When the sun melted the snow on the Palm House roof the moon refroze its edges into a crenellated coastline which ebbed away down the glass until snow fell again. There was a moment in early afternoon when the rays lacked sufficient heat to gnaw any further and the day’s new boundaries were complete. On one particular afternoon sunlight blazed the fringes of its map into gold filigree and fell through as topaz rain into the princess’s hair as she walked the length of the aisle. Leon was wandering about looking at vistas, at juxtapositions, discontented with a chance massing of too many dark greens at the jade vine’s foot. Harmony, balance; the plants’ disposition was critical to their overall effect, and their overall effect might elevate an interesting collection into a work of art. Passing the young tamarind he laid an encouraging hand on a branch and was at once distracted by the approach of the princess’s aureoled figure. At the sight of her youthful Asian face in its golden nimbus his heart staggered momentarily beneath the weight of memory. When she said ‘I may be going away, but first …’ it seemed to fly apart and, riding on a fragment, he was carried back to 1928 and found himself on the beach with Cou Min staring helplessly at where a splash of dried seawater had left, like the evidence of tears, a floury patch of crystals on the delicate skin between her earlobe and cheek. The whole story could be contained in one short summer of nine weeks, in which time the thin boy with the fishy dungarees had suffered the other pole of his life to be fixed. By the end he was the complete human being, a little celestial body wobbling bravely on its twin axes of loss and longing.
The arrival in Flinn of a Dutch fisheries expert had greatly excited the townlet. Extravagance of any sort entered neither the lives nor thoughts of its inhabitants, with their dour muling and muted dolour. The spectacle presented by Dr Koog was of royalty. They were not to perceive that the prodigious limousine in which he drew up outside the inn was a battered maroon shooting-brake, a vast jalopy disgorging an exotic retinue, chests and coffers of treasure and fine raiment and finally Dr Koog himself, a gentleman of aristocratic mien with muttonchop whiskers, a high white collar with rounded points and a crimson tie which lit up the square. It was some time before the townsfolk could see the car for what it was and the treasure chests as a collection of scuffed cabin trunks and leather boxes full of oilskins and scientific equipment – epibenthic nets, nests of circular sieves, microscopes and Nansen bottles. By then the boys were referring to Dr Koog’s whiskers (strictly among themselves) as ‘bugger’s grips’ and his exotic retinue had resolved itself into Mrs Koog – a dumpy lady with a gay laugh – and two foreigners who acted as servants. These were from one of the Dutch colonies, Bali or Java or somewhere like that, a mother and daughter presumably acquired as one acquired a tan, in the course of government service or private enterprise. The inn door finally closed behind them, the car’s engine ticked as it cooled, and three or four urchins too young to be intimidated squatted by the chromium hubcaps and fell into hysterical giggling pleasure at the sight of their own distorted faces and bulbous tongues.
Leon, on his way home from an errand, had been as diverted by this magnificent arrival as everyone else until he saw the servant’s daughter. In that moment he became possessed, wholly taken over by an inflooding of such amazement he could scarcely breathe. His very blood forgot to circulate. He even stopped coughing. Blessed the young to whose diary pages – scribbled in tears and pry-proof code – come doomed and wistful words like ‘unattainable’ which their hearts refuse to take seriously. In their imaginings the attainment is ever-present and any day now will be happening. To fall in love on the instant so that it has the effect of everything collapsing at once drenches the rest of time, or at least the rest of that summer, with a vibrating unreality. Certain migraine sufferers have advance warning of an attack when a shimmer appears above objects or haloes them entirely. Others are also filled with a strange exaltation despite knowing that it always leads to a darkened room and a shattering ache. The rest of that afternoon shuddered about Leon in just such a way as he went home along the track across the polder. Without warning his life had fallen into pre-today and post-today. A singleminded canniness of devotion was born which began at once to plan tomorrow. Unreality supervened again the moment he went to bed that night. As he lay in the darkness he scarcely noticed the lighthouse flipping its spurts of light across his curtains. He was in thrall for the first time to the addictive incense which rises from a pillow receiving confession. Her face was as close as the inside of his own eyelids yet beyond his reach. Try as he might he couldn’t get her beloved physiognomy into focus. It had been more than a glimpse he had had of her, too. He had gorged his eyes as she carried boxes and bags and rugs between shooting-brake and inn while he stood not five feet away. He clearly retained the impression of black eyes, of skin the colour of the honey Wim’s mother made, of a cheek flat or infinitesimally hollowed so it contained the merest wisp of diagonal shading such that the backs of his fingers might have smoothed it away. But he couldn’t fix her features. The harder he tried the more they skidded off and congealed into those of the tobacconist’s daughter whom he loathed, even (God help him) of the tobacconist himself. Exasperated by his own disloyalty and by the perverse waywardness of his memory he fell eventually out of unreal waking into real sleep. When he awoke with a yielding tingle of instant recall at the change which had come into his life the lighthouse’s beams were already invisible on the paling curtains and his mind was made up.
