The passive, the windguided who – like Leon – move at a slow drift through whole clutches of years are most likely to fake up, retrospectively, a narrative to cover themselves with spurious intent. The career landmarks of And then … And then don’t adequately describe their lives. Had Leon been obliged to look back over his thirty-three years and describe their course, there might only have come to him the moods associated with certain events if not the events themselves: whatever indelible indigo had welled out of endless wanderings along a solitary shore, constant planting to see what might grow, his head all the time coming up and his eyes fixing on nothing as thought walked away from him down a familiar corridor and he unresistingly followed. What might characterise such repetitions? Neither a hunt nor a chase, maybe: more methodical than the one, in slower motion than the other and altogether less gallant than a quest. And the object sought, the ostensible Cou Min so often summoned? How could she not suffer a marvellous fate, a transformation like that a sapphire undergoes when it emerges from the ground looking for all the world like a dull chunk of gravel but which, trundled round and round in a tub, loses its irregularities and becomes smooth, taking on lustre and its own colour? Finally the craftsman cuts and polishes until a gem sits on a piece of velvet, the diminished but sublime ghost of its crude ancestor.
When Leon thought of Cou Min, as he frequently did, it was the jewel he mostly saw, a hallowed thing made smooth by constant handling. Very occasionally she ambushed him in a raw manner of her own, provoking a jarring discontinuity. At those moments her figure sidestepped the tragic tameness he had assigned her as if his great passion had happened to another person entirely, or maybe to the same person but in a different life. Even eighteen years later a trap could still spring and drop him out of the diurnal world of stove house gardening into a melancholy pit. It happened one day when he was sowing five trays of assorted spices, three of which he planned to turn over to a colleague for raising in the Temperate House. The cumin seeds’ dry rattle in their packet, the fleeting image of a live organism encapsulated in a husk ready to be awakened, the play of names which could mean nothing to any but one man, precipitated that man through a hole where he was caught and held a long moment, seeing another world and another time, his deserted hands frozen above a tray of leaf mould. Now and then he yearned to be free of her, to slough off her memory and escape. More often he adored her abiding centrality: the unseen attractor around which his life could revolve. It is some people’s luck to find a way of remaining true to their first passion, a hidden faithfulness which survives, that endures even happy marriage to a stranger and a lifetime’s displaced love. There are others who, having survived the scald, can never put it out of their minds and are forbidden all compromise. Like anyone they may be plastic in their daily affections, opportunist in their desires, but they grip at their heart something which renders all else casual, temporary, unreal; and sooner or later – in the nick of time or, painfully, not – it surfaces like a deep sea creature and lovers break up and marriages are annulled. Leon’s case was simple: better no-one than not-her, a proposition that extended itself into a more general idea which ruled his days, that Nothing was preferable to anything on the wrong terms.
Thus the windguided, the passive man: who neither hunts nor chases but maybe searches in the patient doleful manner of one hoping he will recognise what he was always looking for if ever by chance he were to find it.
The evening of his uneasy conversation with the princess and of Felix’s melodramatic self-revelation dragged interminably. For the first time he saw the night people as intruders and wished they would leave him to his House and plants, to his provocative lodger on the other side of No Admittance. He thrice confiscated the chargé’s cigarette, eliciting, with his claimed need for nicotine as a pesticide, a dandyish and acerbic ‘Oh nonsense. My dear sir, it piques you to be punitive. Terribly exciting in its way but if you really wanted nicotine so much then instead of gathering it in tiny amounts – one slapped wrist at a time, as it were – you could surely have grown tobacco by the bushel. You could grow anything in here. Opium. Hashish. Babies, probably, if you knew how to sow them.’ Laughter, not all of it easy. In darkest manner Leon informed him that until the war the Customs and Excise people used to give the Gardens regular bales of impounded tobacco for burning in fumigators. It was the war which had upset the supply. Furthermore, it was as much as his job was worth to be caught growing illicit or dutiable plants in any but specimen quantities. This ponderousness raised a wilted eyebrow but no riposte. Eventually the door gave its last squeak and he shot home the bolts even while the yellow candlelight still showed a hunched back skidding away beyond the windows along the glassy path. The man fell heavily but he didn’t reopen the door, listening instead to the sounds of friends rallying around. The stray beams of their torchlight outside pattered randomly across the tropics within. Soon these too disappeared and he was left to do his ritual nightly round.
