Griefwork Read online

  ‘You’d care to hear my theories? Bless you, I’m flattered. Though I do say it myself I have, I think, one or two to offer. What you say is perfectly true – age does lend a certain weight, I find, to one’s opinions. There’s a fellow comes here from time to time who pokes rudely at me and fondles my parts – calls himself a professor, too, quite disgusting – Seneschal, that’s his name. Claims to be an authority on me and mine, or “gymnosperms” as he calls us – and no, Professor Seneschal, we’re not much flattered by your attention. The insolent monkey claims my noble race of cycads is primitive. I fear his unappealing little brain automatically equates the ancient with the unsophisticated. Like so many members of his species he sees himself as the culmination of millions of years’ evolution and thus fancies himself as perfected. There he stands, the great Professor Seneschal, the perfect example of his perfectly evolved species. Racial purity in person! From which position he deigns to examine my own genus and declare it imperfect. He knows quite well that cycads have survived practically unchanged for about a hundred and sixty million years longer than his own miserable species … I do beg your pardon, but you know what I mean – a rhetorical trope, merely. I’m informed that the entire evolution of the human species via the apes can now be considered as having been compressed into the last six million years or so which I’m afraid makes you by comparison a lot of Johnny-come-latelys – again, no offence. But explain if you can how, unless it’s from an innate racism, Professor Seneschal can look at a family which has survived intact all the changes and vicissitudes of a hundred and sixty million years and still see it as primitive? Surely it is proof of extreme evolutionary sophistication? His kind have been obliged to go from trees to trousers in a wink of time whereas we cycads have needed no such desperate measures. Does it not argue conclusively that it was we who were already perfected, having no further need of change in order to survive? None of these embarrassing transmogrifications for us: shedding tails and shedding hair and, come to that, shedding blood. Scarcely a dignified history, if I may make so bold.

  ‘But I digress. I haven’t forgotten that my real subject is the palms. However, it was necessary to “set the scene”, as it were, because we now reach the point at which Professor Seneschal and his cronies draw from their already erroneous hypothesis their most opprobrious conclusion – to wit, that far from being a clear and perfected race we cycads are in fact muddled and ambiguous as to our identity, that we have not yet “decided” whether we are “really” palms or conifers. It’s like saying the Professor’s problem is that he has failed to make up his mind to be either a chimpanzee or a fruit bat, though someone more malicious than I might suggest the choice had already been thrust upon him. In any case he says our leaves are reminiscent of palm fronds while our beautiful cones resemble those of fir trees. Oh, the vulgar fallacies of these racist evolutionaries! Post hoc ergo propter hoc! And this same grotesque logic is somehow expected to build into a steady intentional line of descent, culminating in the great Professor himself! Under duress, then, I might well agree that his hands had a remarkable similarity to those of a chimpanzee and – I have this on an authority whose identity I cannot divulge – his gonads bear a considerable resemblance to those of a fruit bat, erectile tissue and all.

  ‘The palms? Well, as a member of a race which can draw collectively on the memories of a hundred and sixty million years, I can inform the Professor that it’s perfectly meaningless to go on about who derived from what and when. Here we all are, are we not? The fact that there are, undeniably, palm trees in this world whose fronds might be thought to have some faint similarity to our leaves is scarcely a reason for accusing my kind of ambiguity and muddlement. It’s insulting. Besides – and here’s a pertinent question for Herr Doktor Professor – what’s wrong with ambiguousness in any case? There’s nothing in this world which is not ambiguous, not one single thing which could be said unequivocally to represent “reality”, whatever that might mean. My word, one despairs at the lack of intellectual sophistication on the part of some of these newer – my apologies again, dammit, but I’m sure you’ll forgive my heatedness. This dreary simplistic way of looking at things gets me on the raw, I’m afraid.

