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I never really warmed to Clovis—he was far too stupid to inspire real affection—but he always claimed a corner of my heart, largely, I suppose, because of the way he instinctively and unconsciously cupped his genitals whenever he was alarmed or nervous. It was rather endearing, I thought, and it showed a natural vulnerability, in strong contrast to his usual moods: raffish arrogance or total and single-minded self-absorption. In fact, he was self-absorbed now as he sat grandly at ease, frowning, pursing and unpursing his lips—completely ignoring me—and from time to time sniffing absentmindedly at the tip of a forefinger. He had been similarly occupied for upwards of an hour now and whatever he had stuck his finger into earlier that day had obviously been fairly potent, not to say narcotic and ineradicable. Knowing Clovis as I did, I suspected he could maintain this inertia for ages. I looked at my watch. If I went back now it might mean talking to that little swine Hauser…. I debated the pros and cons: spend the remaining hour I had left to me here with Clovis or risk enduring Hauser’s cynical gossip, all silky insinuation and covert bitchery?

Should I tell you about Hauser now, I wonder? No, perhaps not; Hauser and the others will engage us as we meet them. They can wait a while; let us return to Clovis.

I changed my position, uncrossed my legs and stretched them out in front of me. A small ant seemed to have trapped itself under the strap of my brassiere and I spent a few awkward minutes trying vainly to locate it. Clovis impassively watched me remove first my shirt and then my bra. I found no insect but discovered its traces—a neat cluster of pink bites under my left armpit. I rubbed spit on them and replaced my clothes. As I did up the top button on my shirt, Clovis seemed to lose interest in me. He slapped his shoulder once, brusquely, and clambered into the mulemba tree beneath which he had been sitting, and with powerful easy movements he swung through the branches, leapt onto an adjacent tree and was away, lost to sight, heading northeast toward the hills of the escarpment.

I looked at my watch again and noted the time of his departure. Perhaps now he was going to rejoin the other members of his group? It was not unheard of for Clovis to spend a day on his own but it was out of the ordinary—he was gregarious, even by chimpanzee standards. I had been watching him for three hours, during which time he had done almost nothing singular or unusual—but then that too was worth recording, of course. I stood up and stretched and walked to the mulemba tree to examine Clovis’s feces. I took out a little specimen bottle from my bag and, with a twig, collected some. That would be my present for Hauser.

I walked back down the path that led me in the general direction of the camp. A large proportion of the trails in this part of the forest had been recently cleared and the going was easy. I had had markers and directional arrows nailed to trees at important intersections to help me find my way about. This portion of the reserve, south of the big stream, was far less familiar than the main research area to the north.

I walked at a steady even pace—I was in no particular hurry to get back—and in any event was reasonably tired. The real force of the afternoon’s heat had passed; I could see the sun on the topmost branches of the trees but down here on the forest floor all was dim shadow. I enjoyed these walks home at the end of the day and I preferred the confined vistas of the forest to more impressive panoramas—I liked being hemmed in, rather than exposed. I liked the vegetation close to me, bushes and branches brushing my sides, the frowsty smell of decaying leaves and the filtered, screened neutrality of the light.

As I walked I took out a cigarette. It was a Tusker, a local brand, strong and sweet. As I lit it and drew in the smoke I thought of my ex-husband, John Clearwater. This was the most obvious legacy of our short marriage—a bad habit. There were others, of course, other legacies, but they were not visible to the naked eye.

João was waiting for me, about a mile from camp. He sat on a log picking at an old scab on his knee. He looked tired and not very well. João was very black, his skin almost a dark violet color. He had a long top lip that made him look permanently sad and serious. He rose to his feet as I approached. We greeted each other and I offered him a cigarette, which he accepted and carefully stored in his canvas bag.

“Any luck?” I asked.

“I think, I think I see Lena,” he said. “She very big now.” He held out his hands, shaping a pregnant belly. “She come very soon now. But then she run from me.”

He gave me his field notes and I told him about my uneventful day with Clovis as we strolled back to camp. João was my full-time assistant. He was in his forties, a thin, wiry man, diligent and loyal. We were training his second son, Alda, as an observer, but he was away today in the city, trying to sort out some problem to do with his military service. I asked how Alda was progressing.

“I think he will return tomorrow,” João said. “They say the war is finish soon, so no more soldiers are required.”

“Let’s hope so.”

We talked a little about our plans for the next day. Soon we reached the small river that Mallabar—I think—had whimsically named the Danube. It was fed from the damp grasslands high on the plateau to the east, and descended in a series of pools and falls in a long deepish valley through our portion of the Semirance Forest, and then moved on, more sedately and ever broadening, until it met the great Cabule River a hundred and fifty miles away on the edge of the coastal plain.

Beyond the Danube, to the north, the forest thinned out and the walk to the camp cut through what is known in this part of Africa as orchard bush; grass and scrubland, badged with occasional copses of trees and small groves of palms. The camp itself had been on this site for over two decades and, as it had become established, most of its buildings had been reconstructed in more permanent form. Canvas had given way to wood and corrugated iron, which was in turn being replaced by concrete bricks. The various sheds and dwelling places were set generously far apart and were situated on either side of a dirt road that was known as Main Street. However, the first sign of human habitation you came across, as you approached the camp from the direction of the Danube, was a wide cleared area, about the size of three tennis courts, in the middle of which was a low concrete structure—hip high—with four small wooden doors set in one side. It looked like some sort of cage or, I used to think, something to do with sewerage or septic tanks, but in fact it was the research project’s pride and joy: the Artificial Feeding Area. It was deserted now, as João and I passed it, but I thought I saw someone sitting in one of the palm frond hiding places at the perimeter—Mallabar himself, possibly. We kept on going.

The camp proper began at the junction of the forest path (which led south to the Danube) with Main Street, which was itself just an extension of the road from Sangui, the nearest village, where João and most of the project’s assistants and observers lived. We stopped here, arranged to meet at 6:00 A.M. the next day and said goodbye. João said he would bring Alda if he had returned from the city in time. We went our separate ways.

I sauntered through the camp toward my hut. On my left, scattered amongst neem and palm trees and big clumps of hibiscus hedge, were the most important buildings in the camp complex—the garage and workshops, Mallabar’s bungalow, the canteen, the kitchen and storage sheds, and beyond them the now abandoned dormitory of the census workers. Beyond that, over to the right, I could just see, through a screen of plumbago hedge, the round thatched roofs of the cooks’ and small boys’ quarters.

I continued past the huge hagenia tree that dominated the center of the camp and which had given it its name: grosso arvore. The Grosso Arvore Research Center.

On the other side of the track, opposite the canteen, was Hauser’s laboratory and, behind that, the tin cabin he shared with Toshiro. Thirty yards along from the lab was the Vails’ bungalow, not as big as chez Mallabar but prettier, freighted with jasmine and bougainvillea. And then, finally, at the camp’s northern extremity, was my hut. In fact “hut” was a misnomer: I lived in a cross between a tent and a tin shack, a curious dwelling with canvas sides and a corrugated iron roof. I suppose it was fitting that it should go to me, on the principle that the newest arrival should occupy the least permanent building, but I was not displeased with it and was indifferent to what it might say about my status. In fact Mallabar had offered me the census hut but I had declined; I preferred my odd, hybrid tent and its position out on the perimeter.

I reached it and went inside. Liceu, the boy who looked after me, had tidied up in my absence. From the oil drum of water in a corner I poured a few jugfuls into a tin basin set upon a stand, took off my shirt and bra, and washed my sweaty, dirty torso with a washcloth. I dried myself down and pulled on a T-shirt. I contemplated a visit to the long-drop latrine outside, housed in a structure that looked like a sentry box woven from palm fronds, but decided it could wait.

I lay down on my camp bed, closed my eyes and, as always when I returned home at the end of the day, tried not to let my feelings overwhelm me. I arranged my day and my routine in such a manner as not to leave myself with much time alone and little to do, but this moment of the early evening, the light milky and orange, with the first bats jinking and swooping between the trees, and the tentative creek-creek of the crickets announcing the onset of dusk, always brought in its train a familiar melancholy and cafard and, in my particular case, an awful self-pity. I forced myself to sit up, took some deep breaths, inveighed powerfully against the name of John Clearwater, and went to sit at the little trestle desk where I worked. There, I poured myself a glass of scotch whisky and wrote up my field notes.

My desk was set in front of a netting window in the canvas side wall, which I rolled up to let in as much breeze as possible. Through it I had a view of the back of Hauser and Toshiro’s cabin some eighty yards away, the matting sentry box of his latrine and the wooden shower stall that Hauser had personally constructed beneath a frangipani tree. The shower was an elementary contraption: the shower head was fed from an oil drum set higher in the tree, the flow controlled by a spigot. The only onerous task was the filling of the oil drum: buckets of water had to be lugged up to it by ladder, but that was a job Hauser was happy to leave to his houseboy, Fidel.

As I watched, the door in the shower stall opened and Hauser himself appeared, naked and glossy. Clearly, he had forgotten to bring a towel. I watched him tread carefully across the prickly grass to his back door. The tight dome of his big belly gleamed and the little white stub of his penis waggled comically as he flinched his way to safety. Hauser did this quite often—that is, wander naked to and fro from shower stall to cabin. He had a full view of my tent with its windowed sides. It had crossed my mind several times that he might be deliberately exposing himself.

The sight of Hauser’s little penis and the taste of the scotch combined to cheer me up and it was with restored confidence that an hour later I walked down Main Street toward the canteen, lit now with the blurry glow of hurricane lamps. As I passed his cabin, Hauser emerged.

“Ah, Mrs. Clearwater. Such timing.”

Hauser was bald and thickset—a strong fat man—and his eyes were dull and slightly hooded. In the months I had been at Grosso Arvore our relations had never advanced beyond mutual guardedness. I suspected that he didn’t like me. Certainly, I didn’t warm to him at all. As we walked together to the canteen I gave him the specimen bottle full of Clovis’s fecal matter.

“Could you find out what this one’s eating?” I asked him. “I think he might have been ill.”

“An amuse gueule.” He inspected the bottle. “Chimp shit, my favorite.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“But this is what I’m here for, my dear young lady: handsomely paid haruspication.”

This was exactly the sort of fake-donnish banter I couldn’t stand. I gave Hauser a look of what I hoped was candid pity and pointedly turned away from him as we entered the canteen. I collected my tray and knife and fork and the cook served me up with a plateful of boiled chicken and sweet potato. I went to the end of the long table and sat down beside Toshiro, who nodded hello. We were free to return to our own quarters with our food if we wished, but I invariably ate in the canteen because of the length of the journey back. One blessing was that there was no requirement, official or unofficial, to make conversation. With the members of the project so reduced it would have provoked unbearable tensions if we had felt obliged to indulge in small talk every time we met. Toshiro, taciturn at the best of times, munched on pragmatically. Hauser was arguing with the cook. No one else had arrived. I started my bland chicken with little enthusiasm.

In due course the other members of the project drifted in. First came Ian Vail and his wife, Roberta. They said hello and then took their trays back to their cottage. Then Eugene Mallabar himself entered, collected his food and sat down opposite me.

Even his most embittered enemy would have had to concede that Mallabar was a handsome man. He was in his late forties, tall and lean, with a kind, regular-featured face that seemed naturally to emanate all manner of potent abstract nouns: sincerity, integrity, single-mindedness. For some reason his too neatly trimmed warlock’s beard, and its associations of substantial personal vanity, did not detract from this dauntingly positive air he possessed. Tonight he wore a faded blue polka-dot cravat at his throat which set off his tan admirably.

“Where’s Ginga?” I asked, trying not to stare at him. Ginga was his wife, whom I quite liked, despite her stupid name.

“Not hungry, she says. Touch of flu—perhaps.” He shrugged and forked chicken generously into his mouth. He chewed lazily, almost side to side, as if he were eating cud. He used his tongue a lot, pushing his food against his palate, searching for morsels around his molars. I knew this because I could see it: Mallabar ate without closing his mouth properly.

“How was your day?” I asked, looking down at my plate.

“Excellent, excellent…” I heard him drinking water and wondered when it would be safe to look up. “Mmmm,” he went on, “we had five in the Feeding Area. Four males and a female in estrus. Fascinating series of copulations.”

“Just my luck.” I snapped my fingers in parody disappointment.

“What d’you mean?”

“Ah.” I felt an immediate and intense weariness descend on me. “You know: I’m in the south. All that fun going on here.”

He frowned, puzzled, still not with me.

“It’s not important,” I said. “Forget it. So Ginga’s got flu?”

“We have it on film.”

“What?”

“Today. At the feeding area.”

“No, Eugene. Please. It doesn’t matter.”

He smiled slyly, nodding. “All right. Got it. You were teasing me.”

“Look, Eugene…oh God.”

He was snapping his fingers. “Just your luck. Got it.”

I felt my neck muscles knot. Jesus Christ.

He forced out a long chuckle and ate on, hugely.

“How was your day?” he said after a while.

“Oh…Clovis smelled his finger for a couple of hours.”

“Clovis?” He shook his fork at me.

“XNM1. Sorry.”

Mallabar smiled benignly at my error, stood up and went to refill his plate. Mallabar was one of those people who could eat as much as they liked and remain thin. As he moved to the buffet he passed Ian Vail, who was returning with his tray for the pudding of sliced mangoes and condensed milk. Vail smiled at me. It was a nice smile. The adjective was exact. He had a nice face too, only a little plump, with pale eyelashes and fine blond hair. He put his tray down, came over and squatted close by me.

“Can I come and see you?” he said, softly, so Toshiro wouldn’t hear. “Later. Please? Just to talk.”

“No. Go away.”

He looked at me: his eyes were full of rebuke for my coldness. I stared back. He stood up and left. Mallabar returned with a heaped plate. He watched Vail leave before sitting down.

“Are you going with Ian tomorrow?” he asked.

“No,” I said, too abruptly. “No, I’m back in the south.”

“I thought he was planning to invite you.” Mallabar was eating vigorously again. I watched him with genuine fascination. Why had no one ever told him, I wondered, that he ate with his mouth open? I supposed it was too late to change now.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What was he saying to you, then? It was very brief.”

“Who?” I said ingenuously. Mallabar was notoriously curious about his colleagues.

“Ian. Just then.”

“Oh…that he was passionately in love with me.”

Mallabar’s mobile face stopped.

I looked at him: head cocked, open-faced, eyebrows raised.

He smiled with relief.

“Good one,” he said. “Excellent.”

He laughed hard, showing me more of the contents of his mouth. He drank water, coughed, drank some more. Hauser stared curiously at me from the other end of the table.

“Ah, my dear Hope,” Mallabar said and touched my hand. “You’re incorrigible.” He raised his glass to me. “To Hope, our very own tonic.”

WHAT I LIKE TO DO

What I like to do with him is this. We are lying in bed, it doesn’t matter when, at night or in the morning, but he is warm and drowsy, half asleep, and I am awake. I lie close to him, my breasts flattened against his back, his buttocks pressed against my thighs, my knees fitting his knee backs, his heels on my insteps.

Without much ado I slide my hand over his hip and hold him, very gently. His penis is soft and flaccid. So light in my palm. Light as a coin—a weight, a presence merely, but that is all. For a while nothing happens. Then the warmth of my cradling fingers slowly makes him grow. That fleshy inflation, the warmth now transferring back to me with the exothermic flush of blood irrigating the muscle tissue. This power I have, this magic transformation that my touch effects, never fails to excite me. Engorged, thickening, veined like a leaf, it slowly pushes through the loose cage of my fingers, and he turns to face me.

 

Hope Dunbar had heard people talking about John Clearwater in college for some time before she met him.

Clearwater.

The name stuck in her head. Clearwater…she recognized its recurrence in conversations several times without taking in its context.

“Who is this Clearwater everyone’s talking about?” she asked her supervisor, Professor Hobbes.

“John Clearwater?”

“I don’t know. I just keep hearing the name.”

“He’s the new research fellow, isn’t he? I think that’s the one.”

“I don’t know.”

“Incredibly brilliant man, that sort of thing. Or so they say. But then they always say that. I’m sure we’ve all been ‘incredibly brilliant’ in our time.” He paused. “What about him?”

“Nothing. Just curious about the name.”

John Clearwater.

A few days later she saw a man in her street with a folded newspaper in his hand looking up at the houses. He wore a gabardine raincoat and a red baseball hat. He looked up at the facades of the terraced houses curiously, as if he were thinking of buying them, then he turned away.

Hope had rounded the corner off the Old Brompton Road and he was headed in the opposite direction, so she never managed a proper look at him. It was the conjunction of the raincoat and the baseball hat that made him singular in some way. The thought came to her, unbidden, that this man might have been John Clearwater.

Two days after this encounter she was walking along an unfamiliar corridor in the college (she had been up to the computing department to collect a printout for Professor Hobbes) when she passed a door that was open by about six inches. The name on it was DR. J. L. CLEARWATER. She stopped and peered in. From where she was standing she could see a corner of vermilion college-issue carpet and a bare wall with cellophane-tape scars.

For some reason, and with untypical presumption, she took a step forward and pushed the door wide.

The room was empty. Clouds in the sky shifted and the spring sunshine suddenly painted a yellow window on the wall. Dust motes still moved, unsettled recently.

On the floor were a dozen cardboard boxes filled with books. The desk was clear. She went round it and opened two drawers. A chain of paper clips. An olive green paper puncher. Three boiled sweets. She searched the other drawers. Empty. A tension and baffled excitement was beginning to quicken inside her. What was she doing in this man’s room? What was she playing at?

On the soft chair in the corner was a coat. A woolen coat, charcoal-gray herringbone. Then on the mantelpiece above the gas fire she saw a mug of coffee.

Steaming.

She touched it. Hot.

Her mouth was dry now as she picked up the coat and went through the pockets. A pair of sheepskin gloves. A small plastic bottle of pills marked Tylenol. Some change.

There was a noise at the door.

She turned. Nothing. No one. It swung mysteriously on its hinges, an inch or two, shifted by some nomadic breeze roaming the building.

She laid the coat back on the chair. John Clearwater, she heard teasingly in her head, John Clearwater, where aaaaare you? Her eyes flicked around the room looking for something—she wasn’t entirely sure what. She wasn’t entirely sure what weird motives were making her behave in this way.

She picked up the mug of coffee and sipped it. Strong and sweet. Three spoonfuls of sugar, she would guess. She put it back down. The pink lipstick crescent of her lower lip was printed on the rim.

She turned the mug so her trace was unmissable, and left.

 

There was another sighting, she thought. Again, she could not say why her instinct was so emphatic, but she was sure that this was her man. She deliberately did not seek him out, but she found that as she wandered through the precincts of the college, going about her business, she was evaluating, unconsciously, every strange male face she encountered. She had an absolute confidence that she would recognize him.

Then, one evening, she was at an off-license buying a bottle of wine, en route to a friend’s dinner party. The place was busy and there was a queue at both tills. Her bottle was wrapped in tissue but when she presented her ten-pound note it was discovered that there wasn’t sufficient change. While the attendant burrowed in the adjacent till for a fresh supply of coins her attention was suddenly attracted by a man leaving the shop.

He was at the door, on his way out, when she turned. He was bareheaded, dark-haired and wearing a biscuit-colored tweed jacket. From each pocket protruded a bottle of red wine. Under his right arm he carried an untidy bundle of books and papers. The weight of the bottles stretched the material of his jacket across his broad shoulders. She thought, first: that’s one way to ruin a jacket. And then, almost immediately: that’s John Clearwater. He left the shop and moved out of sight.

The sales assistant laboriously counted out her change. By the time Hope was outside there was no sign of him. She felt no frustration; she knew it had been him. And she felt quietly sure that she would meet him, eventually. There was time enough.

And she was right. It took a little longer than she had calculated, but their respective trajectories finally touched at a faculty party. She saw him standing by the drinks table and knew at once it was him. She was almost drunk, but it was not alcohol that gave her the confidence to push through the room and introduce herself. The time had come, it was as simple as that.

THE MOCKMAN

Pan Troglodytes. Chimpanzee. The name was first used in 1738 in the London Magazine. “A most surprising creature was brought over that was taken in a wood in Guinea. She is the female of the creature which the Angolans call ‘Chimpanzee,’ or the Mockman.”

The Mockman.

Chimpanzees can, without encouragement, develop a taste for alcohol. When Washoe—a chimp reared with a human family and taught deaf-and-dumb sign language—was first introduced to live chimpanzees, and was asked what they were, he signed, “Black Bugs.” Chimpanzees use tools and can teach other chimpanzees how to use them. Chimpanzees have pined away and died from broken hearts….

Genetically, chimpanzees are the closest living relatives to human beings. When genetic matches were made of chimp and human DNA it was found that they differed only by a factor of 1 1/2 to 2 percent. In the world of taxonomy this means that chimpanzees and human beings are species siblings and, strictly speaking, the classification should really be changed. We belong to the same genus—Homo. Not Pan Troglodytes, then, but Homo Troglodytes and Homo Sapiens. The Mockmen.

 

I was eating my breakfast—a mug of milky tea and a drab slice of bread and margarine—when João arrived, Alda accompanying him. Alda was slim, like his father, eighteen years old with much lighter-toned skin, almost caramel colored. He had a big, open face and an attentive air, as if he were curious about everything he saw. He was not particularly bright, but he was very keen. I asked him what had happened about his military service.

“No, no,” he said with a relieved grin. “Too many soldiers now. War he finish soon.”

“Oh yes?” This was news to me. “What do you think?” I asked João.

He was less sanguine. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “They say UNAMO is finish…but you still remain with FIDE and EMLA.”

“UNAMO is finish,” Alda said with some emphasis. “They catch them at Luso, near the railway. Kill plenty plenty.”

“Who caught them?”

“The federals…and FIDE.” He made diving sounds, his caramel hands swooping. “Gasoline bombs.”

I reflected on this. “I thought FIDE was against the federals.”

“Yes, they are,” Alda said patiently, “but they both don’t like UNAMO.”

“I give up,” I said. “Let’s go.”

It was cool this early in the morning—sometimes I thought I saw my breath condense, just for an instant. The sky was white and opaque with misty cloud, the light even and shadowless. A heavy dew on the grass turned my dun leather boots chocolate in seconds. We walked through the silent camp, heading south.

As we passed Hauser’s cabin I heard my name called. I turned. Hauser stood in the doorway wearing an unattractively short toweling dressing gown.

“Glad I caught you,” he said. He handed me back my specimen bottle, clean and empty. “Most amusing. Did you think it up by yourself or did that genius Vail help you?”

“What’re you talking about?” I said coldly. I can be as frosty as the best of them.

“Your feeble joke.” He pointed at the specimen bottle. “For your information, the last meal your chimp enjoyed appeared to be a chimpburger.” His thin false smile disappeared. “Don’t waste my time, Dr. Clearwater.”

He went back into his cabin, haughtily. João and Alda looked at me with eager surprise: they rarely witnessed our arguments in the camp. I raised my shoulders, spread my palms and looked baffled. This needed further thought. We set off once more.

 

Eugene Mallabar had started the Grosso Arvore Research Project in 1953. It began modestly, as a field study to flesh out some chapters in his doctoral thesis. But the work fascinated him and he stayed on. He was joined two years later by his wife, Ginga. Between them their investigations into the society of wild chimpanzees, and their scrupulous and original field studies, soon brought scientific acclaim and increasing public renown. This became genuine celebrityhood, on Mallabar’s part, when he published his first book, The Peaceful Primate, in 1960. Television films and documentaries followed and Grosso Arvore, along with its telegenic founder, thrived and grew. Research grants multiplied, eager Ph.D. students offered their services and governmental influence broke through the hitherto impenetrable barriers of red tape that had stood in the way of real expansion. Soon Grosso Arvore became a pioneering national park and game preserve, among the first in Africa. Then came the international success of Mallabar’s next book, Primate’s Progress. Invitations, citations and honors followed; Mallabar became the recipient of a baker’s dozen of honorary doctorates; there was a biennial cycle of lucrative lecture tours in America and Europe; Mallabar chairs in primatology were established in Berlin, Florida and New Mexico. Eugene Mallabar’s place in the annals of science and ethology was secure.

The essence of the Mallabar approach to the study of chimpanzee society was painstaking and time-consuming. Its first and key requirement was that the observer habituate himself with the apes he was studying so that they accepted his presence in their world without fear or inhibition. Once that had been achieved (it had taken Mallabar almost two years), then the next stage was to observe and record. Over the years of the project this process had evolved into something highly organized and systematic, and vast amounts of data were gathered and analyzed. All observations were logged in a uniform way; chimps were identified and followed, and their biographies were steadily compiled and annotated over the years. The result was that, over the two decades since Mallabar’s initial studies, the Grosso Arvore project now represented the most exhaustive and thorough study of any animal society in the history of scientific investigation.