Putting on his cleanest clothes he ran downstairs, wrenched his bicycle from its shed and pedalled into Flinn. There he presented himself at the inn to learn what he could and, before timidity and resignation could get the better of him, to offer himself. As what? As anything: drudge, messenger, lover, car cleaner, boat rental expert, lifetime companion, slave. The first thing he learned from the innkeeper, quite forcefully, was that it was barely six o’clock and a gentleman like Dr Koog was hardly likely to be afoot after the previous day’s long journey. Afoot, afoot, afoot; Leon morosely hopped down the inn’s three steps and sat with presumption and temerity on the great car’s running-board, leaning his head against the cover of the spare wheel half recessed into the wing and gazing up at the shuttered and curtained windows. The innkeeper came out and told him to take his reeking bum off guests’ property. So he went down to the little harbour and sat on the jetty instead and watched fishermen unloading withy creels of flatfish and herring, haddock and gurnard while a summer morning crystallised around him. The early sun did its best to squeeze from the glittering grey North Sea a suggestion of tropic tints so that flashes of green and violet leapt from the lit edges of taupe sills, lapsed and collapsed in time with his heart.
To telescope judiciously, to haste things on: at ten to nine that morning Dr Koog engaged him as an ‘experimental assistant’, the august lineaments of which title concealed the outlines of a dogsbody. He would be responsible for carrying equipment down to the boat and back up again, for cleaning it, repairing torn nets and performing such other tasks as might crop up. Dr Koog was friendly and had renounced his imperial collar and tie for an open-necked soft shirt. As he talked Leon’s eyes wandered, trying to see around the man of science so as to catch a glimpse of the girl descending the stairs. He was unlucky in this but went home with a lifting sense of enterprise and success. By a legitimate ruse he had brought himself into the orbit of his beloved object (whom he couldn’t yet name) and so fully had he embraced his new persona an oddness never struck him: that roughly eighteen hours ago he had never heard of Dr Koog nor tried to find buried in his pillow the face of a Javanese servant girl. But the next morning when he started work he saw her outside the inn, coming down the steps behind Mrs Koog. At the time he was talking to someone and his mouth continued to speak as he fixed for ever her red dress, her fledgling breasts mere hints beneath a white organdie bertha. That was how her face looked, framed by raven hair gathered in a thick glossy plait tied with a blue ribbon. That was how her fractionally plumper lower lip protruded as her heels elastically bumped each step to show she was fourteen and not twenty-four, just enough left of the child to make coming slowly down three steps less than a prosaic affair.
‘… about hiring a suitable boat?’
‘What? Sorry, sir, I didn’t …’, for it was apparently Dr Koog himself to whom he was talking.
The scientist raised a hand cheerily towards the retreating backs. ‘My wife’s off to do her shopping and we’ve no time to waste. She’s on holiday. I’m not. Find a boat, get started, that’s the thing. Know anything about fish?’
