Submergence (3 page)

The sand thereabout was coarse sugar and the footsteps she made down to the sea were demerara. The water’s edge was turbid and swirling with gravel and shells and seaweed. There must have been a storm. She felt the need to touch the Atlantic again. She pulled off her gloves, got down, and set her hands in it until they lost feeling. The depths of the oceans filled her working mind, but for that moment she was determined just to look at the play of wind on it and the gulls wheeling above it. She had come to see the sea, not the ocean.

A log fire blazed in the reception. An ancient computer with an apricot badge sat unused behind the desk like a piece of treasure, a reminder of when computing machines were generously built and slow-witted and not taken for granted, and a statement of how the establishment endured through technological revolutions. A Christmas tree filled the hall beyond, decorated in the local style with dried flowers, glinting ornaments, and golden candles. She sipped clear hot tea while they conducted the formalities. She signed her name in a ledger with a fountain pen and was given a room key made of brass. A porter led her through the hall and smoking lounge to an old lift with the English word UP illuminated above the cage door. She asked to take the stairs. Her suite was at the back of the hotel on the second floor, as she had
requested. There was a bedroom and a living room with a large silk Turcoman rug. It was a part of the hotel dating back to the days of the manor, the part where the ceiling beams had been soaked in milk for a year to harden them. The views were of the lawns, the pines, and the beach beyond. At night it was possible to see the lighthouse. There was a handwritten note on her bed stating that it was the third Sunday in Advent and by hotel tradition guests were invited to serve themselves lobster bisque and other foods in the hotel kitchen at no additional charge. The bisque was to be served from a blue and white Meissen bowl and the tables in the dining room set with gold cutlery. She put the note on her side table and undressed.

The bath was antique and deep. The oils provided were expensive and aromatic. Half-submerged in the scalding waters she slipped in and out of sleep. She had planned to call her mother, but lightheadedness overcame her. She fell asleep on the bed in her bathrobe and woke to the dark and the steady burning fire. She turned on a light, attended her hair, and pulled on a dress. Before she could zip it up, she changed her mind. She took off the dress, put on pyjama trousers, a T-shirt and a cashmere sweater. She called room service and ordered the bisque, a potato salad and a bottle of white wine. Her research assistant and friend, Tom Maxwell, or Thumbs, had copied several films for her. She put the disc in the player and watched
Ghostbusters
. Thumbs said she would like the Sumerian connection. When the dinner came she poured a glass of the wine and turned off the film and went and smoked a cigarette on the balcony. It had begun to snow.

There had been so many waiting places in his travelling life. His childhood had been different. It had been settled. He had grown up in northern England, where a river flowed into the North Sea. When the
tide was at its lowest it was possible to wade across the river. There was a competition. You had to hold your nerve: for a few steps you were fully underwater.

His family lived in a Regency house at the edge of the common. From his bedroom, he could descry a black mill whose sails turned only on the windiest days. They called it the satanic mill. The churchyards in the town were filled with seagulls and the air was briny when the wind blew from Denmark. If you climbed the minster in wintertime there was a view of the ice on the marshes and the North Sea raging beyond.

Horses were true for him. To ride them was not to feel confinement in any way except in the facing forwards. He had ridden horses in the school holidays across the common to the sea and along the shore. He had joined the army because of horses, but had ended up in the Parachute Regiment, not the Hussars. Still no matter how hard he tried, the memory of the touch and smell of horses eluded him. The possibility of getting up on a horse’s back in the stinking Somali dark and filling the room was more fabulous to him than if one of the golden angels had appeared and he were able to touch its wings and raiment.

He was not suited to domesticity, to a narrow French apartment, a daybed to catch the afternoon sun, expensive ashtrays and tables piled with glossy magazines. He lived in a fine house in the Muthaiga district of Nairobi, but the garden was more his home. There were steps leading down to a swimming pool and a terrace with a long table where sunbirds rested and rose again to feed off the bells of hanging flowers above. The lawn sloped to a ravine. He had seeded the top part with wild grass so that it was loud with cicadas at night. The bottom part gave out into euphorbia and large spiderwebs and bare earth. It was shadowy. He hardly went down there. There was an electric fence that now and again sparked and on the other side was a stream along which the thugs of Nairobi waded at night with their fence-cutters, iron bars
and guns. Coils of smoke rose from the forest on the other side of the stream during the day. There was the thrum of traffic on the Thika Road. The fumes of the numberless minibuses carrying Nairobians to and from work somehow clarified the flowers and gave them the scent of vulnerability: here was a garden that might be swept away in a day.

