at a meeting, ‘for the benefit of Robert’s widow and children’. The same man – having sat for a while with my mother, passing the time of day and enquiring after each of the children in turn – had asked her if she knew where my father’s book of ritual might be kept. It was lent only and should be returned to the Free Gardeners from whence it came, but only if she could lay hands upon it at that moment, and she was not to think of troubling herself about it.

  ‘Well,’ she told me, ‘I knew where it was, right enough, because your father always kept it in the same place, under his pillow, and I was so grateful to them for their contributions and their kindness that I fetched it at once, and gave it to him. Did I do the wrong thing, William?’

  I could not, in all conscience, say that she had done the wrong thing. And besides, there were more small sums of money forthcoming from the Gardeners over the years, so I am
sure she did the right thing, but I would dearly like to have known what was written in that book, and it is one volume which has never been through my hands in all these years that I have been dealing in and with books.

  God knows what daftness they got up to, nor why men in particular are so fond of their secret rituals, like lads at play. It has sometimes occurred to me that women are far too sensible to indulge in such nonsense, but encourage their menfolk in these pursuits with the sole aim of getting them out from under their feet. And we men dutifully oblige. But the meetings served some purpose in that they would also exchange knowledge, gardening knowledge of the sort to be found in the book which Thomas had given me. And it was helpful, because I suppose there would be some among them who could neither read nor write, or perhaps who struggled, could maybe manage an order for plants but that was all. It would be very helpful to them if their fellow gardeners could pass on the detailed and intimate knowledge that was needed to nurture plants and the ground from which they sprang.

  I know what the sum total of my father’s ambition was, though, because he told me. He wanted to grow a pineapple.

  ‘Ah,’ he would say. ‘That would be a very fine thing. To have a hothouse. To grow pineapples. Or even a single pineapple! Let’s not be greedy about this, William.’

  I told Thomas about this in an unguarded moment. I think he could see that I was inclined to scoff but he was never one to mock those who loved their work.

  ‘Not a bad ambition,’ he said. ‘Not a bad ambition at all. I have heard far worse.’

  ‘The good lord knows what he would have done with it if ever he had succeeded.’ I glanced at Thomas. What did I see in his face? Mild disapproval perhaps? He was my weather vane at that time and I would temper my behaviour to his responses.

  ‘But I suppose it was a harmless enough ambition for a working man to have,’ I added, seeing that he so obviously expected me to defend my father.

  ‘It was a grand ambition,’ said Thomas, decidedly. ‘Have you ever tasted a pineapple?’

  ‘No. I imagine it might be something like an ordinary apple.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘Then you have tasted one?’

  ‘Aye, once or twice. They are sweet beyond sweetness. I tell you, William, if the fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden had been a pineapple, not all the angels in the heavens could have kept Adam and Eve from tasting it. And thinking paradise well lost! So don’t mock your father’s ambition. Perhaps he had tasted the fruit at some time and that was what inspired him.’

  ‘He never said. But then we never asked him.’

  ‘They are ambrosia and their juice is like the nectar of the Gods. It runs down your chin and leaves the scent of itself on your fingers.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Oh aye. But I am told that they are devilish hard to cultivate here in Scotland.’

  ‘I’m sure they are. I wonder if I’ll ever grow one?’

  ‘Would you like to try?’

  ‘I’ll try anything that will buy me a measure of satisfaction. Or money. I take it they are very expensive.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘But mostly, I think I would do it for my father.’

  ‘It would be a fine tribute to him. My uncle has a pineapple house,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘In Ayrshire.’

  ‘His gardener must have the secret then.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘My father would have been envious. But if he had managed it himself, he would have been the envy of the Free Gardeners as well.’

  ‘Did you never want to go to the meetings with him? Were you never curious about what they got up to?’

  ‘He said he would take me when he thought I was ready. He died before he could do it. Or before I was ready. And afterwards I thought I never would be ready. All the ritual, all the nonsense that seems to have grown up around it! I have small curiosity about it and I think I never will have.’

