‘It’s not the best of lives,’ he said. ‘It’s like living in the gutter of a motorway, feeding off tyre-mites, from speeding cars.’
‘The seashore’s better than a motorway. It’s lovely here. It’s beautiful,’ Celice replied. She’d never found a place more beautiful. She’d never been obsessed like this before.
Joseph shook his head. He’d always shake his head when she was fanciful. He’d shake his head at her for almost thirty years. ‘It’s beautiful for us. Zoologists have all the fun. They’ve no idea, these little guys. They only eat and hop and die. Even after dark. Whenever it’s high tide. Most of them only last a day or two. Kaput! The gulls and jetfish get them, if they escape the waves. It’s jump, jump, jump, and salt nits for the ones that survive. They couldn’t give a damn about the scenery.’ He picked crickets off his clothes and dropped them on the sand. ‘Sometimes I wonder what they’re for. They have no point.’
‘They seem to keep you entertained,’ she said.
‘Ah, yes. That’s what evolution has been for, to keep the zoologists happy.’
Joseph leaned across and took two crickets off her collar and another from her hair. This was the first romantic moment of their fife. He found a final cricket, caught in her clothes, and placed it on his palm. ‘Another go, Cecile,’ he said. ‘Blow wet.’
For the next thirty years Celice would mock Joseph for this first courting speech: ‘Blow wet, Cecile.’ She would perfect quite a comic anecdote to torture him. She reproduced his voice, the little lectures that he gave, his uninvited spit (their first exchange of body fluid), the uncorrected insult of her misheard name. She was Cecile for him until he was reproved later that evening by Festa.
‘Your father and his sprayhoppers were the most unromantic creatures I’d ever met,’ she’d say, when her daughter, then eight years old, first demanded to know how her parents had met. ‘I should have drowned him there and then. He could have kissed me if he’d wanted to. Instead, I got. ’ and here she would present her parody of Joseph ‘. “The marine cricket is a beetle, actually. Fully equipped. You see the double set of defunct wings, its antennae and its segmented abdomen? Not boring you, I hope. It’s not a cricket at all, in point of fact. I do wish scientists would take more care with names, Cecile.” ’ This was a story that their daughter loved.
Actually, Celice had been oddly charmed at the time by Joseph’s revelations on Pseudogryllidus pelagicus and touched that he had bothered even to misremember her name. She was flattered that he had shared his studies with her. It felt as if they were exchanging intimacies.
But most of all she liked his playful trick of showing how the sprayhopper could launch itself at will, his will. This was so typical of him. This was the man’s appeal. He was a lurking conjuror. Not worth a second glance, you’d think, until he pulled his doves and rabbits from his sleeves, until he startled everyone with song, or challenged them with riddles, or sent a stone-dead insect flying through the air with just a puff of breath.
He was still pondering the sprayhoppers’ eccentricities when he and Celice began to walk, ankle deep in flushing water, amongst the living filters, the molluscs and the siphons, back along the shore towards the study house, for lunch. The selvage of the tide was cold and phlegmy. All along the shore the drenching sand was tossing crickets in the air.
11
1.20 p.m.
Joseph and Celice did not attempt to leave the ruins of the study house by the garden wall on their day off. They were too middle-aged and stiff for clambering. The flute bushes below the wall, through which Joseph (with Celice, belatedly, at his heels) had crashed all those years before, were now impenetrable. Besides, they understood too well the mantra of historians: the past can be revisited but only fools repeat it. Joseph, it’s true, would play the fool that afternoon if given half a chance. Why else was he walking with Celice towards the dunes except to be a bad historian? But he would not steer his wife across the wall and force her through the flute bushes towards their past just yet. That would be sentimental and transparent, as well as bruising. He was not fool enough to think their youth, in all its details, could be repeated quite so readily. Nor was he blind to Celice’s inner turbulence. The study house was not an easy place for her. Her mood was sombre, close to tears.
They took, instead, the unromantic route, through what had been the yard gate. The gate itself — wrought-iron irises, made in the 1920s, and valuable — had been stolen off its hinges years before. Most of the granite flagstones had been lifted from the yard. But the steps through the undergrowth were still in place, though collapsed in parts and slippery with vegetation. Celice held on to Joseph’s shoulders as they descended in single file towards the old farm road. It was the first time she’d volunteered a touch all day.
No doctor of zoology could be entirely unprepared, of course, for the changes on the coast. These two had read the newspaper reports and seen estate plans. They’d signed petitions to protest against the ‘luxury development of valued public grounds’. Yet, even without the intercession of architects and builders, they would not have expected the foreshore and its hinterland to remain exactly as it had once been. Zoologists have mantras of their own: change is the only constant; nothing in the universe is stable or inert; decay and growth are synonyms; a grain of sand is stronger and more durable than rock. If cities could be transformed by wear and tear and shifting tastes, despite their seeming permanence, then something as soft and passing as the landscape could be flattened and reshaped in just one night, by just one storm.
So they did not expect to discover the old farm road unchanged after thirty years of storms. It would not have a surfacing of manac husks or a garnishing of cattle dung. There were no working farms or fields any longer in the neighbourhood. The only crops these days were mortgages and weeds. It was most likely that the road would be pinched and overgrown like the magic and neglected lane of fairy tales. There would be an overhang of pines and heavy shade. Death’s ladder to the underworld. Their way might well be blocked by rotting trunks and thickets. Instead, they came out of the trees into a harsh and blinding sky, too tall and blue and punitive, above a shocking corridor of clearances. Construction had begun. The soil was stripped of trees in a swathe of flattened, tyre-pocked earth, twenty metres wide. Great stones and roots were sheared and pushed aside like dry moraines as if an earthen glacier had carved a passage through the land. These were the early, heartless makings of the service drive which, once surfaced, would give access to the lorries and the builders. Later, the drive would be upgraded to a civic motorway to serve the seven hundred homes of Salt Pines, the landscaped, gated enclave (‘convenient for both the airport and the city’) that would, within a year, begin to house the region’s richest and most nervous businessmen.
Celice and Joseph shook their heads. Such were the miracles of man. They walked a few metres along the intact edges of the corridor but then retraced their steps when they were blocked by mounds of debris. Where should they cross? Where was the public path? ‘Somebody should complain,’ said Joseph, knowing that the somebody would not be him. ‘Where are we supposed to go?’
They had to shade their eyes against the sun to search the far side of the clearance for a footpath sign or some clue of how they could proceed towards the coast. There was no remaining evidence of any of the summer cottages that had once lined the farm road. The string of small freshwater ponds, breached and punctured by the bulldozers, had either drained away or had been buried under soil. Occasionally, from the direction of the airport road, there was the harsh percussion of a dumper truck delivering its clinker or its gravel for the new highway, or granite aggregate for the building raft on which Salt Pines would float. The sand alone would not endure the weight of all that taste and money.