Griefwork (6 page)

Several days’ snow had left the Palm House practically deserted, with few visitors by day and none at night. Leon presumed they had little faith in the buses and trams which ran the sketchiest of services past the Botanical Gardens’ main gate, and equally little coal to dry their shoes and thaw their feet once they did arrive home. On an auspicious morning when it wasn’t actually snowing he allowed himself to hope for one of the princess’s surprise visits.

He had spent an hour or two potting up
Annona
muricata
seedlings, a task which had been delayed. This was a small tree whose fruit the English knew as soursop and the Spanish as
guayabano,
hinting at a non-existent connection with guavas. He had never seen this fruit but knew it from illustrations to be dark green, vaguely pear-shaped and covered with soft spikes, sometimes growing to the size of an irregular cantaloup melon. There were thirty seedlings, and he touched their first glossy leaves with affection. It never staled, the pleasure of watching seeds which had formed inside fruit warmed by a tropic sun in a forest eight thousand miles away sprouting into an alien world, duped by heat and light and moisture. Such a light, too, as no
Annona
would ever normally see. The snow outside riddled the Palm House with its glare, blotting up colour and
replacing it with brilliant blacks and whites and greys. So strong were its effects that it had the qualities less of light than of a chemical which, when people were dipped in it, etched brutal discriminations. Anyone below the age of twenty it turned into children; anyone above it aged. The cold which accompanied this light afforded its own litmus test, too, the young going pink and the old blue.

Leon had been outside to see if there were any fox tracks. In his apprentice days before the war there had been a population of foxes in the gardens but it was some time since he had heard, seen or smelt one. They, too, might have been eaten. He found no tracks and the cold air had brought on a spasm of coughing so violent he had staggered back indoors bent over, his face suffused, legs weakening at each step. Once inside he had sat heavily down on the gravel – the sensation was more of having been pushed to the ground – while the steamy vapours slowly eased his lungs. There was, he vaguely knew, something else, something connected with the heart. ‘Lungs and heart,’ as the doctor had said years ago, tapping the varnished tube of his stethoscope on the palm of his hand, ‘lungs and heart. No use thinking of them as separate. They’re both bedfellows in a sick chest.’ For a moment on the gravel Leon had felt the weakness spread upwards throughout his body like hemlock so that even his vision grew momentarily dim though with red streaks like sunset. ‘But of course we’re none of us up to snuff,’ he told himself when he was back on his feet. ‘Short commons for everyone. What can you expect on half rations?’

Even as he returned to his seedlings he felt optimistic about the future. Things could only improve. Here were thirty little plants where a month or two ago had been none. Probably half of them would wind up in other gardens, at Kew outside London, at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, the Orto Botanico in Florence, in Paris, Brussels, Edinburgh, The Bronx. Obviously
Berlin and Frankfurt would have to wait. Who knew what was left of those once-magnificent gardens? Strangely, many of the learned societies which administered such places had managed to remain in touch throughout the war. It had been amazing how amid bombing and shelling and with an entire continent in convulsions of militarised chaos, a network of private links and public services like veins beneath the skin had pulsed on in some sort of fashion. Late in the war Leon had been caught in an American daylight raid when the whole city centre had been cleared of people, tin-helmeted wardens herding everyone off the streets and into shelters. His last sight before being pushed underground had been of a postman, open leather satchel in a steel basket on the handlebars of his bicycle, pedalling among the last raid’s uprooted cobblestones while troops and gunners dashed for their positions. The postman was holding a letter as he rode, reading the address. It had flashed upon him how layered reality was, not at all a single thing. The postman belonged to another, concurrent version, like a ghost of prewar days passing through in a dream. By such means had the Royal Botanic Society kept in touch with brother bodies, exchanging professorial greetings, learned papers, even seeds and cuttings, the hideousness of human behaviour made to vanish in the contemplation of a new rose or a batch of tenderly coaxed seedlings.

It made him happy, then, to imagine these little plants leaving him to join another collection elsewhere, new life being passed from hand to hand, propagating itself together with knowledge. Was he not a midwife in his mould-stained apron, bringing into the world difficult infants in this great incubator, rearing, training and strengthening them until they could flourish on their own and be ready to leave if need be? His children. Up and down the nave, in aisles and transepts, beneath the dome, his children, rampaging with vigour. Only when placed in the context of the snowscapes outside could they be seen as delicate.
On their own terms they burgeoned fit to cover the Earth.

