Turtle Diary (14 page)

I ought to give some thought to what I’m getting into. Casual affairs with people one works with are probably best avoided. And if this isn’t a casual affair what is it? I’m not in love with Harriet. I feel good being with her, like sleeping with her, don’t want to think beyond that.

It was cosy going to her place on Saturday night, walking under the street lamps looking up at lighted windows and knowing that I too had a lighted window waiting where I shouldn’t be alone.

In bed we lay looking up at the patterns of light, the shapes of the windows thrown on the ceiling by the street lamps.

‘What were you so busy with all afternoon and evening?’ Harriet said.

‘Odd jobs I’d been putting off,’ I said. I thought of the first time we’d made love in this room with the terror in it, wondered if the room would slide away, the light patterns on the ceiling and the clothes on the chair, and leave only the terror. It didn’t. The room stayed. Harriet was there, warm and smooth along the whole length of me. Tomorrow we’d wake up together but I couldn’t tell her about the turtles.

‘A penny for your thoughts,’ said Harriet.

I hate it when people ask me what I’m thinking.

I was reading about colliery horses in this morning’s paper. Pit ponies, they’re called. They live underground and work with the miners. They’ve saved lives, the article said, by stopping in their tracks and refusing to go ahead seconds before a roof-fall. They’ve led miners with broken lamps through black tunnels to safety, and it was said that a horse once pressed its body against a collapsing wall to give the men time to escape.

I like thinking about the horses and the men working together underground. A large strong animal and a man together add up to more than a man and an animal. They aren’t afraid of the same things, and where the senses of one leave off, those of the other go on. I wish I had a horse to work with. Either I think the roof’s going to fall in all the time or I think it’ll never fall. I’m sure a horse would give it no thought at all except when the actuality impended. One can’t have a horse to help with writing or drawing. Mice perhaps. Madame Beetle is not a help in any practical way but I feel that her attitude is exemplary. Swimming, diving, coming to the surface for air or sitting quietly in her shipwreck she is in harmony with her small world, has a good style.

How very patronizing of me, now that I consider it, to think that of Madame Beetle. If she’s in harmony with her ‘small world’ then she’s in harmony with as much of the world as she has contact with. If I enjoyed comparable harmony I’d speak of it as being with
the
world, not my ‘small world’. And if I find her exemplary how can I say she’s of no practical value? If I
were paying a Zen master for instruction I’d consider him an exemplar whose example had practical value. Madame Beetle cost only 31p and her tiny daily fee is not even paid in money so I discount her value.

I wrote a letter to Harry Rush thanking him for his offer but saying that I simply did not have a book on The Tragic Heritage in Children’s Literature in me. I wasn’t sure I’d post the letter but I took it with me when I went out. I didn’t feel like cooking or eating in the flat. I took Tolstoy’s
The Cossacks
with me and went to an Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge near William G.’s bookshop.

It was early and the place was almost empty. I settled into a booth, ordered
escalope milanese
and a half-carafe of red and began
The Cossacks,
which I’d last read twenty-five years ago. At the end of the first short chapter I came to:

… the three shaggy post-horses dragged themselves out of one dark street into another, past houses he had never seen before. It seemed to Olenin that only travellers bound on a long journey ever went through such streets as these.

Perfectly true, I thought as I drank my wine. The same streets do not exist for everybody. Only travellers bound on a long journey go through such streets as those. Only solitary sojourners go through other streets, sit at tables such as this.

My seat shook a little as someone sat down in the booth behind me. I was facing away from the door and hadn’t seen them come in. I went on with my Tolstoy until I heard William G.’s voice say, ‘I’m having
escalope milanese.’

‘Where’s that on the menu?’ said a female voice, one I’d heard before. The girl at the bookshop who’d given me his address and telephone number. Her voice came from beside him rather than opposite.

‘Here,’ said William. Odd how people do that with menus. One person reads aloud the name of a dish and the other person requires to see it in print as if the word were a picture.

‘I’ll have the scampi,’ she said. I didn’t want to overhear their conversation but my
escalope
hadn’t come yet.

‘Jannequin, Costely, Passereau, Bouzignac,’ said William. ‘Renaissance madrigals with soprano solo.’

