Submergence (4 page)

He went directly to dinner. It was some special occasion. The guests were asked to serve themselves bisque in the hotel kitchen. He went in there. The floor was tiled with white and black diamonds. The high windows were steamed up. It was possible to sense but not to see the snow falling thickly outside. Dozens of copper-bottomed pots hung above the gas stoves. The chef in white uniform unhurriedly chopped and diced.

There were eight other guests in the dining room. Their chatter and forms were vaguely realised to him in the way the chef had been. It was his tendency to stand himself down in every safe place, to blot out what was peripheral, and recover some sense of his own self. In addition to the bisque were dishes of pheasant, goose, tripe, salted bass, vegetables, puddings, fondants, fruit and cheeses. The tables were set with white linen, candles and gold cutlery. There were photographs of famous guests hung on the applewood panelling. Among them were Mozaffar ad-Din Shah of Persia tossing coins to the local children and Henrik Ibsen eating a goose in the Christmas of 1899. Mark Twain was photographed in the same dining room a decade later. There was the mezzo-soprano Giulietta Simionato, mouth open, chest bursting, and a colour photo of President François Mitterand in his suite in the hotel, looking out into the night at the sea bounding France.

He was restless. There was a flaw in him which urged him to catalogue rather than enjoy. He picked up a fork. See it for what it is. It is gold-plated, just that.

*

His room was on the third floor, facing up the hill to the parkland and the wood. When he opened the window there was the shriek of gulls. He considered asking for a larger room. Perhaps in the morning. Hotel rooms in Europe were always smaller than you hoped. You were initially disappointed, though so what, that was life, the longer you spent in the room, the more accommodating it became. What you did not like distinguished it. He had a sense that perhaps it was that tolerance of the distinctive which separated Europe from America. The United States talked about individuality, but delivered the unvaried and replicated. In his experience, American hotels were prefabricated, with piped music, airless corridors, tinted windows that would not open, circulated air that could not be shut off, a small plastic bathtub, chlorinated water – tepid, never hot – a plastic cup in a plastic wrapper. Who would drink that? Whereas in Africa there was always a bottle of water and a glass at the bedside, and there was often a hallway opening onto a garden, and there were swimming pools in the better hotels where you could swim to the moon at night, stopped only by the electric fence at the edge of the compound, and so you floated in the deep end above the mess of lights of an African city in the valley below – disordered clumps, wrongly beautiful, like a scan of a damaged brain.

Besides, there was nothing wrong with the room he had been given. It had two desks, a balcony, a fireplace, an expensive bed, a nicely arranged series of engravings of the regiment of Aquitaine. The bathroom had windows, an iron bath with lion feet and a shower whose ingenious chrome fittings had no visible pipes.

After unpacking, he went down to the bar. He ordered a large whisky. The barman – Marcel, he found out – was the chef’s cousin. He was fresh-faced, but with the telltale cauliflower ears of a rugby player. He radiated a professionalism that invited candour. That made James cautious.

‘You play rugby.’

‘I used to.’

‘What made you stop?’

‘Oh, you know, I broke my neck.’

They talked for a while, about the state of France, whiskies, Kenyan rugby, then James excused himself and sat at an old table in front of a large brick fireplace. Drilled into the wall above the hearth was a large flat-screen television. It was turned off. He stared at it.

‘Just for Bastille Day and sports, my friend,’ said Marcel, bringing over another whisky.

He read the newspapers on his electronic tablet. He travelled lightly, precisely. He had a steel IWC watch, one bag, no printed books, and yet dozens of volumes on the tablet: it was 2011, and the works he kept close were a few novels, poetry collections and journals recommended to him, all of them fitting onto a device lighter than a magazine. It surprised him how quickly he had been won over to electronic ink. Words were shapes. You entered them, they entered you. It was true the device ended the relationship between book and reader, but that was no matter in return for having a library to hand, and the ability to hide codes within it.

When he lay in bed later that night his tablet was bright in the otherwise unlit room. The snow fell thickly outside. Oblivious to the guests, whiteness seized the building in the darkness. There were spectres. The gulls were faintly heard through the curtainfolds. He highlighted with a sweep of his finger some 700-year-old lines of William Langland’s
Piers Plowman
and stored them with another sweep in a folder on the device:

And so I went travelling far and wide, walking alone through a wild, uncultivated region, following the edges of a wood. The jubilant songbirds caused me to linger, and I lay back for a little while in a clearing, under a lime tree, listening to the delicious carolling of these birds. The cheerful sounds that came from their throats worked on me, till I drifted off to sleep there.

