Turtle Diary (8 page)

We shook hands and parted. Going home on the tube I was astonished at the number of paint- and ink-stains on the shirt I was wearing.

Neaera H. The penny didn’t drop until a few minutes after we’d parted, then I remembered the Gillian Vole books, Delia Swallow, Geoffrey Mouse and all the others I used to read to the girls.
Delia Swallow’s Housewarming
was Cyndie’s favourite for a long time, she never tired of it. This must be the same Neaera H., she looked too much like a writer-illustrator not to be one.

Back at the shop I went to Picture Books in the Juvenile section and looked at a copy of
Delia Swallow’s Housewarming.
No photograph or biographical details on the back flap. All it said was that Delia Swallow, though the stories were written for children, had long been a favourite with readers of all ages, as had Gillian Vole etc. I looked at the first page:

‘Just any eaves won’t do,’ said Delia Swallow to her husband John when they were looking for a nest.

‘I’d like eaves on the sunny side and with a view.’
‘Field or forest?’ said John.
‘Field with forest at the edge I think,’ said Delia.
‘Riverside or hill?’ said John.
‘Riverside with a hill behind,’ said Delia.
‘Right,’ said John, and went to sleep.
He always kipped after lunch.

Ariadne and Cyndie always liked it that John Swallow kipped after lunch. In the evenings he usually dropped in for a pint
or two and a game of darts at the
Birds of a Feather,
after which:

He sometimes flew a little wobbly going home.

Strange. While I was married to Dora and living in Hampstead and working at the agency Neaera H. was writing those books. Now here we are, both of us alone and thinking turtle thoughts. At least I assume she’s alone. She looks as if she’s always been alone. Of course I’m seeing her out of alone eyes, I could well be wrong.

The turtles share a tank at the Zoo. I share a bath at Mrs Inchcliff’s. Hairy Mr Sandor. I taped a little sign to the bathroom wall:

PLEASE CLEAN BATH AFTER USING

Not that it’ll do much good. It’s not too bad really, he only baths a couple of times a week. Miss Neap baths daily and when she’s been before me the bathroom smells very blonde and militantly fragrant, as if mortality could be kept at bay by lavender in the same way that garlic repels vampires. If Dracula and Miss Neap were to have a go I think he’d be the one to come away with teeth marks in his throat.

When I had a bathroom of my own. I think about that sometimes. When I was an account executive. When I owned a house. When my daughters sat on my lap and I read to them. When they collected pebbles with me on the beach. Ariadne’s twenty now, Cyndie’s eighteen. I haven’t seen them for three years. I don’t know where they are.

The past isn’t connected to the future any more. When I lived with Dora and the girls the time I lived in, the time of me was still the same piece of time that had unrolled like a forward road under my feet from the day of my birth. That road and all the scenes along it belonged to me, my mind moved freely up and down it. Walking on it I was still connected to my youth and strength, the time of me was of one piece with that time. Not
now. I can’t walk on my own time past. It doesn’t belong to me any more.

There’s no road here. Every step away from Dora and the girls leads only to old age and death whatever I do. No one I sleep with now has known me young with long long time and all the world before me. Rubbish. I remember how it was lying beside Dora in the night. O God, I used to think, this is it and this is all there is and nothing up ahead but death. The girls will grow up and move out and we’ll be left alone together. I remember that very well. It’s the thisness and thisonlyness of it that drives middle-aged men crazy.

Why turtles for God’s sake? Helping them find what they’re looking for won’t bloody help me. And now I’m lumbered with it. I’ll have to find out what it costs to hire a van. I wonder if the two of us can get the turtles on to the trolley. She doesn’t look that strong. We’ll need a board or something for a ramp. Maybe I should build crates for them, they’d be easier to handle that way. I hate details. And now it’s got to be Polperro just to make life more difficult. I know there’ll be some kind of physical problem like having to climb a million steps or lower ourselves by ropes or the tide will be out and we’ll have to drag the turtles across a mile of mud in the dark. What on earth can Polperro mean to her?

