‘Est-ce qu’elle est arrivée, peut-être?’ The usual enquiry could be heard as the sound of the double doors tweaked pairs of eyes out around fronds and stems.
‘My dears …’ The cold, which was extreme, maybe provoked the chargé to more than his usual waspish languor. ‘My dears, elle ne va pas arriver, tout court. I’m not at all sure I care for this –’ he had sunk his beak gingerly towards the sparse greenish flowers buried unassumingly at the heart of some fleshy blades. ‘Now you must tell me, do you have these in Brazil?’ This was addressed to a tall, handsome young man whose sideboards still trailed into silky wicks like a boy’s rather than being shaved square. ‘Never mind what they look like, you couldn’t possibly forget the smell. Like a tom-cat sitting in a jasmine bush. Fairly hateful, I’d say, but authentically exotic.’
‘We have flowers which smell of decaying cheese,’ offered the young man. ‘They attract flies and insects which pollinate them.’
‘And are they beautiful?’
‘Exquisite.’
‘One might have guessed.’ The chargé lit a cigarette. ‘I only did that to attract you,’ he said as Leon surged darkly forward, ‘though not, I confess, with pollination in mind. What are these spear things called?’ He stubbed out the cigarette and courteously handed it to the gardener.
‘Down there to the left there’s a label.’
‘Good gracious, so there is.’ The diplomat bent forward from the waist like melting toffee. ‘It flowers day and night but is only scented after dark,’ he announced at large. ‘Very frugal, I’d say. Now then, sir, I have a message for you.’ He took from an inside pocket a small creamy envelope embossed with a crest and sealed with green wax. ‘It’s from the lady whose absence you’ll have noticed tonight. She begs to be forgiven but is unable to see you in person. As a matter of fact,’ he consulted his slim watch, ‘I imagine she’s at present somewhere over the Middle East. You’re surprised? My dear sir, I’m sorry to be the bearer of sad news. Evidently you’ve not read tonight’s papers? There’s been a coup in her country.’
From the way his listeners moved a little closer to him the chargé was not after all relaying common knowledge but imparting genuine diplomatic intelligence. He basked as Leon turned the envelope over and over between stained paws. ‘It’s confused, to say the least. It seems to be a coup led by the princess’s own uncle, a military man. He claims to have placed the entire royal family under arrest. Yes indeed, you’re asking the same question as all of us. Since the uncle must himself be of royal blood, how has he managed this trick? Chissà? What we do know is that he has loudly denounced her father for the usual evil misrule, despotism and tra-la-la but also for having collaborated in a most unpatriotic and abject manner with the recent Japanese occupation. It’s even rumoured that the princess herself is implicated, but I’m sure everyone here who remembers a young, sophisticated and dazzlingly beautiful lady – a true diplomat – will find the charge wholly incredible. Our embassy was told that her uncle’s agents, among them the sinister fellow who used to accompany her here, escorted her to the aeroplane. The poor girl had no choice but to go. It’s conceivable that when it stops to refuel in one of those dreadful hot places like Karachi she might find a moment to slip away if the British feel it’s in their interest to be sympathetic. I couldn’t bear to think of anything happening to that exquisite creature.’
The chargé fitted another Egyptian cigarette into his oval holder and lit it. For once Leon seemed not to notice. His mind was seeing an aircraft standing, engines ticking over, its propellers flicking off their silver rays as a small figure jumped from the open door into Asia’s immensity.
‘She adored this place, of course, but you know that already. She adored you, too, mister gardener, Don Juan, Lothario. Whence this strange charm, I wonder? It’s proof even against your hairdresser, though in future I beg you to consider Giorgio’s in Palace Square. He understands hair just as you understand plants. I once had some slight –’
‘What will happen to her?’ interrupted Leon fiercely.
The chargé waved a hand and left the gesture’s signature on the air in fragrant smoke.
‘Who can tell? Asian politics are a closed book to me, as they are to everyone else. She may escape, she may not. She may be in jail, shot or on the throne by the end of the week. Her family is immensely powerful and immensely rich. One waits breathlessly for the outcome. There’s even been talk of their all being tried by military tribunal on charges of war crimes; there’s quite a vogue for such things just at present.’
