That last tissue of truth and falsehood is the version of events my wife had always known and I’m sure she continued to believe it until the day she died, some five years ago now. It feels as though it were last week and I still miss her. I still go to the kirkyard from time to time and find myself unable to believe that she is lying down there, where I too will follow her in due course.
But it was not the whole truth. And I have waited this many a long year to come to the whole truth of the matter. How can I explain? Until that moment, when I saw Jenny lying upon the dissecting table, the whole of my life for many years past had been concerned with growing things, with the care and nurture of plants and trees. Well, my green time ended with Jenny. Since then, I have worked with books and dusty manuscripts and the truths contained therein, the wisdom of words. And sometimes, I have found myself following a perilous path indeed, for words and books and pamphlets can lead you into trouble as surely as affairs of the heart. I have often found myself negotiating that narrow pathway between my principles and the safety of myself and my family. They hang men for their beliefs, for their writings and even for their thoughts, but not, I think, for tending their gardens.
Do I regret the loss of that green time? Of course I do. I sometimes think I would give half my life to be back there, wandering through the countryside, gathering plants for Thomas with the prospect of meeting Jenny on the way home. Or to be back upon that hillside on the Isle of Arran, carefully loosening the earth from around the roots of a tiny whitebeam that clings to life on the edge of a precipice. But perhaps because of all that I have read and learned since, perhaps because of the dangers and the injustices I have known in my life, there is that in my mind that baulks at the prolongation of lies and half truths any longer.
I did not, of course, go to Ayrshire to work for Thomas’s uncle. How could I? How could we be on any kind of footing ever again, not servant and master, not friend and friend, not even remote acquaintances? All that was at an end, and I could not even bring myself to think about him, let alone mention his name. Whenever he came into my mind – and during those first years it was more often than was either comfortable for me or conducive to any kind of peace – whenever he came into my thoughts I would deliberately swerve away from the very idea of him. At last I thought about him infrequently, and that was a relief to me.
I remained in the city, and although I would hear about him from time to time, because he was fast becoming a man of some consequence, I did not see him. This was something of a miracle, but then Glasgow was growing quickly over those years, we moved in quite different circles, as we always had done, and our paths never crossed. It would have been easier for him to seek me out than vice versa, but he did not do it and so I must assume that he never wanted to do it. But some years later, I heard that he had left the college and had moved to his uncle’s house in Ayrshire, where he was amassing a great collection. This hurt me for a while, all unreasonably, until somebody told me that his collection was not of plants and trees, but of fossils, the petrified remains of ancient life forms.
For myself, I was despairing of ever finding suitable work, but at last, perhaps because of my love for books, rare in a young man of my station, I got work with a printer of somewhat radical persuasion. The position came to me through Mr Caddas who, being a man of great good sense and widely read too, had many connections in that line. Besides it was in his best interests that I should flourish, because some time after Jenny’s death, I found myself keeping company with her sister Anna.
It was not my intention. It began as a simple continuation of our friendship. We were both grieving and I think we were a comfort to one another. We wanted to remember happier times, wanted to talk about the Jenny we remembered, full of life, full of ideas and skills and small but wonderful ambitions: to create beautiful things, to sew flowers and grow flowers and to make people well. In talking about Jenny, we were healed, after a fashion, and through this quiet healing we drew closer.
I had known Anna since she was a child and thought of her like that, until one day I looked at her and found that she had become a woman. I saw that she was looking at me as a woman looks at a man she loves. And then, having waited a decent time, we were married, with the blessings of my mother and her father. I flatter myself that the match gave both of them a certain amount of pleasure, although Sandy Caddas was never quite the same again. Even though he seemed happy enough with Nancy, sometimes you would find him weeping for no obvious reason. Once, when I had made a clumsy attempt to comfort him, he had told me, ‘Just leave me be for a while. If you find me in tears, just leave me be, lad. The thought of her comes into my head and I miss her. But it will pass. It aye passes!’
Many of my brothers and sisters are gone now and I miss them too, Johnnie most of all. Johnnie grew up and went away to sea like his uncle, and never came back, like his uncle. He never made old bones, and I think it broke my mother’s heart, because she was not the same after and didn’t survive him by many months. The night he died, she frightened us all by waking us with a great shriek, wailing, ‘Johnnie’s gone, Johnnie’s gone!’ and so he had, taken by some foreign fever. When she came to her senses, she said that she had seen him. He was standing at the foot of her bed, shaking his head as though regretting something, and then she knew, even though it was a good long while until the news reached us in a letter.
James worked in the gardens for a few years more – my exclusion evidently did not include him – and lodged in the college, so that he should be close to his work. Later, he got work out at Gilmorehill, in the gardens of a big house there, married, and had a large family. They all lived in a certain amount of cheerful squalor and he died there a few years ago. His surviving children are all grown and he had a great number of grandchildren as well, at least some of whom have become gardeners in their turn. In due course, one of them came to the house and presented me with a fat pineapple and I found myself shedding a tear in memory of my father, even as I tasted the sweetness of it, and laughing at the absurdity of life in general.
