Turtle Diary (18 page)

I passed an antique shop. There was a brown and varnished sea-turtle shell in the window. A black man – was he from the Caribbean? – was looking at it. He wore a white mac, it was a wet grey day. Next door was a fruiterer, there were oranges. The rain stopped, the sun came out into a gunmetal sky. ‘Well, yes,’ I said aloud. ‘Of course.’

The black man turned and looked at me. ‘Tortuguero,’ he said. He said it like a password but made no secret sign. He said it because he needed to say the name aloud just there and then
to me. I nodded, felt dizzy with my face against the dot. How did he know that I knew where Tortuguero was? I shall never see the picture. I could grind my teeth and weep.

On my desk in the middle of the night does some tiny figure look at Madame Beetle and dream of setting her free? Is there any limit to smallness and largeness? Is it possible actually to hold an orange in the hand? Iron and wind are both grey. Would there be oyster-catchers in armour on the rooftops if I looked up?

The sea was wherever it was, and the turtles. It couldn’t be done again. Of those who did the launching there were no survivors. I passed an empty playground. The rocking horse was rocking, all its five seats empty.

I went to the Zoo, to the Aquarium. The turtle tank was empty, still being cleaned. I opened one of the PRIVATE doors, found George Fairbairn on the duckboards behind the fish tanks. There was a clean ocean smell, the illuminated water seemed like clear green time, the wood of the duckboards was like the wood in boats.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘they get off all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they must have done, unless you’ve heard any reports of turtles being picked up off the Cornish coast.’

‘Not so far,’ he said.

I had nothing to say but I felt safe on the boat-feeling wood in the green light of salt-water time.

‘All right?’ he said. ‘You look a little peaky. Fancy a cup of tea?’

‘I’d just like to stay here a while and look at the water,’ I said.

‘I’ll bring it here,’ he said.

Below me the leopard shark swam his aimless urgent round like an office boy. Twit, I thought.

George Fairbairn came back with the tea-tray, set it down on a plank. I’d never really looked at him closely, he didn’t compel attention. He was a very medium-looking man, neither tall nor short, neither dark nor fair, about my age. His face was just a plain face, cheerful and undemanding.

‘How do you stay cheerful?’ I said.

‘I don’t mind being alive,’ he said. He poured the tea, took a tin of tobacco out of his pocket, rolled a cigarette, lit it. ‘There’s nothing you can do about this, you know,’ he said. ‘Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn’t in us. It’s almost as if we’re put here on earth to show how silly they aren’t. I don’t mind. I just like being around them.’

I began to cry. I leant against him and sobbed.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, stroking my hair. ‘You needn’t hold back, these are all salt-water tanks.’

There’s nothing like a little physical violence to make a man feel young again. I was half crippled from it. Sandor must have trodden heavily on my left foot, the next morning it was so tender and swollen that I could hardly put my weight on it. My ribs felt as if I’d been run over by a lorry, my left arm and shoulder weren’t working right, my neck was stiff and sore and the left side of my head felt soft.

The cooker was clean when I got to it to make breakfast but I was sure that was only because it was Sunday and Sandor was sleeping in. I doubted very much that I’d find it clean on Monday morning. I spent a quiet day with the newspapers, went to a Japanese film at the National Film Theatre in the evening, took a late walk. Harriet rang up while I was out but I didn’t phone her when I got home. I had Monday morning, the bath and the cooker on my mind. In bed I lay awake for a long time with fantasies of beating Sandor into a state of abject obedience but the fact was that I couldn’t do it. He was younger and bigger and stronger than I and he handled himself very well indeed. I thought of getting up earlier so as to be first at the bath and the cooker which would leave Miss Neap to follow him. She’d see to him. But that would be cheating.

Monday morning I woke up early. A grey and dreary morning with no hope in it. Things would always be the way they were, it said. Why struggle. I thought of the dawn wind over the ocean. ‘Out at sea the dawn wind/Wrinkles and slides,’ said Eliot. I took
Four Quartets
off the shelf and looked at
East Coker.
It begins with ‘In the beginning is my end.’ The line I’d remembered was at the end of Part I:

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

Towards the end of the poem I read:

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The last words were:

In my end is my beginning.

