To his chagrin Leon was obliged to have the rest of his hair cut to match the missing chunks, which meant a style little different from that of a concentration camp survivor. He left the barber’s shop as though wrenched out of civilian life and back into a wartime world when half male Europe had its head shaved for convenience, discipline, lice. The angry shock gave him a confidence close to insubordination. Going back to the Botanical Gardens’ main gate office he said he must see Dr Anselmus at once. The secretary raised her eyes from a romance with a look of amazement as if she hardly recognised him, which further enraged him.
‘Doesn’t come in Thursdays, does he?’
Since the enforced shutting up of the Society’s mansion, which until the war had furnished graceful offices for the Gardens’ director as well as for senior research fellows and administrators, Dr Anselmus had been obliged to work from home.
‘It can’t wait.’
‘It’ll have to. You can see him first thing tomorrow.’ The secretary, whose own hair had dulled over the years to a carefully supported heap of smouldering embers, gave his skull another look.
Normally Leon enjoyed sparring with the Dragon Lady, as she was now universally known, but today he was too pressed and savage to dally. ‘I’ll just have to find him at home, then, shan’t I?’
‘Gee, sure,’ said the Dragon Lady, who was seeing American films and G.I.s with equal enthusiasm. ‘Why not, sugar? And when you’ve seen him you can stop by the Palace and have a chat with the King about his begonias. You might get a royal warrant. “Consultant plant doctor to the crowned heads of.” Gee.’ She waved a glittering hand. ‘Tomorrow.’
Leon went for a walk beside a canal. Though indifferent to clothes he had changed out of his military remnants into the suit he kept for whenever he left the Gardens. Not a fancy affair, it was lumpy at the seams, especially around the edge of collar and lapels: the sort of suit an upholsterer might have run up for himself in hard times. What with that and the haircut he looked fairly indistinguishable from the demobbed soldiers wandering the city trying to find a door which would let them back into normality. The only difference was that he was older than most and not wearing a military greatcoat hopefully dyed to look like an overcoat. The curator of one of Europe’s most important surviving palm houses – genius, philosopher, communer with plants, visible companion of an invisible – wore against the cold a plaid ulster, a truly Sherlockian affair which a visitor in 1938 had shed in the heat and, bafflingly, never retrieved. Finders keepers, Leon had said proudly after a decent month’s interval. He had inherited in one pocket some small change and in the other a pair of orange pigskin gloves and a brand new mousetrap. Now, his head roaring with thought, he stood on a quay and gazed down at a family of kittens investigating the snow on their barge’s deck. With his cropped scalp, ulster and orange gloves – particularly the gloves – he was assumed by passers-by to be an NKVD officer engaged on an inscrutable Soviet surveillance mission.
This was a wealthy district known locally as Little Venice, in common with several other such canalside neighbourhoods scattered throughout northern Europe. Nothing about it was particularly Venetian. The mainly seventeenth-century houses which overlooked the waterways, often through wrinkled panes of very clear, thin old glass, were those of well-to-do bourgeois merchants. Counts, margraves, princes and other exotics tended to roost elsewhere, generally in plain, gloomy houses with too many rooms and too little garden for the height of the estate walls. It was exactly the district where one would expect to find the director of a Botanical Gardens living, and was indeed where the young Leon had once come as an apprentice, bearing a message for Dr Anselmus. His thoughts stilled to a purposeful hum, Leon the cropped and sinister turned and crossed to the remembered house, read the copperplate script beside the bell-pull and was in due course admitted reluctantly by an old factotum.
Once inside the door the visitor, surrounded by the panelled and carpeted vistas of gracious living, felt his scowl melt and fall away like slush off his boots. The factotum’s ‘Kindly wait here, sir’ and the glance at the grey half-moon clots of ice on the polished floor reduced him further. What idiotic temerity could have brought him here? He looked at the prints on the wall, at the tall, moulded double doors on either side leading to salons and dining-rooms, closed and mute. He listened to a morning silence only intensified by the slow, hollow-chested tick of an immense grandfather clock in walnut across whose decorated face a golden schooner rocked the seconds away. Far off in the depths a pan clattered. From closer overhead a door shut and feet returned to the shrill squeaks and detonations of ancient parquet. Leon was shown straight down the hall, along a corridor and into a wooden cabinet of a room overlooking a long, thin garden. Curiously he stared down. Given its owner’s profession it was a surprisingly ordinary plot, as far as could be judged from the shapes beneath the snow. Bulgy bits would be flowerbeds, the flat bits strips of grass, with between them the straggle of rose stems on trellis work à l’anglais. Horticulturally, it suggested a perfunctory state of health bordering on neglect, like that of a successful doctor’s own children. Presently Anselmus himself came in.
‘Leon!’ he greeted his curator affably, after a startled glance at the haircut. ‘It must be important to bring you here. Nothing serious, I hope?’
