Griefwork (13 page)

With parting kicks and spits the group slouched away up the boulevard. Bursts of laughter ricocheted back along the wall to
where Leon was standing, gasping and trembling, less rescuer than survivor of a moral disaster. At his feet, half lost in the shadow of overhanging branches, hunched a form whose torn garments lay around in a tattered puddle. Once on his knees Leon could see that the puddle was actual, no trick of the light. With immense effort he gathered the dripping body in his arms and rose unsteadily, leaned briefly against the wall and set off for the wicket gate into the Gardens. By the time he was inside he recognised he would never have the strength to pick it up again once he had put it down. He kicked the wheelbarrow over, spilling the logs, and managed to right it with one foot while balancing on the other. Finally he was able to ease his burden into the barrow which he trundled, a hank of black hair flopping over its lip, towards the Palm House. He opened both doors, backed the barrow inside, closed and locked them behind him. Having made hasty arrangements in his quarters he summoned his last strength, picked the lightly moaning deadweight out of the barrow, carried it through into the boiler room and laid it gently on the mattress he had dragged over to the furnaces.

In the yellow light of forty watts he inspected the victim. A young man, a youth, folded into a bloody ball with arms between thighs, quivering with the strain of hunching himself ever smaller until he might mercifully wink out of this world. His eyes were scrunched shut, his mouth and chin juddered with each indrawn breath like those of a chilled and exhausted swimmer.

‘Safe now,’ Leon told him. ‘Hush.’ He fetched a bowl of hot water and a towel while planning what he would need. In his dispassionate way he had already assessed the likely damage and knew there was no help except what he could give. The city’s main teaching hospital had been commandeered for wounded German troops; the only other hospital was out in the suburbs and partly bombed. He also knew there was no
transport to be had after dark and that if he were to go wheeling his patient about the streets during curfew in search of a doctor neither of them would survive ten minutes. With the end of the war in sight the occupiers’ morale was low. Drunk and panicky soldiers careered through the streets in military vehicles taking pot-shots at anything that moved, cheering and roaring on. Nor would his luck hold for a second time were he to meet up again with muzzle-face and his gang. From a shelf he brought down a box of dried moss and two bottles of decoction, one of
Arnica
montana
flowers and the other of marigolds. He found a clean dish, put the moss to soak in the marigold lotion and returned to his patient. With the deliberation of self-reliance he set to work. As he did so he talked unceasingly, quietly, as to two visitors whose identities merged, separated briefly, merged once more.
‘Ssiiih,’
he whispered as he held the boy’s head and coaxed him to drink warm Arnica mixture laced with cane syrup. ‘We have to dress your wounds or they’ll take chill.’ Gradually he unfolded the body, opened clothing, took stock of the constant bleeding, applied a compress of moss and held it firmly in place. The patient gave no sign of additional pain but seemed to have retreated behind a grey barricade of shock.

All night long Leon sat with him while a winter wind sprang up outside. Its cloutings and rushing over the Palm House’s acre of glass came through to the boiler room like the sound of a railway station’s distant cavern filling with softly escaping steam as a train prepared to leave. At intervals he pressed the boy’s own hands over the pad and got up to stoke the furnaces, fetch a blanket or more of the hot Arnica and syrup which he insisted be drunk. His patient lapsed in and out of consciousness and as he bathed the side of the bruised, puffy face he wondered whether one of the assailants’ kicks might not have caused concussion or worse, but the pupils in the dark eyes were of equal size and responded promptly to the light bulb’s yellow glow.
Sometimes he caught the eyes open and fixed on him without expression; at others they were closed and he could stare back wonderingly at this piece of human wreckage washed up at his domain’s door. Beneath the asymmetry of bruising was a thin dark face framed by lank hair. Seventeen? Nineteen? Twenty-one? Impossible to tell. Years of hunger and fear had made everybody’s age hard to guess. Europe was full of old men of twenty and children in uniform. Death might briefly restore a person’s youth as the protective mask relaxed or it could make even the young look ageless, as if their features had resolved into the stock lineaments of an antique species.