‘She? A war criminal?’ This time Leon heard his own belligerence and remembered himself. Never before had he been part of his visitors’ conversation. He had always answered their questions more or less politely, more or less brusquely according to mood, but he had never taken the liberty of hanging on the edge of a circle of talk until sucked into its centre to offer opinions of his own. Oddly, the chargé seemed almost to be addressing his remarks directly to him as part of a private conversation the others might overhear if they chose.
‘You must endeavour to be a little worldly,’ he said kindly. ‘In these circumstances to be accused of war crimes may mean no more than that one has been eclipsed, whether temporarily or not. It doesn’t mean that the princess herself committed atrocities with those beautiful hands. Did you ever notice the half-moons of her nails? The most delicate pearly mauve. You must remember that her family were on the throne during both the Japanese occupation and the American liberation. They need to have done nothing. Merely to have survived both régimes confirms guilt in their opponents’ eyes.’
‘But she was interested in city planning.’
The lame absurdity of his protest apparently didn’t strike the chargé whose tone, on the contrary, suggested complete sympathy. ‘And she liked Lancôme. I never could respect a woman who hasn’t learned how to wear Guerlain and Lancôme. Both houses produce scents of the utmost sophistication and complexity. The princess had perfect taste in scent, which is very unusual in one so young. She was –’ a razory note here ‘– naturally interested in city planning, too. The recent efforts of the Americans to dislodge the Japanese from her country have left the capital in some disrepair. “Partially destroyed” would be a better description, according to diplomatic friends of mine. She and her family own large tracts of land in the capital including, one gathers, a royal game park. Doesn’t that sound exotic? A private game park in the middle of a city with a gilded hunting pavilion at its centre. That’s the East for you, that’s power. Now along comes the West with another kind of power: oil. The Americans have discovered large deposits along the coast somewhere. Well, my dear, it would hardly amaze one to hear that deals of a Byzantine intricacy were being hatched, would it? Let me see: the uncle takes over with American backing in return for the promise of exclusive drilling rights. The ex-royal family are allowed by the skin of their teeth to take a suitcase and a servant apiece and fly into exile in somewhere ruinously déclassé like Vientiane or even, God help us, Hawaii. It will emerge that they were secretly planning to sell off the nation’s patrimony, the royal game park and hunting lodge, to the highest bidder in order to build offices for the expected postwar boom. The greedy fiends! Was nothing sacred to them? And so on and so forth. Then after a discreet interval the royal game park is ploughed up and put down to office buildings as part of the government’s democratic and enlightened plan to abolish the last traces of feudalism and restore the nation’s assets to the people. Tra-la-la. My dear, American diplomacy. It’s like watching somebody trying to do joinery with a chainsaw. Whatever that is.’
The chargé raised an amused eyebrow at the dead stub of his cigarette which, lost in the throes of his oratory, he had smoked down to the holder.
‘But she wasn’t like that at all,’ said Leon. ‘She would never have sold off a city park for development. She had this extraordinary plan –’ He couldn’t complete the sentence. He suddenly had no desire to throw titbits into the gossi
p pool, to give away anything of his princess. The diplomat’s account was shocking, delivered with that worldly nonchalance which always made hearsay sound like fact, conjecture like truth, knowingness like knowledge. What did these people know? How? And why did they always make it appear as if they knew yet more? The chargé was still watching him with his odd kindness. He detached the cigarette stub and offered it gracefully.
‘This really ought to be framed or mounted,’ he said. ‘It’s the very first I’ve been allowed to finish in this enchanting place. I believe you’re slipping. And this extraordinary plan of hers?’
Leon only shook his head, candlelight glinting on his hacked fur. The story he had just heard had done something savage to her presence. In any case mentioning a job offer by someone who no longer had the power to appoint would perversely suggest a failure of his own.
‘Nobody’, said the chargé obscurely, ‘is proof against the past. Not her, not you. Nor even I,’ he added with a quick smile at his young companion.
That night Leon’s wretchedness wrapped him in a sheet of flame. He burned on the mattress beside Felix in the spilled light of the half-open fireboxes. Everywhere he looked he encountered the same falling away. Several times he reached out and laid a hand on the gypsy’s shoulder, left it there until it grew to feel as heavy as a toad. Only when he tried to turn him over was there any response. Then the unyielding rigidity of the boy’s body, as if bolted through the mattress and into the brick floor, was so eloquent he lost heart.
