Griefwork Read online

  Yet with each sun Leon’s heart lightened in expectation as he cycled into Flinn after the usual acrid exchange with his uncle (who was little mollified by the small sums he brought home in place of his previously free labour). Some days he never even glimpsed Cou Min. On others, circumstances would conjure her arm beside his own and he would marvel at their different colours and ache to pass his fingertips over the tiny hairs trapped at her elbow’s crease. Or else his eyes would be offered her leg, casually raised as she tied her shoe, the hem of her dress falling momentarily back or catching a stray favonian huff of breeze so as to permit his gaze access to unbearable depths of tender, apricot thigh. Those evenings he cycled home exhausted, worn out by the effort of maintaining his balance, riding the lurches, acting the uncomplicated, eager apprentice. It was impossible. Language, culture, constant supervision and sheer adult incredulity placed Cou Min on the far side of an insurmountable barricade.

  Who at fifteen could ever imagine that everyone in his town, throughout Europe, in the entire world, might be constantly filled with similar hopeless longings? That this sweet ailment which had descended on him sooner or later afflicted everybody? And who would conclude that at the centre of this universal longing there resided a tenderness so intense, so yielding, that it constituted a form of racial frailty? How out of sheer thwart and desperation protective guises were donned so that each morning from bedrooms the world over men and women stepped wearing armour – suits and overalls and uniforms which mediated the permissible and damped private anguish. But fifteen-year-old Leon was naked before his longing, even as he longed for nakedness. When he repeated her name into his pillow his scalding breath came back to him smelling of damp feathers. Behind squeezed lids he tried again and again to assemble her, to will her to stand before him, smile, reach out to place her hands behind his neck and draw him to her. Yet with faithless malignity his memory supplied only morsels in soft focus. In fantasy he was able to adore at leisure the sweet jut of an ankle bone beneath its short white sock; an ear transluced by pelting summer sun; the backs of her calves (modestly kissing as she stood waiting while adults talked) tensing and relaxing to her rocking on and off her toes; the tender nape so artfully hidden and revealed by the shining pigtail. Yet these wonderful details refused to coalesce into Cou Min complete. Instead they drifted about like motes in strong sunlight. Behind them floated her presence, by now as much part of him as his own beating heart and equally beyond sight, like the familiar figure glimpsed in a dream, so well known that its real identity is never disclosed.

  And thus, sadly, passionately, he sang the Fragmented Beloved, dissolved in her own beauty.

  Since everything about this summer was revelatory he also discovered how much being in love sharpens the senses even as it paralyses the intelligence. Had he been the diary-keeping sort he might well have headed one entry ‘The Day I Smelt Her Knee’, an event which took place without any contrivance of his. Once again they were at sea. Dr Koog and a crewman were hauling up a dredge of bottom samples, using a sheave. Leon had just turned away as it came aboard. The boat lurched, the heavy dripping net swung into his back, the end of its steel header catching him behind one ear. Half stunned, he was thrown to the deck where he slid on all fours like a dog on ice, thudding into Cou Min’s legs where she sat on the edge of the engine-hatch coaming. He never quite lost consciousness but experienced a dreamy, prolonged sublimity where his vision was narrowed to an area of russet knee and he breathed the scent of salt wind on sunbaked skin. Even as it seemed he could stay there for ever the singing in his ears grew fainter, hands grasped at his shoulders and he was helped back on to his feet, unwillingly restored to the world. Had he been writing this up later while nursing the ragged remains of a headache, he might have gone on to list several other of Cou Min’s intoxicating scents including those of her hair and her upper arms. Her clothes, too, had an innocent fragrance like the warm ghosts of coconut oil and the waxy smell of children’s bedding. And had he been writing reflectively years afterwards he might have been tempted to enlarge generally on the smells and sounds of the young as opposed to those of adults, for his adolescent self had engraved Cou Min pungently and for ever in more than merely the visual dimension. The very young might not be aware of noticing such things, but it is by subtle as well as by obvious means that they choose their loves from among their peers and coevals, from appropriate calves and puppies. Is this not true? (he might have written, with monumental vexation at the years which made it impossible to complete that summer – now destined to remain for ever unconsummated and lost to proper expression.) Is it not so, that young skin and hair smell different? That the young sound different not only when they speak or sing but when they eat and even when they digest? It is adults whose teeth clack and whose jawbones crepitate so irritatingly when they munch; who leave lavatories stenching of the fermented ichors of coffee and tobacco sputum; whose breaths are accompanied by the shrill whistlings of nasal hair. How visually led people are, then, to imagine that this vast spread of difference could be squeezed down into matters of looks alone! Women in particular went to great and costly lengths in order to appear young, with their creams and diets and rinses, as if age were only wrinkles, fading and middle-age spread. Yet a blind person could tell in an instant they were fakes. No matter what art and artifice she employed no woman could ever go back to smelling and sounding as she had at Cou Min’s age. Her very breathing would betray her. The body’s clock is not read in the face or hands but in its sonorities and the leak of glands. The interwoven sensualities of youth are fully understood only by other adolescents, for whom they are new (if sometimes a little on the rank side) and free from the corruption of nostalgia.

