Griefwork Read online

  The gardener observed these undercurrents eddying in and out of the little blind alleys ending in swags of leaves and branches. What better place for hormonal tweakings and discreet rutting than a palace enclosing that sensual languor which everybody said was the chief ingredient of the tropics? Some nights, restless himself, he would drag his mattress out of the boiler room and lay it on the gravel path, now in this place, now that. Then the stars were no longer the stony eyeballs of eternity but the prickly decor of a languid sky draped behind plumes and fronds. He was adrift in an unmapped world, on an equatorial islet. He would lie and envisage the trysts and assignations whose whisking hems he had caught in photographic glimpses. The curl of a garment, an eyebrow, a mouth’s corner; the whiteness of fingertips touching amid ruffled dark green. But there was nothing for him to concentrate on. No sooner had he called up one image than another fell in front of it like a superimposed lantern slide. The vignettes of urban mating slithered and ran, congealing only into a general impression of other lives being lived but flirtatiously only, not intensely, not in the grip of passion. Unsleeping, he would get up and slowly walk his garden, pace out his domain, trailing whispers and syllables, the half-words of half-thought. Lonely? he wondered. Was that it, then? An ache for … But whenever he tried to put a shape or face to this lack it was never enough to make it solid or plausible. A rich woman in tweeds, a coquette with a parasol, a serious lad with rimless spectacles. Not enough, finally. Too much flesh, not enough of the intangible electric which shocked at the sight of a breaking bud’s first gleam of colour, the soft trudge of a heron across the sky at dusk, the noise of sea wind through rimy grasses in a winter’s dawn. What, then? Like the pink of a scalp declaring itself through sparsening hair, the subtext of a life rose inexorably to the surface. It was of lack; so be it. But lack fabulously dressed in sound and sight and colour and smell. It was a lack which never would have to contend with slow domestic clotting, which would stand in tears over no grave nor be wept over in its turn. Solitude’s dark beam might sweep round, over and over again proclaiming the land deserted, the sea empty, the earth flat. Yet what richness managed to thrive in the brilliant interstices, the revolving splinter that lit and ever rekindled sublime pleasures! He returned with a sigh to his mattress. The soft plop of terrapins lulled him to sleep.

  Meanwhile, his secret project for assembling night-flowering species was taking shape. Since many of the monsoonal varieties were trees rather than shrubs this was evidently going to take time even though several were quick growing. The attraction of the plants themselves would be inseparable from the novelty of having visitors in the Palm House after dark. That the same Sunday afternoon strollers might return and become night people was intriguing and provocative. Everything changed after dark. Something else began to show through, subtly, and people were no exception. From his first day as a glazing boy just after his arrival in the capital Leon had been fascinated by those who came to see the plants. How different they were from the fisher-folk of Flinn! They were positively exotic, these townees, with their peculiar refined accents, their witty remarks and sophistication. They might have belonged to a different planet the way they chattered and drifted and trailed scent and pomade. These were the people who had money and influence, who read books and could use the knowledge. They went to theatres, cinemas, operas, ballets and art galleries. It was not long before he knew he would always be excluded from their society. No matter how eminent he became, a gardener remained a gardener. On the other hand he might well be able to woo them on his terms. His plans therefore contained an element of seduction, just as he himself was considerably seduced. He had long supplemented his book learning with eavesdropping and his appointment as curator made this even easier. As an assistant he had scurried, always at the beck and call of his irascible and whimsical old predecessor. Nowadays, though, he could employ assistants of his own by day while at night he lingered and absorbed, from behind clumps of greenery, the talk of those he secretly courted. Nobody in his childhood had ever had conversations, he now realised. They had had exchanges: more or less terse, jovial, brutal, but never these relaxed and worldly discourses full of jokes and innuendo. Bit by bit in recalling the things they said his own inner conversations acquired something of the same urbane quality, the same slight detachment which accompanied ideas. They also had an autodidact’s mixture of learning and magpie knowledge. On his own subject he knew far more than he could express, so he expressed remarkably little; but when alone with his plants he would hear them voice outlandish, barely-formed opinions culled randomly from visitors on politics, banking, gynaecology, the arms trade, perfumery and the role of Antonio in The Marriage of Figaro.

