“What?”
“An equation.” He started to tell her but she stopped him.
He laid the squares of turf over the soil and stamped them down. “Quite weird,” he said. “The whole thing.”
That evening, after their meal, instead of reading, John sat at the table and worked, steadily covering the pages of her sketchbook with the complex hieroglyphics of mathematical formulae. The next day he had no detective story to recount to her but he was so elated at what he had achieved the night before that he went swimming in the sea, naked, for all of ninety seconds. She folded him in a towel and then in the picnic blanket, laughing at the image he had presented emerging from the waves, white with shock and cold, and his crabbed, crouched stumble up the beach to rejoin her.
“Freezing…” his voice blurted hoarsely, his body vibrating like a machine. “Fucking freezing!” Then he laughed, an exuberant bellow, like a blare on a trombone. Hope had never heard him laugh like that before. It was odd to hear the brazen, clear voice of exhilaration.
The following day, as they were about to set off, she came out of the front door and found him tying the spade to the crossbar of his bicycle.
“OK,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“It’s an experiment,” he said, smiling. “I want to see if it’ll work again.”
So Hope sat and sketched while John dug a hole. He made it six feet square and, working methodically, pausing for a rest from time to time, he had it five feet deep within two hours. He stopped for lunch.
“How’s it going?” Hope said.
“Nothing yet.” He looked vaguely troubled.
“You can’t just arrange to have a flash of insight, you know,” Hope said, reasonably. “I’m sure Archimedes didn’t start bathing several times a day, you know, after the eureka business.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Probably…but it was definitely something to do with the digging itself. The effort. The logic of digging. Shifting volumes…seemed to clear something in my mind.” He reached for a sandwich. “I’ll have one more shot at it after lunch.”
He started again. Hope watched him enlarge the hole, cutting turf, stacking it neatly, and then sinking the spade into the dark soil, working the blade, loading it and flinging the earth onto its moist pile. There was something satisfying about the work, even she could see that: simple but effortful, and with instant and visible results. The hole grew deeper. Hope went for a walk.
When she came back he was sitting down making more notes in her sketchbook.
“Eureka?” she asked.
“Semi-eureka.” He grinned. “Something totally unexpected. Three leaps ahead of where I was, if you see what I mean. In fact I can’t quite see where it’ll join up yet, but…” He looked suddenly solemn. “It’s an amazing idea.”
She sat and watched him fill the hole in.
“But this is the boring part,” she said.
“No, no. I’m doing this with gratitude. The hole has worked for me, so I gladly return it to its nonhole state.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Up yours.” He was happy.
The new idea he had received appeared to satisfy him. He stopped working and started reading detective novels again, and for some days their old routine reestablished itself. But on their penultimate day on the island, ignoring her protests, he brought the spade with him again.
“Don’t you feel a bit of a fool?” she mocked him.
“Why should I?” he said, with some belligerence. “What do you know? These ideas I’ve had this holiday…I haven’t thought like that in years.” He looked at her with some pity. “I don’t give a toss about your sensibilities.”
“Don’t worry about me. Dig away.”
He did. He dug without stopping for three hours, this time cutting out a long, thigh-deep trench. She forced him to stop and rest for a while but he soon resumed. There was a “glimmering” he said. At dusk he gave up, exhausted. We’ll come back and fill it in tomorrow, she told him, pulling him away.
They cycled home slowly, freewheeling down the gentle slope into the village. The first yellow lights shone in the windows, the clouds over the mainland were pink and plum, the sea was silver plate.
John seemed unduly disconsolate. She tried to cheer him up.
“Let’s eat in the hotel tonight,” she said. “Get pissed.”
He agreed readily enough. Then he said: “I was so close today. I know it. There was something key, something crucial. But I just couldn’t get to it.” He made a grabbing movement with both his hands. “Just out of my reach.”
As Hope leaned her bike against the wall, the thought came to her, unbidden, unwelcome, that perhaps her husband was going insane.