  One thing Leon certainly would not have noted in a putative diary was his theft of Cou Min’s handkerchief, carried out with the unthinking response of the hardened criminal who stoops hawklike on a dropped wallet. This had fallen out of her sleeve when she brought tea up to her master and his assistant in the laboratory. Dr Koog had just explained how for the purpose of rough identification it was convenient to divide the flatfishes into three kinds: the turbot family, which included brill and megrim and had their eyes on the left side of their heads; the plaice family to which lemon sole, dab, halibut, witch and flounder belonged, whose eyes were on the right; and the proper sole family – also right-eyed – essentially represented by the Dover and sand soles. With a magnifying-glass Leon was examining the rosette around the nostril on the underside of a sand sole they had caught that morning when Cou Min knocked and entered with a tray. He broke off to watch her softly chiming progress and imagined running the lens over her entire body. As her hand dropped to the door handle on her way out a white wedge of handkerchief fell unnoticed from her sleeve and lay on the threshold like an abandoned sandwich. Quickly he went over and scooped it up, eliding this swift gesture into the act of picking up a teacup and bringing it over to the doctor who was still intently probing the sole’s apertures with a pair of forceps.

  He never really got closer to Cou Min than this. He had thought to recognise in her a fellow outsider, adrift in a strange place and an alien culture, surely isolated by her youth in the enforced company of adults. In vain his own feelings of dissociation, in vain his certainty of this bond between them. They had everything in common but a language. The summer went on passing; passed. He learned a good deal about fish, about marine organisms, how to use a microscope and at last see for himself what he had always intuited through the grockle sound of the sea threshing its roots around pebbles: that it was alive throughout with unsuspected creatures now shimmering in their prismatic colours and intricate shapes in the sunlight which bounced up from the swivelled mirror. What he saw was a glimpse, just as what he learned was a glimpse; but it would be impossible for him to return to the crudeness of smoking bloaters. Once this summer’s turmoil had abated an intellectual disquiet would be found heaped like clouds out of which blew a wind fit to drive him away from Flinn and carry him as
far as the capital.

  And one day he was near the jetty, just far enough along the beach so that the water was not agleam with the restless rainbows of spilled engine oil, rinsing out plankton sieves in the shallows. When he straightened, dungaree legs rolled to his knees, he saw her standing a few paces off. He waded back and laid the sieves on the sand, heart beating with the certainty that she could only have come on a private errand. For the first time she smiled directly and unequivocally while holding his eyes. Then she said, in passable dialect, ‘I may be going away.’ And directly she spoke he realised it was true; she had purposely troubled to learn a parting line to convey that she had known all along what she meant to him, an act of politesse, even of sad mercy, which ran him through. ‘I thought you couldn’t speak … Going? But when?’ he blabbered. ‘You can’t go, Cou Min. Not now …’ Not now they could speak to each other, he meant, but they couldn’t. She only shook her head helplessly, her one phrase of his language exhausted, her message delivered. When he said, ‘But I love you, Cou Min. I honestly, truly do,’ he reached out involuntarily and grasped her hands, whereupon her tiny wrists – surprisingly strong – swivelled so that she also could exert a fond pressure. She spoke a soft sentence or two which conveyed less to him than a sandpiper’s cry. It was then that he saw the smear of dried salt dusting the cheek by her ear, the floury bloom minutely textured by the silky fuzz growing beneath, and was so immediately overcome with longing and despair that the remains of the strength which had sustained him week after week left him at once and he fell weeping to the sand. Involuntarily he reached forward and, drawing himself to her ankles, kissed her feet.

