Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘But what about the science?’

  ‘Oh, the science. That was carrying on in the background. Thousands of exotic specimens were brought back and classified, often with ulterior motives. Those eighteenth-century voyages of discovery had been commercial as much as purely scientific, of course. Several European powers had colonies in the tropics and trade had given the people back home a taste for exotica. So they established botanic gardens out in the colonies which to begin with weren’t much more than collection points for specimens brought in from up-country, but soon turned into research centres in their own right.’ He shut the book he was holding with the confidence of a bore and began ‘If I remember rightly’ with the bore’s implicit challenge to summon the energy to prove him wrong. ‘Calcutta Botanic Gardens, 1787. Peradeniya in Ceylon, 1810. Buitenzorg Garden in Java, 1817. They were the beginning of the scientific propagation of exotic species for export and trade generally. It all came down to money eventually. The classic example was that of the Englishman, H.A. Wickham, who brought rubber seedlings from Brazil in the 1870s back to Kew where they were propagated and re-exported to Ceylon and Malaya. It virtually destroyed Brazil’s rubber trade. They were ruthless, the British, like the Belgians; ruthless and inventive. At the start of this century our own King came here to these Gardens and stood in this very House to make a speech about the grand purpose of such places. He really came to see the new heating system he’d paid for. That’s the system I’ve still got,’ added Leon, ‘so you can see the problem. Boilers nearly half a century old. Small wonder we limp from one crisis to another. Anyway, you’ve presumably noticed the plaque.’

  ‘Plaque?’

  ‘On the wall by the main door. That bronze thing. Needs a good clean, of course, but I haven’t the men to waste on details.’

  He led the way to the entrance and the princess saw that what she had always taken for a black hatchway, an access to some arcane piece of plumbing, was no mere metal panel but a commemorative inscription fixed by four magnificent bolts to the brickwork. “A National Garden”, she read, “ought to be a centre for receiving stock and, in turn, for aiding the Mother Country by supplying everything that is useful in the vegetable kingdom. Medicine, commerce, agriculture, horticulture and many lucrative branches of manufacture can benefit from the adoption of such a system. Thus by care and diligence Man may multiply the riches of the Earth.”

  ‘A fine piece of mercantile and nationalist rhetoric,’ he agreed, watching her face as she read. ‘There you have the energy and spirit of the nineteenth century. And there you also have the end of the great era of glasshouses. The King didn’t know that, presumably, but they were doomed.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Partly they fell out of fashion. Mostly because the world was changing. They may still work as living museums but they’re inefficient in terms of purely scientific work. Propagation needn’t involve growing palm trees to their full height. According to Dr Anselmus it was the First World War which really put an end to them. A good many glasshouses were in private hands but their owners couldn’t get the coal to heat them. A magnificent one came down not far from here at Marby. It was derelict, the plants all dead. Perhaps the best of all to go was in England, the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth. That was a wonderful building, wonderful. Its central dome was two feet higher even than the Palm House at Kew. Built in 1836, a whole decade before Kew, it was full of mature palms as well as bananas and ferns and orchids and an unrivalled collection of aquatic plants. Interesting construction, incidentally. Ridge and furrow design instead of smooth walls and roof. Like magnified corduroy. It was an old idea for using all the available light as the sun changed its angle. But it needed a ton of coal a day to heat and in wartime they weren’t entitled to have it. Preserving tropical flora was not a work of national importance – one of those bureaucratic phrases we’ve also become familiar with over the last few years. Different war, same problem. That First War, though: it ruined any pretence that there could be peaceful commercial competition between nations. All trade is war and glasshouses aren’t built for wars. Anyway, the British pulled down Chatsworth Conservatory in 1920. They say men wept as they did it. Forty-eight iron pillars each weighing three tons on either side of an aisle wide enough for a carriage and pair. I wish I’d seen it before it was too late.’

  She watched as he stared out through the paned doors at the snow. How very differently occidentals acted when moved by something, she thought. Instead of bursting into laughter they became quiet and deliberately reduced themselves to a kind of elegiac nakedness. Still not used to it she was slightly repelled, or at least ashamed on their behalf. This man talking about a long-defunct glasshouse might have been a child mourning its mother. It was quite unfathomably inappropriate to treat things as if they were people. Once again she saw a river choked from side to side with children’s bodies, the dead puffed up in the water’s face.

