The Biographer's Tale (14 page)

“There is something shifty about all that shamanistic stuff in the Linnaeus document,” he said. “Something decidedly shifty.”

“Shifty?” I repeated.

“If you look into it,” he said, “I think you'll find that that's so. But I don't know that you will be much the wiser.”

I was perhaps stung by this last remark into making a decision to visit the Linnean Society. I had noticed its existence once or
twice already, on my way to exhibitions in the Royal Academy. It has a secret-looking door
inside
the arch of the Palladian grandeur of Burlington House. I telephoned, and asked if the Society's collections were open to the general public. By appointment, I was told. Use of the Society's library was also available by appointment. Linnaeus's own collections were held in an atmospherically controlled strongroom, but someone would be happy to show them to me. His collections? I asked. The Society was founded in 1788 when the collections were purchased, after Linnaeus's death, by James Edward Smith, who became its first President. It moved the collections to Burlington House in 1857. Many of Linnaeus's specimens had been destroyed or dispersed, but what was left was substantial. What was I particularly interested in? The fish, the insects, the library? As I thanked the courteous voice on my telephone, it came to me, I remember, that this would be my first contact with
things
. Not Destry-Scholes's things, but
things
, nevertheless. I felt a thrill in my fingertips.

I set out on foot from King's Cross, where I lived, to Piccadilly. I was watching my pennies, which was increasingly necessary, and getting some exercise, both. Keeping fit is a major problem for sedentary scholars. Ormerod Goode was right that I was “peaked.” An odd word. I wondered what its derivation was. The post-structuralist I had been would have taken pleasure in a pun—Goode had perceived, without looking, that I was piqued by his lack of interest, by his non-offer of a drink. I looked up “peaked” in the
OED
. I have one I bought in a sale, which is compact, that is one volume, but very large and cumbersome, and can be read with a lens which has its own little light that makes an island of a word in
a sea of invisibly tiny print. I have to read it crouched over it, on the floor. “Peaked,” to my disappointment, had no etymological source, but was said to be colloquially derived from “peaked,” meaning the point, or summit, of a mountain, or hill, thus a face sharpened or thinned by illness or malnutrition. I do have a sharp face. It is a word I would apply to it. I also think it is a word Goode would apply, being a place-names man with a prejudice in favour of the Anglo-Saxon. I believe, though, I did look
peaked
, not only because I am naturally thin and sharp. It is difficult, in view of all the subsequent events, to remember clearly the sense of aimless desolation with which I set out to walk to Piccadilly. Aimless is the wrong word. I had
too many aims
, towards all points of the compass, including the entirely arbitrary one of Piccadilly.

Desolation, however, is not the wrong word.

I was in one of those little streets around Bond Street when I saw the Maelstrøm. It was in the window—narrow but deep—of a small shop which advertised itself, in sky-blue lettering on pine green, as Puck's Girdle. The Maelstrøm was made of a kind of bravura and exaggerated origami, a funnel of scissored and foaming navy-blue paper with spiring silver coils and feathery snipped and streaming froth. It was suspended on nylon thread in a slight current of air, and swayed in a gyre. Balancing it on the other side of the window was a creamy paper replica of the Alhambra, with delicate windows and tracery, colonnades and courtyards. In the middle was a small jungle, a paper rainforest with a parrot or two, some
golden frogs, several winding paper snakes and receding jungle paths under the canopy like a set for a children's theatre. Whoever was good with the scissors was good with lettering. They had scattered shadowy grey bird-like words over the top half of the glass.
GET AWAY. LOOK FORWARD TO. GO OUTWARD. CLIMB. DREAM. LOOK. LISTEN. SUN. RAIN. WIND. ICE. WATER. FLY. FLOAT. HURTLE. PERIPLUM
.

I liked hurtle. I liked periplum.

The floor of the window was deep in small things. Pebbles, little lamps, glass bottles, feather butterflies, wax fruit, winding ribbons of sand, snowflake crystals in plastic.

I stared. The only conventional poster said, “This is not a bucket shop. We sell solid pleasure at reasonable prices.”

There was another notice, handwritten.

“Part-time person wanted, frankly as a dogsbody. With possibility (eventually) of travel.”

Naïve critics are accustomed to saying that life is random, things do not turn out, or present themselves, in life with the glittering appositeness and fated inevitability that they do in literature. Everyday experience contradicts this silly wisdom every day.

I went in.

