Griefwork (24 page)

Dr Anselmus rubbed his topaz so it trundled its cylinder up and down his waistcoat like the front wheel of a tiny steamroller. How had he got on to this? It had been an altogether unpleasant start to the day. The wretched man – and what on earth had made him shear off all his hair like that? – was seriously mad. Ill, too, of course, but essentially quite off his head. Poor Leon (Anselmus actually heard himself think
the dutiful phrase and, as with all such things people overheard themselves think, believed it sincere). Poor Leon, it’s really too bad. Academically unqualified he might be but in his own way he’s a strange kind of genius. (The magnanimity of this thought was genuine too: the generosity of an obituarist whose own far more estimable triumphs include being alive.) On the other hand there
was
a sense in which it was all quite timely …

Anselmus swung around in his chair to look through the tall windows at those of his neighbours opposite, at the frozen canal between them. Where, he wondered, had the man got his peculiar ideas? It was true there had been an article in
Hortus
recently about the destruction of habitats in the Pacific theatre, and it did seem likely that the razing of islands and other territory belonging to the old Japanese Mandate might have caused the loss of several plant and animal species. Had Leon had the advantage of a proper education, though, he would have known that wise old Horace had it right.
N
aturam
expellas
furca,
tamen
usque
recurret
: you can drive Nature out with a pitchfork but she will always return. The notion of mass tourism in secondhand bombers was quite a different matter. It had the pure nuttiness of those American pulp science fiction magazines he sometimes found his students reading. Bug-eyed monsters, man-eating plants, bleak futuristic worlds without vegetation run by robots where people were forced into underground cities like ant colonies. Did Leon read such stuff, too? And that weird thing about museums at night … One of the mainstays of that sort of fiction, Anselmus had noticed, was the presence of a skimpily clad blonde – or so at least one inferred from the covers. Was there, he thought, a blonde glittering brassily somewhere in his curator’s opaque life? It was unlikely enough to make him smile. He noticed it had started to snow again.

He
had
failed,
then.
He
had
done
his
best
but
his
oratory,
his
arguments
had
come
to
naught.
Anselmus
–
crass,
shifty
Anselmus
–
hadn’t
heard
a
word,
while
pretending
it
had
been
a
useful
‘clearing
of
the
air’.
Pure
bluster.
Then
finally
Leon’s
lungs
had
betrayed
his
head
and
he’d
been
unable
to
go
on.
Cou
Min,
Cou
Min,
have
you
brought
us
to
this?
he
wondered.
Is
it
you?
Despondent
he
walked
his
House
whose
very
panes
seemed
to
tremble
about
him,
the
ground
to
quiver
underfoot.
He
found
himself
back
at
the
Acacia farnesiana,
instrument
of
his
guilty
triumph
the
previous
night.
The
shrub
seemed
not
to
have
suffered
much
from
the
trampling.
Quite
the
reverse,
as
it
soon
made
clear
in
a
soliloquy:

‘Well, of course I can bite! Ours is an adventurous and risk-taking species, boldly going where no man dares to tread – certainly not barefoot, that is. For this reason our shoots are well armed; and I may say it was a pleasure I’d hardly dared even dream about, sinking my full length into those tender tawny boy-feet. The meaty plush of it! The whine of muscle tone as it tenses in agony! The succulence of blood! It was, I can confirm, altogether worth being trodden on. Not since I dipped into the back of a gardener’s hand in 1937 have I felt anything like it, and that was a mere sip of pleasure compared with this beatific gorging. The warm, cushiony embrace is the most satisfying
thing this universe has to offer. What makes it even more piquant (
mot
juste
) is that one can’t experience it without first having been abused. Thus the boy took a liberty and straightway rewarded me with solace and revenge. How I adore him! He has the most exquisite sole. Even now, I daresay, he can feel where I was inside him. I may well have caused a little oozing and affected the way he walks for a day or two. I do hope so. Such thoughts fill me with a kind of afterglow, a happy hum of remembrance. Humans, of course, being slavishly egocentric, can’t talk about us without resorting to the usual weary epithets, “cruel” thorns being the most over-employed, judging by several centuries of their rumty-tum poetry. “Cruel”, indeed. By provoking that adjective we could hardly have presented a kinder gift to their sonneteers, whose constant need for padding or pruning is so easily satisfied by the word’s metric ambiguity: a single long or a trochee according to necessity. More to the point (
juste
again) “cruel” is notoriously never the way the human foot is described as it unheedingly attempts to walk all over
us.
Oh, no. This is, for dimmer listeners, of religious significance. Why, you dolts? Because it’s proof that we’re the offshoots of a thoughtful, loving Creator. It was He who ensured that even as we were downtrodden we would be rewarded an hundredfold. You’ll find that practically all the thorny species are pretty religious. It’s only the ones who
should
have been thorny and – by some accident of heredity – aren’t, that are cynical and atheistic. I’m told that thornless rose varieties are the worst. They might smell wonderful but underneath they’re one black rant of blasphemy and frustration.

‘But back to the boy, my divine and punished trampler! The gardener – whose new hairstyle so faithfully reflects the brutal chic of the times – is filled with nagging worries concerning this lad, as well he might be. Among them is the very pertinent question: did the princess mention him to Anselmus? Since she
was standing right behind Leon while he was trying to cough his lungs inside out she had ample time to observe Felix in that cool, objective, Asian manner of hers which gives nothing away. She might have been saving the information to explode later like a bomb in a marriage bed, or to present on ice at a military tribunal. That’s part of her power, which is why she causes such a stir.
Elle
est
arrivée,
forsooth! They yearn to be noticed by her, dazzled by her, raped by her.

