The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  TUESDAY 5th JUNE

  . . . It’s clear enough why I see M now – she’s a break from having to worry about presenting myself or being interesting. I hardly need to speak. And though the lamentation seems endless and is boring, from time to time there’s a quality in her resisting the terrible fall – the good joke, the appetite for a sandwich, a flash of irritation or amusement at something I, or others, have said or done.

  He had tried once making a list of them, the few ordinaries that contrasted so much with her inability to take pleasure in anything, to feel anything strongly except misery:

  (1) To an always surly waiter at the Amalfi café: ‘Please could you bring me another coffee – this one’s cold.’

  (2) Her anger, real indignation rather than whining, at having to work on a day she had arranged with her boss to take off but which had become inconvenient for him.

  (3) A joke about a visit to the ballet where the ballerina repeatedly stuck out her leg at a right angle so that the male lead could turn her through three hundred and sixty degrees: ‘It looked like someone opening a tin of peas with an over-sized fairy.’

  (4) Her giving a pound to a blind beggar who, it turned out, she had seen the week before reading a bus timetable on Oxford Street.

  (5) The very occasional, and always unpredictable, use of the word ‘fuck’.

  (6) The immaculate shine on her shoes.

  He had thought over the incident with the beggar. It was precious in a way that was inconsistent with a personality pathologically lacking in pretension. He was convinced that her sense of worthlessness was genuine, untainted by a capacity for dramatising. But an affectation of this kind seemed to imply an inner world capable of self-regard. Affectation was a sign of life.

  There were other signs also: malice, desire, vanity. There wasn’t much, but what there was implied that something was going on, or had been going on, that she was harbouring a personality under the endless low of the emotionally exhausted, the weariness that colours everything from the food they eat to a walk in the sun. He had read somewhere that uncovering life in the prehistoric past was like trying to reconstruct a great book; but of this book there remained few pages, of these few pages few lines, of these few lines few words.

  Almost exactly a year after he had met her at the party, she had steered him, mildly against his will, into going for a cup of coffee outside the National Film Theatre after a chance meeting on Waterloo Bridge. The coffee was disgusting and the bridge that loured over the cinema acted as a tunnel to the cold wind hustling off the Thames, so he paid indifferent attention to her at first. But after about ten minutes, and despite his discomfort, he became aware of a new way of speaking.

  ‘. . . he’s so dreary.’

  An insult from her was almost shocking.

  ‘Sorry, you’ve lost me. Who’s dreary?’

  She laughed at herself for rambling. He could depend on her not accusing him of inattention.

  ‘Fowler, at the bookshop. If I have to hear one more time about how centred and at peace with himself he is! He’s not centred, he’s just dull . . . and smug. And all that drivel about his indifference to material things. He loves his little blue Fiesta with its stupid bead thing draped over the back of the seat – it looks like a dead armadillo. My aunt has a little blue Fiesta. If he’s a Buddhist, I’m a banana.’

  Looking at her more closely, he could see that the grey skin of the terminally sad had become instead merely pale, with the faintest flush of red colouring her cheekbones. He listened more carefully as she joked about her state – as she referred to it – and the idiocy of the tolerance she had given to the assortment of criminals who had induced it. She gave him smiles of open appreciation, and as she talked he realised that she held him responsible for her transformation. He was astonished, even shocked. How far she must have fallen to create such a friendship from nothing more than his lukewarm interest.

  On the other hand, he was deeply impressed by her resilience. There’s something to this woman. But he was alarmed that he had missed, with any exactness, what it was. You can’t afford this, he thought.

  She became fascinating because she had so astonished him. She was like a dead shrub that, on a closer look, had innumerable buds, small as seeds, emerging from the bark. Over the next two weeks, she accepted his increasing presence in the same spirit with which she had accepted his occasional interest and, indeed, seemed not quite to have grasped the fundamental nature of the shift in his attitude towards her. He assumed this was her innate passivity at work; she was prepared to take whatever you gave her and be grateful. The entry for 12th August, which he had underlined to mark its significance, showed that this was not so.

  . . . as the waiter arrived I was distracted and on turning back saw that she was reaching into her bag to pay.

  ‘You paid last time,’ I said, perhaps too quickly [Be careful of this – 14/6/94].

  ‘You’re very . . . fair,’ she said, smiling. It was only a slight smile but it was the first sign of warmth I had ever seen on her face.

  Whenever they went for coffee together he always remembered who had paid last and, in a good-humoured way, insisted on taking turns. This idiosyncrasy of his – in a minor fashion he was rather mean with money – had significance for her in a way that seemed to touch her profoundly. Why it did so was perplexing. That the peripheral bits and pieces of yourself could resonate for others like this was alarming, more evidence of how particular and arbitrary people’s inner lives were. Simple stuff like this, misunderstood, had opened a door that allowed her the possibility of escape. Months later, however, and frighteningly, what had seemed to be mysterious and eccentric turned out to be both straightforward and understandable. For all that she lived the life of a poor student, she was quite wealthy because of an inheritance from her grand-mother. For years she had been too artless to hide this and she was used to being with people whose expressions of friendship or intimacy had been motivated solely by their sense that she was an easy touch. He was the first person, perhaps in all her life, to talk to her for any length of time without trying to get anything out of her.

