Picture a boy beside a grey northern sea, a distant figure whose neutral tones blend easily into the landscape. His faded dungarees, stuck with dried and curling fish scales, are the silvery blue-green of the sea holly scattered in clumps among the dunes. His hair is the melancholy yellow of rock samphire shaken by wind in cups and hollows. The landscape in which he moves is pared down to three elements: land, sea, sky. Each of these has a superficial scurrying quality beneath which it is as static as a grim metal poured long ago and set. To one horizon stretches rumpled water raising an infinity of failed castles. To the other, a terrain of low tufted dunes and saltings trembling stiffly in a flat wind and reaching inland past the invisible estuary. No trees, no vertical objects break the tyranny of the horizontal save only three wind pumps, vastly distant from each other and appearing bigger and closer than they really are, like oil drums in a desert. Although these are the late 1920s the sky remains as innocent of the aeroplane as it was when it frowned upon Europe’s last retreating ice sheets.
The boy smells strongly of fish oil, and is quite unaware of it. From before dawn he was helping his uncle empty the smokers and pack the boxes: bloaters sweating amber droplets, the twisted batons of eels. They were still nailing the lids when the lorry called, though in this land its arrival could hardly be said to have caught them by surprise. Its insect crawl had been visible for ten minutes, its rattle over sluices and the bridges made of loose railway sleepers audible even above the sea’s beating pulse. He had helped with the loading, drunk a pint of milky coffee, walked off along the shore to a point where the house he had left, with its line of huts, looked no more than the cluttered superstructure of a wrecked ship stranded far away on tidal flats. Now in the distance beyond it are Flinn’s palish gleams: roofs greasy beneath stray sunlight, the steely flare of greenhouses. Most prominent of all is the menacing white stump of a lighthouse which dominates the town and at night intermittently blanches his bedroom curtains with its beam.
Ten years earlier the lighthouse had set the course of his life, and so cardinally that it was only of late he had managed to make a story from what had been an inarticulate wound. A space had at last opened up in that ever-receding landscape to accommodate a remembered figure and the images which clustered around her like birds about a distant statue, immobile in sunlight. Immobile, for there is no movement in memory; there are only instants which paint the fluent living with the rigidity of death, even when they are most in motion. Yet this boy would have said how vividly as a five-year-old he remembered his mother’s bicycle spokes, sprrixx, as she pedalled away up the track across the polder to Flinn, the sun sparkling off the twirling wires, merry as mills. So he had stood as he always did when she went shopping in the village, watching her out of sight. It took a long, long time. The pedalling figure shrank to a gliding blob, now disappearing behind a stretch of stiff bushes, now sinking into invisible declivities, reappearing heraldically proud, crossing a bridge over one of the cuts. That creeping dot was his mother. At the same time he thought of anybody else in the distant village who might happen to be gazing inland rather than seaward: how they would notice movement out there among the kale fields, a creeping dot with a speck of colour to it which slowly grew and resolved itself into Christina in her orange headscarf escaping from that foul-tempered brother of hers and her poor little boy for a quick round of cards, some purchases and a good few glasses of schnapps (which Leon could smell when she returned). And so he watched everyone and everything out of sight: boats putting out, a heron flying, the lorries coming to fetch smoked fish, a white steamer crossing the horizon and leaving its long thinning smudge. They all trailed behind them a hollow never quite filled by their return, carrying away part of him with them so he could look back and watch himself watching, just as he was sure his mother never once glanced over her shoulder to glimpse her melancholy child dwindle behind her. Sprrixx.
One day in Flinn marketplace there had been a stir of interest as a lorry arrived bearing a huge lump tethered beneath green canvas. The driver asked the way to the lighthouse, possibly out of self-importance since it was clearly visible from all points in Flinn and, indeed, from many a mile outside. It stood on a low sandy cliff not a quarter of a mile away and had been blind in its eye for nearly a year since the heavy steel trolley on which the half-ton lens revolved seized up one night. The year was 1918, and even at the end of the world’s first mechanised war the arrival of a lorry in Flinn was an occasion and a large group followed it along the sandy track. It would be a three-day task to instal a jib on top of the building, haul the new mechanism up, swing it in and seat it in its bed. A crew of trained engineers was sitting in the cab with the driver, and the keeper of the only inn for some miles began cheerfully throwing open windows and airing beds. The weather was propitious: a high blue summer sky with a few mare’s tails languidly unravelling their tresses across Europe. Scattered lark song ascended flutteringly on weak thermals from among the dunes. The sea rocked and glittered to the horizon. The work began.