‘Very well, then: she must have seen Felix. And what did she think? That he was some new assistant Leon had been given? Some tatterdemalion apprentice who with the right training and influence might grow into a useful horticulturist? (Well, he might at that if he could curb the urge to vandalise the plants.) Of course, she might have thought that. But those Asian eyes with their mysterious canthic fold which lets everything sidle in and so little out, would have been trying to see patterns, make sense of peculiar Western
mores,
dress the fabled world of science and technology in the rotten flesh she knows is the common human denominator. And those eyes would have taken in the slippery, unmarried man in early middle age living in his crystal shell whose very air blurs the outside world, who refuses even to lodge out and simply go to and from work like everybody else. They would have taken him in, dispassionately, as he coughed on his knees in that abject way (is this, after all, the genius one has heard so much about? The man of vision and ambition who might abandon us and go off to create a Snow House for Kuala Lumpur or Jesselton or wherever?). Her eyes would also have taken in the way this supposed apprentice stood in the doorway watching him, neither tense with helplessness nor indifferently lounging but full of a wry domestic
déjà
vu.
And she would have thought, “Good God, they’re lovers. Of course.”

‘All right, play dumb. Fine, if you insist then: no, she wouldn’t. She would hardly have noticed the boy at all. The
great Leon was the centre of her picture, her plan. Anybody else in the vicinity was merely a labourer on the estate: a tangential figure such as painters daub into landscapes to fill up the gaps and add a vague sense of activity. Go on believing that version if you prefer.

‘But if she
did
notice him and think him significant the remaining question is, would she have told Anselmus? If she’d seen Felix and Leon as a couple, wouldn’t that affect her plan? Mightn’t she now have to consider importing them both if Leon were to accept her job offer? And meanwhile mightn’t Felix be a useful lever for Anselmus to ease out his curator before (oh, so regretfully, the traitorous hound!) pulling down the Palm House in exchange for a new site, more power, a bigger salary and a generous backhander from the dark fiscals? There are excellent prospects for a nasty scandal, are there not? Behaviour which might elicit amusement in Jesselton or Kuala Lumpur is a different matter in these cold, unforgiving latitudes. How badly, then, did Anselmus need to get rid of Leon? Would he be capable of doing a deal with this potentially useful and powerful lady? Had he already done it?

‘I’ve watched him tonight, the gardener, stumbling and mumbling in the candlelight as usual, more than ever unable to read his fellow-humans and their motives. (“Stumbling” – what an erotic word that is, with its rich possibilities of the randomly-descending foot!) Nearer, gardener! You owe me a debt. It was I who caught your sportive faun for you, never forget. Had it not been for me and a few simple prickles you’d never have got your hands on him and rewarded his abuses as I just had. Oh, between us we could make a pincushion of that juicy gypsy!

‘But you’re not just worried, are you? You’re lost and muddled, too, even as you patrol your domain, your private landscape of congealed time with the pipes sighing underfoot and the snowflakes sizzling on the panes overhead. She’s no
mere scheming bitch, this princess of yours, is she? You’re in love with her, too, in your eccentric fashion.
Is
it because she reminds you of someone else, long ago? Somebody who was scarcely even real for a summer but to whose imaginary memory you’ve abandoned your one and only life? You’ve been taking this line quite a lot lately, we’ve noticed, in your nocturnal rambles both physical and verbal. You seem to think it has to do with something poetic bound up with your whole life and this place. I can’t comment on that. We thorny species are beyond poetry except, as I said, when co-opted as metaphors. We assume it must be connected with the beauty of retribution … “Cruel”? Did I hear “cruel”? Ah, on the grounds that clichés generally reflect truisms and truisms some banal aspect of truthfulness? You really do have the strangest notions of cruelty. May I remind you of that night-flowering South American climber,
Araujia
sericofera,
which you yourself have planted down at the far end of this House? Its popular nickname is “The Cruel”, I believe, because the peculiarly tight arrangement of its flowers often traps moths by the proboscis overnight, releasing them at dawn. I think that’s beautiful, both functional and mischievous. Nor are we thorns cruel, as I keep making clear. We merely raise points; others impale themselves on us. Proceed, unhappy man.

‘Yes, I’d agree: she’s obviously attracted to something in you, though thanks to her cultural difference it’s not plain what it would be. You like to think it’s a certain rough animality? That might have been more plausible ten years ago. In any case it sounds like dismal male vanity. But you’re intriguing, I’d allow that. Both powerful and elusive. That’s an unusual combination, and some people are excited by the unusual. You’re right. Dull, dull, dull the courtship rituals we’ve witnessed in here. People who’ve seen nothing, done nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing, smelt nothing. Dull, dull, dull. The meanest periwinkle has more
to offer than these walking vacuities. They aren’t thoughtful, they aren’t imaginative, they aren’t spiritual, nor funny, nor subversive, nor even decently perverse. In their anxiety they touch nothing and nothing touches them. Instead they engulf things constantly through their eyes and mouth. Ingesting they pass, and leave no trace except perhaps a smear of deodorant.