Turtle Diary Read online

  Neaera had sandwiches and a flask of coffee in a carrier bag, pillows and blankets as well. She seemed about as nervous as I was.

  ‘I’m not used to the width of this thing,’ I said. ‘It would be a help if you’d tell me when we’re too close to the parked cars or the kerb.’ We started off for the Zoo.

  ‘Too close,’ she said about every two minutes. I nodded and swung away, trying to think of anything I might have forgotten. There were meant to be a spare tyre, tools and a jack somewhere in the van but I hadn’t thought to ask where they were. Never mind. The rain was a nice little bonus, just enough of it to make the windscreen wipers work smoothly. I liked that, it was cosy.

  George Fairbairn was on the lookout for us at the works gate, we left the crates with him and drove to a kebab house on the Finchley Road. They always play Greek music there but not too loud, just a pleasant background sound that gives privacy. I hate those places where there’s a shouting kind of silence in which people make display conversation for the people listening at the other tables.

  It was still light outside, the rain was coming down nicely and it was shadowy enough in the restaurant for the candle at our table to have some effect. I felt all right. Atoms speeding to infinity aren’t necessarily lost, are they. They’re just going where they’re going. There’s a thing that happens in my mind, a foreshadow of a waiting thought. Sometimes I know it’s a thought that’ll fill me with dread and then the dread comes before the thought. Sometimes I sense round the corner an easy thought and the ease comes. What was it, I wanted to hold on to it. Going where they’re going, that was it. Things and people are as they are, where they are. Dora and Ariadne and Cyndie are where they are, Neaera and I and the turtles. That’s all, nothing to be afraid of. One needn’t even hold on to that, no holding on. Just let go of the terror, don’t hold on to the terror. Simple if only I could remember that.

  ‘Where is it on the menu?’ said Neaera, and she laughed. I’d said I was going to have the doner kebab.

  ‘What’s funny about doner kebab?’ I said.

  ‘I was laughing because I asked you where it was on the menu,’ she said. ‘It’s one of those odd things people always do.’

  I showed it to her on the menu. We ordered a carafe of red and we both had doner kebab. Did the waiter think we were married, I wondered. I was feeling all right, smoking a cigarette and craving another cigarette at the same time but holding on to nothing else. Comfortable in a way. I’ll never cease to be amazed by the fact that people uncomfortable in themselves can give comfort to other people. Even I have given comfort, Ariadne and Cyndie used to feel cosy with me. Neaera was an uncomfortable person, I could feel that. But I felt comfortable with her.

  ‘Do you know anything?’ I said.

  ‘Not a bloody thing,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t know what’s best for anybody?’

  ‘Not even for myself. Especially not for myself.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said. I raised my glass. ‘Here’s to not knowing anything.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ she said, and raised her glass. We both laughed, it just came out.

  ‘Except the turtles,’ I said, ‘We know what’s best for the turtles, eh?’

  ‘Oh shit,’ she said. No laughter. ‘It seemed to want to happen, didn’t it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It seemed to want to happen.’ Her face was sad. I felt at home with her face. Maybe it was a beautiful face, I don’t know. It looked as tired as my own, dark circles under her eyes. Very black eyebrows, no grey in her long black hair. Harriet. Well, yes. We’d subscribed to a series of recitals but that wasn’t a lifetime contract. I’d never seen Neaera’s flat but I could imagine books, drawing-table, typewriter. I could imagine being there with her in the evening reading, writing maybe.

  ‘You haven’t got a cat, have you?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Do I look as if I’ve got a cat?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I have a water-beetle,’ she said.

  ‘Why not,’ I said. ‘Nothing wrong with water-beetles.’

  ‘It started as insect exploitation,’ she said. ‘I thought there might be a story in her.’

  ‘Don’t reproach yourself,’ I said. ‘If I had anything to exploit I’d exploit it. Why should insects have special privileges, they’re no better than the rest of us. We can take the beetle to Polperro as well if you like.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘she’s a fresh-water beetle and she’s stuck with me, we’re in it together.’

  ‘How do you know it’s a she?’ I said.

  ‘Ridged wing covers instead of smooth,’ she said, ‘and she doesn’t have the same kind of front legs as the male. No suction pads for holding on whilst mating.’

  ‘Male turtles have an extra claw for that,’ I said.

  ‘Nature provides,’ said Neaera.

  It was dark and still raining when we came out of the restaurant. We got back to the Zoo a little after eight. George Fairbairn wheeled out the crated turtles on the trolley. The turtles lay on their backs with their flippers pressed against their sides, their mouths open. I could hear them sighing, they knew they had fallen among fools. They had a fresh ocean smell.