A Saturday in July in London. All the windows in her flat were thrown open. She forced herself to watch the evening news. Even at that hour there were sunbathers in the garden in the square. She took a cold shower then sat at her desk by the window with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. It was a week before her voyage to the Greenland Sea. She picked up a piece of paper that had been left in her pigeonhole at the university by her unbalanced Polish colleague, Tomaszewski.

‘Thought by national poet Poland Czeslaw Milosz when Berlin Wall fall,’ Tomaszewski had scrawled in a blue biro.

Then the quote, in block letters:

What will happen next? The failure of Marx’s vision has created the need for another vision, not for a rejection of all visions. What remains today is the idea of responsibility (when the nineteenth-century idea of progress has died out), which works against the loneliness and indifference of an individual living in the belly of a whale.

Tomaszewski had underlined the word whale.

He recounted how they had walked hand in hand in the snow and how Danny had turned to him and explained that there were vast numbers of salp and jellies in the oceans whose vertical migrations were equivalent in scale to the birds lifting up from the dunes into space.

‘On a planetary scale, birds crawl,’ she said.

Utrinque Paratus
. Ready for everything. That was the motto of the
Parachute Regiment. What was his orientation in space? He had leapt from planes as a paratrooper. He plunged. The air was thin. The land came up quickly. He had never found that inner space which intensified forms.

She was a mathematician and an oceanographer. She had been educated at St Paul’s Girls School in London and St Andrew’s University in Scotland. There had followed a stint at CalTech in Pasadena, a doctorate and lectureship at ETH, and the professorship at Imperial.

Her earliest work at ETH had been on a project to track the diving patterns of Cuvier’s beaked whales in the Ligurian Sea. That had been too zoological, too macroscopic. It was the deep itself which interested her. At first, she thought she would work on modelling the conveyors which so massively circulate water between the oceans. That had proved too mechanical. Her interests became biomathematical – concentrated on the estimation of microbial life in the deepest layer, the Hadal deep.

She was a Londoner. In London, she could lead different lives on the same day. She was a star in the maths department, rich and worldly. With her parents and siblings she led a jet-setting life. Her flat was not far from the university, also in South Kensington. She wore a diving watch, a man’s watch, gold, with a black dial. She liked to think it connected her with the first French Navy aquanauts. Being a woman hadn’t helped her career. Glamour might have done. When she went to a cocktail party, she went to be noticed. She might wear a dress open at the back, diamond earrings, an old pair of Italian flat heels, and her purse would carry an African motif.

For a time, the abyss could be said to have tormented her. The contrast with what was at the surface and what was below perhaps heightened her natural desire for reversals. She careened between work and
self-destruction. At one event at the Royal Geographical Society she noticed a man she had once met in Zurich. They left together. There were many such encounters. She went clubbing alone. It was either maths or she was on her back. When she was made a professor she withdrew, or matured. She stopped taking stimulants. She put bulkheads in her life. She divided her work-friends from her friend-friends. Her lovers were in yet another compartment. When she went to see her nieces and nephews in Holland Park on Sundays anyone amusing might be invited to join, even the broker in bed, as long as he agreed to tea and buns and a trawl of arcades afterwards. But when it was grown-ups only everything was sealed.

Thumbs was the only work-friend to be invited into her family. Her brothers liked him, and not just because he provided an excuse for video gaming. He laughed in a way that drew people in. He was spastic, unable to contain his insecurities. His office was decorated with busty pin-ups on their knees, wet, raven-haired. To her knowledge, he had never had a girlfriend. When she descended into blue obscenities he was left blushing and fidgeting. More than her successful brothers did, Thumbs brought out the sister in her. He was depressive, unwashed, the kind of grown man who turned around Dungeons and Dragons dice in his pocket. He could not abide exercise, except for his bike ride to work, long hair plastered under his helmet, and his summer hikes at her mountain cabin in Liguria, from where he returned leaner, and less pasty. She took meals and wine around to his flat. He provided beer, marijuana and chocolate. She brought in the research money, she had that savvy, but they shared authorship on published papers. They had a corresponding suppleness of mind. They worked together on whiteboards, alternating marker pens. They held similar views on the consilience of knowledge: it was not too grand to say that they felt they were close to a breakthrough that would forever change the understanding of the dimensions of life on earth.

*

Routine became important to her. She played in a squash ladder at the university. She swam. She had lunch in the canteen. On Thursdays she often went to the cinema with her colleagues, with dinner at the same restaurant off the Old Brompton Road beforehand. She tried to meet up with her girlfriends every week. They cooked together. There was a book club. They went to galleries and to the ballet. She answered their questions about her work, but never burdened her response with applied complex analysis or non-linear dynamics.