Mallabar was not alone, of course: there were other celebrated primate studies going on as well in Africa—at Gombe Stream, at Mahale National Park, at Bossou in Guinea—but there was no doubt that Mallabar, and Grosso Arvore, had the highest profile and attracted, thanks to the allure and skill of its founder, a reputation that could only be described as glamorous.

In this long catalog of success and glory Mallabar had made one important error—but it was one he could not have foreseen, to do him justice. He had chosen the wrong country. The civil war that began in 1968 brought massive problems, not to say occasional danger. Happily, the fighting that took place was at a safe distance, but there remained always the threat of sudden upheavals and breakouts from enclaves. The crude violence employed by the four armies contesting power and the unpredictable nature of their fortunes meant that the old days of glossy magazine stories, cover features and TV documentaries were over. The census of the chimpanzee population of the Semirance Forest (a very expensive and ambitious undertaking) was the first casualty of the unrest once the supply of Ph.D. students dried up. Work permits and visas for the remaining scientists became far harder to come by, and all manner of provisions became unobtainable as international opinion and superpower muscle-flexing imposed official or unofficial economic sanctions. Worse still, the uncompromising savagery of the federal government’s attempts to crush the competing guerrilla factions drew mounting condemnation and opprobrium from the West. The supply of grants and awards—the fuel upon which Grosso Arvore ran—began to dwindle alarmingly. Eugene Mallabar and Grosso Arvore found themselves attached, by association, to a bankrupt regime with an unsavory international reputation. Mallabar, needless to say, protested everywhere that the interests of scientific research had nothing to do with politics, but to little avail.

But good times, he said in his inimitable fashion, were just over the next hill. Lately, a UN resolution had been ratified and widely supported. The most radical of the guerrilla armies, UNAMO, appeared to be terminally underaided and the other two—FIDE and EMLA—began to talk vaguely of reconciliation. Thus prompted, the federal government started to make noises of appeasement and hatchet-burying. Suddenly there was a little new money available, but still—despite all the peace-mongering in the air—nobody was prepared to take up the short-term job it was meant to fund. Until, that is, I came along. What made me do it? I shall tell you about that in due course.

Mallabar had a new book almost completed, a summation of his life’s work. It was destined to be his chef d’oeuvre, the last word on chimpanzee society and what the years of work at the Grosso Arvore Project had taught humankind about their closest biological cousins. It was also designed as the crowning celebration of Grosso Arvore’s silver jubilee: we were securely placed on the scientific map, but the new book was designed to etch Grosso Arvore’s name in stone.

But as the book was in its final stages there had been a mystifying schism in the chimpanzee tribe that Mallabar had documented so thoroughly. For some unknown reason, a small group of chimpanzees had broken away from the main unit, had migrated south out of the Grosso Arvore park and had established themselves in an area of the forest not hitherto covered by the research project. Why had they left? Was this important? Did it signify something crucial and unrecognized in the evolution of chimpanzee society? A new job was funded to try and answer these questions. It fell to me to observe this small breakaway group—the southerners, as they were known—and continue the documentation of their daily lives until the book was ready, and to see if there was any explanation forthcoming for their untimely departure. “And besides,” Mallabar had said in—for him—a rare moment of anthropomorphism, “they are family. We would like to know why they left us and how they are getting on.”

 

João left me and Alda and set off in the rough direction Clovis had taken the day before. Alda and I planned to go to a large fig tree where the southern group often fed. We followed a winding path through the humid undergrowth. The seasonal rains were expected soon and the air was heavy with moisture, warm and stagnant. We walked at an easy pace, but I was soon sweating, and waving futilely at the platoons of flies that escorted us. Alda walked in front of me, the dark triangle of perspiration on his pink T-shirt pointing the way.

The fig tree proved to be empty apart from a small troupe of colobus monkeys. But in the distance, not too far off, I could hear the excited hooting and screaming of chimpanzees. Another fig tree grew in an outcrop of rocks about half a mile away. From the noise that was being generated it sounded as if the whole southern group might be there.

It took us half an hour to reach it. Alda and I approached with our usual caution. I led the way. I sank to my haunches about forty yards from the tree and took out my binoculars. I saw: Clovis, Mr. Jeb, Rita-Mae with her baby, Lester, Muffin and Rita-Lu…. Alda ticked their names off on the daily analysis sheet as I recited them. No sign of Conrad. No sign of pregnant Lena.

They were sitting high in the branches of the fig tree, a partially leafless ficus mucosae that at some juncture, I guessed, had been hit by lightning. Half of the tree was dead, stuck in a permanent winter, while the other half, as if in compensation, flourished vigorously. The chimps foraged idly on the ripe red fruit. They seemed content and unconcerned. I wondered what had made them scream.

Alda and I settled down for a long period of observation, our analysis sheets ready, our field journals open. The chimps glanced at us from time to time but otherwise ignored us—they were thoroughly habituated to observers. Through my binoculars I studied them all individually. I knew them and their personalities, I felt, as well as I knew my family. There was Clovis, the alpha male of the group, with his unusually thick, dense fur. Mr. Jeb, an old male, bald-headed, with a gray goatee and a withered arm. Rita-Mae, a strong mature female, with patchy brown hair. Rita-Lu, her daughter, an almost mature adolescent. Rita-Mae’s son was Muffin, an adolescent, a nervous, neurotic chimp who was only happy in his mother’s presence and who had been deeply upset by the arrival of her new baby, Lester. The two members of the group who were missing were Conrad and Lena. Conrad was an adult male whose eyeballs around the iris were white, not brown, a feature that gave him a disconcertingly human gaze. Lena was heavily pregnant, by whom I had no idea. She was a lone female who had attached herself to this southern group. Sometimes she traveled with them for a few days but she always left of her own accord after a while, to reappear up to a week or so later. She kept herself somewhat aloof, on the fringes of the group, but they seemed to accept her comings and goings without fuss.

We watched the chimps for over two hours. Muffin groomed Rita-Mae. Rita-Lu left the tree for twenty minutes and returned. The troop of colobus monkeys—from the first fig tree, I supposed—passed nearby. The chimps barked at them. Clovis displayed aggressively, shaking branches, the hair on his body erect. Later Mr. Jeb tried, half-heartedly, to copulate with Rita-Lu, who was partially in estrus, but she drove him away. Lester played with his mother and brother. And so the time wore on, an average chimp day: feeding, grooming, relaxing, with a certain amount of aggression and sex.

And then they seemed to have eaten their fill. Rita-Mae picked up Lester, slung him on her back and slid down one of the huge buttressing roots of the fig tree to the ground. Slowly the others followed. They prowled around the foot of the tree for a while, munching on some fallen figs. Then baby Lester slipped off his mother’s back and ran off to tug and pull at what looked like a tangle of rotting vegetation. Rita-Lu scampered after him, snatched the bundle away and flailed it violently up and down, making loud waa-bark noises as she did so. Through my binoculars I could see that the object she was flinging about was limp, but solid, like a very oily rag, say, or a dead fish.

She soon lost interest, however, as she saw the other members of the group moving out of the fig tree clearing, and threw the bundle away as she ran to follow them.

“We go?” Alda said. Normally we would spend the rest of the day trailing the group.

“No. Wait,” I said. Something about that bundle intrigued me. We picked our way over the rocks to where Rita-Lu had flung it. Alda crouched down and prodded it with a twig.

“Baboon,” he said. “Baby baboon.”

The tiny carcass was half eaten. Most of the head was gone, as were the chest and stomach. Two legs and an arm remained. A gleam of thin white ribs, like the teeth of a comb, shone through blackening membrane. The pale body, a bloodless bluey gray, was covered in the finest down. It looked distressingly human.

A dead baby baboon, eaten by chimpanzees, was not extraordinary. Chimps would eat baby monkeys, duiker, bushpigs, anything they could catch…. But I knew this wasn’t a baby baboon. This was the corpse of an infant chimpanzee, a few days old.

We have been aware for a long time now that chimpanzees are not pure vegetarians like gorillas. In London Zoo, in 1883, a chimp called Sally was observed to catch and eat a pigeon that had flown into her cage, and she continued to feast on any curious bird that hopped in looking for pickings. Indeed, Mallabar’s own work here at Grosso Arvore had done much to establish the different types of meat that chimps consumed, and revealed for the first time their predatory nature. Mallabar was the first person ever to observe and photograph chimpanzees hunting monkeys. In a memorable film he shot, the world saw a group of adult chimpanzees organize themselves into a hunting party, chase, capture and consume a baby bushpig. Chimpanzees liked eating meat—people were very surprised to learn—and chimps hunted and killed in order to get it. It made them less lovable, less gentle, perhaps, but more human.

I walked around the rocks and the blasted fig tree and I thought of the way Rita-Lu had thrashed the ground with the tattered remains of this baby. I wondered what Eugene Mallabar would make of this. Alda waited patiently for me.

After a minute or two I told him to put the corpse in a plastic bag and seal it. As he did so, I examined the ground beneath the fig tree and collected samples of feces in my specimen bottles. As I labeled them I tried to keep my thoughts calm and rational. What I had here was some very interesting evidence, but the case it made was highly circumstantial…. First, there was the meat in Clovis’s feces. Second, the half-eaten corpse of a baby chimp, two or three days old. Third, the gleeful aggression Rita-Lu had displayed toward the corpse. And fourth? Fourth, the possibility of more meat traces in the fecal matter just collected. What did that add up to? I checked my natural excitement: softly, softly, I thought.

Then there was the baby. Whose baby? Lena’s? It was possible; she was due to give birth any day. But if so, how did the baby die? What had eaten it and why? And why had Rita-Lu behaved in such a way? I stopped myself from further unprofitable speculation. We needed more facts, more data. I sent Alda off to find João and said that both of them should try to locate Lena, find out if she had given birth and if her infant was with her. I picked up the plastic bag with the dead baby in it—so light—and headed back to Grosso Arvore.

 

I stood in Hauser’s lab. The simple building, a rectangular corrugated-iron shack, contained a small but surprisingly efficient and well-equipped laboratory. Hauser’s work at the project was to do with chimpanzee pathology. He was currently trying to identify the various types of intestinal worms that infected chimps; hence the avidity with which he welcomed our cloacal samples brought in from the field.

We stood together, now, looking down at the pathetic remains of the baby chimp laid out on a stainless steel dissecting tray. Hauser’s lab had a small generator to power his centrifuges and chill his refrigerators. In a corner a table fan turned its face this way and that, dispensing its breeze, endlessly saying no, no, no. Hauser wore a white coat and trousers, but with no shirt or undershirt under the coat. Beneath the antiseptic smells of his chemicals and preserving spirits it was just possible to distinguish the thin vinegar reek of his body odor, a noisome seam in the olfactory strata.

He gave a soft grunt and poked at the body with the end of his ballpoint pen. He lifted a minute leg and let it drop.

“It is a chimp,” I confirmed.

“Absolutely. Very young and maybe dead for twenty-four hours. Hard to say. Brains gone, viscera gone. Hardly worth chewing on the rest. Where did you find it?”

“Ah…at one of my feeding sites.”

“The very discreet Mrs. Clearwater responded.”

I ignored him and laid out my specimen bottles.

“Is there any way,” I began as lightly as I could manage, “that you could tell if these ones”—I pointed at the bottles—“had consumed this one?” I indicated the baby’s corpse.

Hauser looked steadily at me, thinking. The sweat stood out on his bald head like little sun blisters. “Yes,” he said. “Tricky, but possible.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Then I assume these aren’t chimp feces.” He tapped one of the bottles with his pen. Hauser was no fool—which was annoying.

“God no,” I said. “At least I assume not.” I tried a laugh and it came out not too badly. But I could sense Hauser’s mind at work, testing the implications. “Just a crazy theory of mine,” I went on, “about predators.” As soon as I uttered the words I regretted them. I had said too much: Hauser knew better than anyone what chimpanzees ate. He had identified dozens of plant and fruit types from fecal study alone. He would be looking much more closely now. For some absurd reason I suddenly felt guilty about my insignificant duplicity. Why didn’t I simply air my suspicions, test my theory on a fellow worker? But I had the answer to that: I knew my colleagues too well to trust.

“No hurry,” I said. “Whenever you’ve got a moment.”

“No, I’ll get right onto it,” Hauser said, ominously.

I left the lab with some relief. It was hot outside, the midafternoon sun burning palely through a thin screen of clouds. No birds sang. All the noise came from the Artificial Feeding Area, and from the volume of pant-hoots, barks and screams it sounded as if there were two dozen chimps scoffing Mallabar’s free bananas. And with such a large number present everybody else would be there: Mallabar, Ginga, Toshiro, Roberta Vail, and half a dozen assistants, all observing and notating furiously. Ian Vail would be out in the field, I supposed; like me he was highly dubious about Mallabar’s celebrated toy.

I walked back to my tent, debating whether I had handled the discovery of the dead baby correctly. I should learn to be more craftily evasive, I thought: a bad evasion is tantamount to telling the truth. I was interrupted in my recriminations by the sight of João and Alda waiting for me. No sign at all of Lena, they said. There was no point in sending them out at this stage of the afternoon so I let them go home. I dragged a chair out into the shade of a canvas awning stretched above the tent’s opening and tried to write a letter to my mother, but my mind was too busy to concentrate and I abandoned it after three or four lines.

 

That evening in the canteen I waited until Roberta had left before I approached Ian Vail. His surprise, and then sly delight, might have been touching under any other circumstances, but his evident pleasure that I had initiated a conversation irked me. Our relations were cordial and professional, so far as I was concerned. I was making an innocent inquiry, so why did he have to render it personal, find it implicit with other motives? He set his tray down and turned to give me his full and focused attention.

“Fire away,” he said, his pale-lashed pale eyes irradiating me with telepathic avowals, I felt sure, but to no effect: Ian Vail did not interest me.

I asked him if there had been any recent births to any of his northern chimps.

“No, there are two pregnant, but nobody due soon. Why?”

“I found a dead baby today. Looking for a mother.”

“How did it die?”

“Accident, I think. I don’t know.”

He stroked his chin. The light from the hurricane lamp caught the hair on his forearm, dense and whorly, golden wire. It looked half an inch thick.

“There’re a couple of nomadic females pretty far gone,” he said. “Do you want to check? If Eugene isn’t feeding tomorrow we might find them. Shouldn’t be hard.”

“Fine,” I said, trying to ignore his boyish grin of pleasure. We arranged to meet at seven in the morning. He would come by in the Land-Rover and collect me.

I walked back to my tent, noticing that the lights in Hauser’s lab were still on. I realized I hadn’t seen him in the canteen that evening and I felt a seep of worry drip through me. Hauser was not known for working late.

Half an hour later, as I was writing up my field notes for the day, I heard Mallabar’s voice outside, asking if he might have a word with me. I let him in and offered him a scotch, which he declined. He looked around my tent, and then back at me, as if its contents might provide some encoded clue to my personality. I offered him a seat, but he came straight to the point standing.

“That body you found today, why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“Why should I?”

He smiled patiently, the wise headmaster confronted by the difficult pupil. I always strove for extra confidence where Mallabar was concerned. He worked his charms so thoroughly on everyone else that I made special efforts to show how impervious I was to them.

“Deaths must be logged. You know that.”

“I am logging it.” I pointed to my book. “I just don’t have all the facts yet. Hauser’s—”

“That’s why I’m here, to preempt you.” He paused. “We have the facts now. It wasn’t a chimp.”

“Oh come on.”

“Hope, it’s a terribly easy mistake to make. I’ve done it many, many times myself. A partially eaten or decomposed body of a newborn…hard to tell, my dear, hard to tell.”

“But Hauser—”

“Anton just confirmed to me that it was a baby baboon.”

“Ah.”

“I don’t blame you, Hope, I want you to know that. You were doing your job. I just wish you had come straight to me with your hypothesis.” Now he took a seat. I wondered what he knew of my hypothesis.

“I must say I thought—”

“I didn’t want,” he interrupted again, and gestured at my journal, “I didn’t want you to be barking up blind alleys.”

“Thank you.”

He stood up. “We’re not fools here, Hope. Please don’t underestimate us. We certainly don’t underestimate you.”

“It looked very like a chimp, I can tell you.”

“Well…” he said, drawing it out, relaxed now that I had admitted it. Then he did something extraordinary: he leaned toward me and kissed me on the cheek. I felt the prickle of his neat beard.

“Good night, my dear. Thank God you were wrong.” That smile again. “Our work here—” he paused. “Our work here is terribly important. Its integrity must be beyond any question. You must understand the potential damage of wild—no, I don’t mean wild—of hasty theorizing…hmm?” He looked pointedly at me, said good night once more, and left.

After he had gone I sat down and smoked a cigarette. I had to calm down. Then I finished writing up my field notes: I described the day’s events precisely, and made no alterations to the data.

That completed, I left my tent and walked down Main Street to Hauser’s lab. The lights were still on; I knocked and was admitted.

“Just in time,” Hauser said. “You can take these.” He handed me my specimen bottles, rinsed clean.

“What were the results?”

“No trace of meat. Nothing out of the ordinary. Fruit, leaves.”

I nodded, taking this in. “Eugene’s just been round to see me.”

“I know.” Hauser was unperturbed. “I too thought it was a chimp at first, and I mentioned it to him in passing…so we both took a closer look.” He smiled faintly and cocked his head. “It was a baby baboon. Incontrovertibly.”

“Funny how we both thought it was a chimp, instantly, like that.”

“Terribly easy mistake to make.”

“Of course.” All right, I thought, we’ll play it your way. I looked at him searchingly, directly. To his credit he didn’t flinch.

“May I have the body please?” I asked.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Why?”

“I incinerated it two hours ago.”

THE WAVE ALBATROSS AND THE NIGHT HERON

I sit on Brazzaville Beach in the early morning sunshine watching two gulls fight and flap over a morsel of food—a fish head or a yam heel, I can’t make it out. They squawk and strut; their beaks clash with a sound like plastic cups being stacked.

In the Galapagos Islands, the wave albatross mates for life. I have seen films of them smooching and petting each other like an infatuated couple out on a date. And this is no courtship ritual or opportunistic display; these two will cohabit until death intervenes.

One of my gulls gets wise and snatches up the scrap of food and flies away with it. The other lets him go and pecks distractedly at the sand.

In the Galapagos Islands there is another bird called the night heron. The night heron produces three chicks and then waits and watches to see which one will emerge the strongest. After a week or so the strongest chick begins to attack the other two, trying to bundle them out of the nest. In the end it succeeds; the weaker chicks fall to the ground and die.

The mother night heron sits beside the nest watching while this struggle goes on and one offspring disposes of the other two. The mother does not intervene.

 

John Clearwater was a mathematician. It seemed an innocuous statement to make but, as far as Hope was concerned, that was both the root cause of his allure for her and the source of all his enormous problems. She knew he was not particularly good-looking, but then she had never been very drawn to handsome men. There was something facile and shallow about male beauty, she thought. It was too commonplace, for one thing, and thereby devalued. Everywhere she went she saw notionally “good-looking” men of one type or another: men serving in shops, men eating in restaurants, men erecting scaffolding, men in suits in offices, men in uniforms at airports…. There were many more good-looking men in the world than women, she reckoned. It was much much harder to find a beautiful woman.

Clearwater was of average height but he looked stockier. He was also a little overweight when she met him, and these extra pounds added to the impression of squat solidity he gave off. He had wiry black hair, thinning at the front, that he brushed straight back. He wore unexceptionably orthodox clothes: brown sports jacket and dark gray flannels, Viyella shirts and knitted, patternless ties, but they looked absolutely right on him, she thought. There was a literally careless quality about the way he dressed, and the well-used, well-fitting nature of his clothes ignored fashion and style with a blunt panache that she found far more attractive than the most tasteful and soigné modishness.

He had a long, straight nose and bright, pale-blue eyes. She had never known anyone who smoked a cigarette so fast. His driven-back hair and his demeanor of restless hurry were both oddly exciting to her, and liberating. When she was with him she felt her own potential expand to preposterous lengths. He was indifferent to the ephemera and faddiness of the world, its swank and swish. His tastes, like most people’s, were both banal and arcane, but they seemed to have developed under their own impulsion, self-generated, uninfluenced. She found that innocent confidence and self-sufficiency very enviable.

There were disadvantages too. That self-sufficiency made him relatively incurious about her likes and dislikes. When they did something she wanted, she always felt it was an act of politeness on his part, however much he protested to the contrary. And his utter absorption in his work, which was of an abstraction so rarefied as to be vertiginous, excluded everyone, as far as she could see, apart from a handful of people in distant universities and research institutes.

She met him, eventually, one June evening at an end-of-term faculty party. She had just collected the typescript of her Ph.D. thesis from the typing agency and the strange joy that the sight of that ream of paper had provoked had encouraged her to drink too much. When she finally found herself face to face with Clearwater she stared at him very intently. He needed a shave—he had a heavy beard—and he looked tired. He was drinking red wine from a half-pint glass tankard filled to the brim.

“So, what’s your racket?” he said to her, with no enthusiasm.

“You can do better than that,” she said.

“OK. You’ve spilled wine on your blouse.”

“It’s not wine, it’s a brooch.”

He leaned forward a few inches to peer at the jet cameo pinned above the swell of her left breast.

“Of course it is,” he said. “I should have brought my specs.”

“Are you American?”

“No, no. Sorry: ‘brawt.’ How’s that? I spent four years at Cal Tech. It can damage your vowels.”

She looked at his clothes. He could have been a prep school master in the 1930s. “I could tell you’d lived in California. All those pastel colors.”

He looked a little taken aback, suddenly lost, as if a slang word had been used that he wasn’t familiar with. She realized that he couldn’t believe she was talking about his clothes.

“Oh…my clothes, I see.”

“Not exactly the cutting edge of haute couture.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not interested in clothes.”

Under further questioning he told her that he shopped about once every five years, when he tended to buy a dozen of everything—shoes, jackets, trousers. He held up a sleeve to expose a hole in the jacket elbow.

“Actually, this is almost ten years old. Wasn’t much call for jackets in California.”

“So what did you wear, when you lived there?”

“Jesus Christ.” He laughed. Then he added more politely, “Ah…I don’t know. I didn’t wear jackets.”

“What about the beach? The sun?”

“I was working. I wasn’t on holiday. Anyway, what would I want to go to a beach for?”

“Fun?”

“Listen, I’m thirty-five. Time’s running out for me.”

She laughed at this, too long, the drink making her uncontrolled. Then he started to laugh at her laughing at him. It wasn’t for a long time that she realized he had been deadly serious.

By the end of the evening he had asked her to go out with him. He did go out, he admitted, and he did drink, in phases, usually when he was changing “areas of study,” as he put it. It was lucky for her, he said without any condescension, that she had caught him on the cusp.

They had sex for the first time about a week later, in the bedroom of her flat in South Kensington. He was living in the Oxford and Cambridge Club, vaguely looking for somewhere to live within walking distance of Imperial College, where his research post was. He came back to her flat the next night and stayed, and the night after that, and stayed. After a dozen nights she offered to put him up until he could find his own place. It seemed sensible. He was still living there in August when, three months and five days after their first meeting, he asked her to marry him.

 

They had been married for nearly eight weeks when Hope noticed the first change. Summer was over, autumn was well advanced. She came home one cold and frosty evening and opened a bottle of red wine.

“Do you want a glass, Johnny?” she called.

He came through to the kitchen.

“No thanks,” he said. “I’ve stopped.”

“Stopped what?”

“The booze.”

“Since when?”

“Since now.”

He opened the fridge. Hope saw what looked like half a dozen pints of milk. He poured himself a glass. He grinned at her. He seemed in an unusually good mood.

“Got to keep my strength up.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’ve found it,” he said. “I know what I’m going to do next.” He made a little turning motion with his hand. “Full of amazing—The potential. The excitement.”

She felt happy for him. At least, that was what she told herself she felt.

“Great. What is it? Tell me.”

“Turbulence,” he said. “Turbulence.”

THE ZERO-SUM GAME

Turbulence is John Clearwater’s new passion. Hope knows that his old passion, his old love for many years, was Game Theory. He spent four years at Cal Tech working on Game Theory: the theory of rational conflict. John Clearwater has told her a certain amount about the work he did at Cal Tech. He started with two-person games—two-person zero-sum games, as he put it. A zero-sum game is a game where one person’s win is necessarily the other person’s loss. “Like marriage,” Hope said. “Well, no,” John said. “Marriage is a non-zero-sum game. And emotions come into play. One person’s loss may not necessarily be another person’s gain.” John told her there was another factor too: he was particularly interested in games of perfect information, where there were no secrets. In these games, be said, there was always an optimum strategy. That was what he was looking for: optimum strategies. Chess is a game of perfect information, so is tick-tack-toe. Games of perfect information can be infinitely complex or comparatively straightforward. The only condition was that there had to be no secrets. Poker isn’t a game of perfect information. Poker is a two-person, zero-sum game without perfect information. “Just like marriage,” Hope said. He still disagreed.

