The Biographer's Tale (31 page)

Christophe said Erik was fine. He added that he had been trying to reach me, but I was not ever at home. I kept quiet. I didn't want to give anyone at all Vera's address. Christophe said that they had acted—reacted—hastily. That they hadn't at all realised what I had been going through with Maurice
Bossey. That they very much hoped I'd come back. That they were distressed I hadn't got in touch. Dean, standing legs apart against the sun, smiled benignly. Christophe said he'd like to cook dinner for me (they'd never invited me home, before). He included Fulla in the invitation. She snorted again. Christophe said, with real Gallic charm, that they did in fact genuinely want her advice on whether actively useful taxonomical holiday cooperations were possible. Dean grinned more broadly. Fulla said she had had that idea herself. She looked now more like her sharp public self, and less like my earthwoman. I said the whole of my life, the whole of my life and work, needed rethinking. But it didn't necessarily exclude a return to Puck's Girdle. And I should like to come to dinner, I said. And me, said Fulla. Thank you. Christophe touched Dean's arm. “We'll be off,” he said. He turned back. “Oh, and Phineas. We owe you a holiday. You never took your holiday.”

So Fulla and I dined with Erik and Christophe. I do not think they thought we were a couple. I do not know what they thought. I don't know whether Christophe saw where Fulla's fingers were when he emerged from the trees. Nor do I know—since I am listing what I do not know—what Erik made of Christophe's forays into the territory of Hern the Hunter. I was more worried about Erik's reaction to myself. He had urged my sacking, after all, not Christophe. He met us in the entrance hall of the Notting Hill house where their flat was, and crushed me in a bear-like embrace, stroking my legs and shoulders, ruffling my hair, roaring with laughter. He then, perhaps excessively, embraced Fulla too, lifting her from
the ground, and welcoming her in rapid Swedish. His face was lost in the thicket of her hair.

Their flat was a surprise, after the modern beauty of Puck's Girdle. It was a mixture of exaggerated Regency and Victorian Gothic, with carved silver thrones, peacock-feathered china, thick shimmering velvet curtains, and hosts of small lamps, with jewel-coloured shades—emerald, crimson, cobalt—casting pools of delimited golden light amongst thick shadows. We ate a salad of smoked halibut and marinated mushrooms, a jugged hare with chestnuts and spiced cabbage, a lemon syllabub and feathery biscuits. I mention this food—I hate food in ordinary novels, though I would forgo none of Proust's, or Tolstoy's, or Balzac's—because I saw I was horribly hungry, having lived on my own meagre and incompetent cookery in Willesden, and, much more than the champagne and burgundy, it made me feel spoiled, and soft, and unreal. And because they had gone to some trouble, for me (and for Fulla) and this was generous, since I had cut them with their own blunt instrument, and accused them of snuff movies. Fulla ate fiercely, and with obvious pleasure.

We sat on heaped velvet cushions, and drank Turkish coffee. Erik and Christophe devoted their considerable charm to getting Fulla to talk. She told fearful tales of possible lurches in the population of pollinators (including those of the crops we depend on for our own lives). Tales of the destruction of the habitats by humans, and of benign and necessary insects, birds, bats and other creatures, by crop-spraying and road-building. Of the vanishing of migratory corridors, even where habitats existed. Of the over-dependence on the farmed
honeybee, which was all too successful as a competitor for nectar and pollen, but which was not necessarily either the best or the safest pollinator for many plants. She spoke of the rapid spread of the mite
Varroa jacobsoni
, which originated in the Far East and is ravaging the hives, now, of almost the whole world. Of the dangerous Africanised bees moving northwards in the Americas. Of the need to find other (often better) pollinators, in a world where they are being extinguished swiftly and silently. Of the fact that there are only thirty-nine qualified bee taxonomists in the world, whose average age is sixty, and of whom only two, both over eighty, are training successors. Of British bumble-bees, of which there were once five species, one already extinct. Of population problems, and feeding the world, and sesbania, a leguminous crop which could both hold back desertification, because it binds soil, and feed the starving, but for the fact that no one has studied its pollinators or their abundance or deficiency, or their habits, in sufficient detail. (It is pollinated by leaf-cutter bees,
Megachile bituberculasta, Chalicodoma sp. Xylocopa sp
. These bees can be managed, as they will breed in reed stems, bamboo, blocks of wood.)

