Not for me at all. On the other hand what was. For anybody. Nothing really. Not for her when she came out and not for him. Nor would my coming-out be for anyone whatever they might think. In that case why hold on to me. A futile gesture. Life went on, one couldn’t stop half way. I was getting angry. There was a redness silently exploding in my mind. Violence. Lovely. Bumpitty bump.
I was on the landing feeling quite wrenched and pulled about. Mr Sandor was one flight down, rubbing himself in various places and looking up at me with great concentration. Now he’s really going to be angry, I thought. I didn’t mind. I didn’t care if we killed each other.
Mrs Inchcliff came racing up the stairs. She’d never smoked, stairs were nothing to her even at sixty. ‘What’s happening?’ she said. ‘Why is everyone lying on the floor? Are you both all right?’
‘We have collision,’ said Sandor. ‘Down we tumble.’ He was still staring at me and I saw in his face that he saw in my face that I wasn’t afraid of him any more.
Later I drove the van back to VANS 4-U. Five hundred and fifteen miles without a dent or a scratch! I was tremendously impressed by that. The shape of the van was so different from the shape of me and my life, how had we managed to stick together without hitting anything for all those miles!
42 Neaera H
Something very slowly, very dimly has been working in my mind and now is clear to me: there are no incidences, there are only coincidences. When a photograph in a newspaper is looked at closely one can see the single half-tone dots it’s made of. There one sees the incidence of a single dot, there another and another. Thousands of them coinciding make the face, the house, the tree, the whole picture. Every picture is a pattern of coincidence unrecognizable in the single dot. Each incidence of anything in life is just a single dot and my face is so close to that dot that I can’t see what it’s part of. I shall never be able to stand back far enough to see the whole picture. I shall die in blind ignorance and rage.
The men who used to work in the hole in the street are gone, the hole is closed up. I don’t know if the street is different or not. In the shop where I’d seen the oyster-catcher on TV all the screens showed two men in sombreros shooting at each other with revolvers from behind rocks.
I passed an antique shop. There was a brown and varnished sea-turtle shell in the window. A black man — was he from the Caribbean? — was looking at it. He wore a white mac, it was a wet grey day. Next door was a fruiterer, there were oranges. The rain stopped, the sun came out into a gunmetal sky. ‘Well, yes,’ I said aloud. ‘Of course.’
The black man turned and looked at me. ‘Tortuguero,’ he said. He said it like a password but made no secret sign. He said it because he needed to say the name aloud just there and then to me. I nodded, felt dizzy with my face against the dot. How did he know that I knew where Tortuguero was? I shall never see the picture. I could grind my teeth and weep.
On my desk in the middle of the night does some tiny figure look at Madame Beetle and dream of setting her free? Is there any limit to smallness and largeness? Is it possible actually to hold an orange in the hand? Iron and wind are both grey. Would there be oyster-catchers in armour on the rooftops if I looked up?
The sea was wherever it was, and the turtles. It couldn’t be done again. Of those who did the launching there were no survivors. I passed an empty playground. The rocking horse was rocking, all its five seats empty.
I went to the Zoo, to the Aquarium. The turtle tank was empty, still being cleaned. I opened one of the PRIVATE doors, found George Fairbairn on the duckboards behind the fish tanks. There was a clean ocean smell, the illuminated water seemed like clear green time, the wood of the duckboards was like the wood in boats.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘they get off all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they must have done, unless you’ve heard any reports of turtles being picked up off the Cornish coast.’
‘Not so far,’ he said.
I had nothing to say but I felt safe on the boat-feeling wood in the green light of salt-water time.
‘All right?’ he said. ‘You look a little peaky. Fancy a cup of tea?’
‘I’d just like to stay here a while and look at the water,’ I said.
‘I’ll bring it here,’ he said.
Below me the leopard shark swam his aimless urgent round like an office boy. Twit, I thought.
George Fairbairn came back with the tea-tray, set it down on a plank. I’d never really looked at him closely, he didn’t compel attention. He was a very medium-looking man, neither tall nor short, neither dark nor fair, about my age. His face was just a plain face, cheerful and undemanding.
‘How do you stay cheerful?’ I said.
‘I don’t mind being alive,’ he said. He poured the tea, took a tin of tobacco out of his pocket, rolled a cigarette, lit it. ‘There’s nothing you can do about this, you know,’ he said. ‘Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn’t in us. It’s almost as if we’re put here on earth to show how silly they aren’t. I don’t mind. I just like being around them.’
I began to cry. I leant against him and sobbed.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, stroking my hair. ‘You needn’t hold back, these are all salt-water tanks.’
43 William G
There’s nothing like a little physical violence to make a man feel young again. I was half crippled from it. Sandor must have trodden heavily on my left foot, the next morning it was so tender and swollen that I could hardly put my weight on it. My ribs felt as if I’d been run over by a lorry, my left arm and shoulder weren’t working right, my neck was stiff and sore and the left side of my head felt soft.
The cooker was clean when I got to it to make breakfast but I was sure that was only because it was Sunday and Sandor was sleeping in. I doubted very much that I’d find it clean on Monday morning. I spent a quiet day with the newspapers, went to a Japanese film at the National Film Theatre in the evening, took a late walk. Harriet rang up while I was out but I didn’t phone her when I got home. I had Monday morning, the bath and the cooker on my mind. In bed I lay awake for a long time with fantasies of beating Sandor into a state of abject obedience but the fact was that I couldn’t do it. He was younger and bigger and stronger than I and he handled himself very well indeed. I thought of getting up earlier so as to be first at the bath and the cooker which would leave Miss Neap to follow him. She’d see to him. But that would be cheating.
Monday morning I woke up early. A grey and dreary morning with no hope in it. Things would always be the way they were, it said. Why struggle. I thought of the dawn wind over the ocean. ‘Out at sea the dawn wind/Wrinkles and slides,’ said Eliot. I took Four Quartets off the shelf and looked at East Coker. It begins with ‘In the beginning is my end.’ The line I’d remembered was at the end of Part I:
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
Towards the end of the poem I read:
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost