Mr Darwin's Gardener (8 page)

What a pity! Poor boy! If you wonder why John Davies is no good at fist fights, you know now. You know why he keeps stumbling on flat ground!

Duchenne
and
Dystrophia musculorum progressiva.

Eileen Faine and Sarah Hamilton try out French and Latin.

A waste of time. The first thing speech gets rid of is words that twist your tongue. No need for fancy words; you can get the gist without them. The disease wastes the sufferer's muscles. He loses the ability to walk. He dies before reaching adulthood. There is no cure.

Repent and be cured.

This is what happens when an atheist elevates himself above the Lord, when he does not respect his Creator, who can change a rock into a pool of water and a stone into a well.

The prophet says that
every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth for the coming of the Messiah.

In Holwood, a hundred yards towards Downe, there is a treacherous hole.

I pray for them. I put my own affairs to one side. You understand, Lord, I am praying for succour for Thomas
Davies and mercy for his son. Thy Will Be Done, of course. My heart is heavy with concern for my Margaret and for Thomas, although excessive worrying involves the sin of disbelief. I do not know better than You what is right, but I think that illness and misfortune affecting children is wrong.

Because there is grief under my own roof.

Is there ever a time without sorrows? I compare mine to Thomas's misfortunes. I am startled, as if a dark figure had passed by the window at dusk. Things could be worse, but the closest I get to joy is a sigh of relief.

The congregation must abandon quarrels and conflict, and pray together in church for Thomas Davies and his children.

The trouble is, we cannot even agree on the service.

Not to mention God. And there are many opinions and disputes about the Creation.

I asked to make an appointment with Dr Kenny in order to see the book in which a facially paralysed man is made to smile by means of electricity. But the doctor had closed the book. I did get ointment for my piles.

Who knows, maybe the congregation is planning to give my wheelchair to the boy, if I have the sense to die first. They think they know best. And reason pulls at the heart-strings.

Who is the source of the information that John Davies suffers from a deadly and debilitating disease? Whoever finds that out, they shall be left holding the end of the string.

What did I say? Sickness engages the mind more than love, because sickness comes to everyone, but love can give you a wide berth.

Grief is shared by talking, and there is enough for everyone. It is inexhaustible, like the fish and loaves in the Bible. Even crumbs are gathered up by the basketful. Oh, ah, alas, alack.

A rumour can do without its subject. When a rumour spreads, the person concerned is not needed at all, for other people's talk speaks for him. And once the rumour has been propped up with words aplenty and then patched up, you can lean on it with your whole weight.

BALDERDASH, I say.

It is snowing on the second Sunday of Advent as Thomas Davies stands on the steps outside his house and looks at the allocated area, fifty-five by twenty-two yards in size. His footprints and the children's show up in the old, dry snow. Large flakes float on to the field. The church bells ring. The echo reverberates in the cold air, moves away and disappears.

When the boom of the bells and of human voices becomes quiet, the white silence of snow dominates the landscape.

I no longer shout cold prayers at the sky.

Though my despair was mighty, my soul is, after all, a strong, four-stranded rope with a core of hemp or jute. When reason and hope arise from the long season of despair, it is time to think, and make plans, and banish the God who has haunted me since childhood. His voice is planted in our heads and does not allow us a word in edgeways.

God is silent now, but the sun rises and sets.

He went, was silent at last.

He watched Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, punished the woman with pain and cursed the earth so it grew thorns and thistles; He expelled the people from the garden, eastwards, and posted guards at the gates; 
He wanted to wipe people off the face of the earth, and cattle, reptiles, the birds of the sky! He wanted a deluge to destroy all flesh, everything that contained the spirit of life, though he forged a covenant with Noah and made a rainbow in the sky as a token thereof. Still He did not stop harassing people, but tormented Job, Lot, Isaac; and punished Egypt with frogs and lice and horseflies and cattle plague and boils and hailstones and locusts and darkness! He did not let Moses into the Promised Land; He made laws and, when they were in place, He rushed among the heathens to destroy their shrines and stone those who worshipped false gods; He threatened to strike with rashes, abscesses and madness; He allowed thumbs and big toes to be cut, swords to kill, cities to be set on fire. He shouted like a lunatic:
Ye have not obeyed my voice: why have ye done this?
And every time his ire was ignited, he handed people over to the neighbouring enemies.

