A House in Order by Nigel Dennis Page B

self in the autumn and the childish way I had imagined being looked after in winter: it hurt my dignity to think that I had been brutally punished for the worst stupidness of my whole life. But the staging ran all day as the soggy pots dried in the heat and toppled over when their icy bottoms thawed, and at last I began to pick them up and look at them contemptuously before I chucked them in a corner: I had not reached the stage where I wanted to kill anything alive, out of revenge. After chucking away a dozen of the dead, I hit on a second freak that had stayed alive, a storksbill of another sort, and eventually a number of others appeared, three in a row on one occasion, for some extraordinary reason. I saw all the first survivors as just crazy sports of nature – creatures thathad done something impossible by chance – but after a while I began to remember that it was my hands that had made the thick pots and filled them with the right sand, and my skill that had directed things, so I began to feel proud and instead of greeting them as natural freaks or self-survivals found myself saying: ‘So my paper kept you warm, did it?’ and ‘So sand suits you, eh? I thought it would.’ Before the sun went, I had lined up three dozen survivors out of two hundred, including the house-leek of all things, which was black and rotten except at the core, where I found a green streak under my nail. So instead of looking back on my autumn self as an unspeakable fool, I started thinking of him as more skilled and clever than people would imagine, and I said to myself at last: ‘I would certainly like to meet the gardener who could do such miracles as I have done.’ That night I was warm enough to sleep for about three hours and in the morning was almost shocked to find that my mug of coffee was just warm to my lips instead of frozen and made them smart as if acid had run into the cracks.
    Strewn about in the shed and tramped by me into the earth, I found scores of the plants I had dug up so wildly when I had been given the spade. I put the best of them into the dead one’s pots, which was a long business because though my hands were half the size they’d been, my fingers were either dead to feeling or too painful to use. Then, it rained for a solid week and the whole greenhouse, well warmed by now, turned green and putrid, with water rising up the holes I had dug for gravel, so that a number of the plants that had stood up to the frost died disgustingly of grey mould. But now I slept for whole nights at a time and had no wild fantasies to drive me mad, except the fear that once the rain had driven out the ice, I would get up one morning to find that my toes or feet had thawed and dropped off. Instead when the sun and frost came back, I found that most of my pains were gone and that I dared even to pull the stuffing out of two of the squares of glass and encourage my icy enemy to come in and change the stinking air. I was even fool enough to take a bar of yellow soap and wash my shirt on the staging, as a result of which most of it turned into mouldy slivers of stagnant wool or just fell to pieces leaving me with the arms and some of the front but no back and shoulders at all. There was soap enough by now to scrub out a palace but scrubbing was more than my hands could manage and I used the soap for the leaves of the plants and the disinfectant powder for their soil. My inborn hatred of all little parasites that creep into greenhouses kept me steadily at this job, which turned out to be a real triumph: not a single member of the whole disgusting breed of sucking pests lived longer than overnight with me. And almost every morning, the temperature of my coffee rose, until one day I drank it almost hot.

Suddenly, all my changes
    Suddenly, all my changes of six weeks before arrived outside too. Four men came – the first I had seen in daylight for four months, except my guards – and carried away the shutter-boards round the verandah.