This is how I prefer to remember all my contacts with civilisation: as briefly as possible.
Fans revolved idly in the school’s lobby. A row of African violets butted up against each window, brown in the heat, and a small table was stacked with copies of a pamphlet called ‘Good News for Modern Man’. I read it while I waited for Father Anthony, and it reminded me of the Church I grew up in: the primary colours and cheerful messages, the merry Heaven and blotty, yellow Hell. ‘For God so loved the world,’ it told me in a bright, responsible voice. I felt a small nostalgia. I had one of my headaches and all the angles of the world seemed wrong.
‘Dr Birch!’ cried Father Anthony, arriving. Father Anthony seems always to be arriving: there is a perpetual commotion about him. I’ve also never met a pinker man in all my life. His face is rose and his ears are salmon. His neck folds into itself like certain kinds of coral. His hands sprout from the ends of his arms anemone-like and gloved in pink.
‘Dr Birch!’ he cried again.
‘Call me Bill.’
‘Bill, Bill,’ he said with delight, shaking my brown hand with his pink one. His was smooth and cool; mine was damp. Father Anthony has a gift for the comfortable use of names. He dispenses them like small gifts, as if they’ve been prepared lovingly in advance. I can imagine it – this small recognition – feeling large enough to turn a soul back to God. I believe that Father Anthony’s God is an old friend to him, gracious and prudent, with a priest’s sympathy, a compassionate memory, and a steady heart for his flock’s misgivings and undoings and hurts.
‘This way, Bill, this way,’ said Father Anthony, ushering me along with his hands. I wonder if, like certain corals, they glow all the pinker in the dark. ‘We’re proud to welcome you. The sisters are very excited, as are our students. This is quite a treat. What a treat. We have so few visitors. The bishop once – what an occasion. This is in my lifetime. Well, my tenure here – a lifetime in itself. Ha, ha! This way, this way.’
He escorted me into a small, overcrowded hall in which nuns quieted students and drew blinds over windows. They went about their tasks with a sensible bustle I found intimidating.
Father Anthony introduced me as Dr William Birch, eminent marine biologist. I introduced myself as Bill Birch, malacologist.
‘A malacologist,’ I explained, ‘is a scientist who studies molluscs.’
It occurred to me for the first time that this title of mine is extremely ominous, belonging as it does to the list of distasteful words beginning with ‘mal’: malcontent, maladjusted, malformed, malicious. I wanted to explain that until my passion for the colossal squid blotted out my love for all other marine organisms I was a conchologist, which sounds much safer. More avuncular, sort of bumbling. Instead I loomed above them, malacologist, and ordered the lights out.
The students watched my slideshow presentation rapturously in the semi-dark. Their crowded bodies gave out a smell of warmed fruit about to spoil. It seemed to me as if their hair were filling up the room and muffling my voice, and when I felt prickles of fever up my legs and sweat behind my knees, I couldn’t be sure of the cause – sickness, or girls?
A tiger shark swam across the screen. The girls all breathed together, softly, ‘Shark.’ An anemone appeared, and they sang together, ‘Anemone.’ ‘Starfish,’ they sighed, and ‘Seahorse,’ ‘Eel.’ I showed them a beach camouflaged by thousands of newly hatched turtles and they inhaled collectively (we slow-breeding humans are always astonished by the extravagance with which sea creatures, seasonally awash in salt and sperm, reproduce themselves). I showed a photograph of myself in the observation station, taken by my departing colleagues. I paused on this photograph for too long because I was struck by the plump health of my former self, with his light tan and professionalism (he stands in the station doorway in prudent boots and his posture is in no way diminished by the tropical mountain rising above him). Then I showed pictures of Mabel in her bay and the students giggled. They know Mabel, although we have taken care not to publicise her. They know I’m the man who watches Mabel in the long afternoons and then watches them with his long binoculars. They laughed at her, friendly, and they laughed at me.
‘Thanks to the wonders of technology,’ said Father Anthony, ‘you have shown us the goodness of creation.’
The students can walk for minutes through the goodness of creation to see firsthand, in the blood-temperature sea, the same wonders I had just displayed. Since leaving the school I’ve found myself repeating the girls’ breathless catalogue: shark, anemone, starfish, seahorse, eel. A children’s book of the sea. And I think of the waste involved, the sea full of death and the dying: all of creation’s necessary hunters fanning out among the reefs and rocks and sunken ships, all of them hungry, and if not hungry, dead. What if I’d discussed this in my talk? A Lecture on the Origin of Species? But Father Anthony seems a sensible man. Perhaps the students are taught evolution. I suspect we think similarly, all of us who were trapped yesterday in that hot room: we’re worried, daily, by the vast number of unredeemed things in the world.