‘My uncle’s a fisherman, sir. I help him smoke the catches, mend the nets, stuff like that.’
‘Know how to tell a fish’s age?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Sex?’
‘You mean like cock fish and hen fish, milt and roes?’
‘That’s it. Perhaps I’d better explain what I’m up to. The governments of all the countries which have North Sea coastlines want to find out more about the way fish breed, where they lay their eggs, what they eat, what makes a good breeding season, where they go when they migrate. That sort of thing. Once we know, we may be able to improve our fishing practices. At the moment we’re taking far too many young fish and certain varieties are becoming scarce, as I’m sure you’ll have noticed. Some areas are badly over-fished. There are limits to what we can go on taking and taking, year after year. If it was on land we’d say the animals were being hunted out. Not the least of our problems is that we know next to nothing about fish. Now, a boat. With an engine. There’s one we might use lying away in Holland and I can always get that but I thought maybe we’d try for something local first.’ Dr Koog had already steered Leon down to the jetty. His breezy energy was contagious and the boy felt there was nothing he couldn’t arrange, no obstacle he mightn’t overcome. With a man like Dr Koog behind him he was sure that getting to know the daughter of his wife’s maid would be a pretty straightforward affair.
After some enquiries and haggling a suitable boat was engaged, a steam smack which had seen better days, and Leon’s aestas mirabile was launched and under way. In some respects the doctor was scarcely less marvellous than the girl. He clearly believed that since Leon had volunteered for the job he might as well learn from it. He took the trouble to explain whatever he was doing and encouraged the boy to ask his own questions. They spent roughly half each week at sea, generally day excursions but now and then going out at night. The rest of the time Leon was his lab. assistant. Koog turned one of the inn’s attics into a makeshift laboratory suitable for sorting and classifying specimens, preparing slides, writing up notes. It opened up a world the boy could never have imagined. He was proud of his dexterity with a knife and could split and gut a herring in a neat double movement, but Koog was less impressed by this skill than by a casual aside of Leon’s that he sometimes put his head in the sea and listened to the fish. In the first instance the doctor showed him how to perform a simple dissection and explained a fish’s basic anatomy, since like many fisher-folk the boy was utterly familiar with the creatures and almost entirely ignorant of them. In the second he questioned Leon closely about what he thought the sounds were that he heard, and whatever had made him listen in the first place? Leon blushed and begged him not to mention it to anybody since the villagers already thought him peculiar enough. Unfortunately he couldn’t identify specific creatures by their sounds but only knew the sounds were there. What was more, although at one time or another he had seen most of the species around these coasts his ability to name all but the commonest was slight, and even those he often knew only by their local names. All varieties of squid, cuttlefish and octopus were referred to as ‘stickers’, for example. They were winged stickers, bony stickers and round stickers. Dr Koog listened attentively and then with the aid of the specimens they caught and the illustrations in textbooks (such books! such pictures!) showed him how very different each was, with different abilities and habitats. He soon saw that the creatures of the sea were as subtly diverse as the plants he so minutely discriminated, that the crude commercial relations he had with them disguised everything which made them interesting. The revelation lay in his grasping the idea of an unsubjective taxonomy. The private method he had devised for classifying natural things evidently had a parallel. All unbeknownst to him science had been assorting them according to criteria he would never have hit on in a million years, fitting them neatly into trees or setting them on the rungs of ladders so it became possible to trace an orderly relationship between everything.
While all this was going on he had made other discoveries. The girl’s name was Cou Min – at least, that was how it sounded. She was half Chinese, half East Indian. On his recent travels to those parts of Asia Dr Koog had been accompanied by his wife who, owing to an attack of malaria, had been too ill to return to Holland in time to give birth. The infant was stillborn and Cou Min’s mother had devotedly nursed Mrs Koog and, both husband and wife were convinced, had saved her life where the local Dutch doctor was evidently failing. In recognition they had offered the woman a permanent position as Mrs Koog’s private maid, a post she had been only too glad to accept since her own husband now lay in a cemetery in Batavia. There was another thing Leon learned which made him gloomy indeed, which was that Cou Min spoke only Chinese and a Malay dialect. Her mother communicated with the Koogs in kitchen Dutch as opaque to Leon as Chinese itself; her shopping expeditions must have been a fine linguistic gallimaufry. Of the entire household only multilingual Dr Koog could converse with his new assistant with complete ease.