She described—in detail—a world of small deaths and vanishings, of long strings of unconsidered, unexamined, causes and effects, of baffled creatures and lumpen human decisions. She was practical and furious.

Erik and Christophe said that they knew that people went on ecological holidays.

“Further unbalancing and disturbing the disturbed Galápagos—” cried Fulla.

“It needn't be there. It could be anywhere. It could be useful. It could provide funds and helping hands—”

The money, said Fulla, goes to glamorous things like tigers and pandas, which are doomed anyway. The tourists want to see shiny fish and parrots and monkeys. Not bees. Not beetles.

They could learn, said Christophe.

Fulla said she had a project studying Mediterranean bees. Many of our plants are derived from Mediterranean plants, and we need to find viable alternatives to the honeybee. Possibly very quickly. But the EU and everyone else think bees means honeybees, and funding comes under apiculture, which is circular, and that is that.

Her eyes flashed. Her hair flared and glittered. If we sent you tourists, said Erik, could you teach them?

Could you
use
them?

Fulla said she would need several semi-trained people—parataxonomists—or the tourists would simply be trampling nuisances. But there
were
no parataxonomists.

Christophe said that it appeared that Phineas was on the way to becoming a parataxonomist.

I said, sipping my grappa, that I was a drop in the ocean.

Erik said oceans were made up of drops.

Christophe poured more grappa.

Fulla said, anyway, she was off back to Turkey herself in exactly a fortnight.

That was the first I had heard of that, but I said nothing. I said nothing, then.

We went home to Fulla's little flat and went to bed. (I had told Vera I was out and would not be back for the night. She was up and about again, wandering the house, occasionally turning
the marbles.) I still said nothing. I had no idea what to do with myself. None at all.

I decided to return to see Ormerod Goode. I rang and made an appointment—from Vera's house, using Vera's phone. I had done so much work, and indeed, so much writing, but had nothing to show for any of it except this manuscript, which for obvious reasons, cannot be public property. I had had a further thought about Scholes Destry-Scholes which I should have had much earlier. I wanted at least to put that point to Ormerod Goode, before admitting defeat.

Goode sat in his brown study and offered me nothing. He asked how I was doing, and I said badly. I told him about the three brief lives, the fact that they contained obvious lies, and the existence of the shoeboxes. I made a halting attempt to describe the cards and the photographs.

“Is that all?” said Ormerod Goode, without entering into any discussion of Ibsen, Galton or Linnaeus.

I said it was. It was all. (I had not mentioned the marbles, I should say, or the trepanning instrument.)

Goode said it was not much. He added, musing, that I appeared to have little aptitude for biographical research. He attempted to mitigate this severity by saying that he was sure he himself would be just the same, which was why he had chosen place-names to study. Public property, can't move off, he said. Stay put. Interconnected. Satisfactory.

I said there was one thing he might be able to help me with. I had realised that one of the few “facts” I had about Scholes
Destry-Scholes was that he had perhaps drowned in the Maelstrøm. It struck me that my only informant about that had been Ormerod Goode himself. I wondered exactly where he had seen the information?

It hardly mattered, said Goode, considering the dearth of other material, surely.

I said it did matter, to me personally, though I took his point about my failure as a potential biographer.

“I got it from Jespersen in the Scandinavian Department,” said Goode. “He showed me the cutting. He collects anything to do with the Maelstrøm. Myths and legends, films and cartoons, metaphors in poems, news items, any old grist to his mill. He's mildly dotty. He told me. He said something like, ‘You know that odd chap who came and talked about biography? He seems to have been sucked into my funnel-thing.' You can't quote that, of course, that isn't
what
he said, which I certainly don't remember with any exactitude after all these years. I don't know how anyone ever believes hearsay witnesses in courts of law, do you, Nanson? I could take you up to see Jespersen, if you like. He lives along the top corridor in the Roman Jakobsen building.”