Father Anthony took me to his study after my presentation. A white room with a view of jungle trees, and above the window, an ivory Christ on an ebony cross. Sun-faded copies of ‘Good News for Modern Man’ filled a low bookshelf. The sun ages everything so quickly that they might have come in on last month’s supply ship. Even Darwin looks a little more worn around the edges than when he arrived a few months ago, glumly agnostic. Only the thirsty trees seem to resist the sun, growing greener by the day, sweating out a greenness that hurts my eyes and forces me to keep them trained on the sea. The mosquitoes, also, seem unaffected, but I suppose they hide from the sun in the daytime.
‘May I ask you a question?’ said Father Anthony.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Are you a man of faith, Bill?’
‘That seems like the kind of thing you’d ask before letting me get up there in front of your girls.’
‘Our students are not necessarily young women of faith, Bill. And we would never keep you away from them on the basis of your beliefs.’
This implied – I was sure of it – that Father Anthony had considered keeping me away from them on some other basis.
‘Well, I’m not a man of faith,’ I said. ‘No, I’m not.’
And because this seemed so definitive – because this was the first time I had said anything like it aloud to a living man – I wanted to qualify it. I said, ‘I used to believe, you know. God, the maker of Heaven and Earth, Jesus Christ, conceived by the Holy Spirit. The third day he rose again from the dead. You know, all that. The Church of England.’
‘But not anymore?’
‘Not anymore,’ I said. ‘So I suppose that means I’m going to hell.’
And I regretted this immediately; it was such an amateur thing to say. But my head was bad and I was worried I might have an attack – a vertigo attack – right there in his office.
‘God knows your heart better than I do,’ said Father Anthony. ‘I thought you might be a believer because in your lecture you said the way a squid eats is like a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Ha, ha! I found that very funny. It’s rare these days to come across a good biblical joke. Can I order you some tea?’
Father Anthony is a kind and good-natured man, one of those beaming, healthful men who truly believe drinking a hot liquid in insufferable heat will cool you down, and my heart went out to him – broke for him, really – and I loved my fellow men and wanted to sail home to them instantly. I wanted to have sailed already. And why hadn’t I? Mabel, I suppose, whom only I could save. I was also embarrassed at having said so much. I was talkative in my guilt and sorrow, and would admit to anything.
‘No tea, no thanks,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘If you don’t mind, I’ll have some. ‘A “spot of tea”, yes? I’ll ring the bell. Something cool for you, perhaps, Bill?’
His hand was poised in midair, holding a small silver bell. Did I mention
we were both sitting, him behind his desk, and me in front of it? It was like being at school again.
‘Yes please, something cool,’ I said.
I pressed my hand against my forehead, and when the something cool came, I pressed the glass against my forehead too. Father Anthony looked concerned. He looked on the point of ringing his little bell again.
‘When you agreed to give this presentation today,’ said Father Anthony, ‘you asked for a favour in return. You said there was a scientific matter we could help you with. Is it to do with your squid?’
‘With Mabel, yes,’ I said. ‘Strictly speaking, of course, she’s not my squid. She’s not anybody’s – not even God’s. Do you see? I want to free her. That’s what I want your help with.’
‘You agree, then, with those activists in town?’ said Father Anthony. I realised he was referring to the young people I’d seen at the port; I understood that Mabel was no longer a secret and they were here to protest her captivity. This explained why Eric had been so unforthcoming with me.
‘I don’t know who they are or what they believe,’ I said.
‘They want the very same thing you do – to release the squid. You could ask for their help.’
I thought of the boys in the bar and the girls on the dock, of their sincerity, their photogenic martyrdom, and the primary colours of their T-shirts, and I said, ‘Tomorrow, Father Anthony, it has to be tomorrow. Before they find her and turn her into something she isn’t.’
‘Turn her into what?’ he asked.
‘Do you know very much about colossal squid, Father Anthony?’
‘Only the information you presented in your lecture today,’ he said. ‘Their brains are round with holes in them, like donuts. They have eight arms and two long tentacles.’
‘The most important thing I said about colossal squid today, Father Anthony, was that we don’t know anything about them. And even though I’ve been watching Mabel for over a year now, I still know nothing. It’s even possible that Mabel is still immature, that she could get bigger. How can we be sure of the true size of the colossal squid? Who knows what we’ll fish up some day – the gargantuan squid? We might have gone a step too far, calling this one colossal. Soon we’ll run out of superlatives. Wouldn’t it be better just to leave things be? They’ve recorded a mysterious bloop, you know, coming from somewhere underwater, which could only have been made by an animal of unthinkable size. I hope we never find it.’
Father Anthony waved his hand in the direction of his tree-crowded window as if mysterious bloops were none of his business.
‘The squid an infant – interesting,’ he said. ‘But wouldn’t it look different if it were so young? Forgive me, but you must know that at least? You scientists?’
‘No!’ I cried. ‘It’s impossible to tell. Darwin talks about it in Origin: “There is no metamorphosis; the cephalopodic character is manifested long before the parts of the embryo are completed”. A squid is always a squid, right from birth – so we talk of mature or immature squid, but never of infants. The squid has no infancy, which means no nostalgia. It has no Romantic period. Squid think Wordsworth is full of horseshit. They have no childhood! None at all! They’re born adult, and the only change they undertake is death. There is no metamorphosis!’