 

I was ready, early the next morning, when Ian Vail came by to pick me up. There was a dirt road that took you a mile or so into the heart of the northern area. It saved a lot of time: a fifth to a quarter of my day was spent in commuting to and fro.

As we drove off Vail told me that he had sent two of his field assistants ahead at first light with walkie-talkies to look for the chimps. With a bit of luck, he said, we might be able to cover most if not all of the northern chimp population in a day. I was very much aware of the aftereffects of my encounter with Mallabar the night before. I asked Vail if he had spoken of our trip to anyone. He looked at me, a little surprised.

“No,” he said. “Why?”

“Mallabar thinks it wasn’t a baby chimp. That body. He says it was a baboon.”

“And you don’t agree.”

“It’s not a question of agreeing. I’m right, he’s wrong.”

Vail made a face. “Look, Hope, maybe you shouldn’t tell me any more, you know? Eugene has been extraordinarily…I just don’t want to have to take sides.”

I smiled to myself: very Ian Vail. “Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll keep your name out of it. Just a professional disagreement.”

“He must have his reasons. I mean, if you’re right.”

“I am and he has. Though I’ve no idea what they are.”

I sensed Vail’s deepening worry: what was he getting into here? To what extent, by aiding me in this way, might he be going counter to his benefactor’s wishes?

“It’s awkward for me, that’s all,” he said feebly. “With Roberta and all that.”

Roberta Vail. Ian’s American wife and Mallabar’s amanuensis and uncredited coauthor. Roberta worshiped Mallabar—the term was not too strong—and everyone knew it, even though her adoration was couched in terms of proper professional awe. Perhaps, I thought now, it was Roberta’s fervent devotion to Eugene that had made Ian Vail try to kiss me that day…. I realized, also, that Roberta had better not learn of this trip—not because she distrusted her husband (she didn’t), but because of its implicit disloyalty to the God Eugene. However, that was one confidence I knew our Ian wouldn’t divulge.

We parked the Land-Rover and set off up the path into the low hills that climbed toward the grasslands of the plateau. We were now right in the middle of the Grosso Arvore National Park, an area of approximately one hundred square miles. Our particular territory, where the northern group of chimpanzees were situated, was smaller, a strip of forest and scrub approximately ten miles long and two miles wide. It supported a fluctuating population of between thirty and forty chimpanzees—now reduced somewhat by the migration of my southerners.

About half of the northern chimps had been spotted by one of Vail’s assistants, so we were informed over our walkie-talkies. We made good progress. It took us only about half an hour to reach them. I noticed how the going here in the north was far easier; there was little of the thick forest or dense undergrowth that I encountered in the south.

We were lucky to find so many of the chimpanzees together at one site. The reason was that three large dalbergia trees grew here and the flowers were in bud. I counted fourteen chimpanzees sitting amongst the branches, grazing avidly on the small, sweet bud clusters.

Ian pointed. “Two of the pregnant females are here. Look.”

Two down. How many to go?…We sat down about sixty yards from the trees and watched the chimps through our binoculars. It was about half past eight in the morning, probably approaching the end of the first feeding session of the day. Already there was a certain amount of calling and excitement. But the chimps were still gorging themselves. Dalbergia buds are a favorite food and the source would only be available for three or four days before they flowered.

I could see through my binoculars that one young female was heavily in estrus. The pink swelling of the skin of her genital area was remarkably large, a protuberance the size of a big cabbage. The male chimps in her tree were growing increasingly excited and aroused. There was much branch-shaking and displaying, calling and shrieking. But the female kept herself at the very extremity of the dalbergia tree, sitting on thin whippy branches that could not possibly bear the weight of another chimp. Chimpanzees often copulate in trees and occasionally a male would advance out toward her as far as he dared, and squat down, showing her his erect penis, shaking leaves and hitting branches in his excitement. But the female appeared to ignore him, and munched on contentedly, cramming her mouth with handful upon handful of sweet yellow dalbergia buds.

But eventually, as if she sensed their collective arousal had reached a peak, and the waiting males had suffered long enough, she climbed down out of the tree. And at once half a dozen males and adolescent males followed her to the ground. The air was loud with calling and hooting.

I saw one big male, with a patch of brown fur on his neck, take up the familiar squatting position near her. His legs were spread wide and I could clearly see his erect penis, thin and sharp, about four inches long, almost lilac against the dark fur of his belly, quivering above his bulging scrotum resting on the ground.

I tapped Ian’s elbow. “Is that the alpha male?”

“Yes. N4A.”

“Come on. What’s his name?”

“We call him Darius.”

“And the female?”

“Crispina.”

Darius scratched the earth and rapped the ground with his knuckles. He gazed directly, intently, at Crispina, who was half turned away. She raised her lurid rump and backed slowly toward him, looking round from time to time. Darius squatted, almost immobile, swaying very slightly from side to side, the pale tense cone of his penis twitching slightly. He grunted softly as Crispina backed smoothly into his lap.

It was over very quickly. As he thrust, Darius made a harsh grunting noise, and Crispina screamed. After about five or six seconds, and ten thrusts on Darius’s part, Crispina leapt away. Darius picked up a bundle of leaves and carefully wiped his penis. But already Crispina had turned away and was presenting her florid rump to another squatting chimp.

I glanced at Vail. He was peering intently through his binoculars. We watched as Crispina copulated with four of the other attendant males. She refused to have anything to do with two of the adolescents, no matter how histrionically they displayed for her. In fact she seemed more interested in Darius, to whom she returned several times, presenting her rump and backing up to him, even, at one stage, hopefully touching his flaccid penis. But he wasn’t interested anymore, or wasn’t aroused. Then, as if on some covert signal, everything seemed to calm down. Crispina lay on the ground and groomed herself; Darius and the other males climbed back up into the dalbergia trees. Vail put down his binoculars and chuckled.

“Fascinating…she sure knows what she wants, does Crispina,” he said, with what looked like an ugly smirk on his lips.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing…” He was coloring. “I mean it’s fascinating to see a dominant female emerge in the group again. It’s taken a while. Shall we move on?”

We left the dalbergia trees and retraced our steps about half a mile before taking a path that headed northeast. One of Vail’s assistants had spotted another, smaller group of chimpanzees feeding on termites’ nests. Something about Vail’s last remark nagged at me.

“What do you mean about a dominant female emerging again?”

“Well, it used to be Rita-Mae, you see. Before she went south. Crispina—what went on there—it was just like Rita-Mae.”

“The copulations.”

“Yes. And favoring certain males. Rejecting others.”

“And you think that’s significant. There’s some kind—” I searched for the right word, “some kind of strategy?”

“Ah-ha. Another person who hasn’t read my paper.”

“What paper?”

He looked absurdly pleased with himself. “It’s a theory I have. You see, it’s not the alpha male that gives the group its cohesion, it’s a female. A dominant female. It was Rita-Mae that led the group south, not Clovis.”

This was all new to me. “How did Mallabar respond?”

“Oh, he doesn’t agree. Not at all. He doesn’t think the split has anything to do with sex.”

As we tramped along the path toward the termite nests, Vail told me more about the article he had written. I didn’t listen particularly hard; my thoughts were suddenly back with the dead baby. And Lena. Eventually, to shut him up, I asked if I could see it sometime. He promised to bring it round.

At the termite nests we found Vail’s assistant watching a small group of six chimps feeding on the ants. There was a female here who was very pregnant. Vail said that she was one of the two nomads he logged regularly. Neither had been fully integrated into the northern group.

“She’s one of the strange attractors,” he said.

“Why did you call her that? Strange attractor.”

“Just an expression. Before Crispina became sexually popular, it was these ladies that stirred things up. They would breeze into town, as it were. Is it important?”

“I’ve heard the phrase before, that’s all. In another context.”

We watched the chimps feed for a while and then returned to the Land-Rover. My head was full of ideas. I asked Vail to run me through his theory once again. He said that the northern group had been stable, socially speaking, because of the presence within it of a strong, sexually popular female—Rita-Mae. When she left, the other younger females could not fill her role and the group began to fragment socially. Other nomadic females were drawn in by the males in an attempt, Vail thought, to find another Rita-Mae. But it wasn’t until Crispina started to become popular and favor Darius—who promptly emerged as the alpha male—that the unrest and disruption caused by the schism began to abate.

“But I can see problems ahead,” Vail went on. “Two of the other females in the group are pregnant and so is one nomad. Crispina is the only one with a functioning sexual cycle. When she becomes pregnant, God knows what’ll happen.”

“What does your theory say?”

“I’m afraid that’s where it starts to run out of steam.”

 

Vail dropped me off outside my tent. It was midafternoon, hot and silent apart from the metallic burr of the cicadas. Inside my tent it was stifling. The tin roof was theoretically designed to keep it cooler but I could not calculate why it should. I took off my shirt and wiped myself down. Liceu had folded away my freshly washed clothes in a tin trunk. I opened it and chose a white T-shirt. Then I frowned: the trunk had not been locked. This was not for security; the key hung from a string tied to a handle, but I always asked Liceu to lock the trunk to minimize the risk of any bugs or other clothes-eating insects crawling in.

I pulled on my T-shirt. Perhaps he had simply forgotten. I sat down at my desk and looked at the objects on it: the photograph of my parents, of my sister and her children, the stapler, the red tin mug filled with pens, the scissors, the faceted glass paperweight…. I didn’t remember leaving the paperweight in exactly that position. Or the scissors. Or maybe I had. Or maybe Liceu had dusted. I opened the desk drawer. There was my field notebook, rubber bands, paper clips, ruler, my black journal. It all seemed undisturbed. Then a gleam of foil caught my eye, sticking out of a curling-cornered old paperback edition of Anna Karenina. I opened the book. They were still there, my three remaining condoms. But I now knew somebody had been through this drawer. I kept the condoms hidden in the middle of that book, tucked in close to the spine. They weren’t there to mark my place.

Hauser or Mallabar?…Then I paused. Surely this was getting a little out of hand? I opened my journal: there was my entry, unaltered. The corpse of a two-to three-day-old chimpanzee infant, partially eaten. What did I expect?

I placed my hands palm down on the warm wood of the desk. The death of a baby chimp. The sexual popularity of Crispina. Ian Vail’s theory. And now somebody was going discreetly through my possessions. Looking for something, or merely confirming suspicions?

“Hope?”

Ian Vail was outside. I pulled back the tent flap and let him in.

“God, it’s hot in here,” he said. He seemed slightly edgy. “I’m heading back out again. Brought you this.” He handed me a journal. Bulletin of the Australian Primatological Association.

“I didn’t know you were a member,” I said.

He grinned apologetically. “It was the only place that would take it. I think I told you—Eugene wasn’t exactly falling over himself to help me get it published.”

I flicked through the journal looking for his article. I found it: “Sexual and social strategies of wild female chimpanzees.” I read a few sentences.

“A real page turner,” he said. “Once I put it down I could hardly pick it up again.” He chuckled weakly at his old joke.

I was looking down at the open pages in my hands, but from the new proximity of his voice I was aware he had moved closer to me. A few seconds dawdled by. I knew what would happen the moment I looked up.

I looked up. He stepped toward me and his hands gripped my shoulders. I turned my face; his lips and nose squashed into my cheek.

“Hope,” he said thickly. “Hope.”

“Don’t, Ian.” I pushed him away. “What do I have to say to you? Jesus Christ.”

He looked wretched. The blush burning his fair skin, sweat glossy on his forehead. “I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said.

“Oh my God…don’t be so, so ridiculous, Ian. For heaven’s sake!”

“I can’t help it. Today, when…I thought you—”

“Look. This is not going to go anywhere. I told you the last time.”

“Hope, just give me—”

“What about Roberta?” I turned the knife. “I like Roberta,” I lied. “I like you, but that’s all. You’re not being fair to any of us.”

He had an odd look on his face, as if he had been chewing on some gristle but was too polite to spit it out.

“Please, Ian.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t…it won’t happen again.”

He left. I sat down at my desk and thought about him for a while. Then I read his article. It was really quite good.

 

Roberta Vail was plain and on the plump side. She had wiry, naturally blond hair that she always wore pulled back from her forehead in a firm, clumpy ponytail. She wasn’t unattractive, but she had a tired, slack expression to her mouth. She finished her meal and lit a cigarette. She only smoked when Ian was absent.

“Where’s Ian?” I asked, as I sat down opposite her with my tray.

“He’s not feeling so good. Not hungry.”

I commiserated and started my meal.

There was a quality about Roberta that always baffled me. Perhaps it was her closed, inert countenance—what was she thinking? Was she happy or sad? Did it matter? Or perhaps it was simply that air of mystery that is associated with certain couples: a nagging curiosity on the part of the observer as to how they could ever have been attracted to each other in the first instance; a fundamental ignorance of what it was that the one found alluring in the other…. This may be a little unfair, I thought. I could see what might be thought interesting or appealing about Ian Vail, but as for what he saw in Roberta, I was stumped. But then, I reflected, we are always on shaky ground when it comes to understanding one man’s meat or another man’s poison in the sexual arena. I have been wrong more times than I care to think, and my oldest friend, Meredith, confided in me after my marriage broke up that she had never, ever understood my obsession for John Clearwater. I was amazed—I thought it would be as plain as day to others.

I returned my attention to Roberta, who was telling me about something she had observed at the Artificial Feeding Area. I stopped listening altogether when Mallabar and Ginga came in. There was an attitude in Mallabar’s bearing this evening that was unusual. He seemed to be bracing his shoulders square; his eyes—I know this sounds absurd—appeared brighter. He went through into the kitchen area and Ginga joined me and Roberta.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Eugene’ll tell you. Have you a cigarette?”

I offered her a Tusker, Roberta a Kool. She chose Roberta’s. We both lit up and Roberta went in search of pudding. Ginga turned to me and positioned her body so we could talk confidentially. Ginga had a narrow face with thin lips, prematurely lined and aged from too many years under the African sun. She had unusual eyes—the upper lids seemed heavy, as if she were dying to go to sleep but was making a special effort for you. She spoke good English but with a pronounced accent—Swiss-French, I supposed; she came from Lausanne. She was very thin. I imagined that in the right clothes she would look elegant. I had never seen her in anything but a shirt and trousers. She wore no makeup.

She patted my hand and smiled at me. Ginga liked me, I knew that.

“Hope, Hope, Hope,” she said, mock-despairingly. “Why is Eugene so cross with you? He was in a rage the other night.”

I shrugged, sighed, and told her a little about the transformation of dead baby chimp into dead baby baboon. It made no sense to her, she said.

“So where’s the body?” she demanded.

“It doesn’t exist,” I said. I inclined my head in Hauser’s direction. “He incinerated it.”

Ginga made a face. “Well, you know he’s been so worried, Eugene,” she said. “For the project. There is no money, you know? It’s terrible.” She reflected a moment, running a hand through her short hair. She took a slow, avid pull on her cigarette, hollowing her cheéks. She exhaled, giving me a half smile, half grimace.

“But I think everything will be fine now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wait and see.” She pointed.

I turned. Mallabar emerged from the canteen’s kitchen with two foil-capped bottles of Asti Spumante. Everyone stopped talking as, with undue ceremony, he assembled glasses, popped the corks and poured out the foaming wine, silencing with histrionic gestures all speculation as to the cause of this rare treat.

So we waited dutifully, with our charged glasses, while Mallabar stood at the head of the table, head slightly bowed, jaws and cheeks working as if he were actually masticating, tasting the speech he was about to deliver. I sensed people gathering behind me and turned. All the kitchen staff were ranged behind me and most of the field assistants. João caught my glance and mouthed something at me but I couldn’t interpret it. Mallabar looked up at the ceiling; his eyes seemed moist. He cleared his throat.

“These last three years,” he began huskily, “have been the hardest I have ever known in more than two decades at Grosso Arvore.” He paused. “That we have been able to continue our work is due in large part to you”—he thrust both hands at us—“my colleagues and dear friends. Under the most trying circumstances—the most trying—and in the face of increasing difficulties, we have struggled on to sustain that vision that was born here so many years ago.”

Now he smiled. He beamed, showing us his strong teeth.

“Those black days, I think we can now say, are behind us. A brighter future beckons at the end of the rainbow.” He nodded vigorously. “I heard this afternoon that the DuVeen Foundation of Orlando, Florida, is to award us a grant of two and three-quarter millions of dollars, U.S., spread over the next four years!”

Hauser cheered, we all clapped. Toshiro whistled deafeningly.

“We are already recruiting in the States and the U.K.,” Mallabar continued triumphantly. “I can tell you that within months the census will be resuming. We are negotiating with Princeton University for two more research fellowships. Many other exciting developments are afoot. Grosso Arvore, my dear good friends, is saved!”

We raised our glasses and, prompted by Hauser, drank to the health of Eugene Mallabar.

After the Asti Spumante we moved on to beer. We sat around the table, exulting in our good fortune, chatting and laughing. Even I, the newcomer, felt cheered, not so much at the news but at the patent elation on the faces of the others, the old-timers. Four more years, a big grant by an important foundation…where one led, others would surely follow, we decided. Hard currency—solid dollars—would soften the restrictions imposed by the government as a result of the civil war. Perhaps Mallabar was right: a brighter future did beckon at the end of the rainbow.

Later, as we were leaving, Mallabar came up to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and left it there. I wondered if he were a little drunk.

“Hope,” he said sonorously, “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.” He squeezed my shoulder. With his other hand he caressed his beard—I could just hear the rasp of tidy bristles.

“Well…what?”

“Could you do this week’s provisioning run? I know it’s Anton’s turn but I need him here. I can’t spare him.” He smiled fondly at me, not showing his teeth. “We have to reassess all our various projects, in the light of the DuVeen grant. We can’t waste a moment.”

I thought. He was referring to the fortnightly run into the provincial capital where we stocked up on supplies. It was at least a three-day trip, sometimes longer, and we usually adhered strictly to the rota. I had made it a month ago.

“It would be a special favor to me,” he said carefully, more pressure being applied to my shoulder. “You would be my goose who laid the golden egg.”

“How could I refuse.”

“Bless you.” A final squeeze. “Good night my dear. See you tomorrow.”

I walked slowly back to my tent, wondering if there were other motives behind this “special favor.” Was it a punishment or was it a way of saying no hard feelings? I strolled past Hauser’s lab, and then on my left the vast pale columnar trunk of the hagenia tree. A nightjar fluted its haunting five-note call.

Something moved at the entrance to my hut. I stopped.

“Mam, it is I, João.”

I went into the tent and lit the hurricane lamp. João stood outside. I asked him in but he said he had to get back to his village.

“I saw Lena, Mam. I come to tell you.”

“And?”

“She has her baby.”

“Oh.” I had the sensation of a sagging, a falling inside me.

I thanked him, we said good night and he left for home. I sat down on my bed, suddenly tired. Stupidly, I felt tears smart in my eyes.

NOISE OR SIGNAL?

The man I work with—Gunter—started to go deaf fairly recently. The doctors couldn’t explain why but his hearing problems became so bad that be was obliged to be fitted with a hearing aid. He told me that, initially, he found the amplified sound in his head alarmingly hard to cope with. Everything came at him in a rush, he said, trying to explain the effect; sounds were suddenly unfamiliar and new. “You see, Hope,” he said a little plaintively, “the problem was that I couldn’t tell what was irrelevant and what was important…I couldn’t tell noise from signal.”

I think: Join the club. Learning to listen is like any process of education. You have to sift through a mass of phenomena and discard what is unimportant. You have to distinguish the signal from the noise. When you find the signals a pattern might emerge, and so on.

That was what John Clearwater was attempting to do with his work on turbulence. Here was an area that was all “noise,” completely random and unpredictable. “Hyperbolic” was a word he used. Was there any pattern in turbulence? Were there any signals being given off? And suppose there were, would a pattern form? And what would that tell us about other disorderly systems in the universe? He told me once that he was looking for equations of motion to predict the future of all turbulent systems….

The eye sees. It explores the optic array before us. Things shift and change, but the eye searches always for concepts of invariance. That is the way the visual world is pinned down and understood. John was on a different tack: it was variance that fascinated him now—systems in flux, erratic and discontinuous. He was trying to comprehend happenstance, he told me, and write the book of the unruly world we lived in.

On Brazzaville Beach the waves roll and tumble and flatten on the sand in a sizzle of foam. Endlessly, wave after wave. On a beach in Scotland once, John pointed out to sea and said: what I want to do is write the geometry of a wave.

 

Hope did not notice any further changes in John Clearwater as the weeks progressed. He had stopped drinking but it made no difference to his demeanor. He spent more time away from the flat at the college but his new sphere of interest—turbulence—did not appear to be all-consuming.

In early spring they went to Scotland for a holiday, renting a cold cottage in the Borders near Biggar for a fortnight. They traveled to Ipswich and spent a weekend with John’s mother (his father had died a decade previously). She was an old frail gray lady, her back hooped in a pronounced dowager’s stoop which made her look up at you sideways, cocking her head to obtain a clearer, oblique view out of one bright eye. She lived with John’s brother, Frank, and his wife, Daphne, in a new housing development on the outskirts of the city. Frank was a pharmacist, bald and genial. He and Daphne had two young boys—Gary and Gerry—who were polite and disciplined. To Hope it was a dull and interminable weekend of endless snacks and meals and television, most of which she spent in a state of confused befuddlement, trying to divine John Clearwater’s origins in this bland suburban mulch. From time to time she caught herself sneering, and warned herself against being too contemptuous: for most of the world, she realized, this was the Good Life.

She got drunk on the train home to London, drinking whisky and eating chocolates (she was not so slim in those days) and chatting volubly about her life as a schoolgirl in Banbury and Oxford. John found it amusing. He sat opposite her with his bitter lemon, goading her on to more daring revelations.

Her own life at this stage was in something of a hiatus. Her thesis was complete, immaculate, submitted, and she was waiting for the oral examination. For the very first time in her life, it seemed, the future lay open ahead of her, empty and innocuous. She luxuriated in her idleness; it seemed pointless, she thought illogically, to apply for a job with her Ph.D. unexamined. So she read and shopped, visited friends and went to films in the afternoon, repainted their bedroom and looked vaguely for a larger flat. She was happy. Her father had always told her to make sure and recognize that state when it arrived, and acknowledge it. “It’s like money in the bank, old girl,” he would say, “money in the bank.” She was happy and she recognized that fact, as instructed. Being married had many advantages, she realized, one of which was joint bank accounts. John’s salary easily paid for everything.

Hope’s thesis was entitled Dominance and Territory: Relationships and Social Structure. She had drifted into ethology almost by accident after her degree in botany, judiciously steered in that direction by her supervisor, old Professor Hobbes. But when she felt the urge to study again she realized she had grown tired of laboratories and of animals in cages and so she resumed her botanizing and resurrected some work she had done years before on trees. She thought that it would at least get her out of doors. Professor Hobbes had no objections and he directed her up a few avenues of research that he himself was too busy to explore. She wrote a paper on “The Tilia Decline: An Anthropogenic Interpretation.” Hobbes said it wasn’t publishable, but he might find the data useful for a talk he was giving at a symposium in Vienna. Hope had no objections; she was fond of Edgar Hobbes, and all his pupils knew this was part of the quid pro quo for his patronage. He had no worries about her doctorate, and neither had she; her work was thorough, exact and surprisingly literate, Hobbes said, for a scientist. Her oral examination was a formality and, eventually, one chilly afternoon, she emerged from her college to walk the streets as Dr. Hope Clearwater.

That evening, she and John went out for a celebratory meal. They found a French restaurant in Knightsbridge that was expensive enough to raise the occasion to “rare treat” status and ordered a bottle of champagne.

“Come on, John,” she said. “You’ve got to have one glass. At least.”

“No.” He smiled pleasantly. “It doesn’t agree with me. Not when I’m working.”

“Christ, it’s Saturday tomorrow.” She poured him a glass anyway.

He raised it in a toast. “Congratulations, Doc,” he said. “Lots of love.”

They clinked glasses. She drank hers down in large gulps and watched him set his carefully on the white tablecloth. It fizzed, untouched, brimful, all through the meal.

 

Apart from his new alcohol-free life, there were no other significant changes in John’s life that Hope could easily discern. But, subtly, indubitably, things were different. For a long time she blamed herself for experiencing this feeling, on the grounds that if you persistently go around thinking something is different, this in itself will be sufficient to establish that fact. Covertly, she observed and analyzed him, and she had to admit there was very little to go on. Perhaps she was imagining things? They went out together, they talked to each other just as often, they shared enthusiasms and exasperations as before, they made love with the same frequency…. But despite all that, in the end she knew that, in some as yet undefined way, he was not the same man she had met and married.

