Extracts from the diary of Dr Alfred Jones: his wedding anniversary
7 June
Until today, my diary has for the most part been used to record the times of meetings, appointments with the dentist, or other engagements. But for the last few months I have felt the need to set down some of the thoughts that come and go, the increasing sense of intellectual and emotional restlessness which has grown in me as I approach middle age. Today’s date marks our wedding anniversary. Mary and I have been married now for over twenty years. It seems right, somehow, to start recording the pattern of my daily existence. Perhaps it will help me find a perspective from which I can appreciate and value my life more than I am able to just at present.
For Mary’s anniversary present, I have bought her a subscription to The Economist, which I know she enjoys reading but begrudges the cost of buying for herself. She bought me a replacement brush for my electric toothbrush, which is most useful. I never think much about anniversaries. The years pass seamlessly. But for some reason tonight I feel I ought to reflect on what is now many years of marriage to Mary. We married not long after leaving Oxford. It was not a whirlwind romance, but I think ours has been a calm and settled relationship suitable for two rational and career-minded people such as ourselves.
We are both humanists, professionals and scientists. Mary’s science is the analysis of risks inherent in the movement of cash and credit around the world’s financial systems. She has written papers such as ‘The role of SDKs (Special Deposit Reserves) in mitigating unusual flows of non-reserve currencies’ which have attracted a great deal of attention and I enjoyed reading myself, although I could not follow some of the algorithms. Mary has now moved from the more academic wing of the bank into the managerial side. She is prospering, well paid and respected, and likely to go far. The only disadvantage is that we are tending to see a little less of each other as she has to travel a great deal these days.
I made my name with my study ‘The effects of alkaline solutions on freshwater mussel populations’, which introduced some groundbreaking new concepts concerning the mating of freshwater mussels. Since then, my career has developed too. I am not as well remunerated as Mary, but my work gives me satisfaction and I believe I am well thought of by my peers.
Mary and I have chosen not to have children. Our lives are therefore relatively unruffled. I am aware that a childless marriage is sometimes an excuse for selfishness and therefore we both make a conscious effort to engage with our community in the little spare time that we have. Mary gives lessons in economic theory at our local immigration centre to migrants from Chechnya and Kurdistan, who seem to end up in our area. I give lectures to the local humanist society from time to time. Last week I gave the third in a series of talks, ‘Why God cannot exist’, and I like to think that these talks in some way provoke the audience to question the superstitions of earlier eras which still linger on in the religious teachings that regrettably persist in some of our schools.
What else can I say about more than two decades of marriage? We both keep ourselves fit. I go running two or three times a week; Mary does Yoga when she can. We were vegetarians but now eat fish and white meat, and I allow myself alcohol from time to time although Mary does so rarely. We enjoy reading as long as the books are improving or informative, and occasionally go to the theatre or to art exhibitions.
And I fish, an unreconstructed activity of which Mary disapproves. She says fish feel pain whereas I, as a fishery scientist, know that they do not. It is perhaps the one subject on which we have to agree to disagree.
So there it is: another anniversary. This year has been much like the last year, and that year was very like the one before. If I occasionally wish for a little more excitement, a little more passion in our lives, I can usually put this down to neglecting to follow the dietary guideline that people of my blood group (Type A) should follow: not too much meat. Occasionally I fall prey to temptation and eat some beef, and so it is not surprising I then have irrational feelings of…I am not sure what? Am I bored, perhaps? How could I be?
It only takes something like this Yemen salmon project to raise its head to remind me that I have a dislike of the irrational, the unpredictable and the unknown.
