The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

by Elspeth Davie

  ‘I’m bringing the evening sky down into it,’ he would reply. ‘I’m trying to bring back those deep forest pools that have all dried up.’

  ‘Is that not too dark a brown, Martin?’ they would say, pointing to certain parts of the outside woodwork.

  ‘Well, it’s not as dark as the earth after that great thunderstorm, if you remember,’ he would say.

  ‘And what about that green on the garages? That could be more cheerful, couldn’t it? It’s a real gloomy green.’

  ‘Yes. Late summer is always dark in the forest.’

  Once in a while Martin would cross over to visit the botanist and his wife. They now looked out on to a very different scene. The new road across the ancient forest was coming nearer. They knew the sound of saws, of crashing trees, and finally the noise of traffic would one day burst through.

  ‘I never knew it would be as bad as that when I sold the place,’ said Martin.

  ‘Well, how could you?’ said the botanist’s wife. ‘It was up to us to find out.’

  ‘The first idea was to leave a wide strip of forest on this side,’ Martin went on. ‘I saw the plans, in fact.’

  ‘Plans go for nothing when money comes into it,’ she said. ‘We saw plans too. A very nice man pointed it all out on the map. Of course I see now he thought we were a pair of dear old sentimental things who’d be happy with a flower patch and a garden gnome. He told us he loved trees himself. It really seemed as if he couldn’t bear to see a twig fall off, let alone a tree lying on the ground. When we saw him off he murmured: “Life must go on, you know.” But we’ve enjoyed living here and we’ll stay as long as we can. I’m still writing a book, but I’m finished with fairies and forests. It’ll have to be water now. We’ve always been travellers so we’ll move off while we can to some great lake or river. My husband’s an expert on water plants too, so that will suit him. Surely nothing will happen to dry up the water unless it’s a nuclear disaster.’

  ‘Will you be moving away soon?’ Martin asked.

  ‘No, luckily they’re not going to knock us down just yet. They’re just going to surround us with new houses. And we’re to be “landscaped” to keep us quiet. A few trees and bushes and a patch of grass, I suppose. When the road reaches us we’ll move to some lake or other as I’ve told you. Meantime I’m going to start up a small woodland tearoom or something of the kind. I’ve no conscience, I’m afraid. We need a lot of money if we’re to move away, and I can make it. The tearoom will try its best to be twee, olde-worlde and horrible, but I hope to nip that in the bud. The place will become more and more expensive, even fashionable. People will drive out from the city and from all the new housing estates, and I shall slave for hours. I shall make an unusual jam from berries. It will be called Forest Conserve. Conserve, not jam, because we can give talks on conservation at the same time and encourage discussion. My husband obviously knows the eatable from the poisonous berries, so that should be all right. I shall have to learn to cook and bake at last, and he can talk about plants and trees till the cows come home. The tearoom will probably be called “The Botanist’s Bothy”. It will be very exclusive and will be a tremendous draw even to those who have hardly seen a leaf.’

  ‘I’ve never met such an optimist!’ Martin exclaimed.

  ‘I might as well be. Jack is the pessimist. The mixture’s explosive, stimulating, or whatever word you want to call it. At any rate, we’re too old for marriage guidance. Years and years ago we went, but I fell madly for one of the guiders and botched the whole thing up. But to go back to jam. Eventually this special conserve of mine may reach the city shops. The jars should bear a special tree label designed by a proper artist. You are an artist, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I’m told I’m not – not the kind you’re talking about. I paint houses, doors, walls and windows. I’m a housepainter. By the way, I expect you’ll be needing lots of wooden plates and bowls for your Bothy. Probably chairs, stools and tables too. You can get them all from the craft shop on the other side.’

  ‘I’m not a crafty person, as a matter of fact,’ said the botanist’s wife. ‘Are you trying to bring us all together? I’ll look over sometime, of course.’

  ‘Then there are the monks up there,’ Martin went on. ‘When you’ve made enough, why don’t you try some of your jam with them? Everything good and natural would be welcome there.’

  ‘I haven’t even made the stuff yet, and I very much doubt if I’m good and natural myself,’ she replied. ‘But I’ll think it over.’

