The Biographer's Tale (27 page)

Fulla was heading for a kind of oaky glade, where centenarian trees stood amongst the rotting stumps of their fellows. “They understand—the verderers—that you need to leave rotten wood
lying around
,” said Fulla, with satisfaction. “This is what I brought you to see.” She examined the stumps with satisfaction, finding signs of burrowing and drilling which she didn't explain. “Wait,” she said. “They'll come. Have some bread and cheese.” We sat side by side on the edge of the clearing, our backs against a stump, and munched. Fulla—not a
graceful
woman—stuck her legs straight out in front of her. They were shining with golden hairs, which caught the light. After a time, creatures began to impinge. A tiny spider let itself down on a long thread and scurried away into her hair. A twiggy olive-coloured caterpillar of the kind that hoops itself, stretches, and peers, found its way on to her knees and negotiated them. Other caterpillars arrived on sailing threads and fell on to the hair, or the breast-pockets of her
shift. She made no move to brush anything off. A hoverfly darted about her moving lips, as she ate. Bees hummed past, or tunnelled into the light earth round the roots. She identified them obligingly. Solitary bumble-bees, carder bees, male and female, a cuckoo bee,
Nomada flava
, on a dandelion. Another cuckoo bee,
Psithyrus bohemicus
, which Fulla said laid its eggs in the bumble-bees' nest
(Bombus lucorum)
. It hides amongst the moss in the nest until it smells of the nest, Fulla said, and then creeps out and eats the eggs of the bumble-bee queen, leaving its own in their place. Cuckoo bees have thick cuticles, to resist stinging, and tend to be bright and to produce many more eggs than their hosts. The male
Nomada
imitates the smell of its host,
Andrena
, and patrols its nest to attract females of its own species. Their larvae often start with huge sickle-shaped jaws—like the egg-heaving hump on the cuckoo-bird fledgling—to enable them to destroy their host's eggs and larvae. “Not much was known until recently about male bees,” said Fulla Biefeld. “Studies concentrated on the social life and the pollen-gathering, which is female. But the males are very interesting. Bumblebees for instance—the males congregate in a kind of
run
—on an open hedge—and invite the females to run the gauntlet with a kind of dancing display. Or there's this carder bee, which specialises in making nests from the down on salvias and lambs' ears. The male is (unusually) bigger than the female, and very territorially aggressive. It fights and kills all intruders—including much larger bees.” I asked how. I said I thought male bees didn't sting. They don't, she said. They have an armoury of spikes on their bellies which they curl round enemies, to pierce them. The females of that species—
unlike most—mate more than once. “Most females—we think—put out a hormonal signal after they've mated. They don't want to be pestered and lose breeding energy to pestering males. They only live six days.”

I asked, had we come to look at aggressive male bees? No, she said. Here they come. I'll show you what we've come to see.

They came in, flying like tiny demons from some fresco of the Last Judgement, horned and ponderous. Their flight was ungainly, the sound of it burring and clicketing. They are heavily armoured, and yet seem hugely vulnerable, huge in the insect world, eminently crushable in the human. Fulla said, “Southwest London, you know, is the only place they are known to breed in the British Isles. They lay their eggs precisely in rotting oak-stumps. A male will hold a territory—a stump—and fight off the others. Watch, Phineas, the jousting is beginning.”

They do, precisely, joust. A large, shining male sat on a stump, and Fulla pointed out the female waiting in the shade of some dead leaves. She produced from her knapsack a magnifying glass, which we passed from one to the other. The male beetle was a very dark chestnut brown with a (Norman) shield-shaped wing-case and huge jaws, resembling both the indented claws of lobsters and crabs, and the antlers of stags. Behind these was a pair of long feelers with agitated combs on the end, at a right angle. His head too had a carved look, with a wide brow and curving case with bright little gold eyes on the side of it. He had six arms or legs with feathery ends. The female was smaller, and blacker, with discreet pincers in place of the extravagant antlers. He stood on his log, his rival flew
in, and battle began. It did indeed, resemble the head-to-head bellowing engagements of true stags, which must also take place in these ancient clearings. They ran at each other, almost prancing, and locked their jaws, twisting and wrestling, the aim being to dislodge the opponent or, it seemed, to overturn him. In the event the challenger overturned the king of the castle, and both tumbled to earth, where they righted themselves after wild leg-waving, and advanced on each other again, this time walking along a long, narrow root, trying to clash and sway each other off. Again, both fell, again, battle recommenced. Fulla pointed out other battles for other stumps. She handed me her glass. Her fingers are dry and stubby, with tight-trimmed nails. When they touched mine—in a
matter-of-fact
manner—it was electric, I tingled. I looked through the glass and suddenly, briefly, lost my sense of scale, seeing armoured monsters lurching on a rugged battlefield, glossy carapace, and wonderfully articulated, tremulously wiry limbs. I was about to say, they were
glaring
at each other, but that is pure anthropomorphism. I asked Fulla if they met each other's eye, and she said that was an interesting question, she didn't know, and took the glass back. They must emit smells, she said. I said—it had been waiting to be said, and my anthropomorphic observation drove me to saying it—that I had always thought the idea of learning about sex from the birds and the bees was simply foolishness. Dogs, and cows, I said. Fulla put her fingers over my lips to keep me quiet. The challenger was rolled over. A third male was watching from the edge of the ring (the rim of the rotten trunk). Fulla's fingers on my lips were sharp as a bee-sting. I thought of biting them, and did nothing. Surely she
knew
, I thought, what was going on—in some ways ludicrously, I could see
that, but it wasn't how it felt. The king of the castle climbed back up, and made a dash at the new intruder, who backed off.