‘Couperin, Lully, Rameau, Baroque songs for soprano,’ she said. ‘I know those three but I’ve never heard of the others.’ Probably they were on their way to the South Bank and looking at the programme.

The booth creaked as the voices became murmurous, there were silences. I concentrated on Tolstoy until my
escalope
arrived, ate as quickly as possible, finished my wine, didn’t bother with a sweet or coffee. I had to pass their booth to get to the door. If they noticed me I’d say hello, if not I’d just not see them.

I passed the booth, they both looked up at me. It wasn’t William G. and the girl from the bookshop. It was two people I’d never seen before.

I rang up a van-hire place. £2.75 per day, 2½p per mile, £10 deposit. God, how I hate the thought of driving the thing. In films people like Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster leap into vehicles they’ve never seen before, cars, lorries, buses, locomotives, anything at all, and away they go at speed. Sometimes they have to fight with someone first, knock him out before they can drive away. Well of course that’s how it is in films. How can reality be so different?

I still haven’t said anything about the turtles to Harriet and I still don’t want to. She’s begun saying ‘We’. So-and-so wondered if we could come to a party. There was a series of early music recitals and ought we to subscribe. We went to the party, we subscribed to the series.

I keep waiting for the phone to ring from that other world where the turtles are. It’s not another world really, it’s this one. Everything happens in the same world, that’s why life is so difficult. I’ll pick up the van right after work, deliver the crates, come back later, meet Neaera at the Zoo and drive to Polperro. Maybe I ought to pick her up earlier, maybe we ought to have dinner first.

Yesterday evening I looked out of my window and saw the greyhound lady go past alone. No husband. The Greyhound Widow, like a figure on a tarot card. A train went past on the far side of the common. One vertical row of three lights: Tower Hill. I knew the husband was dead, it was in the way she walked with the greyhound. I asked Mrs Inchcliff about it,
she knows everything that goes on in the neighbourhood. Yes, she said, the husband had died a week ago. If he’d lived two weeks longer his widow would have got two years’ salary but as it was she wouldn’t.

There’s an owl in the Charing Cross tube station.
Bubo tubo.
Not really an owl. The sound comes from an escalator but it’s as real as the owl I hear on the common and never see. There’s only one world, and animal voices must cry out from machines sometimes.

There it was: the telephone call from George Fairbairn. Thursday would be the day. This was Monday. If I could drop the crates off about half past six he’d have the turtles ready for me in half an hour or so. He was talking to me in a matter-of-fact way as if I really existed and was a real grown-up person who could drive vans, be at a certain place at a certain time and do what I’d undertaken to do. Incredible. I said I mightn’t be able to get there till after seven. Right, he said, he’d see me then.

Maybe there wouldn’t be a van available, maybe all the arrangements would break down. I rang up the van-hire place. Yes, I could have a van on Thursday.

Maybe I’d not be able to get away from the shop. Late summer, still lots of tourists. I asked Mr Meager if I could have Friday off. Personal matter. He said yes of course.

I thought of ringing up the Zoo and warning them that a turtle snatch was planned for Thursday. I didn’t do it. All right, I thought. Let it happen.

I hadn’t posted the letter to Harry Rush, it was still in my bag. I wasn’t going to do the book but nothing else was happening. Madame Beetle’s good for companionship and philosophy lessons but nothing in the way of commercial profit, and Gillian Vole and that lot seem to be a thing of the past. So I wasn’t completely ready to let go of the £1,000. Wasn’t ready to let go of the
idea
of the £1,000. I could no more write the book than swim the Channel. Actually, with training I might in time swim the Channel but no amount of training will get that book out of me.

William G. rang up. Thursday would be the day. He spoke as if it was all really real and we were real people who were simply going to go ahead and do what we’d said we’d do. Had I in fact said it? That first day at lunch I’d talked in code, talked about hauling bananas. Had I ever said
turtles?
Yes, my very first words to him in the shop before we went to lunch. And then that awful Saturday morning when I went to his flat we talked about the turtles before I left. Perhaps I could still back out of it. But there was his voice coming out of the telephone and I said yes, Thursday would be all right. He asked if he could pick me up on his way to the Zoo with the crates and we’d have dinner before setting out. I said that would be lovely, yes of course and I’d be ready at half past six.

