Griefwork Read online

  For, central to this boy, to his companionship of himself, was a solemnity which could not be put into words but which had the status of a vow. He had promised that no matter what happened he would always remain true to the person he now was, to his unseen companion who alone knew what he endured. What he knew he could not describe except by the feelings it brought, as a merganser brings with it its marvellous plumage out of a grey sky. When a herring smack from Great Yarmouth went aground on the Shaleybanks the clouds cracked apart that afternoon and let out a ray so narrow it illuminated a single spar which burst into gold, the rest of the craft remaining as dun as its sails. It produced in the boy a fretful ecstasy which recurred whenever the weather looked the same. What were such episodes if not cement, building up dab by dab an identity which would last and in which he could be free?

  Very occasionally something stranger and more momentous happened whose plumage was iridescent fire and which could descend while he was putting on a shoe or threading the fluker wire through the eels or watching a Dutch skipper haul up his glistening lee board like a swan tucking up its black web. Suddenly everything broke open. All the syllables and voices spoke at once, together but each intensely clear, and for an endless flash there was equally shuuuff in a wave and in the flare of a gull alighting, grockle in the sheen of marram grass bending before the breeze. Afterwards, when everything had settled back, he could never recapture this as knowledge. He could only remember the suffusion of calm, as one most intensely remembers a great wind by the silence which falls when it is spent and rings on in the mind. He yearned for these things but could never make them happen. Nor did he tell anyone, for there was nobody to tell other than his constant companion who already knew.

  He had once tried to confide in Wim, whose father had four long greenhouses behind the town. These were crammed with row upon row of tomatoes and it was Wim’s task to help with watering, pinching out, tying up trusses, spraying washes. Wim was bigger than Leon, a year older, with sticking-out ears and farinaceous skin. Despite constant eczema which cracked painfully and wept he preserved a cheerful spirit and vagrant passions, pushing potatoes up exhaust pipes and dyeing cats green. When Leon timidly broached the subject of his ‘funny feelings’ Wim’s great ears had lit up bright red and he did things which made little sense but caused Leon to think of gutting and roes. It seemed after all that Wim had not understood, and Leon never tried again. Much later he could vividly recall that scene of cross-purposes: the bright October sun shining hot through the glass on the back of his head, the smell of crushed tomato leaves, the translucent ears and milt.

  One other constant companion was a chronically weak chest. Sometimes on winter mornings when it was still dark he hardly had the strength to light the candle, get into his clothes and totter downstairs gripping the rickety banister. The first breaths of searing sea air or the close tarry fume of the smoke house would bring on a fit of coughing which forced him to sit for minutes, wiping tears from his eyes. On three occasions he had been taken in a cart to the cottage hospital nine miles away, the first at the age of eight, the last when he was fourteen. Each time the treatment was the same. He was put to bed in a warm room and well fed, while every so often a tent of curtains would be drawn around a frame overhanging the head of the bed. A nurse would bring a steam kettle heated by a spirit lamp and set it on a chair with its long tin spout poking through a hole in the curtains. From this spout came steam with an assortment of aromatic flavourings added. The doctor was a great believer in variety, on the grounds that a physiological system as complex as the lungs needed more than a single specific. One morning it might be menthol crystals implanted in a blob of sponge through which the steam passed; later that afternoon it could be benzoin or Friar’s Balsam. The steam helped and Leon would lie back in his semi-delirium while the hot resins opened up crackling passageways in his chest. The first time the doctor doubted he would survive, had believed the infection would spread. He looked thoughtfully at the gasping child, thin to the point of gauntness, called for constant nursing and hot camphorated poultices applied to the chest every two hours and wrapped in yellow oiled silk. He spoke of invasion, capillary bronchitis, pleurisy. With his old wooden stethoscope (to which he loyally clung, maintaining that flexible rubber tubing distorted sound) he listened to the râles in the boy’s lungs. His head was turned towards Leon as he did so, face balanced on the wood tube so that to his drifting patient it looked like some kind of blancmange on a cake stand. The doctor listened as the crepitations roared up, his eyes fixed nowhere, expression rapt as a child’s with a seashell pressed to its ear. Since chest complaints were so common hereabouts he had a fine ear and could distinguish shades of sound which told him much. Above the loud undertow of crackling noises, for instance, that thin squeak was not a good sign. It was the remaining air from the alveoli squeezing back through the clogged atrium into the bronchiole and slowly shutting down another group of air sacs. Areas of the left lung were already producing a dead, meaty sound to auscultation. ‘Time for an expectorant, Sister,’ he would murmur, straightening up at length. ‘Squill, I think. Tincture – no, vinegar of squill, together with syrup of Tolú. Tomorrow morning tar-water, preferably birch tar. Is he drinking?’