On the second morning Christina pedalled into town with her string bag, took a couple of glasses of refreshment and asked where everyone had got to. Told, she hopped back on her bicycle and soon joined the crowd of onlookers. It was at one of the more interesting moments. The men were getting ready to haul up the revolving mechanism, a task almost as delicate as remounting the lenses in it since it was as finely engineered as a watch. It lay in a cradle of mattresses on the back of the lorry, steel and brass glistening beneath a film of light oil. Before the order to haul was given the keeper waved everyone back and the spectators drew off to one side, just far enough so that if the rope broke (as many of the adults and all of the children were hoping it would) they were sure of a ringside seat without being in danger. The men hauled, the rope creaked, the pulley high up on the lighthouse squealed, the mechanism rose slowly into the air. As it did so the upturned heads tilted ever further back until they looked to the foreman up by the jib like a patch of daisies in a meadow. When the load neared the top there occurred one of those brisk claps of wind which come from nowhere and pass into nowhere, a stray lump of summer air perhaps detached from a stiff breeze a week previously and loitering lazily in its wake. It did no harm whatever to the precious mechanism now at the lamp room’s sill. All it did was catch and throw back one of the curved lattice windows. Being heavy, it moved quite slowly and jarred to rest with a thud against a wooden stop bolted to the stonework. The foreman, intent on his job, scarcely glanced up but called out ‘Latch that, Jon,’ his gloved hand on the quivering rope. As the window struck the stop a single diamond pane flew from its mounting and twirled languidly down in a bending trajectory. Hardly any of the onlookers even saw it. This fluttering glass blade took Christina at the base of the neck and killed her where she stood.
His uncle, bereaved brother turned cantankerous guardian, remained an unknown quantity. ‘He’s got his own problems,’ as the teenaged Leon was later to learn in the village, though he never found out what they were and by that time cared less. It was no good trying to impute to the man either a particular cruelty or emotional incompetence, especially not in a time and place which did its best to deny subtleties of feeling unless they were put into the shorthand of convention. It was easy for his uncle to offend no code but also to give no clue to his own motives when with malign scruples, as weeks lengthened to months, he met his little nephew’s tearful demands to know when his mother was coming home with vague news of her progress from one special sanatorium to another. It soon became impossible for the child to ask while looking directly at his uncle. The stoniness was unbearable. Anguish masked as stoicism? Rage at being badgered to come up with fresh fictions? He gave up asking. One sunny morning she had gone away, sprrixx, twinkling off as she always did twice a week, but she had never come twinkling back again and now she never would. That much her bereft child knew. His conviction remained that somewhere beyond the limitless polder, somewhere out in the wide world his mother lay in bed or tottered about in a dressing gown smelling frowsty and looking grey as she did when she had one of her colds. And since he could see her thus, he thought she could surely see him too. How, then, could she bear not to come home and take him in her arms?
In those days Leon howled a lot for his mother. But neither the culture nor the landscape encouraged self-indulgence, and bit by bit the impulse was translated into more appropriate forms. In this way the habit began which marked the rest of his childhood and adolescence of endlessly wandering that desolate littoral in search of driftwood, birds’ eggs, coloured stones, the sounds of water and wind, bobbles of black tar – for any, in fact, but the one thing. And after a time these treasures and their long searches engendered a life, as an oak gall’s tiny grub becomes surrounded by accretions ever denser, larger, more rugose, in final shape and substance utterly unlike their begetter and yet faithfully its home. When he was ten he was allowed to go to the village school if there were no fish to be cleaned and spitted, and sooner or later the insouciant brutality of childhood dragged him to the churchyard and confronted him with a small plain stone bearing his mother’s name.
The child became the boy, ignorant of all that lay outside Flinn except as fragments of schoolroom learning. Tucked into shrubs against the wind, himself to himself in small unknown places, he watched the sea and thought of it stretching back from its nearby line of constant collapse to behind the horizon, on and on until it returned somehow, wrapping the world in a wrinkled sleeve. His mind fled away over its surface to far-off nowheres and diluted his grief by smearing it ever thinner across dreamed deserts or forests whose canopies sagged beneath carpets of celestial butterflies. By such lonely acts the faintest heartening echo sometimes came back to him as from temple gongs struck by his thoughts or as scents jarred from distant blossoms.
The principal sounds of his life included these, made without the larynx and in a fervent whisper: Shuuuff was the voice of the onshore wind which comes in summer puffs and beats against the first dune-crest, curling up its face and striking the exposed roots of eroded tussocks on its lip. Ssiiih was the steady breeze of grey April or October days through samphire and grasses. Grockle was medium-sized abraded stones tumbled by a retreating wave, a sound peculiar to winter and which had always pleased him because at a time when the sea appeared uniformly thick with cold this unexpected hollowness at its roots suggested aeration down below, a valiant lightness permeating upwards. There was a whole vocabulary to describe the noises made by different waves depending on mood, the direction of the wind, the colour of the sky. The sounds he attributed to birds were legion. None of them, had he known it, much resembled any of the standard transliterations used to identify them in books. At some point, after an age of lonely repetition, the words he had assigned these noises had hived off and now stood on their own, names for things which had become the things, had become his companionable whole. Long after he reached the city as a young man he would repeat them when alone, quite consciously, or maybe no more unconsciously than a prayer: something affirmatory and consoling; something heaved, iterated, meant.
For, central to this boy, to his companionship of himself, was a solemnity which could not be put into words but which had the status of a vow. He had promised that no matter what happened he would always remain true to the person he now was, to his unseen companion who alone knew what he endured. What he knew he could not describe except by the feelings it brought, as a merganser brings with it its marvellous plumage out of a grey sky. When a herring smack from Great Yarmouth went aground on the Shaleybanks the clouds cracked apart that afternoon and let out a ray so narrow it illuminated a single spar which burst into gold, the rest of the craft remaining as dun as its sails. It produced in the boy a fretful ecstasy which recurred whenever the weather looked the same. What were such episodes if not cement, building up dab by dab an identity which would last and in which he could be free?
He had once tried to confide in Wim, whose father had four long greenhouses behind the town. These were crammed with row upon row of tomatoes and it was Wim’s task to help with watering, pinching out, tying up trusses, spraying washes. Wim was bigger than Leon, a year older, with sticking-out ears and farinaceous skin. Despite constant eczema which cracked painfully and wept he preserved a cheerful spirit and vagrant passions, pushing potatoes up exhaust pipes and dyeing cats green. When Leon timidly broached the subject of his ‘funny feelings’ Wim’s great ears had lit up bright red and he did things which made little sense but caused Leon to think of gutting and roes. It seemed after all that Wim had not understood, and Leon never tried again. Much later he could vividly recall that scene of cross-purposes: the bright October sun shining hot through the glass on the back of his head, the smell of crushed tomato leaves, the translucent ears and milt.
