The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  Healey did not say anything, forcing Grlscz to continue.

  ‘If I see . . .’ He stopped awkwardly and corrected himself. ‘In the past when I saw a woman I found attractive sometimes I used to give her my card.’ He stopped.

  ‘And you waited for them to call?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything to them?’

  He winced as if experiencing a minor pain. Another awkward pause. ‘I used to tell them it was something I would never normally do.’

  Healey nodded. ‘OK, I can see that, but what about the private number?’

  ‘I didn’t use it for anything else.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that I would always know whoever was calling me – well, why they were calling.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Explain.’

  Grlscz looked down at the floor as if he truly felt the miserable nature of his self-exposure. ‘Sometimes, often, I would pick up the phone and there would be just silence. I suppose they felt ashamed for some reason . . . married, whatever.’ He looked Healey directly in the eye as if he was now ready just to face up squarely and honestly to what he was telling him. ‘The reason I never used it for anything else, why I never made any calls myself, was so that I could say . . .’ He looked away again.

  Throughout his twenty-year career Healey had seen many respectable people mortified by having to tell a complete stranger about something shameful they had done, but there was an acute quality about the man in front of him as if what he was feeling was not only shame at being caught out, but also had a precise awareness of why, and exactly why, it was shameful. ‘Whenever they were silent and I could tell they were going to ring off, all I had to do was say, “It’s you, isn’t it?” ’ He looked back at Healey again. ‘And, of course, it always was.’

  Healey thought about this and admitted that while he was disdainful of the nature of the insight he had just been offered, he was also impressed. It was like reading about a terrible laser-guided anti-personnel weapon in the Sunday papers against which there was no defence. ‘It’s strange,’ said Grlscz. ‘I was never exactly proud of it but saying it aloud it seems . . .’

  ‘Sinister?’ suggested Healey, mocking.

  Grlscz took the point that he was not going to be allowed off the hook. He acknowledged the rebuke. ‘Cheap, I was going to say.’

  ‘Perhaps we could agree on sinister and cheap,’ said Healey, unrelenting.

  ‘Fair enough. Would you believe me if I told you I stopped doing it after I met Maria?’

  ‘Are you going to tell me that?’

  Grlscz looked at him directly again. ‘Yes.’

  Healey looked down at the list of calls made to Grlscz during the eighteen months. He wondered how many lives it would be possible to destroy if he rang these numbers; he felt a surge of resentment against the devices that had made a record for ever of what might have been only a moment’s temptation. If he decided that Steven Grlscz had been involved in the disappearance of Maria Vaughan and was not the admirable saviour of a broken woman everyone said he was, then he would have to ring these people. Hidden lives would come out, no distinction being made between the treacherous user of a faithful husband and the woman momentarily tempted by the flattery of a handsome man who had acted on an impulsive longing to know her better. He had no stomach for this.

  ‘Fortunately for you, the number spies at British Telecom bear you out. No calls during the last six months.’

  Grlscz decided it was dangerous to play the penitent for too long. It was time to draw a line between the business of the phone calls and anything more serious. ‘It was just a shoddy pick-up routine. I haven’t done anything illegal, I’ve just confessed to behaving badly.’ He smiled. ‘Perhaps you’ve missed your vocation.’

  Healey smiled back but his expression was difficult to read.

  ‘I don’t think so, Mr Grlscz. A priest helps a sinner to tell the truth so that he can be saved; a policeman so that he can get him into trouble.’

  ‘And am I in trouble?’

  Healey said nothing, then picked up a passport which was lying on top of Maria Vaughan’s file.

  ‘I couldn’t help noticing in your personal possessions that you had your passport with you.’ He looked at Grlscz pleasantly. ‘Going somewhere?’

  ‘I was going to Barclays in Soho Square. I was opening a bank account. I’d forgotten I had it with me.’ He reached out to take it but Healey put it back on the file out of his reach.

  ‘I’d like to keep it if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I do mind.’

  ‘I’d like to keep it all the same.’ Healey’s expression communicated with unambiguous eloquence that it would be very much better for Grlscz if he cooperated in this matter.

  Grlscz sat back.

  Healey sat back also. ‘Tea?’

  Grlscz laughed. ‘Not good cop, bad cop?’

  ‘Not at all. Polite cop.’

  When Steven Grlscz got home, feeling as if he’d been worked over with a truncheon and a telephone directory, he checked his answering-machine. There was one message. He pressed play. ‘Hi, Steven, this is Alison . . . Alison Cross. Sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. I liked the proposal very much but I’m afraid the others were less easy to convince. We all have to agree about something like this so for the moment we’ll have to pass. Sorry.’

  George Winnicott, hypnotised, was lying on the recliner in Hendrix’s consulting rooms with his eyes closed, breathing deeply and evenly.

  ‘Why didn’t the same terrible collapse happen as it did to the . . .’ Hendrix checked his notes, ‘the people who originally discovered the Vanguard?’

  ‘We kept it secret. Very few people were allowed to come into contact with their records and anyone who did so had to agree to what was effectively permanent exile from their own communities. Once they went to the surface of the planet they had to agree that they would stay there – never leave.’