CABBAGES ARE NOT SPHERES
Memory from Scotland. John Clearwater in the tiny kitchen preparing a salad of winter vegetables. He has a whole red cabbage in his hand that he is about to chop. Hope sees him staring at it. He holds it up to the light and then turns his bead in her direction. He tosses the cabbage to her, which she catches. It is cool beneath her palms and surprisingly heavy. She chucks it back.
“Cabbages are not spheres,” be says.
“If you say so.” She smiles but she doesn’t really know how to respond. This is the kind of remark be makes from time to time, cryptic, askew.
“Well, sort of spherical,” she says tentatively.
He cuts the cabbage in half and shows her the crisp violet and white striations, whorled like a giant fingerprint. The point of his knife traces the wobbling parabola of a leaf edge.
“These are not semicircles.”
Hope sees what be is aiming at. “A fir tree,” she ventures, “is not a cone.”
John chops up the cabbage swiftly and efficiently, like a chef, smiling to himself.
“Rivers do not flow in straight lines,” be says.
“Mountains are not triangles.”
“A tree…a tree does not branch exponentially.”
“I give up,” she says. “I don’t like this game.”
Later, after their meal, he returns to the subject and asks her bow she would set about measuring, precisely, the circumference of a cabbage. With a tape measure, Hope says.
“Every little bump and weal? Every bit of leaf-buckle?”
“Christ…take lots of measurements, get an average.”
“No precision, though. It’s not going to work.”
He leaves the table and starts to jot ideas down in a notebook.
Hope now knows that this set him off down another path. He became preoccupied with the conviction that the abstract precision of geometry and measurement really had nothing to do with the imprecise and changing dimensions of living things, could not cope accurately with the intrinsic ruggedness of the natural world. The natural world is full of irregularity and random alteration, but in the antiseptic, dust-free, shadowless, brightly lit, abstract realm of the mathematicians they like their cabbages spherical, please. No bumps, no folds, no dents or dings. No surprises.
When I turned off the main road onto the laterite track that led to Sangui I had a distinct and unusual sensation of pleasure. Analyzing the feeling further, I realized that I was actually looking forward to getting back to work. The two days in the town, and the time spent with Usman, had been restorative. I had needed them and now I was refreshed. Life was all a matter of contrasts, Professor Hobbes used to reiterate. You can’t enjoy anything without a contrast to it. I smiled to myself as I thought about him. “The tide is either coming in or it’s going out,” was another of his saws, applied infuriatingly to any complaint or moan. Funnily enough, it always seemed to work. I had gone to his office once to remonstrate about faulty equipment or some other injustice. He had looked squarely at me, patted my arm, and had said: “Hope, my dear, the tide is either coming in or going out.” I had gone away, pacified, consoled and somehow wiser too, I had felt.
My reflections on the wisdom of Hobbes almost caused me to miss seeing Alda as I drove
through Sangui. I caught a glimpse of him waving from the doorway of a hut but by then I was virtually out of the village. I couldn’t be bothered to stop, so I tooted the horn and bumped on up the track to Grosso Arvore. I wasn’t sure either if it had been a wave of welcome or a request to halt. In any event, I reasoned, if he wanted to talk to me he knew where I would be.
As I parked the Land-Rover in the garage I gave three loud blasts on the horn to alert the kitchen staff. Martim and Vemba were already unloading the provisions as I climbed out of the cab. I stretched and yawned, and, as I did so, I saw Mallabar hurry across the road from his bungalow. I looked at my watch—just after four. We had made good time. But I was surprised to see him at home at this time of day, and as he strode toward me I could see he was upset about something. I put on a smile.
“What’s up, Eugene?” I asked.
“Hope…” He stopped in front of me. “Ghastly accident. I’m so sorry. I just can’t think.”
