‘And there we have it.’ Leon turned from the window.
‘More like a ruffian than a botanist,’ thought Dr Anselmus. ‘A peaky ruffian at that. And anyway, he’s no more academically qualified than my dog’ (a schnauzer puppy, which perhaps explained the condition of the garden). ‘There we have nothing,’ he said firmly, ‘except maybe a good place to end this conversation.’
‘You haven’t yet heard why I think the Palm House must be preserved, Director.’ Leon was determined that at least one person in the Society’s hierarchy should be made to understand. ‘It’s more than just an old building with a useful but not unique collection of tropical plants. It represents a stage in people’s understanding of the natural world, part of the evolution of knowledge. It’s a dream, a private paradise, a poetic statement even. That remains true at any time. But it’s not even just that. In the eighteenth century they were still naively pleased by exotica for their own sake. Strange, unimagined plants and creatures from places which often hadn’t even been mapped yet – things with an almost mythic quality about them. But by the nineteenth, systems of classification were mastering more and more of the world. New plants might still be strange, but once they could be shown to belong to an already existing class or genus they became tamed. The relationship of man to nature was no longer one of simple awe and delight, it had changed to one of power. Power of knowledge, power of ordering, power of subjugating. The great palm houses symbolised this in the most public and open manner by putting a far-off ruled world under glass back home. A museum, what else? The public could wander around and see plants grouped according to their taxonomy and marvel at this reconciliation of themselves with nature. Thanks to man the wild variousness and generosity of God’s creation now made sense. What’s more, it was seen to be perfectly compatible with industrialisation, colonial expansion and money. Perfect harmony, in fact. That’s by day, of course. By night … Well, it’s another matter.’
Dr Anselmus, who had been waiting for a crack in his curator’s flow into which he might insert a deft verbal scalpel to the effect that he hardly thought he needed a prepared lecture on the history of botanical gardens, was thrown by this odd turn. ‘By night? What do you mean, by night?’ He gave his topaz an irritable tweak. It was a gesture which had not quite worked up the nerve to commit the forthright rudeness of hauling out his pocket watch.
‘Oh, it’s somewhere else at night,’ Leon assured him. ‘You must have felt it. All those classifications melt away. It just becomes up to the senses again, the perceptions. That’s the time to stop looking at the plants and to smell and listen instead. The whole point about museums is that everything’s on display, under glass, made visible. But what happens to museums at night? Ah, now that’s a most interesting question.’ He broke off to cough painfully. Something in the way he leaned against the shutter forestalled the director’s retort.
‘A most interesting question,’ resumed the gardener, wiping the sleeve of his ulster across mouth and nose, eyes glistening. ‘Now, what about this century? This is where my idea comes in. I think we’ve stopped being proud of our power and have begun to be afraid of it. Look at those atom bombs the Americans dropped on Japan last year. Power beyond our control, if you ask me. Look at the destruction caused by the war. Not just the people and the cities, but nature ravaged and battered. Entire jungles set on fire, according to the newspapers. Whole islands in the Pacific reduced to cinders. Millions of rubber trees and crops burnt to stop them falling into whoever’s hands. And what can botanists and horticulturists do about it? Why, collect plants as fast as they can, to protect as much as to display them. Our job will be to help nature survive the bullying of man.’
‘I’d hardly expected our very own Palm House curator to be such a futurist at heart.’
Evidently surprised by a lack of patronage in the tone rather than the words Leon said mildly, ‘How can one not think about the future if one knows any history? As a horticulturist I can see a clear pattern over the last hundred years: that of increasing destruction and despoliation and mechanisation. Now, what would you do with all those Flying Fortresses and Dorniers and Lancaster bombers if you were responsible for them?’
‘What?’ Again Anselmus was baffled by a change of tack. ‘Melt them down as quickly as possible, I suppose.’