♦
8 June
We had a departmental meeting today to consider the final draft of my paper ‘Effects of increased water acidity on the caddis fly larva’. Everyone is being very complimentary, especially David Sugden. Is this a peace offering? He has not pressed me again about the Yemen salmon project and I, of course, have done nothing. I have just kept my head down and am waiting for the whole issue to go away. Anyway, the director’s public praise for the work on caddis flies was a pat on the back for my team. In fact, David went so far as to say that, following the publication of my article, there was probably nothing further worth saying about the caddis fly. Praise indeed. At such times I know that the money doesn’t really matter. Mary sometimes complains that I am not paid enough, but there is much more to life than one’s salary. I have moved forward the boundaries of human knowledge about a little brown insect that, insignificant as it may be in itself, is a vital indicator of the health of our rivers.
Both Trout & Salmon and Atlantic Salmon Journal want a press release.
Mary is in New York. She was home all of Friday and Saturday. Nevertheless, the fridge is empty. I have just been down the street to the late-night Indian takeaway, to buy a few things to eat, and I am sitting here writing up my diary and mopping balti chicken from my lap after some of it slipped off the plastic fork. I have just realised that I forgot to buy any coffee for tomorrow morning.
A last word of self-reproach after a day of professional triumph. How selfish I am, going on about my own success with my caddis fly research—I want to record my admiration for Mary, whose work, which I alluded to in yesterday’s entry and although of a different nature to mine, has attracted comment and admiration at her bank, InterFinance S.A. She is on the fast track at InterFinance. I am a huge believer in women doing well, and to see it happen to one’s own wife in the male-oriented world of finance is very rewarding. The female caddis fly also plays a profoundly important role in her social group.
♦
9 June
My bowel movements this morning were somewhat affected by the takeway, perhaps not surprisingly. I did not go for my usual morning run as I felt rather unwell. There was no coffee left in the tin, and the single pint of long-life milk was well out of date. I arrived at the office feeling out of sorts and it took me a while to get into gear.
It is odd how quickly things can change in one’s life. For the last two days I have been contemplating the tranquil and intellectually engaged nature of my life with Mary, and the intense reward I can still derive from a piece of scientific work well done. All that seems, for the moment, as nothing.
I now have to record one of the most unpleasant incidents of my professional career. At 10.00 a.m. I was sitting with Ray, selecting the most visually compelling photographs to accompany the caddis fly article, when Sally came in and told me David Sugden wanted to see me right away. I said I would go along to David’s office in a few minutes, as soon as Ray and I had finished.
Sally gave me a strange look. I remember her exact words. She said, ‘Alfred, the director means right away. He means now.’
I stood up and apologised to Ray, telling him I would be back in a few minutes. I walked along the corridor to David’s office feeling a little angry. Ours is a consensual department. We are scientists rather than managers. Hierarchies mean little to us, being treated as human beings means everything. David has, on the whole, got the hang of this and although he is a career civil servant he has fitted in quite well. He has certainly been here long enough to know I do not like being bullied or pressurised.
When I entered David’s office I forced myself to smile and keep any sign of annoyance out of my voice. I said something like, ‘What’s the emergency?’
I think it is important to remind David that he is a manager and that I am a scientist. Without scientists, there would be no need for managers.
As usual David’s desk was absolutely clear of paper. A flat-screen computer monitor and keyboard sat on it, otherwise it was several square feet of matt black metal, relieved only by two sheets of paper. He lifted one of them, without inviting me to sit down, as he usually does. He waved it in front of me. I could not see what it was. Then he told me it was my P45. He put it down on the desk and waited for me to say something. At first I did not take in his words, then my heart started hammering. I replied that I did not understand.
David looked at me without smiling. He said, ‘I know you live somewhat in an ivory tower, Alfred, but even you must be aware what a P45 is? You need it for the Inland Revenue and social security people when your employment is terminated by your employer—in this case, us.’
I stared at him. David put down the first piece of paper and picked up the second. He explained that it was a letter, drafted in my name, to Fitzharris & Price. It was a request for a meeting to discuss the Yemen salmon project in the near future. The tone of the letter was apologetic and wheedling, explaining my delay in replying was due to pressure of work and expressing my hope that the opportunity to work together was still there. After I finished reading it I found I was trembling, but whether with annoyance or alarm, I was not sure.