I saw a film years ago,
The Swimmer,
with Burt Lancaster. In it he was an American advertising man whose mind had slipped out of the present. He thought he still had a wife and children and a house but it was all gone. The film began with a golden late-summer afternoon. He turned up at the swimming pool of some friends who hadn’t seen him for a long time. They looked at him strangely, he wasn’t part of their present time any more. While he was there it occurred to him that there were so many swimming pools in that part of Connecticut that he could almost swim all the way home. So he went from pool to pool, public and private, swimming across Fairfield County meeting people from different bits of his life whilst swimming home as he thought. And wherever he went people became angry and disturbed, he didn’t belong in their present time, they didn’t
want him in it. At the end of the film he was huddled in the doorway of the empty locked house that had been his while rain came down and he heard the ball going back and forth on the empty tennis court and the voices of his daughters who were gone. Dora and I saw the film together.

No swimming pools for me. Just a bath that I have to clean Mr Sandor’s pubic hair out of while Miss Neap’s lavender scent marches up and down the walls like a skeleton in armour. The water is not relaxing. Or indeed it may be relaxing, may be totally relaxed but I’m not. I don’t want to be naked with anybody now, especially myself.

Haven’t smoked for three days. Busy night and day not smoking. Already I can climb stairs better but that’s not much of a life. With smoking one has a life while dying. How did the Greeks ever run a whole culture without it? Maybe that’s why there was so much homosexuality. The turtles are no substitute for smoking. I’m tired of playing with pebbles and sucking wine gums. Breathing straight air seems an empty exercise. I may kill somebody if I don’t smoke. Mr Sandor’s life is hanging by a thread if he only knew it.

Shamans in a state of ecstasy fly, travel long distances or think they do, say they do. When 1 was between twelve and thirteen I was lying in bed one night not asleep, not awake, and all at once I was looking down at myself from the ceiling. It wasn’t a dream, I don’t know what it was. I don’t know anything about ecstasy. It happened another time that year too. I was standing by the window looking at myself lying in bed. Twice in my life I’ve been out of myself in that way. I don’t think I’ve been into myself yet.
In
myself like a prisoner. But not into my self.

Ocean. When I think that word I want to be immersed in it and at the same time contain it all. Great green deeps of ocean. A medium of motion and being. And of course the sharks. Walking on the ground is not comparable to that underwater flying, green water touching every part.

I walk a lot at night now, sit on benches in squares feeling the dark on my face, looking at the street lamps. Most of
the other people on the street are young. I don’t want to sit in my room. I don’t want to do anything particularly.

Actually we’re all swimmers, we’ve all come from the ocean. Some of us are trying to find it again.

Eliade says in his book on shamanism:

In the beginning, that is, in mythical times, man lived at peace with the animals and understood their speech. It was not until after a primordial catastrophe, comparable to the ‘Fall’ of Biblical tradition, that man became what he is today – mortal, sexed, obliged to work to feed himself, and at enmity with the animals. While preparing for his ecstasy and during it, the shaman abolishes the present human condition and, for the time being, recovers the situation as it was in the beginning. Friendship with animals, knowledge of their language, transformation into an animal are so many signs that the shaman has re-established the ‘paradisal’ situation lost at the dawn of time.

That’s the crux of it: abolishing the present human condition. Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying. They’re gone and they come back with answers. Could I abolish the human condition? Could I swim, experience swimming, finding, navigating, fearlessness, unlostness? Could I come back with an answer? The unlostness itself would be the answer, I shouldn’t need to come back.

More and more I feel that I ought not to have forced myself into that man’s turtle thoughts. Perhaps he wasn’t even going to do anything about them, perhaps I’ve precipitated a harmless fantasy into an active crisis. None of us can be sufficiently sensitive. We feel our own pain wonderfully well but seldom attribute agony to others. When we were talking there were moments when his face made me think of the John Clare poem about the badger hunted out of his den by men and dogs and taken to the town and made to fight until he was dead. There’s a line in which he ‘cackles, groans, and dies’. William G. looked as if he might be going to cackle.

