Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Thus the windguided, the passive man: who neither hunts nor chases but maybe searches in the patient doleful manner of one hoping he will recognise what he was always looking for if ever by chance he were to find it.

  The evening of his uneasy conversation with the princess and of Felix’s melodramatic self-revelation dragged interminably. For the first time he saw the night people as intruders and wished they would leave him to his House and plants, to his provocative lodger on the other side of No Admittance. He thrice confiscated the chargé’s cigarette, eliciting, with his claimed need for nicotine as a pesticide, a dandyish and acerbic ‘Oh nonsense. My dear sir, it piques you to be punitive. Terribly exciting in its way but if you really wanted nicotine so much then instead of gathering it in tiny amounts – one slapped wrist at a time, as it were – you could surely have grown tobacco by the bushel. You could grow anything in here. Opium. Hashish. Babies, probably, if you knew how to sow them.’ Laughter, not all of it easy. In darkest manner Leon informed him that until the war the Customs and Excise people used to give the Gardens regular bales of impounded tobacco for burning in fumigators. It was the war which had upset the supply. Furthermore, it was as much as his job was worth to be caught growing illicit or dutiable plants in any but specimen quantities. This ponderousness raised a wilted eyebrow but no riposte. Eventually the door gave its last squeak and he shot home the bolts even while the yellow candlelight still showed a hunched back skidding away beyond the windows along the glassy path. The man fell heavily but he didn’t reopen the door, listening instead to the sounds of friends rallying around. The stray beams of their torchlight outside pattered randomly across the tropics within. Soon these too disappeared and he was left to do his ritual nightly round.

  Something is happening to me, he told his plants as the candle-tongues sizzled between his licked fingers. I see now what I’ve made of this life, this one flash of light on a black sea catching me for an instant before it sweeps on for ever. All my passion’s in vain. I’ve never discovered what a satisfactory outcome would have been. To be loved in return as the rock loves the limpet for needing it? Dumb sucking? No; surely my purpose is altogether grander? Down on Palace Square (he told the night-flowering climber, Nyctanthes arbor-tristis) there’s a clockmaker – or there was, before the Nazis took him away and stole his stock – who made beautiful brass clocks. You could watch their works, how the little wheels whizzed and clicked. Instead of putting windows in the sides of the cases he used to place a glass bubble over the entire skeleton. At once this produced a different effect. It became a display. No more of the mechanism was actually visible but it set the whole clock apart as a self-contained world so that passers-by outside the shop window could reflect on it and be reflected in it. That’s also why the instruments in the Royal Science Museum are so fine. One way and another they’re all behind glass, either individually cased like clocks or together in cabinets: isolated, held up as examples of pure function which itself reveals the designer, the maker, the mind. Are the laws of physics universal? I sometimes ask the scientists who visit this House but they can’t agree, apparently, though most seem to think they must be. Look at a working clock beneath its glass dome, then, and you’re seeing a fragment of the universe, motion and energy and energy’s decay … Before they took him away they smashed his hands with their rifle butts. It pays to make sausages and shut up. The light sweeps on and never returns.

  Are you still listening? In my Palm House we’re inside the clock itself, watching the growth, feeling the affection of living, sniffing the decay. I can’t imagine why some people remain unmoved, but most respond. Even those who scarcely notice plants when they’re outside in the open air will pay attention once they’re enclosed in glass and properly arranged. It’s remarkable. Some things only become visible if you put glass over them, and the more ordinary they are the more this is true. What visitors see in here is the universe on display, the Earth’s history and their own evanescence, and they know it.

  But (he stroked Nyctanthes’ leaves) something is happening to me. Now and then I lose sight of the universe and just see myself, a freak displayed like a specimen in this marvellous bottle. Now and then I know what the palms feel as they press their fronds up against the inside of the dome. I must break out if it kills me. But how? The obvious thing’s to accept her offer. Follow the princess to her fabulous land. Become her tame expert. Design a world for her where I could strut and cough in the artificial chill among beds of narcissi. My bank balance would grow with the crocuses, the snowdrops, the winter aconites like ruffed buttercups, the pear trees, the little grove of sallows I’d like to plant at the centre. If I were homesick I could construct a seascape in one corner – no expense spared, didn’t she say? – and try to get rock samphire, sea holly, thrift and spurrey to grow. And meanwhile she …? Would I become her servant, once on her own home ground? Her confidant? Her teacher? Lackey and lover? Or just lackey?

  Nyctanthes arbor-tristis replied not a word. In the semi-dark Leon could hear only the dripping of water and his heart valves’ creak. Really, candlelight was the perfect illumination for a palm house. It was a surprise that enough light drifted upwards to sketch faintly the structure’s outlines: the cast iron spiral staircase which twirled its lacy texture of holes and patterns towards the gallery in steps and risers and balustrade, the arching ribs far overhead on the edge of visibility between plumes and fronds and feathers. Warmth seeped up his trouserlegs from the gratings underfoot. This was his home, there could be no doubt. Anyone might wish for a home both benign and mysterious which comforted and sustained even as it enclosed a tendril of the raw universe.