The victim, the catalyst, the guilty party, had to be—she decided with some reluctance—his work. She almost would have prefered a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, or some deficiency in her own nature that marriage had revealed, but her rival was mathematics. John was no longer as engaged with her as he had been. She was no longer the main focus of his thoughts. It was this shift that had been nagging at her over the weeks. That portion of his conscious mind that she had occupied had diminished. He did discuss his work with her, true, but even the broad, simplified terms he employed were not sufficient for her to grasp it fully. She could not understand what he was doing, or what excited him. She made efforts, but the gap between them was not intellectual so much as conceptual—his brain operated on a different level and in a different sphere from hers. As far as his work in mathematics was concerned there was never going to be anything more to share.

But I have my own work too, she thought, and as if to prove it to herself spent three weeks writing an article entitled Aggression and Evolution. She boldly submitted it to Nature where, to her surprise, it was accepted. Thus encouraged, she started applying for a few jobs and got her reading up to date. She made a point of discussing her work with John—the latest controversies in ethology, new directions in life sciences, as they were now being called—which, to her vague irritation, he found highly interesting. But it made little difference. She saw, in due time, that he was held and involved in what he did in a way that was to her fundamentally strange. It wasn’t like work—as she and the rest of the world considered it—at all. She could not understand it, and, she concluded with a dull ache of despair, that meant she would never really understand him either.

THE MARGIN OF ERROR

Should Hope Clearwater have seen the signs? Should she have recognized the early signals?…

When a skyscraper is built, one of the most obsessively precise jobs is the positioning and fixing of the first, vast, steel girders that form the foundations of the whole airy frame of the building. The margin of error involved in the positioning of these tons of metal is minuscule. It must be no greater than an eighth of an inch. A minute deviation at this stage—a hole drilled a few millimeters askew, an angle miscalculated by a fraction of a degree, can have dramatic consequences later. Eight hundred feet up, that insignificant three-millimeter shift has grown into a fourteen-yard chasm.

John called it the for-want-of-a-nail syndrome. For want of a nail the battle was lost. Something small suddenly becomes hugely enlarged. Something calm suddenly becomes enraged. Something flowing smoothly in one instant becomes turbulent. How or why does this happen? What if, John said, there are small perturbations that we miss or ignore; tiny irritations that we regard as fundamentally inconsequential. These small perturbations may have large consequences. In science, so in life.

Hope has a small perturbation in her life at the moment. A woman from the village behind the beach is careless about tethering her goat. Several times a week it breaks free and makes its way to Hope’s garden behind her beach house. Hope watches it now as it grazes on her hibiscus hedge. She has thought about remonstrating, but the woman—called Marga—is a tough, bossy character. Hope can imagine the entire village becoming involved in their dispute, and she needs the village, and in a way they need her. The system is stable. She can spare a few hibiscus flowers.

 

Hope watched the countryside unreel through the carriage window, dull and gray, green and brown, the hard umber clods of the winter fields dusted with frost. No wonder she felt depressed: a low sky, a drab world, a cold wind…she wasn’t born for English winters, she decided; meteorologically she was inclined to the hot south. To distract herself she switched her attention from the view to a mental image of her destination, her friend Meredith’s cottage, conjuring up a log fire, a hot meal, red wine and soft armchairs. That was better, that was all right, and she knew an approximation of that was waiting for her. It was just unfortunate that Meredith was so dirty, that she never seemed to clean or dust her home. Hope always worried about the sheets too. There had been a time when she didn’t care where or upon what she slept. Even now she would not have described herself as unduly fussy, but these days there was a minimum requirement of whatever bed she found herself sleeping in—clean sheets. She was almost sure that Meredith would not offer her an unchanged bed, but that “almost” was an insidious concern. Best just to drink a lot, she told herself, and forget.

The man sitting opposite her had a tie rather like one of John’s, she noticed. John was away at a convention in New York at Columbia University. It was their first protracted separation since their marriage and she was missing him badly. But not at first. At first she had felt guilty at how much she was enjoying being on her own again, but that sensation had only lasted a day and a night. When he phoned—he phoned regularly—she told him this and he said he was missing her too. She knew he was lying—not lying, perhaps, but merely being nice. He talked with such vigor about the conference and the seminars he was attending, the old friends from Cal Tech he was encountering, that she guessed he only started to think about her when he picked up the phone to make his duty call.

Why was she being so unkind about him, she asked herself impatiently? Why was she so ruthlessly analyzing their marriage? What did it gain? She took out a cigarette, unthinkingly, and rolled it between her fingers.

“Excuse me,” the man with John’s tie said. “This is a non-smoker.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m not smoking.”

She was pleased to see that her response had thrown him, rather. Defiantly, she put the unlit cigarette in her mouth and left it there. She rested her chin on her fist and stared out at the cooling towers of Didcot power station as they slowly drifted by. I must be getting addicted, she thought. Bloody John Clearwater…she had started smoking in self-defense, and now she found she really quite enjoyed it. She let the cigarette hang sullenly from her lips. There was an old television show, she remembered, where the lead character, a private eye or cop, did the same thing as his personal gimmick, always taking out a cigarette, sticking it in his mouth, but never lighting it. He had a parrot as a pet. Big white one, a cockatoo. It was all rather affected and striven for, she thought, and that unlit cigarette became particularly irritating. She glanced at the man opposite, who was reading with rigid concentration, and hoped she was irritating him too.

 

Meredith Brock was a don, an architectural historian, and one of some eminence, so Hope had come to realize, much to her astonishment. Meredith was an old friend; they had known each other since their school days. They were the same age and Hope was slightly affronted that Meredith had made a name for herself so young, albeit in such a recondite area. Her renown had come about as a result of a massive survey of medieval English buildings that she had worked on. An old historian—whose lifelong endeavor the survey had been—had hired her as his assistant to see the books through the presses and had died just as the entire multivolume project had been published. It fell to Meredith to publicize and defend the enterprise—it was controversial and nicely opinionated—and because of her age and her looks she had enjoyed a fleeting celebrity. She duly became the only architectural historian any lazy editor, producer or committee chairman could think of and her profile had swiftly risen. It was when Hope had read Meredith’s name in two newspapers, heard her voice on the radio and seen her on television, all in one week, that she realized just how far her friend had come.

Hope looked at her now as she made them both a drink. She is pretty, Hope thought grudgingly, prettier than me. But she did nothing to exploit her looks. Her clothes were cheap and out of fashion. She wore too much makeup and very high heels, all the time. Her hair was long but never allowed to hang free; it was always held up and arranged in loops and swags by a combination of combs and clips. Hope thought she was at her most attractive when she had just woken up: hair down, tousled, face clean and mascara-free. They were good enough friends for Hope to be able to tell her this, gently to encourage ideas of a new look, a lowering of heels, a less lurid shade of lipstick. Meredith had listened patiently, shrugged and said what was the point?

“It’s no good for people like you and me, Hope,” she had told her, wearily. “We can’t really take it seriously. It’s hard enough even making a vague effort. This whole—” she picked at her acrylic jersey’s appliqued satin flowers, “this whole flimflam.”

Meredith handed her a gin and tonic, one small ice cube floating, no lemon. Hope picked a wet hair off the outside of the cloudy glass. At least the tonic was fizzing.

“Careful, lovely. It’s strong.”

Hope sipped, sat back in her chair and stretched her legs. Meredith threw a log on the fire. A pallid ray of winter sun brightened the cottage windows for an instant, then all was pleasant gloom again.

“So how is Mr. Clearwater?” Meredith asked. Hope told her, but did not expand on her own disquiet. It was too early in the day for confidences, they could wait until after dinner. So they talked generally about John, about being married, about not being married, about what job Hope might find. As they chatted, Hope wondered: does she like John? They had met once before the wedding, and possibly a couple of times since. Everything had seemed very cordial, tolerably pleasant. Why not? She looked at Meredith. No, she thought, she probably doesn’t.

Meredith went through to the kitchen to organize the lunch. Hope sipped her gin, noticing already the effects the alcohol was having on her. She found her thoughts returning inevitably to her husband. She thought of nothing or no one else these days, it seemed to her. Was that healthy? Should she be worried? What was it about him, she wondered, slightly fuddled, that had drawn her to him, given her such confidence?

The gin, the heat of the fire, the softness of the armchair, were sending her to sleep. She stood up and wandered across the room and looked at Meredith’s bookshelves. Antiquities of Oxfordshire, Traditional Domestic Architecture in the Banbury Region, Dark Age Britain, Landscape in Distress…suddenly she knew what it was about John; what obsessed her. John had a secret she could never share. John had knowledge that was denied to virtually everyone on earth. She felt her cheeks hot and pressed her glass to them. That was it: John had secrets and she envied him. This was what had fascinated her about him almost immediately, but she had never really understood it. John and his mathematics, John and his game theory, John and his turbulence…she would never, could never know about them. She envied him his secret knowledge, but it was, she saw, an envy that was strangely pure, almost indistinct from a kind of worship. He was at home in a world that was banned to all but a handful of initiates. You gained entrance if you possessed the necessary knowledge, but she knew it was knowledge that was impossible for her to acquire. That was what made it special. It was magic, in a way. But then a magician might perform some extraordinary trick that made you gasp with incredulity, but it would be possible for you to reproduce it, if he let you in on his secret, if he showed you how. John could spend a lifetime trying to show me how, she thought, but it would make no difference. If you don’t have the right kind of brain then all the effort and study in the world can’t help you. So what did that imply? To enter the secret mathematical world John Clearwater inhabited, you had to have a rare and special gift: a particular way of thinking, a particular cast of mind. You either had that gift or you hadn’t. It couldn’t be learned; it couldn’t be bought.

Hope took a book from the shelf and turned the pages, not looking at them, thinking on, feeling the gin surge through her veins. This envy I feel, she thought, it wasn’t like admiring someone with a special talent—a painter, say, a musician, a sportsman. Through diligent practice and expert coaching you could experience an approximation of what that talented person achieved: paint a picture, play a sonata, run a mile. But when she looked at what John did, she knew that was impossible. An ordinarily numerate person could, by dint of hard work, go so far up the mathematical tree. But then you stopped. To go beyond required some kind of faculty or vision that you had to be born with, she supposed. Only a very few occupied those thin whippy branches at the extremity, moved by the unobstructed breezes, exposed to the full fat glare of the sun.

Hope looked at the book she held in her hands, a little dazed at the clarity of her insight. She saw a photograph of the aisle of a church, transept columns, glass, vaulting. She smiled: she envied Meredith a little too, but it was a more mundane envy. Meredith had special knowledge. She knew everything about old buildings, the exact names for the precise objects. She knew what a voussoir was, the difference between Roman and Tuscan doric, where to find the predella on an altarpiece, what you kept in an ambry, employed words like misericord, modillion and mouchette with confident precision. But then, Hope thought, so do I. I know the difference between pasture and meadow, can distinguish crack willow from white willow, I know what kind of flower Lithospermum purpureocaeruleum is. With time and effort I could learn all Meredith’s knowledge and she could learn mine. But John’s world, John’s knowledge, is beyond me, un-reachable.

She walked through to the kitchen, rather chastened by the rigor of her gin-inspired analysis. A roast chicken steamed in the middle of the pine table. Meredith was draining vegetables in a colander. Hope deliberately did not look at the state of the cooker. One of Meredith’s several cats leapt up on the table and carefully picked its way through the place mats and cutlery to the chicken, which it sniffed and, Hope thought, licked.

“No you don’t,” Meredith said gently, setting a bowl of brussels sprouts on the table and making no more effort to chase the cat away. “That’s our lunch, greedy swine.” She pulled her chair back.

“Sit down, Hope,” she said. “And bloody cheer up, will you? Look like death.”

DIVERGENCE SYNDROMES

I spend a lot of time walking on the beach, thinking about the past and my life so far. So far, so good? Well, you will be able to make up your own mind, and so, perhaps, will I. My work is easy and I finish it quickly. I have plenty of time to remember.

Fragments of John Clearwater’s conversation come back to me. When he was working on turbulence, he told me he had had such good results because be had decided to tackle the subject in a new way. In the past, he said, people tried to understand turbulence by writing endless and ever more complicated differential equations for the flow of fluids. As the equations became more involved and detailed, so their connection to the basic phenomenon grew more tenuous. John said that his approach was all to do with shapes. He decided to look at the shapes of turbulence and, immediately, he began to understand it.

It was at this time that his talk was full of concepts he referred to as Divergence Syndromes. He explained them to me as forms of erratic behavior. And in a subject like turbulence, naturally, there will almost always be a divergence syndrome somewhere. Something you expect to be positive will turn out to be negative. Something you assume will be constant becomes finite. Something you take confidently for granted suddenly vanishes. These are divergence syndromes.

This sort of erratic behavior terrifies mathematicians, John said, especially those of the old school. But people were learning, now, that the key response to a divergence syndrome was not to be startled, or confounded, but to attempt to explain it through a new method of thought. Then, often, what seemed at first shocking, or bizarre, can become quite acceptable.

As I stroll the length of this beach I consider all the divergence syndromes in my life and wonder where and when I should have initiated new methods of thought. The process works admirably with benefit of hindsight, but I suspect it wouldn’t be quite so easy to apply at a moment of crisis.

 

It was at Sangui, João’s village, that the tarred macadam road began. I turned onto it, heard the empty trailer, towed behind the Land-Rover, bump up over the curb and settled down for the long drive into town. Normally it took between four and five hours, but that was assuming there were no major accidents on the way, that the bridges were in reasonable repair, that there were no protracted delays at the numerous military roadblocks and that you didn’t get caught behind one of the supply columns returning from provisioning the federal troops fighting in the northern provinces.

I rather enjoyed this drive—I had done it three times before—and on each occasion relished the buoyant end-of-term sensations it provoked. Turning off the laterite track in Sangui onto the crumbling, potholed tarmac of the main road south was like crossing a border, a frontier between two states of mind. Grosso Arvore was behind me, I was on my own for a few days. Almost alone: two kitchen porters, Martim and Vemba, sat in the back of the Land-Rover on piles of empty sacks. I had offered them the front seats, as I always did, but they preferred their own company in the rear.

The road was straight, running through dry scrubland and patchy forest that spread south from the hills of the escarpment behind me to the ocean, two hundred miles away. It was early morning and the sun was just beginning to burn off the dawn haze. The routine was familiar. The first day was occupied getting to the town. I would spend the night at the Airport Hotel and the next day would be made up of an enervating round of visits to the bank and department store and the various merchants who provided the project with food and supplies, black market drugs and medicines. Occasionally, there were trips to be made to workshops and garages for machinery to be fixed, or spare parts searched for, and this could add an extra day or two to the trip. But on this occasion I was merely provisioning. A long day’s shopping awaited me tomorrow. Then I would spend one further night at the hotel before heading back for home, a much slower undertaking, with the Land-Rover and its trailer heavily loaded. Thirty miles an hour was our average speed.

The road ran through an unchanging landscape. Every ten miles or so we would encounter a small village. A cluster of mud huts thatched with palm fronds; a few traders’ stalls set out on the verge selling oranges and eggplant, sweetmeats and cola nuts. The journey was not dangerous—the fighting was distant and only the federal army had aircraft—but we were always warned not to attempt it after dark. Ian Vail had broken down once, and was very late returning, but Mallabar had refused to send out a search party for him until the next morning. I was never absolutely clear what we were meant to be frightened of. Brigands and bandits, I supposed: there was a risk of highway robbery after dark. Apparently there were gangs roaming the countryside, composed mainly of deserters from the federal army. It was these men that the many roadblocks were designed to deter or catch. Every half hour or so one would come across these outposts, nothing more than a plank of wood propped against an oil drum jutting out into the road, and beyond it in the fringe of the bush or beneath the shade of a tree, a lean-to or palm frond shelter containing four or five very bored young soldiers wearing odd scraps of uniform. You had to slow down and halt whenever you saw one of these oil drums. Someone would peer at you and then, usually, motion you onward with a lethargic wave. If they were feeling bloody-minded they would make you step out of your vehicle, examine your papers and make a cursory search.

These were the moments I did not enjoy particularly: standing in the sun beside the Land-Rover being scrutinized by a young man in a torn undershirt, camouflage trousers and baseball boots, with an ex-Warsaw Pact AK47 slung over his shoulder. It always seemed especially quiet at that moment. It made me want to shift my feet, or cough, just to break the silence that pressed around me as the soldier examined my laisser-passer. In the half dozen times I had been stopped, never once had another car or lorry driven by. It was as if the road belonged exclusively to me.

On this journey, though, we were being waved through without exception. The mood of the men seemed more jocular, and more than once as I had driven off I had seen beer bottles being raised to lips. I remembered what Alda had told me about the defeat of UNAMO forces. Perhaps this was a prearmistice relaxation and the war would be over soon.

We reached the Cabule River by late afternoon. The ramshackle buildings on the far bank marked the outskirts of the town. Our wheels rattled noisily on the metal planking of the ancient iron bridge. The river was four hundred yards wide here. It took a great slow swerve around the town before disgorging its brown water into the dank creeks of its mangrove-clogged delta ten miles away down the coast. The edge of the continent ran straight here—mile after mile of beach and thundering surf. The silty Cabule was navigable only by vessels of the shallowest draft. All the bauxite from the mines—this province’s major source of wealth—had to be transported to the capital and its harbor by rail. Bauxite mines, some timber, a few sugar and rubber plantations, sharecropping and the Grosso Arvore National Park were all this area of the country had to recommend it.

I drove slowly through the town. On either side of the road were deep ditches. A few brick buildings housed empty shops and drinking dens. In the mud-walled compounds beyond them smoke rose from charcoal fires as the evening meal was prepared. The first neon lights—ultramarine and peppermint—flickered in the shack-bars and on the concrete terraces of the hotel-brothels and nightclubs. Music bellowed from loudspeakers perched on roofs or hung from rafters. In the crawling traffic, taxi drivers sat with their fists pressed on their horns. Children knocked on the side of the Land-Rover trying to sell me Russian watches, feather dusters, yo-yos, felt-tip pens, pineapples and tomatoes. There were many soldiers on the streets, carrying their weapons as unconcernedly as newspapers. Old men sat on benches beneath the dusty shade trees and watched naked children spin hoops and chase each other in and out of the rubbish bins. At an uneven table two young spivs with shiny shirts played stylish Ping-Pong, stamping their feet in the dust and uttering hoarse cries of bravado as they ruthlessly smashed and countersmashed.

The press of traffic nudged its way through the town center, past the five-story department store and the mosaic-walled national bank with its swooping modernist roof; past the white cathedral and the brutalist Department of Mines; past the police station and the police barracks, with its flagpole and ornamental cannons, the neat stacked pyramids of cannonballs like the swart droppings of some giant rodent.

Then we turned and headed back north again on the new road to the airport, past the hospital and the exclusive, fenced-in suburbs. We drove past the convent school—St. Encarnación—past the shoe factory and the motor parks. The setting sun basted everything with a gentle peachy light.

The airport was far too large for such an undistinguished provincial capital. Built shortly after independence in 1964 by the West German company that owned and ran the bauxite mines, it was designed to take the largest commercial jets (optimism is free, after all). A sprawling modern hotel was constructed nearby to accommodate all the projected passengers. The bauxite was still being extracted, the mines and the processing plants functioned, after a fashion, but the airport and its white hotel were always heading for decline and desuetude. Five arrivals and departures a day were all it boasted, domestic flights linking other provincial cities. Air Zambia flew in once a week from Lusaka, but the much heralded UTA link to Brazzaville and Paris became another casualty of the civil war when rumors spread that FIDE, or was it EMLA?, had been sold ground-to-air missiles by the North Koreans.

The war had benefited the airport in other respects, however. Half the federal government’s air force was based there now: a near squadron of Mig 15 “Fagot” fighters, three ex-RAF Canberra bombers, half a dozen Aermacchi trainers converted to ground attack and assorted helicopters. As we drove past the perimeter fence I could see the old Fokker Friendship revving up at the end of the runway about to depart on its evening flight to the capital, and beyond it, in their bays, the tubby, tilted-back silhouettes of the Migs.

At the hotel I said good night to Martim and Vemba, agreed to the time of our rendezvous the next morning, and checked in. The hotel was distinctly shabby these days, all incentive to keep it spruced up having long gone, but, after weeks at Grosso Arvore and my tent, it seemed to me still redolent of a tawdry but alluring glamour. It had a restaurant, a cocktail bar and a half olympic-sized swimming pool with a barbecue area. Its rooms were contained in two-story annexes, connected to the main building by roofed-over walkways that passed through tropical gardens. Scattered here and there were one- and two-bedroom bungalows for those guests who planned a longer stay. Sometimes, piped Latin-American music was played in the lobby. The staff wore white, high-collared jackets with gold buttons. At the entrance to the restaurant a notice requested, in English: LADIES PLEASE NO SHORTS. GENTLEMEN PLEASE TIES. Whether it was the ghosts from the heady days of the bauxite factory contractors’ ball, or the still lingering pretensions of the current management, the Airport Hotel (this was its evocative name) had an ambience all its own. It also had air conditioning, sometimes, and hot and cold running water, sometimes, both luxuries that were permanently absent at Grosso Arvore.

I walked through the unkempt gardens to my room, unpacked, had a shower and changed into a dress. I felt fresh, cool and hungry.

I strolled along a walkway to the main building. It was now quite dark and the warmth of the night air, after the chill of my room, seemed to lie gently on my clean bare arms and shoulders like a muslin shawl. I could hear some rumba Muzak wafting over from the lobby’s sound system and from all around me in the grass and bushes came the endless creek-creek of the crickets. I stopped and filled my lungs, smelling Africa—smelling dust, woodsmoke, perfume from a flower, something musty, something decaying.

I turned onto another path and quickened my pace toward one of the cottages. Its windows were shuttered but I could see light shining behind them.

I knocked on the door and waited. I knocked again and it was opened.

Usman Shoukry looked at me, not surprised, but trying not to smile. He was wearing loose linen shorts and a lilac T-shirt. His hair was shorter than the time I had last seen him.

“Look who’s here,” I said.

“Hope,” he said, deliberately, as if he were christening me. “Come on in.”

I did, and he shut the door. When I kissed him I stuck my tongue in his mouth and slipped my hands under his T-shirt and felt his back, running them up to his shoulder blades and then down beneath the waistband of his shorts, my palms resting lightly on his cool, hairless buttocks.

I broke away from the kiss, still holding him to me. His mouth was glossy with saliva. He rubbed it dry with the back of his hand, smiling at me again. I looked at him as if I hadn’t seen him for years. The sherry color of his brown eyes, his slightly askew nose, his thick lips.

“Are you in trouble?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

“I wasn’t expecting you for two months.”

“Well, it’s your lucky day, then, isn’t it? Come on, let’s eat before they run out of food.”

THE INVERSE CASCADE

Hope Clearwater buys four parsnips in the market today. She is delighted and very surprised to find them. She asks the trader where they came from. Nigeria, the trader says. Hope doesn’t believe her, and questions her skeptically: “Where exactly in Nigeria?” The trader is not pleased to have her word doubted. “Jos,” she says, and turns away. Hope remembers that Jos is situated high on a plateau in central Nigeria. All sorts of fruit and vegetables can be grown there because of its cool nights and dry days—even raspberries and strawberries.

The parsnips remind her of a story John told her about an old professor of his. This man had worked for a time on the problem of turbulent diffusion. For his experiments he required a large number of floats that had to be at once highly visible and not affected by wind. For this reason balls—both rubber and Ping-Pong—would be of no use. After experimenting with turnips and potatoes, the professor discovered that the ideal vegetable was the parsnip. Its rough, conic configuration, and the fact that in the water most of the vegetable was below the surface, made it a stable float and indifferent to all but the severest breezes.

What the professor did was to paint several dozen parsnips white and tip sackfuls of them off a bridge over the River Cam. The white parsnips would float downstream, be caught in eddies, cluster and circle in side-swirls or flow downriver in long bobbing strings, photographed by the professor’s assistants standing with cameras on both banks of the river at intervals of twenty yards.

The professor (Hope can’t remember his name) bad done useful work, John said. The problem was that, despite his imaginative experimental technique, his thinking was too rigid. He believed that turbulence was caused by a cascade of energy from large eddies to small. But John’s own work—his breakthrough, as he termed it—had shown that this was only part of the story. In every case of turbulence, in whatever medium, there is also an inverse cascade, a flow of energy from the small eddy back to the large. Hope remembers clearly the day John proved this. He had explained it to her, his voice hoarse with excitement. Disorder, he said, is not simply handed down a chain; some of it is always being handed back again. Once that fact is grasped, a great deal that was baffling about turbulent systems becomes far easier to understand.

