The Glass House

by Beatrice Colin

  “Should I stop?” he whispered. “Should I?”

  Even now the imprint of George’s mouth, the pressure of his lips on hers, the small of his back and softness of his skin beneath her fingertips were locked in her body’s memory. Afterward there were buttons fumbled, laces unknotted, voices swallowed, each of them growing increasingly bolder in a series of meeting places. Despite the hours before and after when she agonized over every detail, it was over before she knew it. Kitty was conceived in the space between a heartbeat and the tick of a minute hand. When she missed her monthly bleed she knew enough about biology to realize that they had done something that could not be easily undone. George was silent when she told him. His eye followed a bird as it glided into the distance, and his jaw hardened.

  “Well, that’s that, then,” he said.

  What about the fiancée in Scotland? her father had demanded the night George came around unannounced and uninvited. Fictional, George admitted. You are not only a fantasist but a liar and a seducer, her father had yelled. And what was more, he continued, how did he think he could support his daughter with such a precarious profession? All the aspects of George Pick’s personality and background that had initially impressed him, that he had lauded with praise only a matter of weeks before, were now proof of his blatant unsuitability. Her father, sweating in the morning jacket that he had hastily thrown on over his nightshirt, must have read George’s face and realized it was already too late. No wonder he was furious: He too had been seduced.

  The marriage was without fuss, a brief ceremony in St. Andrew’s Anglican Church on the Darjeeling Mall Road. Did she regret it now? Of course. Although she could never imagine her life without Kitty, she regretted her haste, her impulsiveness, which rather than opening up her world had narrowed it.

  Her mother had died suddenly that summer, the newly conceived and the newly deceased passing each other so closely that Kitty seemed to have picked up some of her mother’s mannerisms and facial expressions on the way. Her father had married again six months later to a much younger woman and set up a new home, throwing away most of the detritus of the last. His new wife was gay, sociable, jealous, and crammed every spare moment with dinner parties and bridge evenings, leaving no time for anything or anyone else. Apart from Cicely to prove it otherwise, sometimes it was as if his first marriage had never happened.

  Kitty was born a month prematurely while George was away on another expedition. On that trip he found a valley where there were so many orchids, so many thousands of different species, that he made a huge collection. On hearing the news of Kitty’s birth, however, he rushed back, leaving hundreds of plants behind, their roots cruelly exposed, their flowers already wilting in the heat. Later he tried to return, but the valley seemed to have disappeared, like the location of a fairy tale, never to be found again.

  George’s green thumb, his exhaustive knowledge of plants, and talent for specimen collection made him famous throughout Bengal. But for all his singular passion, or because of it, there was a side to George that was sometimes hard to like. His gentleness, she knew, was tempered by brutality. He had wide hands scored with scars, and his touch was exacting, perceptive, merciless. At one consultation with a potential client it was alleged that he had uprooted an entire tray of magnolia seedlings that the client’s gardener had just planted at vast expense, leaving just one, which then failed to thrive and died. He didn’t receive many bookings after that.

  After Kitty’s birth they had lived in a series of rented villas, each a little farther out of town, each a little less expensive than the last. They had been in the current villa, which sat in an abandoned tea plantation, for a year. It was cheap and a little run down but, according to George, purely temporary. She could put up with it for a short while, couldn’t she? Soon they could move anywhere she wanted, a house on the Mall, or to one of the other hill towns, or maybe, if she wanted, to Europe. The brightest of futures was always just ahead of them, so close that they could almost touch it. It was always, however, also just out of reach.

  The setting of the tea plantation was beautiful but isolated. Sometimes it felt like a prison, her only escape long rides through the forests on her horse. When she came back breathless, exhilarated, her skirts, her hands, her face spotted with mud and her hair filled with the scent of mountain snow, George would barely glance at her, his silence filled with accusations he didn’t voice. And then, more often than not, he would take his bicycle and pedal off to town, and be gone for two days, possibly three. George, she discovered, had something missing—an emotional hole. Food, wine, expensive hotels did not impress him. The only currency he valued was the new, the unexplored.

  On the March morning when George had started to plan his current expedition, the air was filled with his itch of impatience. He would travel to Siliguri and then change trains three—or was it four?—times until he reached Saikhowaghat, the end of the line, in Assam. There he would hire mules and muleteers and load his equipment on their sturdy wooden frames; he would employ a cook, buy food from the bazaar—rice, eggs, flour, tinned meat—and then head off on a pony along paths that had been there for thousands of years to transport cotton, walnuts, and opium. Eventually the mule caravan would turn off the beaten track and head into the mountains guarded by tribesmen, the majority of it unexplored, uninhabited, and filled, George hoped, with a profusion of rare and unidentified flowers, trees, and shrubs.

  “You know I support your decision,” she’d said. “But in all honesty I have to say that I would rather you didn’t go. Not right away. Not until we have everything sorted out.”

  It was not only the length of time—a year or more at his own estimation—or the fact that an expedition on this scale was dangerous, difficult, speculative; it was the expense, which was ruinous. There was a stack of unpaid bills on the hall table, and each day’s post brought another final demand for payment.