Towards dawn the bleeding largely ceased and the pulse grew stronger. The pad became suddenly soaked with hot urine. The patient’s eyes opened, then clouded with realisation. Speechlessly he rolled his head. Leon reassured him, fetched a clean handful of moss moistened with lavender oil. Tears of loss and humiliation leaked from closed eyelids and ran back into the dirty hair. As daylight blanched the small dusty windowpanes Leon gazed at the sleeping face and saw himself as he had been, lying in a cottage hospital not expected to live while nurses spooned hot milk and calves’ foot jelly into him or else drew the tent and tried to fill his clotted lungs with aromatic steam. How vulnerable, how frail, he marvelled. Why should any of us survive? Whereas plants, unchecked, would take over the Earth in a few years and smother it with simple fecundity. From the corner of the mattress on which he sat he could see the leafless twigs of a beech scratching uneasily at the sky. It was going to be a scuddy, blusterous day which might with any luck bring down some dead wood. He was immeasurably tired.

All that day the wind blew, and the next. Having put the ‘Closed to Visitors’ sign in the window of the outer door he dragged himself from chore to chore, catnapping between. At noon the first day the patient’s temperature rose alarmingly
and he thought he could see the first signs of infection in the still-seeping wound. To the Arnica syrup he added some powdered sulphur and a few drops of Aconitum. For hours he sat and talked, drowsed into silence, awoke with a start and carried on. Maybe he told the youth the story of his life, about the sea and the coast and the smoking of fish. Maybe he discoursed on plants and their properties, on the changing ideals of botanical collections, on the finer points of constructing stove houses. Probably he didn’t talk about war and air raids and rationing and queues and the black market. They were the common incubus, too widely experienced to be worth mentioning. And besides, what could one tell a casualty of war which he was not already confronting? That twenty-four hours ago he’d been like any one of millions of semi-fugitive men, women and children concentrating only on staying alive, but that shortly afterwards he was singled out for ragged knifework which, if he survived, would change his life?

But he did survive; and by the time the wind had dropped began greedily eating the boiled potatoes Leon gave him. Only, whenever the gardener returned to the boiler room after fetching something or performing some task in the Palm House he would find the boy weeping as though he had dared a glance behind the handful of moss and seen too clearly what he had come to. No acceptable future might be devised which had mutilation as its starting point and sprang from a mattress black with dried blood beside a whispering, creaking furnace through whose mica spyholes could be seen the flap of flames. Where could safety lie? Where might the gangs of dusk not burst in with their boots and blades? Come to that, where was he? Where this bare room with no-one for company but a monologuing stranger and the steady sift of ash into cinderboxes nearby?

Leon brought the boy foul and bitter infusions of twigs or bark, held his hand and talked. But never a word could he get
in reply, not even a name. At first he thought the barrier might be that of language. He had heard the foxy gang leader call him a gypsy and certainly he looked swarthy in a foreign way. Were gypsies Egyptians? He didn’t know. Was this speechless creature a Hindoostani or an Arab or else one of those strange Asiatics from far beyond Hungary? But the problem was not linguistic; the boy nodded when Leon pointed to himself and spoke his own name. Maybe he was dumb from birth, then. Or else shock had temporarily paralysed his faculty of speech. When he did indicate himself his lower lip folded behind the white upper teeth as if to make the letter ‘F’. ‘For now,’ Leon told him, ‘I shall call you Felix,’ since he had heard that the correct name for Arabia was Arabia Felix.

But what to do with him? As always, the gardener walked by night in the Palm House, moving among his plants while the starlight slid off the rounded panes far overhead. Occasionally the white beams of searchlights swung hopelessly across the sky, arousing in him a distant disquiet, echoes of loss, of a steely order breaking up in disarray. He was thin, his coughs rattled up among the leaves and flattened against the streaming glass, but he believed he had never been so happy. Outside the glass, beyond the wall, unspeakable events were dragging to their conclusions. Inside, though it might echo to the hollow boom of anti-aircraft guns, was a frail temple to all that might survive. His private, long-term project for a special collection of night blooming varieties was coming along well. He was ready to concede that the scent of one or two of them was slightly sinister or uncanny: they had, after all, evolved to attract bats and moths rather than human noses. If he closed his eyes while standing in front of them he sometimes became confused about what he was experiencing, so strange were the smells and so apt to provoke disorienting sensations as of a spoken painting, music tasted, sculpture overheard. He longed to see how visitors would
react but of course the curfew and blackout made it impossible and in any case he had yet to spring such a radical idea on Dr Anselmus and the rest of the Board.

