The Biographer's Tale (16 page)

Interesting, I said limply. She stared wrathfully at me. Her face is not beautiful. Her nose is sharp, her eyes too deep under the bristling ledges of her pale brows, her mouth too big for her (smallish) face, and set in what is almost a permanent expression of disapproval. Her eyes are not blue but greenish, flecked with brownish streaks. Her eyelashes are actually quite thick, but so pale that they are only visible in certain lights.

“I do palaeoecology as an adjunct to pollination studies,” she said. “Reciprocities between insects and plants and other pollinators have developed over millions and millions of years. Recently there was a very clever disproof of the idea that rats pollinated the
ie-ie vine
, worked out through the study of bird-specimens collected by nineteenth-century naturalists. There are crops, and wild plants, whose histories we most urgently need to know if we are to preserve them and their habitats. What isn't fertilised dies out. What is inadequately fertilised doesn't grow, doesn't fruit. Too little is known, and whilst we try to find out we lay things waste with crop-spraying, clearance, weedkillers, poisonous plants we have ourselves engineered, imported pollinators, or controlling predators, which in their turn become pests and destroyers. Have you read
Silent Spring
, Mr. Nanson?”

Indeed I had, I said. I had written a paper on literary and popular-cultural images of induced panic and mass fear. I had contrasted seventeenth-century evil spirits with the idea of Napoleon the bogeyman, and fear of the Bomb and heaps of dead birds in a wasteland in our own time.

“Literary and popular-cultural images,” said this fizzing woman, “are neither here nor there. As you say in English. Neither here nor there. Whereas both
here
and
there
and
now
this species is destroying, every day, 6,000 species perhaps, many unknown, some perhaps essential—certainly essential—to the survival of a whole chain of others.”

“You are an eco-warrior,” I said, with disastrous flippancy. I thought I knew her type. Earnest, covered with natural body-hair, intent on organic living, opposed to modern machines and comforts, believers in Gaia and beyond that in a whole-wheat Whole Earth, absolutely no compromise with commerce or experimentation on animals or embryos, makers of sustainable homes with organic earth closets and gimcrack recycling machines, mysticism of minerals, aromatherapies, ley lines, druidic wisdom of the mistletoe, respect for Aztec flesh-ripping with obsidian knives. I am a modern man, if not a postmodern man. I am an urban animal. Cities are a miraculous invention. We have evolved into city-dwellers, with sewage and electric light. It isn't natural to live in moss-huts. It's profoundly
un
natural. The earth never was as these Gaia mythographers believed it had been. It was red in tooth and claw. We have the best teeth and claws.

“There are only thirty-nine in the world,” she said.

Hardly a successful life-form, I thought.

“Thirty-nine
what
?” I asked.

“Bee taxonomists,” she said. “Their average age is sixty plus. Only two are training a new generation of taxonomists. Both are over eighty, and both are in the New World, where the situation's less dire. All are men.”

“Does that matter?” Not only an ecologist, a feminist. Feminism was one of the secondary reasons why I had given
up post-structuralist theory. There is an (almost) irresistible urge to distort or misrepresent or ignore or overemphasise facts and items of information, in feminist theory. It is also not really possible to say so.

“No,” she said. “It's just interesting. What matters is the lack of knowledge. The American alfalfa yield plummeted because they thought they could use honeybees instead of the alkali bees that are its natural pollinator. There is a miracle crop—sesbania, a legume—which could feed Ethiopia and hold back desertification—it enriches the soil—but no one has studied the local pollinators, the bees, no one has studied whether there would be enough, or whether any introduced pollinator could live there, and what effect it would have on indigenous bees and other creatures.”

“Well,” I said pacifically, “it's good that you're around to rectify that.”

“Thirty-nine
,” she said. “It's urgent. You haven't understood.”

“In the steps of Linnaeus,” I said.

“Linnaeus,” she told me, “knew nothing about insect pollination. He invented anthropomorphic fairy tales and thought the bees were blundering about damaging the marriage-chambers, accidentally deflowering the virgins, and robbing the seed-stores. He didn't see—he didn't need to see—the interdependence of things.”

There was a pause.

“If you could get this document photocopied,” she said, “I could look into it, while I'm working here for the next few weeks.”