He humiliated, killed and had killed, meddled in the affairs of nations, tribes, families and villages; His shouting hurt ears and His lust for revenge was insatiable. A shout planted in my head would not leave me in peace, day or night, nor did people who in the Lord's name wished each other all the worst; their pious clamour nearly split my eardrums.

Until I saw God the night before last. He was short, sturdy, dark, hirsute and long-haired. I saw him walk hunched past the house. The last thing He did before walking to the forest and disappearing was say something.

He is silent, and the congregation is silent, and I hear what silence sounds like when even the wind fails to touch the bare branches and snow floats down. He passed but He
left me my daughter and my son, the soft reinforcement of the four-stranded rope.

She runs, Sarah Hamilton runs, and her heels get caught in the tough hay under the snow. She stumbles, her hem whips her legs, her chest feels tight. She pants, drops trickle from her forehead alongside her nose. She runs. When she reaches the road from the meadow, a lump of snow falls off her shoe. She smells the scent of vinegar and onion on her body. She runs, stops, looks right and left, the village road is empty, not a soul, no cat, no dog. Must go to the vicarage, to Dr Kenny. She saw what she saw; they lay in the snow, all three of them, Thomas, the girl and the boy.

I will lose my breath, too.

My heart is thumping. The snowfall thickens. She shakes snowflakes off her bonnet, straightens her skirt, the hem is caught in a hawthorn bush. No one visible through the windows, must knock on doors, bang on the door that conceals a man and some sense. Lord God, bless and protect, because every misfortune befell one man. Thomas put an end to himself and his children. They are
dead
.

They put on boots, scarves, all at sixes and sevens, in a hurry. Word gets around, chess games and tea-drinking are abandoned. Where's the blanket, medicine bag, Bible? They run up and down stairs, doors slam, body and soul in distress and in a tearing hurry. Coat on, inside out but never mind, handkerchiefs. Faster now, and a lantern, it is not dark yet. It soon will be. Forgot the hat, it's snowing. It's grown milder, wet flakes come down, quickly, quickly. Sarah shows the way. There, there, to the field, that is where they… Quiet now, get going, run. Where is the doctor? What about the vicar? No time for a clergyman.

When Thomas Davies and Cathy Davies and John Davies walk along the edge of the field and step on to the road, the backs of their coats covered with snow, the vanguard of the villagers stops without a sound. For once in their lives, nobody manages to utter a word, not even Sarah Hamilton. They nod and bow silently to Thomas, who raises his hat.

They stand on the road in their dark clothes, as the sparse, bluish light of the winter day changes to twilight and the damp flakes of the ever-denser snowfall soak damply into woollen cloth, and make hair and faces wet. They are not good people and they are not bad people. They shift their feet in the slush, ashamed and abashed. Nobody speaks, but inside his coat, each is just as alone as Thomas Davies, who stood on the slope with his mouth agape during service. Melancholy has invaded their minds, but you cannot wring a soul dry like a handkerchief. Each feels the weight of his own sorrows and wishes and yearnings. The burden cannot be lowered on to a neighbour's shoulders. Nor do prayers rise in snowfall, in the dark, under a
low-lying
sky. As they stand on the road, motionless, silent, wet and freezing, they feel that despair is not the hardest thing in life – the absence of hope is.

Someone lights a lantern and the flickering flame
illuminates
the snowfall as the crowd disperses into figures that vanish, shadow-like, through the doors of the houses, each into the light of his own home and into his own life, which, after a brief, quiet moment, continues its course.

The sun climbs higher and banishes the coolness of the night from ditches and furrows.

