Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Can’t have that,’ the head gardener said dubiously. ‘Not on the premises. Bring the Society into disrepute. Think of the headlines. Orgies in the Orangery. They’d have my head.’

  ‘You leave him be,’ said the curator, draining his mug and standing up. ‘He isn’t that sort. He’s not one of your tearaways. Been here what, a year? and nobody’s ever caught him doing anything worse than talking to ladies without washing his face. Don’t stir until you have to, my advice. We need kids like that. Boys nowadays, they come and go. Don’t want to learn a trade. Not like it used to be. Our generation, it was for life, man and boy. These days you need to encourage the good ones.’

  ‘Maybe,’ was all the head gardener would say.

  If a dark figure ever was glimpsed accompanying the Gardens’ most junior employee as he stole at night between boulevard and potting shed, nothing further was said. And if in after-years Leon looked back at these times – which he seldom did, being no common nostalgic – he could clearly recall only details about particular plants and an immense disseminated happiness. With its bowed, peg-tiled roof, its tiny grate and small-paned windows locked solid with generations of paint and cobwebs the potting shed was his first home, tucked into an Eden behind high walls which had a comforting hierarchy, customs and dress. The shed’s very smell was a source of contentment and was made up of creosote, hay, mice, winter wash, tarred twine and the linings of nests. Already the preceding years had blurred and run, infancy and boyhood, into a long self-loyalty beside an aching sea. The gilded galleon atop the Palm House, sails crammed and stays humming, tacked auspiciously into steady breezes, heading for foreign lands to bring back strange pods, seedlings, cuttings, tubers and corms for nurture and cultivation. It was the order that was so satisfactory, the artifice. The natural world’s abundance was too dissipated, too squandered. It was diluted and thinned by distance, by vagaries of climate, by accidents of geology and the wrecking hand of man. A botanical garden, though, could be a living museum, richly concentrating varieties which in nature might not even share the same continent. It was something to set against limitless polders sucked at by a limitless sea until all the flavour was gone. True, those tough maritime plants were subtle and beautiful in their hardiness. Yet the shivering spaces in which they clung and thrived, the marish grasses rooted in the seep and glitter of draining water, all told of something hollow and unquiet which he wished not to think about. Only now and then in winter or in stormy weather when the gulls drifted inland with their pained, angular cries did they bring with them a breath of the past, for a moment producing in him a sense of unravelling. It was marvellous the grief a mere bird could bring, crying and bent against a drab sky. Quickly he would turn back to hoeing around the Crinodendron hookerianum or swaddling a clematis against frost, rendering the gulls powerless and keeping at bay the sad chill they brought. With him at all times was his companion. Like a lone mountaineer who is so certain of a presence that he automatically halves each bar of chocolate, Leon knew he lived with an angel perched on his shoulder, his own familiar, guide and friend.

  Sometimes at night, nested on peat or straw, he would stare up through the potting shed roof as if it were transparent. His being was sucked up by the stars like moisture in sunlight until there was nothing left and he was dispersed throughout the universe. Even in this grand revolve the Gardens remained in view, a patch of earth whose hallowed quality was emphasised by its being an island within a city. He could get no further than this simple perception. More often than not his vision would lose altitude and sideslip into nothing more than a banal aerial view, no doubt inspired by newspaper pictures taken from airships and aeroplanes. At night, at least, his home was a mysterious stain surrounded by the streetlamps and illuminations of a capital city stretching from harbour to zoo. His own dark island gave off only secret gleams as muted as brushed silver: from the lake which held the moon spellbound in its pane and the Palm House itself whose myriad facets glinted with suppressed power. A fox barked. All these images mingled and swirled while, sitting on the ridge tiles not six feet overhead, the barn owl which lived in the hexagonal turret of a summerhouse revolved its head soundlessly and coughed up a pellet of mouse fur and skull plates less thick than fragments of a ping-pong ball.

