The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  They were having dinner at a floating restaurant with friends of hers. He was anxious because he knew that Martin Beck would be there. She had responded easily enough to his careful probing about Beck. He had been a casual date who had become a good friend. It was a black-tie occasion, a fund-raiser for a hospital where one of Anne’s friends worked. Unreassuringly, Beck was rather good-looking. Steven could easily see why Anne would enjoy his company since he was amusing and easy to talk to, but it was also easy to see why she did not view him romantically. From what he had already gathered about her – and no new lover could have been more attentive – he sensed Beck was simply not her type. He was not intense enough for her. On the other hand, that women’s taste in men was difficult to read at the best of times was revealed by the woman Beck had brought with him, Karen. Attractive, stunning, beautiful, none of these words could describe her. The problem lay, he felt, in the degree of workmanship involved in her appearance. The short black dress accentuated the aerobicised figure which lacked even the slightest curve along the tummy, the most touching of all the soft arcs of the female body, he thought, yet the one displayed, if ever, with the most regret. Her face was flawless, like an artefact. What such a woman saw in Beck was an intriguing mystery.

  Still, he found Anne’s friends easy to relax with and he was at his most amusing. The conversation drifted comfortably and when they got on to the subject of names someone pointed out that of the eight people there, four had surnames of eastern European origin. Steven’s was the most unusual and he wrote it down for them on a napkin: GRLSCZ.

  ‘How do you say it again?’ asked one of the other women around the table.

  ‘GRILSH,’ he replied.

  ‘I wouldn’t have had a clue how to pronounce it if I hadn’t heard it first,’ said Karen, leaning towards him with a lascivious enthusiasm she made no attempt to disguise either to Beck or Anne.

  ‘It’s Bulgarian,’ said Steven. ‘The shortages over there are so bad you even have to queue for vowels.’

  As well as playing the part of the amusing new boyfriend, Steven had been keeping an eye on the other diners. At one of the tables close by sat a couple in early middle age. They did not talk much and it was always the woman who began any conversation. Steven saw that she was eavesdropping on a heated exchange between a much younger couple behind her, while the husband stared into the distance. Still lost in thought, Steven saw him gently stroke his wife’s index finger, just two or three times. She smiled, as if reminded of a familiar and deep-seated pleasure. She loves this man very much, thought Steven. Still looking at the couple, Steven gently stroked the top of Anne’s hand, leaving his just barely in contact. Feeling his touch, Anne turned to look at him, watching his distracted gaze. She was about to speak when Karen leant forward, deliberately addressing him with her cleavage.

  ‘So, Steven . . . tell me about how you met Anne. Drawing her picture! So romantic, or was it just a clever routine?’

  He looked at Anne and smiled softly. ‘It was just a clever routine.’

  But it did not work. Anne’s hand had barely a fraction of a millimetre to disengage, but the coldness with which she did so made it seem as if she had wrenched herself free.

  There was a sudden flurry of movement among the waiters as they started to move quickly around the tables, filling every glass with wine. At the far end of the room, standing self-importantly beside the guests of honour, stood a fat toastmaster whose red face was only a few shades lighter than his absurdly tiny formal jacket. As the waiters hurried about their refills, one of them accidentally shoved Anne’s chair as he rushed to finish serving the table. She turned, eyes flashing, but the waiter had gone. She turned back to the table with a murderous expression on her face.

  The toastmaster stuck his chest out like a fat pigeon and began to speak. ‘Ladies and gentlemen and honoured guests,’ he bawled, ‘please raise your glasses in honour of our patron, the Duchess of Montrose. Pray be upstanding.’

  The room, fuelled by an excess of alcohol and too-rich food, scraped noisily to its feet like an exhausted, drugged leviathan, drowning out the remainder of the toast.

