Even now, with no sprayhoppers to be seen, the doctor did not doubt his general accuracy. On countless other, more mildly sloping beaches of the coast there would be many active colonies. He’d seen them himself, many times in recent years, on the Mu and at Tiger Crab Edge. It made no difference that he was not there today to witness them or endow them with a consciousness. (‘They couldn’t give a damn about the scenery, these little chaps.’) It was still a disappointment, though, to find that, on this shore at least, Pseudogryllidus pelagicus had disappeared.
Joseph’s disappointment was not wholly scientific, despite his long-term fondness for the creatures and their connivance in his doctorate. The fantasy that he had nurtured since he’d watched Celice in bed that morning demanded sprayhoppers. They were his Valentine. They were his single rose. They were erotica. If he were to place Celice back amongst the dunes at Baritone Bay where they had once made love, so memorably, so hauntingly, so awkwardly, then first he had to lure her to the beach. So far, achieved. Though by a painful route. But then he needed some strategy more serpentine to take her from the melancholy of the charred remains into the clutching frolic of his arms. He’d need a Venus ladder of deceit, step over step. Something that was more discreet than kissing her or bursting into that old song she had loved, the words of which he could hardly recall. He’d thought the sprayhoppers would be his collaborators once again. He’d pick some off her white T-shirt, out of her hair, blow once more into her hand, set the little creatures flying through the air, and then, perhaps (an innocent progression), drop his spaniel tongue on to her open palm. (‘Another go. Blow wet.’) Would she then allow his hand to push into her black wool coat?
But now unfeeling nature had thrown up a beach too steep for Valentines. This Venus ladder had had its middle rung removed. Time, though, had not destroyed the light. The universe had not expanded quite so fast. Nor had it robbed the spreading breakers of their sorcery. His wife, ahead of him, calf deep, her trousers up around her knees, was burnished, thinned and immatured by sunshine bouncing off the sea, the silver flattered by the gold. A fillet of her hair fell loose across her face, picked up and dropped by a conspiring breeze. A nape of neck. The waist-enhancing sacados. The tugging whiteness of her underclothes. The bottoms of her trousers wet with sea. A woman dressed in black and white; a landscape dressed in blue. No wonder Joseph was enhanced. Had Celice looked round at what was dogging her, she’d have as usual to give its Latin name as homo erectus or homo semens. Its common name bone slave or love-gone-wild or thrall.
‘Let’s go. On to Baritone,’ her husband said, once they had walked the whole length of the beach and she was turning to retrace their route. He spoke as lightly as he could, blocking her. He tugged her jacket lapels.
‘What for?’ Celice raised an eyebrow. Her husband was too breathless and attentive. She didn’t need a cricket on her palm to read his mind.
‘I think the tides might run more lightly there,’ he said. ‘We have to see at least one sprayhopper now that we’ve driven out. There has to be a colony on the bay. Surely.’
‘We have to? Why the we? You go. Anyway, it’s rocky on the bay. You’ve less chance finding any there than here.’ Celice’s feet and back were aching. Her shoulders and her wrists were stiff. Her heart was full of Festa. She would rather sit down on the shelf of shells and pebbles and watch the breakers for the afternoon than risk the vagaries of sex. But Joseph tugged her by the sleeve. She hated that. ‘Come on,’ he repeated. ‘We’ll have our picnic there. Out of the wind. Who knows? We might persuade the dunes to sing.’
‘There is no wind.’
For once the air above the bay was crystal clear, no clouds to moan about, and even a visible horizon, eye-liner blue, where usually the trading of the ocean and the sky produced a grey mist. Good weather brings bad luck, as everybody knows. Misfortune is a hawk, most likely to surprise us when the visibility is good. Death likes blue skies. Fine weather loves a funeral. Wise, non-scientific folk would stay indoors on days like that, not walk along the coast, beyond the shelter even of a tree. The doctors of zoology were ill-informed. They didn’t understand the rigours of the natural world. If sprayhoppers could not survive the changes on the coast, then how and why should they?
12
On Thursday at eleven in the morning, Celice and Joseph’s mobile phone rang in the pocket of her jacket. Its body-smothered pulse was hardly audible. Insects could be louder and more persistent. Its batteries were running down. The ringing sent a feeding gull into the air, protesting at its interrupted meal with downward flagging wings, and half expecting to discover the rare treat of a fat cicada. It flapped and dithered above the corpses only for a moment. By the fourth trill of the phone the gull had dropped again on to Celice’s abdomen and was tugging at the lace of skin it had already picked and loosened. Her skin was tough. In two days she had lost her moistness and her elasticity.
The caller, Joseph’s secretary, let the mobile ring ten times — she was meticulous — then ten times more before she put her handset down. It was baffling and annoying that her boss had not shown up at the curriculum meeting that he himself had convened at the Institute for ten o’clock that morning. She’d already phoned his home and got no reply. She’d attempted to reach his wife, the mystical Celice, at the university. Also missing, from her seminar for senior biologists. Joseph’s secretary knew that she should not try to contact him on his mobile phone, except for ‘urgent things’. That had been his clear instruction. Well, this had been urgent. And alarming. Still was. The curriculum committee, including two vexed professors, a governor and a busy-bored official from the Education Consulate, all equally competitive in their impatience, had been demanding ‘updates’ and explanations by the minute. Now that she had failed to get an answer even from the mobile, all she could provide for the doctor’s guests, as they grew stern and restless in the conference room, was coffee and apologies. It was not like the doctor to be late or absent, she said. Ill-mannered, yes (she didn’t say). Remote. Distracted. But never late. You could always rely on his prompt and taciturn presence at meetings. At half past ten, at her suggestion, the committee drifted off, peeving and frowning at the secretary as they passed through her room to collect their coats and umbrellas. It was a rare event: the opportunity to tut at the director of the Institute without any fear of his uncompromising response.
The secretary had her usual rota of tasks to take her mind off the disruptions of her day. There were the departmental diaries to arrange, memos to be typed and sent, letters to be filed or redirected, redundancies to organize. Normally she’d activate the divert on the office phone till lunch so she could concentrate on all the paperwork and take grim pleasure in her unavailability. But cutting off her phone that day, she felt, wasn’t politic. At worst it could be taken as a snub towards her absent boss.
When she had tried to reach him on the phone, she had not sensed the ringing of an empty room. In her many years of making calls she’d developed the instinct for telling from the far end resonance if there was anybody there, not answering, ignoring her. There had been someone there, not answering, she’d thought, when she’d dialled the doctor’s mobile. Its arpeggio was no dead end. Somebody heard the ringing, could not reach the phone, was in the bath, or still in bed, or on the toilet stool. And would phone back.