One other constant companion was a chronically weak chest. Sometimes on winter mornings when it was still dark he hardly had the strength to light the candle, get into his clothes and totter downstairs gripping the rickety banister. The first breaths of searing sea air or the close tarry fume of the smoke house would bring on a fit of coughing which forced him to sit for minutes, wiping tears from his eyes. On three occasions he had been taken in a cart to the cottage hospital nine miles away, the first at the age of eight, the last when he was fourteen. Each time the treatment was the same. He was put to bed in a warm room and well fed, while every so often a tent of curtains would be drawn around a frame overhanging the head of the bed. A nurse would bring a steam kettle heated by a spirit lamp and set it on a chair with its long tin spout poking through a hole in the curtains. From this spout came steam with an assortment of aromatic flavourings added. The doctor was a great believer in variety, on the grounds that a physiological system as complex as the lungs needed more than a single specific. One morning it might be menthol crystals implanted in a blob of sponge through which the steam passed; later that afternoon it could be benzoin or Friar’s Balsam. The steam helped and Leon would lie back in his semi-delirium while the hot resins opened up crackling passageways in his chest. The first time the doctor doubted he would survive, had believed the infection would spread. He looked thoughtfully at the gasping child, thin to the point of gauntness, called for constant nursing and hot camphorated poultices applied to the chest every two hours and wrapped in yellow oiled silk. He spoke of invasion, capillary bronchitis, pleurisy. With his old wooden stethoscope (to which he loyally clung, maintaining that flexible rubber tubing distorted sound) he listened to the râles in the boy’s lungs. His head was turned towards Leon as he did so, face balanced on the wood tube so that to his drifting patient it looked like some kind of blancmange on a cake stand. The doctor listened as the crepitations roared up, his eyes fixed nowhere, expression rapt as a child’s with a seashell pressed to its ear. Since chest complaints were so common hereabouts he had a fine ear and could distinguish shades of sound which told him much. Above the loud undertow of crackling noises, for instance, that thin squeak was not a good sign. It was the remaining air from the alveoli squeezing back through the clogged atrium into the bronchiole and slowly shutting down another group of air sacs. Areas of the left lung were already producing a dead, meaty sound to auscultation. ‘Time for an expectorant, Sister,’ he would murmur, straightening up at length. ‘Squill, I think. Tincture – no, vinegar of squill, together with syrup of Tolú. Tomorrow morning tar-water, preferably birch tar. Is he drinking?’
But that time Leon had pulled through, and the next, and the next. By his early teens he was left with permanently weakened lungs. He coughed a lot, became easily short of breath. Down in Flinn he excited pity. In his delicacy and unparented isolation he stood out, even on that harsh coast where conditions differed little for most people. Indeed, many were fond of him. He was gentle and polite; and if he seemed remote and always to be talking to himself it was construed as proof that ‘part of him was already on the other side’. In this view people were touched by sickness as by sainthood. He was really only waiting for a fatal complication to set in – pneumonia, consumption – and he would finally go all the way to the churchyard where sickly children ended, his coffin leaned on by a sexton with a pole to stop it floating up as the soaking clods were shovelled hastily back.
So carefully had he watched sails, waves, grasses, skies, that maybe Leon allowed himself to be guided by the wind. A quartering breeze on his thin shoulder-blades veered him diagonally to the railway instead of the bus station. An icy clout to the side of his neck knocked him into the first train rather than the second. At any rate, some explanation should be advanced for the uncanny accuracy with which he fetched up at the Botanical Gardens of all places on the very day there was a vacancy for a low-ranking employee, and this at a time when half the streets of Europe were restless with low-ranking employees looking for work. His companion about him, he moved among these listless folk in a purposeful way, one eye on the clouds. He had already been down to the docks crowded with shipping and admired the forest of masts and rigging, the funnels’ stained livery. But the wind was steadily onshore and he was blown back towards City Hall.
On the far side of the boulevard was a fine high wall bending with the road so as to suggest a large enclosure. He crossed, wincing at traffic din, and came to a pair of iron gates, one of which was open. He wandered in past a little lodge, the wind now squarely at his back. Some way off beyond a screen of willows a small tarn glittered. On it were several dozen waterfowl. Leon approached. Many of the larger ones were odd indeed. There were emerald shanks and weird crests and crimson excrescences like tumours around the base of the beak. He looked about him with amazement. Although the grounds had been landscaped they were laid out not as a park but as an elaborate garden. There were a few expanses of plain grass lawn which together might have constituted a pleasance, but the general effect was more serious and even scientific in a way he found reassuring. On all sides was a profusion of unfamiliar plants and trees, all well maintained and labelled. Used as he was to the North Sea coast he was overwhelmed by the richness of the garden, by the colours and scents, the nooks of shade, the rockeries and summer houses. Butterflies staggered above banks of honeyed trumpets whose name was painted on the wooden marker planted beside them. He seemed to have fallen into a paradise. He wandered about, slightly stupefied.
