The Physic Garden Read online

  My family and I were by no means as badly off as some. We had the produce of the gardens to sustain us and my father had had the foresight to plant extra vegetables in our own cottage garden, but all the same, times were difficult. He had been working hard and the weather was dreich and drear as it so often is in January, that most difficult of months when the sun hardly seems to rise before it is setting again. He had been employed in taking down the old stone bridge over the Molendinar Burn, because it was becoming dangerous. The work was exhausting. I know because I helped him with it, but he would not rest. The payment was to be some twelve guineas, which was a great sum of money to us.

  ‘It is a fine opportunity!’ he said to my mother. ‘Enough to see us through the rest of the winter. We’ll put it by and only use it when we have to.’

  It was in his nature to over-exert himself. He never could bring himself to believe that anyone else could do a job as well as if not better than himself. Before that, we had been employed in laying out new walks in the garden, carting and spreading gravel to improve the pathways, so that the scholars and professors might take the air when the weather improved. But when we began work on the bridge, the wind was cold and the sleety rain was intense. I remember looking at my father’s blue lips and noticing the tremor in his legs and thinking that he did not look as he should.

  He insisted on carrying on with the work, but when I paused for breath, I saw that he was bent double, clutching at his chest and panting for breath. He leaned on me and I managed to half drag, half carry him back to the house. We got him into the box bed in the wall, the two of us, my mother pulling off his muddy trousers, for he was too weak and in too much pain to manage it for himself. I looked at his legs, which seemed very spindly, and the hair on top of his bowed head, which was thinning, showing the shiny pink scalp beneath, and wondered at myself for not noticing how frail he had become. My mother stroked his head, much as she would caress her children, and I saw that her hand trembled.

  ‘Will I fetch Doctor Brown?’ I asked.

  Afterwards, I realised that I should just have gone for him anyway, but my mother hesitated. I know he would have come at my request. Later, he was angry that I had not sought him out there and then.

  ‘Why did you not come for me instantly?’ he asked. ‘There might have been something I could have done! You must know me well enough by now, William, to be sure that I would have come at your request.’

  But when my father came to himself a little, he would have none of it. He said we could not afford doctors, what were the likes of us doing contemplating calling them in and when I said that I did not think we would have to pay Thomas Brown, who had always treated me kindly, he frowned and said he would rather die than take charity from any man. Which is what he did, a few days later, when the pains returned with even more ferocity. My mother, who had been swithering, as she invariably did, between her own sensible inclinations and obedience to her husband, blamed herself.

  But how like him to want to keep going until the end of a particular job. ‘Never leave work half done,’ he would tell me. The maxim has stayed with me and yet I haven’t always followed it. I think now, there are times when it is better to leave a little to be done another day. Which is one of the good things that Thomas taught me.

  ‘Don’t kill yourself, William,’ he would say, with a smile. ‘You’ll get twice as much done if you don’t rush at things but take your ease now and then.’

  At that time, I believed everything my father told me, and would work as though some demon were behind me, urging me on, which was always the way of it with him. Truly, the demon was himself. I have seen it since in many men, and often in men more than women. Women work because they must, but they seem to know how to ration their energies and when they lose a little of their health and strength, they blame it on time, not on others. They may lose their strength but they do not lose themselves in the process. Men grow old and are by no means as full of energy as they once were. They seem to lose something of themselves and blame it on those around them. It is as though their only value is in what they do or what they once did, and not in what they think or what they might have achieved within the span of their years.

  I have tried very hard not to make that mistake. I try to value what I have made of my life and to give myself due credit for my achievements. I loved my wife to the end. I love my sons, although it is not in the nature of Scotsmen to say so very often. I love all my grandchildren and that is permissible. We are by no means so embarrassed by such an admission. But I will also confess that I love none of the others quite as much as I love my little lass with the flaxen hair and that, I have come to realise, is for reasons over and beyond herself, although she is as sunny-natured a child as you could wish to find.

  * * *

  While Faculty cogitated about replacing my father, I found myself supervising the completion of various pieces of work that he had begun, which meant that at least some of his payment could come to me and could be handed on to my mother, for the benefit of my brothers and sisters. But all the same there were many bills to be met, including his funeral expenses.

  I was strong and confident, for sure, but too young to know how little I really knew. And as the eldest son, I found myself in the unenviable position of having to support my widowed mother and my younger siblings. My poor mother, who had always seemed to expect something of the sort, a born pessimist I think, made it clear that she was relying on me to fill my father’s exceedingly muddy boots when it came to providing for the family.

  Our worries were so acute because there were so many of us. While my father was alive, I had not realised just how difficult it was to feed and clothe so many. I had been very ignorant, and he had been content to shield me somewhat from the harsh realities of his life. But when he was gone, I soon came to understand why he had been irritable and morose on occasions. My only wonder was that he had remained so cheerful for the most part, so optimistic, so hopeful for some unspecified future prosperity. I found myself loving and honouring him more in death than I had in life, and regretting that I had not been able to tell him so.