  Until he realised the centrality of her obsession with giving and taking, their new relationship proved difficult. Sometimes she seemed positive, happy even, but there were frequent periods when Maria seemed lost, unable to engage with him. This was nerve-racking for him and he made mistakes, chief among them being to lavish attention on her. The less happy she seemed, the more attentive he became. It made her worse and he felt her slipping away from him. In time he realised she was not ready for such attentiveness, and was not looking for a lover, hence his early failure. First things first, thought Steven, as he decided it was possible in matters of the heart to be a kind of absentee landlord, that ownership could have a special status by virtue of its lack of evidence. He would be conspicuous by his absence. He would allow her to avoid a sense of obligation, and it would be like giving her a bunch of flowers or taking her on a weekend visit to the coast.

  Slowly, measuring in minutes, he began to increase the amount of time he spent with her. He decided to balance everything he did for her with something she could do for him, and he began to record these minutes and these exchanges by writing them down in the green-bound ledgers. He felt awkward about the approach at first: he feared its woodenness might communicate itself in some way. He had started the ledgers, in effect, as diaries, and they were meant to try to fix the swirl of impressions of his daily life in much the same way. They were helpful but not especially. Re-reading them was always a disappointment. Too often they seemed to have missed the very intangibles he was trying to nail down. For a few weeks he tried counting specifics, giving numbers, adding and subtracting. He became fascinated by the detail with which it was possible to audit something so apparently complex. He discovered that before he started the audit he had been afraid he was doing too much for her and in so doing weighing her down with obligation; he was, in fact, only doing two things for her for every
three she did for him. A few simple categories covered the complete range of a relationship. In the end he narrowed it down to five: objects, touching, support, emotion and absence.

  Lying back on the bed, acknowledging that he would not now leave the flat for the long postponed walk, he turned the ledger upside down. He thumbed through the figures collated month by month at the back that detailed everything from the number of times he touched her in a week to the minor presents exchanged.

  To have refined, or complicated, the categories further would have been easy, but they worked in a practical way only by being simple: phone calls, which he detailed separately, could consist of support or emotion, and they could even be classed as a form of touching or absence. But he was not interested in abstractions, in anything for its own sake. For all their rule-of-thumb crudeness, the categories seemed endlessly capable of producing the unexpected. He tried, for example, to rectify the two for three imbalance that emerged after a few weeks of keeping the ledger, but although his records indicated that obligations were now more or less equal, Maria became depressed and apathetic. He returned slowly to the two for three imbalance and her mood lightened. Equally slowly he started to do less for her and she became nervous and hypersensitive. What surprised him was the ratio of obligation. It could be varied over a short period of time. Over one or two days, say, there could be a drop or an increase; but the ratio had to be restored so that over a two-week period he averaged two acts of generosity for every three of hers. Puzzling at first, the nature of the imbalance later appeared obvious. Although his records clearly showed that she gave more to their relationship than he did, her perception was that the contribution was equal. Restored to a true equilibrium she felt obligated to him, and it was this that made her depressed.

  Six months after they had drunk that cup of coffee together under Waterloo Bridge she was in many ways a different woman. For one thing her looks had changed. She had put on a stone, and had needed to; underweight, her bones had shown through on her chest, but now there was a bloom on her. She held herself differently, the victimised stoop of the shoulders having gone with the hesitant look and the worn skin.

  One day they had gone shopping to buy him a new suit. She had tired of waiting for him to make up his mind and had demanded a turn of her own when they had passed a Dominguez shop with an ostentatiously discreet sale sign in the window. The dress she tried on was low-cut and he had teased her: ‘It’s too young for you.’

  ‘Don’t be horrible,’ she replied, admiring her reflection in the mirror, turning sideways and smoothing the expensive fabric along her thighs. ‘I’ve never had a cleavage before.’ She laughed, then looked at herself again. ‘I was like a boy until I was seventeen, straight down all the way. I can’t tell you how desperate I was to have a bust. I actually used to cry about it at night.’

  ‘I’m sure you looked fine,’ he said gently.