The gardener thought that despite the friendliness of the tone the social lines had been quite adroitly drawn in a couple of short sentences.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you at home, sir,’ he said. ‘It is a bit urgent, yes. The fact is, I’m afraid I have to report some damage to two of the plants. Wilful damage.’
‘Damage? What kind of damage? Which plants? Who?’
Leon explained. ‘I take full responsibility, of course,’ he finished.
‘No, no, my dear fellow. You can’t be everywhere at once. You’re a curator, an expert botanist, not a policeman. None of us will forget the immense debt the Society – indeed, the country – owes you for having brought our Palm House through the war practically singlehanded and looking better than ever. But tell me – and this is in complete confidence – whom do you suspect?’
‘It’s hard to imagine any of our visitors doing it, sir.’
‘Quite impossible.’
‘So really that only leaves the staff. Our assistants are … Well, you know how things are. These aren’t easy times and we have to make do with what we can get.’
‘I know, I know. We’ve all done our best to screen out the most unsuitable but really we’ve nothing much to go on except their own claims to have worked in greenhouses before. There may be some poor, twisted fellow with a completely unfathomable grudge in our midst. I’m afraid the casualties of war are by no means all lying in sanatoria and cemeteries, Leon. Well, well. Never mind. Banana flower, eh? That’s sad. Don’t get many of them to set, do we? It has to be an assistant. Unless –’ the director tried for a joke to lighten the gloom given off by his curator’s scowl and institutional haircut ‘– unless of course you’re doing it yourself and don’t know it. Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, eh? You saw the film, presumably? By day the man of quiet scholarship and learning, by night a crazed fiend stalking the Palm House and committing unspeakable acts.’
The riposte took Leon as much by surprise as it did Dr Anselmus, so quickly it came and from an unguessed patch of his brain.
‘Or you, sir. I mean, if that could happen to me without my knowing, so it might to you.’
‘I … well, of course, I suppose you’re right.’ The director, smiled wanly and in that moment Leon could almost believe it himself, could imagine the pink, pettish sobriety of Claud Anselmus’s features melding and distorting at around midnight to remould themselves into those of the monster who slept within. ‘Of course it was merely a jocular theory I was advancing. This isn’t a film. No, it’ll be one of your men all right. Only thing you can do is keep your eyes peeled, I’m afraid, and just hope it doesn’t happen again. If it goes on we’ll just have to bring the police in. Very well, then. Carry on. I’ll drop in tomorrow as usual.’
‘There was one other thing, sir.’ Dr Anselmus’s “jocular theory” had tweaked Leon’s anger, and hence his courage, back. ‘There’ve been a lot of rumours recently about the Palm House’s future, even of moving the entire Botanical Gardens into the country so our land can be redeveloped. If I’m not being presumptuous the House’s future is connected with my own and I’d like to know what’s going on.’
‘Ah, of course, of course. Perfectly reasonable.’ Anselmus was all Jekyll now. A further glance at the shorn head of his most celebrated employee, the gaunt and smouldering features, increased the doctor’s emollient urbanity. ‘I was in any case intending to have a chat with you about that nonsense, knowing how these stupid rumours travel. Of course you’ve been worried, my dear fellow, but I hope not seriously? You surely can’t have imagined we’d even contemplate taking any such step without consulting you? Why, you are – or you would be – the lynchpin of any such move. No, no.’
‘No, no move? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes,’ said Anselmus testily. ‘That’s of course what I’m saying.’
‘There is,’ pursued his employee, ‘no plan being proposed, no intention of selling our land and moving out?’
‘Let me make myself absolutely clear,’ umbrageously offered Anselmus, whose administrative duties had brought him into contact with politicians. ‘This is simply a typical example of the sort of rumour which circulates at times like these. People look around and see all the damage and disruption – bombed-out areas and so forth – and they naturally wonder whether the old world can be restored or if instead it’ll be supplanted still further by change and decay. But from all those trying years – the occupation and the anarchy, pure anarchy, really – we’ve got back not only our beloved King safe and well but our country’s entire legal framework intact. In short, the status quo ante. The Botanical Gardens are not ours to sell, even if we wanted. They weren’t before the war, and nor are they now. They belong to the nation, held in escrow by the university. This is our lawyers’ professional verdict. There.’
Leon was staring out into the director’s meagre garden even as his words blossomed unconvincingly inside the boxlike room. ‘I can see the attractions of a hundred acres in the country instead of fewer than ten in the city,’ he said musingly. ‘A far bigger collection laid out in a modern way. New, efficient houses devoted to specific regions or habitats. Impossible not to see the advantages. Better science so better funding. Room for a seed bank, especially of commercial varieties. Proper public subscriptions and membership. More visitors of the right sort, not just foreign diplomats trying to keep warm.’ And, nerved by having accidentally introduced the chiefest topic of all, the real reason for his presence in this humidor of a room, his eyes wandering between the garden and its owner’s fingers as they fiddled with a topaz fob (a large, faceted yellow lozenge which revolved around a golden spindle hanging from a golden chain) he added: ‘That princess, by the way. I imagine you already know what she wants?’