 

When John Clearwater came back from America he was in good form. He had met someone at the conference—a statistician—who had helped him enormously, almost without knowing it. He told Hope about these new avenues that had opened up, new potentials he could now see. Hope laughed with him, with genuine pleasure—with relief perhaps—at this excitement. Once again what he told her—he spent two hours trying to explain it to her—meant little or nothing, but she felt pleased, reassured. That time, after his return from America, calmed her, staunched the thin hemorrhage of anxiety and doubt. All, it seemed, was well again.

He worked as hard as ever, leaving the flat at eight in the morning and not returning, usually, until nine at night, but their hours together seemed to Hope to recapture some of the vivacity and edge of their first months of marriage. Later, when she looked back, she realized that they had merely been going through another phase. (She found she could demarcate the phases in her married life as efficiently as a historian—they seemed as precise as the circles of growth in the trunk of a tree.) In this particular phase a new enthusiasm dominated—the cinema. They went fairly frequently to the cinema and theater, whenever the mood took them, or whenever some triumphant succés d’estime seemed to demand it. But now John wanted to go out every second or third night. And at first it was fun. His absorption was so intense and single-minded, and the pleasure he took in the cinema so manifestly good for his spirits, that it was a privilege, she reckoned, to share in it. But after six weeks of this, amounting to over two dozen visits—some films were returned to two or three times—she began to find that the strain of accompanying him was growing and she started making excuses.

Part of the problem was that he insisted sitting very close to the screen, in the front row preferably, and certainly no farther back than the third, so that his entire field of vision was dominated by the projected image. At first this was oddly exhilarating, and Hope would emerge from the cinema with her head reverberating like a gong from the big booming pictures, breathless and jangled.

His other idiosyncrasy, however, was harder to take and began to irritate her. He was scrupulous about the type of film they saw. Reviews in as many newspapers as possible were studied and collated, and he built up a small library of film reference books in an attempt to ensure that the film they were going to see would fulfill the demands he made of it. She accused him, jokingly at first, of being the only person she had ever met who sought to entertain himself in a wholly prescriptive way. It was the very opposite of random; he wanted to take no risks. “How can you enjoy yourself, how can you have fun, without an element of risk?” He paid no attention. It was not a narrow censorship he indulged in—he was very keen on horror films and violent thrillers—it was simply that he believed, with a fundamentalist’s zeal, that a true film, a film that was true to the nature of its own form, had to have a happy ending.

“Don’t be so ridiculous,” Hope said, when he first put this to her.

“No, honestly…a film that doesn’t have a happy ending is—” He paused. “—is misunderstanding the basis of all cinema.”

“OK. OK. How many counterexamples do you want me to give you? Two dozen? Three dozen?”

“No. Don’t you see?” He was enjoying himself. “Put it this way. The essence of all art is positive. At root. So in the one great popular art form, the popular art form, this motive has to be even more powerful.”

Hope wondered then if he were teasing her. But his expression—candid, intense—belied this. “Nonsense,” she said. “Rubbish. What more can I say?”

But he wasn’t joking.

And so it went on. And so John only saw those films that did not, as he saw it, demean or betray cinema’s true purpose. Hope came to realize fairly swiftly that going to see these films was in a real sense therapeutic for him. They functioned as a kind of drug, and she began to see how his close-up, all-enveloping, dream-fulfilling cinema buoyed him up and kept him floating. Those few weeks of ease she had experienced after his return from the conference began to be eroded once again by the slow drip, drip of worry.

 

Hope looked up at John’s taut, stretched face as he came. She saw his brow crumple, his cheeks concave, and heard a grunting deep in his throat. Then he exhaled and smiled and lowered his head until their noses met. He settled his weight on his elbows as Hope touched his wiry hair. He fitted his head into the angle of her neck and shoulder and exhaled again, his breath warm and moist against her skin. Inside her she felt the small shiftings and slippings as his penis detumesced. She sensed a complementary swelling of love for him in her throat as she dragged her fingers over his head, down across the thick hair that grew on his neck, trailing them lightly across the flaky blur of big freckles on his shoulder blades, making him shiver.

Catching the thin, sour smell of fresh sweat from his armpits, she slipped her hand into his armpit, feeling the hairs slick and clotted between her fingers. She kissed his neck, pressing her nose into his neck, smelling his own particular scent, his spoor. She remembered thinking once, before she married, what kind of man she wanted to live with, and had run through the various types that seemed most commonly on offer—the caring ones, the bastards, the strong ones, the moneyed, the humorists, the saints—and had decided that what she wanted was not a model or an archetype, but somebody quite different. A man. A person. Different from her.

Hope held and smelled this real person that she had found. Then she slipped her fingers into her mouth and tasted his salt sweat. She reached down his spine to touch the small, flat button of a mole that grew four inches above the cleft in his buttocks and reveled selfishly in the quiddity of this individual who was hers, whom she possessed…. Intimacy made her melancholy and exhilarated. She turned her head and kissed him on the mouth, forcing his teeth apart with a blunt, strong tongue and then sucking his own tongue into her mouth, tasting his saliva.

She pushed him over onto his back and felt his flaccid penis slide wetly from her.

“Ah. Sheets,” he said.

“I love you, John,” she said. “And don’t you forget it.”

“I won’t. But I’ve forgotten the tissues.”

“Then the deal’s off.”

 

It was a Sunday morning. He brought her a mug of tea and then went out to buy newspapers and bread. She shouted at him to put some music on the record player before he left. He couldn’t have heard her because the door closed and there was only silence.

She rolled over and sat on the edge of the bed looking down at her lap and thighs, thinking dully that she was putting on weight. She cupped her soft stomach with both hands—she was. She sighed, and then, absentmindedly, with the backs of her fingers, gently stroked her pubic hair—unusually thick, she thought, a brash, dense triangle—and thought about John, and the cinema, their first wedding anniversary, which was approaching, the holiday they were going to take, and how it would be.

She stood up, walked through to the sitting room and crouched in front of the record player. A thick plank of sun lay across the dining table illuminating the wreckage of their evening meal, the dregs of wine in the opaque, smeary glasses, the congealed scraps on the uncleared plates.

She put on a record and stood up, humming along. And then, somehow, her mood, a phrase in the music, the sun on the table made the moment magically thicken and hold. For an instant she forgot where she was, her gaze unfocused and she seemed to see John, in her mind’s eye, hurrying back to the flat. She saw the sunny street, the shiny cars, the comical way he was trying to read the newspapers as he walked, his arms full of groceries. The shadows the buildings cast were striped obliquely across the street, light and shade. John walked through gloom and glare toward her.

The odd trance passed. She shivered, naked, in the sitting room. She ran back to their bed and slid between just warm sheets.

USMAN SHOUKRY’S LEMMA

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Kwarizmi was an Arab mathematician from Khiva, now part of Uzbekistan in the USSR. He lived in the first part of the ninth century A.D. and is remarkable in that he not only gave us the word algebra (from the title of one of his books—Calculation by Restoration and Reduction—al-jabr means “Restoration”), but also, more interestingly, from his name—al-Khwarizmi—is derived the word algorithm. An algorithm is a mechanical procedure for solving a problem in a finite number of steps, a procedure that requires no ingenuity.

Algorithms are much beloved mathematical tools. Computers operate on algorithms. They imply a world of certainty, of rotas and routine, of continuous process. The great celestial machine, programmed and preordained.

However, algorithmic procedures are of little use for phenomena that are irregular and discontinuous. Fairly self-evident, you would have thought, but how often have we tried to solve the problems in our life algorithmically? It doesn’t work. I should know.

There is another appellation in the world of mathematics that comes faintly tinged with contempt. A Lemma. A lemma is a proposition that is so simple that it cannot even be called a theorem. I appreciate lemmae—or lemmas, maybe—they seem to have more bearing on my world. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs”…“More baste, less speed”…

Usman gave me a lemma once.

We were in bed, it was dark and we had made love. The roof fan buzzed above our heads and the room was cool. I could hear only the steady beat of the fan and the noise of the crickets outside. I turned to him and kissed him.

“Ah, Hope,” he said—I couldn’t see his smile in the dark, but I could hear it in his voice—“I think you’re falling in love with me.”

“Think what you like,” I said, “but you’re wrong.”

“You’re a difficult person, Hope. Very difficult.”

“Well, I am feeling happy,” I said. “I’ll give you that. You make me happy.”

Then he said something in Arabic.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a saying. What we always say. A warning: ‘Never be too happy.’”

Never be too happy. Usman Shoukry’s lemma.

Sometimes I wonder if a lemma is closer to an axiom. Axioms are statements that are assumed to be true, that require no formal proof: 2 + 2 = 4. “A line is a length without breadth.” Life is full of lemmae, I know. There must be some axioms.

 

Usman said he would be on the beach that afternoon if I wanted to meet up with him after my provisioning trip. As it happened I was finished by half past three and a hotel taxi took me down to the bathing beach. I saw Usman’s car, parked alongside a few others in the shade of a palm grove, and let the taxi go.

The palm trees here were very tall and old; their tensed, curved, gray trunks looked too slim to hold themselves erect, let alone bear the weight of their shaggy crowns and burden of green coconuts. The ground beneath them was grassless and hard, almost as if it had been rolled and swept. This had been an exclusive beach once and all along the shoreline were the remains of wooden beach houses and cabanas. Most had rotted away over the last few years, or had been dismantled for their timber and tar paper roofs. Locals had settled here and a ribbon of shanties, made from the recycled cabanas, lurked in the scrub behind the littoral’s tree line. With them had come rubbish dumps and livestock of all kinds. Goats and hens scrounged amongst the palm trees, stray dogs loped along the sand, sniffing curiously at whatever the waves had brought ashore.

One or two of the beach houses were still in good repair. The general manager of the bauxite mines had one, and a few Lebanese and Syrian merchants had clubbed together to keep others functioning. But whatever their efforts, the mood of this stretch of shoreline was inescapably sad, a morose memory of former glories.

I saw Usman standing waist-high in the sea, his torso canted into the green and foamy breakers that rolled powerfully in, smashing and buffeting his body. With particularly large waves he would dive beneath them, hurling himself into their sheer, tight throats just before they crested, and emerge, spitting and delighted, on the other side.

“Usman!” I called and he waved back at me. I sat down on his mat, took off my shoes and lit a cigarette. Behind me, four men played volleyball outside one of the refurbished beach huts. They were brown—Lebanese, I guessed—wore very small swimming trunks and played with histrionic abandon, making unnecessary dives for very gettable balls.

Usman came out of the sea, shaking his head like a dog. He had put on more weight since my last visit and there was a soft overhang of flesh at the waistband of his swimming trunks. He sat down beside me and with delicate, wet fingers helped himself to one of my cigarettes.

“Going to swim?” he said.

“I’m frightened of the undertow, you know that.”

“Ah, Hope. That sounds like an epitaph to me—‘Hope Clearwater, she was frightened of the undertow.’”

Usman was Egyptian and in his early forties, I guessed. He wouldn’t tell me his exact age.

“You’re getting fat,” I said.

“You’re getting too thin.”

He spoke very good English, but with quite a heavy accent. He had a strong face which would have looked better if he were less heavy. All his features—nose, eyebrows, lips, chin—appeared to have extra emphasis. His brown torso was quite hairless. His nipples were small and neat, like a boy’s.

A fly settled on his leg and he watched it for a while, letting it taste the salt water, before he waved it away. There was a milky haze covering the sun and a breeze off the ocean. I felt warm but not too hot. I lay back on his mat and shut my eyes, listening to the rumble and hiss of the breakers. Grosso Arvore, my chimpanzees and Mallabar seemed very far away.

“I should have brought my swimsuit,” I said. “Not to swim. To get brown.”

“No, no. Stay white. I like you white. All the European women here are too brown. Be different.”

“I hate being so white.”

“OK. Get brown, I don’t care that much.”

I laughed at him. He made me laugh, Usman, but I couldn’t really say why. I sensed him lying down on the mat beside me. We were silent for a while. Then I felt his fingers gently touch my face. Then they were in my hair, brushing it back from my forehead.

“Stay white, Hope,” he whispered dramatically in my ear. “Stay white for your brown man.”

I laughed at him again. “No.”

I felt dulled by the warmth and the smoothing motion of his fingers on my head.

“Hey. What’s this?” Both sets of fingers were in my hair now, parting the strands to expose my skull. I kept my eyes closed.

“My port-wine mark.”

“What do you call it?”

I explained. I had a port-wine mark, a sizable spill, a ragged two inches across, above my left ear, a dark prelate’s purple. My hair was so thick you had to search hard to spot it. No pictures exist of me as a bald baby. My parents waited until my hair had fully grown in before they put me in front of a camera.

“In Egypt this means very good luck.”

“In England it means good luck too. It’s bad luck if it’s full on your face.”

He looked resigned. “I just said it to make you feel good.”

“Thank you.” I paused. “Actually it does make me feel good. I often wonder what I would’ve been like if it had been on my cheek.” I squirmed round and rested on an elbow, looking at him. “You wouldn’t be lying here for a start.”

This time he laughed at me. “Yes. You’re probably correct.”

“See. It brings me good luck.”

I lay back again. A clamorous argument was going on amongst the volleyball players.

“Do you want to go to that Lebanese restaurant tonight?” he said. “I shouldn’t be back too late.” He sat up. “I have to go now.”

“Where?”

“I’m flying.”

“A mission?”

“No. I’ve got to test the wiring. You know, two days ago, I was on reconnaisance. I pressed the camera button and my fuel tanks dropped off.”

Usman was a pilot in the federal air force. A mercenary pilot, I should say, not to put too fine a point on it. All the Mig 15s at the airport were flown by foreigners, on hire to the government. Apart from Usman there were two British, three Rhodesians, an American, two Pakistanis and a South African. Their number varied. All had signed contracts and theoretically they were instructors. They were issued uniforms, but did not have to wear them. No discipline was imposed on them. There was a fairly rapid turnover: people who had simply had enough, or casualties. In the year since Usman had been there only one pilot had died while on a mission. Six others had died as a result of mechanical or navigational failures and subsequent crashes. “Your ground crew,” Usman said phlegmatically, “is your greatest threat.”

I had met Usman on the first provisioning run I had made from Grosso Arvore. I had arrived at the hotel earlier than expected and, hot and thirsty, had gone into the bar for a beer. The barroom was long and thin and was lined with simulated leather. The chairs and tables were modishly Scandinavian, the chairs organic looking, a warped kidney shape with splayed iron legs. The tables were like large paving stones, inlaid with shards of broken colored glass. It was very gloomy, and, because of the simulated leather walls, warm. The two ceiling fans were always switched to full blast. The blurred, whizzing propellers produced a stiff breeze that blew your hair about. I had never been in a bar like it and I grew oddly fond of its singular atmosphere.

When I went in that first afternoon the place was empty. Then I saw someone kneeling at the far end apparently searching for something on the floor. He looked up as I came in. He was wearing khaki trousers and a Hawaiian shirt which, for some reason, made me assume he was the barman.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m trying to catch a frog.”

I waited while he did this. Then he brought it over to show me: a small, livid, lime-green tree frog, its throat pulsing uncontrollably.

“I’ll have a beer,” I said. “As soon as you’re ready.”

He pushed the frog out through some louvred glass windows at one end of the bar before going behind it and pouring me a glass of beer.

“How much?” I said.

“The house will pay.”

Then he engaged me in conversation, in the time-honored bar-keep-to-client manner: “Where are you from?” “How long are you staying?” Fairly soon I began to suspect he might be a manager—he seemed far too forward and intelligent to be running a cocktail bar at the Airport Hotel. By the time he asked me to have dinner with him that night I realized I’d been had.

“You thought I was the barman,” he said with some glee. “Admit it. I got you.” He was very pleased with his subterfuge.

“Not for one second,” I said. “I knew it as soon as you opened the bottle,” I improvised. I pointed to the bent bottletop lying on the bar. “No barman in Africa would’ve left that there. He’d pocket it.”

“Oh.” He looked disappointed. “You sure about that?”

“Check it out the next time you’re in a bar.”

He wagged a finger at me. “You’re lying, I know.”

I kept on denying it and agreed to have dinner that night. I was intrigued by him. He told me his name—Usman Shoukry—and spelled it for me, and told me what he did. After our meal that evening—during which I was introduced to two of his fellow pilots, whose prurient speculation I could sense swirling about me—he walked me back through the gardens to my room.

We stopped at an intersection of two paths.

“That’s my chalet,” he said, pointing. “I was wondering if you’d like to spend the night there with me.”

“No thank you.”

“It’s for your own good.”

“Oh yes?” Suddenly I was beginning to like him less. “I don’t think so.”

“No, honestly.” His eyes were candid. “If those fellows you met tonight ever think we haven’t slept together they’ll be round you like…like flies. Buzzing, buzzing.”

“I’ll risk it.” I shook his hand. “Thanks for dinner.”

He shrugged. “Well, I warned you.”

But six weeks later, when I returned on my second trip and he invited me to his “chalet” again, I accepted.

 

Usman pulled into the airport and showed his pass to the bored guard. The barrier was raised and we drove through.

“Would you like to see my plane?” he asked.

We stopped by a large hangar, got out and walked toward a row of half a dozen Mig 15s. Here on the concrete apron one really felt the physical force of the heat. I could see the haze rising off the runway, almost as if the rays of the sun were rebounding, corrugating the scrub and palmettos at the perimeter.

Some of the Migs were silver—almost painfully bright in this sun—and some had been painted olive drab. Here and there a mechanic worked. To one side I saw a row of small trolleys with pairs of teardrop-shaped tanks on them. Usman led me past the first two planes and stopped by a third. He spoke in Arabic to a mechanic who was fixing something in the undercarriage bay. Usman was wearing a blue shirt over his swimming shorts. On his feet were rubber flip-flops. I wore shorts and a T-shirt. I felt strange, as if we were Sunday barbecuers inspecting a friend’s new sports car in the driveway of our suburban home.

I looked at Usman’s Mig. To my eyes it was an ugly plane. It sat low on the ground and was tilted back somewhat, as if on its haunches. The air intake to the jet was in the nose, a large black hole. On either side of this were twin elliptical recesses, each containing the snub barrel of a machine gun. We walked round it. The wings were swept back, their leading edges showing a dull gleam of aluminium where the paint had been worn away by the friction of wind and dust. There were dark streaks of oil and grease on the flaps and the soft tires looked like they needed inflating. I touched the thin metal sides of the plane. It was hot.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “These planes are made from aluminium and aluminium is made from bauxite. They dig bauxite out of the ground here. No wait.” He was going to interrupt me. “What if some of that bauxite is sold to the Russians, who turn it into aluminum which is made into Mig 15s. Then they sell the Migs to the air force here who bomb the people who dug the bauxite out of the ground.”

Usman, to his credit, looked uncomfortable for a moment. Then he shrugged. “It’s a crazy world, you know? Anyway, they don’t sell any of this bauxite to the Russians.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.” Then he ducked under the wing to see what the mechanic was doing. I touched the plane again, rubbing the palp of my finger over a seam in the metal. This Mig seemed much smaller, close to, than I had imagined, having seen them many times flying in and out of the airport. On the ground and at this proximity their machinelike quality was far more in evidence. I could see all the scratches, dents and stains, the rows of rivet heads, places where the sun had caused the paint to flake and blister. Suddenly it was like any other machine—a bus or a car—a thing of components and working parts, of tubes and wires, levers and hinges. A flying machine.

Usman reappeared.

“What do you think of it?” he said.

“What’s her name?” I said facetiously.

“He, not she.”

“I thought planes and ships were female.”

“Not this one. This is Boris. Good Russian name. Big strong bastard.” He gave it a bang with his fist. “D’you want to sit inside?”

I walked up to the cockpit and peered inside. It looked grubby and very well used, the leather on the seat creased and fraying, the instrument panel chipped and scarred.

On one side of the cockpit wall hung a curious cloth pouch, like a purse, embroidered with beads.

“What’s that?” I said.

Usman reached past me and opened the flap. He took out a small blue-black gun, with ebony panels set in the grip with his initials inlaid in silver.

He showed it to me like an artifact, and then offered it to me to hold.

“It was from my squadron. When I left the air force. It’s Italian, the best.”

It felt heavy for such a small gun. The metal was cold.

I gave it back. “Why do you carry it in your plane?”

“Good luck.” He smiled. “My special protection. And in case I’m shot down.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Here, let me help you climb in.”

“Come on, Usman. I’m hot. I don’t know anything about planes. I don’t care.”

“Poor Boris,” he said to the plane ruefully. “She doesn’t like you.”

I had to laugh. Jesus Christ, I said, and turned and walked back to the car.

“What are those things?” I said, pointing at the silver teardrops on their little trolleys.

“Gasoline,” he said. “Drop tanks.”

IKARIOS AND ERIGONE

No Migs fly out of the airport these days. A few months ago the air force moved its main base farther south to counter the increasing EMLA threat. The Airport Hotel is even more deserted than usual as a result. I eat there once or twice a week, whenever Gunter invites me, and often we are the only diners in the entire restaurant. Which is a shame: the food has improved vastly under the new management. A new manager was appointed some months ago, a Greek, called Ikarios Panathatanos.

Ikarios is a hefty, balding man who reminds me a little of Hauser. One evening he told me the origin of his Christian name. The source is a very minor figure in Greek mythology. The original Ikarios was a farmer who discovered how to make wine from the grapes he grew. For a while he kept the secret to himself, making his wine and drinking it alone, covertly. But he enjoyed the experience so much he decided one day that he should share the pleasure with his neighbors, and invited the entire village round to his house to partake of his marvelous discovery.

So the villagers drank their fill. However, as the symptoms of intoxication began to overwhelm them they grew convinced that this was an elaborate plot Ikarios had concocted to poison them. So in a drunken, paranoiac panic they stoned the hapless farmer to death.

But the tragedy did not end there. Ikarios’s daughter, Erigone, overcome with grief at her father’s death, decided to take her own life and hung herself from an olive tree.

That was all Ikarios knew about his illustrious namesake. Ikarios has a pretty little three-year-old daughter whom he has naturally called Erigone. He sees nothing sinister in the connotation at all.

 

Hope needed a job and Professor Hobbes found her one. He telephoned her one day and suggested she come and see him. Months had gone by since her doctorate had been awarded and she could not satisfactorily explain her lethargy, even to herself. She had published one article and done some reading, but little more. It was as if she wanted someone else to initiate the next stage of her professional career, as if she hadn’t the courage to take the next step unguided, of her own volition.

Hobbes was an elderly looking man in his early sixties, potbellied and mustachioed, who could have auditioned successfully for the role of old codger or benign granddad in a television commercial. The affable looks, however, belied a shrewd and often malicious nature. He was a powerful and influential figure in his field and the various scientific societies he was active in. Each year, from amongst his students, he selected one or two as special favorites and spoiled them blatantly, securing grants, better laboratory facilities and, eventually, jobs, almost as a demonstration of the efficacy of patronage.

In her first year Hope had been chosen as one of the elect. And it was understood too that if Hobbes took an interest in you it extended well beyond the walls of his department and was of no fixed duration, to be terminated unilaterally by him, as and when he felt like it. There were eminent academics around the world who were reminded periodically that the markers were still out and yet to be called in. Hope was well aware, as she first did little, and then nothing, to find a job that her inertia would not pass unnoticed. When she heard Hobbes’s surprisingly soft voice on the telephone, it was with sly relief rather than guilt that she gladly agreed to meet to “discuss her future.”

 

“What is going on, Hope?” Hobbes said. “I mean just what the hell is going on?” He poured her a glass of wine. It was white and fragrant and perfectly cold. Hobbes had a fridge in his office. He smiled at her as she drank.

“Why didn’t you apply for that lectureship in York? I could’ve rung Frank.”

“I got married.”

“So what?”

“Having got married, I rather wanted to spend more time with my husband.”

“How sentimental.”

“I need a job in London.”

“You should have taken the York job and commuted. Doesn’t everyone do that sort of thing now?”

She let him berate her for her naïveté for the allotted time, and then said she wouldn’t mind something short term. John was planning to go back to the States, she lied spontaneously, and said that she would not want to commit to anything that would last more than a year. Hobbes grudgingly said he would see what was around.

He called her again within a week. He had two jobs for her, he said, and she had better take one of them. Both were to start as soon as she was ready, both were a one-year contract. Neither was exactly in her area but she was well qualified to do them, and, in any event, he was “old friends” with both the men in charge. The best one was in Africa, he said, studying wild chimpanzees.

