Turtle Diary (6 page)

George Fairbairn, the Head Keeper at the Aquarium, seemed quite willing to tell me anything I wanted to know about the turtles. I have the feeling that if I told him what’s in my mind he might even help me do it and of course that frightens me.

I can’t possibly do it alone. I’d need someone to handle the turtles and drive the van, I can’t do any part of it really except pay the expenses. There’d be the long drive to Cornwall, it would be night-time. I’d put them into the ocean at Polperro. The mystery of the turtles and their secret navigation is a magical reality, juice of life in a world gone dry. When I think of the turtles going into the ocean I think of it happening in that place that so badly needs new reality.

The ends of things are always present in their beginnings. T. S. Eliot has of course noted that. But it seems to me that the ends are actually
visible
in the faces of the people with whom one begins something. There is always an early face that will be forgotten and will be seen again. Sometimes one simply sees the death that will come too soon, as I did with Geoffrey long before the afternoon with the kestrel. But there’s something else, some aspect of the person that is always seen early and will inevitably be seen again no matter how the seeing changes in between. The man who looks a rotter at first and then is seen to be charming will look a rotter again, that can be depended on. The scared person will look scared again, the lost one lost. That man at the bookshop has been seen as hopeless-looking long ago by someone, by himself as well, and his face has returned to that look. My face does not look back at me now when I look into the mirror. That too is a return.

More and more I’m aware that the permutations are not unlimited. Only a certain number of things can happen and whatever can happen
will
happen. The differences in scale and costume do not alter the event. Oedipus went to Thebes, Peter Rabbit into Mr McGregor’s garden, but the story is essentially the same: life points only towards the terror. Beatrix Potter left
it to John Gould to show us Peter dangling from the beak of
Bubo bubo
.

The turtle in Lear’s
Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò
looks like a hawksbill in the drawing. The man at the bookshop has not got a tiny body nor does his head grow too large but there is a good deal of Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo in him.

Through the silent-roaring ocean
Did the turtle swiftly go;
Holding fast upon his shell
Rode the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.
With a sad primeval motion
Towards the sunset isles of Boshen …

Madame Beetle is shaped somewhat like a sea turtle, especially in profile. Seen from above she’s more elongated, less shield-shaped. Her motion is primeval but not sad. Today I cleaned the tank and the filter and she’s been patrolling her domain with renewed interest, repeatedly going up and down one side that was green with algae and is now clear. I wonder if she’s looking at her reflection. ‘Domain,’ I said as if she were free and not the prisoner of my flagging invention. The shipwreck looks quite good now, a little furry and spotty, its foretop lost in green curling fronds. All of the plants are putting out new growth.

Very naval Madame Beetle looks, as neat and boaty as a model at the Science Museum. Her underside is tan with regular transverse black lines as neat as the planking one sees in models. A Victorian one-man submarine perhaps, or a little armoured galley. Up and down the sides she goes then once round the tank rowing her smooth and undulating course. Beyond her little ocean I see rooftops and the sky.

I was on the South Bank one day by the Royal Festival Hall. It was a sunny day with a bright blue sky. I was looking up at a train crossing the Hungerford Bridge. Through the train I could see the sky successively framed by each window as the carriages passed. Each window moving quickly forward and away held briefly a rectangle of blue. The windows passing, the blue remained.

Now suddenly the weather is hot, the days are heavy and humid. There are more and more strong-voiced people in the shop with sunglasses and cameras and American Express Travellers’ Cheques. Many American couples as they age seem to make a sexual exchange: the man looks feminine, the woman masculine. Or perhaps the woman takes over both sexes and the man vacates his altogether. One big strong leathery lady was in yesterday buying guidebooks and maps. She seemed to be carrying her husband under her arm as some ladies carry little dogs on buses. ‘You’d better go buy some antiques, John,’ she said to him. ‘I’m going to be here for a while.’ ‘Right,’ said John when she’d set him on his feet. He went out with his telephoto lens thrusting before him like a three-foot optical erection. If the authorities ever twig what cameras are about they’ll make old men stop flashing their telephotos.