  Later in the car park Anne’s temper did not improve when her old, or as she described it, classic BMW refused to start. They walked to Leicester Square tube with Steven making efforts to keep the conversation going without making it too obvious he was doing so. He did not expect to lift her bad mood, but to prevent it catching fire. It was late and the station was full of people going home from a night in town. The air was thick with the heavy scent of booze on people’s breath, so strong it was like an unwelcome kiss. The screechy voices of young men echoed down the tiled corridors – an exuberance that might, or might not, be laced with paranoid violence. It added unease to her coldness. They waited in silence for the train and when it came he stepped through the sliding doors with her. She looked at him as if he had walked uninvited through her front door.

  ‘I thought it might be best if I came with you.’ He nodded in the direction of four men laughing and shouting at the far end of the carriage.

  She gave a dispiritingly ghostly smile of thanks. ‘I do this journey all the time on my own.’

  There was an awkward beat, not least because he had expected her to relent a little at his concern. Caught out by this, and having to move quickly to get off the train, he moved to kiss her. It was merely a gentle attempt to touch her lips, but she turned her head, offering him only her cheek and instantly pulling away.

  ‘Mind the doors,’ came the driver’s voice over the intercom, his boredom apparent even through the distant crackle of the clapped-out speaker.

  Steven stepped outside, and as the doors closed he called out, ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow.’

  She smiled with all the warmth of a January sun.

  He walked along the platform as the train took her away, wondering how the evening had disintegrated so very badly.

  After shaving the next morning, Grlscz looked at himself in the mirror, searching his reflection. He smiled. It was a warm smile, seeming to mock the intensity of his self-absorption, as if catching himself in an act of vanity he had the grace to find himself faintly ridiculous. It faded to a watchful blankness. A phone rang and he was instantly alert and moving. It was not the phone in his living room and he felt a stab of disappointment that it could not be Anne. He ran up the stairs and was at the door of the spare bedroom by the beginning of the third beat and answering it before the fourth.

  ‘Hello,’ he said softly.

  There was no reply but someone was there; the hesitancy, the awkwardness, the shame emerging in the imperceptibly faint breath. He waited.

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ he said, his voice generous, kind, longing.

  But there was only silence in reply. Then the buzzy drone as it went dead.

  Martin Beck looked at Nick Gau through the window of the history book room. Gau was in his early forties and must once have been beautiful. Time, his dishevelled clothes and what he proudly referred to as his fast-food and malt-whisky gut, had eroded his looks, although from time to time in a good light and after a proper night’s sleep his lost bloom would return briefly. The general effect was that of an over-the-hill angel dressed by Oxfam and fed by Burger King. He was loathed by most of the women on the staff because he treated the things that were important to them with aggressive indifference. This dislike invariably boiled over during the termly ritual of report-writing.

  Report-writing at Mabey’s had nothing to do with an attempt to fix a moment of time in the intellectual and emotional growth of a developing human being in all their flux and fractal roar. Anything but. Martin had once been the unwitting cause of gasps and pursed lips in the staff room when he had written that one girl was ‘lazy, and she had better start doing some work or she will fail her exams’. This had been amended by the head of the sixth form to read ‘she should be more rigorous in her approach and pay closer attention to her texts’. In this way the possibility of disturbance
– parents might complain, questions might be asked – could be eliminated by language which sought to eradicate itself even as the sentence was being read. Ideally, nothing should emerge from a Mabey’s report. Each one aspired to a set of self-annihilating symmetries drained of every quark of sense, a bliss of utter meaninglessness. A friend of Martin’s had recently come home after working in Japan for many years. The Japanese, he said, were mad, but it was only now, returning after all this time, that he realised the English were even more deranged. The Japanese had at least acknowledged their violence, hatred, and disdain by making life possible through the world of ritual. The English were stranger than the Japanese, he said, because they acknowledged none of it. Martin thought he was wrong in at least one respect. Like a Japanese tea ceremony, a Mabey’s report was intended to create a moment of absolute stillness, of total self-abnegating purity in which all disorders, fragments, paradox, all the howl and crash of life, were to be eliminated by total attention to pure form.

