I did not, of course, go to Ayrshire to work for Thomas’s uncle. How could I? How could we be on any kind of footing ever again, not servant and master, not friend and friend, not even remote acquaintances? All that was at an end, and I could not even bring myself to think about him, let alone mention his name. Whenever he came into my mind – and during those first years it was more often than was either comfortable for me or conducive to any kind of peace – whenever he came into my thoughts I would deliberately swerve away from the very idea of him. At last I thought about him infrequently, and that was a relief to me.
I remained in the city, and although I would hear about him from time to time, because he was fast becoming a man of some consequence, I did not see him. This was something of a miracle, but then Glasgow was growing quickly over those years, we moved in quite different circles, as we always had done, and our paths never crossed. It would have been easier for him to seek me out than vice versa, but he did not do it and so I must assume that he never wanted to do it. But some years later, I heard that he had left the college and had moved to his uncle’s house in Ayrshire, where he was amassing a great collection. This hurt me for a while, all unreasonably, until somebody told me that his collection was not of plants and trees, but of fossils, the petrified remains of ancient life forms.
For myself, I was despairing of ever finding suitable work, but at last, perhaps because of my love for books, rare in a young man of my station, I got work with a printer of somewhat radical persuasion. The position came to me through Mr Caddas who, being a man of great good sense and widely read too, had many connections in that line. Besides it was in his best interests that I should flourish, because some time after Jenny’s death, I found myself keeping company with her sister Anna.
It was not my intention. It began as a simple continuation of our friendship. We were both grieving and I think we were a comfort to one another. We wanted to remember happier times, wanted to talk about the Jenny we remembered, full of life, full of ideas and skills and small but wonderful ambitions: to create beautiful things, to sew flowers and grow flowers and to make people well. In talking about Jenny, we were healed, after a fashion, and through this quiet healing we drew closer.
I had known Anna since she was a child and thought of her like that, until one day I looked at her and found that she had become a woman. I saw that she was looking at me as a woman looks at a man she loves. And then, having waited a decent time, we were married, with the blessings of my mother and her father. I flatter myself that the match gave both of them a certain amount of pleasure, although Sandy Caddas was never quite the same again. Even though he seemed happy enough with Nancy, sometimes you would find him weeping for no obvious reason. Once, when I had made a clumsy attempt to comfort him, he had told me, ‘Just leave me be for a while. If you find me in tears, just leave me be, lad. The thought of her comes into my head and I miss her. But it will pass. It aye passes!’
Many of my brothers and sisters are gone now and I miss them too, Johnnie most of all. Johnnie grew up and went away to sea like his uncle, and never came back, like his uncle. He never made old bones, and I think it broke my mother’s heart, because she was not the same after and didn’t survive him by many months. The night he died, she frightened us all by waking us with a great shriek, wailing, ‘Johnnie’s gone, Johnnie’s gone!’ and so he had, taken by some foreign fever. When she came to her senses, she said that she had seen him. He was standing at the foot of her bed, shaking his head as though regretting something, and then she knew, even though it was a good long while until the news reached us in a letter.
James worked in the gardens for a few years more – my exclusion evidently did not include him – and lodged in the college, so that he should be close to his work. Later, he got work out at Gilmorehill, in the gardens of a big house there, married, and had a large family. They all lived in a certain amount of cheerful squalor and he died there a few years ago. His surviving children are all grown and he had a great number of grandchildren as well, at least some of whom have become gardeners in their turn. In due course, one of them came to the house and presented me with a fat pineapple and I found myself shedding a tear in memory of my father, even as I tasted the sweetness of it, and laughing at the absurdity of life in general.
The two younger girls seemed to be well settled, for a while at least. Then Susanna ran off with a footman and was never seen again, although many years later, a short and somewhat travel-stained letter arrived from the Carolinas. In it she said that she was well, was married and ‘as happy as can be expected’, whatever that meant. I wrote back to the direction given on the letter, but she never replied. It hurt me a little to think that of all of us, it was clumsy Susanna, who could not even sew a straight seam, who had attained my ambition of exploring, Susanna who had smelled the scent of exotic flowers under foreign skies.
Jean followed her mistress as lady’s maid when that young woman made a good marriage and moved to her new home in the Highlands. A few years later, my sister married a highlander, a ghillie on the estate I believe, which was a good match for her, but she died in childbirth with her firstborn, which was a great tragedy for her husband and a sadness for all of us.
Bessie lives yet. She made the best of her opportunities, as my mother was always advising her and anybody who would listen. We expected her to become a cook, but instead, she became a lady’s maid and then a housekeeper. Her mistress had, it seems, made a good marriage, and Bessie prospered along with the family. She never married, which goes a long way to explaining her survival. Childbirth claims so very many of our wives, sisters, daughters, in spite of all our medical men can do to remedy it. For many years she was housekeeper at one of the big houses near the Green and wore smart clothes over her well-corseted figure and preferred not to remember that she was once a scullery maid. Now she lives in a cottage provided for her by her employers, styles herself Mistress Elizabeth Lang, and acts as though she is a great lady in somewhat reduced circumstances. Her own ‘lady’ visits her from time to time, and then they squabble over their memories, like elderly sisters more than mistress and maid. I have heard them at it and envied them such lifelong friendship. You would never guess at her beginnings when you see her in the town, or in the kirk of a Sunday morning, with her stylish bonnets, even in old age, a new one for every season.