I wonder about myself. Why didn’t I simply write a turtle letter to
The Times
and let it go at that? Certainly I’ve felt like taking some kind of action but I’m not sure I’ll feel that way when the time comes. And now I’ve committed myself with this stranger. I have breached my own privacy as well as his and almost I wish I hadn’t. How on earth are we going to get through all those hours together driving to and from Polperro? I don’t think either speech or silence will be comfortable. I feel terribly uneasy about the whole thing. I haven’t even considered any of the physical problems of getting the turtles into the ocean. I haven’t been practical about it at all.

I’m
not
committed actually. At any rate I needn’t be. For years now I’ve had only myself and I must be economical with that self. I can simply say that I hadn’t quite understood what we were talking about when he rings me up. Or I can be up to
my neck in work which is always true. I’m rather a cheerful person as long as the minutes of my days buzz at home like well-domesticated bees. When I come and go too much I’m afraid that they may fly away to swarm elsewhere. I think there still are people in Norfolk who tell the bees when the owner of the hive has died, even pin a bit of crape to the hive so the bees can mourn. When they’ve done their mourning they get on with making honey. One only owns the hive I suppose, never really the bees. Not like cattle.

Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it like Ahab with the White Whale. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone. Even in matriarchal societies I doubt that there were ever female Beowulfs. Women lie with gods and demons but they don’t go looking for monsters to fight with. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew but the Minotaur was his business. There are of course many men who walk in safe paths all their lives but they often seem a little apologetic, as if they think themselves not quite honourable. And there are others, quiet men, obscure, ungifted, who yet require satisfaction of some grim thing that ultimately kills them. William G. has found some monster and … What? Almost I think he’s swallowed it. It’s alive and eating inside him, much worse than if it had swallowed him.

There, I’m worrying about him. I’ve breached my privacy badly. There’s not enough of me for that, I have no self to spare. I must keep my bees.

Sometimes I think that this whole thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable. The intolerable is like H. G. Wells’s invisible man, it has to put on clothes in order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a mirror but my imagination doesn’t go that far.

It’s been at least twenty-five years since I read
Crime and Punishment.
Now I’m reading it again. I’d forgotten that when Raskolnikov murdered the old lady pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, he also killed her half-sister Lizaveta. Lizaveta was ‘a soft gentle creature, ready to put up with anything, always willing, willing to do anything.’ When she came back to the flat just after Raskolnikov had killed the old woman he had to kill her as well.

Alyona Ivanovna and Lizaveta always
do
live together, always die together. You try to kill some aspect of the intolerable and you kill the gentle and the good as well. Over and over. And whoever kills some form of the intolerable becomes himself a manifestation of it, to be killed with
his
good and gentle by someone else. Two by two up the gangway to the ark. But the waters will never recede.

I’m intolerable. It’s got into me, when I feed me I feed it. There’s only one way to kill it.

The idea of ringing up a van place and hiring a van and driving all those miles is so heavy I can hardly lift my head up. Bloody details. Too heavy. Too much.

It was past three in the morning and I was staring into the green murk of Madame Beetle’s tank. The plants are all shrouded in long green webs of algae, there are white and ghostly bits of old meat hanging about blooming with mould, the sides of the tank are very dim. It’s like the setting for a tiny horror film but Madame Beetle doesn’t seem to mind. I can’t think now how it could have occurred to me that I might write a story about her. Who am I to use the mystery of her that way? Her swimming is better than my writing and she doesn’t expect to get paid for it. If someone were to buy me, have me shipped in a tin with air-holes, what would I be a specimen of?

I went to the bookshelves, got
The Duchess of Malfi
, sat down in my reading chair, turned to the scene where the executioners enter
‘with a coffin, cords, and a bell’
. I read the Duchess’s speech: