The Blue Last

a few minutes he was back, saying both of the previous employers had been most satisfied with his work. They were, of course, Marshall Trueblood and Diane Demorney.

“They were indeed effusive, Mr. Plant.”

Then Barkins asked him the usual boring questions as to why Mr. Plant had left these two satisfied employers. Mr. Plant had wanted to move to London, et cetera, et cetera.

The little girl had finished sizing him up (reaching her conclusions far faster than the butler) and had gathered up her strange doll and gone outside.

Barkins thought he would do with having a trial run for a week or two. Melrose had reacted with proper humility.

Which is why he was standing by the pond, at either end of which he had pointed out the gardener’s still- thriving hakonechloa and Rubrum grasses, the Rubrum’s sprays of delicate flowers still going strong in December. Then there was that New Zealand grass with its drooping flowerheads at the far end, over there. Melrose made much of these grasses, they being about the only thing he knew. “Hakonechloa” he had learned-as he had a few other gardening nuggets of wisdom-from Diane Demorney.

“Point out,” Diane had told him in the Jack and Hammer, “that hakonechloa is a must-have for every snob around who knows nothing at all about gardening-I certainly don’t, nor do I want to-point out that the name is simply on everybody’s lips.”

“But… what is it?”

“Some sort of grassy thing.”

“Well, but what does it look like?”

“Melrose, don’t be simple. How should I know? If it’s a grass, I expect it’s green. Tallish.” Her hand measured off air. “Look: when you don’t know a damned thing about a subject, you rattle off one or two esoteric bits that hardly anyone knows-”

“Well, hakonechloa won’t do, then. You said it was on everybody’s lips.”

“But people don’t know it’s on everybody’s lips, do they? One or two bits and then learn the Latin-I think it’s Latin-names for this or that and toss them in occasionally.”

“You mean even if I’ve got the names wrong?”

Diane looked over her shoulder to the bar where Dick Scroggs stood reading the paper. She gave him the queen’s wave, meaning two more drinks. To Melrose she said, “I expect it will be wrong, but who cares, as long as it’s Latin.”

“But a gardener might know.”

Diane sighed deeply. “Even if he does, you just finesse whatever you’re looking at for something that doesn’t grow around there-a palm tree or something.”

“Diane, how could I mistake a plant or a flower for a palm tree?”

“Then say something that grows around a palm tree-at the base of it. He won’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’ll make two of us.” But Melrose had to admit he was enamored of the Demorney grasp of one- upmanship. “Okay-” He read from one of the three-by-five cards on which he was taking notes.

(“Notes! Lord,” Diane had said with a shiver.)

At first, Melrose had done what he thought to be the sensible thing, and gone to the little library, where he’d pulled down a book, slogged through it for a while and realized facts without color, without conversation, without nuance, were boring and hard to absorb. He had only two days before he returned to London, and knew what he needed was a crash course. He needed the gestalt of gardening-watching someone do it, hearing someone speak of it. To this end he had gone in search of Alice Broadstairs, who, along with Lavinia Vine, competed at the annual Sidbury Flower Show. The trouble with this approach, Melrose should have known, was that Miss Broadstairs was such a gardening enthusiast, she rattled on and on about her roses and orchids, covering entirely too much ground (literal and metaphoric), so that Melrose was bombarded by facts he couldn’t assimilate, and, more important, that would probably do him no good. He took notes, though, for among all of this fall of blossom was the odd bit that would help: a rose called Midsummer Beauty that was still brilliant in December; the Mahonia japonica, that he could remember because it rhymed; and Diane’s hakonechloa. He came, in other words, to realize that knowledge was style: it’s not what you know, it’s how you know it. Diane was the person for this, and she would be having lunch (the two olives) at the Jack and Hammer.

She had said, “Do something with mistletoe. Christmas is just around the corner, unfortunately.” Diane could only make it through the holiday season with a breakfast of eggnog.

“ ‘Do something’? I’m not decorating the garden.”

“I mean, look up one or two kinds of mistletoe and trot them out if you’re looking at a bush.”

“Doesn’t mistletoe grow on trees?”

Diane tapped her stirrer with its marinated olive gently on the rim of her glass. “I have no idea. Find out what kind, then.”

Melrose made a note on his card. “What if this house doesn’t have the kind mistletoe grows on?”

Diane rolled her eyes and ate her olive, after which she said, “Then you ask him why this kind of tree isn’t in the garden.” Languidly, she fixed a cigarette into her black holder. “You’re usually inventive. One must be able to turn things to one’s advantage. How was Florence?”

“Magnificent, absolutely magnificent.” Somehow, this galloping trip that had irritated him to death (except, of course, at the end) had turned in his mind to something gorgeous and fragile. “My favorite place was San Gimignano.” Not only did Melrose pronounce this correctly, but he managed to sound like a native when he blended that second “i” with the “y.” He had practiced a lot.

“Say that again.”

“San Gim-i’yan-o.”

“How fascinating. I love Italian names. ‘San Gimignano.’ Hmm.”

It annoyed Melrose that she pronounced it exactly right without any practice at all. For some reason, Diane was good at things like that.

“San Gimignano (he liked saying it) is about twenty miles outside of Florence. It’s like suddenly finding yourself back in the Middle Ages. The town’s famous for its towers. Once there were hundreds of them, so many you could walk across town on the rooftops.”

“I can hardly walk across town on the pavements.”

“I imagine this ‘tower’ business was a kind of ego thing. Oh, the towers permitted fortification-you know, pouring boiling oil down on your enemy-but I bet the whole idea got out of hand and everyone tried building a tower taller than his neighbor’s, so they just kept building taller towers.”

Diane tapped her cigarette free of ash. “Sounds like Las Vegas. Now, tossing things like that name into conversation, well, it would stop everyone but the mayor of San Gimignano dead in his tracks.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning people don’t give much of a damn what you say. It’s the way you say it. Knowledge is presentation.”

Exactly. Melrose smiled.

Angus Murphy’s voice drew him back from the Jack and Hammer, saying, “Ya do seem t’ know y’r grasses, ah’ll say that. Come wi’ me.”

Melrose followed him to a bed of largish, flat-headed white perennials. “Achillea, this lot is. Hardy flower.” He looked even more narrowly at Melrose. “But you must know that, ah expect.”

He could not believe his luck! He was first out of the gate on this one. He knew only this species because he liked its common name. “This white one has always interested me: ptarmica, sneezewort, I believe it’s called.”

“That’s it, aye. Surprised you’d know that one-”

(So was Melrose.)

“-not got much to recommend it.”

“Now I’m rather partial to the A. millefolium Heidi (only because it was described as ‘fading beautifully’), but I don’t seem to see any in your garden…”