Griefwork (3 page)

Nowadays the voices he gave them had become quite sophisticated. Long before the war, when Leon had just arrived in the Botanical Gardens, plants had spoken to him using the elemental speech he had always bestowed on wind and waves. During his rise to curator he had been obliged to meet more and grander people – not simply administrators like the director, Dr Anselmus, but highly informed amateurs with conservatories of their own, visiting dignitaries from other gardens all over Europe, even social butterflies who, re-emerging
from the war’s enforced hibernation, were beginning once more to flutter round his House as if it were a buddleia coming into bloom. From all these people he had caught new modes of expression, new voices. Recently he had noticed his plants adopting their own conversational tones. Since the coming of the night people, especially, several had taken on a brittle sarcastic quality which revealed unsuspected currents. What could only be described as bitchiness and rivalry was opening interesting fissures in what had once seemed the uniform dumb harmony of green and living things. These days he hardly even needed to walk his forest paths in order to overhear his plants. Long after he had gone to bed their discourse continued softly, whispers which he could distantly hear until the moment he fell asleep and again not long after waking. He had come to recognise distinct generic voices. The palms were overbearing, the
Annonas
by turns spiteful and tender. In their joint company he was drawn osmotically upwards and out of himself as if his very being were as fluid as sap. Sometimes these dialogues told him things he hadn’t known he knew. Not the least strange aspect of this odd man was that he was thus able to be unself-aware while providing a half-amused, knowing commentary as though he were standing a long way off from himself or as if it were all happening in a distant country.

The last candle made of his bending face the ancient mask of a tyrant or a priest before it, too, winked out. Leon paused then as he always did, looking back on a world which only he ever saw. It spread away to every horizon, a tessellated land whose each plant was distinct yet thickly nested among its neighbours. Small water noises tinkled where voices had been muffled. Newt and terrapin nosed their way about invisible tanks while drops condensing inside an acre of cold glass pattered down on soil and leaves. Sometimes he could hear the tightly-wound shoots of bamboos and lilies squeak as they thrust upwards. As his
eyes adjusted, dabs and dots of green light marked patches of luminous fungi whose spores had arrived with the plants in their Wardian cases (along with mites and pests and noxious insects) and had thrived in the congenial warmth. And, as he waited still longer, a directionless radiance seeped into his eyes. It was so faint as to be without colour, yet had an intensity of its own powerful enough to permeate the universe. This was starlight filtering through the thin layer of snow on the roof. Where was this place really, this sublime kiosk? Rushing through space? Sunk in the sea? It was here and everywhere and nowhere possible, and it always made him shiver with pleasure and humility, as one looking up at mountains. From his mouth issued gentle, unvoiced whispers, almost sighs:
shuuuff
…
ssiiih
… which, as soft as the starlight was dim, surely penetrated every corner of the cosmos. They were the repetitive gesture of someone who, quite without knowing it, lives in a state of constant sorrow.

Already thinking of the
Annonas
he was going to re-pot first thing next morning, Leon slipped in through No Admittance, turned out the light inside and crossed the darkened room unerringly to the boiler room door. Inside, the dim 40-watt bulb was on, hung with cobwebs. To his eyes it dazzled with detail. Much of the floor space of this large room was taken up with the furnaces themselves, with bunkers full of small coal and logs and with heavily lagged tanks, pumps and pipes all set with gauges at strategic points. The floor was immaculately swept. On it in one corner lay a large mattress. Leon turned the light off and went over to kneel on it. By the red glow spilling out of the open firebox doors a figure became visible drawn up on its side beneath a sheet, a plane of face amid a tangle of gypsy tresses, an eyelash trembling in mock sleep. With the tenderness of someone opening a longed-for present the kneeling man drew down the sheet, exposing a naked back which he bent forward to kiss. ‘The happy land,’ he murmured. ‘Arabia felix.’