All this for Sandor’s ring round the bath and his muck on the cooker. Ridiculous. But so is everything. So was Thermopylae. The things that matter don’t necessarily make sense. My end seemed immanent in every breath and my beginning seemed never to have happened.

The turtles would be well on their way now, following whatever track they followed. Just doing it. Not thinking about it, just doing it.

No sound from the bathroom. Sandor didn’t have a bath every morning. I heard his door open, heard him padding to the kitchen, heard and smelled his cooking, heard him go back to his room.

I dressed, went to the kitchen. Muck all over the cooker again. I got the cloth that I always cleaned it with, held it under the cold tap, got it good and wet, knocked on Sandor’s door.

‘Who is it?’ said his voice from inside.

‘Me,’ I said.

He opened the door, Persian dressing-gown, red slippers, hairy ankles.

I held up the wet cloth. ‘Clean the cooker,’ I said.

‘I clean your cooker right enough,’ he said. ‘I break your bones, you don’t go away.’

I shoved the cloth into his face, brought my knee up hard into his crutch. When he doubled over I got both hands on his head, forced it down as I brought my knee up again into his face. What am I doing, I thought. He’ll kill me for sure this time.

He was on the floor with blood all over his face and I thought it might be wise to beat him unconscious if I could but before I could get in another blow his feet shot out and I went flying. Slammed into the wall and that was the last I knew for a while.

When I came to I was on my bed and Mrs Inchcliff was sitting by me. ‘Where’s Sandor?’ I said.

‘He’s gone off to the doctor to get his nose seen to,’ she said.

‘How’d I get here?’ I said.

‘We carried you,’ she said. ‘Mr Sandor and I. What
is
all this between you two?’

‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Thermopylae. In my end is my beginning.’

So I came limping into the shop rather late and there were all those books and Mr Meager and Harriet selling books and customers buying books and I thought, What in the world am I doing here, what’s all this nonsense with books and who are these people? As I came in through the door the books and people seemed to get farther away instead of closer, receding from me as the shore recedes from a boat that sails away.

‘Got everything sorted out all right?’ said Mr Meager.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘thank you. Sorry I’m late, it couldn’t be helped.’

‘Feeling all right?’ he said. ‘You look a bit off this morning.’

‘No more than usual,’ I said. ‘It’s just that you haven’t seen me for a few days. You probably don’t notice how I look ordinarily.’ My mind seemed clear but my head felt a funny shape. I turned
to look at him from the hard side of it. He looked back at me with his whole head nice and hard. He has very bright blue eyes like Paul Newman but nobody would ever buy a poster of Mr Meager.

Harriet brought me a mug of coffee with a manner that seemed unnecessarily domestic. She looked heavily understanding, which irritated me. I felt there wasn’t anything to be understood. And my head really did hurt where I’d hit the wall with it.

‘I rang you up last night,’ she said, ‘but you were out.’ There was the reproachful look again, the same look I’d seen when I first met her.

‘I got home too late to ring you back,’ I said.

‘How are you?’ she said very seriously as if I’d just come back from hospital.

‘I’m fine,’ I said, and she looked hurt. You can tell
me,
her eyes said. No, I couldn’t tell her. What was there to tell? You can’t do it with turtles, that’s all. You have to fight Mr Sandor and everything else. Every day, every inch of the way.

‘You can’t do it with turtles,’ I said.

‘You can do it with me,’ she said, and gave me a quick grope behind the counter. The singlemindedness of the woman!

‘That’s not the only it there is,’ I said.

‘
Sorry
,’ said Harriet, and removed herself to the Occult section.

I rang up Neaera when I had a moment. She wasn’t home.

At lunch-time I went to Hyde Park and ate my sandwich and apple under a tree and did not give up smoking. Soon maybe but not yet. I looked at the yellow leaves on the grass and the boats on the Serpentine and the people around me as if I’d come back from the Lakes and the Torrible Zone and the hills of the Chankly Bore. But nobody said how tall I’d grown. All the yellow leaves were too much for me, I didn’t know if I could go back to the shop and last the day out.