‘For ploughshares? No, you’d sell them off to the air companies and travel firms like Thomas Cook. They’d get them very cheap and fill them with all those people who haven’t been able to travel since 1939. Tourists. That’ll be the way to make money in the future. The more people do it the cheaper it’ll become. Not this year, not even perhaps for ten years. But one day everyone will be able to hop on a high-speed airship or aeroplane and go and see all the plants we’ve got here in the Gardens, but in their natural habitats. By then the habitats’ll probably be huge nature reserves just as they have game reserves. But – and this is the point – they won’t quite find what they’re looking for. People will spend their time going ever further to ever more remote places in search of pure virgin nature, the realest, the most utterly authentic and unspoiled. But they’ll never find it because they’re there, and if they can be so can everyone else. They’ll think they’re looking for plants and animals, but it won’t be that. They’ll also be trying to discover what relationship they could possibly have with a natural world now completely in their power. Well, things like that retreat even as they’re searched for, don’t they? And that, among other reasons, is why I shan’t be taking up the princess’s offer. Within my Palm House I’m authentic, and so is it. Far, far away there’s a vast natural simulacrum of what I already live in. Part of our job as I see it is to train the public to understand that museum, memorial, research centre – whatever it is, the place is priceless. It’s because it’s so unnatural it can make people think and change their minds. We must preserve it at all costs. At any cost at all, really, since it’ll never be rebuilt.’
And the two men, employee and employer, directed and director, found themselves staring at one another in astonishment until Anselmus’s eyes slid away beneath the visionary gaze. Leon’s surprise was by no means at his own eloquence, which as we know he had been practising day and night for years with an audience of gently transpiring green ears, but at the way Cou Min’s phantom had unexpectedly shaken itself free of plaster dust somewhere up by the moulded ceiling which had received the main thrust of his speech, and floated down as a third presence in the room between himself and Anselmus. Had his pleading been on her behalf after all? Was the glass and iron structure which contained what felt like his lifework no more than her shrine, the truest expression (patched and unrepaired) of that far-off summer with Dr Koog, learning to look systematically at the natural world? How meagre was love, how flimsy its supports, how suspended its animation! he thought, coughing and coughing as the dust reached his lungs. Distantly he was aware of activity. A sleeve advanced into his aqueous vision.
‘Here, take this. My dear fellow, you’re in a bad way.’ The door had closed behind the factotum and Anselmus was offering him a generous glass of brandy. When the spasm had eased and the brilliant display of retinal pyrotechnics was over Leon took the drink with a shaking hand and drank it off at a gulp. ‘You’re ill,’ his employer advised him.
‘No iller than usual. But it might be convenient, mightn’t it?’
‘Now, now, don’t start all that again. You’ve said some hard things this morning and I won’t deny they needed saying. Absolutely. Clears the air. But you really must agree you’re not well. Might you please try to suspend your paranoia and take a much needed fortnight off? God knows you’ve earned it. I’d like you to see a doctor friend of mine – the question of money doesn’t arise, of course. He’s an excellent fellow: chief thoracic consultant at the Royal. We’ll get you right, first, and then we’ll have a proper joint effort with all the board and trustees and departmental heads to thrash this whole thing out. Actually, I’m most grateful to you for being so forceful. Y
ou’ve convinced me we urgently need an overall policy based on absolute agreement as to our role in the future.’
Leon was leaning heavily on a table, staring down at his large hands.
‘I’ll see your doctor,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Why not? But I must get back to the House now. There’s work to be done.’
He was thinking of no single thing, perhaps, but a world hovered over by Felix’s uneasy spectre. This morning the gypsy had appeared chastened and contrite, rather pettish over his pricked feet. But what was happening? Last night beneath the coconut, possessed by or else possessing some demon, there had been a hallucinatory instant when Leon had glimpsed his own tiny figure as if frozen by a camera’s magnesium flash or the revolving beam of a lighthouse. White, contorted, hunched; staring at nothing with open eyes and mouth, incorporated in an even smaller manikin, as inscrutable as maggots caught in mid-maggotry at a stone’s turning. In that instant he could not have named either creature, still less the act they were engaged in. He had felt his body thrust itself downwards as if through layers of other bodies to reach whatever or whomever it sought: through gypsies and students and store-owners’ wives, through nameless dalliances to – (no, oh not to Cou Min: that was love, not lust) – to faceless imaginings and genderless pollutions in pursuit of the virgin real, the most utterly authentic, the ever-receding. And the harder he had thrust the more it had fled him: wan, enticing, repetitious, inexhaustible. But this morning the point had been, what must be done to avert scandal? Felix had to go; Leon couldn’t bear him to go.
‘If you’re thinking of your new arrivals,’ Anselmus began. ‘What are they, by the way? Imagine, on order for nearly seven years. I think Seneschal told me one was a Gnetum.’