  ‘The real problem with the palms derives largely, in my view, from their crude height. This casual fact of nature has led directly to all their faults of character. I’m sorry to stoop from the level of scientific discourse for a moment to that of mere moralism, but anyone in this House would readily agree with this opinion. To borrow the repugnant idiom of the times which I’ve heard bandied about by recent visitors, the palms have a tendency towards a “Master Race” complex. More unfortunate still, it’s made worse by the attitude of Homo sapiens sapiens (too wise by half!) which merely encourages the palms’ belief in their own superiority. I’ve made this a matter of some study so you won’t find me short of ammunition. What? Oh very well, then, chapter and verse. Linnaeus, who described many of the more than 2,500 species of palm, called them the princes of the plant kingdom since they supplied Homo with food and shelter and clothing. This is notoriously not the behaviour of most princes, but we’ll let it pass. He also pointed out that the etymology of the name “palm” derived from that of the palm of the hand since the fronds reminded humans of their own fingers. Linnaeus was, of course, a man himself. Any plant meeting with mankind’s favour is accorded royal status! So much for scientific objectivity. Such childish hierarchies! There’s also a glaring inconsistency here. We cycads are considered “muddled” because we remind man of both palms and conifers. Why, then, isn’t Homo equally muddled because palms remind him of himself? Why indeed. But it gets worse, as this Leon fellow’s readings in the Society’s library will confirm. If you turn to the Deutsches Magazin für Garten- und Blumenkunde for 1872 (volume 25, I fancy), you will find the following pieces of dotty anthropomorphism, which I’ll take the liberty of doing into your own language to save time:

  ‘“The palm tree resembles man in its straight, upright, slender proportions, its beauty and its separation into two sexes, male and female. If its head is cut off it dies. If its brain suffers then the whole tree suffers with it. If its fronds are broken off they will no more regenerate than will a man’s amputated arm. Its fibrous bark covers it as a man is covered with hair.”

  ‘This is lamentable stuff, to be sure, and we need hardly bother to spike the weak points in such analogies. Separation into two sexes, forsooth! Most palms are monoecious, are they not? The same plant bears both male and female flowers. No ambiguity there, of course; oh no. (Our male and female cones, I’d like to remind you, are borne on separate plants.) And as for the “fibrous bark”, I’d always understood that the whole point about Homo’s alleged superiority was precisely that he was not covered with a pelt of hair. It’s clear that Professor Seneschal and his ilk still unconsciously think of themselves as apes, no doubt from having been apes far longer than they’ve been men. But let us proceed:

  ‘“The palm’s distinguished shape is superior to that of all other plants in its noble bearing, as are its deliberate striving to reach the skies, its nourishing fruits, the materials it supplies for clothing and shelter, and its airy crown swaying to the least current of air whose rustling passage led man to believe he was listening to an invisible being. All these combine to create the impression that the palm tree embodies a higher being: if not an actual deity then surely its dwelling place.”

  ‘Gentlemen, [said Encephalartos with a lecturer’s at-a-loss gesture] I ask you. With all this sheer tosh talked about them, is it surprising it’s gone to the palms’ heads? When those passages were written the palm – in however stunted and ignoble a form – had become an essential ingredient in any bourgeois household, whether in drawing room or conservatory, as several of the species in this House bear witness. (One searches in vain, I submit, for anything princely in these runts and dwarves.) The palm was thereby reduced to a mere cliché of the exotic, a symbol of the longing which urban man felt for a rustic and s
upposedly spiritual self he had lost somewhere in the past. Oh dear, oh dear. One really does despair. All I can say is that so far as anyone in this House is concerned the planet had been getting on quite well without this sort of pretentious prattle. Before that, palms were just tall plants, and nowhere near the tallest. Nowadays it appears they’re actually the nests of gods, mainly because they remind human beings of themselves. And we cycads are supposed to be primitive? Words fail me.’

  For once, this turned out to be true and Encephalartos relapsed into his customary pithy gloom.