Rab and my mother came to live with me and Anna in my new lodgings, which consisted of two rooms over the printing business. After my mother’s death, Rab remained with us. To our surprise, he flourished in this new, bookish environment. He was always sickly and short of stature, but – in the manner of creaking gates that hang longest – he lives yet. He and my wife grew as close as brother and sister in time. She loved him and he confided all his troubles, such as they were, in her.
He worked in the book business with us for many years until, again somewhat to our surprise, but greatly to our pleasure, he married a pretty, capable and kindly widow called Euphemia, fathered two sons of his own to add to her three daughters and lives close by. I think all of this astonishes even Rab himself. He expected very little from life and life has heaped unanticipated riches upon him. He is very well respected as he goes about the town, always with a faint air of disbelief and his nose in a book. We meet often for a drink and a chat, mostly about the books that are his passion. I could not have predicted any of this. But life has a way of springing these surprises. When my master in the book business died, I took over from him and made a success of the business. We print, we publish, we buy and sell books. The very smell of books is in my nostrils and I think it is now in my bones as much as it is in Rab’s and I will never escape from it, nor would I want to.
Which is not to say that sometimes I do not have a hankering after the life I might have lived, after the possibility of travelling and exploring, of gathering plants and seeds and bringing them home. I have regrets too and they are very profound. I mind in the twenties and thirties, when they were planting up the t
own green with trees of many kinds, how much it hurt the heart of me, a sensation of envy and regret so powerful that it made my head ache. I have made the very best of what I have, you must understand that. But often, when I lie awake at nights, with the sounds of the city stilled at last, I sometimes get the strangest sensation.
How can I explain it to you? But I see that I must try, even if it seems like an old man’s folly. It feels at those times as though I have somehow missed my way. As though I have been a wanderer down all these years. Not unhappy with my lot, but still a wanderer for whom some other destination was intended, but who has lost his way. It is as though something was planned for me, some pathway I could not find, could not take. Perhaps some god frowned on me for an instant. Some pagan god of the woods, Pan himself maybe? A jealous god, for sure. But it also seems to me that there might be some other incarnation of myself, the man who followed that pathway among the trees, among the green and growing things, the world of plants and their magical, miraculous properties. Is he any happier than I am? Who knows? Perhaps not. For nothing stays constant. Everything changes in time.
I have no way of contacting that other me, of speaking to him, of seeing where he is and what he is doing. He is a stranger to me and I to him. I might have the odd pang of envy, but there is nothing to be done. All I know is that it is the strangest feeling and it makes me profoundly sad, a melancholy that lasts all the next day and sometimes longer, a nostalgia for some paradise lost, some door slammed shut and locked against me, some entrance to an enchanted garden that I cannot now find and will never see again, not in this life, at least.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Letter
But what of the letter that Thomas enclosed with the book? Well, I made myself read it, although I confess I waited several days before I could bring myself to take it from its hiding place, unfold it and spread it on my table.
My dear William,
I can say nothing that will make things right between us because I know now that nothing can ever do that, even though so many years have gone by. We cannot reclaim the past and should not even try, although I wish with all my heart that we could have spoken earlier. I return your book to you at last. You sent it back to me, but now, at the end of my life, I must return it where it belongs as a token of my continuing affection for you. I did a great wrong to you and to the woman you loved. But you must have wondered why I did not admit my fault earlier. You must have thought the worse of me for it. I have suffered with that knowledge all my life, without being able to remedy it in any particular, for fear that you would think I was seeking only to justify my actions. Now, at the end, none of this matters. So I can tell you.
The reason why I did not confess everything to you at the time, was that I had some hopes – vain hopes I now see, for God help me, my thoughts were all on you and our friendship and our future travels, and not on the poor lassie – I had some hopes that all might yet be well between us. That Jenny had found some kindly house where she might give birth, that she would come home bringing the child with her, that you would marry her, without ever discovering my part in the deception, for how could she possibly tell you? I thought at first that you might believe the child to be yours, but when you told me that could not be, I hoped, nay, I was sure that you – the loving, honourable William I knew – might marry her, child and all, without ever discovering the truth of its parentage. It is the kind of secret that many women have carried with them to the grave. My work as a doctor had taught me that, at least. I hoped that you would decamp to Ayrshire, where I might visit you. Where I might join you in due course, since I was well aware that my uncle had only one son, and he, God help him, was in very poor health. I hoped that this house might ultimately come to me, as in fact it did, not from any motive of greed, but because I thought that the two of us might do wonderful things with the gardens here.
