To Ben
Contents
1 William G.
2 Neaera H.
3 William G.
4 Neaera H.
5 William G.
6 Neaera H.
7 William G.
8 Neaera H.
9 William G.
10 Neaera H.
11 William G.
12 Neaera H.
13 William G.
14 Neaera H.
15 William G.
16 Neaera H.
17 William G.
18 Neaera H.
19 William G.
20 Neaera H.
21 William G.
22 Neaera H.
23 William G.
24 Neaera H.
25 William G.
26 Neaera H.
27 William G.
28 Neaera H.
29 William G.
30 Neaera H.
31 William G.
32 Neaera H.
33 William G.
34 Neaera H.
35 William G.
36 Neaera H.
37 William G.
38 Neaera H.
39 William G.
40 Neaera H.
41 William G.
42 Neaera H.
43 William G.
44 Neaera H.
45 William G.
46 Neaera H.
47 William G.
48 Neaera H.
49 William G.
50 Neaera H.
51 William G.
52 Neaera H.
53 William G.
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
1
William G.
I don’t want to go to the Zoo any more.
The other night I dreamt of an octopus. He was dark green, almost black, dark tentacles undulating in brown water. Not sure what colour an octopus is really. Found colour photos in two of the books at the shop. One octopus was brown and white, the other was grey, pinky, brown. They change colour it seems. Their eyes are dreadful to look at. I shouldn’t like to be looked at by an octopus no matter how small and harmless it might be. To be stared at by those eyes would be altogether too much for me, would leave me nothing whatever to be. There was a black-and-white photo of octopuses hung up to dry on a pole at Thasos on the Aegean Sea, black against the sky, black bags hanging, black tentacles drooping and drying, behind them the brightness over the sea. They’re related to the chambered nautilus which I’d always thought of only as a shell with nothing in it. But there it was in the book full of tentacles and swimming inscrutably.
Then I wanted to see an octopus. On Friday, my half-day at the shop, I went to the Zoo. Grey day, raining a little. Went in by the North Gate past the owls. Bubo this and Bubo that, each one sitting on its bar with wet feathers and implacable eyes. Over the bridge past the Aviary towering high against the sky, a huge pointy steel-mesh thing of gables and angles full of strange cries and dark flappings. There were little shrill children eating things. There was steam coming up in the rain from three square plates in the paving at the end of the bridge. Two girls and a boy bathed their bare legs in it. The tunnel on the other side of the bridge was echoing with children. Copies of cave-paintings on the walls of the tunnel. They didn’t belong there, looked heavy-handed, false. One wanted to see SPURS, ARSENAL.
Very dark in the Aquarium. Green windows, things swimming. People black against the windows murmuring, explaining to children, holding them up, putting them down, urging them on, calling them back. Echoing footsteps of children running in the dark. Very shabby in the Aquarium, very small. Too many little green windows in the dark. Crabs, lobsters, two thornback rays, a little poor civil-servant-looking leopard shark. Tropical fish, eels, toads, frogs and newts. There was no octopus.
Sea turtles. Two or three hundred pounds the big ones must have weighed. Looping and swinging, flying in golden-green silty water in a grotty little tank no bigger than my room. Soaring, dipping and curving with flippers like wings in a glass box of second-hand ocean. Their eyes said nothing, the thousands of miles of ocean couldn’t be said.
I thought: when I was a child I used to like the Zoo. The rain had stopped. I went to the Reptile House. No. Didn’t want to see thė snakes on hot sand under bright lights behind glass. Left the Reptile House, approached the apes. The gorilla lay on his stomach in his cell, his chin resting on his folded arms. No. I couldn’t think which was worse: if he could remember or if he couldn’t.
I went out of the Zoo to the 74 bus stop at the North Gate. There was a young woman with a little boy and girl. Maybe the boy was eight or nine. He had a little black rubber gorilla on a bit of elastic tied to a string and he danced the little black gorilla up and down in a little puddle, spat spat spat, not splashing. It was only a bit of wet on the pavement.
‘Stop that,’ said his mother. ‘I told you to stop that.’
2
Neaera H.
I fancied a china castle for the aquarium but they had none at the shop, so I contented myself with a smart plastic shipwreck. Snugg & Sharpe are expecting a new Gillian Vole story from me but I have not got another furry-animal picnic or birthday party in me. I am tired of meek and cuddly creatures, my next book will be about a predator. I’ve posted my cheque for 31p to Gerrard & Haig in Surrey for a Great Water-beetle, Dysticus marginalis, and I should have it by tomorrow. I’ve asked for a male.