  Despite the disapproval of his own failure at report writing, it was nothing compared to Gau’s first attempt. These reports were legendary because he had written them using green ink. The sheer fury of Emma Caxton, who was responsible for the sixth-form reports, seemed rooted in her notion of the sacrilegious; she was affronted in a way that only the notion of profanity could explain. Martin was with Gau when she came to tell him to do the reports again. ‘It’s green,’ she kept saying, ‘it’s green,’ in the tone one would normally hear the words ‘rape’ or ‘incest’ or ‘massacre’. She seethed as if real flesh were burning. The intensity of her anger was obvious and she spoke to him with the studied determination of someone controlling physical pain. Yet it was as if she were muzzled, but by what Martin couldn’t think. He put it down at the time to her cowardice, since Gau was not a new-girl teacher straight out of college who could be easily traumatised by sharp words. It was only months later that he began to understand that her inability to let her anger flow was not due to lack of courage, nor did this inability stop at Gau, nor was it confined to Emma; none of these women in late middle age knew how to be angry with a man.

  Interestingly, it was only the women over fifty that Gau treated in this way. But there was nothing timid about these women. They did not suffer from doubt or low self-esteem and within their departments they were as ferocious and arbitrary as robber barons; but when dealing with men something was missing, or was present, which confounded them like Antony’s spirit before Caesar’s. For Gau it had become an addictive semi-spectator sport, like bear-baiting. He didn’t care what tethered them but he trusted it as if it were a chain hammered into the ground by a steel spike.

  Martin opened the door and went in. Gau was sitting on the window-sill at the furthest point in the room from a fifth-former, a girl of about fifteen. She was an extraordinarily beautiful child with a delicate bone structure, enormous eyes and a strong, athletic body.

  ‘Ah, Martin, come and have some Earl Grey.’

  ‘Have I interrupted?’

  ‘Not at all.’ He looked at the girl and smiled. ‘Emily was just about to leave. You’ve got some poor third-formers to go and oppress, haven’t you, my dear?’

  She got up, leaving the full cup of tea on the table next to her, and said, ‘Thank you, Mr Gau.’ Gau waved to her without looking as he filled a kettle from a large jug which had written on it: ‘Not to be removed from the chemistry lab’. Speaking over his shoulder he said, ‘I hear you’ve been visited by the curse. I must say, at twenty-nine you’re a bit of a late developer.’

  ‘So it’s out.’

  ‘Indeed it is. By the end of break you’ll be the talk of the staff room.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘You surprise me. I mean, what a mixture of the unspeakable, the shameful and, hush, the sexual! Such an opportunity for a lifting of eyebrows, a lowering of voices and the shaking of heads. In our neck of the woods sorry stuff like this passes for scandal. They think all their birthdays have come together.’

  Martin looked at him as he brought the tea. ‘Is it sorry stuff?’

  Gau looked at him, disdainful and mocking. ‘She didn’t even drop the real thing in your bag as her little act of spite. Typical bloody Mabey’s girl. I mean, if you’re going to do something like that at least do it properly. I’d have admired that; it would have shown some balls.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t an act of spite.’

  This delighted him. ‘It’s not your birthday, is it? My dear fellow, you should have said, I’d have baked a cake. I suppose you think the red ink and . . . what was it?’

  ‘Leaves,’ said Martin quietly.

  ‘Leaves . . . dear God. So there’s a message in the entrails, is there?’

  ‘Yes, I think there probably is.’

  ‘And what would it be?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re so sure of yourself, you tell me.’

  ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree, old son. Forget symbolism and psychology. Biology, that’s the answer. Women are complicated creatures. I don’t mean emotionally complicated or any of that, I mean physically complicated. They’re an endless succession of tubes and tunnels, exits and entrances, causeways and cul-de-sacs, obstructions and blind alleys. And the chemicals that serve them! My God! Endless secretions and discharges and hormones. Half an ounce of FSH could poison a small city. It’s a factory in there and it doesn’t really work – it’s always on strike or dumping things illegally into the river.’ He took out a cigarette from a packet of ten Benson and Hedges on the table, lit up and blew out the first lungful in a long, extravagant breath.