  ‘When I wake him.’

  ‘Plenty of hot milk. Sweet, with a lump of butter. Look at him. How can he fight like that? Poor little scrap. Bowels?’

  ‘Not so far, Doctor.’

  ‘Hickery-pickery, then. Nothing stronger. We can always increase the dose. Carry on, Sister. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.’ He looked again at his patient, picked up his silk hat from where it lay over the boy’s feet and shook his head.

  But that time Leon had pulled through, and the next, and the next. By his early teens he was left with permanently weakened lungs. He coughed a lot, became easily short of breath. Down in Flinn he excited pity. In his delicacy and unparented isolation he stood out, even on that harsh coast where conditions differed little for most people. Indeed, many were fond of him. He was gentle and polite; and if he seemed remote and always to be talking to himself it was construed as proof that ‘part of him was already on the other side’. In this view people were touched by sickness as by sainthood. He was really only waiting for a fatal complication to set in – pneumonia, consumption – and he would finally go all the way to the churchyard where sickly children ended, his coffin leaned on by a sexton with a pole to stop it floating up as the soaking clods were shovelled hastily back.

  None of this happened. He survived and he left. One day in 1929 when he was about sixteen he walked to the town, hitched a lift on a cart full of Wim’s father’s tomatoes and vanished citywards. He forsook the cold, salt-laden yawn of sea, sky and polder and with him took a private landscape and an unseen friend. Not physically strong but entirely self-possessed he wandered for some weeks before finding a job as a gardener’s boy in the distant capital. A month after he had left, his uncle and two companions were drowned while fishing, caught in a squall which became a great storm. Had he survived, the uncle would have returned to find his dwelling roofless and sagging, the smoke house blown flat. In this manner he was saved from ruin by disaster.

  So carefully had he watched sails, waves, grasses, skies, that maybe Leon allowed himself to be guided by the wind. A quartering breeze on his thin shoulder-blades veered him diagonally to the railway instead of the bus station. An icy clout to the side of his neck knocked him into the first train rather than the second. At any rate, some explanation should be advanced for the uncanny accuracy with which he fetched up at the Botanical Gardens of all places on the very day there was a vacancy for a low-ranking employee, and this at a time when half the streets of Europe were restless with low-ranking employees looking for work. His companion about him, he moved among these listless folk in a purposeful way, one eye on the clouds. He had already been down to the docks crowded with shipping and admired the forest of masts and rigging, the funnels’ stained livery. But the wind was steadily onshore a
nd he was blown back towards City Hall.

  Not far from the centre was a park. With one of his remaining coins he bought a bun, unconsciously divided it into two and ate as slowly as he could, sitting on the grass. Children kicked a football, the pages of an abandoned newspaper lolloped before the breeze. A hundred yards off was a row of plane trees beyond which he could see the flicker of traffic on the boulevard. He watched a brace of sheldrake cross the sky, quite high, then lose height rapidly to slant steeply behind the tree tops, wings downcurved. ‘Hutt,’ he said. ‘Hutt.’ This was the air passing through a duck’s tight wings as it braked for landing. He got up, brushing off crumbs and leaves, and made for the trees.