  There were eight of us, of whom I was the eldest – a great number to provide for at any time, let alone one of general poverty and deprivation. My younger sister, Bessie, barely fifteen years old, was already in service at the house of one of the more wealthy college professors in the town. He was a great man with a number of business interests that were far from scholarly, but respectable enough. She was employed as the scullery maid, which means she was a skivvy, responsible for everything from raking out the ashes in choking clouds and lighting the fires in the morning, to emptying the chanties from under the beds. Her first job after lighting the kitchen fire and setting the porridge pot on top of it, so she told me, was to wake the cook, which was no easy task, given that Mistress MacTaggart was fond of a dram or two before bed. Thereafter her days were as long and full and quite as exhausting as my own. She must undertake everything from gutting the breakfast fish to peeling potatoes, with her hands made red raw by the icy water, from scrubbing the kitchen table until the wood turned white to cleaning the pots and pans, but at least she was well fed and she had a roof over her head, so that was a relief to all of us. She was a good-natured lassie and we loved her dearly, but my mother and I were relieved that she, at least, was off our hands.

  Next came the twins, twelve-year-old Jean and Susanna, ‘great big lumps of lassies’ my mother used to call them, which drove them wild. They were old enough to do some sewing, which kept them occupied and brought in a few pence each week, although they lacked both skill and concentration, as my mother also used to say, lamenting their awkwardness. More often than not she had to launder their work when they were finished, simmering it with soap in the copper, since it was so grubby and sticky from their fingers, and then pressing it with a smoothing iron. But they could stitch a plain seam, and that was useful. Susanna’s eyesight was not good, which was some excuse for her clumsiness. Jean
was careless and a wee thing selfish. She liked animals and was always to be found playing with a mischief of kittens under the table, or coaxing the fox terrier that belonged to one of the professors into our garden with bits of cheese, for which it had a passion.

  ‘I wouldn’t care,’ said my mother, ‘but we can ill spare the cheese. She feeds it enough to make a good supper for herself and her sister. And she is normally so greedy, but that dog must take precedence!’

  It was true that what they lacked in concentration they made up in appetite. They would have eaten us out of house and home. My father always said as much, although he never begrudged them a mouthful of bread or a cup of milk. But when times were hard, as they were now that my father was gone, they had to make do with less, and ‘we’re starving’ was their constant complaint. But they were good humoured withall, and always laughing.

  I had, besides my sisters, Bessie, Jean and Susanna, three younger brothers, James, John and Robert. James was old enough to do his bit about the gardens. Nine years old and he could wield a spade with the best of them. He was wiry but very thin and the sight of his spindly shoulders bent over the spade would – so my mother sometimes said – make her heart ache for him. Mine too, although I wouldn’t admit as much. She would try to feed him up, putting extra bread on his plate, an extra spoonful of porridge in his bowl. But he was stronger than we realised. My father had been keen to see him schooled, as I myself had been taught to read and write, but James was a poor scholar at the best of times, and his learning had been limited to the occasional lesson from the old dominie who had once taught me, and who would try to wrestle words and numbers into his bullet head for a few pennies, when my father could spare them.

  Of the two youngest, John was but four years old when my father died, and Rab was a little lad of two, just toddling about, both of them too young to do much more than I had at the same age, although I found employment for Johnnie, who was something of a favourite with me, in scaring the birds, whenever I had planted seeds in the garden.

  Rab was the runt of the litter. He did nothing but cling to my mother’s skirts and hinder her from doing her work. He was a sickly soul, with a terrible cough, day and night, and with the snotters always hanging into his mouth, green candles my mother called them, dripping down from his poor nose. She worried about him, but then we all did. When food was scarce, she would go without herself so that he could eat. He liked to nibble the bread and sip the broth off her dish, but his appetite was small, so it was no great hardship. And for all that he was sickly, he was mostly uncomplaining, except when the earache beset him. Those twin organs would become so inflamed that he had trouble hearing and he would keep us all awake at nights, sobbing, ‘Mammy, mammy, my ears are that sair!’ On the whole, though, Rab was a brave wee boy and Johnnie made much more of a fuss over the least little upset. When he was stung by nettles in the garden or when he accidentally dropped a rock on his toes while he was trying to help me, you could have heard his wails and cries all over the college.

  Most tragic of all, my mother was heavily pregnant with her eighth child when my father died. He never lived to see the baby, named Janet, and she did not survive him by many months, so my mother felt herself doubly cursed. For my part, I could not help the uneasy sense that the infant would have been just one more mouth for me to feed. I cannot say I was relieved at her death. I mind even yet her waxy face on the day she died, like a spent candle end, and my mother’s sobbing, low and persistent, for night after night, but all the same, I cannot deny that it was easier to provide for seven than for eight.