Something is happening to me, he told his plants as the candle-tongues sizzled between his licked fingers. I see now what I’ve made of this life, this one flash of light on a black sea catching me for an instant before it sweeps on for ever. All my passion’s in vain. I’ve never discovered what a satisfactory outcome would have been. To be loved in return as the rock loves the limpet for needing it? Dumb sucking? No; surely my purpose is altogether grander? Down on Palace Square (he told the night-flowering climber, Nyctanthes arbor-tristis) there’s a clockmaker – or there was, before the Nazis took him away and stole his stock – who made beautiful brass clocks. You could watch their works, how the little wheels whizzed and clicked. Instead of putting windows in the sides of the cases he used to place a glass bubble over the entire skeleton. At once this produced a different effect. It became a display. No more of the mechanism was actually visible but it set the whole clock apart as a self-contained world so that passers-by outside the shop window could reflect on it and be reflected in it. That’s also why the instruments in the Royal Science Museum are so fine. One way and another they’re all behind glass, either individually cased like clocks or together in cabinets: isolated, held up as examples of pure function which itself reveals the designer, the maker, the mind. Are the laws of physics universal? I sometimes ask the scientists who visit this House but they can’t agree, apparently, though most seem to think they must be. Look at a working clock beneath its glass dome, then, and you’re seeing a fragment of the universe, motion and energy and energy’s decay … Before they took him away they smashed his hands with their rifle butts. It pays to make sausages and shut up. The light sweeps on and never returns.
Are you still listening? In my Palm House we’re inside the clock itself, watching the growth, feeling the affection of living, sniffing the decay. I can’t imagine why some people remain unmoved, but most respond. Even those who scarcely notice plants when they’re outside in the open air will pay attention once they’re enclosed in glass and properly arranged. It’s remarkable. Some things only become visible if you put glass over them, and the more ordinary they are the more this is true. What visitors see in here is the universe on display, the Earth’s history and their own evanescence, and they know it.
But (he stroked Nyctanthes’ leaves) something is happening to me. Now and then I lose sight of the universe and just see myself, a freak displayed like a specimen in this marvellous bottle. Now and then I know what the palms feel as they press their fronds up against the inside of the dome. I must break out if it kills me. But how? The obvious thing’s to accept her offer. Follow the princess to her fabulous land. Become her tame expert. Design a world for her where I could strut and cough in the artificial chill among beds of narcissi. My bank balance would grow with the crocuses, the snowdrops, the winter aconites like ruffed buttercups, the pear trees, the little grove of sallows I’d like to plant at the centre. If I were homesick I could construct a seascape in one corner – no expense spared, didn’t she say? – and try to get rock samphire, sea holly, thrift and spurrey to grow. And meanwhile she …? Would I become her servant, once on her own home ground? Her confidant? Her teacher? Lackey and lover? Or just lackey?
Nyctanthes arbor-tristis replied not a word. In the semi-dark Leon could hear only the dripping of water and his heart valves’ creak. Really, candlelight was the perfect illumination for a palm house. It was a surprise that enough light drifted upwards to sketch faintly the structure’s outlines: the cast iron spiral staircase which twirled its lacy texture of holes and patterns towards the gallery in steps and risers and balustrade, the arching ribs far overhead on the edge of visibility between plumes and fronds and feathers. Warmth seeped up his trouserlegs from the gratings underfoot. This was his home, there could be no doubt. Anyone might wish for a home both benign and mysterious which comforted and sustained even as it enclosed a tendril of the raw universe.
I don’t want to see the real tropics – he confided to Nyctanthes.
How could one be rational when there was a suggestion of bulldozers and treason in the air? Dr Anselmus had never been other than a staunch ally who, Leon recognised, had championed him practically from his start as apprentice glazier. What could he be talking about with the princess? Of course it was true that, finally, Dr Claud Anselmus was Director and Leon was an employee, and directors and princesses could consort and chat and plan together where directors and employees could only exchange quite formal, technical opinions even though they had known each other sixteen years. That was how things were. But he made a vague, timorous resolution to have the matter out as soon as he could. Didn’t he have his own plans on the Society’s behalf? Wasn’t his Palm House becoming a popular attraction instead of the uneasy and virtuous cross between fossil and museum which it had been before the war?