Under trees, squills push dry leaves out of their way and thin-stemmed bells cover the forest floor with blue. Bright lawns bloom with narcissi, hundreds, thousands of narcissi. The bright yellow trumpets, the orange bowls and discs of their corollas, turn towards the sun and spread their scent in the air.

A lark springs out of the grass and ascends towards the pale-blue firmament, singing a long note.

A chaffinch on the branch of an oak lets out a rising verse and sparrows twitter in the holm-oak hedges.

When the wind blows from the south-west, and the cold and warm currents meet between forest and church, the jackdaws are caught in the turbulence and glide upside down. They spread their wings against the wind and descend topsy-turvy, stomachs facing the sky, kyah, kyah, kyah, until…

A bird's eye spots a red thread caught on a hawthorn prickle, quivering in the whirl of the wind. The jackdaw breaks out of the turbulence, lands, pecks, flies up to the tower and takes the thread to its nest.

A magpie flits off a roof to a fence and from the fence to the grass. On the ground, its beak stabs a matt-brown, swollen chestnut. Two green leaves on a sturdy, pale-yellow stalk push out of a crack in the shell.

In a hollow, circles spread on the dark-green surface of the pond. The water bubbles as frogs climb on top of each other. Three, five, seven frogs in a pile squeeze the frog below between their thighs and paddle with their webbed feet.

The depths of the pond hum and croak as a stiff-legged frog clambers up to the muddy bank.

On the edge, a ginger cat lies in the short green grass, body tense, ears flattened, tail swishing.

The frog jumps. The cat leaps, the claws of its right front paw out. It strikes, scratches the frog's cool, wet skin, then quickly withdraws its paws. It sits down on the bank, licks its paws, gets up and steps slowly backwards on rigid legs, back arched. Then it turns round and runs into the grass.

A brown hare leaps over the stubbly field at the edge of the forest, stops, stands erect. Another brown hare stops, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth and a seventh. They stand tall on their hind legs, some twenty yards apart, ears straight, bodies immobile.

The wind blows from the field into the forest. Two crows fly after a goshawk. The crows circle the hawk, and when the hawk breaks its flight to hover, the crows catch up with it. The hawk beats the air with its wings and flies high above the crows.

When the cat jumps over a fallen tree trunk, a rotten branch, sunk into the wet grass, cracks. In the blink of an eye, the brown hares spring into a run: one, two, three,
four, five, six, seven. They hop into the forest, and the hawk, gliding high above, sees a field underneath. Green, pointed shoots appear from the soil between pale-brown, dry stubble.

Brimstone butterflies with yellow wings and green wings flutter by the side of the ditch. The cat runs after them. It lifts both front paws up into the air and leaps, sinks back to the ground, turns its head, skips, runs. The butterflies fly a yard, two yards, land on the bottom branches of the hawthorn and fold their wings. The sun shines through their wings. The cat crouches. Its tail swishes as it leaps forwards. The butterflies float in the air, they fly right and left, turn, land, fold their wings, spread their wings, flit up and down. There are three, two, five, they fly in the same direction, in different directions, they pass each other, fly over each other. The cat sits in the grass, turning its head this way and that.

A small, hairy tortoiseshell lands on a brown-grey, sun-warmed stone and folds its rust-red wings, with their yellow and black spots and, at the edges, bright blue dots. Wings folded, it is the colour of the stone.

The cat climbs up the trunk of an elm. From the tree, it jumps on top of a brick wall and sits down in the sunshine, eyes closed, to lick its fur.

Its ears turn as the gravel crunches.

Thomas Davies walks along the garden path in his
shirtsleeves
, for the sun is warm on open ground. But in hollows and dells, and in the shade of bushy evergreen shrubs, a chilly breath of air still lingers in the mornings. Thomas walks slowly. Even in spring, a gardener is in no greater hurry than the soil, the rain, the sun and the wind. He inspects the trees in the garden, the bushes, the bed of
perennials and the vegetable patch. He sees the pink of the cherry trees, the yellow of the daffodil field, the blue of the grape hyacinths and purple of the crocuses. He sees orangey-yellow primroses and tickseed in the flower bed; and the green, yellow, red stems pushing up from under dry-leaf rosettes; and a young stem that has punctured the shell of its seed and which, half covered by sandy soil, is struggling, arched, to lift two wrinkled leaves into the sunlight.