David picked up the P45 again and took back the letter to Fitzharris & Price. He held them up in front of me and explained in a neutral tone of voice, ‘Dr Jones, you can leave the office with your P45 or you can take away this letter and sign it and get it sent by messenger round to Fitzharris & Price. Personally, I am wholly indifferent which you choose to do, but I believe Fitzharris & Price has been told you are the man to talk to, otherwise I have to say I would not have given you the luxury of this choice.’
I looked around me for a chair. I saw one on my left and asked if I could sit down.
David looked at his watch and told me he had an appointment with the minister in half an hour. He said, ‘The minister will be asking me for a progress report on this project. What am I going to be able to tell him?’
I swallowed several times. My legs were trembling. I pulled the chair across, sat in it and said, ‘David, this is wholly unreasonable—’
He interrupted me. ‘Which piece of paper are you going to leave this office with?’
I could not speak. This Nazi behaviour shocked me to the core. I pointed to the letter to Fitzharris & Price.
‘Then sign it now.’
‘May I have a moment to read it?’ I asked.
‘No.’
For a moment I almost lost control. I wanted to crumple the letter up and fling it in David Sugden’s face, but instead I found myself reaching inside my jacket for my fountain pen, and then I pulled the hateful rectangle of paper towards me and signed it.
David immediately took it from me and told me he would send it by messenger himself. He said he had cancelled all my diary appointments by email for the next month. I had one priority, and one priority only, if I wanted to keep my job. I had to meet Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, persuade her that the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence was the only organisation that had any chance of coming up with a proposal for her salmon project, and I had to persuade her that I was the right man for that job.
I nodded. David stood up. He looked for a moment as if he was going to say something by way of apology or explanation. Then he checked his watch again and said, ‘I mustn’t keep the minister waiting.’
I left without saying anything further, I hope with some dignity.
Now, as I record these unpleasant events, I reflect that it would have been nice if Mary had been at home tonight. Sometimes one wants to talk things over with one’s partner. Mary doesn’t like long phone calls. She says phone calls are for information. The trouble is, she isn’t often at home to have the conversations that she doesn’t feel we should have on the phone. But I’m so proud of the way she is getting on.
I hope she will be proud of me when I tell her of the dignified way I stood up to David Sugden’s bully-boy tactics.
♦
15 June
I am writing this in the office.
Mary comes home tonight. I find I have been missing her. There is nothing to eat in the entire house. I must remember to call in at Marks & Spencer on the way home. I will buy some ready-to-eat meals. I must remember to get a new pair of pyjamas, as the elastic has gone in my present (Tesco) pair. I have kept a note of the mean time between failure (MTBF) of various things like socks—hole in the heel; pyjamas—elastic cord failure. I am afraid that I can detect a clear downward trend, almost a planned obsolescence, in some of these products. I am hoping Marks & Spencer will be more reliable.
No bowel movement this morning. A sure sign of stress. I did go for a run, however, and burned off some of the anger that has been churning inside me like bile.
This morning I received a phone call. Sally buzzed through to me and said there was a Harriet Someone on the line from Fitzharris & Price, and would I take the call? For a moment, glorious rebellion: I so nearly said, ‘No, tell her I’m busy.’ But instead I told Sally to put the call through—a girl’s voice with what I would call a cut-glass accent asked if she was speaking to Dr Jones.
She was very polite. She apologised for disturbing me, told me she understood I had been very busy with some major projects and said she would not have disturbed me at present except that her client was being very pressing. Then she asked if I recalled her original letter about introducing salmon to the Yemen?
I made an assenting sound at the back of my throat. I did not trust myself to speak. She took this to mean yes and asked when we could meet. For a moment I was tempted to shout, ‘Never!’ but instead I found myself agreeing to go and visit her at her office in St James’s Street the following morning.
‘Will your client be there?’ I asked.