‘I’m ill,’ he remarked, but more to himself. He had lived on his own for too long to have acquired habits of demand. His chest scalded him. He got up and drank feverishly from the tap, selected an infusion from the cupboard, drew off a cupful of hot water from a spigot on the boiler, sipped it. ‘I’ve failed,’ he said. Then, remembering, ‘I’ll read to you.’ He got up again and searched the pockets of his trousers draped over a chairback. He found the envelope, slumped on to the mattress with it and ran a nail beneath its flap. Absently he inspected the thumb as if for scale insects, then took out a single cream sheet.
‘“Cher Maître,”’ he read aloud, ‘“for that is how I think of you. In my country we have holy men, some of whose qualities I see in you. I had not expected to find any such thing so far from home and perhaps I allowed my pleasure and relief to show too obviously. For this I apologise.
‘“The snow is coming down and I have heard terrible news. His Serene Highness my father has been taken ill and I must fly to his bedside at once, even before saying goodbye to you. As I believe I hinted, our country did not have an easy passage through the recent war and in the present circumstances it becomes impossible to predict what will happen. Our plan together – or at any rate my own dream – will have to wait a little before going ahead. I believe I may have been guilty of rushing you the other day. This was improper and I am sorry if it seemed I was applying pressure. It was nothing more than my own eagerness. You are a great man, I am sure of it, and will find your own way.
‘“And so I must bid you adieu for now, with the greatest sadness and sincerest thanks for all you have taught me, only part of which you will know about. Your beautiful exotic poem in which you live and work will remain the happiest memory of my first diplomatic posting and an inspiration in whatever upset the immediate future holds for me. Once I, too, had hopes of being a poet. Maybe one day I shall be after all. Whenever it happens, and wherever we both are, it will have been as much your doing as mine. Plant something for me. Tahassa, HRH The Princess Imluk.”’
When he had finished Leon fell silent. Fuel collapsed in a boiler with a cindery rush and the glow intensified for a moment, lighting up the letter he held. Beside him Felix lay like a stone bolster. He seemed not even to be breathing and, leaning aslant, Leon saw his eyeballs’ staring gleam. His own fever was affecting him like alcohol: not enough to blur but, on the contrary, enough to sharpen the emotions. Under its influence her words were not those of someone announcing an unforeseen journey and the separation of two people whose relationship appeared to be based more on the admiration of one party than on the shared allusions of friends. Instead her letter had left him with the distillate of farewell, of valediction, speaking for his whole existence with the fatuous punctuality which pretends to significance. He could not for the moment have uttered a word without at once falling into tears. Why had she described the Palm House as a poem? Or had she meant his life, his vision? It was unfair of her to write on a page, with easy strokes of her cultured hand, something he himself had surely never thought, could never have thought, but which now stood as a humiliatingly truthful proposition. Unfevered, sober, he knew how gruffly he would dismiss such pretentious nonsense, in public at least. ‘I’m a gardener. I dig the ground and plant things and hate wireworm and spider mite. I worry constantly about the shitty boilers and the shitty assistants and the shitty coal they send me whose smuts drift down and stick to the shitty glass I’m given to work with. Otherwise, of course, it’s a right little sonnet we’ve got here. Seen the paintwork? The putty on the south side of the lantern? It’d break the heart of the fellow who built this place.’ Now, with the fever on him and the scent of loss disguised as ‘Cuir’ drifting up from the writing paper, a capitulation occurred and he was forced to admit there might be something else beyond the bare profession thus crudely sketched. Was it this which had gone wrong? His expertise betrayed by a dreamy flaw? And what did she mean by ‘exotic’, anyway? Hardly the plants, since palms were as workaday in southeast Asia as plane trees in the municipal park across the way. Didn’t exoticism simply depend on being outside or somewhere else? Maybe she meant he always was somewhere else, always would be; that even the place which most reeked of him and his labour was no structure of putty and glass and iron ribs but rooted entirely in his mind where it glowed and brooded and festered and hung its unsettling fruit. Living out a dream rather than in one? No, that was far too explanatory. There was a vulgarity about the whole idea. He wished she hadn’t mentioned poetry at all. He quite wished she had returned the lotus, too. It had been blighted by events, having progressively fallen from the category of outright gift through that of ‘indefinite temporary loan’ and was now unrecovered property.