  ‘But they could pass on information, couldn’t they, and wasn’t that the problem?’

  ‘It would have been, if they’d been allowed to pass on what they discovered there. But they weren’t.’

  ‘So what was the point of doing this?’

  ‘They were there to find something that we knew was there from research the Illyrians had uncovered. The Vanguard had also been profoundly worried about their own decline. They’d been trying to find a solution.’

  ‘And they failed.’

  ‘Of course. But if we could find out more about that failure, then we could avoid the same mistake. Knowing where not to look would have been invaluable. Our survival was at stake. We had to take the risk. And, besides, who can resist the apple of knowledge?’ She laughed. ‘It isn’t human.’

  ‘I take it you found what you were looking for.’

  ‘Yes.’ She paused for a moment. ‘I’m not sure what you’d call it – a theory of extinction, perhaps. There’s a great history of things dying out in the universe . . . ninety-nine point nine per cent of all the creatures and plants that have ever lived are now extinct. The Vanguard believed they had uncovered a pattern that we had missed. To put it simply, our view had been that complex living systems, whether they were a species of plant or a civilisation, went into decline when something happened that put a great strain on the social and economic or biological order. Any system can adapt to a certain amount of change but if this change is too radical, the plant, the animal or the civilisation simply can’t cope and it collapses. It seemed obvious, common sense, and the evidence seemed to back it up. We thought we knew how it happened but not what we could do about it. The Vanguard showed us that we were wrong.’ There was a short pause.

  Winnicott sat upright and looked at them. ‘I wonder if I could have a glass of water. I’m very thirsty.’

  Both analysts looked at him in surprise. Winnicott was looking at them and smiling. But he was speaking in the woman’s voice. There was a brief pause.

  ‘I’m afraid
I’ve only got tap water.’

  ‘Tap water would be wonderful,’ she replied, amused. Already it was impossible to think of the person sitting across from them as a man. The way they were being teased was immensely alluring: the tone of voice suggested the presence of a wonderful quality which you entirely lacked yourself but deeply wanted to share in. They were both disturbed when Winnicott crossed his legs because the gesture was entirely womanly. There was nothing parodic about what they were watching – this was not an impersonation, however skilful. Winnicott’s face had relaxed into an expression at once sweet and strong. There was a warmth and ease with the physical world that was entirely absent in Winnicott. His eyelashes seemed to have grown, although this could not possibly have been the case. Both men were disconcerted by what they were witnessing. On the one hand they were sitting across from an emotionally restricted middle-aged man in the throes of a serious mental breakdown and with a five o’clock shadow falling across his pale cheeks; on the other, they were in the company of a woman who knew, without question or conceit, that she was an object of desire. And both men were uncomfortably aware that if this woman took a liking to you, you would be given something you had always wanted and never had.

  Hendrix left the room, leaving Eddy Haynes on his own. He felt an unaccustomed emotion it took him a moment to recognise: he was starting to panic. She noticed this and smiled, as if secretly flattered by the anxiety of an adolescent’s confused desire. But clearly she could not resist. She looked directly at Haynes and, after a pause, winked at him. She laughed at his confusion and for the first time since he was seventeen, Haynes blushed at being teased by a woman.

  Hendrix returned and handed her the glass of water.

  ‘Thank you.’ She took a long drink then put the glass on the table. ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘Um . . . extinction,’ said Haynes at last.

  ‘Oh, yes. My memory, it’s slipping a lot these days. Anyway, the Vanguard had realised that matters were more complex than that. The onset of rapid change was a crucial first step but it wasn’t this that usually caused extinction. It was what happened when things began to return to normal after the period of rapid change had worked itself out. They claimed that it was the return to something like the previous state of affairs that usually proved too much for the organism. It was as if having had the strength to overcome a major change in the environment – a series of bad winters for a type of plant, the social changes brought about by too much economic change in a society – they were unable to adapt to yet another change, even if that change was a return to normality, to the familiar. In terms of behaviour, for want of a better term, it was still one more drain on their ability to adapt. Going back to the way things used to be, to ways that had formed their very nature was the last straw.’ She stopped and waited for them to ask a question.

  Haynes spoke first. ‘But why was this so important? I mean, I understand the point but it’s just a refinement, isn’t it? Most periods of major change are followed by a return to normality. OK, so it’s the last bit that kills you off. It seems pretty academic to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, thoughtfully, ‘academic is quite a good word under the circumstances. Understandably you’re looking at this in human terms.’ She looked out of the window. ‘The thing is, it’s only in human terms that it isn’t quite so significant.’ There was another pause and she frowned. ‘Life in the rest of the universe is quite different from life here. Even though the Vanguard were different in many ways, in one essential way they were exactly like the people who sent me here . . . exactly like me.’

  Even from across the room they could hear her breathing become laboured and her language halting. ‘Everywhere else in the universe, everything changes very slowly indeed compared to here. It took . . .’ She was clearly in increasing discomfort now.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She held up her hand impatiently. ‘Let me finish. It took human civilisation barely five thousand years to go from the first writing to the invention of the computer. Everywhere else as far as we know – and this was true of the Vanguard as well – the same process has taken approximately two hundred thousand years. Everywhere else life changes much more slowly than here. Gradual change is normal everywhere else . . .’ She stopped, breathing heavily and clearly in pain.

