The Physic Garden (16 page)

His next words confirmed these feelings.

‘I promise, William, that I will use the book with care. I promise I will consider those who gave their lives to illustrate it. I promise I will use it to save other lives. Will that content you and even persuade you just a little?’

‘You speak as if you are beholden to me in some way.’

‘More than you know,’ he said. ‘More than you will ever know.’

‘Then I am content.’

And so, we resumed our friendship. If anything, we were closer than before, knowing that we could disagree, might even quarrel like equals, but that it would never damage our regard for one another.

Later that year, Jenny declared that she had finished the christening cape at last. There was not one more stitch she could put into it and it was ready to be handed over to its new owners. I had been following its progress on my visits to her house and reporting back to Thomas. I found myself marvelling at her skill with a needle, which seemed to reflect her skill in her garden. If Rymsdyk drew and painted pictures on canvas and paper, then Jenny surely drew and painted pictures with her needle. Thomas and Marion had arranged the christening ceremony and issued invitations to their friends. Although he had seen samples of Jenny’s work before he commissioned the cape, Thomas had still not met my Jenny.

‘Why don’t you ask her if she would be so kind as to bring it to your house, William,’ he told me. ‘I should like to congratulate the seamstress in person when I pay her, so I think I shall collect it myself.’

Jenny’s father brought her to the door. I mind the day well, even at this distance in time. They set off early, travelling with one of the carriers on a rough and ready cart. She was carrying the garment wrapped up in a piece of pale silk to protect it from the dust of the road. Sandy Caddas had business in the town, taking finished cloth to the merchants who commissioned it from him. When Jenny was busy and he couldn’t leave Anna under the
supervision of their neighbour, Nancy, with whom he seemed to be on increasingly good terms, he had got into the habit of bringing her with him and leaving her at our house. Anna was obliging enough and would sit quietly doing whatever task my mother allotted to her, drawing when she could get paper, but chiefly helping with cooking or baking bread, in which she seemed to take a tremendous enjoyment, being much more adept at it than either of my younger sisters.

On this particular day, however, Mr Caddas had made Anna stay behind with Nancy. I think he was aware that poor Jenny was on pins, wondering whether the christening cape would meet with Doctor Brown’s approval, and much too nervous to be bothered with her sister. My mother had been up early, cleaning the house from top to bottom in honour of the distinguished visitor. Thomas had become quite at home in our house and because he always turned the full force of his charm upon my mother, she was invariably pleased to see him. But she had never become exactly at ease with him. Instead, particularly after the gift of lemons, she would flutter about him as if he were royalty, a deference that irritated me but was none of his doing.

His occasional unanticipated visit would throw her into a panic. She would make him sit down in my father’s old chair, and give him whatever we had in the house that she thought might be fit for a gentleman: new ale, old whisky if there was any, which was seldom, bannocks and honey, soft fruit in season. Once she presented him with a platter of ripe strawberries from the garden as triumphantly as though they had been jewels. I saw that she had selected them all so that their size and shape were completely regular, although I couldn’t find it in my heart to comment on it. I understood her partiality. And to give him his due, Thomas accepted all this adulation – for that was what it must have seemed like – with his usual grace and good-natured diffidence.

I sit here in the sunlight and find myself remembering him the way he was then, with no thought of the old man he would have become during the years of our estrangement. There is a sense in which that old man does not exist for me. When I see myself in a looking glass, I am always faintly surprised by the face that stares back at me. Who is this wrinkled stranger who seems to me very like the turtle that my wee Jenny so loves to look at in my illustrated volumes of Daudin’s
Histoire Naturelle
? Where did he come from? And why is he usurping my body?

Did Thomas feel the same whenever he had occasion to glance at himself in the glass? And did he, I wonder, ever give a passing thought to me? Did he remember our friendship and grieve for it from time to time? I would give a very great deal to be able to travel backwards and see him one more time, really see him and not just with the mind’s eye, which is a cold substitute for reality, however potent. I wish I could see him as he was then, striding into my house, bringing light and air and ideas with him. I find myself wishing we could have met again, just once. But maybe that would have been a disappointment. Because I never did see him again, this is how he is in my mind still, young and vibrant, my best and finest of friends.