I looked at the telephone after I’d put it down. Sly thing, getting words out of me I’d no intention of saying. This was Monday. Tuesday Wednesday Thursday. Oh God, more than
two hundred miles each way. I’ll pack sandwiches and a flask of coffee but how much time will eating sandwiches and drinking coffee get us through. The whole thing is quite likely to end in disaster with the van and the turtles and us overturned in a ditch somewhere in the middle of the night, all blood and splintered glass, groans and whimpers. Maybe we’ll be killed outright, and all for some stupid notion long since gone out of my head. Oh shit.

Blankets. We’ll want a bit of a rest before the drive back. Pillows. Surely he won’t book hotel rooms, it isn’t that kind of thing. No, no, just let it be done and out of the way as quickly as possible. Towel and soap, toothbrush, toothpaste. Have a wash in the public lavatory before starting back. Wear jeans and a shirt, take a cardigan. Cigarettes, mustn’t run out. Has he got maps? He looks the sort to have maps, torches, compasses. He’s the anxious type and I know we’ll get lost.

The tide. Will it be in or out. What’s the use of bothering to find out. However it is is the way it’ll be. I wonder if they’re still killing oyster-catchers at Penclawdd. They must be.

I asked Webster de Vere to feed Madame Beetle, left him a key and the remains of the lamb chop she’s been living on for the last week. I still haven’t posted the letter to Harry Rush.

And here’s Thursday.

Thursday. Grey and rainy. That was a help, sunny blue-sky days always look like bad luck to me. Harriet wanted to know where I was going but all I said was that I had things to do.

‘There’s no need to make a mystery of it,’ she said.

‘And there’s no need to ask me either,’ I said.

‘Look,’ said Harriet, ‘you’re perfectly free to do whatever you like …’

‘Thanks very much,’ I said.

‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ said Harriet. ‘You don’t have to treat me like a stranger just because you’re going to be with someone else.’

‘Everything isn’t sex,’ I said. ‘There are other things that are private.’ I hadn’t minded telling Mrs Inchcliff and Miss Neap but I just wasn’t willing for Harriet to know everything about me. She walked away looking reproachful, had very little to say to me for the rest of the day.

After work I went to pick up the van. It was a Ford Transit 90, 18 Cwt, huge, smooth, bulgy and white, not a dent or scratch on it. I couldn’t believe I’d get it there and back intact. They gave it to me with no hesitation whatever.
VANS 4-U Van Hire
in big black letters on both sides.

The man at VANS 4-U said the petrol tank held thirteen gallons and the van would do from fifteen to twenty miles to the gallon. I thought fifteen more likely than twenty although the engine certainly sounded economical, I wondered if it would go up hills with two people and three turtles. I filled the tank,
later I’d fill my five-gallon container as well. On the map our route looked like about two hundred and fifty miles, and at night I couldn’t count on petrol stations being open. If the van did fifteen miles to the gallon that was one hundred and ninety-five miles on a full tank and seventy-five miles more on the extra five gallons in the container, so we ought to be all right even if there were no stations open.

It felt strange sitting up so high with all that van around me. The gearbox was at least an ordinary four-speed one. The width of the thing was appalling. I was behind a bus when I first pulled out into the street and I was only about six inches narrower than it. I kept going up on the kerb with my left front wheel when I thought I was a foot away from it.

The rain was still coming down gently and steadily. I drove to my place, loaded on the crates, the trolley, the petrol container, the rope, torch, map, road atlas, an eiderdown to lie down on, an old blanket to put under it, a couple of blankets to cover us. Us? I didn’t think either of us had any hanky-panky in mind and we’d have our clothes on. Couple of pillows. Thermos flask, we could probably fill it and get some sandwiches at one of the services on the M4. I felt very jumpy the whole time. Cigarettes. I took four packets. I couldn’t think of anything else. I went to the loo twice, got into the van and drove off, mounting the kerb from time to time when I made left turns and getting angry looks from pedestrians. I stopped to fill the petrol container, then headed for Neaera’s place.