  Oh, the payment exacted for love which has no return! The humiliation, the later self reproach; the inevitability of the malicious onlooker (in this case Wim’s older brother) who hurries off to spread the riotous news. A thespian act upon the beach! A ham melodrama in which weirdo Leon falls at the feet of his Chink goddess, a slant-eyed servant’s brat! In public! Not ten minutes ago! Probably if we’re quick they’ll still be at it!

  But we’re not quick enough, for that was the end we witnessed, five seconds after which Cou Min squatted briefly and laid her hand on the boy’s trembling head. At this touch he sprang to his feet like one brought to his senses and turned back to the sieves and the sea, brusquely blotting his cheeks with shirted biceps while she walked away down the beach, at the jetty giving a small shake to her head as if to free the lustrous pigtail. The next day she left in a taxi together with her mother and Mrs Koog while the doctor stayed on for another week to finish his research. It was only then that the Dutchman appeared to notice his assistant was heartbroken rather than sickening for flu. After a little he explained, no doubt kindly, that Cou Min was engaged to a wealthy Chinese in Batavia – had in fact been affianced since she was nine, such was the way they did things there. He was under oath to this merchant grandee to return the girl on his next trip to the East Indies, which was to be before Christmas (it was now the first week in September) when they were to be married. A few days later the doctor himself left. Leon mutely helped him repack the maroon car with boxes and containers heavy with specimens. At last Koog held out his hand.

  ‘Best assistant I ever worked with,’ he said. ‘I’ll miss you badly, young man. Take this book – no, go on. From time to time you may want to refresh your memory about some of the fish we’ve seen. They’re all there. The herrings, especially, would merit your earliest attention. And here’s my card. If ever you’re passing through The Hague be sure to look me up. I should be back there by next summer. Well,’ he paused and glanced at the sky over the harbour as if for inspiration. ‘Don’t waste it. I mean your gift. You notice details. You appreciate difference. You like discriminating. It’s a rare thing at your age. Perhaps you can make it pay. Something scientific, I’d suggest. Go off to the capital and get yourself an education.’

  With this breezy farewell the doctor sped away. Leon never saw him again, nor any of his entourage. Later that day, flicking listlessly through the book he had been left, he discovered wedged between the pages describing the Clupeidae four rosy banknotes whose value together was more than his uncle earned in six months, enough (before his uncle found and stole three of them) to get him to the capital and enrol in some sort of course, had he chosen. And so that fateful summer ended. His own traitorous memory added an ironic postscript, for he found that no sooner had the Koogs left than he could visualise Cou Min entire, standing, sitting, squatting, running, looking at him and smiling from the other side of nowhere with that smile reserved for the dead in photographs.

  Eighteen years later he watched the princess walk the length of the Palm House with her hair burnished as the sun’s rays fell through the golden ice-frieze high above her, and heard her speak Cou Min’s own words: ‘I may be going away.’ They produced a distant pang, an echo revived, precursor of loss, inevitable bad news, endings. ‘But,’ she went on, ‘first I have a most serious offer to make to you. You don’t believe me? Je vous assure.’ Yet once again they were interrupted by the timely appearance of her lance-eyed shadow.