  On the far side of the boulevard was a fine high wall bending with the road so as to suggest a large enclosure. He crossed, wincing at traffic din, and came to a pair of iron gates, one of which was open. He wandered in past a little lodge, the wind now squarely at his back. Some way off beyond a screen of willows a small tarn glittered. On it were several dozen waterfowl. Leon approached. Many of the larger ones were odd indeed. There were emerald shanks and weird crests and crimson excrescences like tumours around the base of the beak. He looked about him with amazement. Although the grounds had been landscaped they were laid out not as a park but as an elaborate garden. There were a few expanses of plain grass lawn which together might have constituted a pleasance, but the general effect was more serious and even scientific in a way he found reassuring. On all sides was a profusion of unfamiliar plants and trees, all well maintained and labelled. Used as he was to the North Sea coast he was overwhelmed by the richness of the garden, by the colours and scents, the nooks of shade, the rockeries and summer houses. Butterflies staggered above banks of honeyed trumpets whose name was painted on the wooden marker planted beside them. He seemed to have fallen into a paradise. He wandered about, slightly stupefied.

  ‘We can’t leave this, can we?’ he kept remarking. ‘Oh no, we can’t leave,’ came the reply. The wind had dropped, the sun beat hotly back from the brick walls of potting sheds and outhouses. Along the paths moved nannies drowning in light, the silver spokes of their perambulators glittering like pinwheels, sprrixx, while around them trotted their older charges, some of whom wore velvet leggings, for the day had started cool and dull. His chest paining him with excitement, Leon sat on a bench in the shade of a camellia gazing across at the Orangery (which of course he did not recognise as such). At once he fell victim to a strange fugue. In an instant he watched the seasons changing, the trees stripped and black with mist, the cold blaze of snowlight, the nursemaids and sauntering couples bundled up and brisk. All this he saw taking place in a withdrawn silence as if out of earshot. ‘Ssiiih,’ he whispered when it was over, already rooted to the garden by virtue of this perspective. And then he noticed between trees the tall glitter of the Palm House. Approaching it he saw there were a couple of lesser conservatories not much different from Wim’s father’s greenhouses. He paid them little attention. It was the Palm House which drew him, with its crystal dome and flashing weathervane shaped like a golden ship, full-rigged and holding its course into the eye of the wind. The panes of this immense glasshouse were misty with condensation but he had the impression of green bulks of foliage and, beneath the dome itself, of actual trees.

  Seeing a couple leaving he let himself in through the double set of doors and stood in wonder, breathing the hot damp reek. This incense went straight down in his lungs, clearing airways, easing tightness. He walked the spongy paths, admired plants whose shapes he had never imagined. If the walled garden outside were itself a fragment of the seventeenth century, this indoor land was a patch of primordial terrain. It was as if once, unknown ages ago, a tropical forest had covered this part of the Earth until one day people had noticed it retreating and had clapped a greenhouse over a remaining tentacle like a tumbler over a butterfly, preserving it intact as the rest shrank away and vanished for good. Altogether he spent an hour in there, alone but for three visitors who came and went. There seemed nobody in charge. He left and after a search found a fellow in a leather jerkin and gaiters who directed him back to the lodge.

  ‘Little sod,’ a vaguely official-looking man was saying to a red-haired woman sitting at a typewriter in the office. ‘We’re missing two hundredweight.’

  ‘You mean he’s nicked them?’ asked the woman incuriously.

  ‘Clean as a whistle. Imagine, two hundredweight of trellis straps.’

  ‘What on earth are they?’

  ‘Those nail things for driving into walls to hold plants up. They’ve got a lead tag on them which you bend over the stem to grip it. It’s the lead he was after. Any scrap merchant’d give him a good price for … Yes?’

  ‘I want to do your glazing,’ said Leon.

  ‘We’ve got a glazier.’

  ‘We had a glazier,’ the woman reminded him tartly.

  ‘There’s a lot of panes missing or broken,’ Leon insisted, adding truthfully, ‘I’m good,’ thinking of all the glass he had helped Wim replace. There was hardly a winter storm which hadn’t taken its toll.

  Whatever wind had blown him here was evidently still blowing his way. Within half an hour he was engaged as a gardener’s boy for a pittance and with permission to sleep in a potting shed where there were some bales of peat and a horse blanket. ‘Can’t think why I’m doing it,’ the man kept saying. ‘No references, nothing. And especially after all this. I suppose you’ve not got your eye on anything? There aren’t any trellis straps left but maybe you’re planning to start a black market in putty?’

