The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  As she lifted it out, she was aware of her pounding heart. She shuffled out from under the desk, stood up and placed it on the table. She felt eighteen again and about to open the manila envelope that contained her A-level results. She opened it about a third of the way through, looked; then turned to halfway, looked; turned to about three-quarters in then shut it and sat down. For five minutes she tried to understand what she had just seen. Shock fought bewilderment, anger and disgust.

  Then she examined the album page by page. The series of pictures, all cut out of magazines, began with women in their mid-thirties but the majority were in their mid-forties. The oldest was sixty-three, though she looked younger, or rather her body did. All the women were naked, many graphically so, and all the pictures had originally been taken on Polaroid, presumably by husbands or boyfriends. These were not the airbrushed models of the pin-up magazines or Page Three but ordinary women: wives, girlfriends, few of them beautiful, some strikingly unattractive. Many of the photographs were modest enough, smiling women without their bikini tops, sharing a joke with their husbands; others, often of the same women, were of legs held wide apart, fingers opening themselves to the camera, faces abandoned to something overpowering – bold, shameless. There were hundreds of them, row upon row of the pretty and the plain, the riotously buxom and the painfully thin, large thighs and tiny breasts, or uniformly plump without a sign that they were anything but absolute in their desirability. Some had a printed caption giving their name, presumably false, their age and their greatest sexual desire: sex outdoors with other women, groups of men. Whether they were true or the women had invented them to make themselves more desirable hardly seemed to matter. There were no simpers, no carefully contrived pouts, just a mixture of friendly smiles – as if, above the neck, they were on holiday or posing at a Sunday barbecue – and frank, unambiguous invitations to gawp at breast and cunt, belly and thighs. After ten minutes she hid it at the back of one of the larger drawers of the desk and went downstairs.

  For the rest of the day she felt wounded, not only as if she had found him in bed with another woman but also as if, on noticing her, he had kept on having sex. And what offended, insulted, bewildered her most was their ordinariness. The pouting tarts of Penthouse with their unattainable mien and artificially flawless bodies would have been a shock, but somehow the fact that they were from another world, an unreal one, of hours of make-up and careful light, would have allowed her an escape. No one could be like them, not even the beauties in the photographs themselves. But everyone could be like those women in the album, even, or especially, Jane herself. She understood that he, like every man, looked at and desired the occasional beauty in the street, but these pictures revealed an endless riot of desire for middle-aged women, the fat, the thin, the everyday, the pretty, the plain, the badly dressed. These women, too, were part of it – and she was not. She was outside whatever deal it was that they had struck. And such a contradictory deal, so intense sometimes, the gaze captured by husbands or boyfriends in their instant cameras, but sometimes like a wedding photo, a snapshot where the woman had simply forgotten to put on her dress or underwear and didn’t seem to mind one way or the other.

  She had been coldly distant when Geoff had returned at about seven that night. He asked her what was the matter and she had said that there was nothing. He realised that this was not true because he was a solicitous husband, and he asked her again. Again she denied there was a problem and he did not pursue it. But he knew she was upset, and seriously. He waited till their two children had gone to bed, then tackled her a third time. She left the room while he waited with a growing sense of dread, seeing that she was more quietly angry than he had ever seen her, and when she returned carrying the album he went white.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said.

  He did not reply. He could not. She asked him again, but he seemed to have become a different person, utterly shattered by her discovery, as if the kind, thoughtful, loving, occasionally bad-tempered man she had known for sixteen years had broken into pieces. To her astonishment and fury he continued not to answer her increasingly angry demand for an explanation. He was deprived of speech.

  ‘I want you to tell me what this is!’ She was almost shouting now.

  But he could not bear it. Suddenly he left the room. She heard the door close, and he was gone.

  He did not return until two in the morning, and stayed downstairs. She fell asleep, weeping. When she woke up, feeling as if something in her had died, he had already left. What had died was respect. Betrayal she would have been able to deal with given time, but this made him squalid – he had diminished and shrunk. It was the anger of distaste and disdain, and it was poison to the great love she had for him. She had always admired him, had seen him as a worthy person. He had worth and he had weight. He was solid, a rock. She loved him because she had the deepest respect for him, and because he showed her the same respect she felt as if she had the same weight and worth. He might have been hard to live with at times, but in the last few years she had loved him more deeply than she had ever imagined possible. She felt something had grown around her and through her and that a powerful and abiding love would always sustain her. And this feeling was all the greater because as a young woman she had always considered the notion of a great and abiding love something she would try never to long for. Her parents had been sour and drab and miserable with each other, and while she’d had higher expectations for herself, they had not been that high – just something better than she had witnessed. And then after ten years of good marriage she gradually realised that she had found her great love. She loved him intensely and passionately. And he knew it.