‘No, he is in the Yemen. But he is anxious to meet you on one of his future trips over here. That is, if you agree to take this any further after our meeting tomorrow.’ We agreed on a time to meet at her office in St James’s Street.
♦
Later
Mary has just come home. She arrived at Heathrow this morning about seven and went straight to her office, and of course she has overdone it. She looked at the Marks & Spencer Italian Selection I had purchased and said, ‘I’m sorry, Alfred, I’ve just got no appetite.’
Naturally I didn’t want to bore her with my problems when she was so exhausted. However, she revived over a glass of wine and talked for a while about US banking regulations. Most interesting. She has gone to bed now, and so will I in a moment.
It would have been nice if we could have talked a bit about my problems at work, but I must not be self-centred.
♦
16 June
My meeting at Fitzharris & Price was not quite what I expected.
I cannot help but feel resentful towards these people who have disturbed the relative tranquillity of my life with their absurd ideas. My intention was to be damning without being rude, discouraging without being negative. I still feel, as I write this, that their proposal is so stupid that it will soon wither and die.
When I arrived at the F&P offices I found an elegant reception area, with an elegant receptionist commanding it from behind a large partners’ desk. Opposite the desk were a pair of comfortable-looking leather sofas and a low glass table with Country Life and The Field laid out on it. Before I could sample any of these luxuries Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot came out to meet me.
She thanked me for sparing the time to come and see her. She was courteous, elegant, tall and slender. She appeared to me to be dressed as if she was about to go out to lunch at a smart restaurant rather than for a day’s hard work in the office. Mary always says it is demeaning for working women to dress themselves up like that. She herself is a strong believer in sensible, practical working clothes which do not accentuate the wearer’s femininity.
We went into Ms Chetwode-Talbot’s office, which looked out over St James’s Street. The windows were double-glazed and the room was quiet and full of light. Instead of going behind her desk she guided me to two armchairs facing each other across a low mahogany table on which were set out a white china coffee pot and two cups on a tray. We sat down, and she pulled the tray towards her and poured out two cups of coffee. Then she said, and I remember her exact words, ‘I expect you think we are all absolute idiots.’
This was unexpected. I began to trot out some long-winded comments about the unusual nature of the project, how it was outside the mainstream of the centre’s work, and how I felt a degree of concern that we might all waste quite a lot of time and achieve nothing.
She listened patiently and then said, ‘Please call me Harriet. My surname is such a mouthful it really is too much to ask anyone to use it.’
I blushed. Perhaps Chetwode-Talbot has metamorphosed in pronunciation in the way Cholmondely has become Chumly, or Delwes Dales—one of those trick pronunciations invented by the English to confuse one other.
Then she suggested it might help if I understood some of the background.
I nodded; I needed to know who or what I was dealing with. Harriet—I don’t think it is appropriate for us to be on Christian-name terms, but it is quicker to write just her first name in this diary—began to explain. I crossed my legs and clasped my hands over my knees and generally tried to assume the expression my tutor at university used to adopt when I had put in a particularly bad piece of work which he was about to tear to shreds.
Harriet gave me a faint smile and explained that I had probably gathered by now that Fitzharris & Price were chartered surveyors and property consultants, not fisheries scientists.
I told her I appreciated the point.
She bowed her head in acknowledgement and explained that for many years the business of her office had been acquiring agricultural or sporting estates in the UK on behalf of overseas clients—in particular, Middle Eastern buyers. Fitzharris had discovered quite quickly that its clients didn’t just want it to buy the estates but also manage them in their absence.
That had led Fitzharris into providing technical expertise on a whole range of subjects, such as land agents’ services and help with recruiting estate employees through to advice on farming practice, sporting lets, obtaining planning permission for building new country houses, and so on.
Of course, Harriet told me, most of their clients are very wealthy, and are fond of often quite ambitious projects to improve the properties they buy. Then she said, ‘We have one such client who has been with us for a number of years. His wealth derives in part from oil, but if there is such a thing as a typical oil sheikh, he is not it. He is a most unusual, visionary man.’