  ‘But we took in several of the Chatsworth plants,’ he was saying. ‘That Encephalartos you saw me hitching up the other day is the best of them. Ah, we’ve got plants here from all over Europe whose original houses are gone. And now this latest war. I’m told half the great German houses are down. Bombed or starved out. Times like these, it’s the civilising things which go to the wall. Gangs of children roam our cities like packs of dogs, you know. Stealing, black marketing, selling themselves to soldiers for food, living in doorways. Who’d dare to claim that keeping a lot of plants alive took precedence over feeding them? But if you look at history you’ll soon see that’s a false question because there are always the hungry and the homeless. The human casualties of the industrial revolution didn’t for a moment stop them building places like this.’

  At length she said, matter-of-factly, ‘You know a lot.’

  ‘The history? Book learning. I’m interested. If I were an engine driver I’d want to know the history of steam engines. Aren’t you the same? You couldn’t do your job without knowing the history of your country, I suppose?’

  She didn’t reply except to say, ‘Well, history. What about the future? Your own? You’ve just described the place you work in as obsolete.’

  ‘Only out of fashion. Not useless at all. As Loudon said, “a greenhouse is entirely a work of art.” He meant artifice: that it’s a matter of human ingenuity and aesthetics to create a completely artificial enclosed world. Nowadays people use the word artificial as though it always meant fake, something ungenuine, not real. What could be realer than this?’

  Nearby, a man in shirtsleeves stood on a pair of steps and was sponging the undersides of a banana’s broad leaves. Not twenty feet away in another world a humped flowerbed lay like a corpse beneath snow criss-crossed by the tracks of birds.

  ‘It’s just very unlikely.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ he agreed with pleasure.

  ‘But I’ve been hearing things. People say a new spirit’s emerging, that science and art must pay their way, that from now on places like this will have to justify the money spent on them because there are so many priorities. Food, housing, jobs, health, reconstruction everywhere. I’ve heard there’s even an argument about the future of these Botanical Gardens because the land should belong to the city. They say it’s old-fashioned and undemocratic to have a place of minority appeal taking up valuable land. They say.’

  ‘Utter nonsense,’ said Leon sharply. ‘Oh, I’ve heard the rumours, of course’ (how easy it suddenly became airily to dismiss the murmurs which, voiced by candlelight and among conspiratorial leaves, had so recently left him panicked and hollow), ‘everyone’s heard them. There’s nothing in it, I assure you. History again, that’s how I know. The whole history of city planning since the industrial revolution has been concerned with how to give people access to open spaces. Garden cities and city gardens. Parks are fundamental to cities. The Botanical Gardens aren’t the city’s to sell, in any case, and since this Palm House is the last of its size in the country and one of a dwindling number worldwide it’s a nat
ional treasure and couldn’t possibly be under threat. We’re incredibly lucky to have survived the war. We’re certainly going to survive peace.’

  ‘I’m told dirty air will be an increasing problem. The glass becomes filthy and the light can’t get in.’

  ‘Of course it’s a problem, especially when people use low grade coal. But that’s a matter for government legislation, a clean air act or something. Stop people making smoke within the city confines. Don’t ask me,’ he said with sudden dismissive vehemence. ‘I’m not a bloody politician, I’m a gardener. I just want to get back to my plants.’ He turned away and lifted an edge of split bark with a thumbnail, looking for pests. ‘Mealy bugs,’ he said in disgust. ‘That’s what comes of talking instead of spraying.’

  The sudden change in the conversational temperature apparently left the princess at a loss. Then, as if it determined her to be undiplomatically blunt, she said:

  ‘As I said the other day, I may be going away. A new job. Recalled home. So I’ll make my offer now. Thanks to this place, and thanks mainly to you, I’ve decided on a grand project. I want to build a glasshouse for my own city, but I want it to be of a completely new kind. Instead of a hothouse I want a cold house. My idea is to plant all the things which can’t live in the tropics – all those daffodils and little bulbs which like the snow, your soft fruits, the raspberries and redcurrants and – what are those hairy things called? – gooseberries. With the most modern refrigeration I’m told we can even make real snow. Wouldn’t that be piquant? Crocuses poking out of snow inside as mangoes ripen outside? It’s a … a delicious reversal. Real artifice, don’t you think?’