This frustration was made worse since, to give the girl pleasure, Koog would sometimes invite her on his field trips. To judge from her evident enjoyment and lack of fear she was perfectly familiar with the sea, though not with one as cold. She would sit on a coil of rope bundled up in thick clothing while her eyes took in everything. Whenever Leon’s met hers he experienced an eviscerating pang. He would contrive to sit beside her and judiciously exaggerate the sea’s motion so his body bumped against hers, at which he flashed her an easy smile of apology behind which a raving yell of hopeless love was bitten back. Once when they were delayed by a lost net it was past ten at night when they turned for home and as light left the sky and dark welled up from the sea his hand, after some minutes’ stealthy manoeuvring, fell against hers and with a soft involuntary exhalation he kept it there, or it stayed and held hers of its own accord, being clearer in its intentions than its owner was. This breathless moment prolonged itself while she didn’t stiffen or object or draw hers away. And then gradually her not drawing it away became sheer passivity and he could no longer pretend this was the demureness of a young goddess but some paralysing inertia or indifference with, maybe, deep cultural roots. He didn’t let go, of course, since any contact on any terms feeds lonely hours and days of a lover’s life, sustains dreams, quickens the air. At first he had kept his face averted but later looked into hers, puzzled, and found the dim oval likewise turned to him. But the eyes remained invisible, their expression unreadable until they neared land enough for the lighthouse to sweep its double flash across, in whose brief exposures he believed he saw a smile.
But the weeks passed and by broad daylight he read the same ghastly benevolence about the mouth whose contours his own had sought in the plump creases of his pillow, and in her eyes his own beseechingly caught the mere evidence of uncommitted liveliness. Her glances were everywhere, frank and inquisitive, young girl in a foreign land; and wearily it seemed to him she cast the same expression on a bag of cherries, the innkeeper’s dog, the contents of one of her master’s newly hauled-up dredges, as she did on him. Leon tried using Koog as an innocent interpreter, having him ask her if she were cold, if there were fish like this in her country, whether she went to school. Although some of the questions got through, Koog had a habit of answering them for her, absently, and such replies as he did extract were probably modified by their passage through the same indifferent filter. Leon thought the doctor wasn’t especially protecting her; it obviously never entered his head that she was anything but a child, and a native one at that, towards whom nobody could feel anything other than the vague and undifferentiating kindness due all children. Certainly he seemed not to notice the wandering of his assistant’s attention whenever Cou Min was present, nor see his trembling fingers as evidence of strain rather than debility.
‘That’s a nasty cough,’ he would say as Leon was bent double by formalin fumes and could feel the scientist’s eyes counting the line of vertebrae knobs beneath his shirt. ‘We must get some weight on you.’ But this, too, was vaguely said and the zooplankton in the water column soon rose up again and regained his attention.
Yet with each sun Leon’s heart lightened in expectation as he cycled into Flinn after the usual acrid exchange with his uncle (who was little mollified by the small sums he brought home in place of his previously free labour). Some days he never even glimpsed Cou Min. On others, circumstances would conjure her arm beside his own and he would marvel at their different colours and ache to pass his fingertips over the tiny hairs trapped at her elbow’s crease. Or else his eyes would be offered her leg, casually raised as she tied her shoe, the hem of her dress falling momentarily back or catching a stray favonian huff of breeze so as to permit his gaze access to unbearable depths of tender, apricot thigh. Those evenings he cycled home exhausted, worn out by the effort of maintaining his balance, riding the lurches, acting the uncomplicated, eager apprentice. It was impossible. Language, culture, constant supervision and sheer adult incredulity placed Cou Min on the far side of an insurmountable barricade.