The eye is not quick enough. He turns his back for a moment and a new sharp, green point has risen from the soil.

At the end of the vegetable patch, the rhubarb spreads its crumpled leaves like green fans atop red, angular, juicy stalks.

Fuzzy bumblebees with black and yellow stripes fly into the dandelions at the foot of the wall. A soldier beetle with its red shield spreads its black wings and lands on the corolla of a tickseed flower. Insects fly up and down around the berry bushes, black dots against the light.

By the greenhouse and next to the brick wall, warm air shimmers. It smells of compost, nettles, manure and water, stagnating in a wooden barrel, covered with green slime.

Thomas seizes his spade and presses the blade into the soil with his boot. He is turning the soil over for the tomatoes. They grow well in heat, sheltered from the wind. As the clods roll off the spade, he sees the earthworms. They slither deeper into the soil, having earlier burrowed their way closer to the surface, towards the heat. He watches them disappear into passages, except one whose body had been cut in half by the blade of the spade. Pity, Thomas thinks. Earthworms are deaf and blind, not much more
than a long gut supported by segments of muscle, but soil and leaves pass through them to mutate into humus, which makes gardens and fields grow.

Thomas mixes rotted manure with the turned earth. He does not yet plant the tomato seedlings. The December snow, and the bird-shaped imprints made by himself, Cathy and John, vanished weeks ago, but the risk of frost will continue until the spring equinox, although the winter was mild.

In the vegetable field, Thomas breaks up the lumps in the humus with a pitchfork and levels the surface with a rake. Today he will plant onion sets and sow carrots and lettuce. He mixes the carrot seeds with sand, because the seeds are small and hard to sow evenly. He sows different varieties of carrot in four rows in one bed: broad-shouldered, short ones, which keep well in the cellar, and sweet ones, which will be even in width and juicy. He presses the onion sets, preserved over the winter, an inch deep, so they are safe from birds and hares.

When the sun sinks lower, the coolness of a spring evening rises from the shadows.

A blackbird flies to the top of the steeple and sings a clear, undulating tune that reverberates far beyond the treetops and houses.

In the garden of Down House, Thomas cleans the spade, the pitchfork, the rake and the hoe. He hangs up the tools in the shed and shuts the door. He washes his hands in a tin basin, takes down his coat from a hook on the shed wall, puts it on. Thomas goes out through the back gate, then strides across the meadows up the slope. His hurry comes close to joy, for today he will erect the posts around the test area, for the stringing of the wires.
On the kitchen table lies an amended plan, and the shed houses the posts and pegs whittled in winter. In the new drawing, there are eight long posts, and in place of one aerial wire, there will be enough wires for a mesh that will hang over the whole area.

John is running downhill. He is wearing a pair of shoes made by a London shoemaker. They help him run fast. Because his right leg is half an inch shorter than his left, he has his own special shoes. He does not suffer from a disease of any sort. He can run faster than the Other Bailey's son, from the junction of Gorringes and back. Cathy is running after John.

Thomas fetches an iron bar and a spade from the shed. He and the children carry the posts and pegs to the edge of the area marked out with branches and sticks.

If the young, rosy-cheeked woman with the bonny baby on her lap travelling in a carriage in the direction of Downe happened now, at the junction, to look out of the window, she would see, against the sunset, two children standing with bowed heads, and a tall, slightly stooped man with a spade in his hand. She might think a burial was taking place on the hillside, but she would be mistaken, for the moment is not sad, but exciting and hopeful.

What does Thomas Davies plant in the electrified field?

He plants barley, sugar beet and strawberries.

What did God say to Thomas Davies? I know nothing about that.