  It was one of those spring days when a balmy southeasterly breeze drifted up from Damascus and Constantinople still with enough strength after its long, scented journey to evaporate the last tatters of North Sea cloud and inflate over Europe a filmy marquee of blue silk. On such days it hardly mattered that everything was temporary, that gardeners were as evanescent as the blooms they tended. This morning the Botanical Gardens was a walled oasis of fertility full of the inaudible roar of buds splitting. The poignant rapture of the moment seized Leon as he went outside into the sunshine. There was contentment in the air. The few early strollers were well dressed and leisured. From beyond the wall came the dulled sounds of city traffic pricked now and then by a bell or a horn. All was calm and industrious. From the bare glazing bar of the broken potting shed window the fledgling thrushes were making their first flights. For an instant the Palm House sat with delicate immobility at the earth’s hub. Following the gaze of some children he looked into the sky and there, high above the golden galleon, a tiny monoplane was performing aerobatics over the city. As if its canting wings were shedding a happiness caught from the very air through which they winked and flashed he felt an inward soaring so that he, too, could watch the planet’s surface tilt like a plate, the sea’s grey wrinkled slab slither towards the edge like scree. He even thought he could just make out Flinn, a fleck of mould far away up the coastal map caught between sea and estuary on its long spit of polder. The aircraft’s mayfly gyrations went exuberantly on, accompanied, if one strained one’s ears to exclude local birdsong and voices, by a drone shaped like a distant line of mountains, sagging and climbing, dipping and peaking with short patches of bluish silence in between. Gradually, as befitted its insect character, the machine drifted away on the breeze, engine popping, leaving across the marquee’s roof the lone aviator’s dark signature of exhaust.

  Leon, no less exalted and no less alone, dragged himself back down to the Gardens and re-entered his Linnaean temple filled with lightness and energy. They would come to him, he vowed. Oh yes, they would come in their stoles of silver fox or their shapeless corduroys, with parasols and umbrellas, dainty gold watches and sturdy half-hunters. Housewives would come, and students, and old men with dandruff and cracked spats who loved butterflies. Famous actresses – why not? – and society ladies, moguls and diplomats, even – why not again? – the occasional dotty king. They would none of them be able to resist what he could offer: the ordered tropics in their midst, the spectacle of the dreamy and the exotic burgeoning in their hard-edged city. Once the right plants had been collected and had matured the heavy scent of night blooms would lure them … He took it for granted the Society would approve his scheme once they knew about it. It would bring regeneration not just to the Palm House but to the Gardens as a whole, in perpetual danger of becoming fossilised. Everyone was so old, that was the trouble, from the head gardener to most of the Society’s board. Anselmus was quite progressive but what on earth could be done with dim plodders like that cretin who spent his time trying to breed green roses or black hyacinths or something? As if almost anything in the Palm House wasn’t more interesting, more subtly beautiful than some monstrous hybrid. After all, why stop at black hyacinths? Why not spend your life trying to cross a snowdrop with a lupin? A snowpin? he wondered sarcastically (for h
e was soaring). Or maybe trees would be more of a challenge because of the time they took to grow? Cocos with Hevea, then, bouncing its rubber coconuts? No. In his view Anselmus ought to start purging the Society of people like that and encouraging younger blood, enthusiasts who could share the vision of a true garden as something both scientific and aesthetic, vibrant with its own inventiveness and needing no trickery to succeed.

  Thus he saw his own intoxicating future on a brilliant morning in spring. If there was something opaque, not fully declared, in this vision it was no doubt because few people ever managed to be wholly truthful about their own ambitiousness, least of all to themselves. And perhaps, quite without knowing it, he still entertained some fairytale fancy of attracting the one mate who could not resist him, the princess who could discern the princeling beneath the toad’s warts and pulsing dewlap. In any event his motives were more muddled than were others on that sunny day. From newspaper offices and broadcasting stations violent press and wireless campaigns were even then being launched against Czechoslovakia in general as Nazi troops began sidling towards the Sudetenland in particular.

  One Wednesday night some eight years later Leon was wandering, brass syringe in hand, well beyond his guests’ outer perimeter. Here and there he rubbed the steamy glass and pressed his nose to it to see if the snow had begun again. Like a shy child at a party who instinctively moves towards the darker regions of the house, he watched from afar his night visitors clustered by candlelight beyond the palms. A low hum of chatter came back to him, together with the occasional clink of glasses. When he passed the Balsam of Tolú, now a sturdy young tree sixteen feet tall, it addressed him clearly:

  ‘I’m glad for your sake, now you’ve got your way, and it was a nice idea in any case. It’s high time the visitors here learned to use their noses. It’s a pity some of them don’t wander down this end, break a rule and pluck one of my leaves. I’d happily spare the odd leaf in order to be more widely appreciated, though I fear I already know what they’d say. “Ooh yes, it’s like –” they’d crush and sniff a bit more “but very faint. It’s like – you know, sort of medicinal. You have a go,” and the other would say the dread words: “Friar’s Balsam, that’s it,” and they’d move off, reminiscing about childhood inhalations. Depressing that I could be confused with anything as crude as Friar’s Balsam which, though indeed it contains my resin, is mixed with all sorts of other things such as bitter aloes and extracts from various Styracaceae. Just as well they’d only be smelling my leaves. If ever they were to cut my bark they’d find that my sap hardened into a golden brown exudate, crystalline and redolent of an aromatic form of vanilla with a rich dark bitterness underneath. It would no doubt remind them of clot-mouthed black bottles in gruesome surgeries, of all sorts of punitive gargles and liniments. In point of fact my gum has many happy uses, including as a fixative in perfumery, but you wouldn’t expect them to know that. I, on the other hand, am sure I detect a definite trace of myself in the princess’s scent, “Cuir”, as Lancôme thoughtfully re-named “Révolte” in 1939. But as I stand here watching and sniffing and listening to those visitors who do pass me I have to conclude that modern people are progressively abandoning all but one of their senses, abject before vision’s crushing hegemony. They damage their hearing with raucous jazz, clog their palates with tobacco, wear gloves so they needn’t touch anything and finally cut off their noses to spite the stone masks they’ve turned themselves into and from which they peer fretfully with greedy, insatiable eyes. But that’s their affair.