Just then his attention was caught by a movement above him, framed by the banyan’s aerial roots. He froze, the candle he had snuffed sending up its greasy wisp of expiry between his fingers. Nothing moves in here, he thought. Only at the height of summer with all the louvres open do the larger leaves begin their wobble and single fronds whir like lone propellers. Tonight the windows were tightly shut, the muggy air unmoving. A sudden shower of drops clattered through the long leaves of a fishtail palm. Had a darker shape momentarily swung along the deep grey roof, up there where snow muffled such light as was reflected from the clouds above the city? Although capable of rash acts of passion which might pass for bravery Leon had preserved much of his childhood timidity. Not afraid of the dark as such, in certain moods he was apprehensive about his own capacity to frighten himself. Now the lacquer of competence and authority, which the night visitors always applied to him in a shiny coat with their questions and banter, swiftly thinned to nothing and dripped away like sweat. Was it perhaps one of those same night people who had purposely hidden so as to be locked in? And with what stealthy design? The war with its street gangs and inventive brutalities was still too recent for survivors not to remain fearful out of sheer habit. He stayed, therefore, breathing as shallowly and quietly as lungs and chirruping heart would allow. A scuff of sound, a hiss as if skin were sidling through leaves reached him now from all parts of the House. Even acoustics conspired to deceive.
‘I know you’re there,’ he remarked, courageously offhand.
Silence. He hardly knew which to fear more: the arrested moment continuing indefinitely or a sudden blaze of electric light and roisterous cries of ‘April Fool!’ or similar joviality as a band of pranksters leaped out around him and burst into laughter. As the silence lengthened he began to have wilder thoughts. Some animal – a monkey, perhaps? A panther? – had escaped from the nearby zoo and homed in on this only other possible habitat. He had recently heard they were restocking the place with animals collected from wrecked German zoos. ‘Indefinite temporary loan’ was how the newspapers described it. There was also the shipment of plants he had ordered in 1939 and which had arrived just that afternoon. There were three of them, crated and swaddled in sacking for their long journey from Polynesia, and he’d only had time to unwrap the Gnetum. This was because Professor Seneschal had capered and dithered around it since like the conifers and cycads it was classed as a gymnosperm and so was apparently irresistible to the old idiot. But the other two – the Pandanus odoratissimus and the Pritchardia pacifica were still unwrapped. Why mightn’t some snake or sinister monitor have awakened in the crates and even now be sliding its way towards him?
Without a sound the remaining few candles began going out. They did so in no obvious order and he was always too late to focus on whatever it was that extinguished them. All except the last, of course, which he watched with fascination as though his feet were clamped to the grating beneath. Much later he realised how easy it would have been to distract his attention from this last candle: a handful of gravel thrown a second before its flame could reveal the face. Instead he watched a bare arm emerge from the greenery, hand cupped like a cobra’s hood. It struck, and all was dark. And in that moment Leon knew the arm even as he couldn’t guess the purpose.
‘Felix!’ he called. ‘What is it? What are you up to?’ His words fell like pebbles. ‘Is this a game?’ When the question had echoed in his own skull long enough to irritate him he at last moved, impatient with further hiding. He walked back down the aisle to where the main light switches were. He felt for the teak box screwed to the end wall, opened it and smacked his palm down over the rows of toggles. Contacts clicked, relays closed, the dark remained. Had Felix, then, removed the fuses? These were in a similar box inside his own quarters. At that moment something struck him lightly on the shoulder blade and fell to the gravel. He turned and crouched in the faint monochrome, patting the ground until he found the missile: a round object the size of a golf ball, an unripe seed pod he could not immediately identify.
‘No, Felix,’ he sternly told the hot spaces before him. ‘Stop that! It’s gone beyond a joke. Not the plants.’ A second object struck No Admittance with a hollow knock. ‘Did you hear what I said, boy? Have you gone mad?’ But again his own bluster burned in his ears and enraged him with its impotence. He walked along the aisle to the point from which he judged the missiles had been thrown. It was hopeless to be moving into deep bulks flawed by only the dimmest mercuric sheen of snowlight, sensing that they closed behind him once he had passed. Leon, who knew every inch of his domain, soon passed into unknown territory. Never before had he been so aware of the heat, pressing and yielding and dripping as though by merely leaning his body against it, moving into its illusory resistance, he could squeeze actual water from the air. He shed his jacket, suddenly heavy and sodden, then his galoshes. Now in silence he squatted beside a tall shrub and again caught movement above him where none should have been. Felix was up on the clerestory walkway.