I said I wouldn't wish to take her away from her important
work to look into a mere literary puzzle. I said I could do my own research.

“I suppose you mean to spend a few months learning Swedish?” she said scornfully. “I do not see where this project will end. Can you read Latin?”

“Sort of,” I said, truthfully.

“I'm not trying to steal your project,” she said. “Only to be normally helpful. If you don't want help, that's a matter of indifference to me.”

I was … I was about to write
ashamed
, but that isn't true. I was embarrassed. She was quite right, on all counts. She was a piece of luck, not a threat. Was I afraid she would notice the threadbare thinness of my project? That didn't really matter, either. She would soon be off to Ethiopia, or wherever. I said I would be very grateful, and would make a photocopy.

“We could do it now, in the Linnean library,” she said. I tagged after her and watched her reproduce my treasure-trove. She folded it, and stuffed it into her capacious handbag. I gave her my address.

“You'll hear from me if I think of anything,” she said. And strode bouncing away down Piccadilly, the burning bush of her hair simmering behind her.

I began my work (two days a week) at Puck's Girdle. I have to record that (apart from my haunted desks at the British Library) it was the first human space I had ever enjoyed sharing. It was, as I said, blue and green, with starry lights in a midnight sky—and delicately spangled little desk-lights on threads of metal, cone-shaped, crescent-shaped, making little
pools and pencil-streams of brilliance. Not much daylight filtered in through the cardboard Maelstrøm, the Paradise jungle and the Alhambra arcades, though some did, on bright days. Have I said it was spring? We lived in our own softly luminous artificial pool, and moved around it calmly like exploratory fishes. I loved the coffee pot, streamlined stainless steel and glass, that produced endless delicious cappuccino. Along the two sides of the space not occupied by the window and the counter, ran shelves, with books—not brochures—encyclopaedias, atlases, guides to the flora and fauna, the cathedrals and railways, the ships and geysers, the art galleries and sculpture gardens, the temples and arboretums of the world. These expensive and lovely books were attached to the wall with fine stainless-steel chains, and lit by their own downlighters. There were silver-legged stools for customers to perch and browse, stools in many greens, from jade to olive, from apple to evergreen. There were even magnifying glasses, on finer chains. Erik said that they had fitted the chains because of theft, it was true, but he thought they were elegant, and invited long sessions of thought, which he encouraged.

In the back, behind the counter, were a white windowless kitchen and a small bathroom, both minimally and perfectly provided with what was necessary.

My first task was to learn to use the database on the computer. My own is old, grey and cranky. These were new and humming and speedy. My screen was full of sapphire light. I learned to find trains, planes, buses, coaches, horse-caravans, guides, mules, jeeps, car hire, monoplanes, yachts, barges, anywhere, everywhere in the world. I leaned to consult Puck's Girdle's extensive list of trustworthy hotels, inns, bed-and-breakfasts,
tents, caravans, châteaux, monasteries, caravanserais in every category, and how to update it with customer comments, commendations and complaints. I watched Erik and Christophe feed and expand the imaginations of their customers, casual new ones, and old regulars, of whom there were many, from an expert in medieval stained glass tracking a particular glazier from England across Europe to Assisi, to a bird-watching taxi driver who had been through the Indian jungle, the African savannah, the Amazon, on elephants, in Range-Rovers and dug-out canoes, and wanted something new. A man who wanted to do Italy in a new way was encouraged to retrace Goethe's
Italienische Reise
. Another followed the footsteps of Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge in Germany. There was the man who had done all the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars and was embarking on the Hundred Years War. There were followers of Mary Wollstonecraft and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Berengaria and Guenivere. There was also someone who wanted to retrace the journeys of Alfred Russel Wallace. Christophe was trying to interest people in Humboldt in South America. We played games over lunch in the kitchen—Christophe made delicious salads and my complexion improved remarkably—inventing truly extravagant tours, and inventing the customers to whom we would sell them. I say “we.” I am not sure I have ever in my life before said “we” about any group to which I might be thought to belong. There was an ease of belonging between Erik and Christophe, which I have rarely seen. They brushed hands, they touched each other, as they moved about kitchen and office. They appeared to know what the other was doing, without his being in their line of vision,
by some perfection of timing and attention. They included me, most gracefully, not as an equal, but as someone involved in this benign purposefulness. One or the other would ruffle my hair, or touch my shoulder as I peered into the screen. I did not make any reciprocal movement of approach. I did not want to. But I was grateful for the brush of fingers, the acceptance. I have to say, I was grateful.