The ocean is striking back. In this morning’s
Times
there was an item about a Japanese seaweed called
Sargassum muticum
that’s spreading everywhere. It fouls propellers and traps boats, said the report. That was to be expected.

Saturday afternoon I went to the Zoo again. The sunlight was brilliant in Regent’s Park, the air was sticky with ice-cream and soft drinks, people were rowing boats, there were girls in bikinis everywhere in the green grass and the young men walking with their shirts off. Inside the Aquarium it seemed darker than ever. I scarcely looked at the turtles, saw them out of the corner of my eye swooping like bad dreams in the golden-green.

I found George Fairbairn and we went into the room behind the turtle tank. There was another room off that one with a lot of small tanks in it, and he showed me a little turtle somebody’d given the Aquarium when they found out how big it would grow. It was some kind of Ridley he thought but he wasn’t sure which kind. I held it in my hand. One wouldn’t expect a little black sea turtle to be cuddly but it was. It was about nine inches long, heavy and solid, and waggled its flippers in a very docile way. It felt such a jolly nice little piece of life.

After we’d been chatting for a while I came right out with it, standing there between two rows of tanks with the little turtle in my hand. There were big cockroaches hopping about on the floor. ‘What if the turtle freak were to propose a turtle theft to the Head Keeper?’ I said.

‘Head Keeper wouldn’t be all that shocked by it,’ he said.

‘How would we go about it?’ I said.

‘Best time would be when we’re cleaning and painting the tank,’ he said. ‘We take the turtles out and put them in the filters and they stay there for a week maybe while the maintaining gets done. So they’re not on view and maybe for the whole week the Society wouldn’t even know they’re gone.’

‘But if you help me do it there’s really no way of hiding your part in it, is there?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I guess there isn’t.’

‘Would they bring charges against you?’ I said. ‘Would you get sacked?’

‘They wouldn’t bring charges,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think I’d be sacked either. I’m Head Keeper and I’ve been here twenty-seven years, that counts for something. They’d take it up at a Council meeting and consider my reasons but they’d be batting on a sticky wicket actually. The RSPCA’s always interested in anything that might be considered cruelty to animals and if I said that keeping the turtles here was cruel the Zoological Society mightn’t want to push it too far.’

What about me? I wondered. Would I be had up for it? Not unless George Fairbairn grassed on me, and he wasn’t the sort to do that. ‘Are you willing to do it?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s one of those things that’s pretty well got to be done. I’ll let you know a couple of days in advance when we’re going to clean the tank. It won’t be for a month or two yet. Where’re you thinking of launching them?’

‘Brighton?’ I said. Brighton was close, and I was beginning to want it over and done with as quickly as possible.

‘Brighton’s as good as any place I suppose. Although they might have a better chance starting out farther west.’

‘Where’d they come from?’ I said.

‘Madeira.’

Madeira. The name sounded like boats and sunlight. I gave him my telephone numbers at the shop and at home. We shook hands and I left without looking at the turtles. They’d become an obligation now, and heavy.

On my way to the South Gate I saw the woman who’d been in the shop asking about turtle books. She was coming towards me, heading for the Aquarium I had no doubt. Damn you, I thought, surprised at the violence of my feelings. Damn her for what? I might as well damn myself as well, for not being young, for being middle-aged and nowhere and unhappy, for having turtle fantasies instead of living life. She had turtle business in mind, I was certain of it. And I knew she was going to ask me some kind of direct question and I was going to answer it and then we’d both be in it, it wouldn’t be just mine any more. It was the sort of situation that would be ever so charming and warmly human in a film with Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith but that sort of film is only charming because they leave out so many details, and real life is all the details they leave out.