  Seven

  The Gardens are being dug, weeded, bushes trimmed and tied. The lawns have been cut and young men stand on wooden edging boards driving half-moon blades into the straggly turf to produce crisp lines. Others pull rollers or, crouched in potting sheds, laboriously stencil fresh signs and labels to replace those faded to illegibility. There is no shortage of able-bodied help, for the economy is not yet back on its feet. The currency is unstable, the black market thrives: Swiss watches, cameras, nylons, scent, cigarettes, spirits; but also butter, petrol, paraffin oil for heaters, meat, coal, eggs. Any work is better than none, a pittance preferable to no income. Assets are gradually unfrozen and members of the Royal Botanic Society return from visits to London and Zurich having retrieved funds judiciously salted away six years earlier. Their bequests and loans not only turn them from Members into Fellows but enable the Society to hire abundant cheap labour for the Gardens and to put in hand repairs to its devastated seventeenth-century seat, the beautiful mansion at the far end of the grounds …

  Not true, any of it, apart from the black market. Wars do not end as neatly as chapters, nor does regeneration follow on their boot-heels like spring. Nothing is clear. In the listlessness of convalescence everything is lacking, uncriminal energies in particular. Unfinished business yields with difficulty to new. Bygones become foregones, as a bed whose blighted soil infects healthy transplanted seedlings. As a matter of fiction, as a matter of fact, the Society’s elegant headquarters had indeed been left something of a ruin. Early in the war it was requisitioned by the German Agricultural Secretariat and over the years had been comprehensively looted. At the last moment before the occupation Dr Anselmus and a colleague had managed to save some of the better pictures, furniture and carpets. The most valuable books and archives had also been hidden. The men had run a great risk with commendable bravery and since the war’s end a certain amount of commending had been done. The stuff remained where it was, however, because the mansion was in no fit state for priceless objects and incunabula. Until lately it had been used for billeting French, then American troops. When at last it was vacated the horticulturists could wander in through its lolling front doors and take stock of what remained. They looked in silence at the scratched marble flooring, the stairs splintered by hobnailed boots. Upstairs they found they had been bequeathed twenty-six massive and hideous oak filing cabinets, Ministerium style, several hundred of their own empty wine bottles and some scattered sheets of official stationery headed with embossed black spread-eagles which were too scuffed and trampled to have been worth the soldiers’ taking as souvenirs. Most of the shutters were missing, along with much panelling and wainscoting. Somebody said darkly how remarkable it was the way that fellow Leon had kept the Palm House heated right through last winter; nobody could quite bring themselves openly to accuse him of having chopped up the Society’s immemorial seat. ‘Even if so,’ as Dr Anselmus said, ‘it would have been in a good cause and not for personal gain. Better burnt by him to preserve our living assets than to toast the thick ankles of some German secretary.’ He arranged to have the filing cabinets removed to him for fuel.

  Uneasy conversations took place over the only available refreshment, limeflower tea laced with cheap schnapps.

  ‘Can’t you feel it?’

  ‘What?’ asked Leon absently as he poked his finger into a pot of soil to test its dampness.

  ‘The uncertainty. Everything’s uncertain.’ This colleague, an under-gardener in the Temperate House, was a religiously troubled man who would nod significantly when words like ‘dust’, ‘smoke’ or ‘ashes’ drifted innocently through people’s speech. ‘Our money. Our jobs. This whole place, even.’

  ‘The Gardens? The Palm House, you mean?’ Its curator glanced upwards as if glass were already tinkling about his ears.

  ‘Yes, mate, the Palm House,’ the under-gardener said, pleasantly satisfied at shattering a comfortable illusion. ‘And the Gardens. Don’t you ever look further ahead than bedtime tonight?’

  ‘Not often,’ admitted Leon.

  ‘You ought to, sometime. Might save you having a heart attack when the Society goes broke and we’re out on the streets.’

  ‘The Society goes broke?’ Echoing the phrase made it sound still more preposterous. ‘How could it? I mean, it’s the Society.’