Who at fifteen could ever imagine that everyone in his town, throughout Europe, in the entire world, might be constantly filled with similar hopeless longings? That this sweet ailment which had descended on him sooner or later afflicted everybody? And who would conclude that at the centre of this universal longing there resided a tenderness so intense, so yielding, that it constituted a form of racial frailty? How out of sheer thwart and desperation protective guises were donned so that each morning from bedrooms the world over men and women stepped wearing armour – suits and overalls and uniforms which mediated the permissible and damped private anguish. But fifteen-year-old Leon was naked before his longing, even as he longed for nakedness. When he repeated her name into his pillow his scalding breath came back to him smelling of damp feathers. Behind squeezed lids he tried again and again to assemble her, to will her to stand before him, smile, reach out to place her hands behind his neck and draw him to her. Yet with faithless malignity his memory supplied only morsels in soft focus. In fantasy he was able to adore at leisure the sweet jut of an ankle bone beneath its short white sock; an ear transluced by pelting summer sun; the backs of her calves (modestly kissing as she stood waiting while adults talked) tensing and relaxing to her rocking on and off her toes; the tender nape so artfully hidden and revealed by the shining pigtail. Yet these wonderful details refused to coalesce into Cou Min complete. Instead they drifted about like motes in strong sunlight. Behind them floated her presence, by now as much part of him as his own beating heart and equally beyond sight, like the familiar figure glimpsed in a dream, so well known that its real identity is never disclosed.
And thus, sadly, passionately, he sang the Fragmented Beloved, dissolved in her own beauty.
Since everything about this summer was revelatory he also discovered how much being in love sharpens the senses even as it paralyses the intelligence. Had he been the diary-keeping sort he might well have headed one entry ‘The Day I Smelt Her Knee’, an event which took place without any contrivance of his. Once again they were at sea. Dr Koog and a crewman were hauling up a dredge of bottom samples, using a sheave. Leon had just turned away as it came aboard. The boat lurched, the heavy dripping net swung into his back, the end of its steel header catching him behind one ear. Half stunned, he was thrown to the deck where he slid on all fours like a dog on ice, thudding into Cou Min’s legs where she sat on the edge of the engine-hatch coaming. He never quite lost consciousness but experienced a dreamy, prolonged sublimity where his vision was narrowed to an area of russet knee and he breathed the scent of salt wind on sunbaked skin. Even as it seemed he could stay there for ever the singing in his ears grew fainter, hands grasped at his shoulders and he was helped back on to his feet, unwillingly restored to the world. Had he been writing this up later while nursing the ragged remains of a headache, he might have gone on to list several other of Cou Min’s intoxicating scents including those of her hair and her upper arms. Her clothes, too, had an innocent fragrance like the warm ghosts of coconut oil and the waxy smell of children’s bedding. And had he been writing reflectively years afterwards he might have been tempted to enlarge generally on the smells and sounds of the young as opposed to those of adults, for his adolescent self had engraved Cou Min pungently and for ever in more than merely the visual dimension. The very young might not be aware of noticing such things, but it is by subtle as well as by obvious means that they choose their loves from among their peers and coevals, from appropriate calves and puppies. Is this not true? (he might have written, with monumental vexation at the years which made it impossible to complete that summer – now destined to remain for ever unconsummated and lost to proper expression.) Is it not so, that young skin and hair smell different? That the young sound different not only when they speak or sing but when they eat and even when they digest? It is adults whose teeth clack and whose jawbones crepitate so irritatingly when they munch; who leave lavatories stenching of the fermented ichors of coffee and tobacco sputum; whose breaths are accompanied by the shrill whistlings of nasal hair. How visually led people are, then, to imagine that this vast spread of difference could be squeezed down into matters of looks alone! Women in particular went to great and costly lengths in order to appear young, with their creams and diets and rinses, as if age were only wrinkles, fading and middle-age spread. Yet a blind person could tell in an instant they were fakes. No matter what art and artifice she employed no woman could ever go back to smelling and sounding as she had at Cou Min’s age. Her very breathing would betray her. The body’s clock is not read in the face or hands but in its sonorities and the leak of glands. The interwoven sensualities of youth are fully understood only by other adolescents, for whom they are new (if sometimes a little on the rank side) and free from the corruption of nostalgia.
