Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  But he did survive; and by the time the wind had dropped began greedily eating the boiled potatoes Leon gave him. Only, whenever the gardener returned to the boiler room after fetching something or performing some task in the Palm House he would find the boy weeping as though he had dared a glance behind the handful of moss and seen too clearly what he had come to. No acceptable future might be devised which had mutilation as its starting point and sprang from a mattress black with dried blood beside a whispering, creaking furnace through whose mica spyholes could be seen the flap of flames. Where could safety lie? Where might the gangs of dusk not burst in with their boots and blades? Come to that, where was he? Where this bare room with no-one for company but a monologuing stranger and the steady sift of ash into cinderboxes nearby?

  Leon brought the boy foul and bitter infusions of twigs or bark, held his hand and talked. But never a word could he get in reply, not even a name. At first he thought the barrier might be that of language. He had heard the foxy gang leader call him a gypsy and certainly he looked swarthy in a foreign way. Were gypsies Egyptians? He didn’t know. Was this speechless creature a Hindoostani or an Arab or else one of those strange Asiatics from far beyond Hungary? But the problem was not linguistic; the boy nodded when Leon pointed to himself and spoke his own name. Maybe he was dumb from birth, then. Or else shock had temporarily paralysed his faculty of speech. When he did indicate himself his lower lip folded behind the white upper teeth as if to make the letter ‘F’. ‘For now,’ Leon told him, ‘I shall call you Felix,’ since he had heard that the correct name for Arabia was Arabia Felix.

  But what to do with him? As always, the gardener walked by night in the Palm House, moving among his plants while the starlight slid off the rounded panes far overhead. Occasionally the white beams of searchlights swung hopelessly across the sky, arousing in him a distant disquiet, echoes of loss, of a steely order breaking up in disarray. He was thin, his coughs rattled up among the leaves and flattened against the streaming glass, but he believed he had never been so happy. Outside the glass, beyond the wall, unspeakable events were dragging to their conclusions. Inside, though it might echo to the hollow boom of anti-aircraft guns, was a frail temple to all that might survive. His private, long-term project for a special collection of night blooming varieties was coming along well. He was ready to concede that the scent of one or two of them was slightly sinister or uncanny: they had, after all, evolved to attract bats and moths rather than human noses. If he closed his eyes while standing in front of them he sometimes became confused about what he was experiencing, so strange were the smells and so apt to provoke disorienting sensations as of a spoken painting, music tasted, sculpture overheard. He longed to see how visitors would react but of course the curfew and blackout made it impossible and in any case he had yet to spring such a radical idea on Dr Anselmus and the rest of the Board.

  He wandered about in indecision, easily sidetracked by a grotto studded with dim green hazes. He fell on his knees, interested to see if the phosphorescence was strong enough for him to be able to see the outline of his own fingers against it. It was. The boy must stay, at least for now. He was obviously petrified, traumatised. Well then, he must be hidden. If his presence were known neither would be safe. Whatever the lad had done he looked exactly the sort of person the Germans would finish off in their final paroxysm. And as for himself, he would be no better off. Harbouring Jews was practically as bad as being Jewish. Harbouring gypsies amounted to the same thing. Racial degenerates, the criminal element … The epithets were well worn but still carried force in the shape of death sentences. To turn Felix free, even if he wished to go, would be to send him out to die.

  ‘Of course he shall stay,’ he told Passiflora edulis var. flavicarpa, the passion fruit vine, who only urged Leon to play safe.

  ‘Why don’t we betray him to the Germans?’ came the vine’s seductive voice in the dark. ‘They’ll reward you for sure. Some fuel, with any luck, or maybe some new glass. We’re down to our last spare panes. And what about us? All right for you to commit suicide nobly, but you’ll be murdering us. Believe me, once you’ve vanished into some camp nobody will look after this place. Not a chance. The boilers’ll go out and your House will become derelict. The end. And all for a complete stranger. It makes no sense.’

  ‘He stays,’ repeated Leon with a groan.