During the night when he awoke with practised punctuality to feed the boilers a glance through the window into the yard showed it was still snowing. In the morning when he got up and went into the Palm House the light’s effect produced a tingle of remembrance, something to do with what winter means for northerners. So well did he know the smell of snow he thought he could sniff it even inside, in a temperature of 27°C, looking out at the Botanical Gardens lumpy and quilted in the grey early light. Not yet bright, the pallor nevertheless drove in through the glass from all sides, leaching out the plants’ subtle greens. Their extravagant shapes suddenly looked clumsy, the palms tattered, everything ragged and sprawling as if the nature of heat was to bleed away all rigor of outline, corrupt the purposeful and self-contained. The ashy light beat upwards from the wastes outside, the roof beneath its rug of snow darker than the sky itself. Over Leon there came the feeling, beginning at the base of his spine, which he remembered from childhood: a heavy thrill brought on by clouds black with snow massing and spreading overhead, shedding that bruised radiance, avatar of dislocation and extremity.

Meanwhile
his
favourite
tree,
Tamarindus indica,
had
spoken
of
him
in
the
dark
hours
as
he
had
lain
on
his
shared
mattress.
The
vocabulary
was
that
of
the
night
visitors
and
the
books
he
had
read.
The
tone
–
now
tart,
now
mournful
–
was
entirely
his
own
.
To
his
drowsy
mind
the
plant’s
gentle
mockery
was
proof
of
its
affection,
while
its
longing
expressed
something
which
seemed
as
much
a
part
of
him
as
the
blood
sighing
in
his
ears:

‘We’re all of us devoted to our gardener, of course, as he moves among us with his golden wand. However, those of us capable of thought – which is most of the species in this House with the obvious exception of the bananas, who are famously dim – object now and then to the ludicrous qualities he assigns us. We’ve come to the conclusion he can’t help his anthropomorphism, and leave it at that. Nevertheless I do think he ought to be more scrupulous before bestowing on us characters such as “lone and difficult creature” or however he describes me. My neighbour on one side, a very handsome African orchid tree called
Monodora,
will vouch for my being easy-going and companionable; or he will if he has any sense. He himself is due for an annual bout of the dumps which always happens when his flower buds start to form in expectation of spring. It’s worth it, for since he’s completely leafless when he does flower the blooms hang most spectacularly from his bare branches, at which point he becomes loquacious in a triumphalist vein which is quite insufferable. The rest of the year he’s an excellent listener and a good friend, giving off sympathy and a faint smell of nutmeg.

‘As for my “forbidding acidity”, this is a human palate speaking. What to our gardener is twelve per cent tartaric acid is to me an expression of the best in me, what honey is to a bee. Sadly, no-one will ever really appreciate it since the birds and animals who would happily feast on it and scatter my seeds never visit this House. It’s one of the minor moans I burden poor
Monodora
with. My chief complaint is far more serious and difficult to express and concerns – I may as well come clean – my neighbour on the other side. It is of course hopeless, and I accept it. She’s far younger and smaller than I.
As if that weren’t enough she really has no business to be in here at all. If our gardener considers that I’m displaced I can’t imagine what he’d think of her; but by some wilful – and for me merciful – blindness he hasn’t yet noticed her. How she survives is equally mysterious since it ought to be far too hot for her in here. Yet she does, bravely and miraculously. Very well, as I’m going to have to say it sooner or later: she’s a hemlock. Yes, yes, I know. Ridiculous and unseemly. Grotesque, even. A mere baby. A biennial. Don’t imagine I couldn’t say your lines for you, and more eloquently at that.

‘So it’s something I keep to myself. Sooner or later I’ll probably confide in
Monodora.
One more of love’s curses is that it will out: it makes one as reckless as if it were an achievement one yearned to brag about instead of an incubus beneath which one crouches, even though it did descend like manna. I can never tell her, of course, it’s unthinkable. Worse than the shame of hearing one’s own trite and stumbling words would be her expression of naive puzzlement. After that there would be nothing for me but the axe and the flame. No, there is such a thing as dignity and besides I love her far too much to wish to cause her the least upset. I can’t believe I’m the only case of frustrated affection in this House, anyway. In fact I know I’m not. Now and then one hears things said in sleep, confessions, laments and suchlike. It’s probably the common lot, again with notable exceptions. The palms, of course, are above all that sort of thing, being too busy fancying themselves as the philosopher kings of the plant world. Don’t raise your expectations too high, is my advice. I’ve never heard any of them express a single worthwhile thought. The lotuses are a quite different case. I’d wager there’s not a plant in the House who hasn’t at some point or another been kept awake by their carryings-on. You never heard such screaming and bitching. That being said, one has to admit their outrageous remarks are often very funny.
There’s something inherently comic about their situation, too. Talk about a divided community. Half of them are trying to be religious and the other half sordid, and we can all hear which half has the more success.