  ‘Well, it can, you mark my words. The things of Man, the toys of Earth. According to Peter this morning, Anselmus says the estimate for repairs to the house alone’s forty thousand. That’s just the house, mind. On top of that it’ll cost five thousand to bring the gardens round – and that only means back to the condition they were in in ’Thirty-nine. It doesn’t include all the things they were going to have to do then. You remember? Completely re-dig the lake, rebuild the Temperate House from scratch because of the damp rot, dry rot, woodworm, the lot. Put a new heating system into this place. You’ve always said the boilers have had it. All those things’ll cost a packet. Willesz says they’ve got about enough money to keep us on our present salary for the rest of this year. Two years if they don’t take on any of the new men we need.’

  ‘Something’ll turn up.’

  ‘I spent yesterday with Jan nailing up the front doors of the house and putting up what shutters are left. They haven’t got forty thousand, not anything like, so the place’ll have to wait. It’ll be all right so long as the weather doesn’t get in. The roof’s sound, at least.’

  ‘Something’ll turn up.’

  Since that morning months had passed and the gulf Leon had felt opening seemed to have closed again. The boilers throbbed loyally, the gravel crunched firmly beneath his flapping galoshes, the plants creaked with growth and the night people were trooping in to gossip and shelter and admire his blooms. Better still, they were paying for the privilege, nominal entrance fees whose scrupulous surrender by Leon touched Dr Anselmus and made him still sadder since he knew things his famous stove house expert did not. But then, everybody knew things Leon didn’t. The princess was no exception, with her Lancôme scent and flirty predictions. He listened to their gossip but the rumours never quite touched him. They hung about like cobwebs in an untidy bachelor’s house, so familiar he no longer noticed them. That is, until one candlelit night when, in the grotto behind a stand of bamboo, he came face to face with the spider. He overheard a conversation among a group gathered around the night-flowering Cestrum whose slender yellow-green flowers they were sampling.

  ‘I say, Bettrice, try this one … There. Isn’t that divine?’

  Her ‘Mm, yes’ mingled with ‘Make the most of it’ from a second male voice.

  ‘But surely they can’t?’ said the woman. ‘Legally, I mean. Part of the nation’s heritage. You can’t sell off a public garden.’

  ‘That’s just what they’re wrangling about, whether it’s actually part of the University and therefore public or private. Weren’t you there when André was saying all that about the city council getting the estates department to come up with a watertight plan?’

  ‘I never listen to what André says, darling. He’s always using phrases like “watertight plan”.’

  ‘Well, all right, I grant he’s a bit dreary. But he’s in the know.’

  ‘And “in the know”.’

  ‘I’m not doing very well.’

  ‘Not if you’re hoping to sell me on André’s intellect, no. If you’re trying to convince me he’s been eavesdropping on City Hall gossip you needn�
��t bother. We already know he does that. C’est son métier, after all. The man’s a journalist.’

  ‘They have their uses. He might at least ensure this whole business gets aired before it becomes a national scandal. This isn’t a satrapy any longer. It’s supposed to be a democracy again. I like to know what’s being done in my name.’

  ‘In your name, Charles?’

  ‘He’s right, Bettrice,’ said the other man. ‘It’s all very grand to form coalitions and governments of national reconstruction and invoke crisis and emergency and so on, but you’ve got to watch these people like a hawk. This place is a plum.’ (‘Hawks? Plums?’ Bettrice could be heard murmuring.) ‘How many acres, do you reckon? Can’t be less than ten, surely. Imagine: ten acres of verdant real estate this close to the centre of town. And calls on all sides for mass new housing as well as these grandiose plans of theirs for commercial hubbery – “entrepôt status” or whatever the cant phrase is. That means a lot more people, a lot more shops and offices. It’s the exact moment when those buggers with the powdered jowls who survived the war at a profit begin casting around for likely sites for land deals. You yourself said the other day your horrid little landlord had just snapped up that entire bombed street. The one with the Lutheran church.’