  “Why don’t we at least generate some income first? We could plant some tea.”

  “That would take years. I have to leave before the mountains are teeming with plant hunters,” he had insisted. “I want to go to the Mekong River, to the Lohit, set up a base at Rima, and explore that whole area. There are valleys up there that haven’t been charted, where few Westerners have ever set foot. It’s everything I’ve been waiting for, Cicely. It’s why I came to this part of the world in the first place.”

  She remembered how distracted he had been in the weeks before he left, as if he were halfway there in his head already. His eyes were full of light, he could not sleep, he did not eat, he spent hours looking at maps, running his fingers over the brown ridges of mountain ranges and tracing river valleys, the thin black lines like wrinkles on a piece of cloth. It was, she thought at the time, as if he had been overcome by a kind of madness.

  “This trip will make me,” he had told her. “The timing could not have been better. With the inheritance and my experience I can’t fail. Just imagine, my dearest Cicely, your name immortalized in a rare bloom!”

  He gave her that look, a look that said: I’m in love with everything, you, the world, the ground we walk on. It was hard to resist. She made herself turn away.

  His desire was a shifting, corrosive appetite that ate at him from the inside. She had not seen it in him at first. When she closed her eyes, even here in Scotland, she could still smell the jungle; she could see the colors of the orchids, the blues, the creams, the purples; she could feel the heat rising. After almost a decade she could remember every single aspect of that first expedition with George. Imagine a flower, a shrub, nothing like anyone had seen before, she remembered he had told her: a striking shade, a fragrant scent, an azalea or a clematis of a new color or shape or size.

  “Cymbidium elegans,” his voice whispered in her head. “Crepidium purpureum. Calanthe whiteana.”

  She wondered if he would ever find what he was looking for, if he would ever satisfy the craving that consumed him or if it would destroy them all first.

&nb
sp; Cicely took a deep breath and let it go. She must calm down. Take one step at a time. Think of the task at hand. Tomorrow morning the solicitor would confirm their claim, and she could start to make plans. At the base of a holly tree, she spotted a tiny flower with small pink starry petals and a slender stem. She took off her gloves, knelt down, and carefully uprooted it with her fingertips. Maybe this was one of the rare species that Antonia had mentioned?

  The gardener’s wheelbarrow, empty now, had been left beside the glass-house door. A dog, a brown Labrador, lay sprawled out at the entrance and raised its head, its tail beating the ground in greeting. Inside the air smelled of steaming loam and tar wash, of horse manure and seaweed. The windows were clouded with condensation, a steady drip came from the roof. How ironic, she thought, that the Picks keep their glass house warmer than their bedrooms. At the far end, steps led down to a doorway, and she could hear the low rumble of the subterranean boiler.

  “Hello!” she called out. “Mr. Baillie?”

  The man who emerged from the boiler room was not Mr. Baillie. He was young, at least younger than the head gardener, his sleeves were rolled up, his hands were blackened, and his face was flushed—it seemed she had caught him in the middle of things.

  “I was looking for the gardener,” she explained.

  He inspected his palms and then rubbed them with a clean white handkerchief.

  “My uncle’s gone for tea,” he said. “Maybe I can help?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “This is about a horticultural matter.”

  “Try me,” he replied.

  Her face began to color. Was this how the staff addressed the Pick family? He’d be calling her “duckie” next, she thought, or “pet,” as the cabdriver had in London.

  “I was wondering if you knew what this flower is?”

  She held out her right palm to show him.

  “If not, then I’m sure I can find it in here,” she said, bringing Familiar Garden Flowers from her pocket, slightly damp from the rain.

  There was a flash of white as the solicitor’s letter fell to the ground. The gardener hadn’t noticed. Cicely thought it best to ignore it. It wouldn’t do for the staff to find out she had been stealing the Picks’ private correspondence.

  “Let’s have a look,” he said, indicating that she should place the flower in his palm. “Where did you find it?”

  “On the island, near the shore.”

  The envelope was wedged halfway beneath a terra-cotta pot six inches from his foot.

  “Were there many of them?”

  “I only saw one. Is it rare?”

  Although he tried to hide it, a small smile appeared on his face.

  “It’s thrift,” he said. “Common thrift. It grows all over.”

  He knelt down and picked up the envelope—he must have noticed it after all—and peered inside.

  “Another one?” he said.

  She frowned at him, uncomprehending.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Can’t say I know this,” he said. “Maybe I could look it up later. When I’m not so busy?”

  And before she could stop him he had placed the envelope in his pocket.

  “Wait!” she said.

  He stopped, he turned. How could she demand the envelope back without raising suspicion? Would he go straight to Antonia with it? How could she explain what she was doing with the solicitor’s letter?

  “I was almost away with this,” the gardener said and carefully placed the thrift back in Cicely’s palm. “It’s Mrs. Pick, isn’t it?” He gestured at the book in her other hand, and she looked down.