On my way home wheeling the tank and all the other aquarium gear in the push-chair I stopped at the radio and TV shop because there was an oyster-catcher on all the TV screens in the window, a BBC nature film it must have been. It was like encountering someone from childhood now famous. I used to see oyster-catchers sometimes on the mussel beds near Breydon Bridge when the tide was out. They were nothing like the gulls and terns, their black-and-white had a special air, they went a little beyond being birds. They walked with their heads down, looking as if they had hands clasped behind their backs like little European philosophers in yachting gear. But it was a less rhythmical walk than a philosopher’s because the oyster-catchers were busy making a living with the mussels. In childhood at Breydon Water the day was wide and quiet, there was time enough to think of everything with no hurry whatever, to look at everything many times over.
The oyster-catcher on the TV screens was gone, there was a shot of mudflats and sea. The oyster-catcher had been very elegant in colour: creamy white, velvety black, orange bill and eye-rings, pink legs. On the black-and-white screens it had been more existential, a working bird alone in the world. Here I am, I thought, forty-three years old, waiting for a water-beetle. My married friends wear Laura Ashley dresses and in their houses are grainy photographs of them barefoot on Continental beaches with their naked children. I live alone, wear odds and ends, I have resisted vegetarianism and I don’t keep cats.
I passed the place where they’re tearing up the street and the three workmen in the hole said ‘Good morning’ for the first time. Before this we’ve nodded.
As I was going into my flat Webster de Vere, the unemployed actor next door, was coming out of his. ‘Fascinating hobby,’ he said when he saw the tank. ‘I’ve been keeping fish for years. Black Mollies, you know. Nothing flash, just neat little black fish. What will you have in your aquarium?’
‘A water-beetle,’ I said.
‘A water-beetle,’ he said. ‘Fascinating pet. If you ever need any snails do let me know, I’ve masses of them. Keep the tank clean, you know.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s all new to me, I must see how it goes.’
He went down the hall swinging his cane. As far as I know he’s been out of work the whole five or six years he’s been my neighbour. He keeps so fit that it’s hard to tell how old he is but by the brightness o
f his eye I’d say he’s at least fifty-five. Most of the voices I hear through the wall belong to young men of the antique-shop type but I think he lives off old ladies. I’ve no reason to think it except his looks. His eyes look as if he’s pawned his real ones and is wearing paste.
After I’d set up the aquarium I looked in my book of Bewick engravings for an oyster-catcher but couldn’t find one. Bewick has drawn the dotterel, the spotted redshank, the godwit and the little stint but there’s no oyster-catcher in my book. He would have drawn it very well, it’s his sort of bird. The best bird drawings I’ve done were for Delia Swallow’s Housewarming, one of my early books. The story was rubbish but the swallow was well observed, she was a distinct Laura Ashley type.
3
William G.
It must have been soft plastic, that gorilla the little boy had. I don’t think they make those things out of rubber any more.
There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: ‘The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup …’ I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that’s a lot of soup walking about.
How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they’re swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn’t think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can’t believe they’d swim 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. Sea turtles can’t shut themselves up in their shells as land turtles do. Their shells are like tight bone vests and their flippers are always sticking out. Nothing they can do if a shark comes along. Pray. Ridiculous to think of a turtle praying with all those teeth coming up from below.
Mr Meager, manager of the shop and the source of Meager soup, stood in front of me for a while. When I noticed him he asked me if I’d got something on my mind. Green turtles, I said. Was that something we’d subscribed, he wanted to know. No, I said, it was the source of turtle soup. He went away with a hard smile.
It’s hard to believe they do it by observing the angle of the sun like a yachtsman with a sextant. Carr doubts it and he’s about the biggest turtle authority there is. But that’s what penguins do on overland journeys. They’re big navigators too. I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn’t seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind. And when they can’t see the sun, what then? Their vision isn’t good enough for star sights. Do they go by smell, taste, faith?