  ‘I’m touched you should have chosen to raise me. I’ve always taken it as an act of homage, a recognition of your own childhood indebtedness which overcame any silly idea of unhappy associations. (People and their unhappy memories! They shun them with such fastidious horror one can only conclude that’s where they chiefly reside, and would do far better to throw open a few windows than keep up this wearisome pretence of having moved house.) Perhaps on reflection it was less a matter of homage to me than of loyalty to your former self? Although the idea of a former self also strikes me as inaccurate. We are who we were always going to have been. What was my own former self? A seed gathered in Colombia? (I’m told Santiago de Tolú’s rather a pretty place on the coast not far from Panama.) A plumule? A radicle? As I was, so I am now but bigger. As I am now, so will I be, but unfortunately not much more so since as a fully grown adult I ought to reach a height of a hundred feet with a trunk four feet thick and I can’t see that happening here. But the point is we none of us change, we only somewhat transform ourselves. I didn’t personally help towards your survival as a child, of course, so I never saw you in those far-off days. Yet I’m sure you can’t have changed so fundamentally. I imagine all one need do is look around at this House and see your old obsessions respectably disguised as a vocation. I presume this goes for a good few people.

  ‘“I ought to reach a hundred feet,” I catch myself saying. Is this, then, one of my own obsessions? But no, I don’t think so. Really, I’m perfectly content and not a bit anxious about the future. How could I be – you ask – seeing that balsams have a reputation for self-satisfaction to the point of smugness? Something to do with having been esteemed (over-esteemed?) for so long and associated with all those myrrhs and spikenards and frankincenses and other costly gums of mythic resonance. All I know is, I can supply something for the human nose and palate to get to work on. Now this probably is a mild obsession of mine. It’s heartening for us to see our gardener beguiling his visitors’ olfactory, if not sapid, sense before it atrophies entirely. You’re even making their eyes work harder by insisting on candlelight. I wonder if you don’t have a satirical streak in you as you confront these townees with the vestigial whispers of their ancestral past? As they once were, so may they discover themselves still to be! Already some of them are wearing pelts, I notice.’

  Six

  In the early days of the occupation Leon had commissioned a notice which said ‘Beware of Tropical Snakes’ in five languages. He screwed this to the Palm House door where it remained throughout the war. He never discovered if this simple ruse had saved his private capitol from ransack and destruction, but in one way or another the Botanical Gardens were largely spared the invaders’ attentions which, like the blast of bombs, took unpredictable and freakish forms. A grey scout car had nosed in through the gates one morning and stopped, blocking them. Soldiers had deployed with rifles at the ready, expecting ambush. When nothing happened beside the temporary capture of a couple of terrified orchid-fanciers the troops had relaxed and wandered around, poking into potting sheds and summer houses. Leon, standing protectively at the door of the Palm House, overheard them say ‘Just a lot of boring old plants. This is no fun. I know – let’s go to the Zoo.’ The scout car had backed out in a cloud of blue smoke and roared away. The Society’s director, Dr Anselmus, had shortly afterwards shown a high-ranking German officer around the Gardens but this gentleman, while keenly interested in plants, saw Leon’s notice and declined to enter the Palm House despite his escort’s assurance that the snakes were ‘not much in evidence these days’.

  It was the luckless Zoo a mile away which had attracted all the attention. It had even been bombed. American or British pilots discovered that a line drawn between two prominent features, the penguin pool and the bear pits, pointed directly at the Ministry of Telecommunications in the centre of town. This building was well defended by anti-aircraft emplacements and though some way off, the younger and more nervous aircrews, lined up on their target and finding themselves flying directly into a lethal barrage, sometimes jettisoned their bombs early and peeled hurriedly away to safety. During one of these raids a bomb fell within thirty yards of the lion house, causing severe damage. An elderly lion, bewildered by pain and noise and bleeding from a concussed eardrum, loped its way slightly crabwise out of the Zoo grounds and along boulevards of shattered lindens. It caught sight of and attacked its own reflection in a music shop, scattering bright golden saxophones and
severing an artery. A detachment of soldiers found it exsanguinated, gallons of dark lion blood running across the pavement and into the gutter. For good measure they riddled its lifeless body with 9mm rounds before whacking out its teeth and cutting off its paws for souvenirs. Then they hitched it behind their scout car and dragged it away, polishing tram lines and the metal studs of pedestrian crossings with its dusty pelt. Back in barracks its remains were roasted for the officers’ mess. The roaring, redfaced excitement that night, the uniformed men swaying outside trying to urinate on the Milky Way, suggested the catharsis of tribespeople after a long and dangerous hunt.