The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (8 page)

You have to get there by boat. I was very excited. Apart from a couple of refresher dives in pools, this was my first proper scuba dive in years. I absolutely love it. I’m one of those people who has been tantalised by the flying dream for years, and scuba diving is the closest thing I know to flying. And for someone who is six foot five and less sylphlike than, to pick a name at random, the Princess of Wales, the sensation of weightlessness is an ecstatic one. Also, I usually vomit on the way back, which is a good way of working up an appetite.

I wanted to do a regular dive first to get my bearings. Two at a time, we clamped our masks and regulators to our faces did the Big Stride off the diving deck at the back of the boat; and dropped into the water in an eruption of bubbles. A moored dive boat always attracts the attention of a lot of local fish who expect, usually rightly, that they will get fed. The ones you’ll get to see if you’re lucky are the Maori wrasses, which are extraordinary pale olive-green creatures about the size of a Samsonite suitcase. They have large, protuberant mouths and very heavy protuberant brows, but the reason for the name Maori, an Australian will assure you apologetically, is some paintlike markings on their brow. Australians are not racists anymore.

There were quite a few wrasses around the boat, and I made the mistake of getting between a couple of them and some pieces of bread that someone had thrown from the boat. The animals blithely barged past me to get at the food. I sank down to the reef in the huge space of water and light beneath the boat, and drifted easily round it for a while to get used to being underwater again, then came back to the boat to divest myself of my scuba tank and collect the Sub Bug. Together, Ian and I hauled it into the water. I got myself into position behind the thing, and started it up. One of the curious features of scuba diving is that your suit and equipment seem so heavy and cumbersome and unwieldy on the surface—which is one of the things that tend to frighten beginners—but once you descend below water level, everything begins to flow smoothly and easily, and the trick is to exert yourself absolutely as little as possible, in order to conserve oxygen. It is, almost by definition, the least aerobic sport there is. It won’t make you fit.

At first I was disappointed that the Sub Bug wouldn’t move me faster than I could swim. We were gently pulling our way down, but as I started to get used once more to the slowness with which everything happens underwater, I began to relish the long, slow, balletic curves it let you make through the water, stretched out at full length behind it instead of swimming in the normal position with your arms by your side or on your chest. Following the contours of the reef became like skiing in ultra slow motion—an almost Zenlike idea. I began to enjoy it a lot, though after fifteen minutes of experimenting with it, I began to feel I had exhausted its repertoire and began to look forward to swimming under my own power again. I suspect that it’s probably a machine best suited to people who want to experience a dive but don’t want to bother with the business of learning to use buoyancy jackets and so on.

I returned to the boat and we hauled the thing back up out of the water. Well, I’d driven the Sub Bug.

But over lunch I was worried about the total collapse of my absurd comparative test-drive plan, and discussed my thoughts with Ian and Jane.

“I think we just have to think about the comparative test drive on a kind of conceptual basis,” I said.

“And we have to award some points. Obviously the Sub Bug wins some points for being portable up to a point. You can take it on a plane, which you wouldn’t do with a manta ray, or at least not with a manta ray you liked, and I think that we probably like all manta rays on principle really, don’t we? Your manta ray is going to be a lot faster and more manoeuvrable, and you don’t need to change its tank every twenty minutes. But the big points that the Sub Bug wins are for the fact that you can actually get on it. I think it has to get a lot of credit for that, if you’re thinking of it as transport. But then, let’s turn the whole thing around again. The reason you can’t actually ride a manta ray is a sound ecological one, and on just about every ecological criterion the manta ray wins hands down. In fact, any form of transport that you can’t actually use would be a major ecological benefit, don’t you think?” Ian nodded understandingly.