In the rainy season he drove home late from Upper Hill past the last of the drenched commuters who were heading on foot out across the rubbish fields at the back of the central business district. He steered around the yellow spikes laid on the road at the police checkpoints. The police held umbrellas and cheap torches. The rain cascaded down, the torch shone in his face, and it was not possible to think that the policemen would drop their umbrellas to lift up their machine guns, and what of the torches?

The rain was another kind of curtain separating the rich from the poor. No one moved in the slums of Nairobi during those intensely wet and cold nights. The mud and the refuse were swept in under the tin doors. The streams surged. The thugs were up to their necks in it. When he got home he found that his housekeeper had stayed late. He always ate alone and drank by the fire and worked at a laptop on a desk by the window, or lay on a sofa and listened to music.

He liked to take a morning run after a storm down long avenues lined with jacaranda trees. He went past the Chilean residence, the Arab League, the Dutch residence, and continued on around the Muthaiga Golf Club. The greens were flooded, his trainers soaked, legs spattered, a cross-country run, hare and hounds, except there were no hounds. It was only by chance, on returning to his house after one such run, that he noticed the thugs had cut a hole in his hedge in the night. There were rags on the electric fence where they had held the wire down with sticks. For a few nights he locked the veranda. The guards closed the hole with branches and shone their torches on it. It felt like a portal.

Another morning he stepped out and found a hyena dead in a ditch by the front gate. A car had not hit it. There were no marks on it. Only in Somalia, imprisoned, did he understand that the beast’s death mask told of limits and a searching for a way out or a way in. Nairobi had closed in on the hyena like the moving walls in one of those old adventure serials which crush the bit player to death.

The Atlantic is the ocean most crossed and considered by man. It covers a fifth of the globe. The land bounding it is greater than the land bounding the Pacific. Even though the Amazon and the Congo and numerous lesser rivers pour freshwater into it, the Atlantic is saltier than the other oceans. Its average depth is 3926 metres. There are gouges in its otherwise fairly even abyssal plain. The deepest of these is the 8605-metre Puerto Rico Trench. Its most striking feature is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, extending from the Greenland Sea to the Southern Ocean. The telegraph cable laid down by Cyrus Field’s Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1858 did nothing to reduce the amount of water contained in the Atlantic, but led to a narrowing of its time-space, by pulses of sound and then of light. The Atlantic shifted from a Viking vastness to a sea routinely crossed in days by steamer, then in hours by airliner.

The Hotel Atlantic, by contrast, is an ancient manor on the French Atlantic coast that was extended into a hotel by Caesar Ritz, thirteenth son of a Swiss shepherd, hotelier to kings. There is a sister hotel in the Alpes Maritimes, on the first snow-capped mountains driving up from Nice, but the Atlantic is Ritz’s gem. The English spelling, Atlantic, not Atlantique, was in this case meant to simultaneously suggest pedigree and modernity. It was close to what Ritz thought the perfect country hotel should be, and stood in contrast to the belle époque style of his
city hotels. It was a success: there is no need for advertising. With its traditions and quiet and remote location, the preferred booking is for more than three nights.

Even Nabokov foresaw a Jetson future of silent planes and graceful aircycles and a universal system of padded underground roads. Although, being Nabokov, being a lepidopterist, he had a floating sense of perspective. ‘As to the past,’ he wrote, ‘I would not mind retrieving from some corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.’

He was full of his job and of Nairobbery. The morning commute between Muthaiga and Upper Hill had done him in. It was good to be away from it. He had flown business class on Kenya Airways from Nairobi to Paris then taken the morning train to La Roche-sur-Yon. He missed his connection in La Roche and had to wait an hour. It was bitter on the platform, while in the station waiting room it was warm. There was a wood-burning stove. The walls were hung with the heads of tiny deer. The benches were varnished. In one corner was a café with a small curved counter serving coffees, cognac, freshly made soups, stews and crème caramel. A merriment prevailed with the season. It made him sad in a way: life was so much more equable than Africa.

He boarded a country train. Its single headlight shone like the eye of a Cyclops. There was a Mercedes taxi with a sign on its roof to meet him at his destination. It was a new car with black leather seats, still with a new-car smell. An unopened packet of cigarettes sat in a tray by the gearstick. A compact disc with Koranic verses twirled from the mirror. The driver was Algerian. James struck up a conversation in Arabic. The driver turned around and rubbed his stubble and stared: it was as if the passenger had materialised in the back seat. They exited
the station past a kiosk, then off on smaller roads, under beeches, thence into a parkland, past other twisted tree trunks, metal railings, sheep. It was clear. He could see dunes in the distance, the sea, boats on the water, whitecaps. There was something of Biarritz, something of the Isle of Mull, the sky, the sea, and when he stepped inside the Hotel Atlantic, the quality of the tapestries, uniforms, and the attention to detail in the flowers and other arrangements reminded him of the Hotel Bernini in the Piazza Barberini in Rome.