In time, I came to make suggestions. I found my Destry-Scholes research to have surprising uses. We constructed a tour to look at mosaics, taking in the glories of Istanbul and Ravenna, and some arcane churches in Serbia and Macedonia. Erik found a school in Ravenna where travellers could
make
mosaics according to the ancient methods, cutting the stone and placing the tesserae. We went on from there to construct a tour following Turner to Venice, with practice in his peculiar way of making watercolours, dabbling his fingers in drenched colour on paper. Christophe said we were making schools for forgers, and Erik said forgery was a human pleasure that should be catered for, according to Fourier's principles. It wasn't all art—we arranged for someone to be a castaway on an island, and for someone else to prospect for wrecks off the Azores.

Staples of the tours we offered were art-history with a difference. Specialist comparative viewing of Nativities in Germany, Austria, France, Italy and Flanders. Paintings of the Paradise garden across the world. A century of stone angels. At the time when I arrived, Erik and Christophe were researching a tour of Last Judgements on church walls, from Michelangelo to obscure Northumbrian Anglo-Saxons, from
Bavaria to Constantinople. Whilst we were discussing this, an angry-looking man in a raincoat came in and said he did not suppose we could organise a tour of suicide leaps? Places people had jumped from? Erik said he didn't see why not. Beachy Head, the Reichenbach Falls, Paul Celan's Paris bridge, certain skyscrapers. Money, said the man in the raincoat, was no inhibiting factor. It was not a very good, nor a very clean raincoat. When he had gone, Christophe said that he had probably sold everything and intended to jump, himself, from one place or another. Should we help him? Erik said (a) people had a right to jump if they wanted to, (b) the travel might quite likely weaken his purpose, and (c) it was an original idea, it added a new dimension.

Death, judgement, heaven and hell, I said. The Four Last Things. Something was tugging at my mind. A new idea, said Erik. A tour of the Four Last Things. Like a pilgrimage. Tourism had taken over from pilgrimages, said Christophe, that was a cliché. Travel was what was left of religion. Art galleries were the new temples, it was true, said Erik. Once people travelled to see the artifacts in the galleries. Now the galleries themselves—Stuttgart, Nîmes, Houston, St. Ives—were the ends of journeys, spiritual centres of contemplation, as the great cathedrals had been, and before them the caves of the oracles. Great nineteenth-century monumental buildings of the industrial revolution (the Bankside power house, the Gare d'Orsay, the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin) now housed collections of art, canvas and sculpture, wax and glass boxes.

Something tugged more insistently. It was Destry-Scholes's personages. All three were travellers. He appeared to have embellished all three journeys with invented “spiritual” visions. All three personages had, so to speak, hallucinated
themselves, their doubles, their spirits, after strenuous journeys. Ibsen perhaps didn't quite fit. I needed to do more work on his biography, on his real contact, or lack of contact, with Henriksen, his illegitimate son. But the biographical playlet presented the son as a double, an alter ego, a ghost. I had gone off Linnaeus since Fulla Biefeld had departed with the spliced-faked document. I wondered if it was time to start serious work on what Francis Galton had seen in Ovampoland.
Why
had Destry-Scholes taken to inventing spirit-journeys? The truth was, at that time, I had taken to spending more and more of “my own” research time in the British Library producing refinements of tour-plans that Erik and Christophe had in hand. It was nice to come up with an unexpected site full of archaeopteryx bones that could be reached from a better-known one by a trek across the Peruvian wild, or a painting of the Earthly Paradise by Brueghel the younger in an otherwise undistinguished minor Swiss gallery. Erik and Christophe were so encouragingly enthusiastic about my finds and my projects. They pointed out the uses of the Internet for research, and I took to it with pleasure, but it did not beat the library, not yet, with its catalogue and its books full of bibliographies full of books full of bibliographies. It was interesting that Destry-Scholes was becoming more substantial even whilst no progress was being made. I wondered if there was a Galton society like the Linnean?