  Not even the wind bore the faintest whisper as, many hundreds of miles away to the east, maniacal speeches were cheered by vast crowds in floodlit stadiums.

  Overheard:

  Acalypha hispida: He was very interested in survival in those days, wasn’t he?

  Browne agrandiceps: Very. His own, primarily, but also ours. Quite a leap. Humans have a different perspective on these things. They’ve got various grand phrases like “The will to live” and “The life force” which have religious or moral significance for them. We’re a good deal less pretentious. I mean, why invent difficulties? Do you remember him lecturing us about something called “Occam’s razor”?

  A: Vaguely. Didn’t that tamarind he thinks so highly of, the one by the door, make a joke about “Bunkum’s pruner”? Just a bit of mickey-taking. Our gardener’s so earnest, isn’t he?

  B: He’s making up for lost time. In any case it’s obvious just looking around that our own life force must be pretty simple and uniform. Whether we live or die depends on conditions being right. If you ask me, survival’s a straightforward matter. Look at that moss he has such problems with on the outside of the House up beyond the palms. He’s always going on about it rotting the bricks and making the glass green at the edges. It’s because that end faces north. It doesn’t happen on the southward-facing parts because conditions are wrong there. Not enough damp or shade or nourishment. Any plant can understand that.

  A: True. With the right conditions there’s no stopping us. But give the man his due, he also understands it. There’s something in his character which responds to the principle of “all or nothing”. When it comes down to it there’s very little flexibility built into most living things, not even humans. For the majority of creatures everything has to be just so, and within quite narrow limits. What else are all these thermometers for?

  B: Survival.

  A: Exactly. We happen to be particularly sensitive to cold. Our lives hang on a few degrees, which isn’t true of humans. But they have their own problems, our gardener especially. It’s to do with their hearts, I think. The conditions for life may be fine, but they can still lose this “will to live” of theirs. I’ve always thought the gardener’s will was really more a matter of stoicism. He’s very absolute, I’ve noticed. If he can’t have what he wants he’d rather have nothing. I approve of that, don’t you? It’s how we all feel. Anyone here would prefer to grow and blossom and die in due time than merely survive in a sort of straggly half-life. Who wants to live on those terms? One has to be a bit brisk about these things. Our gardener is, and that’s why I admire him.

  B: Me too. Better nothing than the wrong thing.

  Three

  Several days’ snow had left the Palm House practically deserted, with few visitors by day and none at night. Leon presumed they had little faith in the buses and trams which ran the sketchiest of services past the Botanical Gardens’ main gate, and equally little coal to dry their shoes and thaw their feet once they did arrive home. On an auspicious morning when it wasn’t actually snowing he allowed himself to hope for one of the princess’s surprise visits.

  He had spent an hour or two potting up Annona muricata seedlings, a task which had been delayed. This was a small tree whose fruit the English knew as soursop and the Spanish as guayabano, hinting at a non-existent connection with guavas. He had never seen this fruit but knew it from illustrations to be dark green, vaguely pear-shaped and covered with soft spikes, sometimes growing to the size of an irregular cantaloup melon. There were thirty seedlings, and he touched their first glossy leaves with affection. It never staled, the pleasure of watching seeds which had formed inside fruit warmed by a tropic sun in a forest eight thousand miles away sprouting into an alien
world, duped by heat and light and moisture. Such a light, too, as no Annona would ever normally see. The snow outside riddled the Palm House with its glare, blotting up colour and replacing it with brilliant blacks and whites and greys. So strong were its effects that it had the qualities less of light than of a chemical which, when people were dipped in it, etched brutal discriminations. Anyone below the age of twenty it turned into children; anyone above it aged. The cold which accompanied this light afforded its own litmus test, too, the young going pink and the old blue.