He wandered about in indecision, easily sidetracked by a grotto studded with dim green hazes. He fell on his knees, interested to see if the phosphorescence was strong enough for him to be able to see the outline of his own fingers against it. It was. The boy must stay, at least for now. He was obviously petrified, traumatised. Well then, he must be hidden. If his presence were known neither would be safe. Whatever the lad had done he looked exactly the sort of person the Germans would finish off in their final paroxysm. And as for himself, he would be no better off. Harbouring Jews was practically as bad as being Jewish. Harbouring gypsies amounted to the same thing. Racial degenerates, the criminal element … The epithets were well worn but still carried force in the shape of death sentences. To turn Felix free, even if he wished to go, would be to send him out to die.

‘Of course he shall stay,’ he told
Passiflora
edulis
var.
flavi
carpa,
the passion fruit vine, who only urged Leon to play safe.

‘Why don’t we betray him to the Germans?’ came the vine’s seductive voice in the dark. ‘They’ll reward you for sure. Some fuel, with any luck, or maybe some new glass. We’re down to our last spare panes. And what about us? All right for you to commit suicide nobly, but you’ll be murdering us. Believe me, once you’ve vanished into some camp nobody will look after this place. Not a chance. The boilers’ll go out and your House will become derelict. The end. And all for a complete stranger. It makes no sense.’

‘He stays,’ repeated Leon with a groan.

So Felix remained, just as his name remained Felix, and just as if locked into the moment of his salvation. Physically
he healed and strengthened even as Leon’s own health declined, for the gardener gave him most of his rations. Had it not been for the vegetables he grew hidden among the tropical plants he would surely have starved. Felix was back on his feet after three or four weeks, the mattress turned cleaner side up. He was much improved in appearance and seemingly unimpaired apart from being obliged to squat when he urinated, as many desert menfolk customarily do to this day. But his timidity was intense and he was reluctant to leave the boiler room. This was just as well, for keeping him hidden remained their sole chance of survival. The problem was exacerbated by the floating population of assistants who came and went about the Palm House. Until 1942 Leon had retained his prewar staff of five men permanently assigned him. After Germany’s calamitous defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of that year the conscription of ever older men to make up for the losses meant he was often lucky to have two men in late middle age to help him. (Even Leon himself had been ordered to report for a medical examination to confirm his ineligible status. It had been conducted on a raw December morning and it was evident to the army doctor that all was up with Germany if she needed combatants as ill as this man. Having established that a hothouse was the only environment in which Leon could survive, he astutely said ‘I should think you must be fighting for your own life as much as for that of your plants. Be off with you.’) Leon might have been able to bar his own staff from No Admittance on the grounds that he lived there, but he could hardly forbid the outside gardeners their ancient right of access to the boiler room through the yard door to thaw their hands and brew tea. It was therefore necessary to devise a way of hiding Felix, and for this the boiler room’s layout was helpful.

As has been hinted, the city’s Botanical Gardens was not ideally situated. To its pre-industrial founders it had not much mattered that the site was low since they hadn’t foreseen
the Palm House and its heating requirements. The designers of the original heating system had planned to copy that at Kew, where the problem of constant coal deliveries to the middle of a horticultural idyll had been solved by digging an underground tunnel with a track along which fuel could be unobtrusively hauled. In the case of Leon’s Palm House this had proved impossible because the water table was too high. Perhaps seventy yards of tunnel had been cut from above and lined with brick until the idea was abandoned in favour of an access road behind high walls which became part of extensive kitchen gardens, covered with all kinds of espaliered nectarines, vines and loganberry canes. This little road, up which horses pulled a succession of rubber-tyred coal carts, led into the yard behind the boiler room. In order that the public’s illusion of being in deep countryside should not be ruined by the sight of offices and messuages at the back of the Palm House this yard was enclosed by similar high walls, thickly grown with ivies and creepers and broken only by a single wooden door to which few of the outside staff had keys. The space thus enclosed was lined with brick bunkers. Those against the boiler room wall were for coal. Others around the yard contained mounds of pea gravel, compost, peat and crushed shell, while still other sheds housed the glass stores as well as collections of tools, whiting and huge rolls of disused blinds like the sails of an obsolete schooner.