  * * *

  After Janet died, my mother was very low in spirits. ‘We shall starve, William,’ she kept saying. ‘Starve or freeze! Starve and freeze.’

  I didn’t think we would freeze; there was an abundance of dead timber in the gardens, and it was there for the taking. But money for food was another matter, and she was right. I had been thrust into my father’s shoes with scant experience, and my head fairly buzzed with wondering how year after year he had managed to bring in the income that had kept our little ship afloat. I began to understand his weariness and how he had squeezed every last ounce of productive time out of his days. Once the money from the work on the Molendinar bridge was gone, we would barely have enough to keep body and soul together, never mind to give the younger children a modicum of education.

  At last, having racked my brains for ideas, I recollected Sandy Adams, the old gardener, and his wife’s successful apothecary venture. I suggested that we might follow their example, rent a front room in one of the properties adjacent to the university and set up our own apothecary business there. I thought that my mother could run it, much as Mistress Adams had assisted her husband.

  My poor mother, however, was no Mistress Adams. She was so bemused by the sudden death of my father that she could say nothing but, ‘if you say so, son!’ which was certainly the wrong answer, because I knew as much about the business of being an apothecary as I knew about the subject of women, love and marriage in those days, and that was precious little. But then, we are all full of wild and unrealistic aspirations at that time of life. It would be a poor world if the young did not have their dreams. Anything seemed possible to me, and I was too foolish to realise that my mother was still stunned by her twin bereavements.

  I mourned my father with a sorrow that frequently took me by surprise, took the breath from me. Sometimes when I was digging in the garden, I would fancy that he was standing just behind me. I would turn round, expecting to see him, and find nothing but empty air where he should have been.

  ‘Put your back into it, son,’ he would have said. I could almost hear him say it. Then the grief that dogged me would seize me by the throat, and I could feel the tears start behind my eyes.

  I felt that the most fitting tribute to his memory would be for me to make the best of things for his widow and my brothers and sisters. Pursuing my dream of financial independence for all of us, I forged on with the apothecary plan. When a moneylender came to our door, I let myself be persuaded into borrowing a sum of five pounds, to lay down as rent on the proposed apothecary shop, to fit it out and buy in some supplies. They have an uncanny ability to sniff out need, and this man had, no doubt, heard of my father’s untimely death.

  ‘Young man,’ he said. ‘You’ll not regret it. And I wish you every success with your new venture!’ he added, as he walked away, no doubt sniggering up his sleeve at my naivety.

  It was not a clever move. I was very foolish. I thought I knew everything about life, but I had not the smallest measure of wisdom. Not at that time.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Water of Life

  After the death of my father and my infant sister, I threw myself into the work that had killed him with renewed vigour, out of a sort of defiance against fate itself. I moved earth, cleaned out the Molendinar, took down the old stone bridge and did some work on the new one. There was rebuilding and planting up of the banks of the burn to be done with such plants as would spread and bring some stability. I hoped that if I could convince the authorities of my capabilities, then – although I was only eighteen years old – they might agree to make me gardener in his stead.

  It was at about this time that Thomas Brown singled me out for his particular friendship. He had always been disposed to be kindly to me. I had begun to collect specimens for him during the previous spring and summer. But now I saw a very great deal of him as he walked about the gardens, even at times when the weather was particularly inclement. He didn’t seem to mind. There were days when, had I not been engaged on all kinds of renovations, hefting stones like a convict, I would most certainly have been indoors, toasting my toes beside the fire, but Thomas seemed impervious to cold, rain, sleet or even the occasional flurry of snow.

  He was a very striking man. He would stride along with the air of having his head in the clouds. He had a rather stern face, which belied his essential good nature. He had curly hair, which he tied back with a rib
bon, and grey eyes that he sometimes felt the need to strengthen with a pair of round spectacles that sat somewhat incongruously on his nose. He was slender, but gave the impression of a certain vigour and capability. His hands, when you looked more closely at them, were something like the hands of a working man: strong and a wee thing calloused and freckled. He was nothing like most of the professors who would wander about the college gardens, deep in scholarly thoughts, as though they were not quite of this world. Nothing like the professor who had called me a perpetual motion machine, and excused me a beating because of it. There was a fey look about some of them. I thought they hardly even noticed me but it was not in the way the nabbery would deliberately ignore you because you were one of the lower orders. No, it was more that their minds were so wholly elsewhere that they saw nothing: not the young scholars who regularly created mayhem among the trees and flowers, not us gardeners who were always trying to curb their excesses without seeming to insult them, not even the sight of a pretty maid would have disturbed them in the middle of their cogitations. Except that Thomas Brown was nothing like that. You got the feeling that Thomas noticed everything.

  He always passed the time of day with me and stopped to watch me working, but there came an afternoon when there was a woeful, thin sleet, borne on a snell wind which battered it into our frozen faces, and on that day, he watched for a while and passed a few pleasantries, and then he came up to me and offered me a silver flask.

  ‘Here,’ he said, holding it out to me.