“I want you,” said Fulla, “to help me with an experiment.”

“Is he dead?”

“No, no, they don't hurt each other, usually. Unlike the aggressive
Anthidium
. No, it's just male territorial dancing. These creatures are getting rare. There's a belief that the biggest always wins. Unlike territorial battles in butterflies, where the one in possession always beats off the challenger. What we need to do is label the males, and remove them one by one, and record their weights, and the fights, and the winners, as we remove and return them. You can keep them quite safely in plastic boxes with airholes and damp sand—so they don't dehydrate—and I'll give you a set of coloured, numbered discs to attach to them. We did a very successful series of observations on male
Osmia rufa
bees by this method.”

“Why me?”

“Well, you appear to be underoccupied. And I have to go to Turkey. And also back to Oxford. And I
want to know
about these creatures, before we extinguish them.” She hesitated. “You know,” she said, “the first insect I collected was one of these. I found it dead in the road, on a holiday. I put it in a box and labelled it “stag beetle.” I used a Swedish word I thought I'd made up,
hjortbagge
, literally
stag plus beetle
. Then they told me that was wrong, the word is
ekoxe
, literally
oak-ox
, which is much less accurate, I think. Your friend Linnaeus called it
Lucanus cervus
, which does mean stag beetle. So I thought I'd been fanciful, but later I discovered that the old Swedish word was truly
hjortbagge
. I'd imagined it rightly. I collected a lot of other things as a little girl—snailshells and
seed-pods, and butterflies and many other beetles—and just gave them names from nowhere, for fun. I remember putting an elm-bark beetle
—Scolytus destructor
it was called then—it's been renamed
Scolytus scolytus
—in a matchbox and labelling it
The Valise Bug
. It's a rather boring beetle, though it makes wonderfully patterned interconnecting tunnels in the bark of elms—they look like great centipedes—or dragons. It looks like a neat little zipped-up leather suitcase. Of course, it isn't really boring, it spreads Dutch elm disease, it's changed the whole landscape of Europe.” She stopped a moment. I said,

“Do you think
everyone
collects things when little?”

Moths brushed through my mind, multi-coloured tiny glass spheres glistened. What was I doing?

“I don't know. I used to hold parties for bugs in boxes. I never liked dolls. Dead human beings that had never lived, I always thought. With nasty sickly-sweet faces. Then I got interested in fitting the bugs together. Then into fitting the insect world into the rest of the world. Boxes in boxes. Of course,
all
the naming's arbitrary. The new genetic groupings—the clades—are going to sweep away the Linnean families and genera and species, and reconnect everything quite differently. It's possible, for instance, that a mushroom is more nearly related to you than to a chrysanthemum or a slime-mould.”

I said I would like to help her with her project. She was right that I had no function in the world at present. I said I would like to help her, but I wouldn't know how to start without her.

“That's OK,” she said. “We've got plenty of time to set it up. Before I go.”

And she lay back spreadeagled on the turf, amongst dried
rabbit-pellets and deer fewmets, amongst the secret entrances to the nests of bumble-bees and slow-worms, amongst gossamer and starry daisies and dandelion clocks and roaring golden dandelions, and her amazing hair spread like another life-form over the grasses and things flew into it and slid over it on bellies and innumerable tiny feet.

And she opened the top two buttons of her shift, so I could clearly see her freckled brown breasts in their lacy cups. They put me in mind of bird's eggs, or the shadowy entrance to foxgloves. And when she saw me looking, she put up her quick little hands and pulled my face down between them. All of me, all of me, trembled and exploded.