‘It’s already planted. I’ve still to unwrap the pandan and the Pritchardia.’
‘And as for that nasty vandalism business, you must put it out of your head. It’ll probably never happen again. Just one of those unexplained things.’
His mind still full of Felix, Leon was fascinated to hear his mouth produce an audacious inspiration. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if this so-called vandal was actually part of a plot. If enough damage was done I reckon it could be pretty convenient for some people. Don’t you see? While funds are withheld someone is hired to cut up the plants. Stealthy, strategic damage over many months. Sooner or later people will say “Just look at the place. Not worth saving. Needs complete overhaul and repair, new boilers etcetera, and there’s not really enough botanical interest left to make it worthwhile.” Why mightn’t that be happening?’
Oh devious, devious, he thought as his mouth went about its business, implying that Anselmus himself had engineered the whole thing. He could almost believe it himself, it fitted so neatly. That was what happened in wartime, after all. Agents were planted in the subtlest manner … The brandy had gone to his head, despite having entered his body under medicinal pretext. Empty stomach doesn’t help, of course, nor being half starved. Why have you led me here, Cou Min, my love? he wondered, looking curiously at the little room, the little man in suit and topaz, the little glass with its drop of topaz. ‘I’m old,’ he thought in amazement, since it was suddenly how he felt in respect to her. How had he got from then to this? Had it really taken all those years? Nothing aged one like loyalty. It was surely punishment. The gypsies, the men in suits, the dismantling of the beautiful – all were punishment for having loved remote things, for having abandoned the timeless austerities of Flinn.
‘Go home at once and get some rest, Leon,’ the director was saying. ‘We’ll find you a cab if we can but this damned petrol rationing’s making perfectly ordinary things next to impossible,’ he added irritably.
When eventually the front door closed on the back of the ulster Dr Anselmus walked slowly up the grand staircase and along the passage which led, with the sound of ancient kindling, to his study. The irritation persisted as he sank into his chair and gazed around at his booklined walls, at the brightly polished brass microscope he had used as a student, at the black hump of American cloth covering a modern German binocular microscope with Wetzlar optics. Why mightn’t collaboration be a form of heroism, too? he wondered. For, indeed, it had taken considerable nerve and canniness first to have helped hide the Society’s treasures from its headquarters and then, by deft dealings with the Gestapo, to have ensured the Botanical Gardens’ immunity from sack and spoil. This was the part which would never be known, could never be acknowledged. A man like Leon took all the credit for having pulled the Palm House through, but all would have been in vain had it not been for the director’s work behind the scenes. Anselmus thought how unfair it was that having supped with the devil for the best part of five years, often with spoons of terrifying shortness, on behalf of the Royal Botanic Society and a national treasure and science in general, he should forever be unable to speak about it. A few names – what were a few names? Of course one knew the names of the people one knew; it would be fatuous to have pretended otherwise in any country at any time in history and most particularly when faced with agents of the most efficient intelligence service of all: men who had no doubt already known the names and were merely checking on his truthfulness. Just a few names, most of which were anyway prominently listed in all sorts of botanical and other journals. Only names, mind, never addresses. Plus a few other minor things. To himself, to his wife, Claud Anselmus was proud of his courage in those years. Yet ‘collaborator’ was an irredeemably dirty word nowadays. All over Europe men and women were daily being rounded up to face kangaroo courts in barns and cellars they never left alive. Quite right too, in some cases. There was collaboration and collaboration. There was all the difference in the world between ingratiating yourself with the enemy in a lickspittle attempt to gain privileges and personal position, and co-operating to the barest minimum in order to save a national institution. He hadn’t made a Pfennig from the occupation. He had been director at the beginning and he was still director at the end. Nothing had changed. A few score bottles of Rhine wine drunk, a few names … Hardly matters for endless remorse after the worst war in history. Now Seneschal was in a different category altogether. There was a compromised man if ever there was one. And his genetic theories were little short of a scandal for a scientist of his stature.