“No, I don’t think—”

“Don’t interrupt. They’re desperate. It’s American-funded so you’ll be very well paid. And it’ll open all sorts of doors for you.”

No, she said, she couldn’t go to Africa now. Out of the question.

He told her about the other job. “One tenth the money,” he said, disgustedly. The advantage, as she saw it, though, was that she could do it part time. It was a survey of an ancient and historic estate in South Dorset, near the coast. A historian, an archaeologist and a geographer had been studying the landscape’s history, and they needed an ecologist to complete the picture. “Dating woodlands and hedgerows, that sort of thing,” Hobbes said. “Not wildly exciting, but I told them you could handle that. No problem. Don’t let me down.”

She duly met the project director, a former student of Hobbes, it turned out, and she was automatically approved. Graham Munro was a gaunt, mild man who was very unlikely, she realized, to challenge Hobbes’s estimation of her ability. She would start in a month, they agreed, and she would spend two to three days a week working on location. Munro told her there was a farm cottage on the estate that she could bunk down in.

Being employed cheered her up, she discovered. She wondered if it had been her joblessness that had made her fractious and worried, rather than John. He was pleased for her too, he said. They made plans for him to come down with her some weeks, if his own work permitted.

In her final month of idleness she suggested they both take a holiday. They decided to go back to Scotland, and rented a small house on an island off the west coast, reached by ferry from Mallaig.

 

Their house was on the edge of the island’s only village. It was a low, single-story, thick-walled cottage with deep-set windows with a view of the harbor and the bay. Inside it was plainly and functionally decorated: white distemper on the walls, brown linoleum on every floor and minimally furnished. There were two armchairs facing the fire and a dining table with four chairs in the main room. The bedroom had an oak cupboard and a high, iron double bed. There was a chilly lavatory but no bath; all washing had to be done at the sink in the kitchen, a small room at the back of the cottage that contained a gas stove but no refrigerator. There were working fireplaces in the bedroom and sitting room, both of which heated the water. The whole place was lit by gas lamps. There was no phone, no television, no radio.

John said it was like living in a D. H. Lawrence novel, but he liked it, and so did Hope. It was austere but it worked. The fires kept the place warm, the hissing gas mantles provided adequate light for reading. The bed was big and hard and there were plenty of gray, prickly blankets. It was curious, but she found that the rigors of keeping the little house functioning imposed a similar discipline on them. They washed up after meals for the first time in their married life, and they never allowed the baskets of peat and logs to empty. They ate solid, simple meals bought from the village store: tinned stew and potatoes, corned beef and baked beans, freshly caught herring and cabbage. After their meal they would sit in their respective armchairs in front of the fire and read for two or three hours, or play chess. Hope had brought a sketchbook with her and a quiver of new pencils. She started drawing again.

The older houses of the village were clustered around the simple harbor. The newer and remarkably ugly buildings—the post office, the Mini-Market, the primary school and the village hall—were set widely apart on the land behind, placed apparently randomly, facing different directions as if they were ashamed of each other. On a small promontory that jutted out into the bay was a hotel, the Lord of the Isles, that contained the island’s only licensed bar. Elsewhere, throughout the island’s eight-by-two-mile area, were a handful of crofts—one or two derelict—another semivillage on the north shore and one grand house, surrounded by a small copse of leaning, wind-battered scotch pines, that served its current owner, a Dutch industrialist, as a fifth home. He owned great tracts of the island—hence the derelict crofts—and occasionally helicoptered in with his houseguests for a summer weekend. Nobody on the island could understand why he had bought the place.

Very quickly, Hope and John established a routine. They awoke early, after eight hours of sound and dreamless sleep. John lit the fire in the sitting room while Hope prepared the breakfast. Then they did their chores—replenishing fuel, buying food, preparing a packed lunch. This completed, they set off on their bicycles (hired from the Lord of the Isles) and cycled off—rain or shine—until they found a beach or cove that appealed to them. John was reading nothing but detective novels—he had three dozen paperbacks with him—and he would recount, with astonishing recall and detail, the story of the latest one he had read as they cycled along. Once they had found their beach and had settled themselves, they prowled around, searching the tideline for flotsam and jetsam. Hope sketched, John read or went for walks. They never saw another soul.

They might cycle on after their lunch—their aim was to have covered the entire shoreline of the island by the end of their stay—and they usually returned home about four in the afternoon for tea, and sometimes a siesta. At opening time they would stroll up to the Lord of the Isles for a drink and would linger there until they felt hungry. Then followed their prosaic meal and an evening’s reading and drawing. They went to bed when they felt tired, normally before eleven. They made love every night of that holiday, almost as a reflex. The slab, marmoreal cold of their bed had them squirming into each other’s arms for warmth and their arousal was immediate and simultaneous. Their sex was as efficient and unpretentious as their surroundings—no foreplay, no experimentation, no undue prolongation of climax—and they were both asleep within minutes of it ending.

On the edge of the village was a hairy, sloping soccer field and behind one of the goalposts was a rusting bin that was the repository of all the village’s “hard” rubbish, as the notice on its side proclaimed. Newspapers, boxes, tins and bottles—anything that the earth could not break down. All the “soft” rubbish, their landlady, the postmistress, informed them, was to be buried. There was a spade in the wee shed by the back door for this very purpose, she told them, and she would be much obliged if they interred their refuse at least twenty yards from the house. On their third day on the island Hope volunteered to dispose of two plastic bags of hard rubbish if John would take care of the soft.

There was a keen breeze and a fine drizzle that spattered against the hood of her windcheater, but the clouds above were hurrying and broken and Hope could see shreds of indecent blue amongst the gray. She was stiff from cycling and so, after depositing her rubbish, and in an attempt to loosen up, she jogged slowly round the soccer field a couple of times. The island was flat, the roads were well paved. Only the strength of the wind impeded or assisted cyclist and machine.

Half a dozen cold little boys in sports kit ran out of the schoolhouse and listlessly kicked a too-big soccer ball at each other, their complaints shrill and protesting. A young schoolmistress, who was clearly indifferent to the rules of soccer, ignored them, hunching out of the wind by the goalposts to light a cigarette. Hope smiled at her as she jogged past and received a cheery good morning in reply. They had seen each other in the Lord of the Isles the night before and no doubt would continue to do so for the rest of the holiday. Hope looked at the little tottering boys with their raw red noses and knees and hurried back to John.

He was not in the cottage so she went to look for him, through the back garden, a stretch of humpy waste ground with brambles and nettles, toward the remains of what she supposed was a wooden privy and a carious dry stone wall. Beyond that was the heathy spit of land that made up one arm of the bay and beyond that the sun shone on a brilliant cold Atlantic.

John was on the other side of the wall, in his shirtsleeves, standing in a freshly dug pit, waist deep, digging. He was unaware of Hope’s approach, so preoccupied was he with his task. He looked round when he heard her laughter.

“For God’s sake,” she said, “it’s a poly bag of chicken bones and potato peelings, not a bloody coffin.”

He looked, as if for the first time, at his hole and its prodigious depth. His expression was bemused, slightly surprised.

He climbed out, smiling vaguely.

“Got carried away,” he said. Then he dropped his spade. “Hold on, I’ve…I’ve got to write something down.” He ran into the house. Hope rummaged in the pockets of his jacket, hung on the hinge of the privy door, found his cigarettes and lit one. The sun that had been shining on the sea had moved to the land and it warmed her face as she sat on the stone wall and looked at the hole John had dug. The earth was moist and peaty, the color and consistency of the richest rum-soaked, treacle-infused chocolate cake. The blade of the old spade was clean, its edge silvered from years of abrasion, the handle waxy and worn with use.

She smoked her cigarette and was about to go and look for him when he rejoined her. He was frowning. He picked up the spade and looked at it as if it held some answer to a baffling question. He threw the bag of rubbish in the pit and began to fill it in.

“It’s quite extraordinary,” he said as he worked. “I started digging. And then my mind…” He paused. “I started thinking.” He screwed his face up. “And I worked something out as I was digging,” he said slowly, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “Something that had been puzzling me for ages. That’s why I had to go and write it down.”

“What?”

“An equation.” He started to tell her but she stopped him.

He laid the squares of turf over the soil and stamped them down. “Quite weird,” he said. “The whole thing.”

That evening, after their meal, instead of reading, John sat at the table and worked, steadily covering the pages of her sketchbook with the complex hieroglyphics of mathematical formulae. The next day he had no detective story to recount to her but he was so elated at what he had achieved the night before that he went swimming in the sea, naked, for all of ninety seconds. She folded him in a towel and then in the picnic blanket, laughing at the image he had presented emerging from the waves, white with shock and cold, and his crabbed, crouched stumble up the beach to rejoin her.

“Freezing…” his voice blurted hoarsely, his body vibrating like a machine. “Fucking freezing!” Then he laughed, an exuberant bellow, like a blare on a trombone. Hope had never heard him laugh like that before. It was odd to hear the brazen, clear voice of exhilaration.

The following day, as they were about to set off, she came out of the front door and found him tying the spade to the crossbar of his bicycle.

“OK,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“It’s an experiment,” he said, smiling. “I want to see if it’ll work again.”

 

So Hope sat and sketched while John dug a hole. He made it six feet square and, working methodically, pausing for a rest from time to time, he had it five feet deep within two hours. He stopped for lunch.

“How’s it going?” Hope said.

“Nothing yet.” He looked vaguely troubled.

“You can’t just arrange to have a flash of insight, you know,” Hope said, reasonably. “I’m sure Archimedes didn’t start bathing several times a day, you know, after the eureka business.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Probably…but it was definitely something to do with the digging itself. The effort. The logic of digging. Shifting volumes…seemed to clear something in my mind.” He reached for a sandwich. “I’ll have one more shot at it after lunch.”

He started again. Hope watched him enlarge the hole, cutting turf, stacking it neatly, and then sinking the spade into the dark soil, working the blade, loading it and flinging the earth onto its moist pile. There was something satisfying about the work, even she could see that: simple but effortful, and with instant and visible results. The hole grew deeper. Hope went for a walk.

When she came back he was sitting down making more notes in her sketchbook.

“Eureka?” she asked.

“Semi-eureka.” He grinned. “Something totally unexpected. Three leaps ahead of where I was, if you see what I mean. In fact I can’t quite see where it’ll join up yet, but…” He looked suddenly solemn. “It’s an amazing idea.”

She sat and watched him fill the hole in.

“But this is the boring part,” she said.

“No, no. I’m doing this with gratitude. The hole has worked for me, so I gladly return it to its nonhole state.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Up yours.” He was happy.

 

The new idea he had received appeared to satisfy him. He stopped working and started reading detective novels again, and for some days their old routine reestablished itself. But on their penultimate day on the island, ignoring her protests, he brought the spade with him again.

“Don’t you feel a bit of a fool?” she mocked him.

“Why should I?” he said, with some belligerence. “What do you know? These ideas I’ve had this holiday…I haven’t thought like that in years.” He looked at her with some pity. “I don’t give a toss about your sensibilities.”

“Don’t worry about me. Dig away.”

He did. He dug without stopping for three hours, this time cutting out a long, thigh-deep trench. She forced him to stop and rest for a while but he soon resumed. There was a “glimmering” he said. At dusk he gave up, exhausted. We’ll come back and fill it in tomorrow, she told him, pulling him away.

They cycled home slowly, freewheeling down the gentle slope into the village. The first yellow lights shone in the windows, the clouds over the mainland were pink and plum, the sea was silver plate.

John seemed unduly disconsolate. She tried to cheer him up.

“Let’s eat in the hotel tonight,” she said. “Get pissed.”

He agreed readily enough. Then he said: “I was so close today. I know it. There was something key, something crucial. But I just couldn’t get to it.” He made a grabbing movement with both his hands. “Just out of my reach.”

As Hope leaned her bike against the wall, the thought came to her, unbidden, unwelcome, that perhaps her husband was going insane.

CABBAGES ARE NOT SPHERES

Memory from Scotland. John Clearwater in the tiny kitchen preparing a salad of winter vegetables. He has a whole red cabbage in his hand that he is about to chop. Hope sees him staring at it. He holds it up to the light and then turns his bead in her direction. He tosses the cabbage to her, which she catches. It is cool beneath her palms and surprisingly heavy. She chucks it back.

“Cabbages are not spheres,” be says.

“If you say so.” She smiles but she doesn’t really know how to respond. This is the kind of remark be makes from time to time, cryptic, askew.

“Well, sort of spherical,” she says tentatively.

He cuts the cabbage in half and shows her the crisp violet and white striations, whorled like a giant fingerprint. The point of his knife traces the wobbling parabola of a leaf edge.

“These are not semicircles.”

Hope sees what be is aiming at. “A fir tree,” she ventures, “is not a cone.”

John chops up the cabbage swiftly and efficiently, like a chef, smiling to himself.

“Rivers do not flow in straight lines,” be says.

“Mountains are not triangles.”

“A tree…a tree does not branch exponentially.”

“I give up,” she says. “I don’t like this game.”

Later, after their meal, he returns to the subject and asks her bow she would set about measuring, precisely, the circumference of a cabbage. With a tape measure, Hope says.

“Every little bump and weal? Every bit of leaf-buckle?”

“Christ…take lots of measurements, get an average.”

“No precision, though. It’s not going to work.”

He leaves the table and starts to jot ideas down in a notebook.

Hope now knows that this set him off down another path. He became preoccupied with the conviction that the abstract precision of geometry and measurement really had nothing to do with the imprecise and changing dimensions of living things, could not cope accurately with the intrinsic ruggedness of the natural world. The natural world is full of irregularity and random alteration, but in the antiseptic, dust-free, shadowless, brightly lit, abstract realm of the mathematicians they like their cabbages spherical, please. No bumps, no folds, no dents or dings. No surprises.

 

When I turned off the main road onto the laterite track that led to Sangui I had a distinct and unusual sensation of pleasure. Analyzing the feeling further, I realized that I was actually looking forward to getting back to work. The two days in the town, and the time spent with Usman, had been restorative. I had needed them and now I was refreshed. Life was all a matter of contrasts, Professor Hobbes used to reiterate. You can’t enjoy anything without a contrast to it. I smiled to myself as I thought about him. “The tide is either coming in or it’s going out,” was another of his saws, applied infuriatingly to any complaint or moan. Funnily enough, it always seemed to work. I had gone to his office once to remonstrate about faulty equipment or some other injustice. He had looked squarely at me, patted my arm, and had said: “Hope, my dear, the tide is either coming in or going out.” I had gone away, pacified, consoled and somehow wiser too, I had felt.

My reflections on the wisdom of Hobbes almost caused me to miss seeing Alda as I drove through Sangui. I caught a glimpse of him waving from the doorway of a hut but by then I was virtually out of the village. I couldn’t be bothered to stop, so I tooted the horn and bumped on up the track to Grosso Arvore. I wasn’t sure either if it had been a wave of welcome or a request to halt. In any event, I reasoned, if he wanted to talk to me he knew where I would be.

As I parked the Land-Rover in the garage I gave three loud blasts on the horn to alert the kitchen staff. Martim and Vemba were already unloading the provisions as I climbed out of the cab. I stretched and yawned, and, as I did so, I saw Mallabar hurry across the road from his bungalow. I looked at my watch—just after four. We had made good time. But I was surprised to see him at home at this time of day, and as he strode toward me I could see he was upset about something. I put on a smile.

“What’s up, Eugene?” I asked.

“Hope…” He stopped in front of me. “Ghastly accident. I’m so sorry. I just can’t think.”

He was uncharacteristically agitated. As one does at these moments I instinctively prepared myself for the worst possible news. My father or my mother. My sister…

“What is it?”

“A fire. There’s been a fire. Your tent…I can’t think how it happened.”

Mallabar related the events to me as we strode up Main Street toward my tent. My huge relief was now being replaced by more mundane concerns. It had happened the night I left, he told me. Toshiro had seen the flames. It seemed that Liceu, the boy who cleaned for me, had carelessly dropped a cigarette stub.

“But Liceu doesn’t smoke,” I said.

“Oh yes, I think so.”

We paused beneath the big tree. Through the hibiscus bushes at the curve of the road I could just make out the front of my tent. It looked undamaged.

“Just a small fire?” I said, hopefully.

“Not that small.”

We moved on. “Where is Liceu?”

“I sacked him. Immediately.”

My tent was in fact half destroyed, the back half. The front looked fine but the back consisted only of a charred supporting pole and a few shreds of burnt canvas. The tin roof was buckled and blistered. To one side stood a sorry pile of my damaged possessions. The bed—ruined; my clothes trunk—carbonized.

“My clothes.” I felt a sudden lassitude descend on me.

“I’m so dreadfully sorry, Hope.”

I ran my fingers down both sides of my face.

“We got a few bits and pieces out,” Mallabar said. “And I think you had some clothes being washed.”

We walked inside. My desk was badly scorched but still standing. After some tugging I managed to open the drawer. Black soaked lumps. Cinders. My letters, some books. All my field notes and journal.

I walked around my ruined home. I had lived here for almost a year.

Mallabar’s concern was palpable; he was practically wringing his hands. “We’ll get it fixed up. Back to normal. Soon as possible.”

“All my field notes have gone. And the journal.”

He winced with sympathy. “Damn. God. I knew it—I saw the desk. Didn’t dare to look.” He gave a sad laugh. “I was praying you’d taken them with you.”

“Worse luck.”

 

I moved into the census building. It was a long, thin, prefab hut—army surplus, I guessed—that at one time had housed eight census workers in the good old days. I set up my makeshift quarters at one end. A new bed was provided and a folding canvas chair. That, and my few clothes returned from the laundry, made up my reduced stock of personal possessions. In some respects my new home was better than my old one—I had wooden boards under my feet for a start—but it did not raise my morale. I felt incredibly temporary, all of a sudden, like someone passing through who had to be put up for a night.

My colleagues were upset for me and full of commiserations that evening in the canteen. Mallabar promised again that my tent would be repaired as soon as possible and Ginga donated a desk and a bright green rug to give me something to work on and to cheer up the hut a little. They were kind, but in the end the misfortune was mine and only a mishap to them. Even the destruction of my field notes was of minor significance. My job at Grosso Arvore was no more than a watching brief; the main body of work at the project would be unaffected by the loss of my data.

I asked Toshiro, who had raised the alarm, what exactly the sequence of events had been. He told me he had been working alone in the lab, had gone to the back door for a breath of fresh air and had seen the smoke. He ran over but by then the back of my tent was well ablaze. He had shouted for help and had snatched a few bits and pieces (my washstand and enamel basin—where were they?) from the front before the heat drove him off. Others arrived, and buckets of water ferried from Hauser’s shower stall had eventually doused the flames.

“Lucky we had Anton’s shower there,” he said. “Otherwise everything would have gone.”

“Where was Hauser?”

Toshiro frowned. “I don’t know. No, actually, I think he had gone to the feeding area.”

I swear to you it was only then that I first thought that the fire might have been deliberately started. You may think me unduly naive, but Mallabar’s anxiety and the patent sincerity of his sympathy had me convinced.

“Was Eugene anywhere near?”

“Well, yes. After me he was the first one there. In fact he thought of using water from the shower.”

Hauser absent from his lab and Mallabar close at hand. A fire started by an allegedly careless smoker who was now sacked and not present, or able, to defend himself. No serious damage caused, and minor inconvenience to the victim. But a year’s data gone up in smoke. I thought further: in theory I should not even have been away—I had accepted advancement up the provisioning rota as a “favor” to Mallabar.

I was clearing my tray when Hauser came in. He marched straight over to me and put his hands on my shoulders. For one horrible moment I thought he was going to hug me, but an inadvertent and automatic stiffening on my part must have informed against the wisdom of this course of action, and he contented himself with a sorrowful, intense look into my eyes.

“Ach, Hope,” he said. “It’s a bastard thing. Really a bastard.”

He was good, as good as Mallabar, but it didn’t matter: I was already plotting my revenge on them both.

He went on to inquire about my bits and pieces. Had I lost this? Could he replace it with that? I happily accepted the loan of his transistor radio.

The Vails had asked me round to their bungalow for a drink. I had been quick to accept; I was not particularly looking forward to my first night in the census hut.

We sat—Ian, Roberta and me—and drank some bourbon. Roberta had made great efforts with their two-room cottage. It was comfortable and homey, with cane chairs and bright overlapping rugs on the floor. The walls were painted light blue and were hung with pictures—local naïf oils—and photographs of previous research projects they had been involved in. Ian in Borneo with orangutans. Roberta graduating, clutching her rolled diploma in two tight fists. Ian and Roberta at the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma, where they had met and married.

That evening, Roberta was strangely relaxed and fussed over me in a rather maternal manner. She brought out a pack of her menthol cigarettes and smoked one, delicately. I could sense Ian’s resentment crackle round the room at this little act of domestic defiance. I puffed away at my pungent Tuskers and soon the air was hung with rocking blue strata of smoke. Roberta steadily became tight on the bourbon and started bitching warily about Ginga Mallabar, testing me out to discover whether I was friend or foe. My pointed neutrality encouraged her, and we were then regaled with a year or two’s worth of hoarded resentments and grudges. Ginga was manipulative. Ginga commandeered a huge proportion of Mallabar’s royalties. Ginga’s needless and inept meddling with agents and publishers had delayed publication of the book by over a year, and so on. I sat and listened, nodding and saying things like “My God” and “That’s a bit excessive” from time to time. Eventually, she stopped and rose slowly to her feet, announcing she had to visit the little girl’s room.

She paused at the door on her way out. “We should do this more often, Hope,” she said.

I concurred.

“I think it’s bad the way we all slink back to our homes in the evening. It’s so…so British. No offense.”

“None taken,” I said. “In fact, I agree.”

“Well, that’s one thing you can’t blame Ginga for,” Ian Vail said, with acid pedantry.

“And why not?”

“Because she’s Swiss.”

“Same difference.”

“For God’s sake!”

I could sense the row—which would inevitably take place after I had gone—was now boiling up dangerously, and so chipped in with some banal observation about how the very geometry of the campsite precluded easy social to-ing and fro-ing—instancing its linear development along Main Street and the almost suburban concern for domestic privacy evidenced in the placing of the various bungalows and huts, etc., etc. The bourbon made me articulate and authoritative.

“You know, Hope, I never thought of that,” Roberta said, frowning, and going off into the night to the latrine.

Ian opened the front door for a moment to let some smoke out. Two moths took the opportunity to flutter in.

“To my knowledge,” Ian said, in a thin voice, “she hasn’t smoked for three years. What’s got into her?”

I decided it wasn’t worth correcting him. Roberta’s little secret was safe with me.

“Leave her alone, Ian,” I said. “She was enjoying herself, that’s all. God, but she’s not too fond of Ginga, though, is she?”

He wasn’t listening. “She was relaxed, wasn’t she…?” He said, as if surprised. He looked at me and gave me an apologetic smile.

“I only say that,” he explained, “because she’s always been a little frightened of you.”

“Of me?”

“Oh, yes.” He gave an edgy laugh. “Aren’t we all.”

I decided not to follow up this remark any further. I reflected on something Meredith had once told me; one of life’s great verities, she had said: the last thing we ever learn about ourselves is our effect.

 

I slept well in the census hut, lulled by the bourbon, no doubt, and oblivious to the many rustlings, scurryings and crepitations that emanated from the farther reaches of the long room. The place was full of lizards, and something—I hoped it was a squirrel—was living in the ceiling space. Before I fell asleep I heard the tick and scratch of sharp claws on the plasterboard as it scampered to and fro, to and fro above my head.

I was wakened by João’s knock at six in the morning. We went to the canteen for some tea and to collect my packed lunch. João said he hadn’t seen Liceu for a few days—he was very upset at the sacking, and had gone away. I suggested that whenever he came back we should meet up.

As we crossed the Danube I broke the bad news to João about the loss of my field notes and journal.

“A whole year,” I said, ruefully. Now that I was heading out to work, the loss was suddenly painful. “We’ll just have to start again.”

“Well, I don’t think is necessary,” João said, trying not to smile. “I have my own notes. Plenty. Every night make Alda copy. For his training. You know he is not so good for writing.”

“From the time I came? Everything?”

“Just the daily journal.” He shrugged. “Of course, some days I am not with you.”

“But I was either with you, or Alda…and Alda has his notes?”

“Oh yes. I check him every night.”

I let the smile grow on my face. “I’ll come and get them,” I said. “Tonight.”

“Of course.” He was very pleased with himself. “So nothing is waste.”

“What would I do without you, João?”

He laughed at me, averting his face and making a tight wheezing sound. I clapped him on the shoulder.

“Well done, João,” I said. “We’re going to be famous.”

We came to a junction in the path. Back to work.

“All right,” I said. “Where do we start?”