  They tried to talk again the next day but it was even worse. He kept trying to explain himself but the words would not come. Words failed him. He radiated humiliation: he had been exposed and he knew it. Someone who loved him had seen him at his most squalid, and neither of them could bear it. Within three days he had moved out.

  In the following week her sense of dispossession intensified. Her desirability had been stolen from her. And she could not see why. The unfairness of her exclusion left her crying bitter tears of disappointment. Sex was something she enjoyed; she was not a prude.

  She found herself fighting the grief that threatened to numb her like one of the homeless struggling to maintain the appearance of being part of the normal world. She’d seen a programme once about American women married to rich men and who’d proved unsatisfactory in some way and had been replaced by younger or more pliant versions of themselves. Once privileged and powerful by proxy, they haunted the stores along Rodeo Drive, still thin and elegantly dressed, but as the sun went down they returned to spend their nights in cars packed with the leftovers of a vanished life.

  For a month she existed as if a sixteenth of an inch separated her from the real world. She functioned perfectly and even began pursuing old interests, but not because she wanted to re-awaken something. Like keeping clean for people without a proper place to wash, it was necessary to perform these everyday tasks in order to prevent an irreversible decline.

  A friend had once described her as well read, and she took to filling every spare moment with reading. The children had stood by, uncomprehending, as their lives collapsed around them. She felt guilty but she could not explain it to them, although they asked. It was inadequate: they had a right to know at least something, but she could not bear to say anything other than that they had a problem which it would take time to sort out. They guessed their father had been having an affair and were resentful when they met him at weekends. But as the weeks passed this faded to a resigned bewilderment, and neither parent would tell them what was going on. The only contact she had with Geoff was over the phone. If she had not been at her wits’ end about the implications of the fraud at TLC she would not have contacted him at all. The children’s future as well as her own was at stake. Their conversations, however, were fraught with worry, anger, resentment and loss. Her disappointm
ent in him was scalding. But strongest of all was a raging, restless incomprehension.

  Since she worked in Covent Garden, it was quite natural that she would head for Charing Cross Road and its collection of second-hand bookshops to fill her appetite for reading as an exclusionary drug. It was a hot day with the area full of tourists gawping at the Cambridge Theatre – still showing Les Misérables – and at the Marquee further up the road, headlining a band she’d never heard of. It was a disappointing trip, the shops full of books that had been remaindered for obvious reasons, but as she went back to work through Endell Street, log-jammed with the grumbling diesels of black cabs and the showy roar of dispatch riders on dirty super-bikes, she noticed a new bookshop on the other side of the road.

  She was pleasantly surprised to find that the books had been chosen rather than delivered. The shop had its share of coffee table detritus, but there were numerous copies of books by good, if usually unfashionable, writers.

  She browsed and within fifteen minutes had chosen two books: The True and Only Heaven and 1984. She had been looking for the latter for some time. Then she realised that having found it she did not feel pleasure at putting her hands on something for four pounds that she could easily have afforded at fifteen, but only a recognition that this was how, once, she would have felt. Jane was in the early stages of negotiating a contract with disappointment. In exchange for modest quarters, a living wage, a uniform consisting of a shapeless dress, thick tights and plain shoes, she would be caretaker to herself; prevent intruders, ensure the doors were locked, the roof impermeable to rain, the carpet curtained against the sun. The terms were ungenerous, the clauses eardrum tight; and if she had not noticed the odd way a succession of men held themselves as they went past her on their way down to the basement of the shop, she would have signed this contract and been buried above ground along with her resented husband.

  At first she had been conscious of them without taking them in. It was as much a question of their way of moving as their presence. Every two or three minutes someone would go down or come up. On the way down they moved with an unconvincing gait. There was something odd, something that didn’t match up. Now and again a man would enter, exhibit a fierce interest in one section for twenty seconds, then a sudden and equally fierce interest in something incommensurate with the previous topic. After about a minute they would make a beeline for the stairs leading to the basement. It was this extravagant behaviour that lured her towards the wide, winding staircase that led to the basement. She was filled with the sense that something strange was waiting at the bottom. Down she went, winding her way into subterranean London, and as she turned the final circular sweep she stopped. Still high on the stairs she could see the men in the room, for there were only men, packed around the walls but facing inward as if this were a class so full of naughty children that there were not enough corners to accommodate all the miscreants. There was so little room at the walls that some men were excluded and had to wait their turn. They stood looking aimless and awkward. Every man at the wall was holding a magazine and all were flicking through them, not casually like a waiting woman at a hairdresser’s, but intently, searchingly. Even from the stairs it was quite plain what was in them: uncountable vulvas signalled to her, rippling across the room like an erratically choreographed genital semaphore. A man supervising from a desk looked up at her from his book and went back to it without a trace of curiosity.

  She turned and left quickly, not realising until she got back to her office that she had left the shop without paying for the two books she was carrying. She stared at them blankly for a few seconds: she had just stolen two books. Then she began to laugh at the implausibility of trying to explain this away if she’d been caught, of the shaming condescension, or the inevitable distortion: DESERTED WOMAN ACCOUNTANT STEALS FROM PORN SHOP.

  She considered what this humiliation would have meant on top of everything. But the fact that she had got away with it left her with a feeling of exhilaration. Her first impulse had been to rush back and pay for them, but this passed quickly. She remembered something she’d read somewhere: if you wanted power over a rival, steal something that belonged to them – nothing significant, a pen, an ornament would do – just as long as they didn’t know you’d taken it.

  On her way home that night she realised that if she did not do something about the album she’d never be free of it, and something about the accidental theft of the two books made her feel as if she could face the prospect. The next day, a Saturday, she looked at it, closed, fat and heavy. Both children were out with their friends, and she decided to get rid of it. She put it in a plastic bag and took it down to the bottom of the garden where they kept the barbecue. It had a curiously altar-like appearance because it was made from white bricks taken from an old night-storage radiator. She built a fire out of the dry sticks by the side of the garden shed. The heat was ferocious, for the barbecue was unusually large and the sticks were dry. But she did not burn it. She stared into the flames until the fire went out. Then she returned to the house and put the album and its Polaroids back in its hiding place.

  Canterbury

  If we wish to understand how the last century arranged its dissolution, where should we look for the milestones? In the minds of many, the images of the twentieth century will be fields of French mud, a Panzer, a soldier eviscerated on a beach, emaciated corpses in a pit, a mushroom cloud. But the image should be that of middle-aged men in suits signing an agreement just before a pleasant lunch. Do not think Somme or Stalingrad, Normandy or Auschwitz; think Versailles, Wannsee, Bretton Woods, Yalta. All misery and all happiness have their roots in a conference of one kind or another.

  Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles

  George Winnicott and Michael McCarthy arrived at the Chaucer Hotel in Canterbury a good half-hour early for the presentation to be given by the beautiful and, considering the esoteric nature of her profession, celebrated Anne Levels of Machine Intelligence PLC. They went into the Pardoner’s Tale bar and ordered coffee. While they waited, Winnicott looked around the room at the Chaucer-related murals. All of them were ghastly but one excelled in the sheer brilliance of its awfulness: it was a huge drawing of a beefy-looking miller quaffing mead or ale – considerable artistic effort had gone into ensuring he would not be seen as merely drinking. He was winking conspiratorially at the viewer. The bar was filling up with men and women who, from their formal clothes, were clearly here for business rather than tourism. The PR woman from Machine Intelligence began her rounds, ticking off names on her clipboard and handing out identity tags. ‘I hate wearing those bloody things,’ said McCarthy. ‘They make me feel like a double-glazing salesman.’

  He looked at Winnicott who was clearly about to ask him a question, although there was an odd hesitancy in his manner. ‘When I was at the Bank of England . . . before I hit my head on that damned door, Charley Varadi said that you were a parachutist – a European champion, no less.’

  McCarthy laughed. ‘Not now. Fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Still. I’m impressed. You don’t do it any more, then?’

  ‘Oh, I still jump – but no competitions. I gave that up after I won the title.’

  ‘Why? If you don’t mind my asking.’

  ‘Not at all. I used to take it very seriously. And then I thought – why? This is supposed to be fun. And it wasn’t fun; it was serious. It was like work. That’s the way sport is now. It’s been turned into work. I mean, just go along to any gym. It should be like going to a sandpit for grown-ups. But it isn’t. Everybody’s a professional sportsman these days, even when they’re the ones doing the paying. It’s supposed to be play – only people don’t know how to play any more.’ He laughed. ‘Sorry . . . a bee in my bonnet. Anyway, I stopped. I just jump in the summer now and a couple of weeks in California at Christmas.’

  ‘Nevertheless, not many people can say they’re champions of Europe. Whatever you say, that’s quite something.’

  ‘You’re right –
too pious. I do like having won it, it’s true.’ McCarthy nodded at the newspaper Winnicott was holding. ‘Talking of play, I couldn’t help noticing on the train that you were doing the crossword. Are you a fan?’

  Winnicott laughed. ‘You’ll disapprove. It’s not just fun for me, I’m afraid. I think addict would be more accurate. I have a habit that stretches to three a day. A tame obsession by your standards.’

  ‘I like to do them myself,’ said McCarthy. ‘But I’m definitely only a fan. My brother sends me them sometimes from America. In fact the other day he sent me just a clue someone had told him about, supposed to be the hardest ever devised. Two weeks I’ve been trying to work it out – absolutely damn all. But perhaps you know it?’