‘Oh! It’s so beautiful when the gardener blows the candles out. When the last light is extinguished a sigh goes through as a billion cells relax at once. I talk too much. I know it; and I only do so because I lack the freedom and courage to whisper to my little hemlock those few words I want to say, and then for all I care the roof can fall in and we perish in the snow which tonight is stealthily patting the panes.’

Picture a boy beside a grey northern sea, a distant figure whose neutral tones blend easily into the landscape. His faded dungarees, stuck with dried and curling fish scales, are the silvery blue-green of the sea holly scattered in clumps among the dunes. His hair is the melancholy yellow of rock samphire shaken by wind in cups and hollows. The landscape in which he moves is pared down to three elements: land, sea, sky. Each of these has a superficial scurrying quality beneath which it is as static as a grim metal poured long ago and set. To one horizon stretches rumpled water raising an infinity of failed castles. To the other, a terrain of low tufted dunes and saltings trembling stiffly in a flat wind and reaching inland past the invisible estuary. No trees, no vertical objects break the tyranny of the horizontal save only three wind pumps, vastly distant from each other and appearing bigger and closer than they really are, like oil drums in a desert. Although these are the late 1920s the sky remains as innocent of the aeroplane as it was when it frowned upon Europe’s last retreating ice sheets.

The boy smells strongly of fish oil, and is quite unaware of it. From before dawn he was helping his uncle empty the smokers and pack the boxes: bloaters sweating amber droplets, the twisted batons of eels. They were still nailing the lids when
the lorry called, though in this land its arrival could hardly be said to have caught them by surprise. Its insect crawl had been visible for ten minutes, its rattle over sluices and the bridges made of loose railway sleepers audible even above the sea’s beating pulse. He had helped with the loading, drunk a pint of milky coffee, walked off along the shore to a point where the house he had left, with its line of huts, looked no more than the cluttered superstructure of a wrecked ship stranded far away on tidal flats. Now in the distance beyond it are Flinn’s palish gleams: roofs greasy beneath stray sunlight, the steely flare of greenhouses. Most prominent of all is the menacing white stump of a lighthouse which dominates the town and at night intermittently blanches his bedroom curtains with its beam.

Ten years earlier the lighthouse had set the course of his life, and so cardinally that it was only of late he had managed to make a story from what had been an inarticulate wound. A space had at last opened up in that ever-receding landscape to accommodate a remembered figure and the images which clustered around her like birds about a distant statue, immobile in sunlight. Immobile, for there is no movement in memory; there are only instants which paint the fluent living with the rigidity of death, even when they are most in motion. Yet this boy would have said how vividly as a five-year-old he remembered his mother’s bicycle spokes,
sprrixx,
as she pedalled away up the track across the polder to Flinn, the sun sparkling off the twirling wires, merry as mills. So he had stood as he always did when she went shopping in the village, watching her out of sight. It took a long, long time. The pedalling figure shrank to a gliding blob, now disappearing behind a stretch of stiff bushes, now sinking into invisible declivities, reappearing heraldically proud, crossing a bridge over one of the cuts.
That
creeping
dot
was
his
mother.
At the same time he thought of anybody else in
the distant village who might happen to be gazing inland rather than seaward: how they would notice movement out there among the kale fields, a creeping dot with a speck of colour to it which slowly grew and resolved itself into Christina in her orange headscarf escaping from that foul-tempered brother of hers and her poor little boy for a quick round of cards, some purchases and a good few glasses of schnapps (which Leon could smell when she returned). And so he watched everyone and everything out of sight: boats putting out, a heron flying, the lorries coming to fetch smoked fish, a white steamer crossing the horizon and leaving its long thinning smudge. They all trailed behind them a hollow never quite filled by their return, carrying away part of him with them so he could look back and watch himself watching, just as he was sure his mother never once glanced over her shoulder to glimpse her melancholy child dwindle behind her.
Sprrixx.