Hoping to cut him off he made his way at a silent semi-crouch along the track to where the spiral staircase rushed upwards on wings of iron. His naked feet doing likewise he found himself in the jungle’s canopy, wheezing, heart clicking in his throat. Now his prey was surely trapped, for although this main landing crossed the House and linked the two clerestories there was no corresponding gallery at the other end. There had, he knew, been architect’s plans for one but for some reason it had never been built, perhaps further evidence of the builders’ ambivalence about the place’s true function. Church or glasshouse? Temple of nature, maybe. At any rate only three sides of the rectangle remained viable upstairs. Down one of these the temple’s presiding spirit, the master gardener, now pursued his quarry, his rogue secret, hoping to suppress, capture, stifle it before it could escape. From the faint signs of movement at the far end of this narrow walkway he knew his stratagem was working. Felix was cornered now, up under the curved panes. Unless he tried a suicidal climb across one of the spans to the other side there was no way down. At which moment the dim snowlight fell with muffled gleam on a torso, washed in the smouldering chemicals of panic and desire, before it sprang outwards with simian carelessness. Instead of the expected sound of a body hitting a plinth thirty feet below the pursuer heard only a sharp swish of leaves and the creak of wood bending.
This savage, accomplished leap at once bridged the gap between Leon’s knowing and refusing minds. Just as only an agile climber could have severed the banana’s flower, so only Felix could have judged and made that jump into space. He must have had bad luck indeed to fall into the hands of a dismal gang of street louts. His splendid litheness had been caught unawares, probably dog tired and asleep in a doorway. Only in this way could so skilled an animal have been dragged down by an urban pack. Now he was loose and roaming the dark spaces below, pupils dilated to full night vision. But what was his plan, his purpose? To mock? To tantalise? What imaginary grim crime could this fond vandal be repaying? Leon, who had retraced his steps, stood uncertainly at the head of the winding stairs. Suddenly the forest at his feet contained real menace. Too much was opaque. He remembered the cleanness of the cuts in the flower stalk and tree bark. A very sharp knife precisely wielded. He knew nothing of madness except being able to assign it conventionally to unkempt souls who gibbered in public places (and who had largely disappeared under the German occupation). He wondered whether Felix might genuinely have taken leave of his senses. The boy had made a remarkable recovery from his injury and in the months since had been docile and tractable. Affectionate, he thought; of course Felix was affectionate. They had shared too much, too much sacrifice and fear and mutual indebtedness for there not to be affection. And hardly a firelit night had passed without the boy’s wordless accommodation. But were there not things more important than words? Dumb of mouth didn’t mean dumb of gesture, still less of brain. Without speaking a syllable Felix had mastered the heating system’s idiosyncracies. He was no prisoner, either. Had he wished to leave he could have walked out at any time since the war’s ending. So what was happening now?
Such novelistic representations of a pondering mind did not, of course, enter Leon’s, though all were more or less thoughts he hadn’t put into words at one time or another. He did, however, stand in indecision, fearful of going down. The heat was extraordinary. Surely the temperature was too high? The ironwork was hot to the touch, slick with moisture. The pattering of drops was a light shower passing over a forest, lost and primordial and extending far into the distance. He was aware of these events’ sheer wrongness. The botanical world was holding itself apart from the crude human plots and motives being played out among its trunks and leaves. It was retreating. ‘Shuuuff,’ sighed the gardener without knowing it, but no charm worked. He was left with no alternative but to go down, to play out this doltish piece of theatre.
‘We’re stopping this at once, Felix,’ he said as he descended, speaking conversationally down into the threatening arena. He had just decided that light was the most important thing. Playing cat and mouse in the dark with a demented street arab was absurd. How could he, a man of his professional standing, have been drawn into this game even for an instant? He should have gone straight to the fuse box where he kept a torch. He would now do just that, relying on the armour of rational behaviour to get him along the aisle of the Palm House – his Palm House – and through No Admittance. After all, Felix wasn’t chasing him, and of course was being mischievous rather than murderous. Purposefully he stepped to the ground and walked back along the aisle, making no particular attempt to watch or listen. Reaching the door he found, with the sense of having known in advance had he only been able to put the thought together, that it was locked.
Reduced once more to bluster he rattled the handle angrily. ‘Damn you, Felix! Come on, open up. I know you’re in there.’ But by the steady pattering at his back, by the chirp and murmur of unseeable things, the vacant bark of his own voice, he knew there was nobody in the rooms beyond and that just now they were part of another universe. On the far side of the door lay a utilitarian realm of sinks and cupboards and boilers. It was in the world behind him that an outcome awaited. (Somewhere just out of sight and at some other intersection of time two figures stalked each other through a dream forest, two animals in human guise driven out of their wits by hunger or hatred or pure inaction. Whatever was in their hearts tugged at each other with the power of a moon’s gravitational pull. Wordless, blind, and irresistibly attractive, it turned them into archetypes or candidates for war.)