  ‘I’m not a thief.’

  ‘No,’ said the man with a slight stare. ‘I don’t believe you are. I wonder what it is you are, though? Apart from being mysteriously punctual?’

  ‘A good glazier.’

  Not only that but a willing and reliable worker. By the year’s end Leon had made a niche for himself in the Gardens’ hierarchy of labourers. True, it was near the bottom; but in some way he had made himself indispensable, or at least was off the list of those who might be dispensed with if the worsening economy made layoffs necessary. Wearing his leather jerkin and gaiters (obligatory for all staff members, a remnant of eighteenth-century uniform) he mastered various kinds of maintenance while learning all he could about horticulture. For the first year he was not allowed to have anything to do with the plants, many of which were rarities from all over the world. He asked questions and remembered answers, watched and watched. He lived in the potting shed, ate at workers’ cafés, bathed once a week in the Palm House boiler room, had his own key to the wicket in the main gates. This by itself was a measure of the peculiar trust he inspired.

  ‘Very odd boy,’ as the head gardener remarked to the Palm House curator. ‘Talks to plants.’

  ‘Not just to plants. Sits there in that tin tub in front of the furnaces carrying on to himself. I can hear him from the next room. Sort of nonsense full of squeaks and groans and things. You wouldn’t say he was potty, though, would you?’

  They thought for a moment, warming their hands on the mugs of tea they were holding. The dried mud on their palms husked over the glaze. ‘Not to talk to, no,’ said the gardener. ‘That’s what’s odd. Remember that painter they brought in? The one who’d been gassed in the trenches? Now there was a fellow off his onion. He didn’t just talk to himself. Went about shouting at people who weren’t there. Gave me the willies. But young Leon’s not like that. When he’s on his own he talks to himself, right, but when he’s with you he talks perfectly normal, doesn’t he? No, he’s not potty. And I’ll tell you what, that boy’s got the greenest fingers I’ve ever seen. You know when you’re losing a plant? You’ve tried everything short of sitting up with it at night? Point comes when you think sod it, that’s it, heave it up and put it on the bonfire. Old Leon’ll come by and say “Don’t pull him up, Mr Smy, don’t pull him up.” And he’ll mess about with it and make sort of hissing noises at it as if it was a horse and blow me, a week later there’ll b
e this little green shoot. Soon as winter’s over I’m having him off maintenance. It’s a waste. You could go out in the street right now and in five minutes find thirty men to put a washer on a tap or patch a water butt or dredge dead leaves out of the lake.’

  ‘And glad of the work.’

  ‘Exactly. No, I’m having him off that. The lad’s got something. Wants watching, though. A lot to learn. He will keep talking to visitors. Caught him at it only this morning. Willesz had put him to cleaning out that runoff tank at the back of the Orangery and he’d got this barrowload of sludge and muck, looked like a blackamoor, pushing it along a walk if you please, not even going round by the wall. When I came on him there he was, bold as brass, stopped out there in the middle talking to this young lady. “Since when”, I asked him soon as I could get him away, “does the Society encourage filthy dirty gardener’s boys to talk to ladies and gentlemen of the public? One, it’s against regulations and two, it’s a question of manners.” He knew better than to give me any sauce but it’s not the first time he’s done it.’

  ‘Nor the last, probably. Not if it’s young ladies he likes chatting up,’ said the curator wisely. ‘I sometimes wonder if he’s not having quite a bit of fun on the side after hours in that potting shed of his.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said the head gardener. ‘Never thought of that.’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t seem to want to leave it. My wife tried to get him to lodge with us. You know how soft she is and she’s sort of taken a shine to the lad now that our two have left the nest. Doesn’t like the sound of his cough and he’s too thin – you know how they go on. Fine by me. Shove a bed up in the attic, it’d be better than kipping between peat and straw, but he wasn’t having any. Respectful-like but no, he was happy where he was. Perhaps that’s why. Ask me, he’s on to a good thing. Not many kids his age have a little private roof over their heads with their own key and nobody asking questions.’