Seeing a couple leaving he let himself in through the double set of doors and stood in wonder, breathing the hot damp reek. This incense went straight down in his lungs, clearing airways, easing tightness. He walked the spongy paths, admired plants whose shapes he had never imagined. If the walled garden outside were itself a fragment of the seventeenth century, this indoor land was a patch of primordial terrain. It was as if once, unknown ages ago, a tropical forest had covered this part of the Earth until one day people had noticed it retreating and had clapped a greenhouse over a remaining tentacle like a tumbler over a butterfly, preserving it intact as the rest shrank away and vanished for good. Altogether he spent an hour in there, alone but for three visitors who came and went. There seemed nobody in charge. He left and after a search found a fellow in a leather jerkin and gaiters who directed him back to the lodge.
‘You mean he’s nicked them?’ asked the woman incuriously.
‘Clean as a whistle. Imagine, two hundredweight of trellis straps.’
‘I want to do your glazing,’ said Leon.
‘We had a glazier,’ the woman reminded him tartly.
Whatever wind had blown him here was evidently still blowing his way. Within half an hour he was engaged as a gardener’s boy for a pittance and with permission to sleep in a potting shed where there were some bales of peat and a horse blanket. ‘Can’t think why I’m doing it,’ the man kept saying. ‘No references, nothing. And especially after all this. I suppose you’ve not got your eye on anything? There aren’t any trellis straps left but maybe you’re planning to start a black market in putty?’
‘Very odd boy,’ as the head gardener remarked to the Palm House curator. ‘Talks to plants.’
They thought for a moment, warming their hands on the mugs of tea they were holding. The dried mud on their palms husked over the glaze. ‘Not to talk to, no,’ said the gardener. ‘That’s what’s odd. Remember that painter they brought in? The one who’d been gassed in the trenches? Now there was a fellow off his onion. He didn’t just talk to himself. Went about shouting at people who weren’t there. Gave me the willies. But young Leon’s not like that. When he’s on his own he talks to himself, right, but when he’s with you he talks perfectly normal, doesn’t he? No, he’s not potty. And I’ll tell you what, that boy’s got the greenest fingers I’ve ever seen. You know when you’re losing a plant? You’ve tried everything short of sitting up with it at night? Point comes when you think sod it, that’s it, heave it up and put it on the bonfire. Old Leon’ll come by and say “Don’t pull him up, Mr Smy, don’t pull him up.” And he’ll mess about with it and make sort of hissing noises at it as if it was a horse and blow me, a week later there’ll be this little green shoot. Soon as winter’s over I’m having him off maintenance. It’s a waste. You could go out in the street right now and in five minutes find thirty men to put a washer on a tap or patch a water butt or dredge dead leaves out of the lake.’
‘Exactly. No, I’m having him off that. The lad’s got something. Wants watching, though. A lot to learn. He will keep talking to visitors. Caught him at it only this morning. Willesz had put him to cleaning out that runoff tank at the back of the Orangery and he’d got this barrowload of sludge and muck, looked like a blackamoor, pushing it along a walk if you please, not even going round by the wall. When I came on him there he was, bold as brass, stopped out there in the middle talking to this young lady. “Since when”, I asked him soon as I could get him away, “does the Society encourage filthy dirty gardener’s boys to talk to ladies and gentlemen of the public? One, it’s against regulations and two, it’s a question of manners.” He knew better than to give me any sauce but it’s not the first time he’s done it.’
‘Blimey,’ said the head gardener. ‘Never thought of that.’
‘Maybe,’ was all the head gardener would say.