Harriet paused to refill our cups with fresh coffee, and I found myself reluctantly admitting to myself that however foolish the project was, there was nothing foolish about this woman.
She added, ‘I am not going to attempt to describe what my client’s motivation is. I think it is important you try and understand it, if you decide to help us, but it is for him alone to tell you about that part.’ She continued, ‘He is a man we hold in great respect in this firm. He is an excellent steward and landlord of the properties he has bought in this country, an employer everyone would want to work for, but people like working for him because of his personal qualities and not because he is enormously wealthy. Moreover, he is an Anglophile, which is perhaps less usual in the Yemen than in some other parts of the region, and his prominence in his own country means he is viewed as a key potential ally in Yemeni councils by the Foreign Office here.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘Indeed, Dr Jones. I think you are aware there is a political dimension to all of this.’ She did not attempt to call me Alfred. ‘I know you will have had some pressure brought to bear on you from within government. Believe me, it was not of our doing and I very much regret it. We would rather you took on this job, impossible as it may seem at the moment, of your own free will, or else not at all. And that will certainly be the view of our client.’
‘Ah,’ I repeated, and then when she appeared to have stopped speaking, ‘Well. You were speaking about introducing salmon into the Yemen.’
‘And salmon fishing. I believe it is intended to be fly-fishing only, no spinning.’
‘No spinning,’ I repeated.
‘Are you a salmon fisherman, Dr Jones?’ asked Harriet. For some reason I blushed again, as if I was about to admit to something covert and slightly sinister. Perhaps I was.
‘As a matter of fact, I am very keen. Perhaps not as unusual amongst us fisheries people as you might think. Of course I nearly always put back any fish I catch. Yes, I enjoy it very much.’
‘Where do you fish?’
‘Here and there. I like to try different rivers. I’ve fished the Wye, the Eden and the Tyne in England; the Tay and the Dee and a few smaller Scottish rivers. I don’t get much time for it nowadays.’
‘Well, if you take this project on I’m sure my client will ask you to fish with him at his place in Scotland.’ Then she added with a smile, ‘And perhaps one day you’ll fish on the Wadi Aleyn, in the Yemen.’
I saw where this was going.
‘Well, there are a few problems with that idea,’ I suggested. This time Harriet crossed her legs, a movement that somehow caught my eye, and clasped her hands around her knees and looked at me critically, just as I had tried to do to her a moment or two earlier.
‘Let’s go through some of them,’ she suggested.
‘First, water,’ I said. ‘Salmon are fish. Fish need water.’ Harriet only looked at me when I said that, so I had to continue. ‘Specifically, as I said in my letter, salmon need cool, well-oxygenated water. The temperature should ideally not exceed eighteen degrees Celsius. The best conditions are rivers fed by snow melt or springs, although some varieties of salmon can live in lakes if they are deep and cool enough. So there’s a fundamental problem, right there.’
Harriet stood up and went across to her desk, took a file from it and then sat down again.
Opening the file she said, ‘Water. Parts of the Yemen have up to 250 millimetres of rainfall a month in the wet summer season. It is brushed by the monsoon, like parts of the Dhofar region in the south of Oman. On top of surface water run-off from the summer storms, there is constant recharging of the groundwater. People didn’t use to think there was much groundwater in the Yemen but since they started looking for oil they have found one or two big new aquifers. So, yes, water is a huge problem, but there is water there. The wadis become rivers, and pools and lakes form in the summer.’
This was surprising.
‘Then there is the question of water temperature. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Yemen isn’t that hot, but if it is, the oxygen will leave the water and the fish will die.’
Harriet looked at her file again and said, ‘We’re thinking mountains. That’s where the rain is, and the elevations in the central highlands go up to over 3000 metres. At that height the temperatures are bearable. The night-time temperatures go down to well below twenty Celsius even in the summer. And Pacific salmon get as far south as California—as long as the water is aerated, they seem to be able to survive. I don’t mean to be telling you your business, Dr Jones; just that it might not be as open and shut as you first thought.’
