The Devil's Garden (12 page)

The Herbarium had always drawn Pilchard powerfully and now he returned to it as to a haven of order and tranquillity that worked according to the slow rain-soaked time of plants and the Catholic Church, not the jostling and impertinent time of Man. It was to him what wine cellars are to others. Its very smell, rich with ecclesiastical overtones of the inevitability of decay and growth, carried a metaphor, on the air, of comforting rebirth and tranquil eternity and offered a peace of mind that he thought of as
compost mentis
. The blinds, ‘tatties', were lowered over the windows, against the heavy heat, so that colours receded to muted shades of sepia and light itself was thickened and slowed. Ranges of shiny mahogany cabinets with brass fittings stretched along the walls, each opening to disclose confident, racked drawers, each numbered drawer containing stiff folders of dried samples, laced to the page and identified in browning natural ink harvested from squid. Some were a hundred years old, delicately fading to dust, others new, a sheen still upon them, their place determined not by secular chronology but the timeless Linnaean classifications according to which God or evolution had created the world. Yet the Nature that had born them was also their prime enemy. They had to be regularly checked for infestation by chewing mite and boring beetle. In the wet season, fungus bloomed, for in the tropics there were eager spores and eggs everywhere looking for a home.

Pilchard was surprised to find Catchpole there, acid-free folders spread about him at a table. Pilchard peered over his shoulder, looking down into the seam of the gone-to-seed toupée that was visibly moulting. On his neck, a boil was sprouting, coming nicely to the boil in fact, and Catchpole picked at it's snowy peak absent-mindedly. He was playing with his rubber plants. In the Gardens, everyone had to be able to turn his hand to any subject and here, by selective breeding, they had produced generations of freakish, musclebound varieties that pumped out ever more prophylactic latex.

‘Where's Dagama?' Dagama was the gaunt and moustachioed Eurasian who ran the Herbarium with a rule of iron but a heart of gold. Catchpole frowned and his forehead moved up freely under his wig, lubricated by sweat. A Herbarium was a sort of library not, therefore, a place of casual conversation.

‘Gone,' he said curtly in a church whisper and returned to his folders. Catchpole was northern and had that form of extreme rudeness that Yorkshiremen call, with pride, ‘plain-spokenness'.

‘Gone? Gone where? Why are you whispering? There's no one else here. You won't wake up the plants.'

‘Oh for God's sake, man, who can tell. These days people disappear without leaving so much as a glass slipper behind. Actually …' he showed smug rodent teeth behind fat lips, ‘… it's sort of funny. You know those fungi spores he was always so keen on—cryptogams? Well, apparently, the Nips went crazy after those warships of theirs were blown up by the commandos in the harbour and started sniffing around everywhere for spies.
You
wouldn't know about it, of course, tucked away snugly in Changi but they put the fear if god up the rest of us, exposed out here. In fact, we feared for our lives.'

‘Really? In Changi, we feared for our deaths.'

‘Well … cryptogams … cryptograms …' He see-sawed with his hands and smirked. ‘You can see how they'd get muddled up—perfectly understandable—the Nips' Ancient Greek maybe a bit rusty—so it's my belief they hauled him off as some sort of secret codes expert. I repeatedly warned him cryptogam was a classificatorily obsolete term. Actually, I heard on the QT they took him to Outram Road and he didn't exactly get the best room. I shouldn't think he'll be back.' Said with some satisfaction. Pilchard wondered for a second if Catchpole had been at the collection preserved in spirits but he had always hated poor, gentle Dagama, wanted to get his own hands on the Herbarium, the memory of the gardens, the voice of posterity. It occurred to him to ask just who had let on about the cryptogams. Was this the voice of reason or the voice of treason? Catchpole looked at his watch with piggy eyes.

‘Lunch!' he cried excitedly and leapt to his feet like a dog hearing its bowl rattled. Now he was all loud chatter. ‘The old man's a stickler for timekeeping, a gentleman of the old school. I didn't know Japanese were big on the concept of “gentleman”. A few weeks back we had a meeting about how to deal with the army's trespassing on the garden from the north and everybody decided what we needed was more fencing. The anti-aircraft gunners had moved in you see, made themselves at home. But the Prof got hold of the wrong end of the stick and turned up the next day with a rapier and face guard, ready to throw down a gauntlet in challenge and take them all on. He keeps going on about
bullshito,
you know, the
samurai
code.'