So we went to see Thorold Jespersen. A word I was quite fond of, in my post-structural, post-psychoanalytic days, was “over-determined.” In terms of this story (for what else am I writing?) Thorold Jespersen was over-determined. I suppose if he had been young and brisk and surgical I should have been equally satisfied to find him in the story, because of the element of shock or wonder. But there he was, in a dusty attic, behind a dusty table loaded with precarious heaps of leather volumes and yellowing papers, and crumbs. There should have been spiderwebs, but there weren't. His window was a
semi-skylight, and just as filthy as the window of Gareth Butcher's room where the Critical Theory seminars had taken place. Indeed, this one had a rim of lively green slime, or moss, round its veiled dimness. He had two noticeboards on the non-mansard walls, covered (I was later allowed to survey them) with photographs and drawings and steel engravings and geographers' charts of the Maelstrøm. Jespersen sat in the gloom, in a nest of ivory hair, his long white beard wound into his papers, his long white hair merging into it, his papery-white, wrinkled face and his pale, cracked lips, revealing walrus-horn yellow teeth, peering between his locks with watery blue eyes (purging rheum, as Shakespeare said) under jutting headlands of white brows (with crumbs in them. There were crumbs everywhere. Also dropped currants, or maybe mouse droppings). The room, and the man, looked as though there should have been a smell of rotting, but there wasn't. It was all dry, and dusty. It took him a moment or two to recognise Ormerod Goode. When he did, he asked him in a high, spider-thread of a voice, if he had had any luck with his barrow.

“Barrow?”

“Louven How, Green Swang, Cock Lake Side.”

“Black Cock, the Lake. They still perform a lek there. I don't know how much longer. They're threatened with extinction. Dig's going well, yes. They used to think Black Cock was the Devil, but it's only a bird.”

“Pity,” said Jespersen vaguely. There was a silence. Goode introduced me.

“Phineas Nanson. He's got a question about the Maelstrøm.”

“Ah, the explorer. Come to the right place.”

Not an explorer, I said. Nanson, son of Nanson. A researcher, I said, leaving it vague.

“Ah,” said Jespersen. “Just as well. Dangerous, the Maelstrøm. Treacherous. Tricky. Some people think it's the same hole as Dante's Ulysses went down. The end of the world. The known world.” He said, “Lots of ways to the Underworld, all on land.
Facilis descensus Averni
. In pits and mountain bellies. This is the watery one.”

Goode said I wanted to know about someone who had apparently drowned in it. He said, rather firmly, that he remembered Jespersen mentioning it.

“Ah yes. I've got a file of those. Drowned and disappeared. As many suicides as Beachy Head, but mostly never recovered. A good way to disappear. Your man's name, young man?”

“Scholes Destry-Scholes,” I said.

“Ah—” he said, and rose up (he was over six foot and very thin). “Let me see.”

His filing system seemed more orderly than his desktop suggested.

I imagined, even at this point, that there would turn out to be nothing. His dry fingers shuffled dry pages.

“Here,” he said. “Here it is. There's a photograph. Out of a newspaper. Here it is. British writer presumed drowned.”

I was about to see the face of Destry-Scholes.

Jespersen creaked towards me, and handed me the newspaper cutting.

“Hope is extinguished for the British writer, Scholes Destry-Scholes, who left the fishing-port on the island of Vaerøy, in the Lofoten Islands, in a small boat a week ago. The
boat was found, with no-one aboard, not far from the Moskenes Current, more famous by its fifteenth-century name, the Maelstrøm. Mr. Destry-Scholes was on a solitary fishing and walking holiday, and had expressed an interest in the famous whirlpool. Mr. Destry-Scholes achieved some success with his three-volume biography of the larger-than-life British eccentric, explorer, diplomat, scientist and writer, Sir Elmer Bole. His publishers say he was hoping to submit another work shortly, and had been researching both in Norway and in South Africa. The search for authenticity in scholarship can have its dangers. They were not sure who his current subject was. They described him as reclusive, uncommunicative and solitary.”

The photograph that accompanied this text was of a dark rowboat, floating on a choppy dark water, with three gull-colonised rocks and a stocky mountain in the background. “Lots of those,” said Professor Jespersen cheerfully. “Lots of that motif, the empty boat on the water. I've got nearly fifty of them. They like to get Mosken in, and the gannets. Picturesque.”