‘I’m afraid …?’
‘I know she’s spoken to you, sir, because she told me. So you must know that only yesterday she offered me a job in her own country.’
Anselmus’s fingers paused as if finding his words for him. ‘Oh, that plan of hers. She did mention something of the kind. I can’t imagine how you’d have replied. With your usual pungency, I expect.’
‘It was left open.’
‘A curious, even misconceived scheme, I first thought. But on further consideration I found it did have merit. It’s really quite imaginative. As far as I know it would be the only thing of its kind anywhere. An international feather in your cap, certainly.’
‘Are you plotting behind my back, Director?’ Leon asked bitterly. ‘Do you want to get rid of me? Would it make things easier?’
‘Good gracious! How can you even think such a thing? My dear man, you of all people! What, you mean conspiring to let you go? Our most distinguished employee? The very idea.’
‘Perhaps not me, then. But the Palm House, yes, I think that’s possible. Just now it’s more of a liability than an asset, isn’t it? Or at least, a majority of the trustees and board think so. Why throw good money away on installing new boilers if the entire place is due to be scrapped? By modern standards the place is a museum piece and when funds are low museums seem like useless luxuries. Oh, there’s a lot of virtuous talk about national heritage and artistic patrimony and priceless educational and cultural value. But those are just phrases for public consumption, aren’t they? We all know the talk that counts goes on in bank and government offices and the finance departments of places like City Hall.’
‘I hadn’t realised you’d been brooding to this extent. I –’
‘What is hard,’ went on Leon unhearingly, ‘is convincing people that the Palm House has a future, especially when its own trustees don’t really believe in it any longer. They’re all rotted with this new egalitarian stuff the British are cooking up over there: free health, free education, free everything. Wonderful, this liberal democracy. You can do by money everything the communists have to do by force. But by God it’s going to take a lot of money, and that means ever more centralised economic control, ever more centralised powers to tax and organise and regulate and restrict and exploit. That’s not a scheme into which a palm house fits, according to their wisdom, is it?’
‘I’d really no idea you were so well –’ began Anselmus with breezy admiration, but his gardener had not finished.
‘Now I can see a future for our Palm House even if no-one else can. The board already know some of my ideas but they seem not to have paid them much attention. No,’ he waved away an encroaching ‘I assure you –’, ‘they just see schemes. They don’t understand the main idea behind them because they know almost nothing of the history of such places. They might know enough to say, “Oh, nineteenth-century utopias, enchanted shelters from industrialisation and urban grimness” or something of the sort, though why that mightn’t seem quite as valid today I can’t think. What could be grimmer than parts of this city? Bombed, run down, no jobs, no homes, no money about. People ought to be flocking to the Gardens and the Palm House at times like these, reminding themselves of what beauty and richness and fecundity still are. But they’re put off. It’s all too surrounded by an aura of dry learning and crankiness.’ Leon reached for an insult in his best lèse-majestic fashion. ‘They take one look at Professor Seneschal and get one whiff of talk about black snowdrops or whatever abortion he’s trying to breed, and they see a run-down Gardens full of what look like war criminals in gaiters not replanting the trees cut down for firewood, and not dredging and clearing the lake, and not restoring the Temperate House or the summer houses. And they stay away.’
‘While denying the least validity to your personal remark I agree there’s much in what you say. Do you think I’m not just as interested as you to bring the Gardens back to their former splendour? I might remind you’, the fingers twiddled wildly, ‘that I am currently the Director of the entire Gardens, whereas you are curator of the Palm House alone. It is, of course, the Gardens’ main attraction, but nevertheless your area of responsibility is a good deal more limited than mine. The fact is, our funding is still in an equivocal state. We’re awaiting a financial injection from the government.’
‘Which is not likely to be forthcoming. Or rather’, Leon tacked implacably on before his passion’s stiff breeze, ‘it’ll be made dependent on our agreeing to move.’
‘I really can’t think what gives you the right to make these conjectures. Your job is to run the Palm House and not, I’d suggest, to speculate about policy matters which are hardly within the terms of your employment.’
‘And there we have it.’ Leon turned from the window.
‘More like a ruffian than a botanist,’ thought Dr Anselmus. ‘A peaky ruffian at that. And anyway, he’s no more academically qualified than my dog’ (a schnauzer puppy, which perhaps explained the condition of the garden). ‘There we have nothing,’ he said firmly, ‘except maybe a good place to end this conversation.’
