Griefwork (15 page)

‘But I digress. I haven’t forgotten that my real subject is the palms. However, it was necessary to “set the scene”, as it were, because we now reach the point at which Professor Seneschal and his cronies draw from their already erroneous hypothesis their most opprobrious conclusion – to wit, that far from being a clear and perfected race we cycads are in fact muddled and ambiguous as to our identity, that we have not yet “decided” whether we are “really” palms or conifers. It’s like saying the Professor’s problem is that he has failed to make up his mind to be either a chimpanzee or a fruit bat, though someone more malicious than I might suggest the choice had already been thrust upon him. In any case he says our leaves are reminiscent of palm fronds while our beautiful cones resemble those of fir trees. Oh, the vulgar fallacies of these racist evolutionaries!
Post
hoc
ergo
propter
hoc!
And this same grotesque logic is somehow expected to build into a steady intentional line of descent, culminating in the great Professor himself! Under duress, then, I might well agree that his hands had a remarkable similarity to those of a chimpanzee and – I have this on an authority whose identity I cannot divulge – his gonads bear a considerable resemblance to those of a fruit bat, erectile tissue and all.

‘The palms? Well, as a member of a race which can draw collectively on the memories of a hundred and sixty million years, I can inform the Professor that it’s perfectly meaningless to go on about who derived from what and when. Here we all are, are we not? The fact that there are, undeniably, palm trees in this world whose fronds might be thought to have some faint similarity to our leaves is scarcely a reason for accusing my kind of ambiguity and muddlement. It’s insulting. Besides – and here’s a pertinent question for Herr Doktor Professor –
what’s wrong with ambiguousness in any case? There’s nothing in this world which is not ambiguous, not one single thing which could be said unequivocally to represent “reality”, whatever that might mean. My word, one despairs at the lack of intellectual sophistication on the part of some of these newer – my apologies again, dammit, but I’m sure you’ll forgive my heatedness. This dreary simplistic way of looking at things gets me on the raw, I’m afraid.

‘The real problem with the palms derives largely, in my view, from their crude height. This casual fact of nature has led directly to all their faults of character. I’m sorry to stoop from the level of scientific discourse for a moment to that of mere moralism, but anyone in this House would readily agree with this opinion. To borrow the repugnant idiom of the times which I’ve heard bandied about by recent visitors, the palms have a tendency towards a “Master Race” complex. More unfortunate still, it’s made worse by the attitude of
Homo
sapiens
sapiens
(too wise by half!) which merely encourages the palms’ belief in their own superiority. I’ve made this a matter of some study so you won’t find me short of ammunition. What? Oh very well, then, chapter and verse. Linnaeus, who described many of the more than 2,500 species of palm, called them the princes of the plant kingdom since they supplied
Homo
with food and shelter and clothing. This is notoriously not the behaviour of most princes, but we’ll let it pass. He also pointed out that the etymology of the name “palm” derived from that of the palm of the hand since the fronds reminded humans of their own fingers. Linnaeus was, of course, a man himself. Any plant meeting with mankind’s favour is accorded royal status! So much for scientific objectivity. Such childish hierarchies! There’s also a glaring inconsistency here. We cycads are considered “muddled” because we remind man of both palms and conifers. Why, then, isn’t
Homo
equally muddled because palms remind him of himself? Why indeed.
But it gets worse, as this Leon fellow’s readings in the Society’s library will confirm. If you turn to the
Deutsches
Magazin
für
Garten-
und
Blumenkunde
for 1872 (volume 25, I fancy), you will find the following pieces of dotty anthropomorphism, which I’ll take the liberty of doing into your own language to save time:

‘This is lamentable stuff, to be sure, and we need hardly bother to spike the weak points in such analogies. Separation into two sexes, forsooth! Most palms are monoecious, are they not? The same plant bears both male and female flowers. No ambiguity there, of course; oh no. (
Our
male and female cones, I’d like to remind you, are borne on separate plants.) And as for the “fibrous bark”, I’d always understood that the whole point about
Homo’
s alleged superiority was precisely that he was
not
covered with a pelt of hair. It’s clear that Professor Seneschal and his ilk still unconsciously think of themselves as apes, no doubt from having been apes far longer than they’ve been men. But let us proceed:

