Brazzaville Beach (37 page)

“Books,” he said, answering her unvoiced question. “Sorry.”

She kissed his face. “Don't be silly,” she said. “You bring what you like.”

He looked pale, and thinner. But not too bad, considering.

On the drive to East Knap he did not have much to say, passing most of the journey looking out of the window at the landscape. It was a cold clear day; the heavy frost from the night before still lay
on the ground and on the hedges. There was no wind and the trees, the elms and the beeches, stood stark and still.

“God, I love winter,” John said suddenly.

She looked at him. “So how could you live in California?”

“Exactly,” he said, fiercely, “Exactly. I wish I had never gone. I wasted so much time.” He shook his head at some memory. “If only I'd stayed on here, you know…I wouldn't have got caught up in that game-theory crap.”

“Come on, John. It makes no sense, looking back that way. We can all do that.”

“There's no getting away from it,” he said, his voice full of self-disgust. “Game theory: a very Californian thing to do.”

There seemed no adequate response to his vehemence, so Hope drove on in silence. Then, after a while, when it was becoming oppressive, she started to list the improvements she had made to the cottage.

“Can we see the sea?” he said, abruptly.

“Well, yes…now?”

“Please. If you don't mind.”

She forked right and drove along the deep lanes until she came to a convenient stile.

They climbed over and walked up the slope of the downs through clumps of gorse and whin. Here there was wind, whipping cold off the Channel, and Hope retied her scarf over her ears. They reached the top of the gentle rise and there was the sea, lead-gray and choppy. The weak sun hung low, casting long shadows. They had about another twenty minutes of daylight, she reckoned.

“Aren't you cold, Johnny?”

He had a raincoat on and no scarf. He stared out at the sea, not answering. She looked at his thrusting, sharp face, lit by the lemony rays, the keen wind making his eyes water, his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

“God, I've missed this,” he said. “I've got to live near water. A river or a sea. I have to.”

“You old pseud.”

He turned to look at her, not responding to her joke. “No, I have to, Hope. It calms me. It's something I feel, very deeply.”

“Come on, let's get back to the car. Bloody freezing.”

“Just another minute or two.”

After a while he said: “You know that lake you mentioned?”

“Yes.”

“I still can't remember a lake. No memory of it at all.”

“It's still there. I'll show it to you later.”

“Funny, that.” He shook his head. “You sure I used to know it?”

“You used to say it was your favorite place.”

“Funny, that.”

Hope paced up and down, stamping. Then she hunched her coat over her head as a windbreak and lit a cigarette. John stood quite still, gazing at the water, taking deep breaths, seemingly heedless of the cold.

She went back to the car alone, and switched on the engine, the heater and the radio. He returned ten minutes later, cold radiating from his body like a force field. He was shivering slightly by now, and looked pinched and ill. Hope was too angry to speak, and they drove back to the cottage in silence.

In the cottage she made some tea and ordered herself to be more reasonable and understanding. All her fine resolve disappeared when she emerged from the kitchen to discover John unpacking his suitcase in the sitting room and stacking the dozens of books he had brought with him on top of hers, overloading the small oak bookcase she had bought, she remembered, from a little shop in West Lulworth. She remembered the name of it, for some reason, as she stood watching him, mugs steaming in her hands.
Antique bric à brac
, that was it,
Sam M. Goodforth, prop
. A nice oxymoron.

By concentrating on such details she managed to calm down, and accepted John's compliments on her improvements to the cottage with something approaching good grace.

Then she said, more sharply than she had intended: “Where were you planning to sleep?”

He looked lost for a moment, blank. “Oh God,” he rubbed his forehead. “I forgot. I hadn't…I suppose I just assumed we—”

“You can have the bed. I'll have the sofa,” she said, thinking: why am I being so foul? and getting no reply.

“No, no,” he said. “That's not fair. I'm on the sofa.”

“John. No, please. You're recuperating. I have to get up early. It won't be for long.”

Another shadow crossed his face. He sat down slowly in an armchair.

“How long were you planning to stay?” she asked, in a quieter voice. “Would you like to stay,” she added.

“I hadn't thought.”

“John—” She caught herself in time. “We're supposed to be separated. We're not married anymore. Properly.” She felt almost tearful with frustrated anger. “It was your idea to split, for Christ's sake.”

He looked desperate, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

“But that's just it,” he said. “I made a mistake, a terrible mistake. I don't want…I don't want us to be separated, Hope. Ever. Ever again.” He went on, before she could interrupt. “I see now, thanks to my treatment, that it's you I…” He lost his way. He emphasized his final words with flat swipes of his hand. “I should never have broken us up.”

“Let's drop it,” she said, more gently, making an effort. “There's plenty of time. We can talk about it later.” She closed his almost empty suitcase and picked it up. “I'll pop this upstairs. Then we'll go to the pub, get something to eat.”

 

The pub—the Lamb and Flag in Chaldon Keynes—was a mistake, as far as Hope was concerned, and made her feel in even more of a bad mood. The beery atmosphere, the inane chatter, the pinging and bubbling of the gambling games she found profoundly irksome. She ate half a baked potato filled with creamed tuna and sweet corn, and drank a mouthful of a glass of tannic red wine that set her teeth immediately on edge, and whose surface was covered with a fine dust of cork fragments.

John seemed to respond to the place and its young, overweight patrons more favorably, consuming three pints of beer and some
thing called a “Darzet Pastie.” He happily watched two men playing pool for half an hour.