‘You haven’t yet heard why I think the Palm House must be preserved, Director.’ Leon was determined that at least one person in the Society’s hierarchy should be made to understand. ‘It’s more than just an old building with a useful but not unique collection of tropical plants. It represents a stage in people’s understanding of the natural world, part of the evolution of knowledge. It’s a dream, a private paradise, a poetic statement even. That remains true at any time. But it’s not even just that. In the eighteenth century they were still naively pleased by exotica for their own sake. Strange, unimagined plants and creatures from places which often hadn’t even been mapped yet – things with an almost mythic quality about them. But by the nineteenth, systems of classification were mastering more and more of the world. New plants might still be strange, but once they could be shown to belong to an already existing class or genus they became tamed. The relationship of man to nature was no longer one of simple awe and delight, it had changed to one of power. Power of knowledge, power of ordering, power of subjugating. The great palm houses symbolised this in the most public and open manner by putting a far-off ruled world under glass back home. A museum, what else? The public could wander around and see plants grouped according to their taxonomy and marvel at this reconciliation of themselves with nature. Thanks to man the wild variousness and generosity of God’s creation now made sense. What’s more, it was seen to be perfectly compatible with industrialisation, colonial expansion and money. Perfect harmony, in fact. That’s by day, of course. By night … Well, it’s another matter.’
Dr Anselmus, who had been waiting for a crack in his curator’s flow into which he might insert a deft verbal scalpel to the effect that he hardly thought he needed a prepared lecture on the history of botanical gardens, was thrown by this odd turn. ‘By night? What do you mean, by night?’ He gave his topaz an irritable tweak. It was a gesture which had not quite worked up the nerve to commit the forthright rudeness of hauling out his pocket watch.
‘Oh, it’s somewhere else at night,’ Leon assured him. ‘You must have felt it. All those classifications melt away. It just becomes up to the senses again, the perceptions. That’s the time to stop looking at the plants and to smell and listen instead. The whole point about museums is that everything’s on display, under glass, made visible. But what happens to museums at night? Ah, now that’s a most interesting question.’ He broke off to cough painfully. Something in the way he leaned against the shutter forestalled the director’s retort.
‘A most interesting question,’ resumed the gardener, wiping the sleeve of his ulster across mouth and nose, eyes glistening. ‘Now, what about this century? This is where my idea comes in. I think we’ve stopped being proud of our power and have begun to be afraid of it. Look at those atom bombs the Americans dropped on Japan last year. Power beyond our control, if you ask me. Look at the destruction caused by the war. Not just the people and the cities, but nature ravaged and battered. Entire jungles set on fire, according to the newspapers. Whole islands in the Pacific reduced to cinders. Millions of rubber trees and crops burnt to stop them falling into whoever’s hands. And what can botanists and horticulturists do about it? Why, collect plants as fast as they can, to protect as much as to display them. Our job will be to help nature survive the bullying of man.’
‘I’d hardly expected our very own Palm House curator to be such a futurist at heart.’
Evidently surprised by a lack of patronage in the tone rather than the words Leon said mildly, ‘How can one not think about the future if one knows any history? As a horticulturist I can see a clear pattern over the last hundred years: that of increasing destruction and despoliation and mechanisation. Now, what would you do with all those Flying Fortresses and Dorniers and Lancaster bombers if you were responsible for them?’
‘What?’ Again Anselmus was baffled by a change of tack. ‘Melt them down as quickly as possible, I suppose.’
‘For ploughshares? No, you’d sell them off to the air companies and travel firms like Thomas Cook. They’d get them very cheap and fill them with all those people who haven’t been able to travel since 1939. Tourists. That’ll be the way to make money in the future. The more people do it the cheaper it’ll become. Not this year, not even perhaps for ten years. But one day everyone will be able to hop on a high-speed airship or aeroplane and go and see all the plants we’ve got here in the Gardens, but in their natural habitats. By then the habitats’ll probably be huge nature reserves just as they have game reserves. But – and this is the point – they won’t quite find what they’re looking for. People will spend their time going ever further to ever more remote places in search of pure virgin nature, the realest, the most utterly authentic and unspoiled. But they’ll never find it because they’re there, and if they can be so can everyone else. They’ll think they’re looking for plants and animals, but it won’t be that. They’ll also be trying to discover what relationship they could possibly have with a natural world now completely in their power. Well, things like that retreat even as they’re searched for, don’t they? And that, among other reasons, is why I shan’t be taking up the princess’s offer. Within my Palm House I’m authentic, and so is it. Far, far away there’s a vast natural simulacrum of what I already live in. Part of our job as I see it is to train the public to understand that museum, memorial, research centre – whatever it is, the place is priceless. It’s because it’s so unnatural it can make people think and change their minds. We must preserve it at all costs. At any cost at all, really, since it’ll never be rebuilt.’
And the two men, employee and employer, directed and director, found themselves staring at one another in astonishment until Anselmus’s eyes slid away beneath the visionary gaze. Leon’s surprise was by no means at his own eloquence, which as we know he had been practising day and night for years with an audience of gently transpiring green ears, but at the way Cou Min’s phantom had unexpectedly shaken itself free of plaster dust somewhere up by the moulded ceiling which had received the main thrust of his speech, and floated down as a third presence in the room between himself and Anselmus. Had his pleading been on her behalf after all? Was the glass and iron structure which contained what felt like his lifework no more than her shrine, the truest expression (patched and unrepaired) of that far-off summer with Dr Koog, learning to look systematically at the natural world? How meagre was love, how flimsy its supports, how suspended its animation! he thought, coughing and coughing as the dust reached his lungs. Distantly he was aware of activity. A sleeve advanced into his aqueous vision.