“Ow.” João smacked a palm against his forehead. “I forgot. Lena and her baby, I saw her. She have a boy.”

“Let’s go and find her.”

 

We found Lena at midday with a few other members of the southern group. They were resting in the shade of an ironwood tree. Lena was nursing her new baby and around her lounged Mr. Jeb, Conrad, and Rita-Lu. There was no sign of Clovis, Rita-Mae, Lester and Muffin.

João and I approached a little closer than usual, settling down only thirty feet or so from Lena. Her baby was almost hairless, and blue-black in color. Conrad was grooming Mr. Jeb, but I noticed from his regular glances toward Lena that he was clearly fascinated by the baby. Rita-Lu lay idly in the grass. She looked half asleep. I noticed a fresher pinkness on her rump and possibly some signs of swelling.

“We need a name,” João said softly, “for the baby.”

I thought for a while. “Bobo,” I said, finally. I had no idea why. João wrote it down on his record sheet: “Bobo, male, son of Lena.”

Conrad stopped grooming Mr. Jeb and slowly made his way over to Lena. She was leaning back against the trunk of the ironwood tree. Bobo clung feebly to the hair on her belly—through my binoculars I could see his tiny fists clutching tufts of fur—and sucked hungrily on her right nipple. Conrad moved closer, and Lena gave a small bark of warning.

Conrad sat down a few feet away and gazed at them both. Then, with Lena watching him intently, he reached forward very slowly across the gap between them and touched Bobo’s back. I had always assumed that Clovis had impregnated Lena, but now I had a funny feeling that Conrad might be Bobo’s father. Then Lena got up and moved away from him. I saw that the placenta was still hanging from her and the black loop of the umbilical cord was still connected to Bobo.

I shifted my position slightly and the noise I made caused Conrad to turn and look at me. With his white sclerotics, Conrad’s gaze was always the most disturbing I had ever received from a chimpanzee. The whites around the brown iris made his eyes as meaningful as any human’s. I looked at his black muzzle, the wide thin slit of his mouth and his heavy brows…he always seemed to be frowning. Conrad, a rather solemn and dignified character, not given to displays of frivolity. He came toward me a few paces and made some pant-hoots. Then he sat down and stared at me for a full minute, unswervingly. I looked into his eyes for a second or two, and then turned away.

Then, in the distance, I heard more hooting and barking. The other chimps hooted in response. Soon a crashing of branches heralded Clovis’s arrival, followed by Rita-Mae, Lester and Muffin. Like Conrad, Clovis was very curious about Bobo, but Lena would not let him come close, barking and grimacing and even, at one stage, climbing into the ironwood tree. Clovis gave up and moved away. However, when Rita-Mae approached, Lena was much less anxious, even going so far as to lay Bobo down in the grass. Rita-Mae peered closely at him, seemingly fascinated, and stroked him gently once or twice. Then Lena gathered him up and moved away again to the periphery of the group.

After resting in this way for a couple of hours the chimpanzees roused themselves and moved off northward, João and I following behind. They halted at a fig tree above the banks of the Danube, where the river cut a deep ravine through the foothills of the escarpment. We watched them feed for a while. I watched Rita-Lu repeatedly touching her genital area and sniffing at her finger. She was coming into season.

 

That evening I walked down the track into Sangui to collect all João and Alda’s field notes. João had said that he hoped Liceu might be there.

João’s house was one of the largest in the village, and one of the few to be made of concrete. He was sitting on the narrow veranda with a small baby on his knee. He told me this was his third granddaughter. I took the baby while he went to collect the papers. She was naked, fat, and almost asleep, drugged by her feed. She had small gold earrings in her long, soft lobes and around her hips was a string of tiny multicolored beads. Her belly button was a small hard dome, the size of a thimble. I stroked her hair and thought of Lena and Bobo.

João came back with his wife, Doneta, who relieved me of her grandchild. João had a great bundle of papers, mainly copies of the daily analysis sheets. He turned up the light on the veranda lantern and I quickly sifted through them.

“Is this everything?” I asked him.

“Even today’s follow,” he said.

This was ideal. “Is Liceu coming?” I asked. I was keen to get back home with this material.

“He is already here. Liceu!” he called into the darkness of the compound. After a moment’s pause, Liceu stepped uneasily into the circle of light cast by the lantern. Liceu was a teenager, about sixteen or seventeen, a constantly grinning, rather gormless boy who had wanted desperately to be a field assistant but who had neither the aptitude nor the patience. He came forward reluctantly, his face heavy with hurt and resentment, and started immediately and with belligerent conviction to protest his innocence. I let him go on for a while and began to piece together his version of events.

He had been tidying my tent, he said, and he had taken my dirty clothes to the camp laundry to be washed. He had been sitting chatting in the cooks’ compound when he had heard a commotion and run out to find the tent well ablaze. No, he said, he had not seen any sign of Mr. Hauser or Mr. Mallabar. He had no idea how the fire started.

Doneta brought us all mugs of sweet tea. I lit a cigarette and offered one to João. He accepted. Liceu was still fulminating at the injustice of his dismissal in an unpleasant droning way when I casually offered him the pack. He said at once, “No thank you, Mam,” and carried on talking. Two seconds later he stopped, realized what I had done to him, and looked at me accusingly.

“Ah, Mam, you know I don’ never smoke.” He sucked air disapprovingly through his teeth. He spread his hands. “Tell her that, João.”

João confirmed this. I reassured Liceu, and apologized for testing him in that way. If I had not known it before, I did now: the fire in my tent was not the result of one of Liceu’s cigarette butts.

Later, I walked back alone up the track to Grosso Arvore, hefting a thick bundle of daily field records under my arm. The oval pool of light from my torch shone four feet ahead on the ground as I searched for snakes and scorpions, its beam freckled with dancing night insects. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do with all this data, to tell the truth, but it seemed to me clear that if Mallabar and Hauser wanted my records destroyed, then it would be prudent for me to try and reproduce some copy of my own research, however patchy. Something Roberta had said also nagged at me: if Ginga had delayed publication of the book for a year, did that imply that its publication was now imminent? And could that explain the panic and unseemly coverup of the dead baby chimp? Also, all this talk about money was intriguing. Mallabar had been made wealthy by his work at Grosso Arvore; I wondered how much he would receive around the world for the successor to The Peaceful Primate and Primate’s Progress?

I sat up late that night in the census hut analyzing and summarizing the information in João’s and Alda’s field records. To be secure, I really required copies of all these, but the nearest photocopiers were a six-hour drive away…. Perhaps I could volunteer to do next week’s provisioning run again? I smiled to myself. Usman would be very surprised.

Around midnight I came to the final days’ notes. There was João’s sighting of Lena and her new baby…. I turned the page: here, Alda had seen six unidentified male chimpanzees in southern territory. I frowned—they must have been northerners. I checked the map references. According to Alda’s estimations they were well south of the Danube.

I stood up and paced around the census hut. This was most unusual. Since the community split no northern chimps had ever traveled that far south…I yawned, went back to my desk and tidied up my papers. I wondered if Ian Vail had noticed this migration; if it was temporary, or if the little band of northerners was still in the south?

I undressed, went to bed and forgot about it. That night I dreamed of Hauser, emerging naked from his shower stall and scampering across the grass to my tent with a box of matches in his hand. He struck match after match and held them to the canvas in vain. Then suddenly Mallabar appeared, unzipped his fly, and pissed on the side. His urine ignited like blazing gasoline and soon the tent was burning fiercely. Then with horrible squeals Lena fled from it, Bobo clutched to her belly, her placenta bouncing and dragging on the ground behind her….

I remembered this dream vividly the next morning and wondered vaguely what my unconscious was trying to convey: Hauser could barely strike a light, while Mallabar pissed like a flamethrower. It made no sense to me.

 

When João arrived he said he felt ill—a fever, he said. I sent him home. I picked up my provisions from the canteen and headed south to look for Lena and Bobo. I found them toward midmorning, with all the other members of the southern group present, at the half-dead fig tree. I noticed that Lena’s placenta had dropped free in the night and that only six inches of dry, shriveled umbilical cord hung from Bobo’s hairless belly. Rita-Lu’s sexual swelling had also grown and both Mr. Jeb and Clovis were intensely interested in it, sniffing and inspecting her genital area whenever possible. Mr. Jeb even squatted down and presented his spiky erection to her, but she screamed at him and he scampered off promptly. The males generally seemed less curious about Bobo today, but Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu constantly approached Lena and her son. Lena was cautious, but she allowed them to hunch over the baby, peering at him and touching him gently from time to time with their fingers.

I took up my position and observed them for almost three hours. My head was full of suppositions and hypotheses about the fire, and the possible role played in it by Mallabar or Hauser. I had temporarily hidden the field notes beneath the mattress of my bed, but the census hut was not well blessed with hiding places and I realized, on reflection, that beneath the mattress was the first place anyone would search. I wondered whether I would be wiser leaving them with João until I had had copies made, but couldn’t decide. All the time, I asked myself, fruitlessly, what on earth was going on.

Then I heard a warning bark that snapped me out of my circling speculations. I looked up. Lena, holding Bobo to her, was now sitting in a low branch of the fig tree. Rita-Lu was approaching her, on the ground, one hand held out. Behind Lena, I saw Rita-Mae climbing higher in the tree. Lena bared her teeth at Rita-Lu. I wondered what I had missed, the mood was now so clearly tense and hostile. Rita-Lu persisted, arm held out, inching closer, as if she wanted to pet Bobo. Lena screamed furiously at her, the noise shrill and ragged, and stood up on the branch, as if she were about to jump to the ground and run off. But before she could move further, Rita-Mae swung down through the branches of the tree above her and threw herself onto Lena’s back. All three fell six feet to the ground.

At this commotion, the other chimps began to scream and display but none intervened in the fight. As Lena hit the ground, still clutching Bobo, Rita-Lu immediately grabbed her free arm and sank her teeth into her hand, working her jaws violently, chewing on the flesh of her palm. Lena screamed in agony, and with rapid jerking movements tried to pull her hand free. Rita-Lu hung on and I saw Lena’s blood falling from the sides of her mouth as her head was jerked to and fro. Meanwhile, Rita-Mae had leapt on Lena’s back again and was trying to rip Bobo from his mother’s grasp. Then she backed off and lunged and snapped at Lena’s rear, her teeth gashing her bare rump badly.

At this new attack, Lena dropped Bobo, her head arched back in a shriek of pain. She whirled round and leapt on Rita-Mae, snapping and punching with her fists. Rita-Lu immediately seized the baby and climbed with it up into the tree. Lena tore herself away from Rita-Mae and raced after her child. She bit Rita-Lu on the shoulder and tore Bobo away from her. Now Lena had Bobo, but Rita-Mae was in the tree beneath her and was snapping and biting at her feet while Rita-Lu, above her, repeatedly hit her about the head and shoulders with her hands. Lena held one arm above her head to protect herself. Rita-Mae, with a sudden lunging movement, grabbed Bobo and shimmied down the tree to the ground with the baby, while Rita-Lu kept up the attack.

Bobo was making a shrill keening sound, his thin arms batting the air uselessly. Rita-Mae bounded away from the tree, holding him out at arms’ length with one hand. Then she squatted on a rock and drew him into her breast as if she were going to cuddle him.

It was at that moment that I knew what she was about to do. I screamed at her: “Rita-Mae! Rita-Mae!” But I was just another sound in the cacophony of sounds, and she didn’t hear me, or was not bothered by my desperate shouts. Bobo wriggled and squirmed in her grasp, then Rita-Mae hunched forward and bit strongly into his forehead. I heard a distinct cracking sound as the frail skull was crushed by her teeth.

Bobo died instantly. At this, Rita-Lu immediately broke off the fight with Lena, retreating higher into the fig tree. Lena lowered herself slowly to the ground, exhausted and bleeding from the bad wounds on her hand and rump. The noise subsided.

I looked round. Rita-Mae was eating Bobo. She tore into his belly and pulled out his entrails with her teeth. She flung his guts away onto the rocks. Rita-Lu, meanwhile, climbed out of the tree, circled round Lena—who started to scream, loudly and monotonously—and rejoined her mother. They both fed on Bobo’s body while Lena screamed vainly at them. Then, abruptly, she stopped. She seemed to lose all interest; all her outrage disappeared. She gathered up some leaves and dabbed at the wound on her rump with them.

Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu continued to eat the baby. Lester came up to his mother but she pushed him away vigorously. The other chimps also seemed to grow indifferent to what was going on. Only Lena kept staring at Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu. Then she left the tree and made her way over the rocks toward them. She stopped about six feet away, and watched them silently as they ate her dead baby. Then she began to whimper and extended her hand. At first Rita-Mae ignored this gesture. Lena circled around the two of them. She found a fragment of Bobo’s entrails on a rock, picked it up, sniffed it and let it fall. She whimpered again. Rita-Mae dropped Bobo’s body and went toward her. Lena whimpered submissively. Rita-Mae embraced her, holding her in her arms for a full minute. Then she released her and returned to the baby’s corpse. Lena sat and watched Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu for the rest of the afternoon as they fed idly on the body. At dusk, when they moved off to their nesting site, Rita-Mae draped the shreds of Bobo’s body over her shoulders like a scarf.

 

Mallabar’s face remained still and emotionless as I told him what I had seen. We were in the census hut, alone; the evening meal was over. I sat on the bed, he sat by the desk. I finished talking. He looked down; I could see his jaw muscles working busily beneath his neat beard.

“Was the field observer with you?” he asked, formally.

“No. He was ill so I sent him home.”

“So there was no other witness.”

“For God’s sake, I’m not on trial. I saw—”

“I’m sorry, Hope,” he interrupted me. “Deeply sorry that you should feel this way.”

“Feel what way? What’re you talking about?”

“I’m prepared, just this once, to accept that the shock of the fire and the loss of a year’s research may explain this…this fantastical story.”

He looked at me, his face full of concern. I said nothing.

“On a personal level,” he went on, “I can only record my deep hurt that you should feel such resentment and bitterness toward us here, your friends and colleagues. And whatever you may think, we are your friends.” He stood up. “You’ve changed, Hope.”

“Good.”

“No, it’s not. And I’m sorry for you.”

This made me mad, but he started speaking again before I could interrupt.

“I’ll overlook this now,” he said, “but I must warn you that if you persist in these fabrications, if you repeat them to anyone outside this room, I will have to terminate your employment here, immediately.” He paused. “As for myself, I won’t speak of this to anyone. At all.”

“I see.”

“Do you understand?”

“I understand everything.”

“Then you’re a shrewd person, Hope. So please don’t let this foolishness continue.” He stopped at the door. “We won’t talk about this again,” he said, and left.

 

I worked hard that night. By the time I went to bed I had most of my article drafted out. I was pleased with my title too: Infanticide and Cannibalism Amongst the Wild Chimpanzees of the Grosso Arvore Project. The peaceful primate’s days were over.

FERMAT’S LAST THEOREM

Peano Curve. The Weierstrass Function. The Cauchy Condition. L’Hopital’s Rule. A Möbius Strip. Goldbach’s Conjecture. Pascal’s Triangle. Poincaré Map. The Fourier Series. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. A Cantor Dust. A Bolzano Paradox. A Julia Set. Riemann’s Hypothesis. And my favorite: Fermat’s Last Theorem.

What are these things?…Why am I so curious about them?…What is it about these names, these oddly poetic appellations, that is so beguiling and fascinating? I want to know about them, understand them, find out what they do, what they imply.

And this, I suppose, is every mathematician’s secret dream. To have a function, a number, an axiom, a hypothesis named after you…. It must be like being an explorer on a virgin continent, naming mountains, rivers, lakes and islands. Or a doctor: to have a disease, a condition, a syndrome called after you. There you are on civilization’s intellectual map. Forever.

Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Now, bear with me. I love the ring of this one, it sounds so good. Let’s see what we can make of it. (I found it hard too: formulae have a narcoleptic effect on my brain, but I think I’ve got it right.) Take this simple formula: x² + y² = z². Make the letters numbers. Say: 3² + 4² = 5². All further numbers proportional to these will fit the formula. For example: 9² + 12² = 15². Or, taking the proportionality downward: 12² + 5² = 13². Intriguing, no? Another example of the curious magic, the severe grace, of numbers.

Along comes Pierre Fermat in the seventeenth century, a civil servant whose bobby was mathematics. He wondered if this same proportionality would apply if you raised the power above two. What if you cubed the numbers? Would x³ + y³ = z³? The answer was no. It never worked, no matter how high be raised the power. So be produced his notorious Last Theorem. THERE ARE NO POSITIVE WHOLE NUMBERS, WHATEVER, WHERE ‘N’ EXCEEDS TWO, SUCH THAT Xⁿ + Yⁿ = Zⁿ.

For four hundred years no one has been able to prove or disprove Fermat’s Last Theorem, and they have checked every power of ‘n’ from 3 to 125,000. Intriguingly, Fermat himself said at the end of his life that he had a proof, though it was never found when his papers were searched after his death. What I like about Fermat’s Last Theorem is that it remains one of those conjectures about the world which are almost indubitably true, that no one would ever deny, but which, in the final analysis, we can’t actually, physically prove.

 

Hope trudged across the dewy field toward the hedgerow. It was eight in the morning and a gray mist off the sea lay over the downlands that stretched along the coast in this part of Dorset. She checked her map to make sure she was in the right place and veered over to a corner of the field. Reaching the hedge, she hooked the end of her tape measure over a protruding hawthorn twig and unreeled the tape for thirty meters. The hedge was thick, perhaps six feet across at its base, and was growing on a small bank. At first glance it looked like an ancient hedgerow to her, in which case, she reflected, it should conform to her dating theory. She walked slowly along its length. Predominantly hawthorn, but there was a fair amount of elder and blackthorn mixed in there too. On closer inspection she found some field maple, dogwood and, just within the thirty meter sample area, a small patch of holly. She noted this all down on the map and in her record book. Six species in thirty meters: according to the theory this hedge had been here for approximately six hundred years. She took a small sample of the soil for the geologist and then made another quick search for brambles, but there were none in this section. She sat down on a stile and wrote it all up.

The survey of the Knap estate was well advanced. Much of the archaeological work was already completed: the ancient barrows, the deer enclosure, the Celtic field systems, had all been thoroughly examined, mapped and described. The ecologist who had done the initial work on the hedgerows and woodland had resigned for some reason—hence the job vacancy—but Hope had found so many inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his estimates that she had told Munro she would have to start again from scratch. It meant that she had much more work to do than she had been contracted for, but it kept her busy, and for that she was grateful.

Her own approach to the problem of dating was based on a simple formula she had devised, namely, one shrub species in a hedge equaled a hundred years. She made many trial counts on hedgerows whose age was known (the earliest detailed map of the estate was dated 1565) and her method had proved to be surprisingly accurate, with an insignificant margin of error. So she had set about dating all the unmapped hedgerows with some confidence, and already she had discovered that there were many more medieval hedgerows than had hitherto been imagined. Feudal and Saxon field systems were revealed where previously eighteenth-century enclosure fields had been believed to exist. The landscape history of the estate was far more complex and thorough than had been envisaged. As a result of her efforts, one hundred and forty-seven new hedgerows had been classified as level one. In conservational parlance, they were of ancient and abiding historical interest and to be preserved at all costs.

To her vague surprise, Hope found she was thoroughly caught up in her work, in a way she would not have imagined possible. Sure, it was routine and methodical, but there was a profound satisfaction in that routine and method when it allowed her to draw clear and irrefutable conclusions.

Another bonus was that she was out of doors all the daylight hours, walking the downlands and the fields in all weathers. In the weeks she had been there, she had lost weight—almost fourteen pounds—and she felt markedly fitter. Now she had almost finished classifying the estate’s hedgerows and Munro was encouraging her to move swiftly on to the many woods and coppices.

She was keen to do so. She had forgotten this facet of her personality: the dogged application of, an exultation in, her expertise. This was what she had trained herself to do; this was why she was educated. Problems were presented to her and she found a way to solve them. It was a feature of her character that, when it was not required or employed, she somehow forgot. It did not feature in her private conception of herself. The fanciful, wishful version of Hope Clearwater tended to downplay the professional scientist in her.

Now she was working again she enjoyed and savored the unrelenting rigor of her approach to her task, the unswerving persistence of her routine and the evident success of her experimentation. In her work she was achieving something irrefutably concrete. However recondite, however parochial, she was adding a few grains of sand to that vast hill that was the sum of human knowledge. She was discovering aspects of the English landscape that were unknown or hidden; and what pleased her most was that she could prove she was right. As her steady documentation of the estate increased and as the maps were redrawn and dates corrected she developed a quiet but strong pride in her abilities. Her latent self-confidence—never far below the surface—re-emerged into the clear light of day again.

Munro was pleased, and said so. But he had other priorities, largely directed by the need to complete the project on schedule. Hope was stubbornly resisting his attempts to hurry her along, as she had developed another dating theory that was even more precise and she was impatient to try it. Munro was not so enthusiastic, as it might mean more delay. Her theory was that the number of bramble subspecies in a hedge would follow the same pattern as shrub types, and she had proved the efficacy of the method to Munro very neatly one day, in an attempt to make him vote her more funds. (With a few assistants she could cover the entire estate in two months, she reckoned.) Munro was impressed but as yet undecided. He would see if there was any chance of hiring an assistant or two, he said, but he reminded her that the estate had fifty-three named woods and coppices and all but twelve of them were dateless.

She left the field and set off down a farm track toward Coombe Herring, a small village on the estate. There was a long ditch and bank there that ran up to the edge of the village that the project’s archaeologist had classified as part of the enclosure of an early seventeenth-century deer park. There was a problem in dating the hedge on the bank as it was almost entirely hawthorn. Out of curiosity Hope had done a bramble test on it and it had turned up a count of ten subspecies. She felt sure, as a result of this, that the ditch and bank belonged to a construction that was significantly older than the deer park—an old parish or manor boundary perhaps, or even a barrow mound. When she put this supposition to the archaeologist—a lean-jawed, pale-faced man called Winfrith—he had almost lost his temper with her. He reminded her that he had spent months plotting and reconstructing the configuration of the deer park, and he informed her that he had no intention of redrawing his maps because of a “bunch of brambles.” She planned to take several more examples from thirty-meter sections and confound him with the evidence.

She walked through the small village and up a sunken drove road that rounded a hill and eventually led on to East Knap, the village where she was living. It was a cool day, even for September, with a fresh east wind and the sky low and dense with packed clouds. She climbed up the bank off the road, went over a stile and cut through a small wood of coppiced hazel to the disputed bank and ditch.

She measured out her first thirty-meter section and with a pair of secateurs began to collect samples of the profusion of brambles that grew amongst the hawthorn. She worked steadily and carefully, placing the samples in plastic bags and labeling them. The wind stirred her hair, and her nostrils were full of the scent of earth and leaf mold disturbed by her feet and the dusty green smell of the hedge.

She picked a bramble berry and ate it, her mouth full of its winey, sour taste. She could hear birds singing and the restless thrash of the hedgerow elms above her being hustled and bothered by the wind. Through the gaps in the hawthorn she could make out the gentle rise of the coastal downs and sense, rather than see, the chill of the Channel beyond. Behind her back the landscape of Dorset unfolded. Its gentle hills, its fields and woods, the shallow valleys with their farmsteads and villages. Her mind was calm and full of her task and all her senses were stimulated as she crouched at the foot of a hawthorn hedge in a landscape she had come to know as intimately as any in her life. No wonder she loved her work, she thought, no wonder—she added guiltily—she hardly ever thought of John.

 

The project office was in the stable block of Knap House, a long attic room above a row of loose boxes. Every Friday there was a meeting to report on the individual progress of each project worker. Munro chaired it, invariably diplomatic and mild. Hope arrived a little late to find Munro and Winfrith waiting for her. She gave Munro, a soil geologist, the soil samples she had taken that day and sat down at the round table. Winfrith had motored in for the meeting from Exeter where he spent most of his time these days working with the project’s historian, a woman called Mrs. Bruton-Cross, whom Hope had met infrequently. These were her three colleagues, but she dealt mainly with Munro, who supervised and collated all their respective efforts. To all intents and purposes she worked on her own from Monday to Friday. Munro would telephone her in the evenings if he had anything of note to import.

The meeting lasted its usual half hour and Winfrith left at once for Exeter. Munro made her another cup of coffee.

“Here Saturday, Hope?” he asked her. “Marjorie and I were wondering if you’d like to—”

“Sorry. Going up to London, I’m afraid,” she said quickly, trying to keep the relief out of her voice. She had had one dinner with Graham and Marjorie Munro in their little cottage in West Lulworth and that had been sufficient. It had proved to be an eternity of strained conversation and wineless food. The one small sherry she had been offered—and had consumed—before dinner had turned out to be the solitary alcoholic component of the evening’s entertainment. As she ate her way through Marjorie’s special casserole (recipe happily provided if requested), Hope had been seized by such a craving for booze that she made an excuse (flu coming on) and had left before coffee, making straight for the nearest pub before it shut.

