Had we anything new on sea turtles other than the Bustard, she asked. Her voice was as I expected, low and husky. She spoke as if she’d come a long way from wherever she’d been in her mind and couldn’t stop long.
No, I said. Nothing else new. Had she read Carr?
Yes, she had. She looked directly at me when I mentioned Carr as if registering the fact that I knew of him. Then it seemed her mind went elsewhere, she thanked me and left the shop.
Pity, in a way. If she’d been young and pretty would I have tried to extend the conversation? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really want to talk to a woman who’s accumulated the sort of things in her head that I have in mine. And I haven’t had much interest in women at all for a while, not in a realistic way. Fantasies, yes. But not actualities, not practicalities. For a time after the break-up I went to bed with as many girls as I could but nothing lasted and I didn’t want it to. They wanted attention paid to them, attention paid to a present they were part of and a future that belonged to them, and my mind was elsewhere.
I used to want to find someone to listen to Chopin with. Now I don’t even like to hear Chopin. Nor Scarlatti. Nor the Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven quartets. Not even Bach. I haven’t listened to the B Minor Mass for more than a year. The idea of music has seemed totally foreign to me for some time now. I can’t think any more why anyone would want to bother with sounds in that way. I can stand on the platform in the Underground and listen to the wincing of the rails as the train comes in, listen to the rumble as it goes. I can listen abstractly to the football players on the common, trains going by, aeroplanes overhead. Raw sound I don’t mind but music has nothing to do with me any more. And it’s not as if I can meditate or anything like that. It’s just that plain sounds and silence are all I want to hear.
On my Friday half-day I went to the Zoo again. One of the keepers in the Aquarium came out of a PRIVATE door and I asked him about the turtles. The big ones have been there twenty or thirty years, he said. I asked him if it was possible to look at the tank from the other side. Yes, he said, and took me into PRIVATE.
One had to go up a few steps and climb through a hole in the wall, then there were planks across the back of the tank. It was brightly lit, had a backstage feeling. The turtles looked different seen from above.
‘That’s not the colour they’d be in natural light,’ the keeper said. ‘Their colour fades here.’
‘Would it be a big job moving them out of here?’ I said.
‘We do it sometimes when we clean the tank,’ he said. ‘Put them in the filters. Bit awkward getting them through the hole, you have to mind their jaws. But it’s not too difficult.’
‘Suppose,’ I said, ‘some sort of turtle freak decided to steal the turtles and put them back in the ocean. What would he need for the job?’
‘You’re talking about me,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve wanted to do. I’ve told them we ought to let the big ones go, replace them with little ones. We go fishing off Southampton for specimens two or three times a year, and I’ve said why don’t we take the big turtles along and put them into the Channel. Apart from wanting them to go free I’m tired of cleaning up after them. But they don’t want to know, they’re not interested in the turtles here.’
‘Wouldn’t transport be a problem?’ I said. ‘Don’t they have to be kept from drying out? And isn’t the Channel too cold for them?’
‘Funny,’ he said. ‘You’re the second this week that’s asked me about turtle transport. A lady was chatting to me about the turtles the other day. Sometimes no one asks about them for six months at a stretch. Drying out’s no problem on a trip as short as from here to Southampton. Put them on wet sacks, they’d even be all right without anything for that distance. I don’t think the water’d bother them. Cold water makes them a little sluggish but I think they’d backtrack up the North Atlantic Current till they hit the Canary Current or the Gulf Stream. I bet they’d be in home waters in three months.’
‘The lady,’ I said, ‘was she rather arty-intellectual looking? Husky voice?’
‘That’s the one,’ he said. ‘Friend of yours?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Then there isn’t all that much to it, is there? Just a matter of hiring a van and taking along a trolley or something. But the place must be guarded at night?’ I wondered when he’d start looking at me hard and ask me about the questions I was asking.
‘Securicor,’ he said. ‘But they make their rounds on a regular schedule. That’s no problem.’
Was he inviting me to have a go at it? I liked the look of him, he seemed a right sort of man. Suddenly it all seemed hugely possible, I began to go trembly. ‘It’s been nice talking to you,’ I said, and got his name and telephone number. George Fairbairn. He’s the Head Keeper. It seemed almost too much to think about at the moment, almost as if it were thrusting itself upon me. And what had she in mind for the turtles? Probably the same sort of lark or at least the same sort of fantasy. Funny, two minds full of turtle thoughts.
12 Neaera H
Children in the sunlight and the green shade of the square. They seem shaped of light, of silver air or green shade, changing substance as they move from one to the other. Their little shouts and cries are like coloured dots that make a picture of noise but looked at closely the dots are coloured silence. High-legged and quick the children wade in twos and threes through light and shade like shore birds.
What I do is not as good as what an oyster-catcher does. Writing and illustrating books for children is not as good as walking orange-eyed, orange-billed in the distance on the river, on the beaches of the ocean, finding shellfish. And of course they fly as well which must be worth a good deal. Oyster-catchers fit into the world, their time fits. I don’t know how long they live. Herring gulls can live as long as twenty-eight years. The eyes of herring gulls are utterly pitiless, have no pity even for the bird they’re part of. They seem not to be bird eyes but ocean eyes, yellow eyes of the ocean looking out of the bodies of birds.
The man in the bookshop who knew about Carr, his eyes too seemed other than of himself, seemed not to be seeing things on his behalf. It was as if he found himself always in strange houses looking out of the windows of rooms in which nothing was his. A tall hopeless-looking man with an attentive face and an air of fragile precision like a folding rule made of ivory. There was something in my memory: The Man in the Zoo, the David Garnett novella about the man who had himself locked up in a cage and exhibitedt as Homo sapiens. Not that he seems part of such a story but the idea of him has something of hapless patience in it.
George Fairbairn, the Head Keeper at the Aquarium, seemed quite willing to tell me anything I wanted to know about the turtles. I have the feeling that if I told him what’s in my mind he might even help me do it and of course that frightens me.
I can’t possibly do it alone. I’d need someone to handle the turtles and drive the van, I can’t do any part of it really except pay the expenses. There’d be the long drive to Cornwall, it would be night-time. I’d put them into the ocean at Polperro. The mystery of the turtles and their secret navigation is a magical reality, juice of life in a world gone dry. When I think of the turtles going into the ocean I think of it happening in that place that so badly needs new reality.