  A year or so later, climbing down from the window of a house where he’d been painting, Martin caught a glimpse of pale green on the path below. He bent down and saw a single seedling pushing up between the flagstones. This excited him like the sudden sight of a new comet to an astronomer, or like the feathers and leaves blown towards an early ship of discovery – signs that some huge, unknown continent was near. He didn’t dare touch the fragile green thing, but was across within the hour to his friend, the botanist. Quickly they came back together to study every detail of this new life – its straight, determined stem and the infinitesimal green leaves.

  ‘Yes, there you’ve got it!’ exclaimed the botanist, rising triumphantly and dusting his knees. ‘Your first oak tree and, if you’re lucky, the beginning of a forest!’

  ‘You mean if we live for four or five hundred years?’

  ‘Well then, let your heirs and all their distant offspring have it. In no time the trees will be strong. They’ll push down the houses, topple the poles and cover the concrete. In some hundreds of years’ time people may have learned something. Stupidity can’t go on forever. They may long for wood rather than iron, for strong roots to strangle the steel. Have you seen the roots of trees? Ferocious, tenacious, and so strong centuries of gales won’t move them.’

  ‘Yet this seedling could be crushed in seconds,’ said Martin.

  ‘Of course,’ replied the botanist, ‘but jungles have covered civilizations with a green so powerful you could hardly drag it off the stone.’

  ‘But you can’t stop progress on the earth,’ said Martin.

  ‘What progress?’ asked the botanist.

  ‘New machines, new rockets, new satellites, new robots, new bombs, new space-probes to the great Computer God in the sky. I only paint houses but I’ve tried to paint in forest colours. But do people want green? No, they want yellow, scarlet, electric-blue, orange and pink inside and out. Green’s supposed to be unlucky and always has been. Ask your wife. Ask in any shop. Who wants to wear green?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know anything about superstition,’ said the botanist. ‘I just know the earth always wants to wear green and always has done. Leave it alone for a few years and look again. Everything has gradually disappeared except green. What’s lucky for the earth can’t be unlucky for people, can it?’

  They now hurried back to fetch the botanist’s wife who agreed that green was supposed to be unlucky, but in nothing else she could think of but clothes. She herself, however, donned an apple-green skirt to show she was no party to superstition. She accompanied the men to the gardens at the other side of the forest to look at the seedling. Quite a few neighbours from adjoining gardens now gathered when they saw two men and a woman staring fixedly at the crack between the paving stones. Most stayed away, suspecting something horrible. One man, in fact, shouted across his fence: ‘Is it a snake?’

  ‘There, you see,’ said the housepainter. ‘People expect a snake in the grass, never the grass itself. Very soon they’ll see only snakes and no grass. Can you blame them?’

  Nevertheless, when the people of the road discovered what the three were staring at they searched their own paths and gardens. Suddenly there were shouts from one side and the other or even from upper windows where people were looking down. Yet they were peculiarly mixed shouts – mostly shadowy and doubtful, yet gradually lit here and there with a glimmer of hope. It seemed as if those who’d lived on the edge of great trees at first could hardly recognize
a green seedling. But soon more and more people were looking for them. They went running here and there into one another’s gardens, bumping together in their search as if enacting a clumsy fallback into Eden – that magnificent memory of green trees. Soon there would be no more discussion about forest colours in a house. It was the forest itself they longed for. Naturally there were those who mocked at the fuss over this colour green. Weren’t lots of awkward things green? Mould was green. Phlegm was green. And so was immaturity. Above all they laughed at the idea of green ever covering the engines of destruction. How could greenness ever get a grip on the smooth, round bombs, or take root on the slippery satellites of war? But the botanist himself knew how childish the idea of greenness could become if it meant only grass and plants covering the surface of the earth like a comfortable, plushy carpet. He spoke up now about the destruction – as weapons and poison took over – of all fruits and crops, the disappearance of all peoples and animals, the poisoning of air, sea and soil to unknown, enormous depths. He stopped all talk of seedlings. Instead he lectured them on science. ‘What will the earth become if we carry on as we’ve been doing?’ he asked at the end of his talk one night. There was silence and he answered himself: ‘A small, stinking poisoned pill in space.’ A few successful businessmen who’d continually and comfortably travelled the earth took affront at the name ‘poisoned pill’. They asked the botanist to illustrate his ideas to an audience. He complied and showed them great parts of the sky on screen. It was just possible – though not very likely – that man was unique, he said, while pointing to swirling blue veils of nebulae, infinitely distant in time and space.