‘Here, take this. My dear fellow, you’re in a bad way.’ The door had closed behind the factotum and Anselmus was offering him a generous glass of brandy. When the spasm had eased and the brilliant display of retinal pyrotechnics was over Leon took the drink with a shaking hand and drank it off at a gulp. ‘You’re ill,’ his employer advised him.
‘No iller than usual. But it might be convenient, mightn’t it?’
‘Now, now, don’t start all that again. You’ve said some hard things this morning and I won’t deny they needed saying. Absolutely. Clears the air. But you really must agree you’re not well. Might you please try to suspend your paranoia and take a much needed fortnight off? God knows you’ve earned it. I’d like you to see a doctor friend of mine – the question of money doesn’t arise, of course. He’s an excellent fellow: chief thoracic consultant at the Royal. We’ll get you right, first, and then we’ll have a proper joint effort with all the board and trustees and departmental heads to thrash this whole thing out. Actually, I’m most grateful to you for being so forceful. You’ve convinced me we urgently need an overall policy based on absolute agreement as to our role in the future.’
Leon was leaning heavily on a table, staring down at his large hands.
‘I’ll see your doctor,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Why not? But I must get back to the House now. There’s work to be done.’
He was thinking of no single thing, perhaps, but a world hovered over by Felix’s uneasy spectre. This morning the gypsy had appeared chastened and contrite, rather pettish over his pricked feet. But what was happening? Last night beneath the coconut, possessed by or else possessing some demon, there had been a hallucinatory instant when Leon had glimpsed his own tiny figure as if frozen by a camera’s magnesium flash or the revolving beam of a lighthouse. White, contorted, hunched; staring at nothing with open eyes and mouth, incorporated in an even smaller manikin, as inscrutable as maggots caught in mid-maggotry at a stone’s turning. In that instant he could not have named either creature, still less the act they were engaged in. He had felt his body thrust itself downwards as if through layers of other bodies to reach whatever or whomever it sought: through gypsies and students and store-owners’ wives, through nameless dalliances to – (no, oh not to Cou Min: that was love, not lust) – to faceless imaginings and genderless pollutions in pursuit of the virgin real, the most utterly authentic, the ever-receding. And the harder he had thrust the more it had fled him: wan, enticing, repetitious, inexhaustible. But this morning the point had been, what must be done to avert scandal? Felix had to go; Leon couldn’t bear him to go.
‘If you’re thinking of your new arrivals,’ Anselmus began. ‘What are they, by the way? Imagine, on order for nearly seven years. I think Seneschal told me one was a Gnetum.’
‘It’s already planted. I’ve still to unwrap the pandan and the Pritchardia.’
‘And as for that nasty vandalism business, you must put it out of your head. It’ll probably never happen again. Just one of those unexplained things.’
His mind still full of Felix, Leon was fascinated to hear his mouth produce an audacious inspiration. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if this so-called vandal was actually part of a plot. If enough damage was done I reckon it could be pretty convenient for some people. Don’t you see? While funds are withheld someone is hired to cut up the plants. Stealthy, strategic damage over many months. Sooner or later people will say “Just look at the place. Not worth saving. Needs complete overhaul and repair, new boilers etcetera, and there’s not really enough botanical interest left to make it worthwhile.” Why mightn’t that be happening?’
Oh devious, devious, he thought as his mouth went about its business, implying that Anselmus himself had engineered the whole thing. He could almost believe it himself, it fitted so neatly. That was what happened in wartime, after all. Agents were planted in the subtlest manner … The brandy had gone to his head, despite having entered his body under medicinal pretext. Empty stomach doesn’t help, of course, nor being half starved. Why have you led me here, Cou Min, my love? he wondered, looking curiously at the little room, the little man in suit and topaz, the little glass with its drop of topaz. ‘I’m old,’ he thought in amazement, since it was suddenly how he felt in respect to her. How had he got from then to this? Had it really taken all those years? Nothing aged one like loyalty. It was surely punishment. The gypsies, the men in suits, the dismantling of the beautiful – all were punishment for having loved remote things, for having abandoned the timeless austerities of Flinn.
‘Go home at once and get some rest, Leon,’ the director was saying. ‘We’ll find you a cab if we can but this damned petrol rationing’s making perfectly ordinary things next to impossible,’ he added irritably.