“Shame,” Munro said, genuinely. “Marjorie was looking forward to meeting John.”

“Oh, he’ll be down again,” Hope said vaguely. “I’ll give you plenty of warning.”

“Say hello to the Big Smoke for me,” Munro said.

“What?”

“Say hello to the—”

“Sure. Certainly.”

She drove back to East Knap and packed her bag and had a bath before leaving for the station at Exeter.

She sat in the train drinking beer and looking out at the dusky landscape. She missed Knap more each time she left it, she realized. Had she stayed she would have worked on all weekend. She didn’t need a break; these trips to London were proving to be something of a chore. And she found she was growing to dislike the city with its noise and dirt. She poured more beer into her plastic cup. But something was wrong, she said to herself: surely she should be happier at the thought of being with John again?

 

On Saturday morning John sat in his pajamas staring out of the kitchen window at the towers of the Natural History Museum that rose above the chimneys and gables of this part of Kensington. He was making little clicking noises with his tongue and tapping his chin rhythmically with a forefinger.

Hope watched him over the top of her newspaper. He had kept this up for almost ten minutes now—just staring out of the window and making clicking noises.

“D’you fancy a film this afternoon?” she asked, refusing to be irritated.

“Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m going into college. I’ve got some computer time booked.”

Hope forced herself to speak reasonably. “How long will you be?”

“Should be back…” He turned and looked at her, then cocked his head, figuring. “Early evening. All being well.”

“OK.” She stood up. She put on her raincoat and picked up her bag. “I’m going out.”

“Fine. See you later.” He looked back at the towers of the Natural History Museum.

 

Sunday was better. They went for lunch with some friends the college, Bogdan and Jenny Lewkovitch. He was a plump, fair-haired Pole; Jenny was English, petite and self-effacing. They lived in Putney and had two young children. Over lunch, John was lively and amusingly malicious about their colleagues.

Bogdan was a physicist. John had said on the way to lunch that, despite this fact, he respected his mind. “Which,” he added, “is pretty unusual for me, because normally I don’t have much time for physicists.”

“Why?” Hope said, wondering vaguely where he ranked ecologists who dated hedgerows in Dorset.

“Why? Because they refuse to admit—most of them—that what they do is basically all about mathematics. They think they’re doing something grand with their expensive machines, something in the world. But it’s all mathematics, really.”

They were driving down Fulham Palace Road toward Putney Bridge. Hope looked out of the window at the trees in Bishop’s Park. The sun was shining and the horse chestnuts were just beginning to turn yellow. She thought of the work that lay ahead of her in the woods and coppices of Knap and longed to be back there. For the first time she felt a little sorry for John and his clean, airless world of perfect abstractions.

“Don’t you think that’s a little childish?” she said.

“What?”

“My discipline’s better than yours. Na-na-nana-na.”

John smiled. “Ask Bogdan. If he’s honest he’ll tell you I’m right.”

 

That evening they made love.

“You’re a difficult bugger,” she said, kissing his long nose.

“I know,” he said. “Just as well you’re not, or we’d be in deep shit.”

“Yeah.”

He slipped his hand across her belly, fitted his palm briefly to her hipbone, then ran it up over her ribs to cup a breast.

“Bones, bones, sharp angles,” he said. He flipped back the sheet. “Hey. Your tits are getting smaller.”

“I’m not fat any more.”

“All that tramping around the turnip fields of Darzet,” he said, in a stage West Country burr.

“You should be pleased.”

He lay back smiling to himself.

“How’s the work going?” he asked.

“My God, I don’t believe it. You really want to know?”

“Sure.”

“Let me tell you about this fascinating technique I’ve developed for dating hedgerows.”

“Oh yes?”

“It’s all to do with counting the number of subspecies of brambles. You see—”

“Good night.”

 

As she unlocked the door to her cottage in East Knap on Monday morning, Hope felt an agreeable shift in her gut, an excited tightening of her sphincter. She realized she was glad to be back. She felt somewhat guilty about this because, all things considered, the weekend had been quite a success, after the difficult Saturday. But it was hard to contradict or suppress the palpable sensations she was feeling.

She busied herself about, first unpacking and then making herself an early lunch of a corned beef sandwich. As she ate, she remembered that John didn’t like corned beef. He couldn’t stand the smell of it, he said. He didn’t like her to eat it either—he claimed he could smell it on her breath hours later…

She sat at the kitchen table and thought about him and their marriage and her new ambivalence, the slight but steady distancing from him that she felt more and more as the weeks passed. Might the fault lie with her, she wondered. Perhaps she shouldn’t have married him? Or anyone, come to that. She had always assumed she would be married. She had always been quite confident that one day she would encounter someone with exactly the sort of strange allure she demanded. She knew herself, or so she thought, and she knew that she required someone different, someone odd and very intriguing, even to the point of being difficult…just like John, in fact.

Perhaps she had rushed things, been too sure of herself? She thought back to that first meeting, that moment when she had said, yes, that’s the one. She had known, as if by pure instinct, that he would be right, was worthy of her…she looked at her half-eaten sandwich. My God, she thought, maybe I’m a victim of my own arrogance? That to marry John was the ultimate act of selfishness in a fairly selfish life?

But then, she thought, why did she have to make it seem as if her meeting and falling in love with John had been some deliberate act of will on her part? She often did this, she realized: she reshaped the haphazard inexplicable twists and turns of her life into an order that she approved of, where the controlling hand of her authorship could be read clearly, like a signature. What nonsense! she thought, confronting now with some alarm the reality of her current existence. She was behaving like a Soviet historian, cooly airbrushing assassinated generals or purged ministers out of official photographs, reshaping, tidying events to suit her own way of thinking. The random, the capricious, the whim of happenstance had as powerful a role to play in her life as in anyone else’s—so why was she so afraid to admit it?

She stood up and went to put on her boots and coat, telling herself to stop interrogating herself so incessantly. It had been a good weekend. Don’t sink it under a huge cargo of analysis.

She looked at her watch. Little Green Wood awaited her.

All week Hope worked in the woods and coppices of the Knap estate. She found this job even more amenable than the hedgerow dating. The weather was fair but cool and the leaves on the trees were just on the turn. She loved the woods at this time of year, the pale, lemon-juice rays of the sunshine spread through the thinning canopy of leaves dappling the ground, and the air was always cold enough to make her breath condense. In the beech woods and the hazel coppices, with the sky screened and the horizon invisible, she felt even more cut off from the world and its hurry. Only occasionally was there the sound of a car or a tractor in a nearby lane, or the pop-popping of someone out with a gun. Otherwise she was alone with the shifting shadows and sunbeams of the ancient woodlands, hearing nothing but the endless hushing of the coastal breezes in the branches above her head.

 

John liked the cottage, he said, but he had only stayed there once before, shortly after Hope’s arrival at Knap, and before she had been truly settled in. Now she was, emphatically and comfortably, and over the weeks she had come to think of it as very much her home. But when John came to stay again he moved around it, naturally enough, with total ease and unconcern, just as he did in their London flat. For some reason, this familiarity, this lack of any by-your-leave, vexed her. She was watchful of him as he moved about the rooms, as if he were a clumsy guest. She found the way he took cushions from the armchairs to make himself more comfortable on the sofa, the way he raided the fridge and larder for his huge “snacks,” finishing off her biscuits, drinking almost all of her orange juice, leaving half-empty, skinning mugs of coffee on the mantelpiece, stupidly irksome. She was not a fanatically tidy person herself, but the smallness of the rooms in the cottage forced her to be neat. Now, with another large adult in the place, who didn’t possess her sense of propriety, it began to feel cluttered and messy.

“Do you think you could hang your jacket up?” she asked him, after they had returned from a walk and he had slung it over a chair back.

“Don’t be so obsessive. Why?”

“Makes the place look untidy.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“It does. I hang mine up.”

“It’s just a jacket on a chair. I haven’t been sick on the carpet.”

“It’s just something I happen not to like.”

“You hang it up then. Christ, you’d think we were about to be inspected.”

They bickered and niggled at each other through the weekend. Then John announced he felt like staying on for a couple of days. Hope said that would be fine; they could go on to her parents’ house together on Wednesday.

“What on earth for?” John said.

“I’ve been telling you for weeks. Ralph’s seventieth birthday.”

“Oh. Is there a party?”

“Yes,” she said with exaggerated patience. “A big party.”

“Count me out, then. God, you know I can’t stand that sort of do.”

“Fine,” Hope said, vaguely surprised that she wasn’t more annoyed. “Suit yourself.”

 

Sometimes John came out with her into the woods as she worked. He was no trouble; he said he was quite happy watching her move around, measuring and collecting. Occasionally, he would wander off on his own and explore the estate. There was one place he found that he was particularly fond of, not far from the remains of the old Jacobean manor house.

Here, a small valley had been turned into an ornamental lake, now rather reedy and silted up. The original panorama had been spoiled by a Forestry Commission conifer plantation on one side of the valley, but the approach to the lake, which was made by a long clear ride, or chase, still had a strange enchantment.

Now, you walked through a beech wood along the overgrown path of the ride. On your left-hand side was the small stream that fed the lake. It had been dammed and built up so that the water fell in a series of ornamental ponds and falls. Just before the lake was reached, and while it was still screened from view by the beech trees, the path kinked right so that you had to go round a dense stand of green-black yews.

And then, suddenly, the vista was revealed. The silver sheet of water, full of sky, and, beyond, grassy meadows set with old oaks and limes. At the far end of the lake was a carefully planted avenue of elms that was intended to carry the eye to a distant monument, a column of pink granite on the summit of a hill a mile or so off, but that had never been built.

Hope knew about the lake, of course, but had never approached it from the direction John had found. He took her to see it.

“Now isn’t that clever?” he said pointing to the stand of yews, as he walked her round it. “Just when you think you’re there, you have to stop, turn, go round, and then: bingo! Expectation, frustration and then double the effect because you’ve momentarily forgotten what you came to see.”

 

Hope’s parents still lived in the house where Hope had spent the greater part of her childhood. It was in Oxfordshire, not far from Banbury, a straight long house in a small village not too disfigured by drab council houses or bijou retirement homes. Hope caught a bus there from Banbury, for nostalgia’s sake, and allowed the old images of her past to unreel in her mind as they drove south toward Oxford, ducking off to the side here and there, as they visited east and west of the trunk road.

She left the bus at the green and walked past the church, the graveyard and the row of yellow almshouses, turning left up a shaded lane, beech nuts crunching beneath her feet, toward her family home.

The capacious front lawn was occupied by a large blue-and-white striped marquee. A lorry had been backed down the drive and men were unloading gold-painted bentwood chairs and round chipboard tabletops. From inside the tent she could hear her mother’s and her sister’s voices clamorously instructing the workmen where to place their loads.

She slipped by the lorry and let herself into the house. She placed her case down at the foot of the stairs and walked through the sitting room and dining room into the kitchen. There were flowers everywhere and the air was filled with the smells of blossom and beeswax polish. Through the kitchen window she could see her father at the end of the leaf-strewn rear garden burning something in the incinerator at the edge of the orchard. She went to join him.

Hope’s father was tall and lean. His hair, which had been dense and glossy all his life, had started to thin rapidly in the last two years, a fact that he pretended to make light of but which in reality upset him considerably. He had always been unduly proud of his hair, and in the many photographs of him as a young man, which were placed about the house, it was the feature of his one noticed first. He had known a brief but lucrative period of fame as a West End matinée idol before the Second World War, but even in those days he would never have been described as conventionally handsome. Nonetheless, people thought of him as handsome; he had a reputation for his looks, because he had exactly the kind of hair—swept back in a smooth shiny parabola from a clear forehead, with a not too pronounced widow’s peak—that handsome men were expected to have. No one really noticed his rather small eyes, or the somewhat too thin lips, or whether he had a mustache or not (that came and went like the seasons) because everyone’s gaze settled at once on that proud, almost indecently lush head of hair.

Even gray it had looked good, but now it was falling out and all that glory was gone. In defiance he had grown a beard, an affectation he had hitherto loudly despised—only good for hiding a weak chin, he thought—but it was a patchy, curly thing, as if his body had expended all its energy making superb, pedigree hair for sixty-eight years and wanted a rest from the job.

Hope walked up quietly behind him. He was wearing an ancient jacket, the tweed so worn it hung like a shawl from his square shoulders, jeans—improbably—and a pair of horrid tawny suede shoes.

“Hello, Ralphie,” she said. Some of his friends still pronounced it Rafe but, since retiring from the stage in the fifties, plain Ralph Dunbar it had been to most people, including his family.

He turned with no surprise (she was the only person who called him that) and came toward her, solemn-faced, arms wide.

“Hopeless, darling Hopeless,” he said.

She kissed his bearded cheek and he squeezed her to him strongly.

“Happy birthday,” she said. “I haven’t got a present, I’m afraid.”

“To hell with that. How do I look?”

“Great. But I can’t stand that beard.”

“Give it a chance, girl, give it a chance.”

They wandered back to the house, arm in arm. Her father smelled of woodsmoke and a faint musky perfume. He was always experimenting with different colognes and aftershaves.

“So glad you’ve come, Hopeless. Now I’ve got you all here.” He sniffed. “Christ, waterworks. Here we go.”

Hope had never known anyone, man or woman, who would cry so easily. It was as much a part of his repertoire of emotional responses to the world as a frown or a chuckle.

He wiped his eyes and hugged her passionately again. “It’s a funny old world, but a great old life,” he said. It was one of his familiar expressions. “Wonderful. Grand old life.” They had reached the kitchen door. He turned toward her.

“Where’s John, by the way?”

 

Hope always looked intently at her sister, Faith, whenever she had the opportunity, searching for lineaments of her own looks in that of her sibling’s. Was there something familiar, possibly, in the slightly belligerent jut of her lower lip? A correspondence in the bold arc of the eyebrows? Would anybody think, seeing them side by side, that they were related?…As far as Hope was concerned there was no resemblance at all, apart from their laughs, which were identical. As soon as it had been pointed out to her, Hope had endeavored never to laugh in that way again. It was their deep laugh, the uncontrolled explosion of merriment. There were times when Hope could not restrain it, and she laughed like her sister. Two factors prevented people from commenting on it, however: Hope and Faith saw very little of each other and they had entirely different senses of humor.

She didn’t dislike Faith, it was just that the gulf that had begun to grow between them in their late teens was now so wide as to be insurmountable. Ten years ago, shortly before she married her husband, Bobby Gow, she announced to the family that she did not want to be known as Faith any longer: henceforward her new name was to be Faye.

“Such a shame John couldn’t come,” Faith/Faye said to her now. “The whole point was to get the entire family together.”

They were sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea. Ralph was back in the garden. Her mother was supervising the flower arrangements in the marquee. For an instant Hope thought about making an excuse for John—pressure of work, a conference—but decided to tell Faye the truth.

“Actually, he hates these sort of occasions. Runs a mile from them.”

“Charming.” Faye gave a baffled smile. This was clearly aberrant behavior of the highest degree.

“I mean to say,” Faye said, “it is his father-in-law’s seventieth birthday. Daddy’s very upset, you know. He’s not showing it but I think he’s jolly hurt.”

“Ralph couldn’t care less. Anyway, I don’t think he likes John particularly.”

“Nonsense! Hope!” In Faye’s world, members of the same family loved each other unreservedly, for all time.

“I don’t think any of you like him.”

“That is not fair,” Faye said, a little flustered, playing for time, unused to all this candor. “John is…of course we like him. We just haven’t seen much of him, that’s all.”

Hope let her go on protesting. Faye had a pretty face—even-featured—with a small perfect nose that Hope coveted. Hope had her father’s nose, long and very slightly hooked. But Faye treated her prettiness almost as an embarrassment. She cut her straight, dark hair short, severely and unadventurously, parted neatly on one side. She wore minimal makeup. Her clothes were the uniform of her class and status—the box-pleated skirt, a blouse or silk shirt, little waisted jackets, plain, low-heeled shoes. Hope had once suggested she let her hair grow and Faye had retorted that, to her, long hair always looked dirty. Hope accepted the implied insult without reproach.

Faye had three children—Timmy, Carol and Diana—and was married to a solicitor, Bobby Gow, with a practice in Banbury. Every time Hope contemplated the life Faye led she was always appalled by its waste, its lack of even faint excitement, its rigid cultivation of the norm. They had been good friends in their teens—Faye was three years older—but approaching adulthood had soon separated them in almost every regard.

Hope suspected that her sister’s life—superficially serene, blessed and prosperous—was in reality a long catalog of large and small dissatisfactions. And she could see her restlessness with this lot, and the endless compromises she had to make to live with it, hardening her year by year. For Faye, the passing of time only signaled the mounting, overwhelming unlikelihood of her life ever being different; the steady retreat of alternatives to her current existence—however whimsical, however minor—ever being explored.

Hope felt sorry for Faye, sinking in the quicksand of prudence, moderation and propriety, but she knew that was the one emotion, the one act of sympathy, she could never express. Faye would rather die than have Hope feel sorry for her. That was not the way the world was meant to be organized: the whole purpose of putting up with this dullness, this inevitability, this pretense, was to allow Faye to feel sorry for Hope. Not the other way round, most definitely. So Hope said nothing, and Faye felt safer for a little longer.

Hope tinkled her teaspoon in her cup as she stirred in more sugar. A silence had fallen.

“Where’s Timmy?” Hope said. She liked Timmy, Faye’s eight-year-old son. He was a solemn, sweet boy with odd, obsessive interests.

“Well, he’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“Away at school. Since last year. Hope, really, I don’t think you listen to a word I say.”

 

The family assembled at seven before the guests arrived. They toasted Ralph with champagne. Ralph raised his tumbler of whisky in response and delivered a tearful, polished, and extravagant hymn of praise to his “own special darlings.” Hope noticed how avidly he swilled down his drink and presented the glass for more. At this rate he wouldn’t see dessert. Hope watched her mother stiffen slightly, but only for a moment. Her mother, Eleanor, was dressed smartly in pink and cream; even her blond hair had a faint strawberry rinse through it. She was an attractive woman who, in her fifties, had recognized that the addition of a little weight would be more advantageous to her appearance than the effort of constant dieting. So she had let herself grow a little plumper. Her skin was fresh and she carried the extra pounds with aplomb. Hope could see that even now she was desirable. She had large breasts and the general impression she gave was of a cosseted, elegant softness. She spent a lot on her clothes and jewelry. She was bright and shrewd. Hope saw her discreetly remove Ralph’s glass as he fussed over Faye’s little girls.

“Super you could come,” she heard Bobby Gow’s voice at her side. She turned. “Shame about John.”

“Well…us lot. All the locals. I’d run a mile if I was him.”

Bobby Gow gave an edgy smile and looked uncertain. Was she joking or was she serious? If he disagreed, would she think him stuffy? If he agreed with her, would it seem disloyal?…Hope could sense him going through the options.

“All work and no play,” he said finally, inanely, and gave a little laugh.

“So. How’s life, Bob?” Hope said.

He frowned and smiled weakly. “Fine, fine…well, you know, can’t complain. Soliciting away.” Hope was sure he had said this to her on every occasion they had met.

“How’s Timmy getting on?” She was beginning to feel exhausted already.

Gow waggled his hands, signaled indecisiveness. “I’m afraid he’s taking a bit of a while settling in. But it’s a good school.” He swallowed and looked at his champagne. “Fundamentally. Anyway,” he went on, “do him good to get away from Mother.”

“Really? Why?”

He didn’t answer. “We miss him terribly, though, old Timbo. Specially the girls.”

“I bet they do.”

“Anyway. There we go.” He pulled a smile. He looks like a man in agony, Hope thought, dying to escape me.

“How about a refill,” he said abruptly, snatching her glass away. He went in search of more champagne and Hope turned to her nieces, Carol and Diana, pretty in their party dresses. She wished she liked them better.

 

Hope was wearing an old black velvet dress with long sleeves and a V-neck. She had pinned her hair up loosely round her head and at her throat she wore an old pearl choker that belonged to her mother. She idled unnecessarily in the kitchen, reluctant to rejoin the throng in the drawing room again. Most of the guests had arrived by now, about eighty all told, and the volume of noise was growing by the minute as they drank champagne and guzzled canapés.

Little Diana came into the kitchen with an empty tray and Hope gave her a new one filled with miniature vol au vents.

“What’re these, Auntie Hope?” Diana said.

“Vol au vents. And please don’t call me Auntie, Diana, OK?”

“What should I call you then?”

“Hope. That’s my name.”

“But Mummy says—”

“Tell Mummy I don’t mind. Off you go.”

Hope followed her out. The room was tight with people. The men, young and old, in black tie; the women—so many blondes—painted and lacquered. The noise was insufferable.

“Hey, Hope! Hope Dunbar!” someone drawled loudly at her elbow.

She looked round. It was a young man, fair-haired with a flushed, bright face that was vaguely recognized. She couldn’t remember his name. He kissed her cheeks.

“How are you? Haven’t seen you for…God, how long? You committed matrimony recently, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. I mean I am married.”

“Been away? You’re very tanned. D’you ski?”

“No. I spent all summer working out of doors.”

“Really?” He was genuinely astonished. “What are you? Some sort of riding instructor or something?”

“I’m an ecologist.”

“Oh…” A worried look came into his eyes. “Sounds great. Anyway.” He began to look around the room. “Where’s hubby? Love to meet him.”

 

Hope stood beside her mother as the guests filed into the marquee. Round tables had been set out in a semicircle facing a wooden dance floor. On a dais beyond that, the band’s instruments stood—piano, drums, a double bass leaned against a high stool, and a saxophone held in an iron frame—awaiting their musicians. The tables were covered in pink cloths, the marquee was lined in ruched bands of pink-and-white material, and white flower arrangements stood on truncated doric columns here and there. It looked pretty and tasteful. Everyone knew where to sit. Eleanor Dunbar smiled sweetly at her guests as they moved by.

“It looks lovely,” Hope said.

Her mother looked at her. “So do you,” she said. “In an untidy sort of way.” She gestured at Hope’s hair. “Should’ve let me put it up for you.”

“I’ll be back in the woods tomorrow. It’s hardly worth it. Should we sit down?”

Her mother held her back a second. “Keep an eye on Ralph, will you, darling?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I have to table-hop and while I’m away he’ll drink too much.”

“It is his seventieth birthday.”

She didn’t smile. “Of course it is. But I don’t want him falling down drunk before the main course. Just…watch him for me.”

They moved toward their table.

“He seems all right,” Hope said.

“You haven’t been here for a while. He’s not funny anymore.”

Her mother’s face was expressionless. Hope felt a sudden tightness, a coiling, inside her.

“I am sorry, Mummy,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Her mother stopped, looked at her and smiled formally.

“Don’t pity me, Hope. I won’t have that.”

Hope felt a real depression settle on her when she saw she was sitting between Bobby Gow and a man called Gerald Paul, an old friend of the family. He was a retired theatrical agent whom her mother had worked for before she married Ralph. Hope rather suspected that they might have been lovers in the past. Perhaps they still were, for all she knew.

Bobby Gow actually turned away from her when she sat down, so she was obliged to talk to Paul. He had a thin, wide mouth full of what looked like brown impacted teeth, set at all angles. Oddly enough, his breath did not smell disgusting, only slightly sweet, as if he had rinsed his mouth with vanilla essence.

“Wonderful to see Ralph looking so well,” Paul said, looking across the table. “And your mother. Gorgeous creature.”

Hope looked at her parents: her mother, licked by the salacity of Paul’s gaze; her father, listening, his hand constantly stroking his beard…. To his left, Faye gave Carol a sip from her glass of champagne. Paul was reminiscing about “wonderful Eleanor.” Hope closed her eyes and felt a sudden desire to be in Little Barn Wood. She decided she would leave the room while the speeches were made.

She took a deep breath and spooned out a ball of avocado from the pear in front of her. A waiter came and leaned over her mother, then circled the table to her.

“Mrs. Clearwater, telephone for you.”

She excused herself and went through to the sitting room. It must be John, she thought, as she picked up the receiver. It was Graham Munro.

“What is it, Graham?” she said, interrupting his apologies.

He explained. That afternoon three of the Knap estate farm workers had been passing through the beech wood near the old manor house when they heard an unusual noise. On investigating, they discovered a man digging a “trench system”—Munro’s words—on the lake bank. Apparently some forty yards of trench over three feet deep had been dug. The workers challenged the man and remonstrated with him. Then they frog-marched him to the estate offices.