The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘I see. I’ll have a careful look at the Nancarrow case when I get back. I’m going into hospital on Wednesday so it may have to wait until next week.’

  ‘Ah,’ replied McCarthy. ‘Right. I hope they find whatever it is – if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll manage without me quite happily, but if you need to contact me, I’ll be leaving my ward number with Lucy.’

  McCarthy nodded. There was another silence. ‘She seemed upset, Lucy. Not like her – she’s generally one of the sweetest-natured people I know. Perhaps . . .’ He trailed off, not knowing quite where he was going with this.

  ‘She’s upset about Boyd Gribben.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What do you think of Gribben?’

  ‘As I said before, I strongly disapprove of what he’s been doing with these short-term contracts. If people aren’t any good at their jobs then you get rid of them – short-term contracts aren’t, in my opinion, about flexibility, they’re about control. They’re about making people compliant. When I hear Gribben talking about team-building I start wondering who’s next for a sandbagging. Other than that, I don’t have much to do with him.’

  ‘Well,’ said Winnicott, ‘I’ll have to see what can be done.’

  After McCarthy had left, Winnicott took a document out of the top drawer of his desk and spent a few minutes reading it. Having done so, he signed it, then called in Lucy. He asked her to prepare several documents for his return from hospital then handed her the piece of paper he had just signed. She was surprised that it had her name written at the top.

  ‘It’s the renewal of your contract,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I thought it would be convenient if I extended it up to your retirement.’

  ‘But that’s five years away. We’re only supposed to have two-year contracts.’ She looked at him, bewildered. ‘Does Mr Gribben know about this?’

  Winnicott looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘No doubt the legal department will, in the fullness of time, inform our head of personnel. What you have in your hand is a binding legal document.’ He offered her the pen he was holding. ‘Or at least it will be once you’ve signed it.’

  Martin Beck swore under his breath as the morning staff meeting came to an end with a reminder from the headmistress that because of the renewed bombing campaign on the mainland there would be a practice bomb drill at an unspecified time during the week. This was greeted by all concerned with carefully suppressed irritation, not because of any scepticism concerning the likelihood of the men of violence deciding to launch an attack on a girls’ grammar school in Berkshire (‘You can’t be too careful’ might easily have been the school’s motto), but because these time-consuming exercises were usually instigated immediately before lunch so that the drill would not detract from time at the blackboard.

  Martin was also mildly depressed at his failure to be taken seriously by Anne Levels. It wasn’t love, he knew, but desire, and desire did not mean just sex. That was what made being with Anne so frustrating. It was the blouses that did it. There was always this gaping mouth between the third and fourth buttons, so that when she turned to one side you could catch sight of the curve of her breast. It was a kind of erotic grief, because he knew, although maybe he was wrong, that he was never going to be allowed. He wanted her, but he was not going to get her. He was going to miss out and the grief was so intense because he had an idea of what he was missing – he was the not-quite-talented-enough player who was going to sit out the final on the bench.

  As he went towards the central staircase, he passed the wooden bays that fronted the staff room. There it was in the space reserved for him: a Cellophane bag and inside it something white and soft. The bag was pulled around it tight with the excess formed into a column at the top so that it looked like an upside-down mushroom.

  Standing on the stairs looking at the plastic bag, he was held back by a strong sense that this was better left unopened. Eventually he reached up and took it down to look at it more closely. Even before he had done so he could see that the soft white contents consisted of a sanitary towel. Without realising, he had stopped breathing. The towel was stained with red and flecked with solids. It was not the deep red of coagulated menstrual blood but the red of coloured ink, and the solids were of dried leaves from the trees outside: deep golds and reds and the palest yellows, with some leaves brown and skeletal to the point of the most delicate disintegration.

  He put it back and went for a walk around the grounds. When he returned, he looked at it again. The lack of any clear point to this message – for it was obviously that – made him decide to go and see Alice Winnicott. It was a decision he would come to regret.

  A cowboy went to San Francisco with his black cat, which he left at a friend’s house while he went to buy a new suit. Dressed in his brand new suit he came back to the cat, called it by name and tried to pat it. The cat would have nothing to do with him in his new coat and hat, and hissed and spat at him. Coaxing the cat was of no avail, so the cowboy went away and put his old suit on again and the cat immediately showed its wild joy on seeing its master as it thought he ought to look.

  The friendly nurse put the card she had been reading back in her top pocket. She smiled. ‘All right, Mr Winnicott, you’ve got to try and remember it and tell the same story back to the doctor tomorrow.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll just take your temperature.’

  That night, bored and ill at ease in the ward, he tried to work on E13. In the past few weeks he had almost given up, but he thought that he would have one last try while he was in hospital where there would be more time and fewer distractions. He had even brought his palmtop dictionary and thesaurus. But he found it difficult to focus and his attention kept wandering as he tried to ignore the strange sweet smell of incontinence and disinfectant. He tried to concentrate. E. E. E. E. E was the common nickname for the drug Ecstasy. What were the synonyms of ecstasy? One of them might have thirteen letters. He typed ecstasy into the palmtop: Bliss. Transport. Rapture. Joy. Happiness. Delight. Enjoyment. He tried playing with variations of these. Bliss gave him Blissfulness – but that was only twelve letters. And besides the answer had to be complex; there had to be much more to it than that. He would know it when he saw it.