  That night Leon blew out the last candle and instead of going to bed lingered for a while by the lovelorn tamarind. On hearing it speak he sat sympathetically on the brick pier beside it, knowing that eavesdroppers seldom hear good of themselves but also knowing it was his duty to listen. Tamarindus indica spoke softly, however, almost so as not to be overheard in its self-communing:

  ‘Did I once accuse our gardener of anthropomorphism, of tainting us with human ills? I think I’m tainted anyway, with that fatal unrest which takes over when mindlessness has run its limiting course and one is free to suffer. At any rate he touched me this morning and I understood at once. Oh, not because it was me: it was quite absentminded. It wasn’t a caress but something more wistful. Hardly a week goes by without somebody touching me but it isn’t the same. The visitors like to touch – despite the notices – because we’re rare to them, tokens of the exotic. The assistants have to touch, we’re part of their work. They vary from brutal to considerate. But our gardener’s like none of these. His is the gently musing touch of an unhappy man. If suddenly we could all burst into flower for him I believe we would, in blithe disregard of seasons and genes. The dark truth of this place is – wasted love. Scents and fruitfulness and all manner of budding and burgeoning: wasted. None of it goes any further, no matter what he says about sending seedlings hither and yon through the world. I sense it in his touch. The fruit drops and no seed germinates. The flower opens in futile splendour, the leaf falls. We writhe inside our glass.

  ‘What I learned today is that he’s little different from us. In a sense, are we not his flowering? Do we not speak for him? (And what comes of it? Dumb growth.) Nor is there hope for him outside. The sea wind blows across the dunes and marshes of Flinn, the world unlocks itself from war and finds nothing tender surviving. So much has been lost, and too much loss leads to this: to a gardener’s gestures or a priest’s, acts of succour and generosity which began long ago and with something quite else in mind. Though what should we care? The skills work none the less. His motivations are no-one’s business but his own. It may be that nobody else even notices; quite possibly I wouldn’t myself had I not felt his touch and seen his face. Such love! but of another time and still animating him, like the light now reaching us from a long-extinguished star. However, I mustn’t get sentimental on his behalf: I’m no doubt wrong in reading all this into him and, in turn, committing my own vulgar error of botanomorphism.

  ‘Nevertheless, I do have to go a bit further. I’m an intellectual – through no choice of my own – and there’s no stopping thought. A saving grace if ever there was one for there’s not much to do but think in a place like this. What else do you suppose happens when you’re rooted in earth? I used to gaze down despondently at the antics of those in my vicinity but nowadays I daren’t let my fond and betraying glance slide over my little neighbour for fear I’m unable to tear it away and
she – in all her touching hemlockian innocence – becomes baffled and dismayed. So I admire the architecture instead, which never stales, although in these last eight years the paintwork certainly has. I’ve a childhood memory of when they did it inside and out in gleaming white and the House seemed twice as spacious, the roof floating off among clouds on the far side of a bright gulf. Of course everything does look larger when you’re small but some new paint would definitely help. Even so, there’s plenty to admire right down to details such as the cast-iron pineapple finials everywhere which I love. It’s also impressive that such a slender ironwork skeleton should be so strong, as it obviously is. Especially now, in this overstayed wintertime, one can hear the wind at night clouting the glass and flinging hundredweights of snow at it so the whole building seems to stagger, yet the warmth goes serenely on. All that happens is a momentary change in pressure as the structure flexes, iron and glass bending in order not to break, which I can feel in my stomata since they’re acutely sensitive.

  ‘An eccentric thought has just struck me – a new way of looking at this caged world of ours. Mightn’t it be seen as a memorial? Our gardener may think it’s some sort of living museum devoted to observing and preserving, but really it’s a memorial to a previous world. Maybe that’s what all museums are? Memorials to previous states? No; the thought’s gone. It was just a fleeting idea set off by his touch this morning and the contemplation of all this ironwork … Come to that, mightn’t grief quite efficiently frame the structure of a life? At once unbending and flexible, sombre yet airy, truthful in its inability to conceal itself? Its support would remain when all else had clouded or fallen away.

  ‘Too fanciful, no doubt. Just because for a weak moment I allow myself to be overtaken by melancholy there’s really no call to reinterpret everything in its purplish light. I’ve no doubt our gardener’s no gloomier than anybody else and this House is exactly what it purports to be – no more and no less. But how easy it is with time on one’s hands to slip into that parallel world of longing and sad fancies. Keeping my voice scrupulously low so not a whisper of sound can leak from a single stoma I need only say “Little hemlock. Oh, little hemlock”, and understand what moves him also. Feeble creatures, we are.’