‘Gentlemen, [said
Encephalartos
with a lecturer’s at-a-loss gesture] I ask you. With all this sheer tosh talked about them, is it surprising it’s gone to the palms’ heads? When those passages were written the palm – in however stunted and ignoble a form – had become an essential ingredient in any bourgeois household, whether in drawing room or conservatory, as several of the species in this House bear witness. (One searches in vain, I submit, for anything
princely
in these runts and dwarves.) The palm was thereby reduced to a mere cliché of the exotic, a symbol of the longing which urban man felt for a rustic and supposedly spiritual self he had lost somewhere in the past. Oh dear, oh dear. One really does despair. All I can say is that so far as anyone in this House is concerned the planet had been getting on quite well without this sort of pretentious prattle. Before that, palms were just tall plants, and nowhere near the tallest. Nowadays it appears they’re actually the nests of gods, mainly because they remind human beings of themselves. And we cycads are supposed to be primitive? Words fail me.’

For once, this turned out to be true and
Encephalartos
relapsed into his customary pithy gloom.

The Gardens are being dug, weeded, bushes trimmed and tied. The lawns have been cut and young men stand on wooden edging boards driving half-moon blades into the straggly turf to produce crisp lines. Others pull rollers or, crouched in potting sheds, laboriously stencil fresh signs and labels to replace those faded to illegibility. There is no shortage of able-bodied help, for the economy is not yet back on its feet. The currency is unstable, the black market thrives: Swiss watches, cameras, nylons, scent, cigarettes, spirits; but also butter, petrol, paraffin oil for heaters, meat, coal, eggs. Any work is better than none, a pittance preferable to no income. Assets are gradually unfrozen and members of the Royal Botanic Society return from visits to London and Zurich having retrieved funds judiciously salted away six years earlier. Their bequests and loans not only turn them from Members into Fellows but enable the Society to hire abundant cheap labour for the Gardens and to put in hand repairs to its devastated seventeenth-century seat, the beautiful mansion at the far end of the grounds …

Not true, any of it, apart from the black market. Wars do not end as neatly as chapters, nor does regeneration follow on their boot-heels like spring. Nothing is clear. In the listlessness of convalescence everything is lacking, uncriminal energies in
particular. Unfinished business yields with difficulty to new. Bygones become foregones, as a bed whose blighted soil infects healthy transplanted seedlings. As a matter of fiction, as a matter of fact, the Society’s elegant headquarters had indeed been left something of a ruin. Early in the war it was requisitioned by the German Agricultural Secretariat and over the years had been comprehensively looted. At the last moment before the occupation Dr Anselmus and a colleague had managed to save some of the better pictures, furniture and carpets. The most valuable books and archives had also been hidden. The men had run a great risk with commendable bravery and since the war’s end a certain amount of commending had been done. The stuff remained where it was, however, because the mansion was in no fit state for priceless objects and incunabula. Until lately it had been used for billeting French, then American troops. When at last it was vacated the horticulturists could wander in through its lolling front doors and take stock of what remained. They looked in silence at the scratched marble flooring, the stairs splintered by hobnailed boots. Upstairs they found they had been bequeathed twenty-six massive and hideous oak filing cabinets,
Ministerium
style, several hundred of their own empty wine bottles and some scattered sheets of official stationery headed with embossed black spread-eagles which were too scuffed and trampled to have been worth the soldiers’ taking as souvenirs. Most of the shutters were missing, along with much panelling and wainscoting. Somebody said darkly how remarkable it was the way that fellow Leon had kept the Palm House heated right through last winter; nobody could quite bring themselves openly to accuse him of having chopped up the Society’s immemorial seat. ‘Even if so,’ as Dr Anselmus said, ‘it would have been in a good cause and not for personal gain. Better burnt by him to preserve our living assets than to toast the thick ankles of some German secretary.’ He arranged to have the filing cabinets removed to him for fuel.

Uneasy conversations took place over the only available refreshment, limeflower tea laced with cheap schnapps.

‘Can’t you feel it?’

‘What?’ asked Leon absently as he poked his finger into a pot of soil to test its dampness.

‘The uncertainty. Everything’s uncertain.’ This colleague, an under-gardener in the Temperate House, was a religiously troubled man who would nod significantly when words like ‘dust’, ‘smoke’ or ‘ashes’ drifted innocently through people’s speech. ‘Our money. Our jobs. This whole place, even.’

‘The Gardens? The
Palm
House, you mean?’ Its curator glanced upwards as if glass were already tinkling about his ears.

‘Yes, mate, the
Palm
House,’ the under-gardener said, pleasantly satisfied at shattering a comfortable illusion.
‘And
the Gardens. Don’t you ever look further ahead than bedtime tonight?’

‘Not often,’ admitted Leon.