Inside was also decorated in the very agreeable mixture of sky-blue and pine-green, with touches of a paler, apple-green, and a ceiling studded with little halogen lights like stars, on a midnight ground. The counter was a crescent moon, behind which, one at each end, were two men, one large and blond, one slight and dark. They both wore oil-coloured seamen's sweaters, wide-necked and cable-stitched. They both wore
large, round spectacles, with frames in that iridescent multi-striped light-weight metal (is it titanium?) that is fashionable in Sweden. They asked simultaneously if they could help me. I said I was interested in being a part-time dogsbody. If the job was still available.

They said, again simultaneously, that the notice had only just been put in the window. They introduced themselves as Erik and Christophe. “We sell odd holidays,” said Erik. “Literary holidays—the golden road to Samarkand, haunts of the Lorelei, Treasure Islands. Brontës' Brussels. Anywhere that isn't a Heritage site. The battlefields of the Hundred Years War. Green Hells. And so on. Sometimes we employ individual guides for little groups, but the dogsbody we want would only be required to play around in here with a computer and a filing cabinet.”

I said I had been drawn in by their window. By the origami Maelstrøm, by hurtle and periplum.

“That's good,” said Christophe, the thin one. “Our
favourite
customers are tempted by words and images. We do have a vulgar brochure or two of beach umbrellas and pedalos for those who have an aesthetic taste for the banal. We have a Fourieriste ambition to cater to all tastes. I had the idea, speaking of Fourier, of a world tour of nineteenth-century glassed-over shopping arcades …”

I said it was unlikely in the extreme that they would have an applicant dogsbody who had read Fourier, and his dreamed phalansteries under glass arcades, but that I did happen to have done so.

They had a mild look, of satisfied pleasure, which they shared with each other. I thought they were almost certainly a couple, from the way they looked at one another. I had—for
almost the first time in my life—the sense that if I said what came into my head it would be the right, not the wrong, thing. I said I had come in because I had been reading various accounts of the Maelstrøm and had been attracted by the cutout. Also, as I had said, by the words, by hurtle and periplum. I supposed, I said, that they risked disappointment in clients seduced by words and images. Not really, said Erik. People who live amongst words and images take them around with them like baggage. He asked if I had ever been to the Cimetière Marin of Valéry. I had not. I have travelled very, very little. It was, said Erik, not as he, a northern European had expected. He had expected greensward (he used exactly that word) and low headstones. Not a cramped stone town of dog-kennel mausoleums, with stony streets and blind, blank frontages. But the sea was the same as the image he had taken there.
“La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée
,” they said, in unison.

I said I would very much like to be their dogsbody, if they would have me. Erik asked what else I did. I told the truth, more or less. That I was thinking of writing a book that had run into the ground for lack of information. That I wanted eventually to see the Maelstrøm, though I was not quite sure why. My “subject,” I said, had possibly, not certainly, drowned in or near it.

They consulted each other with silent stares and smiles, a flick of an eyebrow, a movement of a mouth. I wondered if this couple was asking itself how I would fit into their intimacy. I have noticed that I arouse questions in the minds of those I encounter—those who are interested in me
at all
, that is—as to my sexual orientation. I think these things may be harder to diagnose in the very small. I stood equably there,
offering no help on the sexual front, but expressing, I hoped, silent enthusiasm for the general aesthetic of Puck's Girdle.

“Would you change the name of the shop?” asked Christophe, as though he read my thoughts.

I replied that I had wondered. It was hard to know how to take a word like “girdle” on a modern shop. But I had decided it was totally memorable. Once seen, never forgotten. And representing exactly the desired travel connotations. “You could call it ‘Periplum,' ” I found myself saying, “but that
does
look exclusive. That might be thought to be arcane.”

“You'll do,” said Erik. I think he was reserving judgement on my sexuality. I didn't mean him to solve the problem; it was not his business.

When I left, I had learned that they were an ex-artist and an ex-athlete. The artist, who had constructed Maelstrøm, trees and paper colonnades, was the burly Erik, who was a Dane. The athlete was Christophe, who had been an 800-metre runner—until the Kenyans came, he said, and until my hamstring went for the third time. He watched me flinch in my own body at this thought. “We met in Kashmir,” said Erik. “Where we had gone to think our way out of separate
impasses
,” said Christophe. “And we found a joint way out.”

It was agreed that I should begin work in two days' time, for a probationary month, to see if we suited each other. Did they do visits to the Maelstrøm, I asked, my hand on their spherical steel door-knob. “Frequently,” said Erik. “It is a regular request.”