In the evening I went downstairs for a cup of tea with Mrs Inchcliff, my landlady. She wasn’t in the kitchen, I found her in the lumber-room. Her boyfriend Charlie when he lived here used to spend a lot of time in that room. There’s a workbench there and she was sitting on it under a green-shaded light with her feet on a saw-horse. She’s sixty years old, still a good-looking woman, must have been beautiful when she was younger. Goes about in jeans and shirts and sandals mostly, wears her hair long. From the back she looks like a girl except that her hair is grey.
‘With just a little more capital Charlie and I could have made a go of the antique shop,’ she said. ‘If we could have hung on for another year we’d have been all right. Charlie loved it.’
Charlie had indeed been very good at finding things, stripping off paint and varnish, rebuilding and restoring. He was twenty-five when they broke up a couple of years ago. He went off with a woman of fifty who had a stall on the Portobello Road.
When he and Mrs Inchcliff had been in business a good many of their antiques had cost them nothing at all. They used to go out scavenging in her old estate-car almost every day. They’d had a regular route of rubbish tips and she still kept her hand in. When a building was due to be condemned she usually beat everyone else to the knocker on the front door and she seemed to find the most profitable skips on both sides of the river. She was always shifting odd doors and dressers and various scraps of timber and ironmongery, more out of habit than anything else though I daresay she made a few pounds a week selling things to dealers.
‘If you ever want to do any woodworking,’ she said, ‘shelves or anything, you can use the tools and everything here whenever you like.’ She’s said that to me several times.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing I need to make right now.’ When I had a house I used to make things. When I had a family. When the girls sat on my lap and I read to them.
I sat down on a chest. There was a sack trolley leaning in the corner, left over from the antique-shop days. I saw myself walking down a dark street in the middle of the night wheeling a turtle on the sack trolley. Just a flash and it was gone. There was a pebble in the pocket of my cardigan, left there from the last time I stopped smoking. From the beach at Antibes. Look, Dad, here’s a good one. It was cool and smooth between my fingers.
‘I wonder what Charlie’s doing now,’ said Mrs Inchcliff.
There must be a lot of people in the world being wondered about by people who don’t see them any more.
4
Neaera H.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pick up a box or matches without shaking it. Curious. It takes more time to shake the box than it would to open it straight away but it’s less effort. It’s pleasant to hear a lot of matches rattling in the box, one has a feeling of plenty. No one wants to open a matchbox and find it empty.
I lit a cigarette and looked at the water-beetle parcel. A nice little brown-paper parcel, short and cylindrical with airholes in the top. When I undid the brown paper there was a nice little tin with airholes in the lid. Inside the tin was the beetle on damp moss. It was a female, I could tell by the ridges on the wing covers. No males available, said the invoice taped to the tin. That’s life.
With a pencil I prodded her into the little net I’d bought, then lifted the aquarium cover and put her into the water. She swam right down to the plastic shipwreck and scuttled out of sight inside it.
One of my books quoted a naturalist who’d kept a water-beetle on raw meat for three and a half years. I dropped some raw meat through the feeding hole. The beetle rushed over to it, flung it about a bit, then left it and moored herself to a water plant.
Something will come to me, I thought. Delia Beetle’s Sunken Treasure. No, I used that name for the swallow. Cynthia Beetle, Sally Beetle, Victoria Beetle. Victoria Beetle, Secret Agent. A woman of action. I went out and sat in the square.
There is no statue in our square. When I look at statues I find later that I have usually not paid close attention but I have paid close attention to the statue that is not in our square. I’ve come to think of it as a fountain really. There’s a large stone basin and a little thin bronze girl with her skirt tucked up, paddling in the water. She’s not in the centre of the basin but near the rim. In the centre there’s a little jet of water that shoots up taller than the girl. Sometimes the wind blows drops of water spattering on the girl. When it rains, the water in the basin is spangled with splashes that leap up to meet the rain. The bronze girl gleams in the rain. When the sun shines her shadow moves over the water, over the stone rim, over the paving round the fountain. The bronze girl is always at the centre of the circle of
her revolving shadow that marks the time.
In Sloane Square there really is a fountain. With two basins and a proper fountain lady in the upper basin pouring water from a shell, a kneeling bronze physical-education sort of lady, naked but unapproachable. I think of her name as being Daphne. Sometimes an empty Coca-Cola tin, bright and shining, circles her basin like part of a water clock. But that bronze lady and her fountain are cold and heavy compared to the statue and the fountain that are not in our square. There would be beach pebbles in the basin of the bronze-girl fountain.