One day in Flinn marketplace there had been a stir of interest as a lorry arrived bearing a huge lump tethered beneath green canvas. The driver asked the way to the lighthouse, possibly out of self-importance since it was clearly visible from all points in Flinn and, indeed, from many a mile outside. It stood on a low sandy cliff not a quarter of a mile away and had been blind in its eye for nearly a year since the heavy steel trolley on which the half-ton lens revolved seized up one night. The year was 1918, and even at the end of the world’s first mechanised war the arrival of a lorry in Flinn was an occasion and a large group followed it along the sandy track. It would be a three-day task to instal a jib on top of the building, haul the new mechanism up, swing it in and seat it in its bed. A crew of trained engineers was sitting in the cab with the driver, and the keeper of the only inn for some miles began cheerfully throwing open windows and airing beds. The weather was propitious: a high blue summer sky with a few mare’s tails languidly unravelling their tresses across
Europe. Scattered lark song ascended flutteringly on weak thermals from among the dunes. The sea rocked and glittered to the horizon. The work began.

On the second morning Christina pedalled into town with her string bag, took a couple of glasses of refreshment and asked where everyone had got to. Told, she hopped back on her bicycle and soon joined the crowd of onlookers. It was at one of the more interesting moments. The men were getting ready to haul up the revolving mechanism, a task almost as delicate as remounting the lenses in it since it was as finely engineered as a watch. It lay in a cradle of mattresses on the back of the lorry, steel and brass glistening beneath a film of light oil. Before the order to haul was given the keeper waved everyone back and the spectators drew off to one side, just far enough so that if the rope broke (as many of the adults and all of the children were hoping it would) they were sure of a ringside seat without being in danger. The men hauled, the rope creaked, the pulley high up on the lighthouse squealed, the mechanism rose slowly into the air. As it did so the upturned heads tilted ever further back until they looked to the foreman up by the jib like a patch of daisies in a meadow. When the load neared the top there occurred one of those brisk claps of wind which come from nowhere and pass into nowhere, a stray lump of summer air perhaps detached from a stiff breeze a week previously and loitering lazily in its wake. It did no harm whatever to the precious mechanism now at the lamp room’s sill. All it did was catch and throw back one of the curved lattice windows. Being heavy, it moved quite slowly and jarred to rest with a thud against a wooden stop bolted to the stonework. The foreman, intent on his job, scarcely glanced up but called out ‘Latch that, Jon,’ his gloved hand on the quivering rope. As the window struck the stop a single diamond pane flew from its mounting and twirled languidly down in a bending trajectory. Hardly any of the onlookers even saw it. This fluttering
glass blade took Christina at the base of the neck and killed her where she stood.

Her child being five as well as living in isolation made it easier for the unplanned conspiracy to emerge and bear him the news that his mother had been taken seriously ill all of a sudden and wouldn’t be coming back for a while. He accepted this as any child must an adult account of disaster, at face value. At the same time his speechless part must have wondered at the incongruity, at the perfectly everyday fashion in which, only a few hours before, she had pedalled away expressing at the last moment a fake exasperation at his demand to be brought the peppermints he knew she would bring anyway. These delicious mother-and-boy games were snapped off short, at once and for ever, at midday when a motor car drove inexpertly into the yard, temporised by reversing too close to the smoke house door and cuffing it off its hinges, and reluctantly disgorged some pale village women who at once closeted his uncle. After only a few minutes they came out again and got back into the car. One of them reached out of a window with a wild smile and dropped half a bag of liquorice (which he didn’t like) towards Leon’s chest. His hands came up an instant too late, the bag fell and bounced off the running-board and there was a fossil moment. For ever afterwards the image would recur of a crumpled white bag lying on sandy ground in the sunlight, hazed about by an engine’s sound and the sweet pungency of a black tailpipe. Then the exhaust receded, the motor car departed, and everything was over.

His uncle, bereaved brother turned cantankerous guardian, remained an unknown quantity. ‘He’s got his own problems,’ as the teenaged Leon was later to learn in the village, though he never found out what they were and by that time cared less. It was no good trying to impute to the man either a particular cruelty or emotional incompetence, especially not in
a time and place which did its best to deny subtleties of feeling unless they were put into the shorthand of convention. It was easy for his uncle to offend no code but also to give no clue to his own motives when with malign scruples, as weeks lengthened to months, he met his little nephew’s tearful demands to know when his mother was coming home with vague news of her progress from one special sanatorium to another. It soon became impossible for the child to ask while looking directly at his uncle. The stoniness was unbearable. Anguish masked as stoicism? Rage at being badgered to come up with fresh fictions? He gave up asking. One sunny morning she had gone away,
sprrixx,
twinkling off as she always did twice a week, but she had never come twinkling back again and now she never would. That much her bereft child knew. His conviction remained that somewhere beyond the limitless polder, somewhere out in the wide world his mother lay in bed or tottered about in a dressing gown smelling frowsty and looking grey as she did when she had one of her colds. And since he could see her thus, he thought she could surely see him too. How, then, could she bear not to come home and take him in her arms?