Towards noon the sun broke weakly through to light up the south-facing angles of the Palm House roof. There the snow melted from the panes’ topmost edges and sagged to form wet crescents of palish sky. At ground level the temperature remained below freezing, the snow pristine but for the twiglike tracks of birds and the scars of his own flounderings. This layer also transfigured the gardens, hiding signs of damage and neglect. The head under-gardener had been pensioned off, having lost a leg in a tram accident during the blackout. Two other gardeners had been killed in air raids and several boys and men had never returned from conscription into the army. Evidently the Society did not yet feel financially secure enough to fill their vacant posts. The beautiful seventeenth-century mansion attached to the gardens and forming the Society’s headquarters had been requisitioned by occupying forces and left partially ruined. The current priority seemed to be to restore the house before the gardens. Nothing was quite certain. Meanwhile, snow covered all evidence of indecision.

Leon was suddenly prompted to drop what he was doing and go and look at his lotuses. He had scrounged some immense aluminium roasting pans of military origin which now were laid out in a double row where the winter sun fell through the glass. The pans were filled with water up to the rims of the flowerpots they held, each with its sacred lotus. The pots themselves were no longer visible, being hidden beneath the plants’ circular pads and many-petalled flowers which placidly basked in the faintly blue snowlight. He had acquired the seeds from Burma just before the war but had only recently turned them out and grown them and discovered to his relief that they were a nearly pure white variety instead of the usual effeminate pink. The profound silence of these two complementary whitenesses separated only by a membrane of glass now brought a moisture of satisfaction to
his eyes. He relished the intense juxtaposition of two worlds whose huge disparity in miles had simply been compressed into a temperature differential of thirty degrees centigrade. Suddenly taken with the idea of stuffing the entire Palm House with lotuses he found a box containing a last couple of dozen seeds, filled a jam jar with water and took six of the hard, greyish-purple nuts which looked like small olives, pierced the rounded end of each with the point of a nail and dropped them in. Within a few days they ought to have germinated and could then be potted out to join the others in the roasting pans.

In early afternoon the sun was a reddening ball balanced on the roof of the Temperate House when Leon heard the squeal of the entrance doors. He was far away, adjusting the padded zinc halter which, by means of a long cable strung from a bracket, supported the venerable head of a cycad,
Encephalartos
altensteinii.
Grown from a seedling by a founder member of the Society, this ancient palm fern now had a stem nearly a foot thick whose rind, marked by the print of every stalk it had ever produced, was reminiscent in its spiral dotted pattern of something briefly glimpsed as a lump of coal cleaves in a grate. He paid no attention to whoever had entered until aware of a motionless presence at the edge of vision.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the princess.

Evidently her own skin contained a substance impervious to the corrosive reagent in snowlight, for she looked neither younger nor older but only slightly paler, wrapped in furs with ice melting from the welts of her boots. A cylindrical muff hung from her neck.

‘Why is nobody here?’ she asked, glancing about in surprise. ‘Outside it’s – the whole world is –
derelict.
Only here is life and warmth. You’re like a heart, I think, beating and beating in this frozen body of Europe.’

How small she is by day, he thought. He found this saddened
him. Outside the mysterious persona created for her by the night people she appeared defenceless. The snow only exposed her further. He mounted a step-ladder to tauten the stay.

‘Why are you putting wire around its neck?’

‘It’s been wired for years. Probably since last century. Too heavy to support itself.’

‘Surely it can’t be? In the wild there are no kind gardeners.’

‘No. It would have collapsed and decayed long since. Except in freak circumstances it wouldn’t have lived as long as this. Guess how old it is?’

‘You said they put the wire on last century, so I’ll say a hundred years. But a hundred years for a plant in a pot must be impossible.’

‘I believe the Japanese grow miniature trees in pots to a far greater age. This cycad’s a hundred and seventy-three years old. We’re almost certain it’s the Western world’s oldest potted plant. Beautiful, isn’t it?’

‘Not very,’ said the princess. ‘It’s all bent and quite undistinguished. If I saw it like that in my garden at home I should tell my gardeners to pull it up.’