When eventually the front door closed on the back of the ulster Dr Anselmus walked slowly up the grand staircase and along the passage which led, with the sound of ancient kindling, to his study. The irritation persisted as he sank into his chair and gazed around at his booklined walls, at the brightly polished brass microscope he had used as a student, at the black hump of American cloth covering a modern German binocular microscope with Wetzlar optics. Why mightn’t collaboration be a form of heroism, too? he wondered. For, indeed, it had taken considerable nerve and canniness first to have helped hide the Society’s treasures from its headquarters and then, by deft dealings with the Gestapo, to have ensured the Botanical Gardens’ immunity from sack and spoil. This was the part which would never be known, could never be acknowledged. A man like Leon took all the credit for having pulled the Palm House through, but all would have been in vain had it not been for the director’s work behind the scenes. Anselmus thought how unfair it was that having supped with the devil for the best part of five years, often with spoons of terrifying shortness, on behalf of the Royal Botanic Society and a national treasure and science in general, he should forever be unable to speak about it. A few names – what were a few names? Of course one knew the names of the people one knew; it would be fatuous to have pretended otherwise in any country at any time in history and most particularly when faced with agents of the most efficient intelligence service of all: men who had no doubt already known the names and were merely checking on his truthfulness. Just a few names, most of which were anyway prominently listed in all sorts of botanical and other journals. Only names, mind, never addresses. Plus a few other minor things. To himself, to his wife, Claud Anselmus was proud of his courage in those years. Yet ‘collaborator’ was an irredeemably dirty word nowadays. All over Europe men and women were daily being rounded up to face kangaroo courts in barns and cellars they never left alive. Quite right too, in some cases. There was collaboration and collaboration. There was all the difference in the world between ingratiating yourself with the enemy in a lickspittle attempt to gain privileges and personal position, and co-operating to the barest minimum in order to save a national institution. He hadn’t made a Pfennig from the occupation. He had been director at the beginning and he was still director at the end. Nothing had changed. A few score bottles of Rhine wine drunk, a few names … Hardly matters for endless remorse after the worst war in history. Now Seneschal was in a different category altogether. There was a compromised man if ever there was one. And his genetic theories were little short of a scandal for a scientist of his stature.
Dr Anselmus rubbed his topaz so it trundled its cylinder up and down his waistcoat like the front wheel of a tiny steamroller. How had he got on to this? It had been an altogether unpleasant start to the day. The wretched man – and what on earth had made him shear off all his hair like that? – was seriously mad. Ill, too, of course, but essentially quite off his head. Poor Leon (Anselmus actually heard himself think the dutiful phrase and, as with all such things people overheard themselves think, believed it sincere). Poor Leon, it’s really too bad. Academically unqualified he might be but in his own way he’s a strange kind of genius. (The magnanimity of this thought was genuine too: the generosity of an obituarist whose own far more estimable triumphs include being alive.) On the other hand there was a sense in which it was all quite timely …
Anselmus swung around in his chair to look through the tall windows at those of his neighbours opposite, at the frozen canal between them. Where, he wondered, had the man got his peculiar ideas? It was true there had been an article in Hortus recently about the destruction of habitats in the Pacific theatre, and it did seem likely that the razing of islands and other territory belonging to the old Japanese Mandate might have caused the loss of several plant and animal species. Had Leon had the advantage of a proper education, though, he would have known that wise old Horace had it right. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret: you can drive Nature out with a pitchfork but she will always return. The notion of mass tourism in secondhand bombers was quite a different matter. It had the pure nuttiness of those American pulp science fiction magazines he sometimes found his students reading. Bug-eyed monsters, man-eating plants, bleak futuristic worlds without vegetation run by robots where people were forced into underground cities like ant colonies. Did Leon read such stuff, too? And that weird thing about museums at night … One of the mainstays of that sort of fiction, Anselmus had noticed, was the presence of a skimpily clad blonde – or so at least one inferred from the covers. Was there, he thought, a blonde glittering brassily somewhere in his curator’s opaque life? It was unlikely enough to make him smile. He noticed it had started to snow again.