I paused, and then said, ‘Salmon parr feed off certain types of fly life, and if we introduced salmon from English rivers they would only recognise food that came from those rivers.’
‘Perhaps that can be introduced along with the fish? There are plenty of flies in the Yemen, at any rate. English ones might adapt if the local fly life didn’t taste good.’ She closed her file with a snap and looked at me with a smile.
‘Then,’ I said with mounting irritation, ‘the salmon parr grow up into smolts, and the smolts want to find the sea, and the particular part of the sea they want to find is just south of Iceland—at least if the fish broodstock comes from an English or Scottish river. How do you suppose these fish will get there? Through the Suez Canal?’
‘Well,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘that’s one of the problems you would have to solve, of course. But if it was me, and of course I’m a completely non-technical person, I’d think along the lines of constructing holding ponds at the bottom of the wadis seeded with salmon, keeping the water cool, injecting it with oxygen if necessary, and confining the salmon there for three or four years. I read somewhere that in Canada salmon stay in the lake systems for that amount of time.’
‘And what then?’
‘Catch them all, then start again?’ She stood up, looking at her watch. ‘Dr Jones, I’ve taken up far too much of your time already. I’m very grateful indeed for you coming and listening to all this. I know how outlandish it is. But please don’t dismiss it here and now. Take a couple of days to think about it, and then I’ll call you again, if I may. Remember, all you have to commit to at this stage is a feasibility study. You’re not going to be putting your reputation on the line. And remember too, if you will, that my client can commit very large financial resources to this project, should they be needed.’
And then I was back in the reception area, shaking hands and saying goodbye, almost without knowing how I got there. She turned and walked back to her office, and I couldn’t help watching her as she went. She did not look back.
♦
17 June
Last night I gave my talk to the local humanist society. My theme was that if we believed in God, we immediately created an excuse for tolerating injustice, natural disasters, pain and loss. Christians and other religionists argue that God does not create suffering but the world in which suffering occurs, and suffering allows us to rediscover our oneness with God.
I argued that such an approach stood logic on its head. All disasters, all loss, all suffering, demonstrate that there cannot possibly be a God, for why would a deity who is omnipotent create a universe so prone to disaster and accident? Religious faith, I argued, was invented in order to pacify the grieving multitudes and ensure they did not ask the really difficult questions, which if answered, would tend to lead to progress.
We were quite a big group that evening: seven or eight of us. Muhammad Bashir, a grizzled old Pakistani from down the road, is a regular attender. I think he wants to save me from myself. At any rate, he knows me well and likes me even though I am, by his lights, a blasphemer.
‘Dr Jones,’ he asked, ‘you are a fisherman, are you not?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘When I can.’
‘And how many hours do you fish before you catch something?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I replied, not clear what he was driving at. ‘Many hundreds of hours, sometimes.’
‘So why do you fish? Is that not a bad use of your time?’
‘Because I hope in the end I will catch one,’ I replied.
The old man hissed with glee, rubbed his beard with his right hand and said, ‘Because you believe. Hope is belief. You have the beginnings of faith. Despite all the evidence, you want to believe. And when you catch one, what do you feel? A great happiness?’
‘A very great happiness,’ I said, smiling at him. It did him good to win the occasional argument with me, so I let him. I didn’t use the thousand logical and statistical arguments I could have done to put him down. I let him finish.
‘You see, Dr Jones, you believe, and in the end your belief brings you great happiness. You are rewarded for your constancy and your faith, and the reward is much greater than the possession of a fish, which you could buy for little money at Tesco. So you are, after all, not so very different to the rest of us.’
♦
18 June
This evening, after dinner, Mary looked up from the crossword and said to me, ‘I’m going away for a fortnight to work in our Geneva office.’
This happened about once every year, so it wasn’t a total surprise. I raised my eyebrows to register mild disappointment and asked her when she was going.