‘Exactly. That’s why it’s beautiful. It’s a survivor, and all survivors have beauty. It has everything against it. By present standards the cycads are primitive, some say the most primitive plants still alive. See its stem and the shape of the leaves? They say “palm”, don’t they? But look at this – a cone. It’s so ancient that botanists claim it hasn’t yet reached the evolutionary crossroads of deciding whether to be a palm tree or a conifer. Propagation’s slow and difficult. Already you can see it shouldn’t be here at all. It ought to be a hundred and sixty million years in the past. But here it is. Add to that its rarity, and people like you and your gardeners, to say nothing of the cold only a few feet away which would shrivel it within minutes, and you’ll understand why I think it’s beautiful. For as long as we can keep it happy and
protected this
Encephalartos
will remain one of Europe’s most celebrated plants.’ He caressed the thick, woody trunk.

For a moment she watched his hands, then said ‘I think you’re a strong man.’

‘What?’ he glanced up absently.

‘A strong man. Someone who doesn’t care what people think of him. Who’s free inside himself. Who dares tell diplomats and aristocrats to stop smoking.’ She wiped mist away from a pane with a fur cuff. ‘I like that kind of power. The other kind is – what was that expression? – two-a-penny.’

Leon only murmured ‘power’, musingly, an aside which might have been no more than a conventional politeness while his attention wandered.

‘We’ve all had a surfeit of tyranny,’ she continued. ‘You here in Europe, we in Asia. Swaggering generals, swaggering armies, police chiefs, politicians, mayors, landowners, petty officials, criminal bosses. In only the last five years my country has been liberated by the Japanese – according to them – and now by the Allies – according to them. Nobody bothered to ask us, but we were perfectly content six years ago without all these liberations and massacres.’ She moved to another pane and drew a neat line of curlicues in the condensation. From each letter, if indeed it was writing, a drop of water gathered and ploughed its way downward, increasing in size and momentum. ‘A river of dead children, this I have seen. From one side to the other. Like little logs floating. Now they tell us things are back to normal again, it was a hiccup of history. So what are we to think of all that power? Those swaggering generals?’

She turned from the window and Leon, who was still caressing the cycad, gave a start and said, ‘Me? I’m just a gardener.’

‘One who would tell a swaggering general to stop smoking in your Palm House, I’ve no doubt.’

‘Maybe I have hidden motives. I’ll show you something.’
She followed him obediently as he walked back and took from its shelf the half-f jar of fermenting cigarette juice. He shook it and she watched the brown liquid tumble and froth, the fragments of paper and shreds of tobacco whirling. ‘Not power,’ he said. ‘Self interest. As always.’

‘I don’t understand. Oh, maybe you don’t like the smell of cigarettes. But that’s a private dislike, not self interest.’

‘No. This juice is valuable to me. I need it. So I collect cigarettes from people who smoke here. Before the war I didn’t bother because I had a tobacco supply. Now there’s a market even for the stubs. So if I can take nearly whole cigarettes away from people like that Italian diplomat who comes here, I’m in luck and it makes me vigilant. As soon as they light up, there I am with my jar and what you call my power. It’s no more than a need for nicotine.’

‘A need?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘You mean, you …?’

‘Drink it? Inject it? No, just spray it on the plants. Nicotine’s a wonderful pesticide.’

‘I’ll pay you a compliment,’ she said, ‘but it’s the truth. You’re a better gardener than any in my country. You understand our own plants better than we do ourselves. How can this be, since you told me once you’ve never been further than this city and that place by the sea where you were born?’

‘I’ve studied,’ he said with a certain haughty modesty. ‘I don’t think it matters where a plant comes from. They’re all the same, really. Of course, some prefer heat and others cold, some need more water or a different soil, a lot of light or plenty of shade. It’s just a matter of knowing these things and then paying attention to each plant to get the balance. Start with the idea that things
want
to grow, that they have to be actively dissuaded from growing. You’ve seen that patch of concrete by the main entrance? You can’t at the moment, of course, but when the snow clears have a look as you come in and out. They
put that down only three years ago for the commandant’s car’ (an immense Mercedes with little silver flagpoles on each wing sporting swastika pennants) ‘and already there’s grass coming up through the cracks. The other sort of power. There’s no mystery, you know. A gardener like me doesn’t really have to do anything much except watch and listen. The plants do the rest.’