He had failed, then. He had done his best but his oratory, his arguments had come to naught. Anselmus – crass, shifty Anselmus – hadn’t heard a word, while pretending it had been a useful ‘clearing of the air’. Pure bluster. Then finally Leon’s lungs had betrayed his head and he’d been unable to go on. Cou Min, Cou Min, have you brought us to this? he wondered. Is it you? Despondent he walked his House whose very panes seemed to tremble about him, the ground to quiver underfoot. He found himself back at the Acacia farnesiana, instrument of his guilty triumph the previous night. The shrub seemed not to have suffered much from the trampling. Quite the reverse, as it soon made clear in a soliloquy:
‘Well, of course I can bite! Ours is an adventurous and risk-taking species, boldly going where no man dares to tread – certainly not barefoot, that is. For this reason our shoots are well armed; and I may say it was a pleasure I’d hardly dared even dream about, sinking my full length into those tender tawny boy-feet. The meaty plush of it! The whine of muscle tone as it tenses in agony! The succulence of blood! It was, I can confirm, altogether worth being trodden on. Not since I dipped into the back of a gardener’s hand in 1937 have I felt anything like it, and that was a mere sip of pleasure compared with this beatific gorging. The warm, cushiony embrace is the most satisfying thing this universe has to offer. What makes it even more piquant (mot juste) is that one can’t experience it without first having been abused. Thus the boy took a liberty and straightway rewarded me with solace and revenge. How I adore him! He has the most exquisite sole. Even now, I daresay, he can feel where I was inside him. I may well have caused a little oozing and affected the way he walks for a day or two. I do hope so. Such thoughts fill me with a kind of afterglow, a happy hum of remembrance. Humans, of course, being slavishly egocentric, can’t talk about us without resorting to the usual weary epithets, “cruel” thorns being the most over-employed, judging by several centuries of their rumty-tum poetry. “Cruel”, indeed. By provoking that adjective we could hardly have presented a kinder gift to their sonneteers, whose constant need for padding or pruning is so easily satisfied by the word’s metric ambiguity: a single long or a trochee according to necessity. More to the point (juste again) “cruel” is notoriously never the way the human foot is described as it unheedingly attempts to walk all over us. Oh, no. This is, for dimmer listeners, of religious significance. Why, you dolts? Because it’s proof that we’re the offshoots of a thoughtful, loving Creator. It was He who ensured that even as we were downtrodden we would be rewarded an hundredfold. You’ll find that practically all the thorny species are pretty religious. It’s only the ones who should have been thorny and – by some accident of heredity – aren’t, that are cynical and atheistic. I’m told that thornless rose varieties are the worst. They might smell wonderful but underneath they’re one black rant of blasphemy and frustration.
‘But back to the boy, my divine and punished trampler! The gardener – whose new hairstyle so faithfully reflects the brutal chic of the times – is filled with nagging worries concerning this lad, as well he might be. Among them is the very pertinent question: did the princess mention him to Anselmus? Since she was standing right behind Leon while he was trying to cough his lungs inside out she had ample time to observe Felix in that cool, objective, Asian manner of hers which gives nothing away. She might have been saving the information to explode later like a bomb in a marriage bed, or to present on ice at a military tribunal. That’s part of her power, which is why she causes such a stir. Elle est arrivée, forsooth! They yearn to be noticed by her, dazzled by her, raped by her.
‘Very well, then: she must have seen Felix. And what did she think? That he was some new assistant Leon had been given? Some tatterdemalion apprentice who with the right training and influence might grow into a useful horticulturist? (Well, he might at that if he could curb the urge to vandalise the plants.) Of course, she might have thought that. But those Asian eyes with their mysterious canthic fold which lets everything sidle in and so little out, would have been trying to see patterns, make sense of peculiar Western mores, dress the fabled world of science and technology in the rotten flesh she knows is the common human denominator. And those eyes would have taken in the slippery, unmarried man in early middle age living in his crystal shell whose very air blurs the outside world, who refuses even to lodge out and simply go to and from work like everybody else. They would have taken him in, dispassionately, as he coughed on his knees in that abject way (is this, after all, the genius one has heard so much about? The man of vision and ambition who might abandon us and go off to create a Snow House for Kuala Lumpur or Jesselton or wherever?). Her eyes would also have taken in the way this supposed apprentice stood in the doorway watching him, neither tense with helplessness nor indifferently lounging but full of a wry domestic déjà vu. And she would have thought, “Good God, they’re lovers. Of course.”
‘All right, play dumb. Fine, if you insist then: no, she wouldn’t. She would hardly have noticed the boy at all. The great Leon was the centre of her picture, her plan. Anybody else in the vicinity was merely a labourer on the estate: a tangential figure such as painters daub into landscapes to fill up the gaps and add a vague sense of activity. Go on believing that version if you prefer.
‘But if she did notice him and think him significant the remaining question is, would she have told Anselmus? If she’d seen Felix and Leon as a couple, wouldn’t that affect her plan? Mightn’t she now have to consider importing them both if Leon were to accept her job offer? And meanwhile mightn’t Felix be a useful lever for Anselmus to ease out his curator before (oh, so regretfully, the traitorous hound!) pulling down the Palm House in exchange for a new site, more power, a bigger salary and a generous backhander from the dark fiscals? There are excellent prospects for a nasty scandal, are there not? Behaviour which might elicit amusement in Jesselton or Kuala Lumpur is a different matter in these cold, unforgiving latitudes. How badly, then, did Anselmus need to get rid of Leon? Would he be capable of doing a deal with this potentially useful and powerful lady? Had he already done it?
‘I’ve watched him tonight, the gardener, stumbling and mumbling in the candlelight as usual, more than ever unable to read his fellow-humans and their motives. (“Stumbling” – what an erotic word that is, with its rich possibilities of the randomly-descending foot!) Nearer, gardener! You owe me a debt. It was I who caught your sportive faun for you, never forget. Had it not been for me and a few simple prickles you’d never have got your hands on him and rewarded his abuses as I just had. Oh, between us we could make a pincushion of that juicy gypsy!