  So Felix remained, just as his name remained Felix, and just as if locked into the moment of his salvation. Physically he healed and strengthened even as Leon’s own health declined, for the gardener gave him most of his rations. Had it not been for the vegetables he grew hidden among the tropical plants he would surely have starved. Felix was back on his feet after three or four weeks, the mattress turned cleaner side up. He was much improved in appearance and seemingly unimpaired apart from being obliged to squat when he urinated, as many desert menfolk customarily do to this day. But his timidity was intense and he was reluctant to leave the boiler room. This was just as well, for keeping him hidden remained their sole chance of survival. The problem was exacerbated by the floating population of assistants who came and went about the Palm House. Until 1942 Leon had retained his prewar staff of five men permanently assigned him. After Germany’s calamitous defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of that year the conscription of ever older men to make up for the losses meant he was often lucky to have two men in late middle age to help him. (Even Leon himself had been ordered to report for a medical examination to confirm his ineligible status. It had been conducted on a raw December morning and it was evident to the army doctor that all was up with Germany if she needed combatants as ill as this man. Having established that a hothouse was the only environment in which Leon could survive, he astutely said ‘I should think you must be fighting for your own life as much as for that of your plants. Be off with you.’) Leon might have been able to bar his own staff from No Admittance on the grounds that he lived there, but he could hardly forbid the outside gardeners their ancient right of access to the boiler room through the yard door to thaw their hands and brew tea. It was therefore necessary to devise a way of hiding Felix, and for this the boiler room’s layout was helpful.

  As has been hinted, the city’s Botanical Gardens was not ideally situated. To its pre-industrial founders it had not much mattered that the site was low since they hadn’t foreseen the Palm House and its heating requirements. The designers of the original heating system had planned to copy that at Kew, where the problem of constant coal deliveries to the middle of a horticultural idyll had been solved by digging an underground tunnel with a track along which fuel could be unobtrusively hauled. In the case of Leon’s Palm House this had proved impossible because the water table was too high. Perhaps seventy yards of tunnel had been cut from above and lined with brick until the idea was abandoned in favour of an access road behind high walls which became part of extensive kitchen gardens, covered with all kinds of espaliered nectarines, vines and loganberry canes. This little road, up which horses pulled a succession of rubber-tyred coal carts, led into the yard behind the boiler room. In order that the public’s illusion of being in deep countryside should not be ruined by the sight of offices and messuages at the back of the Palm House this yard was enclosed by similar high walls, thickly grown with ivies and creepers and broken only by a single wooden door to which few of the outside staff had keys. The space thus enclosed was lined with brick bunkers. Those against the boiler room wall were for coal. Others around the yard contained mounds of pea gravel, compost, peat and crushed shell, while still other sheds housed the glass stores as well as collections of tools, whiting and huge rolls of disused blinds like the sails of an obsolete schooner.

  The boiler room therefore had two aspects. To Leon and Felix it was an annexe of the Palm House itself which, because the public were excluded, seemed yet more private, as befitted its status as their bedroom. To other gardeners and the men who brought the coal it was more an extension of outdoors, though complete ease of access was denied th
em by the curator’s eccentric rules and often forbidding presence. Leon now imposed a strict rota for when the gardeners could come in and warm themselves. At all other times the boiler room door was bolted from within, occasioning much puzzled speculation. This routine enabled Felix to slip away before the men came in. He needed merely to have a safe hiding place in case of a proper search, and this was afforded by the aborted tunnel. Having given up on their original scheme, the Palm House’s designers had ingeniously turned it to advantage by devising a way of ducting the smoke from the furnaces along it, running the flue underground for a considerable distance until it could emerge behind a spinney, disguised as the remaining tower of a ruined mediaeval keep, a triumph of nineteenth-century taste. This kept the smuts away but the sight of smoking battlements cast over that part of the Gardens something of the sinister fraudulence of a crematorium. The advantage to Felix was that the first part of the tunnel was a perfect hiding place. In the boiler room itself the huge lagged flue gathered smoke from the three furnaces, further impelled by steam as in a railway engine, before plunging through the floor next to a coal bunker. This bunker was now largely filled by an electrically driven hoist which had been the last word in modern labour saving when installed in 1927, taking the coal from outside via a hatchway and conveying it on a belt up to the hoppers which fed the furnaces. In the grimy shadow of this machine a small access door was let into the floor and led to the tunnel’s mouth.