  His back was still turned but she saw his hands were still. His jacket’s drape remained lumpily impassive but maybe (she thought of an expression in her own language) maybe ears were sprouting from his shoulder blades.

  ‘So,’ she persevered, ‘I want you to come and take charge of my dream for me. Nothing will be spared in materials and labour. Everything will be put at your disposal. Architects will work to your own design if you want. You’ll choose the plants, the layout, everything. The project already has our government’s backing as a matter of national culture with educational and scientific significance. You can name your own salary within reason. There. Think about it and give me your answer soon. You admire this man Lyddon? Lyndon? Loudon. So now you have a chance to be Mr Loudon. I don’t think,’ she added softly, for one of the assistants had moved his steps closer to where they stood and was trying to unseize the worm gear controlling a system of rods which opened the clerestory louvres, ‘I don’t think such a future can be found indefinitely in your present position. Polymethyl methacrylate,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘My scientific adviser tells me it has been used with great success for aircraft windows. I think they call it “Perspex”. Maybe my cold house needn’t be a glasshouse at all but a thermoplastic resin house, properly up-to-date. Lighter, stronger, bigger. Fewer condensation problems. As you can see, where you’ve been thinking of history I’ve been considering the future. You and I will, of course, be working very closely.’

  Absently his thumbnail resumed running up and down the flap of bark, squashing the powdery scale insects and leaving a brownish pus.

  ‘Very closely,’ she repeated. ‘And I think you’ll find there’s less standing in your way than you’d imagine.’

  When he half turned to answer her with a piercing suspicion he found she had gone. Instead, shocked, he saw Felix lounging in the doorway of No Admittance only ten or twelve feet away. There was nothing in the boy’s stance of the timid night creature caught by daylight. This sudden unilateral betrayal of their secret, the casual boldness, nonplussed and frightened him as much as if he had heard the first bulldozers starting up outside. Hidden things were advancing, slightly beyond his present horizon. More immediately, the men would see, the assistants nearby. Wasn’t one of them up in the clerestory with a panoramic view of the House? Arms outstretched, extending the concealment of an imaginary cloak, he began a lurch towards Felix, a gauche shooing, at the same time hunching himself as though his own body were the boy’s, willing it into invisibility. But the breath he drew to whisper a fierce command caught in its own phlegm and set off a fit of coughing which stopped him in mid-step. Pain in his chest hacked and racked while his indrawn whoops filled the House. Convulsively he pressed the insides of both arms to his rib cage, a hand glistening briefly, wet with burst pests or spittle. The familiar crazed reds and blacks filled his eyeballs as he sank to his knees at the feet of the gypsy who remained in the doorway, looking down at his fallen befriender as he rocked and fought for breath.

  When at last the spasm subsided Leon slowly raised his face. His forehead was stuck with chips of gravel and his cheeks were wet with tears. Weakly he drew a sleeve across eyes and nose. Then for the first time Felix smiled. He put out a hand and helped the gardener to his feet. As he did so the princess spoke from somewhere behind Leon.

  ‘We really must do something about your health. You’re much too young to be ill. Besides, you’ll be needing all your strength.’

  Her footsteps crackled daintily away and at last he heard what he faintly knew he had missed hearing before: the familiar double squeak of the entrance doors closing behind her.

  Outside, the dark day dosed and drew down its snows. Once the assistants had left Leon bitterly set about preparing for his night visitors. The boldness of Felix’s treason was too wounding for him to dwell on. He seemed hardly able to think coherently, aware only of a fatigued dread of sooner or later having to confront the gypsy. Bending to pick up a horned nut beneath a Strophanthus divaricatus he was arrested to hear a monologue startlingly congenial to his own mood:

  ‘Our princess may be desirable but she’s touchingly ignorant all the same. Did she really think this place was built by the Romans? Still, we’re all foreigners here, and how much do we know of her own land? Nothing.