  I don’t want to see the real tropics – he confided to Nyctanthes.

  How could one be rational when there was a suggestion of bulldozers and treason in the air? Dr Anselmus had never been other than a staunch ally who, Leon recognised, had championed him practically from his start as apprentice glazier. What could he be talking about with the princess? Of course it was true that, finally, Dr Claud Anselmus was Director and Leon was an employee, and directors and princesses could consort and chat and plan together where directors and employees could only exchange quite formal, technical opinions even though they had known each other sixteen years. That was how things were. But he made a vague, timorous resolution to have the matter out as soon as he could. Didn’t he have his own plans on the Society’s behalf? Wasn’t his Palm House becoming a popular attraction instead of the uneasy and virtuous cross between fossil and museum which it had been before the war?

  Just then his attention was caught by a movement above him, framed by the banyan’s aerial roots. He froze, the candle he had snuffed sending up its greasy wisp of expiry between his fingers. Nothing moves in here, he thought. Only at the height of summer with all the louvres open do the larger leaves begin their wobble and single fronds whir like lone propellers. Tonight the windows were tightly shut, the muggy air unmoving. A sudden shower of drops clattered through the long leaves of a fishtail palm. Had a darker shape momentarily swung along the deep grey roof, up there where snow muffled such light as was reflected from the clouds above the city? Although capable of rash acts of passion which might pass for bravery Leon had preserved much of his childhood timidity. Not afraid of the dark as such, in certain moods he was apprehensive about his own capacity to frighten himself. Now the lacquer of competence and authority, which the night visitors always applied to him in a shiny coat with their questions and banter, swiftly thinned to nothing and dripped away like sweat. Was it perhaps one of those same night people who had purposely hidden so as to be locked in? And with what stealthy design? The war with its street gangs and inventive brutalities was still too recent for survivors not to remain fearful out of sheer habit. He stayed, therefore, breathing as shallowly and quietly as lungs and chirruping heart would allow. A scuff of sound, a hiss as if skin were sidling through leaves reached him now from all parts of the House. Even acoustics conspired to deceive.

&
nbsp; ‘I know you’re there,’ he remarked, courageously offhand.

  Silence. He hardly knew which to fear more: the arrested moment continuing indefinitely or a sudden blaze of electric light and roisterous cries of ‘April Fool!’ or similar joviality as a band of pranksters leaped out around him and burst into laughter. As the silence lengthened he began to have wilder thoughts. Some animal – a monkey, perhaps? A panther? – had escaped from the nearby zoo and homed in on this only other possible habitat. He had recently heard they were restocking the place with animals collected from wrecked German zoos. ‘Indefinite temporary loan’ was how the newspapers described it. There was also the shipment of plants he had ordered in 1939 and which had arrived just that afternoon. There were three of them, crated and swaddled in sacking for their long journey from Polynesia, and he’d only had time to unwrap the Gnetum. This was because Professor Seneschal had capered and dithered around it since like the conifers and cycads it was classed as a gymnosperm and so was apparently irresistible to the old idiot. But the other two – the Pandanus odoratissimus and the Pritchardia pacifica were still unwrapped. Why mightn’t some snake or sinister monitor have awakened in the crates and even now be sliding its way towards him?

  Without a sound the remaining few candles began going out. They did so in no obvious order and he was always too late to focus on whatever it was that extinguished them. All except the last, of course, which he watched with fascination as though his feet were clamped to the grating beneath. Much later he realised how easy it would have been to distract his attention from this last candle: a handful of gravel thrown a second before its flame could reveal the face. Instead he watched a bare arm emerge from the greenery, hand cupped like a cobra’s hood. It struck, and all was dark. And in that moment Leon knew the arm even as he couldn’t guess the purpose.

  ‘Felix!’ he called. ‘What is it? What are you up to?’ His words fell like pebbles. ‘Is this a game?’ When the question had echoed in his own skull long enough to irritate him he at last moved, impatient with further hiding. He walked back down the aisle to where the main light switches were. He felt for the teak box screwed to the end wall, opened it and smacked his palm down over the rows of toggles. Contacts clicked, relays closed, the dark remained. Had Felix, then, removed the fuses? These were in a similar box inside his own quarters. At that moment something struck him lightly on the shoulder blade and fell to the gravel. He turned and crouched in the faint monochrome, patting the ground until he found the missile: a round object the size of a golf ball, an unripe seed pod he could not immediately identify.

  ‘No, Felix,’ he sternly told the hot spaces before him. ‘Stop that! It’s gone beyond a joke. Not the plants.’ A second object struck No Admittance with a hollow knock. ‘Did you hear what I said, boy? Have you gone mad?’ But again his own bluster burned in his ears and enraged him with its impotence. He walked along the aisle to the point from which he judged the missiles had been thrown. It was hopeless to be moving into deep bulks flawed by only the dimmest mercuric sheen of snowlight, sensing that they closed behind him once he had passed. Leon, who knew every inch of his domain, soon passed into unknown territory. Never before had he been so aware of the heat, pressing and yielding and dripping as though by merely leaning his body against it, moving into its illusory resistance, he could squeeze actual water from the air. He shed his jacket, suddenly heavy and sodden, then his galoshes. Now in silence he squatted beside a tall shrub and again caught movement above him where none should have been. Felix was up on the clerestory walkway.