One thing Leon certainly would not have noted in a putative diary was his theft of Cou Min’s handkerchief, carried out with the unthinking response of the hardened criminal who stoops hawklike on a dropped wallet. This had fallen out of her sleeve when she brought tea up to her master and his assistant in the laboratory. Dr Koog had just explained how for the purpose of rough identification it was convenient to divide the flatfishes into three kinds: the turbot family, which included brill and megrim and had their eyes on the left side of their heads; the plaice family to which lemon sole, dab, halibut, witch and flounder belonged, whose eyes were on the right; and the proper sole family – also right-eyed – essentially represented by the Dover and sand soles. With a magnifying-glass Leon was examining the rosette around the nostril on the underside of a sand sole they had caught that morning when Cou Min knocked and entered with a tray. He broke off to watch her softly chiming progress and imagined running the lens over her entire body. As her hand dropped to the door handle on her way out a white wedge of handkerchief fell unnoticed from her sleeve and lay on the threshold like an abandoned sandwich. Quickly he went over and scooped it up, eliding this swift gesture into the act of picking up a teacup and bringing it over to the doctor who was still intently probing the sole’s apertures with a pair of forceps.
He never really got closer to Cou Min than this. He had thought to recognise in her a fellow outsider, adrift in a strange place and an alien culture, surely isolated by her youth in the enforced company of adults. In vain his own feelings of dissociation, in vain his certainty of this bond between them. They had everything in common but a language. The summer went on passing; passed. He learned a good deal about fish, about marine organisms, how to use a microscope and at last see for himself what he had always intuited through the grockle sound of the sea threshing its roots around pebbles: that it was alive throughout with unsuspected creatures now shimmering in their prismatic colours and intricate shapes in the sunlight which bounced up from the swivelled mirror. What he saw was a glimpse, just as what he learned was a glimpse; but it would be impossible for him to return to the crudeness of smoking bloaters. Once this summer’s turmoil had abated an intellectual disquiet would be found heaped like clouds out of which blew a wind fit to drive him away from Flinn and carry him as far as the capital.
And one day he was near the jetty, just far enough along the beach so that the water was not agleam with the restless rainbows of spilled engine oil, rinsing out plankton sieves in the shallows. When he straightened, dungaree legs rolled to his knees, he saw her standing a few paces off. He waded back and laid the sieves on the sand, heart beating with the certainty that she could only have come on a private errand. For the first time she smiled directly and unequivocally while holding his eyes. Then she said, in passable dialect, ‘I may be going away.’ And directly she spoke he realised it was true; she had purposely troubled to learn a parting line to convey that she had known all along what she meant to him, an act of politesse, even of sad mercy, which ran him through. ‘I thought you couldn’t speak … Going? But when?’ he blabbered. ‘You can’t go, Cou Min. Not now …’ Not now they could speak to each other, he meant, but they couldn’t. She only shook her head helplessly, her one phrase of his language exhausted, her message delivered. When he said, ‘But I love you, Cou Min. I honestly, truly do,’ he reached out involuntarily and grasped her hands, whereupon her tiny wrists – surprisingly strong – swivelled so that she also could exert a fond pressure. She spoke a soft sentence or two which conveyed less to him than a sandpiper’s cry. It was then that he saw the smear of dried salt dusting the cheek by her ear, the floury bloom minutely textured by the silky fuzz growing beneath, and was so immediately overcome with longing and despair that the remains of the strength which had sustained him week after week left him at once and he fell weeping to the sand. Involuntarily he reached forward and, drawing himself to her ankles, kissed her feet.