She was looking at me and I couldn’t look away or pretend not to recognize her. Damn her, damn her I thought. We both stopped and I could see her turning the whole thing over in her mind. She has the kind of face that doesn’t hide anything, you can read it right off. Vulnerable, I suppose. Why hasn’t she learned not to be vulnerable, she’s old enough. She was certainly going to speak, was bound to speak, couldn’t help but speak but it was difficult for her, she felt shy. Suddenly I felt sorry for her. Maybe she’d been thinking about the turtles
longer than I had, maybe I and not she was the one who was intruding. All right, I thought, I’m sorry. Go ahead, speak.

‘Hello,’ she said, and went on past me.

‘Hello,’ I said.

Why didn’t she speak?

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade,
And strictly meditate the thankles Muse,
Were it not better don as other use
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?

Fathers are prone to name first daughters elaborately. I don’t mind so much being named after a nymph but I really don’t care to be associated with the pastoral tradition. An idyll based on illusion has no charm for me, but then of course idylls are almost by definition illusion. Even the lovely music of
Acis and Galataea
does not incline me favourably towards nymphs and swains. I think a shepherd ought to tend sheep and a poet ought to write poems. If I owned sheep I don’t think I’d send them out with a poetic shepherd. Although if one forgets the shepherds of Theocritus and thinks of David herding sheep while armed with a sling that’s quite different. David, yes indeed. A poet-shepherd with a strong right arm. I wonder why I never thought of him in that light before.

My hair is often tangled and no one withes it now. There are fashions in emotion as in other things. If I were twenty now and my fiance died in a car crash I think I should soon find another man. My generation was somewhat in between things, neither free nor much supported by whatever held us in. More of us were capable of being brought to a halt by something of that
sort than young people now would be. Our songs were different, our dances and our choices. Rubbish. Even in the privacy of my own mind I can’t be entirely honest with myself.

The man from the bookshop, when I saw him at the Zoo I thought he was going to say something to me. I had the feeling that he was coming from the Aquarium, that he had turtles on his mind. All he said was ‘Hello,’ and we went our separate ways. It’s curious how the mind works. I see the world through turtle-coloured glasses now. Because of the turtles I expect a stranger to speak significantly, am prepared for signs and wonders, my terrors freshen, I feel a gathering-up in me as if I’m going to die soon, I await a Day of Judgement. Whose judgement? Mine, less merciful than God’s. It is not always a comfort to find a like-minded person, another fraction of being who shares one’s incompleteness. The bookshop man has many thoughts and feelings that I have, I sense that.

I went into the Aquarium but I didn’t see George Fairbairn and I was glad not to have the chance to talk further about the turtles. The Aquarium was intensely dark after the violent sunlight outside, I could scarcely see the benches down the middle of it. Young couples were black against the green-lit windows of the tanks. I sat on the bench nearest the turtles but I didn’t look directly at them. At one particular moment that part of the Aquarium was empty except for the turtles and the fish and me. Then a young man and a girl came out of the darkness and stood in front of the turtles. He murmured something that I couldn’t quite make out, and she said in a voice that was like a clear mirror, ‘No, it’s too late, it’s too late.’

I was surprised at the effect of her words on me. I didn’t burst into tears. I didn’t know what she was referring to – it might have been love or theatre tickets but it struck me at once that her observation was probably accurate. Very likely it
was
too late for whatever they were talking about. She sounded the sort of girl who sees things clearly, and young as she was there was something for which it was too late.

Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. It’s a relation of self to the moment. Too-lateness is potentially every
moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it’s no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it’s time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now. Headlights staring out on sleeping streets. Sea-smelling turtles and the smell of wet hessian from the sacking. The tide in or out drawn by a moon seen or unseen.

The man from the bookshop, would he be willing to drive the van? I think he’s perhaps already thought of it, without me of course. Possibly it isn’t something he’d like to share with anyone, I might be intruding. But the turtles are after all public, so to speak. Perhaps they no longer want the ocean and I’m wrong to impose my feelings on them. But I believe they do want the ocean, that must be in them. No, it’s not always a comfort to find a like-minded person. If the bookshop man and I both have designs on the turtles we have got to muddle through it as decently as possible but there’s little to be said between us beyond that. We’ve too much in common for us to be comfortable in each other’s presence for very long.