‘
Bushido
? But
bushido
is a word of Chinese origin. It was invented at the very end of the 19
^th
century by an American-Japanese Quaker who wrote a book for foreigners called—I think—
The Soul of Japan
in English. Only later was it translated into Japanese so they came to believe it about themselves. We have—had—a copy in the Library though I can't claim to have read it.'

Catchpole considered him coolly. ‘Now, that's just the sort of remark that gets you into trouble, old boy, disparaging, juvenile. You never learn do you? I'd keep that bit of wisdom to myself it I were you, hide your light under a bushel, or the old man might well send you straight back to Changi. He's quite capable of it. Sometimes, when he looks at you, you can see he's thinking the space you occupy might be better spent on having a volcano put in.'

Meals for senior staff in the garden were nowadays a communal affair and under the jurisdiction of Ong Kam Yeng, a thin, spidery man with sad eyes, once Pilchard's own cook, now promoted to greater eminence and retaining no residual loyalty. His first move had been to install his nephews, identical twins nicknamed Ping and Pong, as assistants in the kitchen but also about the gardens generally. It was not clear whether these were their real names or a mark of European confusion or just contempt for Asian difference. The brothers deliberately perplexed everyone, joyfully swapping identities back and forth at will and confirming the Western prejudice that all Chinese looked alike and were ultimately interchangeable.

Even before the occupation, racial divisions were unspokenly enforced, here, as across the whole island, and senior staff had eaten apart. Everyone knew that ‘senior' meant ‘white' and now also ‘Japanese'. Eurasians and other hybrids had always been difficult to place but the disappearance of Dagama and the others had relieved that anomaly and restored the calm of a more classical taxonomy. Nowadays, meals began, not with prayers but with what was known as the ‘presentation of parts'. Catchpole had brought a large bunch of edible fern shoots tied up with twine. Ong Kam Yeng handled them with a grudging acceptance. The Professor offered two duck eggs, the sort of luxury only a Japanese could command. Dr Post unwrapped a newspaper parcel. The headline read ‘Japan victorious all over East!'. They must be doing badly then. Ong grunted and probed the bloodied contents. ‘Two squirrel—
tupai
. I make one pie from your two
tupai
.' Tiny Dr Hanada dug in his briefcase and bowed as he offered an immaculate unripe tomato and an obscene and hairy yam, both whisked away. And then Ong was there at Pilchard's shoulder with the expression a wife has on her face when she is waiting for you in the hall at two in the morning on payday with her arms crossed and you are drunk and the money is gone.

‘I had a can of beans. I will find them and bring them tomorrow. A beanfeast.'

Ong made a lemon-sucking face and reached to repossess fork and spoon. ‘You bring tomorrow. You eat tomorrow.'

‘Is that Confucius?'

The Professor looked up over half-moon glasses and batted tired eyelids as a father will at children squabbling over the breakfast table. ‘Mr Ong. Dr Pilchard has not yet been assigned a speciality. We must be patient. Let us wait until tomorrow for his contribution.' Ong rescinded cutlery, grunted and left, overruled but unmollified. ‘Perhaps Pilchard-san you might look into the Orchid House until your strength has returned. The hybridization programme is a mess, the documentation is dreadful.' Pilchard nodded. He detested orchids, the temperamental, leggy showgirls of the plant world, flowers on a stick, denying the reality that all plants ultimately made their living from dirt. ‘You know, gentlemen, there is a strange imbalance in all botanic gardens. In cold countries we cultivate tropical plants under glass in artificial heat. But no one in hot countries ever cultivates temperate plants in artificial cold. It is what you might call the asymmetry of colonised places. Like your own, Japan is a country of the West and of the cold North and so not part of the exotic East.' His face lit up briefly as if with the glow of reflecting snow. ‘We might think of it in the future but I am afraid the Emperor's birthday …' He stopped. Etiquette demanded he now stand and bow to that East of which Japan was not a part, at the mention of His Name, but these were not Japanese so … ‘falls in three months' time. It would be … helpful … yes that is the word … helpful, if we were able to name a new orchid after him and send something off to Tokyo or even General Yamashita …' his eyes shone ‘… a variant of the Tiger Orchid for him perhaps, a nice container, some elegant calligraphy … I can do that part. As we say “We must grind up sesame seeds” for we depend on the powerful. Could you see if we have anything far enough along that might do, Dr Pilchard? A nuisance but truly … helpful.'