I’ve never learnt the names of a lot of fish. I always swot them up on the boat and forget them a week later. But watching the breathtaking variety of shape and movement keeps me entranced for hours, or would if the oxygen allowed. If I were not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasn’t the forces of natural selection that designed fish, it must have been an Italian. I was moving forward slowly in the shallows. A few feet in front of me the reef gradually dipped down into a broad valley. The valley floor was wide and dark and flat. Ian was directing my attention toward it. I didn’t know why. There seemed to be just an absence of interesting coral. And then, as I looked, the whole black floor of the valley slowly lifted upward and started gently to waft its way away from us. As it moved, its edges were rippling softly and I could see that underneath it was pure white. I was transfixed by the realisation that what I was looking at was an eight-foot-wide giant manta ray. It banked away in a wide, sweeping turn in the deeper water. It seemed to be moving breathtakingly slowly, and I was desperate to keep up with it. I came down the side of the reef to follow it. Ian motioned me not to alarm the creature, but just move slowly. I had quickly realised that its size was deceptive and it was moving much more swiftly than I realised. It banked again round the contour of the reef, and I began to see its shape more clearly. It was very roughly diamond-shaped. Its tail is not long, like a sting ray’s. The most extraordinary thing is its head. Where you would expect its head to be, it’s almost as if something has taken a bite out of it instead. From the two forward points—the outer edges of the “bite,” if you see what I mean—depend two horns, folded downward. And on each of these horns is a single large black eye.

As it moved, shimmering and undulating its giant wings, folding itself through the water, I felt that I was looking at the single most beautiful and unearthly thing I had ever seen in my life. Some people have described them as looking like living stealth bombers, but it is an evil image to apply to a creature so majestic, fluid, and benign.

I followed it as it swam around the outside of the reef, I couldn’t follow fast or well, but it was making such wide, sweeping turns that I only had to move relatively short distances round the reef to keep it in sight. Twice, even three times it circled round the reef and then at last it disappeared and I thought I had lost it for good. I stopped and looked around. No. It had definitely gone. I was saddened, but exhilarated with wonder at what I had seen. Then I became aware of a shadow moving on the sea floor at the periphery of my vision. I looked up, unprepared for what I then saw.

The manta ray soared over the top of the reef above me, only this time it had two more in its wake behind it. Together the three vast creatures, moving in perfect, undulating harmony of line, as if following invisible rollercoaster rails, sped off and away till they were lost at last in the darkening distance of the water.

“Ah, no worries, mate,” he said. “No worries at all.”

***

Who are your favorite authors?

Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Kurt Vonnegut, P. G. Wodehouse, Ruth Rendell.

Sunset at Blandings This is P. G. Wodehouse’s last—and unfinished—book. It is unfinished not just in the sense that it suddenly, heartbreakingly for those of us who love this man and his work, stops in mid-flow, but in the more important sense that the text up to that point is also unfinished. A first draft for Wodehouse was a question of getting the essential ingredients of a story organised—its plot structure, its characters and their comings and goings, the mountains they climb and the cliffs they fall off. It is the next stage of writing—the relentless revising, refining, and polishing—that turned his works into the marvels of language we know and love. When he was writing a book, he used to pin the pages in undulating waves around the wall of his workroom. Pages he felt were working well would be pinned up high, and those that still needed work would be lower down the wall. His aim was to get the entire manuscript up to the picture rail before he handed it in. Much of Sunset at Blandings would probably still have been obscured by the chair backs. It was a work in progress. Many of the lines in it are just placeholders for what would come in later revisions—the dazzling images and conceits that would send the pages shooting up the walls. Will you, anyway, find much evidence of the great genius of Wodehouse here? Well, to be honest, no. Not just because it is an unfinished work in progress, but also because at the time of writing he was what can only be described as ninety-three. At that age I think you are entitled to have your best work behind you.

In a way, Wodehouse was condemned by his extreme longevity (he was born the year that Darwin died and was still working well after the Beatles had split up) to end up playing Pierre Menard to his own Cervantes. (I’m not going to unravel that for you. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard Author of Don Quixote.” It’s only six pages long, and you’ll be wanting to drop me a postcard to thank me for pointing it out to you.) But you will want to read Sunset for completeness and for that sense you get, from its very unfinishedness, being suddenly and unexpectedly close to a Master actually at work—a bit like seeing paint pots and scaffolding being carried in and out of the Sistine Chapel.