  That night he dreamt the Dark Figure was sitting on his chest dressed in a cowboy suit leaning over him with the face of a black cat. He began whispering to him: Inert. Insensible. Insensate. Unintelligible. Incomprehensible. Incoherent. Inchoate. Then the Dark Figure raised his huge black body up into the air as if he were a snake about to strike and screamed at the top of his voice: ‘SENSELESS!’

  The following day mostly consisted of hanging about in a pale green smock. It was string-tied at the back as if designed for maximum humiliation, revealing a line of spine and buttock where the hemmed material did not meet. He felt exposed every time he shifted his position as he sat in the various waiting rooms. It was like wearing a skirt – the inconvenience of it, the sense of never being able to relax in case you revealed something private. Why did women wear something like this all the time when they didn’t have to?

  He drank various liquids throughout the day whose metallic origins could not be disguised by sugar. Machines on angled arms were buzzingly passed over and under him from groin to head and back again, clicking and grinding like sharp teeth.

  ‘Right, Mr Winnicott, I want you to repeat the story the nurse read to you yesterday as exactly as you can.’

  ‘The one about the dog?’ There was an awkward pause. ‘I mean the one about the cat.’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  Winnicott cleared his throat as if for a recitation and began. ‘A man came to town to buy a suit and he brought his black cat with him but left it with a friend. When he returned wearing his new clothes, the black cat did not recognise him and wouldn’t go near him and began to attack him. The man tried to reassure the cat that he was the same person he had always been and tried to
pat the cat but the distressed animal would not let him near. The cat was very angry. So the man went and changed back into his old clothes . . . he was a cowboy . . . and the cat . . . and the black cat . . .’ He stopped. The doctor made a note on his pad in the way of an examiner marking someone down for a clumsy three-point turn or a feeble spelling mistake.

  ‘Who is the heir to the throne?’ asked the doctor, as if nothing unusual had happened.

  ‘Prince Charles.’

  ‘Repeat the number: 743825.’

  ‘743258.’

  ‘And this one: 249281.’

  ‘248189.’

  ‘Who was the Prime Minister during the Second World War?’

  ‘. . . Um . . . not Baldwin . . . it’s gone.’

  ‘What does piscatorial mean?’

  ‘Appertaining to a fish.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Harrow-on-the-Hill.’

  ‘On the paper in front of you would you draw a map from the centre of the town to your house.’

  A furious and anxious Howard Cornish paced up and down in his office as he talked into his mobile. ‘Mr Ginelli, you assured me that this was the safest way of stabilising the Tower and that John Barton’s suggestions were too radical. This report makes it clear that removing the lead weights and replacing them with cables was directly responsible for a lurch of . . .’ he looked down at the thick report in front of him, ‘. . . 1.5 millimetres to the south. That’s the equivalent of one year’s movement in a single night. I want to know what you intend to do.’

  As chairman of the international committee responsible for the work on the tower, Ginelli was already a weary, harassed man when the call had come from the furious Cornish. Caught in the crossfire of endless disagreements about the right course of action, he had taken the blame on every side for the most thankless task of his life. If Cornish were to propose withdrawing the underwriting for the stabilisation of the tower, the effect on the already crumbling confidence in the committee would be catastrophic.

  ‘We are already putting a further three hundred tonnes of lead ingots on the north side to halt the movement,’ he said. ‘We know that will work for the present time, until we consider what is to be done next.’

  ‘And what are you going to do next?’

  Ginelli sighed. ‘In the light of events and some further investigations we have invited Mr Barton to resubmit his plan to manage a controlled subsidence on the north side by means of soil extraction.’

  ‘Can you assure me that this time the decision will be taken on strictly scientific grounds?’

  Ginelli bridled. ‘I can assure you without any contradiction, Mr Cornish, that the committee has made its decisions only on such grounds – and at all times.’

  ‘I hope so, Mr Ginelli. But the position is this – if you do nothing, the tower will fall. If you do the wrong thing, as has just been so impressively demonstrated, then it will fall even more quickly. So it follows that we have to be decisive, and it also follows that we have to be careful. My advice – and this advice is the best available, I can assure you, given everything at stake here – is that Barton’s plan has been meticulous in its preparation and has the best chance of working, not least because he has made it clear that he will proceed with extreme caution—’

  ‘Are you accusing us of being reckless, Mr Cornish?’ interrupted Ginelli.

  ‘I’m not accusing the committee of anything, Mr Ginelli. I’m looking at an independent report that states the committee was overly influenced by the local government of Pisa concerned about the loss of tourist revenue caused by the closure of the tower, and that insufficient consideration was given to Barton’s plan for reasons which were not as scientifically objective as you suggest.’

  ‘You talk’, said an exasperated Ginelli, ‘as if it was perfectly clear what was the best thing to do. It’s never been clear what should be done about the tower.’