‘Oh Felix,’ he murmured, swaying as he sat, ‘what are we going to do? How did all this happen? It was the war, wasn’t it? The damned, bloody war.’
The thought gave him some comfort but not enough. He was still ambitious. To grow plants was not the same as watching plants grow. He could almost see how he wanted things to be: almost, but not quite. The princess’s departure had unaccountably muddied the view.
‘Who was she, this princess of ours? Perhaps after all what the newspapers call a raven-haired temptress? Enticing us with opportunity – “name your own salary”, that’s what she said. Can you believe that? Enticing me to selfishness, to abandon you and rush off to a country which for all I know may be completely imaginary. Do you feel as I do sometimes?’ he laid a hand on the immobile figure’s hip. ‘As if everything takes place in a far country? We’re a little ill, I think. That’s all it is. Hungry, too. Tomorrow I’ll go down to the market for a bag of snouts and we’ll rig up a fine stew. Strange things we’re expected to eat nowadays. Butcher’s shops selling whalemeat! I know, and what’s more they still snip coupons out of your ration book for it. A few years ago we wouldn’t have touched the stuff. Reindeer, too. What are we, bloody Eskimos? And that horrible fish from Africa somewhere, what do they call it? Snoek. No, tomorrow we’ll have a good old stew, I promise. Potatoes, carrots, and a proper set of teeth grinning up at you from the bottom of the pot as if to say “Oh yes, we’re the real thing.”’
At this point he broke into coughs which were finally eased with a draught of tarry substance from a bottle.
‘Let me tell you about my plants, my Felix,’ he resumed when able. ‘It may be a discovery of my own or it may not, but I’ve never read it in any book. It’s about their juxtaposition, which means which p
lant is placed next to which. They used to say that shrubs in tropical houses ought to be placed according to region. So you’d get New World shrubs all up one side and Madagascan in a little group over there and those from Malaya and Sumatra and other southeast Asian countries up the other side. Then they said no, they should be arranged according to the order assigned them by botanists. So you’d have the cycads in one place, no matter where they were from, and near them all the Gnetales – only three surviving genera of those, though. Like that. Then still other people thought the arrangement should be entirely aesthetic. How will this look with that? Will this area balance the damned palms which really have to be stuck under the lantern, most of them? Will these leaf colours go well together? Will that tree’s aerial roots obscure this bush? I still think aesthetics are important and I admit I’m not yet happy about how we’ve arranged all our night scented varieties, are you?
‘But my discovery’s something else. I now see that certain plants actually dislike one another and never do well if they’re put side by side. I know what you’re going to say with that sharp little mind of yours – that it’ll have something to do with parasites or fungal infection or a plant changing the chemistry of the soil around it. Sound good sense and not only possible but likely in many cases. You’ll have heard of the mythical upas-tree of Java which poisoned everything for miles? The principle’s well established. But my idea is still that certain plants simply dislike each other and should never be put together. If you were a prison governor and wanted to run a quiet prison you’d make an effort not to put two men in a cell together who were bound to fall out, wouldn’t you?
‘You think all this is barmy, just your old gardener rabbiting on with his usual highfalutin ideas. Mystical harmony or something. No, you’re quite wrong. I’ve watched, I’ve seen, I’ve learned. Did you know there are certain rare people who can blight plants? You can’t explain it and nor can you predict it. If a person like that touches a plant something goes wrong with it. It starts to wilt, or it sheds all its leaves, or it’s suddenly covered in thrips. Remember that piece in Picture News a few weeks back? That one about the girl who wrecks anything electrical just by going into a room? Lights swing about and bulbs explode and perfectly good wireless sets blow all their valves. They say she’s bewitched, which is a pretty funny diagnosis for the middle of the twentieth century. Once she made an electric milk van crash. There’ll be a reason but it won’t be witchcraft, just as there’ll be a reason why some people can blight plants and some plants blight each other. Just opposite harmonics. I read somewhere that you can make light-and soundwaves cancel themselves out if the peaks coincide exactly with the troughs. All you get is darkness and silence. That’s very interesting.’
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