Then Ping, or possibly Pong, reappeared with a bowl of cherry-pink soup that he set down also helpfully. Pilchard looked questioning. What soup, after all, is bright pink?

‘Not crab I hope.'

‘Lizard,' offered Dr Post, spooning with a sigh. ‘You know
chichak
. Not so bad really. Clears you out a treat. One splash and all is silent.' He hesitated and reached nonchalantly across for the triumphalist newspaper the squirrels had been wrapped in, folded it carefully and stowed it away in his pocket, a slight glow of embarrassment about the eyes. ‘At least it's better than being here in the sago worm season. Terribly binding sago worms.'

* * * 

That night, Pilchard slept in one of the old curators' houses in Cluny Road in a ramshackle bed with too many uncoordinated springs. It was an old mock-English, mock-Tudor building with endless tatty rooms, furnished rather like a seaside boarding school with objects that seemed not to have been chosen but rather to have been simply abandoned where they stood by previous generations. Upstairs somewhere was Prof Tanakadate, exiled from the Director's true house by bomb damage, wrapped in the tinkle and twang of arid
koto
music from a wireless set. Dr Post shuffled and groaned next door like an old dog unable to find comfort in its bones. Possibly they had poor, missing Dagama—gone mad—stowed, raving, in the attic. Mosquitoes whined around the bed net like flies around a food safe. Where had that been? Ah yes, the Three Bears' bungalow. How long ago that all seemed. He lay a while listening to the small, hopelessly fragile beating of his heart in the vastness of the night. The garden lay all about, monochrome as in a photograph and stealthily silent, handed back to the animals that also made a living there, sharp-eared and fleet-footed. Out here, far from the centre, they still had the regular music of the hours, the pre-dawn birds, the morning splashing of ducks, the stillness at noon before the evening whirr of crickets and the nighttime screech of owls. Moonlight pressed against the window panes and gleamed in metallic sheen on the leaves as fireflies flashed and dotted the shadows with Morse. He snuffed the oil lamp, a wick floating in coconut oil, and stared up at the darkened ceiling. In his mind, he slowly retreated to another garden, where his father had worked as a gardener at weekends. It was the garden that had sent him East.

It was a special place, a lush oasis in the suburban desert, a model of and for the world and where Dad worked to escape from the joyless wastes of the British Sunday with its interdictions on play, joy, life. It belonged to Sir Robert Vane-Tempest-Stewart, of an ancient house, who had rekindled his fortunes by marrying an heiress of the Landsmann family, owners of a factory that made Landsmann's Famous Foaming Suppositories, advertised by the first poster to greet you as you turned into the High Street. Pilchard had been eagerly instructed by other boys what you did with them but still didn't quite know
why.
In an experimental frame of mind, he had added water to one and seen it fizz to destruction in the sink like a slug on which salt has been poured. Whenever he saw Sir Robert giving Dad his orders or paying his wages, he heard the hiss of those suppositories in which the sound of distant oceans lay curled as in a conch shell. On the whole he liked the VTSs. They had no son, only a stringy daughter who disappeared to Australia and reappeared with her own gawky baby girl and
no husband.
Local women looked at her and pursed their lips and said nothing. They had a gift of saying nothing very loud. There were tales told of a marriage, a car accident, not believed, and the baby was minutely examined for signs of racial admixture
—
alas not found
—
but there was still plenty of time for that to show up later to complete her disgrace. If not, there might be signs of mental impairment, opening up other lines of attack through that male cousin she had always seemed far too thick with to be healthy. Where Pilchard lived, everyone always thought the worst of everyone else and was invariably proved right to do so
.

Sir Richard would sometimes ruffle Pilchard's stringy red hair in a regretful, son-deprived sort of way. Once he asked, “And what do you want to be when you grow up, young man?” Expecting no doubt the answer, “an engine-driver.” Children were always taught that to be winsome, boys should want to be engine-drivers, girls ballet-dancers
.