  ‘Women are like Third World countries that buy these complicated tractors that can do amazing things but no one knows how to fix when they go wrong – which they do all the time because they’re too complicated. No infrastructure, that’s the trouble with emerging nations, and that’s the trouble with women. What they need is experts, professionals, specialists. Instead, all they’ve got is you and me.’ He took another long drag at his cigarette. ‘Look, they have to go to well-woman clinics even when there’s nothing wrong with them. And you know what? They always find something. A well woman? Take it from me, old son, there’s no such thing.’ He took a deep swig from his mug. ‘God, I feel sorry for them,’ he said breezily. ‘Don’t bother looking for an elaborate explanation for your little present. With all that lot going on inside them, it’s no wonder they’re all so fucking crazy.’

  Grlscz had thought carefully about how he would make up with Anne. He was alarmed at the unfairness of her response, its obvious irrationality. He had done nothing to encourage Karen. In the end he decided it would be no bad thing if he allowed his sense of unfairness to emerge. If she wanted a fight, he saw no alternative. This, in turn, made him wary. Being spontaneous was dangerous. There was an alarming pleasure in indignation. Letting himself go was always a temptation, like an athlete resisting a plate of chips, or a Mars Bar, or an extra hour in bed.

  To his relief, she phoned two days later and invited him over. When he arrived, he could tell she had decided she had gone too far, and the distance between them consisted solely of her uncertainty as to how she could let it go without the loss of too much dignity. While she was in the kitchen making tea he came up behind her and put his arms around her waist, kissing the back of her neck. He felt her relax then stiffen again, but as he looked at her sideways on, with his head over her shoulder, he could see that she was mocking herself.

  ‘Oh, Steven,’ she said, mimicking Karen’s breathily sexy voice, ‘if I hadn’t read your name, I’d never know how to pronounce it.’

  ‘And what was I supposed to do, refuse to talk to her?’

  ‘You could have taken your eyes off her cleavage for five seconds.’

  An expression of mock confusion settled over his face. ‘What cleavage?’

  She laughed as she pretended to turn her head away from him, covering her face with her long black hair.

  ‘I was incredibly embarrassed, as it happ
ens. I had visions of Martin asking me to step outside.’

  ‘Martin?’ The note of friendly derision in her response settled any lingering concern about Beck’s status.

  ‘I said I was embarrassed, I didn’t say I was worried.’

  ‘Ooooh! You’re going to have to show me your gold-medallion collection, Tiger.’ Now she was making fun of him. A good sign.

  ‘I don’t have a gold-medallion collection,’ he said. ‘But I do have some etchings I’m pretty anxious for you to look at.’

  She turned round and kissed him with an intensity that surprised him, her body pushing into him. Her tongue touched his lips again, and, for a moment, he felt just the tip inside his mouth. She was exploring the edge of some high dive. But she wasn’t ready yet for the vertiginous leap, the loss of control, the surrender to a fundamental force. Slowly she eased herself back. He could feel it leaving her in the touch of her lips, the movement of her arm, the way she relaxed her body, the force of her breath upon his face. This was all right, he thought, this would do.

  She went over to her briefcase and brought out a file. She was smiling. ‘This is to say I’m sorry for being such a bad-tempered madam.’ There were two papers. ‘Have a look – it’s all right.’

  He sat down and began to read. The first was a report from the Lancet, dated 1951, on the growth patterns of children in two German orphanages just after the war. The second was much more recent: Neonatal Intensive Care for Low Birth Weight Infants: Miami 1986.

  He read for twenty minutes then looked up at her. She could see how grateful he was, and was touched. He was clearly excited by what he had read. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘This could be of immense help.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank NEMO. Would you like to?’

  She went over to her computer and began typing. After a couple of minutes she turned back to him. ‘Come on.’ He walked over to her and she put a headset on him. ‘Just talk normally.’