  ‘Got the champagne?’ he said.

  ‘Champagne,’ I said.

  ‘For the launching,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll get some on the way,’ I said. I hadn’t thought of such a thing as gaiety and celebration in connection with the turtles. If I can possibly miss the fun in life I’ll do it.

  Neaera was standing behind me and she kicked me. At the same time I realized I’d said the wrong thing. I hadn’t even thought of including him. What a stupid lout I am, it’s marvellous.

  ‘I took the liberty of laying on a bottle,’ he said. ‘Give you and the lady a little send-off. And it’s not every day I send my turtles out into the world, you know. Something of an occasion.’

  Why do I always end up feeling like a child? I’m the big turtle humanitarian but he thinks of people as well. We left the turtles sighing in the van and went into the Aquarium, through the green-lit hall to the STAFF ONLY room near the entrance. We sat down at the table and he brought out the champagne. Moët et Chandon it was too. He popped the cork, it hit a photo of a lady with great big boobs that was pinned up by the duty-roster. He’d brought stemmed glasses as well and as the champagne foamed into them it did feel something of an occasion.

  George Fairbairn raised his glass. We stood up with him, raised ours. ‘Here’s to launching,’ he said. ‘Anything, anywhere, any time.’

  And I’d scarcely given him a thought! I felt like crying. ‘Here’s to you,’ I said. ‘Here’s to the man who made this launch possible.’

  ‘Here’s to the man who pays attention to what needs to have attention paid to it,’ said Neaera.

  There wasn’t a great deal said after that, we got through the champagne quickly, shook hands all round, promised to let him know how it had gone as soon as we got back.

  How does that part in Moby Dick go:

  Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between: a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

  Blindly plunged like fate into the lone M4.

  32

  Neaera H.

  On our way to the M4 William stopped at an off-licence and bought a bottle of champagne. ‘We owe it to the turtles,’ he said. Before we started off again he showed me our route on the map. ‘We stay on the M4 until after Swindon,’ he said, ‘then we go through Chippenham, Trowbridge, Frome, Shepton Mallet, Glastonbury, Taunton, Exeter, Plymouth, cross the Tamar, go through Looe and there’s Polperro.’ The rain was running down the windscreen, our heads were close together as we bent over the map, the light of the torch playing on the red and blue and green roads made me feel young again, daring the illicit after bedtime. But it was difficult to make out the place names without my reading-gla
sses, the map was only a beautiful abstraction.

  We drove off, the windscreen wipers took up their steady beat. We were still missing kerbs and cars by scant inches on my side. ‘Too close,’ I kept saying as I leant away from anticipated scrapes, always expecting to hear the rending of metal. William’s head was held in such a way that I knew his neck would ache before he’d been driving an hour. I don’t drive, couldn’t relieve him, he’d have to do it all himself.

  I was determined to be alert, to take in everything and not miss anything. I continued alert on the Hammersmith Fly-over and past the Chiswick Roundabout but soon it was like concerts where I vowed to listen carefully but drifted off and dozed. I didn’t actually doze in the van but fell into a sort of travel trance that alternated with an intense uneasiness about the too-closeness of everything on my side. Whatever William used to drive must have been about two feet narrower than this van. If he was still sitting in a car that wasn’t there any more, was he still in his mind sitting with whoever had been in it with him? There was a long stretch of yellow lights, utterly placeless. The road seemed to come from nowhere and lead to nowhere, it seemed wholly outside of time. I listened to the hum of the engine, the hiss of the tyres, the swish of the windscreen wipers. William had said that he’d worked in advertising but he hadn’t told me much else about himself.

  ‘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.

  Near Glastonbury there was a self-service petrol station open. I put a pound note into the machine and the tank took 96p worth. 4p worth of petrol left for whoever might come along next.

  The van hummed along swallowing up the little crab-shaped reflectors with their little crab eyes. The moon disappeared, reappeared as broken clouds hurried past. Oh yes, I thought, feeling something good just round the corner of my mind: just be all the way in it and you’re all right. Just let go of everything like a falling star. The far-away ones, when you see their light it’s already happened millions of years ago. This too, my brief light, maybe it had flashed across the darkness long long ago. Not my light, just a light. Now I was the one to be it, to flash across the darkness with it. Somebody else’s turn next. Nothing to be selfish about, be it while it’s you and then let go. The van rushed ahead but I let my mind be where it was.