2b

Despite the multifarious disappointments that the years have wrought, Albert Langley’s weekly visits to the Royal Botanical Gardens occasion, if not quite hope, at least a transitory illusion of solace. It is as though his conviction is a ghost limb, subject to all the apparent pangs and irritations of the real thing, and just as persuasively palpable, but ultimately unable to withstand the weight of his disillusion. Fleeting recourse to distraction is preferable to none at all, however, and this, presumably, is why Albert chooses to persist.

Shrunken, both in flesh and soul, with teeth and ears too prominent, he is careful to avoid all visible reminders of these defects as he moves, or is pulled, towards his goal, which in a physical sense at least has always been the same. Indeed, he has undertaken these same trips almost every Wednesday for the past half century, and if they seldom leave him feeling consummated, or even enlivened, they are nevertheless essential to his raison d’être. They represent, it might be said, a kind of parody of his life, and as such can neither be avoided nor, entirely, embraced. The person who through force of circumstance has emerged as Albert Langley is enslaved to these walks, embedded in them like a fossil. There is and can be no escape, except perhaps within the pages of a book.

The sky is green with weight, a dark, unwieldy green, which brooks no argument, and seems to imply asphyxiation, in spite of which the air, though motionless, is palpable.

The deepest pools are stagnant ones, thinks Albert, and is almost overwhelmed - though fleetingly - by lust.

He staggers on (though ostensibly striding). The Gardens, opened early in the twentieth century, have ended up supplanting elegance with a kind of primal virginity, a formless, haphazard, wild sort of air, to which Albert feels himself inexorably drawn. They represent, in part through symbol, but chiefly through actual, tangible reminiscences, an exposition of the feminine - or, more properly, of that which Albert Langley has discovered, and believes he understands, of his own intrinsic femininity.

They are as much an affliction as belief, and just as impossible to ignore.