  ‘We should stop now.’

  ‘Let me finish, please.’

  Both men had stood up but the determined tone of her voice made them hesitate.

  ‘Please.’

  They sat down, uncertainly.

  ‘Until we discovered your existence it was an absolute given with all of us that intelligent life moved slowly, that gradual change was a feature of all known societies. When rapid change did occur the results were always catastrophic. We presumed that without an ability to progress in a relatively ordered way . . .’ she stopped again as if struggling to be clear, ‘. . . a primitive society that changes too rapidly will simply disintegrate. They always have – always.’ She held up her hand again and waited for the pain to subside. She said nothing for nearly five minutes, but as Hendrix was about to end the session, she began again, this time more in control. ‘The problem we had was because of the slow rate of change. Because things moved slowly we couldn’t easily see the shape of things at all . . . Everything took place over such a long period of time we couldn’t see the underlying trends clearly, it was all buried. The Vanguard knew that sooner or later something would happen which was going to disrupt their way of life. By your standards a serious change in social trends could happen in a few years . . . For five thousand years most cultures on earth regarded the question of whether women were the equal of men with either indifference or hostility. What did it take to change that? At the start of this century even most women didn’t believe they should have the vote. And now? It’s nearly ten years after the fall of the most powerful, and most hated, English prime minister for two hundred years. A woman. The same process took the Vanguard nearly two thousand years of undramatic gradual drift. By the time women were the equals of men, no one even noticed it had happened. But it was all so slow, they couldn’t understand the causes of the change.’

  ‘Why does it matter? It all sounds admirable,’ said Hendrix, perplexed.

  Smith was exasperated. ‘You can’t see trends when they move so slowly. More to the point, you can’t understand them – and if you can’t understand them how are you to change the trends you can’t see that are destroying you? They started to realise that they were going into decline – fewer ideas, less drive – but it took a thousand years for them even to suspect that something odd was going on, that they were wearing down in some way.’ She looked up at them, revealing a desperation that they must grasp what she was saying. ‘Do you see?’

  Hendrix looked at Haynes then back at Smith. He nodded.

  ‘So that’s why you came here. We’re different – as a race we change more quickly so you can observe and understand how complex societies change . . . that’s what you’re saying.’

  She sat back and closed her eyes.

  It was Haynes who spoke next. He realised that his feelings of protectiveness had been aroused by her obvious discomfort. He was also aware that while he would have been concerned for Winnicott as a middle-aged male, it was clear that he now felt protective as he would have done for a woman in distress. Nevertheless he could not stop himself. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  She opened her eyes and stared at him.

  ‘Stop fussing. I can assure you I’m not made of glass.’ The impatience, and it was a female impatience at being condescended to, was absolutely clear.

  His irritation was out before he could stop it. ‘What are you made of, then?’

  Despite the pain, she laughed. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Eddy,’ and she emphasised his name in a way that was both flirtatious and dismissive, ‘but the real Jean Smith isn’t green and I don’t have tentacles. I’d cause a stir if I walked down Oxford Street, but no
t much of one. And there are other differences, of course. Where I come from I’m considered rather plain because I have large breasts and a small bum.’

  As was intended, this startled them and she laughed again. Once more they were struck by the sound – rich, good-humoured and deep. She was so sexy. Yet she was a man, and a not particularly good-looking one at that.

  ‘If you’re a woman why have you taken up . . .’ he paused, searching for the right word, ‘. . . residence in a man?’

  ‘It was a mistake, in a way. It’s far too complicated to explain. In any case, I’m not willing to. And even if I did, you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘You could try.’

  ‘No.’

  Haynes looked at Hendrix with an I-told-you-so triumphalism.

  ‘Could you tell us a little more about the differences between . . . well, us and you?’

  She looked at him mockingly. ‘Do you mean men and women, or aliens and humans?’

  Hendrix laughed. ‘I may not know all that much about men and women, but I see them all the time. Why are we useful to you if we’re so different?’

  She looked at him for a moment and Hendrix began to wonder if he had offended her. But then she began to speak briskly, as if addressing a business meeting. Hendrix noticed that the painful interludes seemed to have stopped.

  ‘What you must understand is that you are like us – only much more so. While there seems to be a universal inevitability to personal, social and tribal conflict, mankind has these qualities in what I can only describe as terrifying abundance. War does exist elsewhere, but it’s rare and on nothing like the scale that’s common here; social disintegration takes place but over much vaster time scales. We have about the same level of artistic diversity as you . . . but our equivalent of, I don’t know, the Impressionists would have been the dominant style of work for a thousand years before something else came along . . . slowly. There are no overnight sensations where I come from. We evolve everything and we evolve slowly. There is no word for revolution or fashion in any culture except on Earth.’ She gasped as if she barely knew where to begin. ‘For goodness’ sake, there are six thousand languages in the known universe and all but sixteen of them are spoken here.’ She looked at them intently. ‘Now do you see?’ Haynes was scribbling in his notebook as if his life depended on it. ‘Not really.’