‘Were you ever married?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. He opened his mouth and I thought he was going to say more but he closed it again. Then he said, ‘Were you?’
‘No,’ I said. I too opened my mouth, closed it again.
‘Turtles,’ I said, and shook my head.
‘Yes,’ said William. ‘Turtles.’
Suddenly it seemed to me quite incomprehensible that for the last fifteen years I’d been writing and illustrating Gillian Vole, Delia Swallow and that lot. Drawing birds was what got me into it. I was working at an art studio and I’d done a little advertising campaign with cartoon birds. Somebody said I ought to try children’s books and I sold my first one to Bill Sharpe. Delia Swallow’s Wedding, that was.
A little after ten o’clock we stopped somewhere near Swindon and topped up the petrol tank. We’d done about sixty-five miles, William said, and the tank took something over three gallons. That seemed to please him, getting twenty miles to the gallon. When the van was stopped and the engine switched off we could hear the turtles breathing.
When we turned off the M4 and drove through Chippenham and the other towns William was still shaving things too close on my side. I kept saying ‘Too close’ and being irritated at the sound of my voice and his having to be told. This wasn’t whatever he used to drive and this wasn’t the time when he used to drive it, it was here and now and us and the turtles, damn it. There was something insulting about it, like having a man continually call you by the name of the woman he used to be with.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Now. Tonight. This week, this month, this year. Turtles. Us. Ford Transit 90, 18 Cwt.’
‘Yes,’ said William. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ He knew what I meant. He changed the poise of his head, brought his neck up out of his shoulders. ‘It’s not too bad actually, this,’ he said. ‘In-between is really where I feel best. Neither here nor there.’
‘There isn’t any in-between,’ I said. ‘Any place you pass through is this moment’s here. In-between is an illusion.’
‘Thanks very much,’ he said. ‘You’ve just invalidated most of my life.’
‘Mine as well,’ I said. There were reflecting studs in the road shaped like crabs without legs, each with two little eyes like crabs, continually advancing out of the darkness. Each one stared at me as the van swallowed it up. I stared back.
By 11.30 we’d done a little over a hundred miles and we stopped outside of Frome for sandwiches and coffee. The turtles breathed patiently. Crated and lying on their backs as they were they couldn’t even look up at the ceiling of the van. Their ocean smell seemed fainter now, mixed with the petrol fumes from the five-gallon container. The three plastrons were pale in the light of the torch, looked heraldic: three plastrons supine on a field Ford Transit. ‘Navigare necesse est. Vivere non est necesse.’
I’ve seen films of newly hatched turtles racing to the sea, whole fleets of them almost flying over the sand in their rush to the water. These three lay on their backs ponderous with the finding in them, passively waiting. Looking at them I couldn’t think there was any expectation in them. When they felt themselves once more in ocean they would simply do what turtles do in ocean, their readiness was whole and undiminished in them. If permitted to live they would navigate by the sun, by chemical traces in the water, by the imprint in their genes of an ancient continent now sundered. They were compacted of finding, finding was embodied in them. There were the five gallons of petrol. I thought of the turtles burning in silence.
I got out of the van. The rain had stopped. I stood by the van, leant my forehead against the cool wet metal. The crab reflectors in the road looked at me or not as cars went past or didn’t. In the pocket of my mac was the Caister two-stone. It must have been there from the last time I wore the mac, I hadn’t put it there today.
33 William G
The sky was clearing, a full moon appeared in a ragged opening in the clouds. There’d be a spring tide then, would it be in or out? I felt as if I knew about tides, felt as if I remembered them.
‘I’ve never told you that Polperro is the place where I was born,’ I said to Neaera.
‘Good God,’ she said. ‘But when you were a child surely it wasn’t how it is now?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We left when I was a year old and I’ve never been back since. My mother never talked about it much. Why’d you choose it?’
‘It was real once but it isn’t any more,’ said Neaera. ‘It’s souvenirs and cream teas and a box with a slot for money to preserve the character of the old Cornish fishing village. The turtles may be headed for extinction but they’re real, they work. When we put them in the sea they’ll do real turtle work.’
‘We can’t magic the whole world with three turtles,’ I said.
‘We’d need more?’ said Neaera. ‘Would a dozen do it?’ We both laughed.
My mother never had said much about Polperro. She had no stories of the pilchard fishery, the huers signalling from the shore to the seine boats and that sort of thing. She was born in Calstock where her father worked at an arsenic factory until he died of it. In those days the only protection they had was lint to cover the nostrils and a handkerchief over that. My mother remembered the trees all grey and blighted near the works and the way it smelled on foggy days. She was living at home and teaching in a school but when her father died she left Calstock. Her two younger brothers were working by then, her mother had died earlier. She came to Polperro because she liked the sound of the name and she wanted to be near the sea. She used to remember the jackdaws walking on the quay among the gulls and the fishermen, how they looked as if they might speak.
She became a waitress at a tea-shop. She used to say that was the year she gave up school-teaching, Methodism and arsenic all at once. She met my father soon after and in two years she was a widow living in London with a year-old son. She bought a tobacconist-newsagent business in Fulham and then she used to get books out of the library and read about Cornwall. She liked legends and folklore. I remember her telling me about the spirit of Tregeagle who howled when the hounds of the Devil were after him and was finally sent away to weave ropes of sand by the edge of the sea. I remember how she used to say that part: ‘Forever weaving ropes of sand that crumbled in his hands and the wind blew them away.’
When I think of her seeing the jackdaws walking on the quay I seem to see them with her eyes and I can see the rest of the scene as well, the grey sky over the sea and the headlands, the white-and-black-and-grey gulls with yellow beaks and yellow staring eyes, the fisherman solid and heavy in the grey light with scales and barrows, the boats rocking at their moorings or standing on their legs. I never see it sunny, always grey. I’ve never told anyone about my mother’s jackdaws. My three uncles are dead, I have cousins in Cornwall I’ve never looked up. The house in Fulham where we lived over the shop until my mother died was close to where I live now but it’s been pulled down, there’s a block of flats there now. The road where my father went over the cliff was on the other side of Polperro, we’d not be seeing it this trip.