There was something peculiarly attractive about him, but it was not any great regularity of feature. I would not have thought him especially handsome, but there was some way in which he seemed comfortable in his own body. He had a certain effect upon young and old, male and female alike, that was quite devastating. I thought myself reasonably handsome and Jenny seemed fond enough of me. The other girls I met in the streets around the college and on my excursions into the countryside seemed happy enough to flirt with me, but I had no illusions about myself. Thomas was different. For a while, I fancied it was just myself who was so taken with him, because of his obvious regard for me. We do tend to approve of those who are at pains to show us that they like us, particularly those we consider to be our superiors. But with hindsight, I realise
that it was like that with almost everyone he met. He was a man whom many people loved on sight and almost without effort on his part.

Dear God, even the flea-bitten and ragged dog, the little beast belonging to one of the college porters, would come and fawn upon him when he walked about the gardens, licking his hand gratefully when he bent to pat its rough coat. And I’m still, after all this time, not sure what it was about him that provoked such affection. But whatever it was, I see now that it was dangerous. You would think about him in his absence and wonder what madness had seized you and why you fell in with all his suggestions, thoughtlessly, heedless of your own self interest. But fall in you would, even if you regretted it later. Which should explain a very great deal to me. Everything is forgivable in time. Well, almost everything.

All the same I want … what do I want? I think I want to put things straight. To put things right. To try to describe things as they were and as they are. Ah, but if by some miracle, I could be transported back to those early days, to the innocence and ignorance of that time when I was so fond of him, when I looked forward to our meetings as the high point of my day, when I trusted him completely, would I do it? If it meant forgetting all that had occurred since? Would I do that? If some magical creature appeared and granted me one wish, instead of the three that are more usual in such tales? Well, sometimes I believe I would. Which is both a shame and a revelation to me. With one proviso. I think I could not bear to lose my grand-daughter. I think I would elect to keep her, and in doing that, perhaps I would lose Thomas all over again. And I tell you, it would be hard, but I would have to do it.

Most of the time there was, I fancy, a certain calculation about him. It troubles me to think of it now. Perhaps he was all too aware of his power to influence, particularly where women were concerned. He must have realised it but he generally restrained himself. The trouble was, of course, that he had never yet met any woman, except for Marion, for whom he felt even the smallest regard over and beyond the normal pleasantries of everyday polite
interaction. I believe he had known Marion since childhood, and they had moved very smoothly from friendship to courtship to marriage. But passion? The lightning strike that comes upon you in an instant? No, I do not think that had ever yet troubled Thomas. Or not to my knowledge, anyway. In fact, I flatter myself that he was more fond of me than of most other people.

He was well aware of the power of his personality and kept it very much in check. And although he influenced me and changed me and gave me thoughts and ideas that were a long way above the station to which I had been born, I’m convinced he meant nothing but good by it. I am certain that I would not be the man I am today, would not have had the considerable success I have had – albeit in an entirely different trade – without Thomas’s influence on me, his generous imparting of all kinds of knowledge, to say nothing of the confidence that my learning gave me.

At that time, I cherished the idea that I might one day be able to work entirely for and with Thomas. In fairness I would say it was he who planted the seed in my mind. He would tell me tales about travellers who went to foreign parts: not just the likes of Linnaeus, who was our God at that time, or William Kent, Joseph Banks and William Paxton, but other men, such as Archibald Menzies, men who had started out as common gardeners like myself, men from comparatively humble beginnings, but with a thirst for knowledge and a sense of adventure, not so very far removed from my own. We would talk about the places my Uncle Johnnie had spoken of. Thomas would tell me how there were men who would sail overseas, not as tarry sailors, but as gentlemen or at least passengers, who would travel and collect plants which they would bring back for the gardens of the rich, or for various botanical gardens. He said that there were rich men who loved to collect such things and were willing to pay good money for them. In short, he opened my eyes to a hundred possibilities.