Oh, the payment exacted for love which has no return! The humiliation, the later self reproach; the inevitability of the malicious onlooker (in this case Wim’s older brother) who hurries off to spread the riotous news. A thespian act upon the beach! A ham melodrama in which weirdo Leon falls at the feet of his Chink goddess, a slant-eyed servant’s brat! In public! Not ten minutes ago! Probably if we’re quick they’ll still be at it!
But we’re not quick enough, for that was the end we witnessed, five seconds after which Cou Min squatted briefly and laid her hand on the boy’s trembling head. At this touch he sprang to his feet like one brought to his senses and turned back to the sieves and the sea, brusquely blotting his cheeks with shirted biceps while she walked away down the beach, at the jetty giving a small shake to her head as if to free the lustrous pigtail. The next day she left in a taxi together with her mother and Mrs Koog while the doctor stayed on for another week to finish his research. It was only then that the Dutchman appeared to notice his assistant was heartbroken rather than sickening for flu. After a little he explained, no doubt kindly, that Cou Min was engaged to a wealthy Chinese in Batavia – had in fact been affianced since she was nine, such was the way they did things there. He was under oath to this merchant grandee to return the girl on his next trip to the East Indies, which was to be before Christmas (it was now the first week in September) when they were to be married. A few days later the doctor himself left. Leon mutely helped him repack the maroon car with boxes and containers heavy with specimens. At last Koog held out his hand.
‘Best assistant I ever worked with,’ he said. ‘I’ll miss you badly, young man. Take this book – no, go on. From time to time you may want to refresh your memory about some of the fish we’ve seen. They’re all there. The herrings, especially, would merit your earliest attention. And here’s my card. If ever you’re passing through The Hague be sure to look me up. I should be back there by next summer. Well,’ he paused and glanced at the sky over the harbour as if for inspiration. ‘Don’t waste it. I mean your gift. You notice details. You appreciate difference. You like discriminating. It’s a rare thing at your age. Perhaps you can make it pay. Something scientific, I’d suggest. Go off to the capital and get yourself an education.’
With this breezy farewell the doctor sped away. Leon never saw him again, nor any of his entourage. Later that day, flicking listlessly through the book he had been left, he discovered wedged between the pages describing the Clupeidae four rosy banknotes whose value together was more than his uncle earned in six months, enough (before his uncle found and stole three of them) to get him to the capital and enrol in some sort of course, had he chosen. And so that fateful summer ended. His own traitorous memory added an ironic postscript, for he found that no sooner had the Koogs left than he could visualise Cou Min entire, standing, sitting, squatting, running, looking at him and smiling from the other side of nowhere with that smile reserved for the dead in photographs.
Eighteen years later he watched the princess walk the length of the Palm House with her hair burnished as the sun’s rays fell through the golden ice-frieze high above her, and heard her speak Cou Min’s own words: ‘I may be going away.’ They produced a distant pang, an echo revived, precursor of loss, inevitable bad news, endings. ‘But,’ she went on, ‘first I have a most serious offer to make to you. You don’t believe me? Je vous assure.’ Yet once again they were interrupted by the timely appearance of her lance-eyed shadow.