Master? Great genius? Oh yes. One of the most blissful joys of the English language is the fact that one of its greatest practitioners ever, one of the guys on the very top table of all, was a jokesmith. Though maybe it shouldn’t be that big a surprise. Who else would be up there? Austen, of course, Dickens and Chaucer. The only one who couldn’t make a joke to save his life would be Shakespeare.

Evelyn Waugh, I think, compared Wodehouse’s world to a pre-fall Eden, and it’s true that in Blandings, Plum—if I may call him that—has managed to create and sustain an entirely innocent and benign Paradise, a task that, we may recall, famously defeated Milton, who was probably trying too hard. Like Milton, Wodehouse reaches outside his Paradise for the metaphors that will make it real for his readers.

But where Milton reaches, rather confusingly, into the world of classics gods and heroes for his images

(like a TV writer who only draws his references from other TV shows), Wodehouse is vividly real. “She was standing scrutinising the safe, and heaving gently like a Welsh rarebit about to come to the height of its fever.” “The Duke’s moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb-tide.” When it comes to making metaphors (well, all right, similes if you insist), you don’t mess with Master. Of course, Wodehouse never burdened himself with the task of justifying the ways of God to Man, but only of making Man, for a few hours at a time, inextinguishably happy. Wodehouse better than Milton? Well, of course it’s an absurd comparison, but I know which one I’d keep in the balloon, and not just for his company, but for his art.

We Wodehouse fans are very fond of phoning each other up with new discoveries. But we may do the great man a disservice when we pull out our favourite quotes in public, like “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes,” or “... like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag” or (here I go again) my current favourite, “He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk” because, irreducibly wonderful though they are, by themselves they are a little like stuffed fish on a mantelpiece. You need to see them in action to get the full effect. There is not much in Freddie Threepwood’s isolated line “I have here in this sack a few simple rats” to tell you that when you read it in context you are at the pinnacle of one of the most sublime moments in all English literature.

He doesn’t need to be serious. He’s better than that. He’s up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman, and Louis Armstrong, in the realms of pure, creative playfulness.

From the Introduction to Sunset at Blandings (Penguin Books)

Tea One or two Americans have asked me why the English like tea so much, which never seems to them to be a very good drink. To understand, you have to make it properly.

There is a very simple principle to the making of tea, and it’s this—to get the proper flavour of tea, the water has to be boilING (not boilED) when it hits the tea leaves. If it’s merely hot, then the tea will be insipid. That’s why we English have these odd rituals, such as warming the teapot first (so as not to cause the boiling water to cool down too fast as it hits the pot). And that’s why the American habit of bringing a teacup, a tea bag, and a pot of hot water to the table is merely the perfect way of making a thin, pale, watery cup of tea that nobody in their right mind would want to drink. The Americans are all mystified about why the English make such a big thing out of tea because most Americans HAVE NEVER HAD

A GOOD CUP OF TEA. That’s why they don’t understand. In fact, the truth of the matter is that most English people don’t know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants.

So the best advice I can give to an American arriving in England is this: Go to Marks and Spencer and buy a packet of Earl Grey tea. Go back to where you’re staying and boil a kettle of water. While it is coming to the boil, open the sealed packet and sniff. Careful—you may feel a bit dizzy, but this is in fact perfectly legal. When the kettle has boiled, pour a little of it into a teapot, swirl it around, and tip it out again. Put a couple (or three, depending on the size of the pot) of tea bags into the pot. (If I was really trying to lead you into the paths of righteousness, I would tell you to use free leaves rather than bags, but let’s just take this in easy stages.) Bring the kettle back up to the boil, and then pour the boiling water as quickly you can into the pot. Let it stand for two or three minutes, and then pour it into a cup. Some people will tell you that you shouldn’t have milk with Earl Grey, just a slice of lemon. Screw them. I like it with milk. If you think you will like it with milk then it’s probably best to put some milk into the bottom of the cup before you pour in the tea.* If you pour milk into a cup of hot tea, you will scald the milk. If you think you will prefer it with a slice of lemon, then, well, add a slice of lemon.