  ‘Do we want to? It feels like a myth: the forests and butterflies all dreamed, so that as long as we can believe in them we go on planting and coddling and growing their counterpart here, this yearning effigy. But imagine if we actually went, the terror of the journey! Imagine if the dream began fading when we were halfway there while behind us were abandoned ruins! We should be left with nowhere to alight, like a mournful giant albatross cruising the tradewinds for ever above a wrinkled ocean.

  ‘Why this, why that? Why can’t she take us in her arms? It’s all slipping away for lack of clarity. Maybe after all she has a Chinese husband. The heart’s like a nut: the beginnings of a forest crammed into a shell, celestial butterflies and all. We carry it for years. Sheer loyalty. Between our fingers every other damn thing sprouts, bursting up under the constant patter of warm drops. Only the nut with its stupid clenched dream sleeps on, hardening as time passes. Once it was enough to know it was there. Suddenly there’s wrecking in the air and now it all feels too long ago to help, too private for such public events.

  ‘We ought to break her. We ought to give her something she won’t forget. Going away, is she? They all do. One after another, they go. What’s that if it isn’t betrayal? If it’s not being continually abandoned? All that Paris scent and gliding around in furs. Actually, we wouldn’t mind just once seeing her face pushed into the mould, her lovely nose forced to breathe peat dust. Not revenge but justice. And what, instead, do we give her? Lectures. Lectures! The first resort of the self-taught, the last resort of the lame.’

  Nine

  The passive, the windguided who – like Leon – move at a slow drift through whole clutches of years are most likely to fake up, retrospectively, a narrative to cover themselves with spurious intent. The career landmarks of And then … And then don’t adequately describe their lives. Had Leon been obliged to look back over his thirty-three years and describe their course, there might only have come to him the moods associated with certain events if not the events themselves: whatever indelible indigo had welled out of endless wanderings along a s
olitary shore, constant planting to see what might grow, his head all the time coming up and his eyes fixing on nothing as thought walked away from him down a familiar corridor and he unresistingly followed. What might characterise such repetitions? Neither a hunt nor a chase, maybe: more methodical than the one, in slower motion than the other and altogether less gallant than a quest. And the object sought, the ostensible Cou Min so often summoned? How could she not suffer a marvellous fate, a transformation like that a sapphire undergoes when it emerges from the ground looking for all the world like a dull chunk of gravel but which, trundled round and round in a tub, loses its irregularities and becomes smooth, taking on lustre and its own colour? Finally the craftsman cuts and polishes until a gem sits on a piece of velvet, the diminished but sublime ghost of its crude ancestor.

  When Leon thought of Cou Min, as he frequently did, it was the jewel he mostly saw, a hallowed thing made smooth by constant handling. Very occasionally she ambushed him in a raw manner of her own, provoking a jarring discontinuity. At those moments her figure sidestepped the tragic tameness he had assigned her as if his great passion had happened to another person entirely, or maybe to the same person but in a different life. Even eighteen years later a trap could still spring and drop him out of the diurnal world of stove house gardening into a melancholy pit. It happened one day when he was sowing five trays of assorted spices, three of which he planned to turn over to a colleague for raising in the Temperate House. The cumin seeds’ dry rattle in their packet, the fleeting image of a live organism encapsulated in a husk ready to be awakened, the play of names which could mean nothing to any but one man, precipitated that man through a hole where he was caught and held a long moment, seeing another world and another time, his deserted hands frozen above a tray of leaf mould. Now and then he yearned to be free of her, to slough off her memory and escape. More often he adored her abiding centrality: the unseen attractor around which his life could revolve. It is some people’s luck to find a way of remaining true to their first passion, a hidden faithfulness which survives, that endures even happy marriage to a stranger and a lifetime’s displaced love. There are others who, having survived the scald, can never put it out of their minds and are forbidden all compromise. Like anyone they may be plastic in their daily affections, opportunist in their desires, but they grip at their heart something which renders all else casual, temporary, unreal; and sooner or later – in the nick of time or, painfully, not – it surfaces like a deep sea creature and lovers break up and marriages are annulled. Leon’s case was simple: better no-one than not-her, a proposition that extended itself into a more general idea which ruled his days, that Nothing was preferable to anything on the wrong terms.