  ‘I appreciate the difficulties, but a great deal of money is at stake. Given that doing nothing is not an option, I suggest it’s time that the person who everyone I’ve talked to says is the best man for the job is allowed to get on with it. If he’s not, let me make it clear that the consequences will be serious.’

  There was a defeated silence on the line. ‘Mr Cornish, I am an admirer of Mr Barton – indeed, I supported his plan, but there was a vote and others eminent in the field did not. If he’s allowed to go ahead with this he may well be remembered as the genius who solved the riddle of the Leaning Tower. But you should consider that he may also be remembered as the man who finally brought it crashing to the ground.’

  Although it was dangerous with Healey still hovering, Grlscz could not afford to delay any longer. The decision about Anne Levels was made. Despite his fear of being spotted lurking outside her flat he felt he had no choice, but he was careful to avoid hanging around for hours on the off-chance. It seemed reasonable to wait until the end of the working week. He needed to tempt her into striking up a conversation with him. If Healey kept after him, she might learn about Maria. It would reassure her, make him seem less sinister, if she had been the one to approach him.

  Friday night was a washout because she stayed in. He left at nine, fearing to stay longer. That meant he was obliged to return next morning.

  The next day he arrived at ten thirty, deciding to stay no more than an hour. At eleven, she came out of the flat and walked to the tube. She went shopping in Oxford Street and had lunch at the New World, a restaurant he had eaten at himself and which was famous for its dim sum as well as having the most foul-tempered waiters in Chinatown – no mean feat, he thought, given the competition. He found he could safely watch the exit to the restaurant from the other side of the narrow road because of the rank of phone boxes stationed there. In deference to their location in Chinatown, a plastic pagoda roof had been stuck on each of them. Despite being virtually glass on three sides, the panes in his had become so encrusted with postcard-sized adverts for prostitutes that it had been transformed into the perfect place from which to spy on the world outside. Without any danger of being seen, he could peep through the cracks between the cards like an archer in a castle keep. He passed the wait by looking through the services on offer. Most were conventional enough – Voluptuous Australian; Big Breasted Maid – but others were less so. The most expensively produced card of all, professionally typeset on a pale gold background, was fascinating in its pitch: ‘Les Girls is a co-operative of professional working girls whose aim is to provide a high standard of personal services in accordance with client needs delivered in a healthy and mutually respectful environment. In House or Visiting.’

  There followed two telephone numbers and an Internet address. There was a footnote which he found both unsettling and oddly poignant: ‘Kissing Service Available.’ He felt a kind of kinship with the women who were behind this new deal, with their insight into the way respect and tenderness could be transformed into a thing you could touch. Anything, it seemed, could be rendered into cash.

  He became so wrapped up in mulling this over that he almost missed Anne’s exit from the restaurant. Berating himself for such dangerous self-indulgence, he followed her onto the Charing Cross Road and down to Trafalgar Square where she turned towards the National Gallery. Following at a distance, he arrived in time to see her enter an exhibition on the etching techniques of Rembrandt. He quickly bought a sketchpad and pencil in the museum shop, then followed her into the exhibition. The layout of the room with its numerous separating screens meant that for the first time since the lecture in Canterbury he was able to observe her closely. She wore a tailored suit which accentuated her voluptuous figure and heels which, he felt, were slightly too high given that she was tall already. He wondered if she was self-conscious about her weight and wore the heels to appear thinner. He studied her face as she walked around the room. Just below the left-hand corner of her mouth she had a raised mole, large and a beautiful creamy-brown colour. Most striking, however, was her intense conc
entration as she examined the etchings. This was someone, he thought, who knew how to look.

  Finally she left the exhibition and went into the main rooms of the gallery. Following, he took out his sketchpad. Wherever she settled to look at a painting he would sit down as close as possible, but not too close, and draw her. After a while several people noticed what he was doing, although he was careful to be discreet. Fascinated, only half hiding their interest, they scanned between the man on the bench and the woman he was drawing. As he knew they would be, the watchers were less careful of alerting Anne and in time she started to glance at him. Whenever she did so he was always looking in another direction, as if still copying from the paintings on the walls. The watchers grew bolder as the picture emerged and commented to each other on the way in which he had caught her looks. When she moved on to the next gallery so did he and, gradually, some of the watchers. By now it was clear to her what was happening and Grlscz noticed her confusion, the half-conscious way she tried to strike a more interesting pose as she looked at a painting to which she could no longer give real attention. He also noticed she was holding in her tummy. The watchers became more overt in their open examination of her, like bystanders at a life class. He watched the way her eyelashes moved hesitantly, the slight, unconscious parting of her lips as her breathing quickened and the way the colour rose along her throat, darkening the skin of her neck and face. He stood up and was gone.

  She turned in time to catch his retreating back, but stop-ped herself from going after him. The proof that this was not a pick-up, that an impulse beyond desire had obliged him to follow her, made her doubt the rights she had in what he’d made. And maybe, implausibly, she was wrong; maybe he was drawing someone else; or worse, that the truth about her he had put down on paper was better left alone.