If a dark figure ever was glimpsed accompanying the Gardens’ most junior employee as he stole at night between boulevard and potting shed, nothing further was said. And if in after-years Leon looked back at these times – which he seldom did, being no common nostalgic – he could clearly recall only details about particular plants and an immense disseminated happiness. With its bowed, peg-tiled roof, its tiny grate and small-paned windows locked solid with generations of paint and cobwebs the potting shed was his first home, tucked into an Eden behind high walls which had a comforting hierarchy, customs and dress. The shed’s very smell was a source of contentment and was made up of creosote, hay, mice, winter wash, tarred twine and the linings of nests. Already the preceding years had blurred and run, infancy and boyhood, into a long self-loyalty beside an aching sea. The gilded galleon atop the Palm House, sails crammed and stays humming, tacked auspiciously into steady breezes, heading for foreign lands to bring back strange pods, seedlings, cuttings, tubers and corms for nurture and cultivation. It was the order that was so satisfactory, the artifice. The natural world’s abundance was too dissipated, too squandered. It was diluted and thinned by distance, by vagaries of climate, by accidents of geology and the wrecking hand of man. A botanical garden, though, could be a living museum, richly concentrating varieties which in nature might not even share the same continent. It was something to set against limitless polders sucked at by a limitless sea until all the flavour was gone. True, those tough maritime plants were subtle and beautiful in their hardiness. Yet the shivering spaces in which they clung and thrived, the marish grasses rooted in the seep and glitter of draining water, all told of something hollow and unquiet which he wished not to think about. Only now and then in winter or in stormy weather when the gulls drifted inland with their pained, angular cries did they bring with them a breath of the past, for a moment producing in him a sense of unravelling. It was marvellous the grief a mere bird could bring, crying and bent against a drab sky. Quickly he would turn back to hoeing around the Crinodendron hookerianum or swaddling a clematis against frost, rendering the gulls powerless and keeping at bay the sad chill they brought. With him at all times was his companion. Like a lone mountaineer who is so certain of a presence that he automatically halves each bar of chocolate, Leon knew he lived with an angel perched on his shoulder, his own familiar, guide and friend.
Not even the wind bore the faintest whisper as, many hundreds of miles away to the east, maniacal speeches were cheered by vast crowds in floodlit stadiums.
Overheard: |
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Acalypha hispida: | He was very interested in survival in those days, wasn’t he? | ||
Browne agrandiceps: | Very. His own, primarily, but also ours. Quite a leap. Humans have a different perspective on these things. They’ve got various grand phrases like “The will to live” and “The life force” which have religious or moral significance for them. We’re a good deal less pretentious. I mean, why invent difficulties? Do you remember him lecturing us about something called “Occam’s razor”? |
A: | Vaguely. Didn’t that tamarind he thinks so highly of, the one by the door, make a joke about “Bunkum’s pruner”? Just a bit of mickey-taking. Our gardener’s so earnest, isn’t he? | ||
B: | He’s making up for lost time. In any case it’s obvious just looking around that our own life force must be pretty simple and uniform. Whether we live or die depends on conditions being right. If you ask me, survival’s a straightforward matter. Look at that moss he has such problems with on the outside of the House up beyond the palms. He’s always going on about it rotting the bricks and making the glass green at the edges. It’s because that end faces north. It doesn’t happen on the southward-facing parts because conditions are wrong there. Not enough damp or shade or nourishment. Any plant can understand that. | ||
A: | True. With the right conditions there’s no stopping us. But give the man his due, he also understands it. There’s something in his character which responds to the principle of “all or nothing”. When it comes down to it there’s very little flexibility built into most living things, not even humans. For the majority of creatures everything has to be just so, and within quite narrow limits. What else are all these thermometers for? | ||
B: | Survival. | ||
A: | Exactly. We happen to be particularly sensitive to cold. Our lives hang on a few degrees, which isn’t true of humans. But they have their own problems, our gardener especially. It’s to do with their hearts, I think. The conditions for life may be fine, but they can still lose this “will to live” of theirs. I’ve always thought the gardener’s will was really more a matter of stoicism. He’s very absolute, I’ve noticed. If he can’t have what he wants he’d rather have nothing. I approve of that, don’t you? It’s how we all feel. Anyone here would prefer to grow and blossom and die in due time than merely survive in a sort of straggly half-life. Who wants to live on those terms? One has to be a bit brisk about these things. Our gardener is, and that’s why I admire him. | ||
B: | Me too. Better nothing than the wrong thing. |