  ‘No.’ She looked at him steadily. ‘No, I didn’t.’ She turned back to her reflection with an extraordinary seriousness. He had encouraged her to cut her hair short and the new style emphasised the high cheekbones and grey eyes, diminished the large, flat nose. It worked now to her advantage: without the curtain of lank, straight hair, her face now had a surprising strength. ‘Not bad, though I do say so myself,’ she said, looking at herself with open admiration. He smiled his agreement. She walked over to the changing room, taking a red silk top from a sparsely filled rack. As he waited, he wandered closer to the curtain that acted as a door to the changing room. It was only partly drawn and he could detect movement behind it. He took on the shifty pose that waiting husbands or lovers always adopt in this situation, exaggeratedly calling attention to the fact that they are not gawking. She called out to him. ‘It’s too small. Get me get a bigger size, a twelve, would you?’ He fetched it and returned. Instead of reaching a hand around the curtain as he had expected, she pulled it back completely. She had taken off the blouse and stood in front of him in her bra. It was white, contrasting strikingly with her now lightly tanned skin, and slightly too small, giving an alluring sense of both the soft and the tensely confined. The top of her breast shifted delicately as she reached out. The cup was of a transparent lace that seemed only to accentuate the pink of her nipples. He realised he was in immense danger. Fear and horror rescued him: he looked at her fiercely and threw the blouse at her. Her mouth opened in alarm and astonishment. He turned and walked out of the shop, her cry following him.

  Just out of sight he stopped and considered whether or not to allow her to catch up with him. He decided a reconciliation would be a bad mistake and he had made enough of those. He turned into the nearest side street and then again until there was no possibility of her following, although he was sure she would try to do so. After about twenty minutes he found himself in Silver Street. He walked round the corner to the Owl Café and drank tea with a couple of depressed-looking men in their late fifties and a haggard-looking tart wearing a Crimplene mini. With its Formica tables, cracked cups and tired clientele, it was authentically awful in its Englishness. This England will never go away, he thought, no matter what happens. No designer, no architect, no politician, no amount of money, no European ideal could change it: the true ghastliness of the English would endure always, Gibraltarian in its permanence. He started to drink the grey tea in front of him. He felt sick the way you do after you’ve been hit very hard. He was appalled at his carelessness. For a long time he had neglected everyone but her. If the relationship failed him he would have no one. He had worked so carefully to restore Maria, but he had missed what had been happening while he did so, and it had struck him only when she pulled back the curtain of the changing room. There had been nothing calculated about her exhibitionism. In fact it had not been exhibitionism at all. He was not her lover and yet she had regarded it as safe to reveal herself in this way.

  He had supported her too well and for too long. He had become a friend.

  Men and Women at Work

  the best picture of the world economy is the female body. When I say that the future will be female – and I will say it often – I do not mean that from now on women will be in charge of more things than men, I mean that the future itself is changing sex. I am not joking when I say that this is why the future will be more difficult to understand.

  Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles

  At twelve o’clock, precisely, as the dying twelfth stroke of Big Ben faded to signal the end of one millennium and the beginning of another, the former head of the Anti-Terrorist Squad awoke screaming at the top of his voice, ‘I know the meaning of life! I understand the origin of good and evil!’

  ‘What? My God!’ cried his terrified wife, as she was woken from a deep and dreamless sleep.

  ‘Oh,’ gasped George Winnicott, as he recovered himself. ‘Oh, God, it must have been a dream.’

  ‘You nearly scared me to death.’

  Winnicott sat up, put his head in his hands and groaned.

  ‘You were shouting,’ said his wife, Alice.

  The thin middle-aged man took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry for waking you,’ he said flatly. ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You didn’t say it,’ she replied coldly, ‘you screamed it.’

  He turned his head to one side, a signal that he wanted an answer but would not respond to her tone. The pause continued as her resentment mingled with what she would not acknowledge as alarm. Alice had not heard what he had said but as she woke, in her deep confusion, she had thought the screaming was coming from outside. And that it had been the sound of a terrified woman.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘I was deeply asleep.’

  He stood up.

  ‘My back’s hurting. I’m going to get a couple of Distalgesics.’ He looked at the clock and then at his wife. ‘Happy New Year,’ he said, as he left the bedroom.

  Downstairs he took the pills, put the kettle on and sat down, staring out into the dark night which every few seconds was lit up by the firework di
splay on the Thames, bursts of light so vast they could be easily seen even from their house in Harrow. Soundless from this distance, it was like big lightning without rain or the start of a terrible but distant offensive.

  He had been married to Alice for fifteen years. There had been no particular point at which things had begun to go wrong, no adultery, no thump, no poisonous word which once spoken could not be taken back, no coldly rebuffed sexual request. It had been a slow freeze, a chilly drying out that only a time-lapse camera sensitive to hidden disappointment might have tracked; the missing kind word at the necessary time, the absent gift or the presence of the wrong one, the pursed lip of unspoken disapproval, the imperceptible shrinking when one of them reached out to make it up. But making up was something they did not know how to do. They hardened their hearts so that it would not hurt so much. They were as sensitive as teenage girls. A few hours later as George Winnicott moped over his tea and waited for the sun to rise, eight miles away in the City of London a couple in their late twenties were making their way to their car after a party. Half an hour earlier and they would have met many of the vast crowd, which had gathered by the river to see the fireworks, still miserably trying to get out of a central London whose masters had failed to predict that the three million who had come to bear witness to the new century might want to go home once they had done so. But now it was deserted. The toss of a coin had decided that the woman would drive and consequently she was entirely sober. Her husband was not.

  ‘You want me to appreciate you and help more around the house.’