He was uncharacteristically agitated. As one does at these moments I instinctively prepared myself for the worst possible news. My father or my mother. My sister…
“What is it?”
“A fire. There’s been a fire. Your tent…I can’t think how it happened.”
Mallabar related the events to me as we strode up Main Street toward my tent. My huge relief was now being replaced by more mundane concerns. It had happened the night I left, he told me. Toshiro had seen the flames. It seemed that Liceu, the boy who cleaned for me, had carelessly dropped a cigarette stub.
“But Liceu doesn’t smoke,” I said.
“Oh yes, I think so.”
We paused beneath the big tree. Through the hibiscus bushes at the curve of the road I could just make out the front of my tent. It looked undamaged.
“Just a small fire?” I said, hopefully.
“Not that small.”
We moved on. “Where is Liceu?”
“I sacked him. Immediately.”
My tent was in fact half destroyed, the back half. The front looked fine but the back consisted only of a charred supporting pole and a few shreds of burnt canvas. The tin roof was buckled and blistered. To one side stood a sorry pile of my damaged possessions. The bed—ruined; my clothes trunk—carbonized.
“My clothes.” I felt a sudden lassitude descend on me.
“I’m so dreadfully sorry, Hope.”
I ran my fingers down both sides of my face.
“We got a few bits and pieces out,” Mallabar said. “And I think you had some clothes being washed.”
We walked inside. My desk was badly scorched but still standing. After some tugging I managed to open the drawer. Black soaked lumps. Cinders. My letters, some books. All my field notes and journal.
I walked around my ruined home. I had lived here for almost a year.
Mallabar’s concern was palpable; he was practically wringing his hands. “We’ll get it fixed up. Back to normal. Soon as possible.”
“All my field notes have gone. And the journal.”
He winced with sympathy. “Damn. God. I knew it—I saw the desk. Didn’t dare to look.” He gave a sad laugh. “I was praying you’d taken them with you.”
“Worse luck.”
I moved into the census building. It was a long, thin, prefab hut—army surplus, I guessed—that at one time had housed eight census workers in the good old days. I set up my makeshift quarters at one end. A new bed was provided and a folding canvas chair. That, and my few clothes returned from the laundry, made up my reduced stock of personal possessions. In some respects my new home was better than my old one—I had wooden boards under my feet for a start—but it did not raise my morale. I felt incredibly temporary, all of a sudden, like someone passing through who had to be put up for a night.
My colleagues were upset for me and full of commiserations that evening in the canteen. Mallabar promised again that my tent would be repaired as soon as possible and Ginga donated a desk and a bright green rug to give me something to work on and to cheer up the hut a little. They were kind, but in the end the misfortune was mine and only a mishap to them. Even the destruction of my field notes was of minor significance. My job at Grosso Arvore was no more than a watching brief; the main body of work at the project would be unaffected by the loss of my data.
I asked Toshiro, who had raised the alarm, what exactly the sequence of events had been. He told me he had been working alone in the lab, had gone to the back door for a breath of fresh air and had seen the smoke. He ran over but by then the back of my tent was well ablaze. He had shouted for help and had snatched a few bits and pieces (my washstand and enamel basin—where were they?) from the front before the heat drove him off. Others arrived, and buckets of water ferried from Hauser’s shower stall had eventually doused the flames.
“Lucky we had Anton’s shower there,” he said. “Otherwise everything would have gone.”
“Where was Hauser?”
Toshiro frowned. “I don’t know. No, actually, I think he had gone to the feeding area.”
I swear to you it was only then that I first thought that the fire might have been deliberately started. You may think me unduly naive, but Mallabar’s anxiety and the patent sincerity of his sympathy had me convinced.
“Was Eugene anywhere near?”
“Well, yes. After me he was the first one there. In fact he thought of using water from the shower.”