‘It is not something anyone and everyone can do, William,’ he said. ‘It needs bravery, dedication and knowledge, a unique
combination
of skills.’

‘Yes, I can see that.’

‘And I think that we would make a good partnership, you and I.’

‘Do you really believe so?’

‘I do. I really believe it!’

So we would beguile the hours with dreams. For they were only dreams. But it seemed a wonderful prospect to me. And this was the foundation upon which the two of us constructed a whole edifice of impossibilities.

I had forgotten that Thomas was a dreamer at heart. For that short while, he turned me into a dreamer too. How could it be otherwise? I deferred to him in everything, so why not this? But the reality of the situation was that he had a wife and children, he was a Glasgow doctor and a professor of botany to boot. All his interests and responsibilities were in the city. He had money, but it was not a fortune of the order of, for example, Joseph Banks. And, more to the point, where on earth would he find or even make the time to travel overseas in search of plants, in his current situation?

Maybe later in his life he would have been able to do it, although I am not aware that he ever did. As time passed he transferred his affections from plants to fossils, from living things to their petrified remains. Perhaps he thought it safer that way. Perhaps with these at least, he could do no harm. I heard that he amassed a fine collection, but at second hand only, leaving others to do the travelling. Perhaps he should have done it much earlier in his career, if that was what he wanted to do. But he had not known me then, and I pride myself even now that it was our conversations and my enthusiasm that had sparked these ideas in him. If it was an unrealistic ambition for him, then how much more unrealistic for me, who still had a widowed mother and younger siblings to support, no money whatsoever to spare, and so much work that I barely had enough hours in the day to complete it all, a man who invariably slept the sleep of exhaustion when he finally retired to his bed?

All the same, I have since thought that if we had genuinely
wanted to do it, perhaps we would have found a way. There were other men with even fewer resources at the start and they managed it. So it comes to me that we didn’t want it enough, while there were others who did, who had the imagination, the dedication and the confidence to bring their dreams to reality.

I must return to my story. My grand-daughter has been unwell, taken with fierce pains in her stomach. Illnesses can overtake the young so swiftly. In the space of an hour they can switch from robust good health to desperate sickness. We were all worried about her, but it turned out to be nothing more than an
overindulgence
in unripe plums from a tree in a neighbouring garden. I have done the same myself and the repercussions can be most severe. Her mother fetched a hot stone bottle wrapped in a blanket and a cup of sweet peppermint cordial in warm water. I sat with her and sang to her until her symptoms abated. Now she is well enough to play outside in the low sunlight, although sternly warned away from the tree whose branches overhang the garden at the back of the house. And I am free to return to my tale, but curiously reluctant. I was in full flow. The interruption has disturbed me. I find that I don’t wish to think about it any more. The thought of Thomas makes my heart ache and time will not cure me. But the story must be told, nevertheless.

There we were, waiting for Thomas to arrive – Jenny and myself and my poor, half-demented mother. She was restlessly rearranging things, pulling the threadbare curtains over the beds in the wall, which she had smoothed with unusual care that morning, moving his chair – or at least the one where she always made him sit – up close to the fire, flitting from the table where the christening cape was still wrapped up in its silk, to the fireplace, to the shelf where the best pewter was set out for the visitor’s ale and a couple of wheaten cakes made especially for him and now smeared with enough of the best butter to serve us for
a month. Rab, who had been unwell all that week, was tucked up in a blanket close beside the fire. My mother had even been ready to banish him, her darling, to the scullery or to one of the cold garrets upstairs, fearing that his coughing would disturb the doctor, but Jenny was so horrified by the very idea that my mother relented and let him stay.

God knows what Thomas would have made of it because he always liked to see Rab, always liked to question him about the state of his health.

‘Anyone would think,’ said Jenny, when my mother had gone out of the room briefly to fetch something, another cushion for the doctor’s chair, a better cup for his ale. ‘Anyone would think that we were expecting a visit from the king himself. Is this Doctor Brown such a demanding personage then, William?’