I must ask you to believe me, although it may seem incredible to you, when I say that I had no thoughts whatsoever of continuing the affair with Jenny. I do not know why I even began it, although you must also try to believe me when I say that she was a willing partner. There was no coercion involved. And I thought that this solution would be best for all concerned. I believed that I would be able to do my duty by the child, paying for its education, much as a loving uncle might, that I would be able to retain your friendship, which I valued above all else and, if you can believe me, still do. That I would be able to achieve some sort of peace with Jenny, for whom I always had the highest regard. I constructed such dreams, such castles in the air. Can you imagine?
Reading over this now, this letter that I have written, these many years later, I can see that you will be filled with disbelief. Your face comes before me, with all your innate intelligence and scepticism. But I ask you to try to remember the man you knew then, and for whom, I believe, you had some affection, just as he had such fondness for you, such dreams and ambitions for the pair of us.
Why did I do it? If you have asked yourself that a hundred times, believe me when I say that I have asked myself the same question a thousand times and more. Why? How could I do it to you of all people, to a friend whom I never wished to hurt or harm in any way? I could say that it was a momentary lapse, but that would not quite be true. I was very fond of her. I charmed her, thoughtlessly. She was enchanted for a brief spell and so was I. I think you never fully blamed her, and I hope you never will. But that is not the whole of it. Had she been any other lass, no matter how beautiful, how accomplished, I think I would not have fallen. But your lass. Yours. Why did I do that? It was a kind of lunacy. I confess it, William. I would watch you and I would feel that I knew you better than I knew myself. But then I would become all unsure. Could it be true? Did I ever know you at all? I think there was a part of me that wanted her because she was yours, but not out of envy. I think I wanted, needed to know what you knew, felt as you did, to get inside your mind in all possible ways.
Is this credible? Is this not the very essence of what I was, back then? Thoughtless, sometimes. But full of dreams and imaginings. Wholly impulsive, wholly loving, ever hopeful that I could turn the world the way I wanted it to be. My dreams were so very real that I never wished to wake from them. Well, well. My self-love was my downfall in the end. But worse, it caused the death of an innocent young woman and her child. My child. And a most terrible and unforgivable injury to you, my dear companion. You must believe this if nothing else: I have spent a lifetime repenting of my folly. I wish to God you had written to me before this, for I had not the courage and now I think I do not have the strength to see you again, but wanted only to send you these words.
Your fond and loving friend, as ever,
Thomas
Well, I did read it with a certain scepticism. But I also asked myself, was this not the very essence of the Thomas I had once fancied I knew well? We were three points of a triangle. And afterwards, when passion was spent and reality intervened, my poor Jenny would have presented herself and her condition to him as a problem that had to be solved to everyone’s satisfaction. The logical solution, as he saw it, was that I should marry her. Then everyone would be happy, not least Thomas Brown. But he had reckoned without Jenny’s pride, Professor Jeffray, his chain saw and his dissecting rooms.
Thomas must have fallen ill, mortally ill, not long after he wrote that letter, or perhaps he was already feeling the first stirrings of whatever killed him. But he had written it, put it inside the book, parcelled up the whole and directed that it be sent to me upon his death. No sentimental deathbed reconciliation for Thomas. That was not his way. I could see that now.
And so I come to the end of my story. And I hope that you can understand why that terrible book, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, brings back such an agony of mind, brings back to me the image of the lovely soul that was Jenny, with the child, Thomas’s child – why did I not realise for so many years what a sudden and unimaginable horror that must have seemed to him? – still inside her, laid bare up
on that table for all to see, for Jeffray to approach, wielding his chain saw, demonstrating its efficacy in such cases. It will not do. I cannot think about it, for even now, it makes me sick and angry and like to vomit. So instead I turn my attention to the book that Thomas saw fit to send back to me, the old gardening book that we had once pored over together and that I had returned to him in a rage. I read the lines that are obscurely comforting still.
‘Choose your seeds from the high, straight, young and well thriving. Choose the fairest, the weightiest, and the brightest for it is observed that the seeds of hollow trees, whose pith is consumed, do not fill well or come to perfection.’
Was he but a hollow tree? For he certainly did not come to perfection. But neither did I, so perhaps I was always overly cautious, never quite sturdy enough.
‘The black cherrie is a tree that I love well. There is a sort at Niddrie Castle whose fruit is preferable to any cherrie. I take it to be a soft heart cherrie but it’s a great bearer.’
A soft heart cherry. That was what I was, back then when we used to recite the words as one might recite poetry with a friend. I could remember it as if we had spoken the lines only yesterday, blithely, thinking of our old age as something so remote as to be unimaginable.
‘Gather their fruit when full ripe, eat of the fleshy part and lay the stones to dry a little.’
We were young and strong and full of hope for a happy ending, just as my grand-daughter Jenny is still young and strong, with a head full of dreams and possibilities for her own magical future.
‘Some trees there be that will not bear of themselves till they be old, but if you cut off the head of the shoots and then take out some great boughs, if you mind your time and do it with discretion, you may force your tree to put forth buds and bear.’
The Physic Garden Page 27