‘You ought to, sometime. Might save you having a heart attack when the Society goes broke and we’re out on the streets.’

‘The Society goes broke?’ Echoing the phrase made it sound still more preposterous. ‘How could it? I mean, it’s the
Society.’

‘Well, it can, you mark my words. The things of Man, the toys of Earth. According to Peter this morning, Anselmus says the estimate for repairs to the house alone’s forty thousand. That’s just the house, mind. On top of that it’ll cost five thousand to bring the gardens round – and that only means back to the condition they were in in ’Thirty-nine. It doesn’t include all the things they were going to have to do then. You remember? Completely re-dig the lake, rebuild the Temperate House from scratch because of the damp rot, dry rot, woodworm, the lot. Put a new heating system into this place. You’ve always said the boilers have had it. All those things’ll cost a packet. Willesz
says they’ve got about enough money to keep us on our present salary for the rest of this year. Two years if they don’t take on any of the new men we need.’

‘Something’ll turn up.’

‘I spent yesterday with Jan nailing up the front doors of the house and putting up what shutters are left. They haven’t got forty thousand, not anything like, so the place’ll have to wait. It’ll be all right so long as the weather doesn’t get in. The roof’s sound, at least.’

‘Something’ll turn up.’

Since that morning months had passed and the gulf Leon had felt opening seemed to have closed again. The boilers throbbed loyally, the gravel crunched firmly beneath his flapping galoshes, the plants creaked with growth and the night people were trooping in to gossip and shelter and admire his blooms. Better still, they were paying for the privilege, nominal entrance fees whose scrupulous surrender by Leon touched Dr Anselmus and made him still sadder since he knew things his famous stove house expert did not. But then, everybody knew things Leon didn’t. The princess was no exception, with her Lancôme scent and flirty predictions. He listened to their gossip but the rumours never quite touched him. They hung about like cobwebs in an untidy bachelor’s house, so familiar he no longer noticed them. That is, until one candlelit night when, in the grotto behind a stand of bamboo, he came face to face with the spider. He overheard a conversation among a group gathered around the night-flowering
Cestrum
whose slender yellow-green flowers they were sampling.

‘I say, Bettrice, try this one … There. Isn’t that divine?’

Her ‘Mm, yes’ mingled with ‘Make the most of it’ from a second male voice.

‘But surely they can’t?’ said the woman. ‘Legally, I mean. Part of the nation’s heritage. You can’t sell off a public garden.’

‘That’s just what they’re wrangling about, whether it’s actually part of the University and therefore public or private. Weren’t you there when André was saying all that about the city council getting the estates department to come up with a watertight plan?’

‘I never listen to what André says, darling. He’s always using phrases like “watertight plan”.’

‘Well, all right, I grant he’s a bit dreary. But he’s in the know.’

‘And “in the know”.’

‘I’m not doing very well.’

‘Not if you’re hoping to sell me on André’s intellect, no. If you’re trying to convince me he’s been eavesdropping on City Hall gossip you needn’t bother. We already know he does that.
C’est
son
métier,
after all. The man’s a journalist.’

‘They have their uses. He might at least ensure this whole business gets aired before it becomes a national scandal. This isn’t a satrapy any longer. It’s supposed to be a democracy again. I like to know what’s being done in my name.’

‘In
your
name, Charles?’

‘He’s right, Bettrice,’ said the other man. ‘It’s all very grand to form coalitions and governments of national reconstruction and invoke crisis and emergency and so on, but you’ve got to watch these people like a hawk. This place is a plum.’ (‘Hawks? Plums?’ Bettrice could be heard murmuring.) ‘How many acres, do you reckon? Can’t be less than ten, surely. Imagine: ten acres of verdant real estate this close to the centre of town. And calls on all sides for mass new housing as well as these grandiose plans of theirs for commercial hubbery – “entrepôt status” or whatever the cant phrase is. That means a lot more people, a lot more shops and offices. It’s the exact moment when those buggers with the powdered jowls who survived the war at a profit begin casting around for likely sites for land deals. You yourself said the other day your horrid little landlord had just
snapped up that entire bombed street. The one with the Lutheran church.’

‘I don’t like this at all,’ came Bettrice’s voice muffled in petals. ‘You try, Charles. Talk about exotic. It’s sort of druggy, as if it’s trying to anaesthetise you. Isn’t it? See what I mean?’ There was a masculine grunt. ‘Boring old plots and conspiracies, then.’