  But the botanist’s lifespan was not infinite. The old man caught a chill one evening as he sat outside his cottage and not many weeks later he died. He was buried on the far side of the forest where, months afterwards, it was observed that many small, green seedlings were growing up around the mound of his grave. Though no doubt the seeds had come on the wind, others assumed they had been carefully planted by the gardeners of the road. Up at the monastery it was put down without question as a true miracle of God. Whichever way it was, he lay – after many years had passed – in a grove of tall, green trees.

  The botanist’s wife lived on alone, keeping her house and tearoom going at the edge of the forest. The visitors to the tearoom increased and even her jam, Forest Conserve, was beginning to make its name in distant city stores. She made an arrangement with the craft shop at the other side which still took wood from the forest to make small tables, bowls, stools and wooden spoons. The botanist’s wife helped to advertise all these at her own tables and got a substantial cut of the gains. Every summer she took several pots of her jam up to the monks. Luckily, the head of the monastery loved Forest Conserve. It was an indulgence which at first he had only grudgingly allowed himself. Now, as he grew older, he positively craved it. Often they chatted together and on one visit she enquired if he would care for some beautiful, hand-turned wooden bowls as well as jam. She went on to ask discreetly about the unbroken circle as a sign of perfection. Shortly afterwards the monastery acquired a set of bowls at bargain price, and the shop with its holy back-up became known far and wide. Again the botanist’s widow made a good thing out of it and at the same time was praised by the head of the order for bringing a steady stream of sweetness on to the long tables of the refectory. They had many talks together on religion, on love, death, heaven and hell, good and evil. She congratulated him warmly on the curious fact that he – a confirmed bachelor living in a wood without apple trees or women – should have such a deep and detailed knowledge of the sin of Eve, and advised him that the average woman like herself had little time or opportunity for the more interesting sins. Over the years they became close friends.

  The housepainter lived on, but as he grew older he was a little more careful about climbing ladders. Though he was in and out of many houses he was still an outsider and a lonely man. He was not so fussy now about his colours, though still drawing the line at scarlet and shocking pink for doors and windows. Often as he painted he sang and whistled like a bird in a high tree. He rejoiced that after some hundreds of years no roof that he had painted, no window, wall or chimney pot would be seen for green.

  The Morning Mare

  FOR SOME TIME back the best break in the whole year for Kate had been the short visit to Ireland on her own. No study of the map or talk of any other place could change her mind about this ideal holiday. The town she visited was Dingle in the south-west, where her cousins lived with their parents. It was fun to be with a large family. On her latest stay, however, she found the two oldest boys had just left school and gone to jobs in Dublin. The rest were still at home. Brenda, at sixteen, the oldest girl, was her own age. Two little boys, twin girls in junior school and a ten-month-old baby made up the rest of the family. Kate envied and admired them all. She envied them their black hair, their blue eyes and their casual, colourful clothes. She enjoyed the songs and music of their country, and most of all their stories – admiring the soft or brilliantly cutting edge they could give to the meanest phrase. Mockery and tenderness were here combined, and the sudden, thorny prick of malice. It was useless to try to tell such stories afterwards. They lost their shine and sound, like pebbles carried far inland from a turbulent beach.