I went on my way towards the Linnean Society, considerably encouraged. The entrance, as I said, is in the shadow in the
gateway to Burlington House. I went in; there was a small entrance hall, with a glass case containing memorabilia and portraits. A very steep spiral staircase went up inside the building. I was surprised to see that both hall and stairway—essentially austere—were decorated with very large mushrooms and toadstools constructed, solidly but fancifully, from velvet, tweed, lace and
broderie anglaise
. Several of these monster fungi—as large as two-year-olds—sprouted in the stair-corners and squatted on the landings. They made me uneasy, though their general appearance was sprightly. I was not at all sure what I wanted to ask the librarian, who had kindly agreed to show me round. I wanted to find a whiff, a trace, a smudged fingerprint, so to speak, that would indicate the presence—in the past—of Destry-Scholes. After all, I thought, as I circumvented the velvet fungi, if he had drowned in the Maelstrøm, the exiguous evidence I possessed suggested he had gone there in search of Linnaeus. Who had gone there, according to the document I had a copy of, which Ormerod Goode said was “shifty.” I had decided to explain myself briefly but truthfully—to say that I was investigating someone who appeared to have been researching Linnaeus at the time of his own death. I had brought my folder containing the fragmentary narratives about the three personages. Much depended on the nature of the librarian.

I need not have worried, as it turned out. Several people were gathered in the library office to be shown the library and the collections. I was merely an anonymous extra in the group, all of whom were attending a conference on pollens and spores,
which was indeed advertised in the downstairs lobby. There were two Englishmen, an American, a Dutchman and a Swedish woman, who reminded me of a Picasso ceramic. Not the long-necked, leggy, swanlike kind of jug, the stocky, stout kind. Like a squat S, with breasts pushing forwards and buttocks pushing backwards, and solid calves under a denim skirt with a leather belt. The most striking thing about this woman, however, was not her resemblance to a jar, but her hair, which had a life of its own, appearing so abundant and energetic that it was almost a separate life-form. It was dull gold and frizzy and springy, and long. It would have stood out from her head like sun-rays if she had not caught it back and confined it, on the shelf of her skull, in a plum-coloured elasticated velvet band. It flew out behind this compressed bottleneck like a comet, defying gravity, rushing, so to speak, behind her. I did not notice her face, having taken in her form. I suspect this usually happened. She was introduced to us as Fulla Biefeld, pollination ecologist. We were shown the elegant little library, which had a vertiginous narrow gallery, with a quite inadequate iron rail, that looked as though it might detach itself at any moment. I asked the librarian whether she would have any record of any visit by Scholes Destry-Scholes, and she said it was possible, but not certain. She would have to retrieve and consult the archive. I said I believed he had been considering a biography of Linnaeus when he died. She offered to search the Society's correspondence files.

The party then moved down to the strongroom, which houses what is left (it is a good part) of the Linnean collections. We were asked if there was anything specific we wished
to see. The room is richly dark—one wall has Linnaeus's library, leather-bound, gold-lettered on warm skin, polished and stamped. I ran my eye along the shelf, Virgil and Aristotle, Descartes and Rousseau, and Vaillant. It was a large library for a gentleman of that time, and considerably smaller and more compact than my own rambling and ramshackle heaps of paperbacks. Another savant's library of that time would not have been dissimilar. There was a central desk with specimen cabinets in the space, which had the airless feel of a mausoleum. (I have never gone into a mausoleum, but was thinking about houselike tombs because of Erik's revelations about Valéry's marine cemetery.) Fulla Biefeld said she wanted to see bees. She wanted to know very precisely the physical state of the Linnean specimens of certain solitary bees—though she was also generally interested in butterflies, moths and wasps—from the region round Izmir, and from certain parts of Mexico. She hoped to get permission to put them under an electron microscope to study ancient pollen caught in their hairs, or fur, or scales. For a moment or two we all clustered round the fine drawers of bees, with their twisted corpses contorted on their eighteenth-century pins. One of the men said he had heard that the fish specimens were interesting. I followed him to these drawers, where the fish lay in neat files, one above the other, bisected laterally and pressed like flowers, with their spines displayed and their gaping faces turned sideways to show cheeks, teeth and faded colours. Some of these, the librarian said, were Artedi's fish. Artedi would have been the greater man, said one of the scientists. I did not know anything about Artedi, beyond that he was Linnaeus's friend. I was beginning to suffer mildly from claustrophobia,
amongst all this long-dead life. What did I want to see? the librarian asked courteously.