Absently Leon undid his belt and stepped out of his fatigue trousers, shed his underwear and stood naked in the tropical heat. Then he walked quickly to the place where he kept his spraygun and a few tools, including a couple of old but well honed pruning knives. The syringe was there, as were the hank of raffia and the jar of cigarette ends, but his stealthy hand could find only one of the knives. He tried to remember when he had last seen both together. The assistants were always using them, dabbing them down on ledges where they worked and forgetting to bring them back. One could have been missing for a week without his noticing – since before Myroxylon’s bark was cut, in fact. How often must Felix have got up in the night to stoke the boiler, waited until Leon had gone back to sleep and then prowled the leafy sanctuary beyond the wall, learning where everything was, planning this very event? No; that was surely too intentional, too contrived and silly … Nevertheless, he hid the remaining knife and as an afterthought wrapped a yard or two of raffia about his own waist. Thus clad he stepped forth, unarmed but robed in the full majesty of the jungle.
Far away it was snowing again on the sleeping city so that before first light next morning the early trams all over northern Europe would moan softly across unbroken sheets on invisible rails like icebreakers opening paths across the Barents Sea. The Palm House had meanwhile fallen out of this continuity, or had floated free of it. Trapped in their bubble, this gigantic Wardian case, drenched in heat and breathing the humid stew of molecules – foetor of gums and mulch, resins and mould – Leon and Felix stalked one another. Each had his particular advantage: Felix a youth’s agility and night vision, Leon his wiriness and peculiar memory for sound. The boy who had once distinguished between the noise made by wind through marram grass or samphire was the gardener who could make inspired guesses in the dark as to whether the sibilance from near the staircase was that of a body pushing past sugar canes or pandans. Though the night sky was uniformly clouded the available light did vary slightly from one part of the House to the other. Like many glasshouses built in these latitudes it had been oriented roughly along a north-south axis to take advantage of both morning and afternoon light. Accordingly the western transept felt the day’s last warmth and was also slightly protected from northeasterly winds. Here the panes were freer of ice along their lowest sections, admitting more of the snowy gardens’ dim blanch. So it was that Leon, moving towards the screwpines, caught his first full sight of Felix. He was standing at the edge of a path with his back three-quarters turned to his pursuer in an oddly meditative posture, head bowed, arms loose at his sides. It took the gardener a long moment to perceive that Felix, too, was naked. Just then the outline of the downcast face, slender figure and inky fall of hair froze Leon with something he could not name. Trying to imagine what that sidelong musing might be seeing he thought of the water tank into which the visitor’s child had recently fallen. He stared and stared in its direction to make out the least gleam of reflection and without seeing anything but darkness and more darkness. When he looked back at Felix there was only the crabby silhouette of Encephalartos. The boy had melted away, taking with him the impression of having been holding something desolate in his head as well as an object in one hand. A pruning knife, maybe.
So when a weight crashed on to his back, knocking him to the gravel, flailing the outside of one forearm against a brick plinth and numbing all the nerves in that hand, his first impression was that the boy had an accomplice or had split into two. For an instant he lay beneath the slippery weight and felt a peculiar rasping at the back of his skull. Then suddenly the weight was off him, there was a skitter of gravel, the wocking sound of a large leaf wobbling about its midrib, then silence. This strange attack brought on a mild bout of coughing as the gardener was climbing to his feet, but whether by means of fear or the vitalising damp heat he controlled it. The uncanniness of Felix’s assault had shaken him quite as much as his impact with the ground. As he rubbed sensation back into his hand he wondered if the boy had really seen him reflected, however dimly, in the tank. In any case it was inventive and quite easy for him, once alerted, to have gone around the central stand of palms and come up behind.
Following an aural lead back to the bo tree Leon had his head abruptly grabbed, quickly noosed under the chin and drawn upwards so that he rose reflexively on tiptoe. Simultaneously he felt again that rasping sensation at his skull, in a different quarter this time, before the noose slackened and he stumbled involuntarily to a crouch. A light thud on the far side of the pipal marked Felix’s departure from the tree. The tickling at Leon’s neck was a loose length of raffia draped about his shoulders. He felt at his waist. No raffia there now. Evidently Felix had taken it during his first attack and had just used it to try to strangle him. Yet that made no sense because the boy had let go almost at once, immediately after that odd tugging and grating. He put up a hand and felt his skull. Great lumps of hair were missing. He ran both hands anxiously over his head. There was no mistake: ragged hanks had been shorn off the back and one side.