‘On Sunday.’
I reminded her that we had booked in weeks ago for a weekend’s walking and birdwatching with my brother in the Lake District.
‘I know,’ said Mary. ‘I’m awfully sorry. But someone in the Geneva office has gone on sick leave, and they need me to cover and I know the office. Perhaps you could come with me and we could walk in the hills by Lake Evian?’ But then she thought better of it and said that she would probably have to work Saturdays as well, to find her way into her the job. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘you’ve got your weird fish project on, and you’d better stay with that to keep David Sugden happy.’
I told her rather stiffly that I had not decided whether to do that yet.
‘You should,’ she said.
The rest of the evening was a bit of a frost, but when we went to bed, I think Mary must have felt a little guilty about the way she had changed her plans. Suffice to say, my new Marks & Spencer pyjamas were not required for the early part of the night! A relatively rare event in our marriage of late.
Afterwards Mary said, ‘There now, darling, that should keep you going for a bit,’ and turned on her side and seemed to go to sleep. For a moment I felt a bit like a dog that has just been given a biscuit, but then drowsiness swept across me and I started to doze.
I fell into a waking dream, and saw the bright sunlight of the Yemen uplands and the glittering pools of water where hen salmon were laying their eggs amongst the gravel, 800 eggs per pound of body weight, and the cock salmon were injecting milt amongst them. The salmon eggs were fertilised. They hatched into little alevins. They wriggled about in the clear water and grew into fry, then parr. At each stage of their evolution the fish became larger and stronger, until they had smoked and were ready to make their journey to the sea. If we seeded a wadi in the Yemen with fish from an English river, would those fish head down to the sea in the summer rains, once they had grown? Would the smell of the saltwater lure them to the Indian Ocean, even if it was the wrong ocean? I rather thought so. And if we trapped them downstream and shipped them in purpose-built tanks back to the North Sea so that they could run to their feeding grounds in Iceland, what then? Would they overwinter there and then head back for their native English river, or would they try and find the Indian Ocean?
We could radio tag them. Imagine the excitement if we tracked them heading down the African coast, searching for their new home.
Suddenly I wanted this project. It was so strange that fundamental new science might be discovered. Our whole understanding of the nature of species migration might be transformed. We might witness, over time, the evolution of a new subspecies of salmon which could tolerate warm water, perhaps learn to feed itself in the rich soup of the Indian Ocean.
Then Mary said loudly, ‘What?’
‘What do you mean, what?’
‘You were talking. In your sleep. About spawning. And egg production. Is that what you think about after we’ve made love? About your bloody fish and their reproductive cycles?’
She switched on her bedside light and sat up. She was for some reason wide awake now and very upset. I’ve noticed that guilt makes people go on the attack. Perhaps that was what it was all about. At any rate, I didn’t want a row, about salmon reproductive cycles or anything else, so I said pacifically, ‘Darling, I wish we could do a bit of reproducing of our own.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she replied. ‘We both know that until either I am earning more than £100,000 a year or you are earning more than £70,000—which seems unlikely in view of your present relations with your department—then our after-tax income simply will not be sufficient to compensate for the additional cost of a child. Besides, I’m not ready to interrupt my career for three months, or even a month. Pregnancy might affect my chances of promotion, which right now I think are rather better than yours. You know all that. Why bring it up again?’
Then she yawned. At least she had forgotten what had woken her up originally. She looked a little bewildered.
I said, ‘I know, darling. You’re right. Switch out the light and let’s get some sleep.’
But I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake thinking about our marriage, and wondering whether I was being unfair to Mary, or she to me. I asked myself whether things might have been different if we had had children. I thought about salmon spawning in the highlands of the Yemen. Round and round my head went these thoughts, chasing each other like salmon parr wriggling in the shimmering water of a stream.
I got out of bed and came next door. I thought that maybe writing up my diary would help me sleep.
It hasn’t.