Griefwork by James Hamilton-Paterson Read Free Book Online Page A

wind now squarely at his back. Some way off beyond a screen of willows a small tarn glittered. On it were several dozen waterfowl. Leon approached. Many of the larger ones were odd indeed. There were emerald shanks and weird crests and crimson excrescences like tumours around the base of the beak. He looked about him with amazement. Although the grounds had been landscaped they were laid out not as a park but as an elaborate garden. There were a few expanses of plain grass lawn which together might have constituted a pleasance, but the general effect was more serious and even scientific in a way he found reassuring. On all sides was a profusion of unfamiliar plants and trees, all well maintained and labelled. Used as he was to the North Sea coast he was overwhelmed by the richness of the garden, by the colours and scents, the nooks of shade, the rockeries and summer houses.Butterflies staggered above banks of honeyed trumpets whose name was painted on the wooden marker planted beside them. He seemed to have fallen into a paradise. He wandered about, slightly stupefied.
    ‘We can’t leave this, can we?’ he kept remarking. ‘Oh no, we can’t leave,’ came the reply. The wind had dropped, the sun beat hotly back from the brick walls of potting sheds and outhouses. Along the paths moved nannies drowning in light, the silver spokes of their perambulators glittering like pinwheels, sprrixx, while around them trotted their older charges, some of whom wore velvet leggings, for the day had started cool and dull. His chest paining him with excitement, Leon sat on a bench in the shade of a camellia gazing across at the Orangery (which of course he did not recognise as such). At once he fell victim to a strange fugue. In an instant he watched the seasons changing, the trees stripped and black with mist, the cold blaze of snowlight, the nursemaids and sauntering couples bundled up and brisk. All this he saw taking place in a withdrawn silence as if out of earshot. ‘Ssiiih,’ he whispered when it was over, already rooted to the garden by virtue of this perspective. And then he noticed between trees the tall glitter of the Palm House. Approaching it he saw there were a couple of lesser conservatories not much different from Wim’s father’s greenhouses. He paid them little attention. It was the Palm House which drew him, with its crystal dome and flashing weathervane shaped like a golden ship, full-rigged and holding its course into the eye of the wind. The panes of this immense glasshouse were misty with condensation but he had the impression of green bulks of foliage and, beneath the dome itself, of actual trees.
    Seeing a couple leaving he let himself in through the double set of doors and stood in wonder, breathing the hot damp reek. This incense went straight down in his lungs, clearing airways, easing tightness. He walked the spongy paths, admired plantswhose shapes he had never imagined. If the walled garden outside were itself a fragment of the seventeenth century, this indoor land was a patch of primordial terrain. It was as if once, unknown ages ago, a tropical forest had covered this part of the Earth until one day people had noticed it retreating and had clapped a greenhouse over a remaining tentacle like a tumbler over a butterfly, preserving it intact as the rest shrank away and vanished for good. Altogether he spent an hour in there, alone but for three visitors who came and went. There seemed nobody in charge. He left and after a search found a fellow in a leather jerkin and gaiters who directed him back to the lodge.
    ‘Little sod,’ a vaguely official-looking man was saying to a red-haired woman sitting at a typewriter in the office. ‘We’re missing two hundredweight.’
    ‘You mean he’s nicked them?’ asked the woman incuriously.
    ‘Clean as a whistle. Imagine, two hundredweight of trellis straps.’
    ‘What on earth are they?’
    ‘Those nail things for driving into walls to hold plants up.