  Leon had been outside to see if there were any fox tracks. In his apprentice days before the war there had been a population of foxes in the gardens but it was some time since he had heard, seen or smelt one. They, too, might have been eaten. He found no tracks and the cold air had brought on a spasm of coughing so violent he had staggered back indoors bent over, his face suffused, legs weakening at each step. Once inside he had sat heavily down on the gravel – the sensation was more of having been pushed to the ground – while the steamy vapours slowly eased his lungs. There was, he vaguely knew, something else, something connected with the heart. ‘Lungs and heart,’ as the doctor had said years ago, tapping the varnished tube of his stethoscope on the palm of his hand, ‘lungs and heart. No use thinking of them as separate. They’re both bedfellows in a sick chest.’ For a moment on the gravel Leon had felt the weakness spread upwards throughout his body like hemlock so that even his vision grew momentarily dim though with red streaks like sunset. ‘But of course we’re none of us up to snuff,’ he told himself when he was back on his feet. ‘Short commons for everyone. What can you expect on half rations?’

  Even as he returned to his seedlings he felt optimistic about the future. Things could only improve. Here were thirty little plants where a month or two ago had been none. Probably half of them would wind up in other gardens, at Kew outside London, at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, the Orto Botanico in Florence, in Paris, Brussels, Edinburgh, The Bronx. Obviously Berlin and Frankfurt would have to wait. Who knew what was left of those once-magnificent gardens? Strangely, many of the learned societies which administered such places had managed to remain in touch throughout the war. It had been amazing how amid bombing and shelling and with an entire continent in convulsions of militarised chaos, a network of private links and public services like veins beneath the skin had pulsed on in some sort of fashion. Late in the war Leon had been caught in an American daylight raid when the whole city centre had been cleared of people, tin-helmeted wardens herding everyone off the streets and into shelters. His last sight before being pushed underground had been of a postman, open leather satchel in a steel basket on the handlebars of his bicycle, pedalling among the last raid’s uprooted cobblestones while troops and gunners dashed for their positions. The postman was holding a letter as he rode, reading the address. It had flashed upon him how layered reality was, not at all a single thing. The postman belonged to another, concurrent version, like a ghost of prewar days passing through in a dream. By such means had the Royal Botanic Society kept in touch with brother bodies, exchanging professorial greetings, learned papers, even seeds and cuttings, the hideousness of human behaviour made to vanish in the contemplation of a new rose or a batch of tenderly coaxed seedlings.

  It made him happy, then, to imagine these little plants leaving him to join another collection elsewhere, new life being passed from hand to hand, propagating itself together with knowledge. Was he not a midwife in his mould-stained apron, bringing into the world difficult infants in this great incubator, rearing, training and strengthening them until they could flourish on their own and be ready to leave if need be? His children. Up and down the nave, in aisles and transepts, beneath the dome, his children, rampaging with vigour. Only when placed in the context of the snowscapes outside could they be seen as delicate. On their own terms they burgeoned fit to cover the Earth.

  Towards noon the sun broke weakly through to light up the south-facing angles of the Palm House roof. There the snow melted from the panes’ topmost edges and sagged to form wet crescents of palish sky. At ground level the temperature remained below freezing, the snow pristine but for the twiglike tracks of birds and the scars of his own flounderings. This layer also transfigured the gardens, hiding signs of damage and neglect. The head under-gardener had been pensioned off, having lost a leg in a tram accident during the blackout. Two other gardeners had been killed in air raids and several boys and men had never returned from conscription into the army. Evidently the Society did not yet feel financially secure enough to fill their vacant posts. The beautiful seventeenth-century mansion attached to the gardens and forming the Society’s headquarters had been requisitioned by occupying forces and left partially ruined. The current priority seemed to be to restore the house before the gardens. Nothing was quite certain. Meanwhile, snow covered all evidence of indecision.