We rode back from Richmond decorously side by side on the top of a bus. It was as though my left side (her side) burned and was so to speak dissolving into steam, or gases. Other people may often have experienced this secret journeying with the intention of sex at the end, but I was new to it, as I was new to what Fulla had done to my skin and bone-marrow, my fingers and toes, not to mention the most obvious part, or parts, of me. I could have stroked her, or gripped her, or licked her, all that long way back, but putting it off, waiting,
keeping still
, looking uninterested, was so much more exciting …

She was staying in someone's flat in Fulham. I followed her scent up the dark stairs of the house (it was an attic flat). And …

I began this piece of writing with the moment when I decided to stop being a post-structuralist literary critic. It seems a long time ago. I seem to remember that I began with a revulsion
from Empedocles' idea of the fragmented body-parts in search of each other. I think I was so taken by Ormerod Goode's revelation of Destry-Scholes's biography of Elmer Bole precisely because the over-determinism of Literary Theory, the meta-language of it, threw into brilliant relief Destry-Scholes's real achievement in describing a whole individual, a multi-faceted single man, one life from birth to death. I appeared to have failed to find Destry-Scholes himself. I have to respect him for his scrupulous
absence
from my tale, my work. It will be clear that I too have wished to be
absent
. I have resisted and evaded the idea that because of Destry-Scholes's
absence
my narrative must become an account of my own presence,
id est
, an autobiography, that most evasive and self-indulgent of forms. I have tried both to use my own history, unselfconsciously, as a temporal thread to string my story (my writing) on,
and
to avoid unnecessary dwelling on my own feelings, or my own needs, or my own—oh dear
—character
. It will be clear to almost any attentive reader, I think, that as I have gone along in this writing (we are now at page 161, ms) I have become more and more involved in the act of writing itself, more and more inclined to shift my attention from Destry-Scholes's absence to my own style, and thus, my own
presence
. I now wonder—after the last few pages I have written about the birds and the bees (and the stag beetles) and Fulla B—whether
all
writing has a tendency to flow like a river towards the writer's body and the writer's own experience? I began with what I still consider a healthy desire to
eschew the personal
(the tangential, the coincidental). Yet I am now possessed by a burning desire to describe making love to Fulla Biefeld, and, worse than that, to describe how that
experience differs from the (no less intense, whatever a reader may think) experience of making love to Vera Alphage. And the intensity of the liberation into writing lyrical (banal but shocking-to-me) sentences about foxgloves and freckles, spiderwebs and hairs.

I had already—before the loss of my job, before the impulsive picnic—arranged to visit Vera Alphage on the next day. I wondered, out of a mad sense of either decorum or personal inadequacy—whether to cancel. I felt in some primitive way that Fulla's musk was all over my body, lingering in every crevice. Fulla's love-making is fierce and wholehearted, not prolonged but repetitive (I was pleased by my capacity to rise to these repeated occasions). She cries out, she laughs, you would not suppose her to be the rather grim and severe world-moralist I met in the Linnean Society strongroom. She is all liquid gold, all grip and drive. She bites nicely. I had little blue florets, I found in my shower-room, in the hollows of my collar-bone and stepping along my hip from my groin. When I saw this shadowy blue, with its rose-and-black gooseflesh, on my skin, in my naked solitude, I thought of Vera. Not, as you may imagine, because I thought Vera might detect Fulla's activities from the blossoming of my belly. How could she not, indeed, when you think about it, but I am slow to read signs, as I have said before, and also, there was a half-chance, for Vera always made love with her huge eyes closed and the long lashes damp on the dark shadowed hollow beneath them. No, I thought of Vera, because I always, always think of Vera when I see that particular blue, of bruises and shadows,
of the dark where the pulse of her blue vein beats in her wrist, or the root of her elegant neck, or the inside of her white thigh. I think also of the almost-midnight blue, the night-blue, she has chosen for the background to her photographs of our invisible inner lives, made with frequencies of light our human eyes cannot see. I thought of Vera, it has to be said, as Fulla pushed her warm little face fiercely along the bones of my hip and pelvis, I thought of the
life of the bones
, under, in the invisible world of the body, Vera's world. I thought of them together. Fulla wandered the plains of my flesh, causing every hair to rise to her, and inside my nerve-strings sang Vera. (I am getting better at my lyricism, but am not sure that last sentence works. Let it stand. Who will ever read all this stuff, anyway.
And
, it's true.)