  Hoping to cut him off he made his way at a silent semi-crouch along the track to where the spiral staircase rushed upwards on wings of iron. His naked feet doing likewise he found himself in the jungle’s canopy, wheezing, heart clicking in his throat. Now his prey was surely trapped, for although this main landing crossed the House and linked the two clerestories there was no corresponding gallery at the other end. There had, he knew, been architect’s plans for one but for some reason it had never been built, perhaps further evidence of the builders’ ambivalence about the place’s true function. Church or glasshouse? Temple of nature, maybe. At any rate only three sides of the rectangle remained viable upstairs. Down one of these the temple’s presiding spirit, the master gardener, now pursued his quarry, his rogue secret, hoping to suppress, capture, stifle it before it could escape. From the faint signs of movement at the far end of this narrow walkway he knew his stratagem was working. Felix was cornered now, up under the curved panes. Unless he tried a suicidal climb across one of the spans to the other side there was no way down. At which moment the dim snowlight fell with muffled gleam on a torso, washed in the smouldering chemicals of panic and desire, before it sprang outwards with simian carelessness. Instead of the expected sound of a body hitting a plinth thirty feet below the pursuer heard only a sharp swish of leaves and the creak of wood bending.

  This savage, accomplished leap at once bridged the gap between Leon’s knowing and refusing minds. Just as only an agile climber could have severed the banana’s flower, so only Felix could have judged and made that jump into space. He must have had bad luck indeed to fall into the hands of a dismal gang of street louts. His splendid litheness had been caught unawares, probably dog tired and asleep in a doorway. Only in this way could so skilled an animal have been dragged down by an urban pack. Now he was loose and roaming the dark spaces below, pupils dilated to full night vision. But what was his plan, his purpose? To mock? To tantalise? What imaginary grim crime could this fond vandal be repaying? Leon, who had retraced his steps, stood uncertainly at the head of the winding stairs. Suddenly the forest at his feet contained real menace. Too much was opaque. He remembered the cleanness of the cuts in the flower stalk and tree bark. A very sharp knife precisely wielded. He knew nothing of madness except being able to assign it conventionally to unkempt souls who gibbered in public places (and who had largely disappeared under the German occupation). He wondered whether Felix might genuinely have taken leave of his senses. The boy had made a remarkable recovery from his injury and in the months since had been docile and tractable. Affectionate, he thought; of course Felix was affectionate. They had shared too much, too much sacrifice and fear and mutual indebtedness for there not to be affection. And hardly a firelit night had passed without the boy’s wordless accommodation. But were there not things more important than words? Dumb of mouth didn’t mean dumb of gesture, still less of brain. Without speaking a syllable Felix had mastered the heating system’s idiosyncracies. He was no prisoner, either. Had he wished to leave he could have walked out at any time since the war’s ending. So what was happening now?

  Such novelistic representations of a pondering mind did not, of course, enter Leon’s, though all were more or less thoughts he hadn’t put into words at one time or another. He did, however, stand in indecision, fearful of going down. The heat was extraordinary. Surely the temperature was too high? The ironwork was hot to the touch, slick with moisture. The pattering of drops was a light shower passing over a forest, lost and primordial and extending far into the distance. He was aware of these events’ sheer wrongness. The botanical world was holding itself apart from the crude human plots and motives being played out among its trunks and leaves. It was retreating. ‘Shuuuff,’ sighed the gardener without knowing it, but no charm worked. He was left with no alternative but to go down, to play out this doltish piece of theatre.

  ‘We’re stopping this at once, Felix,’ he said as he descended, speaking conversationally down into the threatening arena. He had just decided that light was the most important thing. Playing cat and mouse in the dark with a demented street arab was absurd. How could he, a man of his professional standing, have been drawn into this game even for an instant? He should have gone straight to the fuse box where he kept a torch. He would now do just that, relying on the armour of rational behaviour to get him along the aisle of the Palm House – his Palm House – and through No Admittance. After all, Felix wasn’t chasing him
, and of course was being mischievous rather than murderous. Purposefully he stepped to the ground and walked back along the aisle, making no particular attempt to watch or listen. Reaching the door he found, with the sense of having known in advance had he only been able to put the thought together, that it was locked.

  Reduced once more to bluster he rattled the handle angrily. ‘Damn you, Felix! Come on, open up. I know you’re in there.’ But by the steady pattering at his back, by the chirp and murmur of unseeable things, the vacant bark of his own voice, he knew there was nobody in the rooms beyond and that just now they were part of another universe. On the far side of the door lay a utilitarian realm of sinks and cupboards and boilers. It was in the world behind him that an outcome awaited. (Somewhere just out of sight and at some other intersection of time two figures stalked each other through a dream forest, two animals in human guise driven out of their wits by hunger or hatred or pure inaction. Whatever was in their hearts tugged at each other with the power of a moon’s gravitational pull. Wordless, blind, and irresistibly attractive, it turned them into archetypes or candidates for war.)