Roger Curtis - Lights in a Western Sky

When spring came, Dr Pentarius busied himself in his dispensary. The bottles multiplied on the shelves, more labels now in his hand than in Margaret’s. Every morning Florence would chide him about the increasing number of mortars and vessels to wash. Carried away by his obsession, Dr Pentarius began to apply the remedies to himself and assess the results more critically than he had ever done with his patients. Not infrequently Florence would find him stock still, timepiece in hand, measuring his pulse or his breathing, then, clicking the instrument shut, passing to the mirror to check his face for pallor or rubor. But he sensed she hadn’t the stomach to tell him what he already knew: that the cause of the gauntness of his features must compromise his every experiment.

A year passed, then two more. The hedge around the physic garden had become tall and fine under Kingsland’s deft shears. The once bare paths were now all but obliterated by bursting cushions of luxuriance. He saw there many of the plants he used – Achillea, Cnicus, Helleborus, Symphytum, Allium, Amni, Ephedra, Hyocyamus – and some he did not yet recognise. Like sentinels above them, there were fragrant plumes of Yucca, of which he stood in awe, blue-green Eucalyptus , Datura and Mimosa. And, amongst them, rising stands of a species he did not know, except as a member of the family – the Solonaceae – to which, besides the humble potato, the poisonous nightshades and the hallucinogenic Brugmansia belonged. These majestic plants, becoming higher with each season, began to bear clusters of pendulous trumpet-like flowers, sweetly smelling, in delicate shades of yellow and pink. He took a specimen for Forsyth to identify, but was no wiser: the Chelsea garden did not possess them, nor did it know of their origin. He had Kingsland set a chair for him where their tallest growths might screen him from the wind and the sun, and the distractions of the house and the river. For hours at a time he would sit with just the tinkling fountain – for Kingsland had at last secured its function – his only focus of distraction.

It was that fourth summer when the child first came to the garden. The mother had died in childbirth, Kingsland had told him. Later his wife had taken pity and taken her in. At first, the bright-eyed girl held no interest for Dr Pentarius, and when Kingsland came again to speak with him he had been occupied and brushed the man aside. The child built houses with stones on the plinth where the doctor had imagined himself immortal, and filled little cups with water from the fountain. It did not seem to him strange that she never came to him under his green canopy, even though, when he went to play with her – which became more and more often – she chatted to him with pleasure and without inhibition.

Only one aspect of Dr Pentarius’ new-found existence disturbed him – his health. For some weeks his eyesight had begun to play tricks. In certain lights the letters on the page of his herbal seemed to dance to a strange rhythm that had something to do with his irregular heart beat. When he rose from his chair he became dizzy, so that for a few moments he could neither stand straight nor begin to walk. Then, one day, reacting to the child’s cry of delight and invitation, he had simply fallen over, and lain there under her puzzled gaze until Kingsland chanced to find him and return him to his chair. That evening he scanned the shelves of his dispensary, wondering which of his concoctions – or combinations of them – might have caused such aberrations. He resolved to sample no more medicines, and with the passing of time his symptoms disappeared. That winter he spent long hours with Forsyth picking over his experiences, without result. Then, the following summer, his problems returned.

From the deep shade Dr Pentarius craned his neck to watch Rosa leave the garden through the arch in the box hedge. A garden of delight, Forsyth had once said; and it was indeed a casket of wonders, on a grand scale, full of botanical treasures to be experienced by all the senses. Without hardly moving his body, Dr Pentarius could grasp the fronds of Mentha, Lavendula and Rosmarinus and squeeze out their sharp perfumes, skim the seeds of Linum and release them, tinkling, on to the flat arm of his chair, hold up the translucent pods of Capsicum so that the contours within were refracted like rainbows in the sunlight. And then there was the gentle laughter of the child he was coming to love and depend upon. He saw the half-finished piles of stones and the sand and the fresh cups for water that Rosa had put there. It promised to be another day of unthreatened contentment on a scale of time stretching indefinitely into the future.

At first the child did not appear, though he could sense her presence outside the garden. Instead, Rosa returned alone, with puzzlement in her beaming smile.

‘It seems Amelia has brought you a present, although I cannot get from her whom it is from.’ She called to the child, ‘Come Amelia, you can give it to the doctor now.’

Amelia walked slowly into view, clutching with both hands a small flat parcel wrapped in green paper and bound with silk cord of the same colour. She held it out to him.

He looked from the child’s face to the parcel and back again. There was something he could not fathom, a tension that had no part in simple giving. Where there should have been only wonderment in the child’s eyes he saw there apprehension also.

‘Thank you, Amelia,’ he said.

His trembling fingers were no match for the cord, even though it was tied in a simple bow. As he handed the package to Rosa the texture of the wrapping seemed to transform itself into shifting patterns of whorls and flourishes, more exotic, more eastern – that was the word that inexplicably entered his head – than could be had even in the capital itself.

Rosa unwrapped the parcel just sufficiently for him to complete the process.

‘A book, Amelia?’ he anticipated. But as the paper fell away he was left holding not a book but a mirror in a simple wooden frame. Disappointed, he turned it over. ‘What’s that on the back?’ he asked Rosa.

‘A date,’ she replied. ‘Today’s date. Or rather, this day six years ago. Does that mean anything?’

Dr Pentarius tried to reply, but could not gather his thoughts sufficiently, and said nothing. He held the mirror at arm’s length, beside the child’s face. An increasing effort of will against his faltering strength just permitted him to keep it there. The two images – his own and the child’s – swam in his consciousness: his wasted, hers open and innocent, one moment so different, the next coming together as if to fuse, because of a commonality of features.

Slowly, the child turned and began to walk dejectedly away, as if her mission – whatever it might have been – had failed.

But, still holding the mirror, Dr Pentarius was engaged in a second voyage of realisation. Tentatively he sniffed the heavy scents that for many days he had inhaled without thought or caution, or even caring to identify their origin. Now he saw behind him in the mirror the contorted and vengeful inflorescences transformed by reflection from the beautiful scented flowers that he knew to be there but could no longer see.

Without thinking he expelled the air from his lungs and inhaled massively. Too late. The perfumes and vapours, inseparable carriers of pleasure and pain, filled his being. His heart pounded, the beats tripping over themselves. His breaths were taken as great convulsive gasps.

His last perception was of Amelia, his grandchild, her dark eyes wide, staring at him from across the garden.

I had tried to flee, to fly back across the Atlantic to obscurity, but the girl at the desk had said no, there were no more flights because of the blizzard, and mine had been the last one in. She watched my fingers drumming on the shiny black – black, yes – counter and for a second her bright puzzled eyes engaged with mine. In my pocket Melanie’s letter telling me of our mother’s death nudged at my thigh. I felt a brief flicker of remorse. But it passed. As I left the terminal the snow swept in, even through the revolving door. Not surprisingly, the taxi reached Mortlake Crematorium fifteen minutes late.