‘But back to the boy, my divine and punished trampler! The gardener – whose new hairstyle so faithfully reflects the brutal chic of the times – is filled with nagging worries concerning this lad, as well he might be. Among them is the very pertinent question: did the princess mention him to Anselmus? Since she was standing right behind Leon while he was trying to cough his lungs inside out she had ample time to observe Felix in that cool, objective, Asian manner of hers which gives nothing away. She might have been saving the information to explode later like a bomb in a marriage bed, or to present on ice at a military tribunal. That’s part of her power, which is why she causes such a stir. Elle est arrivée, forsooth! They yearn to be noticed by her, dazzled by her, raped by her.
‘Very well, then: she must have seen Felix. And what did she think? That he was some new assistant Leon had been given? Some tatterdemalion apprentice who with the right training and influence might grow into a useful horticulturist? (Well, he might at that if he could curb the urge to vandalise the plants.) Of course, she might have thought that. But those Asian eyes with their mysterious canthic fold which lets everything sidle in and so little out, would have been trying to see patterns, make sense of peculiar Western mores, dress the fabled world of science and technology in the rotten flesh she knows is the common human denominator. And those eyes would have taken in the slippery, unmarried man in early middle age living in his crystal shell whose very air blurs the outside world, who refuses even to lodge out and simply go to and from work like everybody else. They would have taken him in, dispassionately, as he coughed on his knees in that abject way (is this, after all, the genius one has heard so much about? The man of vision and ambition who might abandon us and go off to create a Snow House for Kuala Lumpur or Jesselton or wherever?). Her eyes would also have taken in the way this supposed apprentice stood in the doorway watching him, neither tense with helplessness nor indifferently lounging but full of a wry domestic déjà vu. And she would have thought, “Good God, they’re lovers. Of course.”
‘All right, play dumb. Fine, if you insist then: no, she wouldn’t. She would hardly have noticed the boy at all. The great Leon was the centre of her picture, her plan. Anybody else in the vicinity was merely a labourer on the estate: a tangential figure such as painters daub into landscapes to fill up the gaps and add a vague sense of activity. Go on believing that version if you prefer.
‘But if she did notice him and think him significant the remaining question is, would she have told Anselmus? If she’d seen Felix and Leon as a couple, wouldn’t that affect her plan? Mightn’t she now have to consider importing them both if Leon were to accept her job offer? And meanwhile mightn’t Felix be a useful lever for Anselmus to ease out his curator before (oh, so regretfully, the traitorous hound!) pulling down the Palm House in exchange for a new site, more power, a bigger salary and a generous backhander from the dark fiscals? There are excellent prospects for a nasty scandal, are there not? Behaviour which might elicit amusement in Jesselton or Kuala Lumpur is a different matter in these cold, unforgiving latitudes. How badly, then, did Anselmus need to get rid of Leon? Would he be capable of doing a deal with this potentially useful and powerful lady? Had he already done it?
‘I’ve watched him tonight, the gardener, stumbling and mumbling in the candlelight as usual, more than ever unable to read his fellow-humans and their motives. (“Stumbling” – what an erotic word that is, with its rich possibilities of the randomly-descending foot!) Nearer, gardener! You owe me a debt. It was I who caught your sportive faun for you, never forget. Had it not been for me and a few simple prickles you’d never have got your hands on him and rewarded his abuses as I just had. Oh, between us we could make a pincushion of that juicy gypsy!
‘But you’re not just worried, are you? You’re lost and muddled, too, even as you patrol your domain, your private landscape of congealed time with the pipes sighing underfoot and the snowflakes sizzling on the panes overhead. She’s no mere scheming bitch, this princess of yours, is she? You’re in love with her, too, in your eccentric fashion. Is it because she reminds you of someone else, long ago? Somebody who was scarcely even real for a summer but to whose imaginary memory you’ve abandoned your one and only life? You’ve been taking this line quite a lot lately, we’ve noticed, in your nocturnal rambles both physical and verbal. You seem to think it has to do with something poetic bound up with your whole life and this place. I can’t comment on that. We thorny species are beyond poetry except, as I said, when co-opted as metaphors. We assume it must be connected with the beauty of retribution … “Cruel”? Did I hear “cruel”? Ah, on the grounds that clichés generally reflect truisms and truisms some banal aspect of truthfulness? You really do have the strangest notions of cruelty. May I remind you of that night-flowering South American climber, Araujia sericofera, which you yourself have planted down at the far end of this House? Its popular nickname is “The Cruel”, I believe, because the peculiarly tight arrangement of its flowers often traps moths by the proboscis overnight, releasing them at dawn. I think that’s beautiful, both functional and mischievous. Nor are we thorns cruel, as I keep making clear. We merely raise points; others impale themselves on us. Proceed, unhappy man.