  The house she visited was an old one, very beautiful, very distinguished – a wreck of a house, needing paint and plaster, needing nails, new pipes, new drains and long, loving care, but getting none. Occasionally someone might make a start on the garden, but after a month or two of rain mixed with the salt wind from the sea, it would become a wilderness again. When the wind was really high a mass of frenzied ivy darkened the graceful frontage of the house and two great twisted thorn bushes would scratch backwards and forwards over the glass of the austere windows. Mosquitoes floated on the sludgy pool where a few perfect waterlilies opened, almost unnoticed, grew brown, and wilted away again. Once, perhaps, the iron gates had creaked open to welcome strangers. In recent years only a few persons had walked, with velvet feet, on paths green with thick moss. Kate liked this place exactly because of the total contrast to her own neat home and its circumspect street with the well-kept gardens. But here, in the land she visited, startling contrasts were near the surface. It was a place of dream and nightmare, cruelty and compassion. Black water could suddenly well up from clear ditches. Huge, ancient rocks jutted from smooth, green fields and blocked the progress of the plough. It was a land where people walked devoutly from church, talking with love and gusto of a pagan past. It was no use trying to have one side without the other. Alternate darkness and light flickered over everything like the weather.

  Most of all, even more than the stories and the songs, Kate enjoyed the early morning talks with her cousin Brenda with whom she shared a room. This was the time when the two of them discussed everything – school, work, politics, marriage, careers, happiness, unhappiness, friends, parents and grandparents. Kate’s visit coincided with her sixteenth birthday. They woke early that morning and started to talk. They discussed how fifteen might differ from sixteen and even, ridiculously, how sixteen might differ from sixty. They spoke, as usual, about happiness and what exactly it might mean for them. Could they ever get enough of it or would they, sooner or later, fall back into the flat, grey routine where most of their elders seemed to live? ‘Some people,’ said Brenda, ‘think that happiness comes from living absolutely and totally in the present moment – not looking backwards nor forwards.’ She insisted it was a business of taking the last drop of sweetness from these moments. On the other hand, happiness might be one instantaneous flash that lit up a whole day, a week, a month or, with luck, even an entire year.

  At that instant the milk-van went past the window. It was an old horse-drawn van which Kate, every morning of her visit, had come to dread. She knew by the frenzied clopping of hoofs and the clatter of the milk-cans that it was being driven at the usual breakneck speed up the steep, cobbled street. Always it went so f
ast that a trickle of milk would escape from the rattling lids while the van would appear to rock precariously from side to side. The horse was a broken-down old nag with a white froth dripping from its lip and a raw patch on one shoulder. Its neighing was like some dreadful high-pitched coughing, most horrible to hear. Kate knew this for a true nightmare and no mistake – an early morning nightmare which would be repeated day after day till the end of her visit. ‘I wonder if that horse will drop down dead one of these mornings,’ she said over her shoulder to her cousin who was still in bed. ‘And I’m not the only one who’s seen it,’ she added. ‘There are people across the way watching from doors and windows. No-one’s doing anything. Is this the present moment you’re wanting me to keep?’ At the same time she thought how weak and cowardly it was that she had never run down into the street herself, never called out or gone to the police about the driver and his whip. She had made no move at all. Now she could hardly bear to see her face in the mirror, the pink and white coward that she was!

  ‘Well, never mind,’ said Brenda from her bed. ‘You can’t always choose. Sometimes the present moment isn’t good. But look again soon,’ she added slyly. ‘Maybe it will look better.’ Kate couldn’t help smiling even while the clattering hoofs still sounded in the distance. The holidays in this part of the world didn’t exactly match those back home, and sure enough, two schoolboys from the top class were walking past on their way to a nearby school. Coming from distant farms, they had a long way to go, but every morning they contrived to go more and more slowly as they walked under the window of the girls’ bedroom. Sometimes they would walk so slowly they almost stopped. Then together they would look up like two eager, wary young animals, all eyes. They were tall, long-haired youths, sporting sideburns and showing chins and throats that would soon be dark. Their hands were strong and bony with wrists too long for their sleeves. Both appeared to move in awkward mockery of their outgrown gear, at the same time instinctively raising their arms a fraction towards the window in expectation of some future state. For Kate these were the most romantic moments of her visit. She felt the leap of joy as she leaned far out, revealing a soft curve of lace around the sill as the boys stared up. It seemed they stared, steadily, endlessly, totally absorbed and almost vacant-faced in their intentness, as if their cheeks had been wiped blank by a full sponge of milk.