Brazzaville Beach (12 page)

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.