The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
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starlings loop and swirl past on their last flight before roosting. And all the time, while plays are being rehearsed and acted, the birds are building, sitting, feeding their young, and the fact that they choose this, the noisiest part of the park, surely says something about the way they view us. Or don’t see us, don’t regard us at all, except in association with food scraps? There’s nothing odder than what is ignored, not seen, not noticed. Perhaps those coots chose that spot, the most public there is, because the water is the right depth there, and nothing else mattered; and they were not aware of their audience on the bridge except as a noisy frieze which emitted lumps of food and other objects.
The park holds dozens of self-contained dramas, human and animal, in the space of an eye-sweep. On a Sunday afternoon, in July, when the drought had held and held, and the bushes under the tree-cover were wilting because what showers had fallen were not heavy enough to penetrate the thick leaf-layers, the park was full, and coachloads of people from everywhere were visiting the zoo. There were queues at the zoo gates hundreds of yards long, and inside the zoo it was like a fair. There is a path down the west side of the zoo. It is tree-shaded. A bank rises sharply to the fields used for football and cricket. Being summer, and Sunday, it was cricket time, and four separate games were in progress, each with its circle of reserve players, friends, wives, children, and casual watchers. This world, the world of Sunday cricket, was absolutely self-absorbed, and each game ignored the other three. On the slopes under the trees were lovers, twined two by two. At the end where the Mappin Terraces are, four young people lay asleep. They were tourists, and looked German, or perhaps Scandinavian. They all four had long hair. The two girls had long dresses, the young men fringed leather. They owned four rucksacks and four guitars. Most likely they had been up talking, singing and dancing all night, or perhaps had not the money to pay for a night’s sleep. Now they slept in each other’s arms all day without moving. Quite possibly they never knew that cricket was being devotedly played so close, and that while they slept the zoo filled and emptied again. From the slope where they were you can see nicely into the children’s zoo, and across to the elephants’ house. You can see, too, the goats and bears of the terraces. Some people who had given up the effort of getting into the zoo sat on the slopes near the four sleepers, talking a lot, not trying to be quiet, and they watched the elephants showing off, poor beasts, in return for their little house and the trench-enclosed space they have to live in. A woman arrived with a plastic bag and sat on a bench, with her back to the lovers and the sleeping young people, and fed sparrows and pigeons, frowning with the concentration of the effort needed to let the poor sparrows (who were so small) get as much food as the (unfairly) large pigeons. And a little girl in the children’s zoo clutched at a donkey no higher than she was, and cried out: ‘It’s getting wet, oh the donkey’s getting wet!’ True enough, here came a small sample of the long-awaited rain. Not much. A brief sparkling drench. No one stopped doing anything. The cricketers played on. The woman frowned and fussed over the unfairness of nature. The lovers loved. The four sleeping young people did not so much as turn over, but a passing youth tiptoed up and covered the guitars with the girls’ long skirts. And the little girl wept because of the poor donkey who was getting wet and apparently liking it, for it was kicking and hee-hawing. Where was her mamma? Where, her papa? She was alone with her donkey and her grief. And the rain pelted down and stopped, having done no good and no harm to anything. It was weeks before some real rain arrived and saved the brown scuffing grass; weeks before that moment of high summer which was nothing to do with the gardener’s calendar, or even the length of the days, shortening fast again, again the same number of hours as in the long-forgotten no-spring. But it is a moment whose quality is over-lushness, heaviness, fullness, plenty. All the trees are crammed and blowzy with leaf. They sag and loll and drag. The willows trail too long in the water, and then they look as if someone has gone around each one in a boat with shears, chopping the fronds to just such a length, like human hair trimmed around with a pudding-basin. The ducks and geese who have been delicately, languidly, nibbling bits of leaf, and floating in and out through the trailing green curtains, now tread water and strive upwards on their wings to nip off bits of leaf. Perhaps it is the birds who have eaten the low branches away to an exact height all around? There are so many of them now, the chicks all having grown up, that everywhere you look are herds of geese, flocks of ducks, the big swans, water-hens. Surely the park can’t possibly sustain so many? What will happen to them all? Will they be allotted to other less bird-populated parks, each bird conditioned from chickhood to regard every human being in sight as a moving bread-fountain? Meanwhile, the rowing boats and the sailing boats have to manoeuvre through crowds of waterfowl, the sparrows are in flocks, the roses teem and mass, everything is at the full of its provision, its lushness. The hub of the park now is not the chestnut avenue, and the so English herbaceous border, but the long Italianate walk that has the fountain and the tall poplars at one end, the formal black-and-gold gates at the other, and roses lining it all the way. A summer avenue, asking for deep blue skies and heat, just as the chestnut avenue, and the hawthorns, the plums, cherries and currants, are for spring, or for autumn.
The summer gardeners all seem to be youngsters working with bare torsos, or bare feet. They cool off by standing in the fountain’s spray as the wind switches it about. ‘They say’ that the hippies have decided this work, summer gardening, is good for them, us, society. One evening I heard these sentiments offered to one gardening girl by another:
‘There aren’t any hang-ups here, you can do your own thing, but you’ve got to pull your weight, that’s fair enough.’
There is a different relationship between these summer amateur gardeners and the park’s visitors, and between the visitors and the familiar older gardeners, these last being more proprietary. I remember an exchange with one, several springs ago, on an occasion when it had snowed, the sun had come out, and friends had rung to say that the crocuses were particularly fine. Out I went to the park and found that the new crocuses, white, purple, gold, stood everywhere in the snow. Each patch had been finely netted with black cotton to stop the birds eating them. I was bending over to see how the netting was done – a tricky and irritating job, surely? – when I saw a uniformed gardener had emerged from his watchman’s hut and was standing over me.
‘And what may you be doing?’
‘I am looking at your crocuses.’
‘They are not my crocuses. They are public property.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘And I am paid to watch them.’
‘You mean to tell me that you are standing in that unheated wooden hut in all this cold and snow just to guard the crocuses?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Isn’t this cotton any use, then?’
‘Cotton is effective against bird thieves. I am not saying anything about human thieves.’
‘But I wasn’t going to eat your crocuses!’
‘I am only doing my job.’
‘Your job is to be a crocus-watcher?’
Yes, madam, and it always has been and my father before me. When I was a little lad I knew the work I wanted to do and I’ve done it ever since.’
Not thus the youngsters, much less suspicious characters, understanding quite well how respectable citizens may envy them their jobs.
There was this incident when the geraniums had flowered once, and needed to be picked over to induce a second flowering. There were banks of them, covered with dead flowers. I myself had resisted the temptation to nip over the railings and dead-head the lot: another had not resisted. With a look of defiant guilt, an elderly man was crouching in the geraniums, hard at work. Leaning on his spade, watching him, was a summer gardener, a long-haired, barefooted, naked-chested youth.
‘What’s he doing that for?’ said he to me.
‘He can’t stand that there won’t be a second flowering,’ I said. ‘I can understand it. I’ve just dead-headed all mine in my own garden.’
‘All I’ve got room for is herbs in a pot.’
The elderly man, seeing us watching him, talking