On the drive back he was animated, and talked lucidly about his treatment. He confessed that he did not know if it had actually helped him or not; it was important instead, he said, as a kind of emotional watershed in his life. He would have had to go through the breakdown, depression and recovery anyway, he reasoned, and it would have been, in his words, a rough passage. But because that process was marked by the electric shocks it imposed a time scale and structure on him. His treatment and recovery had a beginning, middle and end—a strict duration. And that, he decided, was what had been important, and that was how ECT had helped him, no matter what the actual effect the electrical charges had had on his brain cells. He had been through it, and it was now over, and the simple knowledge that there were no more shocks to come gave him the strong sensation of having passed through something. He had navigated his rough passage, and now he was on the other side he was ready to begin again.

He looked over at her and smiled.

“I know I'm better,” he said, “I know I'm fundamentally all right again because I was able to take the news without flinching. Before the shocks, you see, it would have killed me, I'm sure.”

Hope glanced at him for a second. The night was icy and she was driving with pronounced care. She could practically feel the frost gathering around the car—the heater was on full blast and the windows were fogged with condensation—she felt she was driving through thin solid shards of cold, as if the passage of the car were marked by a cloud, a silver dust of ice particles.

“What news?” she said.

He rubbed his hands together, like a surgeon washing before an operation.

“Do you remember,” he said, “when you came to see me, just after I'd moved out?”

“A Sunday.”

“Yes. And I said that the work was going well, that I was very close to breaking through? That I had worked out this set?”

“The Clearwater Set.”

His laugh was dry. “Well, I was beaten to it. Someone got there first.”

He wrote a formula in the condensation of the car window:

 

“Unreal,” he said. “Dazzling. But someone else thought it up.”

“You know it means nothing to me.”

“It's
so
simple. And that's why it's beautiful. If you knew, if you just knew what you could achieve with that. If you knew what it implied…”

 

She looked at the innocuous figures, bleeding now, mysterious and unknowable. For the first time in ages she felt that old envy of him.

“You see how much better I am,” he laughed, not quite so convincingly. “I can look at that”—he rubbed it out with a swipe of his fist—“and not burst into tears.”

FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM II

Outside, I see a herd of cattle on the beach. Thirty big white cows with preposterous horns and humps. Looping pleats of skin, like an old man's wattles, hang at their necks. The herdsman, a tall thin boy from the north, gazes in frank admiration at the ocean. Perhaps this is the first time he has seen it, his whole horizon full of heaving water
.

He advances cautiously to the final fizzing ruff of a wave and wets his hand. He tastes it. Spits out salt
.

I turn back to my work
.

Diligently, ploddingly, with my fat dictionary by my side, I am translating a letter from French into English for Gunter. It is from the manager of an aluminum-smelting plant in Morocco
.

 

Something nudges and elbows its way into my mind
.

We have been here before, I know, but we might be getting somewhere
.

Is Fermat's Last Theorem true? It might be, we decided. Let us say it is true, but incapable of proof. Perhaps there is a small collection of state
ments that are true, and not solely in the world of mathematics—that are true, but that cannot be proved by any of our recognizable proof procedures? If so, where does that leave us
?…

I can't prove it, but I know that it is true. There are times when a remark like that appears entirely reasonable to me
.

If I say to that boy on the beach, the cattle herder, that the waves on this beach will roll in until the end of time, and he says: prove it—would I be obliged to? Would any efforts I made to come up with an acceptable proof procedure matter, in this particular case
?

I think about it and watch the cows sway and shift impatiently. There is nothing to eat on the beach
.

It seems to me that there are statements about the world and our lives that have no need of formal proof procedures
.

I return to my letter and the price of bauxite
.

 

I used to wonder—occasionally—if I could justifiably describe myself as either an optimist or a pessimist. Whatever response I came up with always depended on my mood. If I was feeling clever, I would consider myself a pessimist, and a proud one at that, no matter how fortunate I had recently been. It was only in my stupid moods that I felt optimistic. The more stupid I was, the more I assumed that events would unfold favorably for me. I now see that there was an error in these neat categorizations: from time to time my cleverness disguised just how stupid I was being.

I think I must have been in one of those phases during the nine days of our capture by Amilcar. I lived in a hazy, thoughtless limbo, existing on blind instinct, trusting to luck, powered by reserves of energy I never knew I possessed. In other words: a classic optimist. When the soldiers surrounded me in that village at the end of the causeway, it all gave way suddenly. I collapsed. I passed out. I had been sitting in the hot sun all day, I had not eaten for twenty-four hours, and I was existing at the screaming pitch of my frazzled, traumatized nerves.

They told me later, the soldiers, that they had almost shot me out of pity. I'm sure they were joking, but from their point of view, they said, all they could see was a filthy disheveled person waving a flag and screaming what they assumed were insults at them.

The two white men were Belgian mercenaries. They were unusually solicitous because behind them with the main unit of the federal army my real savior was waiting, a man called Mr. Doblin, an officious second secretary from the Norwegian consulate. (The Norwegians were responsible for the interests of British subjects in the country, there being no British chargé d'affaires.) Mallabar had helped too. There was a five-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who rescued us.

Half of this had already been claimed by a lucky staff captain. Ian had evaded his pursuers comparatively easily. He had hidden up for the rest of the night and most of the next day before making his way back to the mission school to discover it had been taken over as a federal army battalion HQ.

I learned all this from Mr. Doblin. By the time I had been driven to the nearest airstrip and flown south to the city, Ian was already back at Grosso Arvore, reunited with Roberta. Mr. Doblin was in his twenties, possibly younger than me. He was dark and overweight and in an almost continually pent-up mood of exhilaration over his part in our successful rescue. He complimented me on my composure. Mr. Vail, he said, had been in very bad shape.

“I think he was absolutely conwinced you were dead,” he confided. “We have to tell him you are safe at once.” I agreed. I left it to Mr. Doblin to communicate the good news to Grosso Arvore.