Brazzaville Beach (4 page)

“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-look
ing, 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.