That night Leon blew out the last candle and instead of going to bed lingered for a while by the lovelorn tamarind. On hearing it speak he sat sympathetically on the brick pier beside it, knowing that eavesdroppers seldom hear good of themselves but also knowing it was his duty to listen. Tamarindus indica spoke softly, however, almost so as not to be overheard in its self-communing:
‘Did I once accuse our gardener of anthropomorphism, of tainting us with human ills? I think I’m tainted anyway, with that fatal unrest which takes over when mindlessness has run its limiting course and one is free to suffer. At any rate he touched me this morning and I understood at once. Oh, not because it was me: it was quite absentminded. It wasn’t a caress but something more wistful. Hardly a week goes by without somebody touching me but it isn’t the same. The visitors like to touch – despite the notices – because we’re rare to them, tokens of the exotic. The assistants have to touch, we’re part of their work. They vary from brutal to considerate. But our gardener’s like none of these. His is the gently musing touch of an unhappy man. If suddenly we could all burst into flower for him I believe we would, in blithe disregard of seasons and genes. The dark truth of this place is – wasted love. Scents and fruitfulness and all manner of budding and burgeoning: wasted. None of it goes any further, no matter what he says about sending seedlings hither and yon through the world. I sense it in his touch. The fruit drops and no seed germinates. The flower opens in futile splendour, the leaf falls. We writhe inside our glass.
‘What I learned today is that he’s little different from us. In a sense, are we not his flowering? Do we not speak for him? (And what comes of it? Dumb growth.) Nor is there hope for him outside. The sea wind blows across the dunes and marshes of Flinn, the world unlocks itself from war and finds nothing tender surviving. So much has been lost, and too much loss leads to this: to a gardener’s gestures or a priest’s, acts of succour and generosity which began long ago and with something quite else in mind. Though what should we care? The skills work none the less. His motivations are no-one’s business but his own. It may be that nobody else even notices; quite possibly I wouldn’t myself had I not felt his touch and seen his face. Such love! but of another time and still animating him, like the light now reaching us from a long-extinguished star. However, I mustn’t get sentimental on his behalf: I’m no doubt wrong in reading all this into him and, in turn, committing my own vulgar error of botanomorphism.
‘Nevertheless, I do have to go a bit further. I’m an intellectual – through no choice of my own – and there’s no stopping thought. A saving grace if ever there was one for there’s not much to do but think in a place like this. What else do you suppose happens when you’re rooted in earth? I used to gaze down despondently at the antics of those in my vicinity but nowadays I daren’t let my fond and betraying glance slide over my little neighbour for fear I’m unable to tear it away and she – in all her touching hemlockian innocence – becomes baffled and dismayed. So I admire the architecture instead, which never stales, although in these last eight years the paintwork certainly has. I’ve a childhood memory of when they did it inside and out in gleaming white and the House seemed twice as spacious, the roof floating off among clouds on the far side of a bright gulf. Of course everything does look larger when you’re small but some new paint would definitely help. Even so, there’s plenty to admire right down to details such as the cast-iron pineapple finials everywhere which I love. It’s also impressive that such a slender ironwork skeleton should be so strong, as it obviously is. Especially now, in this overstayed wintertime, one can hear the wind at night clouting the glass and flinging hundredweights of snow at it so the whole building seems to stagger, yet the warmth goes serenely on. All that happens is a momentary change in pressure as the structure flexes, iron and glass bending in order not to break, which I can feel in my stomata since they’re acutely sensitive.
‘An eccentric thought has just struck me – a new way of looking at this caged world of ours. Mightn’t it be seen as a memorial? Our gardener may think it’s some sort of living museum devoted to observing and preserving, but really it’s a memorial to a previous world. Maybe that’s what all museums are? Memorials to previous states? No; the thought’s gone. It was just a fleeting idea set off by his touch this morning and the contemplation of all this ironwork … Come to that, mightn’t grief quite efficiently frame the structure of a life? At once unbending and flexible, sombre yet airy, truthful in its inability to conceal itself? Its support would remain when all else had clouded or fallen away.
‘Too fanciful, no doubt. Just because for a weak moment I allow myself to be overtaken by melancholy there’s really no call to reinterpret everything in its purplish light. I’ve no doubt our gardener’s no gloomier than anybody else and this House is exactly what it purports to be – no more and no less. But how easy it is with time on one’s hands to slip into that parallel world of longing and sad fancies. Keeping my voice scrupulously low so not a whisper of sound can leak from a single stoma I need only say “Little hemlock. Oh, little hemlock”, and understand what moves him also. Feeble creatures, we are.’