Dr Anselmus rubbed his topaz so it trundled its cylinder up and down his waistcoat like the front wheel of a tiny steamroller. How had he got on to this? It had been an altogether unpleasant start to the day. The wretched man – and what on earth had made him shear off all his hair like that? – was seriously mad. Ill, too, of course, but essentially quite off his head. Poor Leon (Anselmus actually heard himself think the dutiful phrase and, as with all such things people overheard themselves think, believed it sincere). Poor Leon, it’s really too bad. Academically unqualified he might be but in his own way he’s a strange kind of genius. (The magnanimity of this thought was genuine too: the generosity of an obituarist whose own far more estimable triumphs include being alive.) On the other hand there was a sense in which it was all quite timely …
Anselmus swung around in his chair to look through the tall windows at those of his neighbours opposite, at the frozen canal between them. Where, he wondered, had the man got his peculiar ideas? It was true there had been an article in Hortus recently about the destruction of habitats in the Pacific theatre, and it did seem likely that the razing of islands and other territory belonging to the old Japanese Mandate might have caused the loss of several plant and animal species. Had Leon had the advantage of a proper education, though, he would have known that wise old Horace had it right. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret: you can drive Nature out with a pitchfork but she will always return. The notion of mass tourism in secondhand bombers was quite a different matter. It had the pure nuttiness of those American pulp science fiction magazines he sometimes found his students reading. Bug-eyed monsters, man-eating plants, bleak futuristic worlds without vegetation run by robots where people were forced into underground c
ities like ant colonies. Did Leon read such stuff, too? And that weird thing about museums at night … One of the mainstays of that sort of fiction, Anselmus had noticed, was the presence of a skimpily clad blonde – or so at least one inferred from the covers. Was there, he thought, a blonde glittering brassily somewhere in his curator’s opaque life? It was unlikely enough to make him smile. He noticed it had started to snow again.
He had failed, then. He had done his best but his oratory, his arguments had come to naught. Anselmus – crass, shifty Anselmus – hadn’t heard a word, while pretending it had been a useful ‘clearing of the air’. Pure bluster. Then finally Leon’s lungs had betrayed his head and he’d been unable to go on. Cou Min, Cou Min, have you brought us to this? he wondered. Is it you? Despondent he walked his House whose very panes seemed to tremble about him, the ground to quiver underfoot. He found himself back at the Acacia farnesiana, instrument of his guilty triumph the previous night. The shrub seemed not to have suffered much from the trampling. Quite the reverse, as it soon made clear in a soliloquy:
‘Well, of course I can bite! Ours is an adventurous and risk-taking species, boldly going where no man dares to tread – certainly not barefoot, that is. For this reason our shoots are well armed; and I may say it was a pleasure I’d hardly dared even dream about, sinking my full length into those tender tawny boy-feet. The meaty plush of it! The whine of muscle tone as it tenses in agony! The succulence of blood! It was, I can confirm, altogether worth being trodden on. Not since I dipped into the back of a gardener’s hand in 1937 have I felt anything like it, and that was a mere sip of pleasure compared with this beatific gorging. The warm, cushiony embrace is the most satisfying thing this universe has to offer. What makes it even more piquant (mot juste) is that one can’t experience it without first having been abused. Thus the boy took a liberty and straightway rewarded me with solace and revenge. How I adore him! He has the most exquisite sole. Even now, I daresay, he can feel where I was inside him. I may well have caused a little oozing and affected the way he walks for a day or two. I do hope so. Such thoughts fill me with a kind of afterglow, a happy hum of remembrance. Humans, of course, being slavishly egocentric, can’t talk about us without resorting to the usual weary epithets, “cruel” thorns being the most over-employed, judging by several centuries of their rumty-tum poetry. “Cruel”, indeed. By provoking that adjective we could hardly have presented a kinder gift to their sonneteers, whose constant need for padding or pruning is so easily satisfied by the word’s metric ambiguity: a single long or a trochee according to necessity. More to the point (juste again) “cruel” is notoriously never the way the human foot is described as it unheedingly attempts to walk all over us. Oh, no. This is, for dimmer listeners, of religious significance. Why, you dolts? Because it’s proof that we’re the offshoots of a thoughtful, loving Creator. It was He who ensured that even as we were downtrodden we would be rewarded an hundredfold. You’ll find that practically all the thorny species are pretty religious. It’s only the ones who should have been thorny and – by some accident of heredity – aren’t, that are cynical and atheistic. I’m told that thornless rose varieties are the worst. They might smell wonderful but underneath they’re one black rant of blasphemy and frustration.
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