In those days Leon howled a lot for his mother. But neither the culture nor the landscape encouraged self-indulgence, and bit by bit the impulse was translated into more appropriate forms. In this way the habit began which marked the rest of his childhood and adolescence of endlessly wandering that desolate littoral in search of driftwood, birds’ eggs, coloured stones, the sounds of water and wind, bobbles of black tar – for any, in fact, but the one thing. And after a time these treasures and their long searches engendered a life, as an oak gall’s tiny grub becomes surrounded by accretions ever denser, larger, more rugose, in final shape and substance utterly unlike their begetter and yet faithfully its home. When he was ten he was allowed to go to the village school if there were no fish to be cleaned and spitted,
and sooner or later the insouciant brutality of childhood dragged him to the churchyard and confronted him with a small plain stone bearing his mother’s name.

‘There,’ they panted in a circle around him. ‘Now will you believe us? Anyway,’ (said their leader) ‘it’s spooky here. I vote we go down to the lighthouse. Or no,’ he added with unexpected kindness, ‘not there. Wim’s trapped some sparrows in his greenhouse. Let’s make his cats get them. Come on, Leon.’

The balder a fact, the more equivocal. This one had immediately split into unrelated parts. Thereafter his mother existed in two tenses simultaneously, past and present; or, like an element, in two allotropes, the one dark and supine in a grave and the other still whitely refusing to come home. Either way it added up to abandonment. At about this time he had begun to avoid looking at the lighthouse and to hate its beam: the long empty finger sweeping over land and sea as if levelling them, ordaining or demarcating an area of blight. As he lay in bed its insistent pulse on the flimsy curtains seemed like surveillance. There were two flashes every twenty seconds. As dusk fell these blips hardened into spokes of light whose inexorable quality added severeness to evening’s melancholy. As if that were not enough the foghorn mounted on a low concrete hut at the lighthouse’s foot sent forth its bellow into the frequent sea mists. These hootings into nowhere sounded, muffled by fog and the remoteness of his house from the village, less strident and more like the regular groans of mortal illness. A territory was defined with Flinn lighthouse at its centre, the circumference of its horizon constantly retraced by the ends of light beams and sound waves. To Leon, glancing up suddenly from where he might be crouched over a drowned gull or the filmy mantle on a peat pool, everything seemed to rush soundlessly outwards into illimitable distance.

The child became the boy, ignorant of all that lay outside
Flinn except as fragments of schoolroom learning. Tucked into shrubs against the wind, himself to himself in small unknown places, he watched the sea and thought of it stretching back from its nearby line of constant collapse to behind the horizon, on and on until it returned somehow, wrapping the world in a wrinkled sleeve. His mind fled away over its surface to far-off nowheres and diluted his grief by smearing it ever thinner across dreamed deserts or forests whose canopies sagged beneath carpets of celestial butterflies. By such lonely acts the faintest heartening echo sometimes came back to him as from temple gongs struck by his thoughts or as scents jarred from distant blossoms.

The boy became the yellow-haired dungareed youth who at every opportunity walked off alone until his uncle’s house was a distant wreck. As he walked he talked in a lively conversational tone to the one who accompanied him. Maybe once, when he was small, he had had the invisible companion whom so many children befriend until one day he or she vanishes, unmissed. This boy talked to his self as it grew, and it spoke back in his own voice or in the speech of waves and wind. Of what did this language consist? Of absolute purity, for one thing, unmuddied by any notions other than his own. His stark and orphaned life contained no music. No impassioned dominie had ever read him poetry with a traitorous glint of tears. Had he had a musical upbringing the sea’s voice might have come to him in the accents of dead composers: the compulsive sequencing which floods the lonely and impressionable child by the shore who constantly hums and whistles his self. Instead the water, the breeze, the birds, shingle and plants were for him an endless syllabary. In correctly hearing and learning to pronounce each sound he talked back to the world which surrounded him, and in talking back intensified the one who spoke.