‘Yes, I’d agree: she’s obviously attracted to something in you, though thanks to her cultural difference it’s not plain what it would be. You like to think it’s a certain rough animality? That might have been more plausible ten years ago. In any case it sounds like dismal male vanity. But you’re intriguing, I’d allow that. Both powerful and elusive. That’s an unusual combination, and some people are excited by the unusual. You’re right. Dull, dull, dull the courtship rituals we’ve witnessed in here. People who’ve seen nothing, done nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing, smelt nothing. Dull, dull, dull. The meanest periwinkle has more to offer than these walking vacuities. They aren’t thoughtful, they aren’t imaginative, they aren’t spiritual, nor funny, nor subversive, nor even decently perverse. In their anxiety they touch nothing and nothing touches them. Instead they engulf things constantly through their eyes and mouth. Ingesting they pass, and leave no trace except perhaps a smear of deodorant.
‘And the higher up the social ladder they are the worse it gets. Diplomats! Dear God! Their minds whirl around in little circles bounded and described by four cardinal points: propriety, security, ambition, terror of disgrace. Once in a while they might trap another diplomat’s wife within that circle, find her own exactly fits theirs and embark on the conventional round of nervous trysts in unfashionable restaurants, of meetings in dark concert halls on the edges of towns in which neither wants to listen to Max Reger, of exchanged glances and brushed fingertips at official functions. Diplomats are bad? Princesses are still worse. Even the people they’re allowed to talk to are defined by protocol, let alone those they’re permitted to sleep with. Namely, two, other than their own husbands: M. Doigt et son voisin, as I’ve heard that Italian vilely express it.
‘The fact that she comes here to see you and picks your brain about plants and things is significant, of course, but not in the way you think. If you did agree to follow her to her distant steamy capital, do you really imagine her vulgar hints (“we’ll be working very closely”) will be made good? She learned her double entendre in the cinema, probably from Mae West, along with that stagey “I may be going away …” of hers. Think, man, for pity’s sake think – and come closer while you’re about it. She’s as free now as she’ll ever be for that sort of dalliance, and that’s not free at all. Her dark companion – you remember him now? Those eyes miss not a trick. Back home in her own country she won’t be a diplomat any longer, she’ll be royalty. Is it likely that royalty would be allowed to flirt with a foreigner who puts up greenhouses? Quite. Yes, we know she’s beautiful. Alas.
‘I’m bored with this topic, but do by all means come here. Where the gypsy’s concerned, too, you’d better get your ideas straight. I know you hadn’t planned on him, that you were taken by surprise, ambushed
by circumstances, call it what you like. It was wonderfully heroic and noble of you. Mr Samaritan, 1944. But since when do Good Samaritans reward themselves by screwing the victim? Ah, he also reminds you of her, does he? Dear heaven, is there anyone who doesn’t? I realise you call it faithful but most would call it obsessive. Well, it only goes to show what we all think: humans are a complete mess.
‘“Cruel” again? We can offer you something less metaphorical if only you’d step a little –. That’s it. There. Now can you see it? Yes indeed, shining just where he dropped it in his delicious anguish. Your pruning knife. Well you’ll be damned … And so, my dear gardener, you will. No, you certainly don’t want to bother fetching torches and rakes and things. Just a step or two further, a foot planted firmly beneath my neighbour’s leaf should do the trick because I’ve also boldly gone there, though you mightn’t think it. Yes! Precisely! Bliss-bliss-bliss! A little painful for me because even a thin old galosh isn’t as tender as firm young gypsy, but oh! Oh! Sumptuous! Thank you, God.’
Eleven
Winter had drawn itself out as if to hold in hibernation the infections bequeathed by war. Now and then it would seem over at last, that the sun could get to work and, in thawing out the corruption, brew compost for spring’s flowers. On such days the sky above the Palm House was an intense windscrubbed blue against which the golden galleon scudded bravely along, her sails stiff. Then after a day or two fresh draughts arrived from the Steppes bringing with them first a dimming cirrus, then a pearlescent overcast and later the familiar rugs of dark cloud which miraculously frayed to earth as white feathers.
Leon had ventured out less and less, so painful was the raw air to his chest and so long the coughing fits it provoked. Once or twice he did find himself in the Gardens, viewing his domain from the outside, and could only be depressed by what he saw. Such stove houses needed repainting every four years, especially the putty which otherwise dried out and cracked. His Palm House hadn’t had a lick of paint since 1938, almost exactly eight years ago. In that time it had become shabby. Much of the glass didn’t even match. In an average year five hundred or so panes broke as a result of the structure’s flexing and corroding. This tally had multiplied considerably during the war because of blast and shrapnel, to say nothing of a hailstorm in 1943 which alone had smashed nearly four thousand panes in twenty minutes. As the war had progressed new glass had been slower and slower in coming and was finally unavailable. No commandeered factory had been allowed to fill special orders for a palm house whose panes were long and narrow and precisely curved.