I did last the day out. Just. In the afternoon Harriet said, ‘Will you be over this evening?’

‘Harriet …’ I said.

‘God,’ she said, ‘you sound so
weary.’

‘I’m pretty thin on the ground right now,’ I said. ‘There’s not all that much of me. I need to be by myself.’

‘Well, good luck to you and all the best,’ she said, and quickly sold a Knightsbridge lady
Rising Sap,
by Taura Strong.

Things appear from unexpected quarters. The single dot before the face becomes another dot of different shape and density.

George Fairbairn had been a background person until now. Now he was the dot before my face, the face before my face. Knowing that I should never see the whole picture I didn’t bother to ask myself what it was.

He had seemed so medium, so unspecially placed between the top and bottom of life that I hadn’t really given him full human recognition until that evening when he brought out the champagne. I’d assumed that he was married, part of a closed circle, no lines moving on his map.

He wasn’t married. He had a flat off Haverstock Hill and that’s where I woke up on Tuesday, the morning after I’d gone to see him at the Aquarium. There was very little in the place, mostly it was furnished with light and quiet. It was on the top floor and looked out over rooftops. There was a Chinese teapot in the kitchen, there was a copy of Lilly’s
The Mind of the Dolphin
on the table by the bed. In the sitting room were R. H. Blyth’s four volumes on haiku and some natural history. ‘I don’t buy books much any more,’ he said. There was a radio but no gramophone.

A curious man, somewhat off to one side of things. As he said, he didn’t mind being alive but I don’t think it meant a great deal to him. I asked him nothing about himself and he offered no information, that was how it was. He had a clean look and a clean clear feel, nothing muddy. That was enough.
There was about him the smell or maybe just the idea of dry grass warm in the sun.

He made breakfast for us. Looking out of the window and across a lawn I saw other people having breakfast in their windows.

‘Do you think you’ll go on doing children’s books?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

We left the flat. In the lift at the Belsize Park tube station there was a Dale Carnegie poster, MAXIMISE YOUR POTENTIAL, it said, and showed a drawing of a thick-faced man in simplified light and shade. He had a pencil poised in his hand and stood looking down at a graph on his desk. Whether you read the graph from his side of the desk or mine the line on it went down.

At Camden Town George kissed me and got out of the train. I went home to Madame Beetle and the snails.

Tuesday morning. I woke up and groaned. I ached all over, and when I got out of bed I could scarcely walk. If Sandor was going to fling down the gauntlet again I didn’t know whether I had the strength to pick it up.

The bath was clean. The cooker was clean. What had happened to Sandor? He was as regular as clockwork, never overslept. Had I done him a serious injury? For a moment I hoped so, then I hoped not. I knocked on his door. No answer. I knocked again, looked at the threadbare musty carpet where my face had been the other day, heard a train go past beyond the common.

‘Who is it?’ said Sandor’s voice from inside, a little more distant than last time.

‘Me,’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Come in,’ he said. He was in bed wearing some sort of wild Islamic pyjamas. He had a sticking-plaster across his nose, his face was flushed, his moustache looked dismayed. There were stacks of foreign newspapers, a chessboard with the pieces standing on it in the middle of a game, flowers in an
art nouveau
vase that incorporated a naked lady. There were framed photographs of men with moustaches, sad-faced women, young Sandor in shorts and a jersey with some school team, a river with a bridge. The wallpaper was old and dark, the furniture was dark, the room had a dark and foreign smell. There was a thermometer in a glass on the bedside table.

‘Are you all right?’ I said. He looked as if he might be wearing a nightcap but wasn’t.

‘I am grotty a little,’ he said. ‘I have 39 degrees temperature, maybe a touch of influenza.’

‘Have you had breakfast?’ I said.

‘I have slightly vertigo,’ he said. ‘I stand up, room goes round, floor is slanty. Not hungry.’