  The solicitor’s letter was still wedged inside. There must have been another envelope between the pages of Familiar Garden Flowers.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  Her heart was still pounding. She forced her face into a smile.

  “Everything is fine. Thank you.”

  * * *

   Antonia glanced up as Cicely left the glass house. What could she possibly have been talking about with the gardener? Young Baillie watched her go, his face expressionless, then headed back down to the boiler room. Antonia picked up the secateurs and began to select some roses for the dining room table. They had to be just right, the heads still tight, the blooms not in imminent danger of blowing.

  Young Mr. Baillie was old Mr. Baillie’s great-nephew. He had arrived a few years earlier from Glasgow, where he had worked for a spell in the Botanic Gardens. In all the time he had worked for them, she had conversed with him only twice. He was, however, good at his job, and kept the boiler topped up and the glass house warm. And now that his uncle was getting on a bit, they needed him. Old Mr. Baillie had worked for her father for as long as she could remember—much longer, in fact—and he had helped establish the gardens and her father’s collection. Her mother had wanted a fernery, which was at the time the height of fashion. But her father had won out, since he was paying for it. He had hired a horticultural engineer, sketched out a few designs, and then, as if to make a point, had built a huge glass house quite out of proportion with Balmarra House.

  As well as his tropical plants, his orchids, and his fruit trees, Edward Pick had been especially proud of his roses, his Bourbons and his Albas, and positioned them in beds around the entrance. But you had to be disciplined, he had told Antonia, with Rosaceae, and cut them back after they had flowered; otherwise they would grow leggy and unproductive. This year, for the first time, on her instructions, the roses had not been cut down to the ground; they had not been hard-pruned in the autumn. New shoots were already appearing, their tiny leaves curled in on themselves like fists.

  The rest of the estate was harder to control. There was always something that needed urgent attention. The house and gardens were in a constant state of decay from woodworm or rot or rust, or from siege by mice, squirrels, and ants. Twenty years earlier, however, Balmarra’s garden and glass house had been much admired. A journalist had visited and written a short feature for the Dunoon Courier. Several botanists from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh had planned to come and take a look, but their ferry had been canceled due to bad weather and the trip had never been rescheduled.

  Although the glass house was kept a constant temperature of seventy degrees, the rest of the garden was now not well maintained; there had once been a team of gardeners, not just a couple. The old paths were blocked by fallen trees that hadn’t been removed, and the decorative ponds were clogged with blanket weed and algae. Just keeping the area around the house free of encroaching vegetation and stoking the boilers for the hothouses took up most of the Baillies’ time. Maybe Antonia did need a plan. She would have to do something about it, but what? There wasn’t any money to employ extra staff.

  Suddenly Kitty yanked open the glass-house door. The girl stood, slightly breathless, and looked around at the damasks and tea roses, climbing on trellises or staked in pots.

  “Why is this place so hot?” she asked.

  “The plants need heat to thrive,” Antonia replied. “Most of them come from other countries, hotter countries.”

  “Like me,” said Kitty.

  She placed her fingertips around a dark red rose, an Alba, and for a moment Antonia was sure she was going to pluck off the head. Instead she lowered her head and sniffed.

  “They smell more fragrant in the early morning,” Antonia explained.

  “Really?” Kitty said. “May I have some? For Mummy?”

  Without waiting for an answer she took the secateurs from Antonia’s hands and started to snip. In a matter of moments ten, twelve, fourteen, twenty heads, white and yellow and pink, red and cream and orange, were severed.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she said as the bunch of flowers grew larger.

  There was a moment when the pipes rattled and the rain began to patter on the glass above.

  “No,” said Antonia. “Be my guest.”

  They walked back to the house in silence, Kitty’s arms full o
f roses, Antonia with her half dozen. She was filled with a kind of furious panic. The rose bed was now practically barren; only a few small buds were left. How would she decorate the house in the coming weeks? What would her father have said? Antonia had never seen such extravagant, wasteful behavior.

  They met Cicely on the front steps. If she was embarrassed by her daughter’s haul, her face didn’t show it.

  “These are for you, Mummy,” said Kitty. “From the hothouse.”

  Kitty went to ask Dora for some vases, and they walked into the house in silence.

  “Come to my room,” said Cicely when they reached the bottom of the stairs. “I have something for you.”

  “That’s really not necessary,” Antonia replied without looking up.

  “Let me put these in water first. But come. Soon.”

  Cicely’s room smelled glorious. The flowers had been arranged, and the vases placed on every possible surface from the mantelpiece to the bedside table.

  “It was very generous of you to let Kitty pick so many,” Cicely said. “I would never have allowed it.”

  Antonia gave a small smile. She realized that she had a lot to learn about children and how to deal with them.

  The cashmere scarf was the deepest, sweetest red. Around the fringe was a border of embroidery; tiny flowers and minuscule bees picked out in silver, yellow, and black thread. It was a beautiful scarf, the fabric soft, the decoration intricate. Cicely wrapped it around Antonia’s shoulders and let it fall to the ground.