Playing with Water (20 page)

Many months later and far away a small incident was poignant with recollections for me. I was in London, intending among other things to have an ear seen to – presumably the constant diving had affected some remote piece of tubing. Thanks partly to a family connection I was to be seen by a private ENT consultant. One morning I found myself in a typical consultant’s waiting-room.

From the room itself there was no way of telling whether waiting patients were to pass through a dark red mahoganyesque door for new contact lenses, a hair transplant, dental work or a gynaecological examination. They might from the look of the place expect to be told they owed three thousand pounds or that with a lucky remission they might just have six months to put their affairs in order. The air smelt of Cavendish Square. Deep carpet on the floor, a standard lamp with a gold shade in one corner, leather armchairs, stacks of
Vogue, Punch, Country Life, The Lady, Autocar
on low tables. Heavy moth-coloured curtains framed a view of what were basically eighteenth-century rooftops misshapen with grimy aerials, asphalted water tanks and corroded heat exchangers. On the marble mantelpiece stood a marble clock of enormous weight and absurdly slow tick: ‘Festina lente’ said the apt admonishment in copperplate script near the top.

But the ordinary gloom and tension which always pervades such fake-clublands was pricked into real poignancy by a large aquarium which stood in the corner opposite the lamp. In it were the usual sorts of small fish inertly doing nothing among the little thermometers, the thin plastic tubes emitting sprays of bubbles, the whimsies embedded in the gravel at the bottom. The purposeful,
unreadable courses the fish would have been swimming in their natural habitat were impossible. Suddenly from behind a pirate’s chest purporting to spill a cascade of jewels onto the sea bed swam an old friend: a tiny specimen of the Queen Trigger such as I had often hunted for my supper. Each species of fish has its characteristic movements and attitudes in the water. Listless and foully lost as this poor creature was it was not so denatured as to have unlearned how to face a threat from in front, in this case my affectionate fingertips on the glass at its nose. It hung there in that familiar head-on posture, dorsal and ventral fins appearing to move in contrary motion, then half-turning to back up and re-face the threat from a little further away. That was the
moment juste
for the spear, as it briefly presented a side view. Mentally I fired and heard the
pok!
of tough hide being pierced, heard alarmed drumming as I headed up through thirty feet of water (for Queen Triggers prefer a bit of depth), my prey spitted. Even as I rose to the sunlit surface I had swept the fish back along the steel rod onto the catch-line trailing below me, starting the process of re-loading before my head broke through into bright air.

‘Pretty, aren’t they?’ I had been joined by the receptionist who had shown me into the waiting-room. ‘Are you a fish fancier?’

I made some non-committal remark and asked whether they had had the Queen Trigger for long.

‘About a week. Handsome little devil, isn’t he? We’ve had several like him already. If you look very carefully you can see he isn’t black at all but midnight blue. And if you look
really
close you’ll notice his scales are sort of fake: they’re just a diamond pattern on his skin. I don’t know why, that kind never seem to last very long. Only a month or two usually.’

I wondered whether to tell her about its high first dorsal spine which locked vertically up to wedge the fish defensively into cracks and which could only be released by pressing down the lower second spine, the trigger. I didn’t tell her the fish were very tasty if wrapped in a banana leaf and roast over an open fire. Instead I wondered whether this particular specimen had hatched into life as fry in the offshore swell of Tiwarik, later to be stunned by Arman’s
cyanide and retrieved in his net, from that moment destined to stare for the rest of its life not through thirty feet of vivid tropical sea but through a few inches of reconstituted seawater warmed by electric bulbs at a wall of glass until saprophages grew in its gills and killed it.

The receptionist ushered me away and into the presence of the doctor who within minutes told me that I had mould growing in my own left gill and wrote me up for some anti-mould drops. That infection cleared, but the trouble persists. I have never been back, though, to see if the little Queen Trigger has survived. From time to time I think of it in its pitiless exile surrounded by fake gems and living in the poop of a bogus galleon eighty feet above the streets of London.

