‘Ridiculous thing to have planted by the house in any case. The roots are coming up through the kitchen floor, for God’s sake.’
I let my breath out and tried not to feel angry. That I’d grown up among the roots of that tree, that Dad had climbed it with me and read me stories in the lowest branch; none of it meant a thing to him and there would be no making him understand. He had hated our father and that was that. He had hated him so much that if I said I hadn’t, he couldn’t conceive that it might be anything but a strange lie.
‘They can save some of the timber to plank up the roof, then,’ I said.
‘Merrick, I told you, we can’t afford to do anything about the roof; I can’t have workmen in—’
‘There’s a hole in the bloody roof, Charles, and we’ve got timber. We’ve got eleven gardeners.’
‘Don’t swear at me. It should be done properly—’
‘But we can’t do it properly, you just said.’
‘Just,’ he said, ‘leave it alone.’
I laughed. ‘I’m not being rained on every time I come into the house because you’re too proud to fix the roof. Talk about spiting your face.’
‘I don’t mind rain,’ he said.
‘Other people do.’
‘Merrick. I said—’
‘I heard what you said, but since what you said was stupid, we’re not going to do that.’
He ignored me. ‘There’s a letter for you.’
I managed to hesitate only for a second when I saw the seal of the India Office before I folded it into my waistcoat. I liked fighting with Charles – if I was disagreeing with him it was proof I hadn’t been beaten down altogether yet – but seeing the seal made the scar on my leg pang and I had to go more slowly.
TWO
Gulliver led the way on the crooked path, which was sometimes gravel, sometimes cobbles, and sometimes only a flatter line of moss along the edge of the lawn. Once we were close to the big tree, the roots pushed up underfoot in bumps and contorted twists. There had used to be rainforest flora all around them: a great litter of orchids, plate-leaved lilies in the marshy patches, and clusters of carnivorous things with spines that closed fast if you poked one. Charles had had it all torn up when he moved the driveway to iron out the hairpin bend. It had made things difficult for the apple carts. I paused to tell the gardeners to save some timber for the roof. They snatched a glance between each other and said of course. They knew better than to ask why we couldn’t bring in workmen from Truro for proper repairs.
Having found early on after coming home from China that I couldn’t sit in the house all day, I’d gone exploring and rediscovered the old greenhouse. It was down in the valley, which hadn’t seen any work since our grandfather had been alive. Because the wind funnelled right up from the sea sometimes, the trees there were blasted and strangely shaped. Some had leaves only on one side and one yew had bent right forward over the glass roof, old and dead and brittle. No matter how often I came in and out, the doors rained moss and spiders. When I’d found the place it had been overgrown. Nobody had asked for it back, so I stole it. I’d never be a gardener again, not like I had been, but although the loss of the profession had smashed over me like a tsunami, the interest behind it had turned out to be waterproof. I had forty-two types of fern and rescued tropical plants growing inside now, so densely that they pressed up against the walls.
The greenhouse stood on the edge of a tiny graveyard. The graves looked like somebody had dropped them there. They were a random, leaning clutter, some far spaced and some not, one half-hidden by the roots of a wind-warped tree that had spilled over the granite and tipped it sideways. There had once been a chapel, but all that was left of it were some stone steps and half a window frame. Dad’s grave was the only one noticeable straightaway. There was a statue that looked down at the headstone, or it did usually. After the storm, one of the trees had fallen where the statue had been, but somebody prescient had moved it fifteen feet to one side.
When I got to the greenhouse, I saw that I’d left the door open, again. It worried me, because no matter how often I did it, I could never remember. I checked the inside lock without much hope. The key was gone, which wouldn’t have mattered, but the same ring had my housekeys on it too. It was the third time I’d left it open since coming home, and the third time the crows had stolen the keys. It had taken me days to work out what had happened the first time and even then only when they brought the keys back to swap for a shilling I’d left on the bench.
I took down the jar of nails and coins on the shelf and sat for a while shining them up with turpentine. When they were gleaming I set them out on the step. I paused when I saw the floor was damp, dripped on, but there was nothing wrong with the roof. The little mechanisms that misted the air in the summer were bone dry. Not for the first time, I wondered if it hadn’t been me who had left the door ajar at all, but someone else coming in to get out of the rain. But I’d asked before, and everyone had always said no.
In stealing the keys, the crows had knocked the map of Peru sideways. I straightened it up. I’d taken it from our grandfather’s collection. It wasn’t all of Peru, only the part he’d lived in. A district well into the interior, Caravaya. Half of it was beyond the Andes and after the line of the mountains there wasn’t much, but he had sketched on a dragon with an amiable face and folded wings. At first glance it was a piece of whimsy but I knew why he had drawn it. There was a river there, in the shape of a dragon, but the territory was uncharted and he’d never taken the measure of the land. I only knew because whenever I saw the little picture, a nursery rhyme floated about at the back of my mind. It was about a dragon and a river and a mountain, but I couldn’t fit the words into the tune any more.
Peru had been where I was meant to go, where I was meant to be now, if nothing had happened to my leg; I was supposed to be fetching cuttings from calisaya cinchona trees to begin a new plantation in India. The only cinchona forests in the world grew in Peru, and the only treatment in the world for malaria was quinine – derived from cinchona bark. Malaria was getting worse and worse in India, which was doing unpromising things to the trade revenue of the India Office. I’d put the map up when I’d thought I might recover enough to go. Still holding it between my fingertips I realised that all it was now was the fossil of a dead chance. I was never going to go. I propped it up on the floor instead, facing away.
Wanting to get it over with, I pulled open the letter and unfolded it against a tray of pansy seedlings. The paper was embossed and thick. Across it was my old manager’s beautiful handwriting in dark black ink.
Tremayne,
Expedition to Peru going ahead. December start. Report to the India Office for November 15th at the latest.
Sing
I turned the paper over and cast around for the pencil I used for plant labels.
Dear Sing,
Cannot go to Peru. Cannot walk. Ask Charles Ledger, he’s good.
Yours