  Leon was suddenly prompted to drop what he was doing and go and look at his lotuses. He had scrounged some immense aluminium roasting pans of military origin which now were laid out in a double row where the winter sun fell through the glass. The pans were filled with water up to the rims of the flowerpots they held, each with its sacred lotus. The pots themselves were no longer visible, being hidden beneath the plants’ circular pads and many-petalled flowers which placidly basked in the faintly blue snowlight. He had acquired the seeds from Burma just before the war but had only recently turned them out and grown them and discovered to his relief that they were a nearly pure white variety instead of the usual effeminate pink. The profound silence of these two complementary whitenesses separated only by a membrane of glass now brought a moisture of satisfaction to his eyes. He relished the intense juxtaposition of two worlds whose huge disparity in miles had simply been compressed into a temperature differential of thirty degrees centigrade. Suddenly taken with the idea of stuffing the entire Palm House with lotuses he found a box containing a last couple of dozen seeds, filled a jam jar with water and took six of the hard, greyish-purple nuts which looked like small olives, pierced the rounded end of each with the point of a nail and dropped them in. Within a few days they ought to have germinated and could then be potted out to join the others in the roasting pans.

  In early afternoon the sun was a reddening ball balanced on the roof of the Temperate House when Leon heard the squeal of the entrance doors. He was far away, adjusting the padded zinc halter which, by means of a long cable strung from a bracket, supported the venerable head of a cycad, Encephalartos altensteinii. Grown from a seedling by a founder member of the Society, this ancient palm fern now had a stem nearly a foot thick whose rind, marked by the print of every stalk it had ever produced, was reminiscent in its spiral dotted pattern of something briefly glimpsed as a lump of coal cleaves in a grate. He paid no attention to whoever had entered until aware of a motionless presence at the edge of vision.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said the princess.

  Evidently her own skin contained a substance impervious to the corrosive reagent in snowlight, for she looked neither younger nor older but only slightly paler, wrapped in furs with ice melting from the welts of her boots. A cylindrical muff hung from her neck.

  ‘Why is nobody here?’ she asked, glancing about in surprise. ‘Outside it’s – the whole world is – derelict. Only here is life and warmth. You’re like a heart, I think, beating and beating in this frozen body of Europe.’

  How small she is by day, he thought. He found this saddened him. Outside the mysterious persona created for her by the night people she appeared defenceless. The snow only exposed her further. He mounted a step-ladder to tauten the stay.

  ‘Why are you putting wire around its neck?’

  ‘It’s been wired for years. Probably since last century. Too heavy to support itself.’

  ‘Surely it can’t be? In the wild there are no kind gardeners.’

  ‘No. It would have collapsed and decayed long since. Except in freak circumstances it wouldn’t have lived as long as this. Guess h
ow old it is?’

  ‘You said they put the wire on last century, so I’ll say a hundred years. But a hundred years for a plant in a pot must be impossible.’

  ‘I believe the Japanese grow miniature trees in pots to a far greater age. This cycad’s a hundred and seventy-three years old. We’re almost certain it’s the Western world’s oldest potted plant. Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not very,’ said the princess. ‘It’s all bent and quite undistinguished. If I saw it like that in my garden at home I should tell my gardeners to pull it up.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s why it’s beautiful. It’s a survivor, and all survivors have beauty. It has everything against it. By present standards the cycads are primitive, some say the most primitive plants still alive. See its stem and the shape of the leaves? They say “palm”, don’t they? But look at this – a cone. It’s so ancient that botanists claim it hasn’t yet reached the evolutionary crossroads of deciding whether to be a palm tree or a conifer. Propagation’s slow and difficult. Already you can see it shouldn’t be here at all. It ought to be a hundred and sixty million years in the past. But here it is. Add to that its rarity, and people like you and your gardeners, to say nothing of the cold only a few feet away which would shrivel it within minutes, and you’ll understand why I think it’s beautiful. For as long as we can keep it happy and protected this Encephalartos will remain one of Europe’s most celebrated plants.’ He caressed the thick, woody trunk.