  Between them Leon and Felix had a system of warning signals which would give the boy time to drop through this panel and crouch in the hot darkness with the tube of blazing gases shuddering by his ear. These included a certain way of rattling the No Admittance door handle and, for real emergencies, dropping the word ‘stokehold’ into conversation which meant Leon and a peremptory guest were about to come through to the boiler room. As it happened, this extreme measure was seldom needed and only twice in earnest, once being when Dr Anselmus demanded to know exactly how decrepit the boilers were and to inspect them for himself. The second time was early one morning after a heavy air raid, one of the last in the war, when a German officer and a squad of soldiers came to the Botanical Gardens looking for survivors of an American aircrew who had baled out of their stricken B-17 over the city. They made a thorough search of all the outhouses, poked among the plants in the Temperate House and then came to the Palm House, obviously dispirited. The officer quizzed Leon about parachutes. ‘The stokehold – you’ll need to see that, I presume?’ said the gardener loudly, throwing open the door with fine indifference and disclosing a neatly swept space with highly polished pipes and gauges. The officer glanced flintily around, said ‘Good work’ and gave no order to search. He and his men drove off and never returned.

  With these measures working Leon tried to coax Felix out into No Admittance. At the first sounds of a visitor to the Palm House, though, the youth would scurry back into the boiler room. What combination this behaviour represented of shyness, shame and fear Leon could not judge. At any rate Felix quickly turned into a reliable boilerman, learned to operate the mechanical feeder and seemed to take pleasure in keeping the room swept and neat, polishing up copper pipes which had oxidised to a dull mahogany. Now and then he even washed clothes for both of them. When early in that final winter the coal stopped Leon would drag his lopping spoils into the yard, lock the door into the Gardens and set to work with axe and saw. It was several weeks before he could induce Felix to take a step outdoors, still longer for the boy to acquire the confidence to work there, sawing and stacking. At the least noise he would bolt indoors and cower by the entrance to his hiding place whence the gardener had to coax him, shaking. Yet under this furtive regime he appeared to be recovering well, though still unable or refusing to speak. One day, to Leon’s delight, he made himself a catapult and, sitting on the back step, began to knock the odd thrush or sparrow out of the branches of the copper beech which partly extended over the yard. These morsels supplemented their scanty diet. The ornamental fowl had long since gone from the tarn but Leon, who as a child had learned fowling in the marshes around Flinn, had netted the shallows and sometimes snared an incautious wild mallard or oystercatcher at dusk. Quite early in the war he had cleaned out most of the Gardens’ squirrel population, trapping them by using cypress cones as bait. He then stuffed them with pine nuts and a sprig of rosemary before roasting them. They had been delicious. The occasional squirrel was still to be seen, having come in from the park across the way; but maybe the war had made them as canny as it had made people for neither he nor Felix caught any more.

  Thus weeks lengthened into months and a gingerly domesticity rooted itself on the narrow frontier between the temporary and the permanent. It was as if nothing could be decided until war and winter both ended. Emergency was not subdivisible. The times were radically disrupted; no peculiar circumstance could disrupt them further. It was a way of surviving which had its own strange stability, and often at night in the boiler room’s warmth the glow of fireboxes and the sighing of the flue extended timelessly in every direction. It was then that surviving was indistinguishable from living and might happily have led nowhere else. At other times when wind and searchlights whipped through the leafless branches of the beech outside and the furnaces devoured their mixture of hoarded coal and scavenged timber, the boiler room filled with a ferocious, dense roar which made the walls shudder like those of an engine room in a ship under full way and racing towards its own destruction on an uncharted reef. Hot pipework, scorched lagging, feathers of escaping steam, the grind and clank of the automatic hopper: all were part of a power which was surely being translated into forward motion. Leon expected to hear above it the seesaw whine of harmonics as gearwheels and transmission shaft went in and out of phase with each other. On getting up and going into the darkened House he would be half surprised to find it silent, its unmoving ironwork anchored deep in urban soil.