‘Of course. Fill in the blanks yourself. On the one hand a choice piece of land and a national need for building sites. On the other a bunch of botanical dodderers, dons and professors and women with tweed skirts and scratched wrists. Stony broke, the lot of them. Can’t even reopen their own headquarters because they can’t afford to repair it, while their grounds go on looking like the aftermath of Stalingrad. Even this Palm House, which is a real gem in its way, looks pretty tatty outside. Now of course the Fellows and professors and whatnot will have some fancy parchments locked away which no doubt contain phrases like “inalienable possession in perpetuity”. They’ve also got a government which claims it hasn’t the money to bail them out but which by magic could probably afford to
buy
them out. It would just be dolled up to look like an act of principled generosity. They’d offer an alternative site twice as large and far enough outside the suburbs to be properly rural, gift of the nation, blah-blah, even more inalienable and even more in perpetuity, tax-free status for the Society and the odd bizarre right such as fifty tons of free manure a year from the Royal stables and a hogshead of beer per gardener. Authenticity. The nation pays to transport the whole caboodle, the King signs the charter his predecessors must have failed to sign for these premises, and even before the ink’s dry the air’s full of flying bits of gentleman’s bespoke pin-striping as this place gets carved up.’

‘All that, yes. Plausible enough. But surely you can’t
trans
plant
… I mean, can you actually move a place like this? What is there? Just plants and air.’

‘Who knows?’ This was Charles’s voice. ‘I believe every word of it. A palm house, well, it’s just a lot of old glass and ironwork, isn’t it? A thing like that wouldn’t stand in their way. He’s right. They’ll offer to build a modern one out wherever, brand new heating, all Vita glass or whatever the stuff’s called. Anyway, what about the docks? You know where those refineries were on the island before the RAF bombed them? They’re talking of building a completely new terminal away on the estuary and turning the island into a dormitory town. Something else to look forward to. We shan’t know the place. And the point is, we live here. We should have some say … Do you think this is mould or are these leaves naturally blue?’

It entered Leon’s awareness that they must have reached the
Chamaedorea
metallica
which he had hand-pollinated so it had fruited the previous year. He shifted his position and immediately felt the coursing of blood to limbs forgotten and frozen. The pit had opened again and into his mind came no words but a wash of black solvent whose acrid flood nothing could withstand. Not just the Palm House but a succession of unidentifiable solidities fell to driftwood in an outward spread of concentric rings. It was not to be stopped. Under a clay-coloured sky baulks of timber trundled in the surf or lay stretched like bodies at all angles on the sand. After all there was to be no escape. It lay beneath everything, eroding, undercutting: fish oil and smoke and frozen hands and an absence too huge to be named.

When the visitors left they took with them much of this turmoil of dissolution. When he was once more alone with his plants and the candle flames burning steadily in the dark a calm resolution possessed him. He made a thoughtful round of his night blooms. The scent of each recalled its history, reminding him of hours of tending, of watching and sniffing and touching
(for the texture of leaves, tumescence of cells, stiffness of vascular bundles tells much about a plant’s health). It brought back memories, too, of scrounging and sawing and hauling; of rising five times a night to replenish inferior fuel in boilers which would have stayed in happily on a couple of hundredweight of good coal. Of Felix, and whatever crumbled within him at the thought of discovery and endings, of draggings out into daylight’s jeering scrutiny. Of standing alone on this very spot on terrifying nights with the searchlights whanging overhead like crazed lighthouses. He longed for order, or at least for a disorder which had become permanent.
‘Sprrixx,’
he breathed, and saw sunlight flashing on bicycle spokes, the tiny beams glittering round and round. The dark dissolve might reach inland to that point, but there it had to stop, held for ever at bay by those twinkling wheels,
sprrixx.

Well then, he would fight. Which was to say (feeling the drowsing power of growth encircling him, any rootlet of which could lift concrete) they would fight. Or resist. Or intrigue or do whatever one did to get one’s way. ‘We took on a gang of pariahs with knives. What are a lot of soft men in suits?’ he asked the plants as he paused and strolled, stroking leaves and caressing stems. ‘Nothing,’ he clearly heard them reply. ‘Anyway, we have Dr Anselmus on our side,’ which was surely true. A powerful ally indeed. The Society was internationally renowned; it was inconceivable they would ever agree to the sort of plans he’d just overheard. A garden was not something one could move, after all. It took years to grow into its shape – in this case centuries. Even if in some imaginary world every plant and tree could be transported alive to take root infallibly in a new site it wouldn’t constitute the same garden.