At the war’s outbreak Leon had circumspectly over-ordered glass and the extensive store had at one time contained twenty-three thousand panes. Over the last year, though, he had been reduced to drawing on crated stocks discovered at the back of the gravel bins. This was antique, dating (according to an enclosed invoice hand-written in rusty ink) from 1907. He thought it was probably the last batch of tinted glass ever ordered. Up until then the Palm House, in common with that at Kew and elsewhere, had been painted green and glazed in green. The glass was coloured with copper oxide because it was thought necessary to protect the plants by shade of a natural tone. By the turn of the century the air pollution in many cities was fogging the glass enough to cut down light severely and tinting was abandoned. When they had unpacked the ancient stocks Leon and his assistants found that over the years much of it had changed colour to a variety of hues ranging from a nearly opaque bottle to malignant pink. Several dozen panes were quite colourless while almost as many were as black as thin sheets of jet, except at the edges where they were the dark grey of X-rays. The wartime maintenance crews had used the least discoloured glass but the place had still emerged looking patched and piebald. He could hardly decide which were worse: brilliant cold days which picked out his building cruelly against the snow’s whiteness, showing every rust streak, every peeling gutter, every bizarre tint mottling its surface; or the leaden days whose sombre light made of it a sad mineral lump, its skin dull as slate, blinded from within by steam and from without by soot. After such confrontations with appearances he would return bitter and morose. It all confirmed his glummest suspicions. The moving finger had written, on glass and in condensation. His vision, that jewelled airship which had hovered in its bright new livery among the trees in 1938 as if tugging at its moorings, impatient to be gone, was long grounded. He could scarcely believe it was ever intended to soar again. On the contrary, it lay as if partially embedded after a disaster. One expected at any moment to see its envelope sag and collapse, its iron ribs poke through.
Increasingly in these pessimistic moods he wanted to be rid of it, hankered after the killing air outside, nearly yearned for the pitiless expanses of Flinn and its estuarine consolations. Long ago (it seemed) in his intense, driven, ’prentice years when by the glow of lamp and candle he had read himself an education in a potting shed, he had come across a story about Mendelssohn, for in those days his omnivorous reading included much that had no connection with Linnaeus and the Genera Plantarum or Wendland and the Index Palmarum. The story described how the composer, on a visit to Denmark Hill in London with his wife in the spring of 1842, had eagerly planned a picnic outing to Windsor Great Park. One balmy morning the hampers were packed, the carriage arrived, the ladies were handed up. Then at the last moment Mendelssohn had hung back, returned to the house, and eventually his wife emerged alone. ‘We shall drive on without him,’ she told the disappointed party. ‘He has something in his mind and begs to be excused.’ When in the early evening after a glorious day the picnickers arrived back in Denmark Hill they were greeted by a musician eager to play them his latest composition, ‘Spring Song’, which he did to cries of admiration. ‘That’s what I’ve been doing while you’ve been at Windsor,’ he said.
What was it about this story which had impressed the young Leon enough for him to recall it in 1946 while brooding on his Palm House’s ruin? Not, at any rate, the urgency of genius, that cliché of cinematic proportions. Rather, it had to do with versions of truthfulness. Ordinary people went and sat out in nature and steeped themselves in views, marvelled at the painterly effects of sunlight on leaf and grass blade, were enchanted by Her Majesty’s deer, filled themselves with cold hock and jellied fowl. Extraordinary people knew all that by heart, stayed at home in South London in dark rooms crammed with pictures and ferns and furniture and created something faithful to all sunlight that ever was, all blue skies and shifting grasses, and which would outlast every tree they saw. Artifice again. The deft dream always would supplant the conventional vista … And in this film, at any rate, the earnest young autodidact with the yellow hair would have got up from his peat bale and gone outside to gaze at the Palm House shivering in moonlight like a tinfoil mirage. One day … Ah, one day.
And the day had come, and the day had gone, and all was leprous and obscured.
Inside, the House appeared remarkably normal – at least to the casual visitor. The occluded light of dud glass went scarcely noticed, was merely a reminder that times were hard, that this was a period of make-do-and-mend. Whose shirt cuffs were not turned? Whose sheets not resewn sides-to-middle? Why should a building be any different? It had even acquired a heroic, rakish look in certain lights, like one of those ex-soldiers glaring on the pavement outside cinemas and restaurants through one clear lens and one smoked. What couldn’t be denied was that botanically it had never looked better. New plants burgeoned, the mature grew in stature. It was this the visitors came for and for this they praised the gardener. Hitherto, praise had evidently cheered the man but just lately seemed to have no effect on him, might even have deepened the creases which had appeared on either side of his stubborn mouth.
Tonight, suspicions of his growing strangeness were at last confirmed by unequivocal symptoms. The cropped skull was amazing, though none dared give it such a knowing look as the Italian chargé. They also noticed he was walking with a slight limp and at once began to imagine a set of circumstances in whi
ch he might have had a brutal haircut and gone lame, trying to connect them with that same compulsion which makes people look for a narrative thread between a stranger’s tattoo and his heavy cold. It was an intriguing game since it prompted them to invent a hidden life for him, one not spent beneath glass and open to public scrutiny.
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