The two younger girls seemed to be well settled, for a while at least. Then Susanna ran off with a footman and was never seen again, although many years later, a short and somewhat travel-stained letter arrived from the Carolinas. In it she said that she was well, was married and ‘as happy as can be expected’, whatever that meant. I wrote back to the direction given on the letter, but she never replied. It hurt me a little to think that of all of us, it was clumsy Susanna, who could not even sew a straight seam, who had attained my ambition of exploring, Susanna who had smelled the scent of exotic flowers under foreign skies.
Jean followed her mistress as lady’s maid when that young woman made a good marriage and moved to her new home in the Highlands. A few years later, my sister married a highlander, a ghillie on the estate I believe, which was a good match for her, but she died in childbirth with her firstborn, which was a great tragedy for her husband and a sadness for all of us.
Bessie lives yet. She made the best of her opportunities, as my mother was always advising her and anybody who would listen. We expected her to become a cook, but instead, she became a lady’s maid and then a housekeeper. Her mistress had, it seems, made a good marriage, and Bessie prospered along with the family. She never married, which goes a long way to explaining her survival. Childbirth claims so very many of our wives, sisters, daughters, in spite of all our medical men can do to remedy it. For many years she was housekeeper at one of the big houses near the Green and wore smart clothes over her well-corseted figure and preferred not to remember that she was once a scullery maid. Now she lives in a cottage provided for her by her employers, styles herself Mistress Elizabeth Lang, and acts as though she is a great lady in somewhat reduced circumstances. Her own ‘lady’ visits her from time to time, and then they squabble over their memories, like elderly sisters more than mistress and maid. I have heard them at it and envied them such lifelong friendship. You would never guess at her beginnings when you see her in the town, or in the kirk of a Sunday morning, with her stylish bonnets, even in old age, a new one for every season.
Rab and my mother came to live with me and Anna in my new lodgings, which consisted of two rooms over the printing business. After my mother’s death, Rab remained with us. To our surprise, he flourished in this new, bookish environment. He was always sickly and short of stature, but – in the manner of creaking gates that hang longest – he lives yet. He and my wife grew as close as brother and sister in time. She loved him and he confided all his troubles, such as they were, in her.
He worked in the book business with us for many years until, again somewhat to our surprise, but greatly to our pleasure, he married a pretty, capable and kindly widow called Euphemia, fathered two sons of his own to add to her three daughters and lives close by. I think all of this astonishes even Rab himself. He expected very little from life and life has heaped unanticipated riches upon him. He is very well respected as he goes about the town, always with a faint air of disbelief and his nose in a book. We meet often for a drink and a chat, mostly about the books that are his passion. I could not have predicted any of this. But life has a way of springing these surprises. When my master in the book business died, I took over from him and made a success of the business. We print, we publish, we buy and sell books. The very smell of books is in my nostrils and I think it is now in my bones as much as it is in Rab’s and I will never escape from it, nor would I want to.
Which is not to say that sometimes I do not have a hankering after the life I might have lived, after the possibility of travelling and exploring, of gathering plants and seeds and bringing them home. I have regrets too and they are very profound. I mind in the twenties and thirties, when they were planting up the town green with trees of many kinds, how much it hurt the heart of me, a sensation of envy and regret so powerful that it made my head ache. I have made the very best of what I have, you must understand that. But often, when I lie awake at nights, with the sounds of the city stilled at last, I sometimes get the strangest sensation.
How can I explain it to you? But I see that I must try, even if it seems like an old man’s folly. It feels at those times as though I have somehow missed my way. As though I have been a wanderer down all these years. Not unhappy with my lot, but still a wanderer for whom some other destination was intended, but who has lost his way. It is as though something was planned for me, some pathway I could not find, could not take. Perhaps some god frowned on me for an instant. Some pagan god of the woods, Pan himself maybe? A jealous god, for sure. But it also seems to me that there might be some other incarnation of myself, the man who followed that pathway among the trees, among the green and growing things, the world of plants and their magical, miraculous properties. Is he any happier than I am? Who knows? Perhaps not. For nothing stays constant. Everything changes in time.
I have no way of contacting that other me, of speaking to him, of seeing where he is and what he is doing. He is a stranger to me and I to him. I might have the odd pang of envy, but there is nothing to be done. All I know is that it is the strangest feeling and it makes me profoundly sad, a melancholy that lasts all the next day and sometimes longer, a nostalgia for some paradise lost, some door slammed shut and locked against me, some entrance to an enchanted garden that I cannot now find and will never see again, not in this life, at least.