  Even allowing for the fact that, in later years, I attained something of a reputation as a radical publisher, a dangerous reputation at times, I never attended meetings, never allowed myself to be persuaded to participate in unwise demonstrations of solidarity. I did not disapprove of them, but I knew that they were not for me and stuck to my principles. If a man brought me a pamphlet and if it was well written, I would print it. Sometimes, if I thought the words might be deemed inflammatory, I would do it in secret and distribute it in equal secrecy. Ostensibly I dealt in rare books, particularly those concerned with natural history. That was the face I presented to the world at large and it was as true as any other. As far as any other beliefs were concerned, and I had plenty, I made no grand gestures and believed nothing I was told, taking nothing on trust. Thomas did that for me at least. He imbued me with a desire to question all things.. Meetings were open to infiltration you see. There were men whose job it was to rouse revolutionary passions and lead good men into terrible folly. I and my family steered a course through some very stormy waters, through times that saw better men than me transported or executed. I sat on a number of fences. In secret, I did what I could, but I did it with great circumspection, knowing that more than myself were involved, that there were others, my wife and my family, who were relying on me to behave sensibly. If I were transported or worse, I would be of use to neither wife not child, and all of us would be wrecked on the reef of my own folly.

  So even back then, I was circumspect and I never did join the Free Gardeners.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Thomas, whenever we talked about it. ‘And yet it’s what men do.’

  ‘Indulge in such nonsense? More shame to them.’

  ‘It gives them a modicum of certainty in an uncertain world.’

  ‘Ritual or no, he was a practical man, my father. He would never have tried to set up an apothecary shop. He would never have fancied himself a botanist. He would never have ached to know more about plants and their properties. He was just a gardener. A fine gardener, but still. Pineapples. That was where his ambitions lay. And maybe he was all the better for it.’

  ‘He would never have treated me with your familiarity,’ Thomas observed.

  ‘No he would not. He could not have brought himself to do it.’

  ‘And consequently he would never have been the friend to me that you are.’

  ‘No. He knew his place and kept his family from starvation. Perhaps I should decide to do the same.’

  ‘You’re a botanist, William, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Aye, and that’s my tragedy. I love it all, the Latin names, and the properties of plants and the uses and the growing of them and the way some plants grow where others do not and the beauty and the poetry of it. Much good may it do me!’

  He said nothing. There seemed nothing else to be said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In Debt

  By the end of summer, and in spite of all my hard work, matters seemed to be coming to a head. Faculty members were complaining about the state of the garden, at first mildly, but then vociferously. The professors who liked to walk there were beginning to look with disapproval on the general untidiness and decay they found. And of course, they blamed me. It was whispered that I was too young and inexperienced for the position, that I was lazy, neglecting my duties. The truth was at once simpler and less open to remedy. I had bitten off more than I could chew. I had rushed into the apothecary plan without realising just how difficult it would be for my mother. Meanwhile, I was struggling more and more to keep up to the work in the gardens and to keep Thomas Brown supplied with plants.

  When I look back on it now, I see that what I probably should have done was to stop obliging Thomas. I should have told him that the garden must be my first priority, with the apothecary business and my mother coming a close second. If I was going to go roaming the countryside, I should have brought back such herbs as my mother could have used to make medicines. In fact, I could have bought them for a few pence fro
m the likes of Jenny and if I had asked her, I think that Jenny might well have taught my mother some of what she knew.

  But I didn’t do any of that. I couldn’t do it. I made all kinds of excuses to myself, but the plain truth was that whatever Thomas asked, I would do. Perhaps he should have seen how I was struggling. Well, I’m sure he did because he tried to do what he could to remedy it. But he was blind to my real problems. He believed that he could educate me, shape my mind, bring me out of myself. But I think my daily struggles to make a living were quite beyond his understanding, as the daily struggles of the poor always are beyond the full understanding of the wealthy, even those who have come from poverty themselves. Our memory for such things is as short as that of women for the pains of childbirth.

  He did help me though, I can’t deny it. And in doing so, he laid the very foundations of what I have become since. He introduced me to a world beyond the garden, a world of books and learning. He made me what I am. But all that came at the expense of the work I was engaged to do in the college, the work I should have done to assist my mother. And for that, I blame him, but I blame myself more.

  * * *

  Without my father to support her, my mother was sinking day by day into a sea of misery. Thomas gave me some medicine which he said might help to lift her moods of unremitting gloom, and so it did, when she could remember to take it. But I think it was Thomas’s attention that made her feel better and when he was gone, she would fall into gloom again. She trusted him as a doctor, but she was uncomfortable with our friendship. I felt guilty because I thought I was not the pillar of strength my father had been, but Thomas would say, ‘How can you be, Will? You’re a young man and her son. Her natural impulse will be to protect you. You want her to lean on you but you can never replace her husband.’