Leon’s impatience with other people’s physical vanity had always allowed him to be nonchalantly smug about his own hair which was, admittedly, unusual. Though unmistakably Nordic it was not a pale, flaxen blond but somewhat yellow – golden he might have preferred it called – as yet unmarred by a single grey hair. It flapped atop his tallish, gauntish frame in a distinctive manner, as well he knew. Its despoliation was upsetting and unnerving, a precise attack on a vulnerability he only now fully acknowledged. He moved nervously away from the Ficus religiosa through the leaves’ long drip tips which brushed his face. He must keep moving; this was no place for idle meditation. He wasn’t safe beneath any shrub which could support the gypsy’s slight weight. Time passed. Heart sighing, he prowled uneasily, now and then fumbling at his head in dismay.
That he finally caught Felix was largely due to the boy’s bad luck or ignorance. A sound had brought the gardener back to the general area of the first attack and, watching, he saw small repeated movements in the same patch of shrubbery. He smiled then, an excited, rat-catcher’s smile. The boy had somehow blundered or dropped into a thick growth of Acacia farnesiana. Barefoot and barelimbed among its thorns he must now take each step with tentative, slow-motion care while crouching to disengage those spines already embedded. Oh, the cassia flower was a nasty one, all right. It grew all over Indo-Pacific littorals in dense mats high up the beach, the creepers of bushes which tangled into thickets against cliff faces (or so the book said). Even as he stole forward Leon thought off at a tangent, wondering whether the more excruciating counterpart of an emblematic crown of thorns might not be slippers of thorn. Reaching out a long bony arm from behind an adjacent bush he enlaced a handful of the preoccupied youth’s own black tresses and yanked him out on to the path. He heard Felix gasp as his stumbling feet trod full weight on to the long spikes, adding to his own exultation. Vandal, mutilator, ingrate … Thief? That snouted dog-face, that scum gang leader (now a respectable bemedalled bureaucrat) had accused Felix of stealing, but Leon had never believed in the charge as anything other than metaphorical. Supposing the gypsy had made himself vulnerable, not by being caught asleep but by some imprudent proposition, some desperate suggestion? Supposing further that dog-face had agreed and then in order to swagger away with his pride intact had trumped up the charge of robbery for his cronies’ ears? More still, mightn’t that add a new, private twist to the idea of stealing from the gypsy (‘let’s nick his jewels’)? Wasn’t Leon (as he wrestled on the path with the squirming boy) really dealing with a common prostitute, street trash such as even now ought to be hanging around the occupying forces’ barracks and pawing hungrily through the refuse barrels of mess and canteen? But Leon no longer knew what to think, lacked the time and spare energy to do anything but weigh his captive towards the ground at a brisk stagger, finally tripping him into a plunge half in and half out of the water tank, then all the way in.
At which Felix’s struggles became galvanic with a non-swimmer’s terror, interspersed with whooshes of air and water coughs. Leon was struck by how cold it was by comparison with the ambient heat, but it was after all groundwater and reached the Palm House from the freezing universe outside. Still grasping the handful of gypsy hair he smacked the face repeatedly into the surface until Felix’s struggles became weaker, then paused in his fury.
Kill or kiss? These are not human decisions when taken naked in a heated glasshouse in a delusory tropic beneath snow and in the aftermath of war. They are no longer even true alternatives for comrades in a shared prison. Strange indeed the land in which these comrades tracked each other to perform their spiteful acts of love, where playfulness might elide into murder without once leaving the same trancelike register and crossing no border on the way. It was then that half-starved Leon’s strength became effortless and cost him not a cough to haul the cold eel beneath his hands bodily out of the tank and cradle it in his arms amid the plants’ silence, in the heavy perfumed dark, while the slopping ripples died, leaving two thudding hearts. He walked with his burden to the newly turned earth at the foot of the tallest palm, Cocos nucifera, laid it on the ground and stroked the water from its quaking back. Then, drenched in the scent of flowers he himself had sown, for the last time he vented his muddled love into Felix in an act which was indeed the last thing he should have done and for which, having done, he leaned his brow upon the trembling nape and weeping begged forgiveness. Later, and for the rest of that night, no drops fell more heavily from the Palm House roof on to the waxy leaves beneath than those the repentant gardener shed by the boilers’ hellish glow.