From a dream that the sea was dead, poisoned and lifeless I awoke, expecting to smell the stench of carrion from the strand below, the hermit crabs tearing at heaps of putrefaction. Instead the lively ocean rested in its bed, washed by moon and stars, its breathing body fanned by light pulses of air from across the strait. I went and sat outside, watching the cordillera opposite skip from one side of the sky to the other like a graph. Immediately I was caught up in the universe. Off-guard with the remains of sleep I was like some careless factory-worker whose clothing is snagged by the machinery he leans over, wrenched bodily into the mechanism and swallowed up. I became as if melted into the sea. My heart beat in time with the mountains. Stars poured down into my head. Without ears, without tongue I heard myself say the words I must always have used, will always use, whose meaning is
Why, you knew all along
and
It is always here, always now
– banalities beyond translation, beyond speech. In that silence alone the universe can be heard talking in pebbles and weed, in glittering plankton and predator’s brain, in the ineffable sound made by the hills as they fold and pleat themselves.
How can it ever be forgotten?
But I do forget it. I am incredulous. How can I pretend none of this is so and allow myself daily to become dragged down by foolishness?

If one were to weep for this idiocy the tears which glistened in the starlight would at least be proper tears of regret and not of pity. To forget the only thing there is seems like a crime for which there could be no redemption. The consequence would properly be that it all became dead things: the sea turned to mere water, the mountains to lumps of geology, the wind and rain became more or less inconvenient. But miraculously the cordillera across the strait is still hefting its crags and shrugging its forests. By the standards of the world’s great mountain ranges it is nothing, this cordillera, a comparative South Downs. But tonight it is the loftiest imaginable perhaps because the sea lying at its feet gives no indication of scale as would a valley floor with houses and the thread of roads.

At once, sadly, angrily, comes into my head my father, who loved mountains. I give a start of surprise at finding him there, but the more I consider it the less surprised I become. It is not just the mountains; it is not even because of my memories of war over landscapes and uneasy oppositions of all kinds. It seems quite specifically because of the dream of poison from which I have just woken, but I cannot quite grasp why.

My father entered my life when I was four. Quite suddenly, this demobbed stranger came into the house claiming to be my mother’s husband. What intelligent child could believe a tale like that? Husbands and fathers were supposed to be an indispensable part of family life yet my mother and sister and I had seemingly got along very nicely without one. Why then the sudden need? Four years later still I was off among the South Downs for months at a time, months which themselves stretched on for another ten or eleven years. In the holidays my father and I scarcely met. He was overworked and testy, the rushed professional who seemed to spend less and less time in the house. In such ways it is quite possible for someone to grow up never knowing his own father. As with the God one heard about at school, the obligations were always there to love and respect and fear him but the outline was dim and hazy, the features blurred. From the remoteness on the other side there came no answer excepting only that sometimes
inexplicable rages played like lightning about one’s head.

Why then do I any longer think of him? How could this vanished stranger play any part in my present life, still less have anything to do with my being here on this island? I do not quite know. I do know he is not irrelevant, though, and that the reason is slowly becoming clearer. Therefore I will stare at the mountains across the strait and force myself to consider once more this business of poison. It is
cyanide
; and it takes me straight back to that second school.

The headmaster met me just before lunch in the corridor outside the dining hall. I stood to attention, held my hands out and turned them over for inspection. Even I could see the wrists were grey above the tide-line but he didn’t so much as glance at them.

‘Your father’s coming this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be interested.’ He wasn’t smiling. A school myth was that when he was wearing green, particularly a green tweed suit, he was in a mood for blood. He was at this moment in a brownish sports jacket with leather buttons but his tie was green and hairy. I didn’t dare ask him why my father was coming unexpectedly. Obviously my behaviour and schoolwork had sunk below the point where the ordinary measures of fortnightly reports and informal conversations by the tea-tent on Parents’ Day were any longer adequate. He had been called to take me away. No, worse: there was going to be a Parent’s Caning.