  In the war’s final month the searchlights in the sky above the city grew more and more haywire. The gardener would stand beneath the palms and watch the beams swoop and skid as if they were unable to remember what they were looking for, no longer capable of concentrating. One by one they failed or were shot out until there was only a single beam left. Possibly its aiming gear had been damaged for instead of pointing up into the night sky it swept impotently around over the rooftops like the intermittent beam of a lighthouse. Its whizzing white passage above the Gardens distressed him. ‘Steena,’ it sang as it whanged overhead and vanished behind the trees. ‘Steena,’ it reappeared. Two nights later the House drummed to a low frequency shaking and the sky glowed vermilion. Evidently the searchlight was hit and further crippled, for although it remained alight the beam froze as it passed overhead, coming to an abrupt stop in mid-sweep so that its lower edge just caught the weathercock on the Palm House’s dome. The searing brilliance pinned the ship like a moth to the sky, leaving Leon benighted in a penumbra below. For ten endless minutes the golden galleon flared on a black sea, ‘eeeen’, so the gardener, staring up through the roof with tears glistening on his cheeks, covered his ears with his hands to shut out the persistent keening. Then the light went out for good and the freed ship vanished, the noise stopped, and a week later the war was over.

  As a squid-cloud thins and the water transpares, the fog and mania drew apart and everyone suddenly saw with awful clarity what they had been and what they had done. There was nothing for it but to rejoice. Stygian camps emptied and people went back to dying in ordinary untainted traffic accidents, to falling off alps in the normal course of pastime. For others the camps never did empty and they never completely came out of hiding. Leon did not triumphantly disclose the ingenious bolt-hole beneath the boiler room, nor did Felix run for cover with any less urgency. The months passed, the transients departed, the population shook down. Now was the time for citizens to re-register, for lists of voters to be re-compiled, for claims to pensions to be established, for all kinds of aberrant and abhorrent recent behaviour to be amne
stied or amnesied. But Felix did not emerge, or Leon didn’t allow him to, or wordlessly they agreed to prolong their liminal predicament for reasons of their own, still subsisting on one man’s rations. Was the boy too ruined to contemplate returning to the world beyond the wall? Was grieving for a brief manhood to be assuaged indefinitely by half-life at the edge of a spurious jungle? Suppose the gardener kept warning him that gangs like those of muzzle-face still roamed the unpoliced streets, snuffling out unfinished business?

  At night Leon still wandered his private jungle and sought his plants’ advice but they could tell him nothing he didn’t know. Rather, they had a habit of indulging a querulous preoccupation with their own lives which calmed him and drew him back again from the harsh and hollow-stomached transactions beyond the garden wall. Among man’s immemorial consolations is undoubtedly the company of green and growing things, no less than the melancholy comforts of scholarship. So it was that his plants had taken characters for themselves, speaking as individuals on a variety of topics. One of his favourites was Encephalartos, the ancient cycad which had partially appropriated the tone and manner of Professor Seneschal, a venerable Fellow of the Society and a world authority on gymnosperms. Its heavy head hung loosely in its collar and its captious asides pleased Leon as he paused to check that the soil was not too damp. ‘Turned warmer since 1908,’ it remarked one day. ‘I put it down to the glass. Not such pretty light, this modern stuff, but it’s thicker quality. Holds the warmth better … And who might you be, young man?’

  At any opportunity, indeed, Encephalartos altensteinii seemed prepared to indulge tetchily in the comforts of his own scholarship, airing his theories for any passer-by:

  ‘Wars?’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them come and go. This last has been the worst so far. All that banging and crashing at night with great flashes of light and what happens? Draughts. Holes in the roof and damn great draughts cutting through the House at every angle. If it hadn’t been for that new gardener’s boy they’ve brought in – what’s his name? Leon? – we’d have all of us frozen in our beds. As it was my cone became quite numb and such things are no laughing matter at my age. But he turned up the heat and mustered a gang and soon had things back to rights. The palms, of course, preserved their usual lofty disdain. Anybody here would testify that there’s not a malicious fibre in my being, but frankly I shouldn’t have minded too much if one or other of the palms had got a little smack – say a piece of steel in the head, nothing too fatal but enough to wake its ideas up a bit. A good stiff jolt to bring it back to reality, if you like.