Hauser absent from his lab and Mallabar close at hand. A fire started by an allegedly careless smoker who was now sacked and not present, or able, to defend himself. No serious damage caused, and minor inconvenience to the victim. But a year’s data gone up in smoke. I thought further: in theory I should not even have been away—I had accepted advancement up the provisioning rota as a “favor” to Mallabar.
I was clearing my tray when Hauser came in. He marched straight over to me and put his hands on my shoulders. For one horrible moment I thought he was going to hug me, but an inadvertent and automatic stiffening on my part must have informed against the wisdom of this course of action, and he contented himself with a sorrowful, intense look into my eyes.
“Ach, Hope,” he said. “It’s a bastard thing. Really a bastard.”
He was good, as good as Mallabar, but it didn’t matter: I was already plotting my revenge on them both.
He went on to inquire about my bits and pieces. Had I lost this? Could he replace it with that? I happily accepted the loan of his transistor radio.
The Vails had asked me round to their bungalow for a drink. I had been quick to accept; I was not particularly looking forward to my first night in the census hut.
We sat—Ian, Roberta and me—and drank some bourbon. Roberta had made great efforts with their two-room cottage. It was comfortable and homey, with cane chairs and bright overlapping rugs on the floor. The walls were painted light blue and were hung with pictures—local naïf oils—and photographs of previous research projects they had been involved in. Ian in Borneo with orangutans. Roberta graduating, clutching her rolled diploma in two tight fists. Ian and Roberta at the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma, where they had met and married.
That evening, Roberta was strangely relaxed and fussed over me in a rather maternal manner. She brought out a pack of her menthol cigarettes and smoked one, delicately. I could sense Ian’s resentment crackle round the room at this little act of domestic defiance. I puffed away at my pungent Tuskers and soon the air was hung with rocking blue strata of smoke. Roberta steadily became tight on the bourbon and started bitching warily about Ginga Mallabar, testing me out to discover whether I was friend or foe. My pointed neutrality encouraged her, and we were then regaled with a year or two’s worth of hoarded resentments and grudges. Ginga was manipulative. Ginga commandeered a huge proportion of Mallabar’s royalties. Ginga’s needless and inept meddling with agents and publishers had delayed publication of the book by over a year, and so on. I sat and listened, nodding and saying things like “My God” and “That’s a bit exces
sive” from time to time. Eventually, she stopped and rose slowly to her feet, announcing she had to visit the little girl’s room.
She paused at the door on her way out. “We should do this more often, Hope,” she said.
I concurred.
“I think it’s bad the way we all slink back to our homes in the evening. It’s so…so British. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said. “In fact, I agree.”
“Well, that’s one thing you can’t blame Ginga for,” Ian Vail said, with acid pedantry.
“And why not?”
“Because she’s Swiss.”
“Same difference.”
“For God’s sake!”
I could sense the row—which would inevitably take place after I had gone—was now boiling up dangerously, and so chipped in with some banal observation about how the very geometry of the campsite precluded easy social to-ing and fro-ing—instancing its linear development along Main Street and the almost suburban concern for domestic privacy evidenced in the placing of the various bungalows and huts, etc., etc. The bourbon made me articulate and authoritative.
“You know, Hope, I never thought of that,” Roberta said, frowning, and going off into the night to the latrine.
Ian opened the front door for a moment to let some smoke out. Two moths took the opportunity to flutter in.
“To my knowledge,” Ian said, in a thin voice, “she hasn’t smoked for three years. What’s got into her?”
I decided it wasn’t worth correcting him. Roberta’s little secret was safe with me.
“Leave her alone, Ian,” I said. “She was enjoying herself, that’s all. God, but she’s not too fond of Ginga, though, is she?”
He wasn’t listening. “She was relaxed, wasn’t she…?” He said, as if surprised. He looked at me and gave me an apologetic smile.
“I only say that,” he explained, “because she’s always been a little frightened of you.”
“Of me?”
“Oh, yes.” He gave an edgy laugh. “Aren’t we all.”