Another myth at this school, more dread than that of the Second Cellars, so awesome nobody even much liked talking about it, was of an event called a Parent’s Caning. This allegedly took place once every twenty years or so when a boy had done something so truly awful that no ordinary punishment could meet the case. It was the prep-school equivalent of being flogged round the Fleet. So brutal was it the boy’s father had to be called in to witness it along with the school doctor who checked the victim’s pulse after each stroke. The entire thing was a pack of lies, of course, mere schoolboy hysteria, but it didn’t stop us believing in it
and now in the corridor outside the dining hall I knew I was to be the victim. I was so frightened I didn’t even bother to wonder what I had done to deserve it. And my father was a doctor, too! That clinched it.

When at the end of lunch the headmaster stood up to make an announcement I was ready to faint, in such a state I would have interpreted anything he might have said as proof of my impending execution. The news that the whole school could have a half-holiday and spend it in the swimming baths would have been utterly plausible. What more natural than that a special site was necessary for a Parent’s Caning, somewhere unusual to impress the gravity of the occasion on everyone present? Actually the man merely said that we should keep clear of the top of the field beyond the junior cricket pitch and walked out. Electricity shot through me. What did that bit of waste space contain but the old oak? Of course. The Hanging Oak, as it was known for its stout horizontal limb with a scar around its bark from the days when the Hall was newly built and it had regularly been used as a gibbet for insubordinate coachmen, cocky servants, mutinous lackeys. The Hanging Oak! The perfect spot for a Parent’s Caning.

It was a Saturday and so we had the afternoon off in any case. At two o’clock a few informal games of cricket convened in a leisurely manner here and there around the playing fields. Some boys were expecting their parents to arrive and pay them a visit. So was I, now, but how different was to be my father’s role! Many of us stood about, not actually near the forbidden tree but for that matter not very far from it. Speculation ran high about what was going to happen. Somebody suggested they were going to cut the Hanging Oak down and that there would be danger to bystanders from the displaced ghosts of those who had dangled from its limb; we had been reading M. R. James under the bedclothes by torchlight. I kept quiet, not daring to tell them the truth because I knew that once I had said it everybody would recognise it as the only plausible explanation.

At two-thirty a familiar car emerged from the rhododendrons at the far end of the drive and crunched to a stop in
front of the school. My father emerged carrying a clinical-looking bottle. Sal volatile, of course, to restore my vital functions. I didn’t dare run to meet him. Instead the headmaster, who was already chatting to a group of parents, detached himself from them and shook my father’s hand with, I thought, a smile significantly tinged with graveness and sympathy. Together they began walking up the grounds towards the junior cricket pitch and the tree.

‘Do you have a stick?’ I heard my father ask.

‘There’ll be one there,’ replied the headmaster.

Since I could no longer postpone the inevitable I went to meet them, unable to feel my legs walking beneath me.

‘Hullo!’ my father greeted me with tasteless cordiality. ‘This is unexpected, isn’t it? How about this for a pretty bottle?’

The bottle he carried was indeed striking, ribbed and blue, bluer even than those milk of magnesia bottles, round and with a ground glass stopper. On the label was a red skull and crossbones. I nodded miserably.

‘Cyanide,’ he said.

‘
Cyanide?
’

‘That’s right. Awfully dangerous stuff.’

‘It’s extremely good of your father to have come,’ the headmaster said with the hypocritical expansive smile we all knew headmasters reserved for boys whose parents were nearby. ‘It was poor old Pollock last night that finally did it.’

Pollock was the First XI wicket keeper who had been stung by a wasp the day before and was all swollen up in the san, instead of playing against a school in Kent which was full of wets but which had really good sausage rolls for match teas.

‘So,’ the headmaster went on, ‘I got old Bisley to do some sleuthing and when he’d tracked it down I thought immediately of your father, being a doctor and so forth, and he very kindly nipped over to the hospital pharmacy.’