‘But you’re not just worried, are you? You’re lost and muddled, too, even as you patrol your domain, your private landscape of congealed time with the pipes sighing underfoot and the snowflakes sizzling on the panes overhead. She’s no mere scheming bitch, this princess of yours, is she? You’re in love with her, too, in your eccentric fashion. Is it because she reminds you of someone else, long ago? Somebody who was scarcely even real for a summer but to whose imaginary memory you’ve abandoned your one and only life? You’ve been taking this line quite a lot lately, we’ve noticed, in your nocturnal rambles both physical and verbal. You seem to think it has to do with something poetic bound up with your whole life and this place. I can’t comment on that. We thorny species are beyond poetry except, as I said, when co-opted as metaphors. We assume it must be connected with the beauty of retribution … “Cruel”? Did I hear “cruel”? Ah, on the grounds that clichés generally reflect truisms and truisms some banal aspect of truthfulness? You really do have the strangest notions of cruelty. May I remind you of that night-flowering South American climber, Araujia sericofera, which you yourself have planted down at the far end of this House? Its popular nickname is “The Cruel”, I believe, because the peculiarly tight arrangement of its flowers often traps moths by the proboscis overnight, releasing them at dawn. I think that’s beautiful, both functional and mischievous. Nor are we thorns cruel, as I keep making clear. We merely raise points; others impale themselves on us. Proceed, unhappy man.
‘Yes, I’d agree: she’s obviously attracted to something in you, though thanks to her cultural difference it’s not plain what it would be. You like to think it’s a certain rough animality? That might have been more plausible ten years ago. In any case it sounds like dismal male vanity. But you’re intriguing, I’d allow that. Both powerful and elusive. That’s an unusual combination, and some people are excited by the unusual. You’re right. Dull, dull, dull the courtship rituals we’ve witnessed in here. People who’ve seen nothing, done nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing, smelt nothing. Dull, dull, dull. The meanest periwinkle has more to offer than these walking vacuities. They aren’t thoughtful, they aren’t imaginative, they aren’t spiritual, nor funny, nor subversive, nor even decently perverse. In their anxiety they touch nothing and nothing touches them. Instead they engulf things constantly through their eyes and mouth. Ingesting they pass, and leave no trace except perhaps a smear of deodorant.
‘And the higher up the social ladder they are the worse it gets. Diplomats! Dear God! Their minds whirl around in little circles bounded and described by four cardinal points: propriety, security, ambition, terror of disgrace. Once in a while they might trap another diplomat’s wife within that circle, find her own exactly fits theirs and embark on the conventional round of nervous trysts in unfashionable restaurants, of meetings in dark concert halls on the edges of towns in which neither wants to listen to Max Reger, of exchanged glances and brushed fingertips at official functions. Diplomats are bad? Princesses are still worse. Even the people they’re allowed to talk to are defined by protocol, let alone those they’re permitted to sleep with. Namely, two, other than their own husbands: M. Doigt et son voisin, as I’ve heard that Italian vilely express it.
‘The fact that she comes here to see you and picks your brain about plants and things is significant, of course, but not in the way you think. If you did agree to follow her to her distant steamy capital, do you really imagine her vulgar hints (“we’ll be working very closely”) will be made good? She learned her double entendre in the cinema, probably from Mae West, along with that stagey “I may be going away …” of hers. Think, man, for pity’s sake think – and come closer while you’re about it. She’s as free now as she’ll ever be for that sort of dalliance, and that’s not free at all. Her dark companion – you remember him now? Those eyes miss not a trick. Back home in her own country she won’t be a diplomat any longer, she’ll be royalty. Is it likely that royalty would be allowed to flirt with a foreigner who puts up greenhouses? Quite. Yes, we know she’s beautiful. Alas.
‘I’m bored with this topic, but do by all means come here. Where the gypsy’s concerned, too, you’d better get your ideas straight. I know you hadn’t planned on him, that you were taken by surprise, ambushed by circumstances, call it what you like. It was wonderfully heroic and noble of you. Mr Samaritan, 1944. But since when do Good Samaritans reward themselves by screwing the victim? Ah, he also reminds you of her, does he? Dear heaven, is there anyone who doesn’t? I realise you call it faithful but most would call it obsessive. Well, it only goes to show what we all think: humans are a complete mess.
‘“Cruel” again? We can offer you something less metaphorical if only you’d step a little –. That’s it. There. Now can you see it? Yes indeed, shining just where he dropped it in his delicious anguish. Your pruning knife. Well you’ll be damned … And so, my dear gardener, you will. No, you certainly don’t want to bother fetching torches and rakes and things. Just a step or two further, a foot planted firmly beneath my neighbour’s leaf should do the trick because I’ve also boldly gone there, though you mightn’t think it. Yes! Precisely! Bliss-bliss-bliss! A little painful for me because even a thin old galosh isn’t as tender as firm young gypsy, but oh! Oh! Sumptuous! Thank you, God.’