She looked down at the ring. Two diamonds flanking a very reasonably sized ruby. Harold hadn’t actually said that it wouldn’t collect dust but he’d implied it because he was an Expert. A Time and Motion Expert, and this, too, Nell found moving. He would make things work for her. She would catch buses, water her house plants correctly from underneath, stop singeing her eyebrows on the geyser…
‘Half past,’ called Larissa from the kitchen, and Nell shot into violent action. Her hair, that was the most important thing. Today it had to stay tidy. After all, it was a sort of lab she worked in, it was science… She brushed it out: green-gold, plumb-straight; hair she washed as often and as carelessly as her face, and began to fasten it on to her head. A rubber band, two clips, a pin…
And now, suddenly, as happened every morning, she was frantically late.
‘Oh God, let me catch my bus,’ she prayed, and threw the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the indigestion tablets into a straw basket, and swallowing a mouthful of brioche ran out into the street.
At once, she was blinded by summer. The tarmac shimmered, the pavement bit her feet; the street cat lay like a spent Ingres courtesan across the steps.
Nell shut her eyes, pierced by a desperate longing for her childhood summers. For the smell of decaying weed along the tide line (which, whatever people said, really was ozone). For the voluptuousness of sand between her toes; for rose-coloured cowries mysteriously special in a handful of common shells. For a man she could see coming out of the water (but this was hardly childhood?) shaking back his hair and laughing as he uncoiled the strands of seaweed round his feet. A man she hoped so much was Harold. Only, would Harold have allowed the seaweed to tangle round his feet? Wouldn’t he, being an Expert, have seen and avoided it?
‘Oh no, my bus,’ yelled Nell, and, too late, began to run, clutching her diamond ring with her free thumb and feeling already the first dreaded slither of what would soon be the waterfall of her descending hair…
On the other side of London, hemmed in between fifteen volumes of a decomposing German dictionary and something called Wissenschaftliche Padagogie, sat Toby Sandford, bent over his dissertation on Animal Symbolism in Sanskrit Literature and trying to extract from his pocket, in total silence, a vinegar-flavoured potato crisp.
The college library was all-enveloping, silent, fusty, with marble busts of surprisingly unclad scholars placed at intervals between the tomes, but Toby wasn’t fooled. This was one of those rare days when all the rules were broken and the whole country ran riot with summer.
He extracted a crisp, closed his eyes and gave himself over to an emotion for which he was really rather young: intense and violent nostalgia. He saw the sea as it had been on the limitless, empty beaches of his native Northumberland, not blue but a cool and pearly grey; saw the entrancing pink legs of oyster catchers glint in the sun, saw a girl (but this was moving out of childhood) come out of the water, letting a skein of seaweed trail in her hand. Now she was bending down, biting with delicate pleasure the bladders of wrack between her teeth. Girls always bit into seaweed…
Or did they? He played the last reel through again in his mind, hoping against hope that the girl was Margaret, with whom he had what was generally termed a relationship. But would Margaret have bitten into a piece of seaweed? Wouldn’t she even there, coming out of the sea in the swimsuit whose straps would not have worked loose, been carrying her dissecting scissors, her scalpel?
‘Overwork,’ said Toby to himself. He’d been determined to finish the thesis for his doctorate before he went away, and usually an English summer was easy enough to ignore. But today…
Suddenly he closed his book, bundled up his papers. He’d take a day off, take Margaret out. To the Zoo? To the Aquarium! And immediately an explosion of images ran through his brain. ‘Sabrina fair… under the glassy, cool, translucent wave…’ ‘Full fathom five thy father lies…’ He saw ferns and fronds and fins and was suddenly and devastatingly happy.
Margaret, when he ran her to ground in the Zoology lab, saw only an interruption to a sensibly planned day. She sat in her white lab coat, bent over the hepatic portal system of an extremely pickled dog fish, lifting with calm forceps the fragile threads of empty arteries, snipping unruffled among clusters of organs as delicate as Lilliputian grapes. Like Toby, she was doing post-graduate research. Unlike him, she never felt as he did, even after he took a First at Oxford, that the research was doing him.
In the end, however, she took off her overall, resigned, composed, because he was nothing but a child, really, and needed humouring, and went to fetch the large, cool, plastic handbag which had in it all the things that Toby never had — clean handkerchiefs, door keys that really fitted doors — and still smelling slightly but impressively of formalin, agreed to go with him to the Aquarium…
There was nothing impulsive about the visit of Harold, with his mother, to the Zoo. It had been carefully planned for days and the route they were to follow memorized from Harold’s map. So far all had gone well, but it was with a certain amount of relief that Harold went up the steps to the Aquarium. The llamas, overcome by the unusual heat, had shown a disconcerting amorousness and the baboons — well, baboons were like that. But it was his pride to spare Mother, who lived alone in Teddington, the least unpleasantness, and there was always something calmingly ethereal about fish.
After the heat outside, the dark, columned halls of the Aquarium were marvellously cool. Margaret and Toby were proceeding tank by tank along its length, for Margaret was above all a systematic girl. A fleet of bass floated motionless in a forest of bamboo. Flounders performed strange and dreamy acrobatics with their bulging eyes. Dust-speckled bubble stars illumined a black heaven beneath which a deeply placid carp smiled as he swam.
‘In a cool curving world he lies and ripples with dark ecstasies,’ said Toby happily, and Margaret, who was beginning to despair of ever curing him of quoting pointless bits of poetry, sighed.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘they have an interesting reproductive system,’ and told him serious things about whitish tubercules and elongated papillae.
‘Oh,’ said Toby, unaccountably cast down, and moved on. An octopus with rows of suckers like milky pearls, gave them an enfant terrible grin from a Stonehenge of sea-washed rocks.
‘Their pancreas is excretory, did you know?’ said Margaret, and elaborated.
‘Well, I don’t like it,’ said a sharp, elderly voice beside them, and Toby, who didn’t either, who wanted the octopus entire and lovable, turned round in sympathy. But the woman, who appeared even on this burning summer day to be clutching a plastic raincoat, was suffering from a different obsession. ‘Nothing will make me believe that the girl will settle down and make you a good wife. I tell you, I heard her talking to my begonias when you brought her to tea. No self control, she said they had. And always barefoot with those straw baskets. An invitation to thieves.’
‘She is very willing to learn,’ said Harold calmly, and looked down at the luminous dial of his watch, pleased to observe that they were comfortably within schedule.
‘Oh!’ said Toby, suddenly and deeply harrowed. In front of them a hopelessly narcissistic lung fish alone in its tank floated constantly upwards to kiss its own reflection in the moment that it broke.
‘That’s tragedy,’ said Toby, ‘to be in love with yourself because there’s no one else.’