At dawn Leon went into the House to retrieve the hanks of his hair and smooth the soil at the coconut’s foot before the first of the labourers arrived. As he raked over the mould his ears burned with guilt to hear the tree – evidently similarly unrested – let fall its sardonic remarks from on high:
‘An intolerable night, quite intolerable, and culminating in a spectacle which prompted the thought that if one knew enough about it one would probably be disgusted. True of most things, no doubt. As it was, there was quite enough disturbance going on to make one positively cross. It’s bad enough anyway to stand with one’s head stuffed up into a glass cupola so that year by year the crick in one’s neck grows worse. But to be deprived of sleep into the bargain by hubbub and commotion simply won’t do at all. The militaristic excesses taking place outside this House until recently – of which I had, perforce, a grandstand (not to say perilously exposed) view – seem now to have been transferred indoors. This new, harebrained scheme of our gardener’s to allow members of the public in here after dark is simply not on. We’re not creatures in a zoo but a tender community which needs its peace and quiet. The dismal lindens and planes I can spy from up here lining the nearby avenue are presumably adapted to non-stop traffic noise night and day. They are low breeds with but rudimentary nerves. We are mostly not.
‘In particular one can’t imagine what our gardener thought he was doing tonight. They come and go, these people, becoming odder all the time. It was different in the old days. The one who planted me – Brunswik, did they call him? – was here until I was mature. He became old or sick or something and according to a conversation I overheard in 1913 they put him on a bonfire. Alas, poor Brunswik; we shall all come to it. But in the meantime one is disinclined to be hurried into an early grave by increasingly bad behaviour on the part of the very people who ought to be looking after us. What are they after all if not servants? There’s been a good deal of rot talked since the turn of the century about egalitarianism, which as any fool knows is the thin edge of complete anarchy. It’s pure drooling lunacy to pretend that all men are equal, just as it would be to claim all trees were equal. Certainly none of the trees in this House believes that. Under normal circumstances one would be only too happy to leave that sort of jejune ideological wrangling to the human element, but unfortunately it affects us too. Egalitarianism leads directly to hooliganism, as tonight’s spectacle shows. It’s precisely what happens when natural hierarchies are allowed to break down.
‘I suppose if one is sixty feet tall disdain does come easily, but what is one to think when such things take place at one’s very foot? Our gardener appeared to be wrestling with that strange child who is alleged to creep about in the dead of night committing unprovoked attacks on members of this House with a horrible little knife. One’s first thought was that the gardener was inflicting some sort of punishment on him, though it’s unclear why they both felt obliged to take their clothes off. Apparently humans need to climb on top of each other in order to punish, and the gardener was pulling this other chappie’s head back by the hair so he was staring straight up at me. His eyes and mouth kept opening and closing and after a while it struck me as more a matter of enjoyment than punishment. But of course one never really has a clue about these creatures’ facial expressions. They seem to register pleasure and agony in pretty much identical fashion. Maybe they’re isomorphic forms of each other? It might be quite interesting to do a bit of speculative research on this: Homo sapiens sapiens is so inscrutable it might repay us to try and fathom him. At any rate these two worked themselves into a terrible state, completely wet and howling, all smeared with earth and whatnot. At last they went away, leaving me with the distinct impression that the man was sorry for having punished the boy. One simply can’t imagine what goes on in these people’s heads, it’s so messy and unclear. In any case we all hope the little vandal learned his lesson.
‘Enough of these creatures. That envious and acrimonious old cycad, altensteinii, has recently put himself in the position of deserving a sharp retort. One might overlook some of his remarks about palm trees just as one physically overlooks his frowsty head and obscene professorial neck – gnarled and twisted as it is and needing the support of a collar and wire. The name “Encephalartos”, of course, derives from the Greek and means “bread-brain” – as unappetising a prospect as one can imagine. Certainly one is scarcely prompted to take sides on the question of his ancestry. That may safely be left to him and Seneschal with their conflicting theories of genetics, Mendelism, racial purity et al.. As to whether he might, in another universe, have become either palm or pine remains a matter of indifference rather than debate. Speaking as a palm of not inconsiderable pedigree I’m happy to say I can see no remotest family resemblance – certainly not to my family, who unquestionably run to height and can hold their heads up without recourse to prostheses. No, all that claptrap can be sidestepped as just one more of those areas which attract lunatics as a flower bees: a mishmash of pseudophilosophy and pseudoscience which brings out the Professor Seneschals with their trunk calipers, their leaf gauges and their dotty botanometry. They’re all as mad as each other. Linnaeus, de Candolle, George Bentham, Joseph Hooker … The presumption of these people! All ordering and reordering what they call Nature (note the capital) according to their own pet theories, with none of them the first idea. Humans! One despairs.
‘The point lies elsewhere: to begin with, in altensteinii’s allegation of what he calls our “crude height” having led to a “Master Race complex”. It is indeed a small mind which resorts to such ad plantam logic and then attempts to back it up by appeals to some kind of notional popular vote. “Anyone in this House would readily agree with this opinion.” If this is what longevity does to the intelligence one prays to die in one’s prime. Besides, who wants to be popular? The very word betrays its egalitarian allure. One’s interested in thought, not in worrying endlessly about being liked. Second, and far more important, is the issue of those tendentious quotations about how Homo turned coconut palms into objects of veneration – our supposed physical commonality with men’s bodies, the deities living in our heads and so forth. All these quotations, incidentally, were cribbed straight out of the gardener’s memory. Altensteinii never opened a book in his life. “Volume twenty-five, I fancy.” What a hoary old schoolboy ploy that is! None the less there’s ingenuity in the way he selected those particular passages. At first sight it might appear he was attacking Homo for what is, admittedly, preposterous and anthropocentric drivel. Gods in the hair, mystical emblems, men’s whole abject desire to discern tokens of themselves as well as pledges of their own immortality in every damn thing they lay their eyes on. Why aren’t they interested in anything other than themselves and their own deaths? It’s most peculiar. Altensteinii appears to cite this stuff to make the same point about Homo’s foolishness but a second reading reveals his hidden argument, which is profoundly anti-palm. All that piousness about our noble bearing is undercut the moment one remembers that this is merely man’s opinion and manifestly not that of old altensteinii. Moreover, by his quoting a list of the ways in which we are useful to man we palms find ourselves in the patronised position of the servant whose services are suddenly discovered to be indispensable and is thereby accorded the status of holy fool.
‘If it were harder to expose, altensteinii’s method might be described as cunning. Having bared it and left it where it lies, however, one draws oneself up with this noble loftiness for which we’re apparently so renowned and turns one’s gaze outward through the steam-blinded glass to speculate about more interesting things. The truth is that I’m a critic at heart, a didact, a lecturer, and it has taken me all this time to cultivate my skill. One more thing to guarantee my unpopularity.
‘Dawn has broken over a landscape which in my heart I know to be utterly foreign. That’s of no account; one’s used to it while becoming ever more apprehensive of the moment when one’s head bursts through the glass and out. Into what? That’s the main preoccupation: trying to decide the nature of the world we’re in as well as that of the world exterior to it. The first logically presupposes the second, but isn’t to say there might not be an infinite number of worlds out there. I can, for instance, easily see how the House could itself be subdivided by enclosing diminishing patches of soil under smaller and smaller glass shells. Indeed I can remember seeing just such a cloche arrangement used years ago to protect seedlings temporarily from the nicotine fumigations. But this raises a disturbing idea, which is that as one was able to look down at the seedlings under glass, taller than they by a factor of thousands, so it’s possible to suppose a palm many tens of miles high beneath a roof enclosing half the sky looking down on oneself at this very moment. It’s not a reassuring thought and leaves one’s position equivocal, to say the least. Nevertheless it could be so, and the mere fact that I can conceive but not perceive it is no hindrance to its possibility. All perceptions – and notoriously vision – are easily deceived, as dependent on learned habits and expectation as on neural activity. I don’t expect to see a greater universe itself enclosed enclosing mine, therefore I don’t see it. I see only what convention tells me is the sky, dotted with points of light, larger and smaller, brighter and fainter. “I don’t much want to see the real tropics,” I heard the gardener tell Nyctanthes only last night. But what are the real tropics, mister gardener? And where, if not at least partly rooted in Flinn? These exotic ladies of yours: where are they really from? Exactly. And knowing that, of course you don’t want to follow the bird of paradise to its nest and find a heap of twigs and shit.
‘Such metaphysical speculations are not to everybody’s taste, of course, and evidently beyond the capacity of most things in this House. (One notices altensteinii’s head hanging a little lower this morning, does one not? Or is it pure illusion? So much is.) But tug on the wire, gardener! Hoist the poor old thing up! He can manage a little higher even though he’ll never make sixty feet and stand on equal footing beside – what were his phrases? – “a mere cliché of the exotic” and “a symbol of longing”. Thus spake Encephalartos!’