At the end of this speech I felt as pink as Father Anthony looked. There was a ticking in the room; I thought it came from the ivory Jesus crucified on the wall.
Father Anthony drew a long breath. ‘Do you like it here on our island?’ he asked.
‘Actually I’m thinking of leaving.’
‘Do you crave human company? That’s only natural.’
‘I want to be surrounded by people again, but I don’t have much desire to talk to them.’
‘But you have so many ideas to share,’ said Father Anthony. ‘If you’ll excuse my asking, do you feel quite well? Not everyone can withstand this climate. I myself, many years ago, spent an entire year supine on my bed. The heat, you see, and it led to a sort of spiritual crisis, a lack of faith, you might say, in the sustaining hand of God. I thought I may have dreamed winter. It was only prayer that gave me strength, Bill – the strength of God against the burden of His creation.’
‘Prayer!’ I said. ‘Can I ask you a question? Doesn’t faith feel to you like a deep-down knowing, something you’ve discovered rather than made? And what do you do when you’ve lost that knowing? Hope that praying to something you no longer know will get it back for you?’
‘Would you like me to pray for you, Bill?’
‘I’m not well,’ I said. ‘I have headaches.’
‘I understand,’ said Father Anthony, reaching out a hand, and I was able, then, to imagine him laid out on a bed, dreaming winter. ‘Why not leave?’
‘Mabel.’
‘Mabel is the squid, yes?’
‘She belongs in the sea.’
‘And what do you propose?’
I explained that the net with which we’d plugged Mabel’s bay was impossible to move with only two men. I corrected myself – one man. Of course he didn’t know about Darwin. Could a priest see the ghost of Darwin? Unlikely. But if all the students were to come down to the bay and we worked together, we could unfasten the net and, very swiftly, move it from one side of the bay to the other, so that Mabel, on escaping, wouldn’t tangle herself in it. (Confession: when I imagine this, I have in mind a delirious scene from the Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty where the girls of Tahiti, bare-breasted, hold an enormous net in the water, into which the native men drive schools of fish.) Father Anthony seemed concerned about this plan. He asked if there would be any danger. I told him no, there would be no danger – unlike octopi, squid are not dangerous to human beings. All those old etchings of whaleboats embraced by monstrous tentacled creatures are completely false. I said this, but we don’t really know. No one has ever swum with a colossal squid. But just to be on the safe side, it’s my plan to feed Mabel all the fish I have while the girls move the net. I’ll get into the water to distract her if I have to. I’ll get so close I’ll fill her clever eyes.
‘Select your strongest swimmers,’ I said to Father Anthony. ‘Those girls will take the end of the net farthest from the beach. They’ll be the ones to swim across the entrance to the bay.’
‘I see you’ve thought this through. Would you excuse me for a minute? I must consult a colleague.’
I let him go with regret. It had begun to grow cool in the room, if it’s possible here to have any sense of what cool truly is, and I fancied that this relief emanated in some way from Father Anthony. His pink skin suggested not clammy heat but the smooth, cool skin of a baby. I was content, sitting there in that office. My presentation had gone well. I was acting on my belief that Mabel should be free. It was good to talk to another man again. And, as if offended by this betrayal, Darwin – who was he, if not another man? – appeared at the window with the air of someone casually strolling by. He peered in.
‘It’s safe,’ I said in a loud whisper. Then I gave him the victory sign, at which he looked puzzled.
‘Where is he?’ asked Darwin.
‘Gone for help.’
‘Help for whom?’
Darwin ambled away from the window and out into the trees, but I could see the bright camel colour of his naturalist’s coat among the greenery; he hadn’t gone far. Sitting comfortably in that cooling office, I considered the ways in which Darwin had never been particularly helpful to me, despite the initial promise of his appearance. After all, to a man – a scientist, no less – who has recently lost his faith, the ghost of Darwin could be a rich resource. We might have sat and talked about God’s sovereignty, and then about its dissolution: a little of God vanishing into the dodo, a little into the long-lost ichthyosaurus. But he seems impatient when I raise these topics, and I’ve come to avoid them. I used to think of Charles Darwin in the same way some people think of Jesus Christ: he was a real man who existed in a specific historical time and he taught some val
uable lessons, many of which I could adopt with no sense of contradiction. In short, I was a sensible man. I was no Creationist. I was reconciled with Darwin. I weighed it all up, and with the same clever hands I held something else entirely: that joyful faith of mine, impregnable.
I was once quite certain that God so loved the world. How sudden it was, on day 282: God’s absence upon my shoulders, like a heavy flightless bird that can still hop to a height. How sobering to pass from Dr William Birch, beloved of God, to Bill Birch, organism. Just to be there on my sticky cliff and feel this way for no specific reason – it was a kind of grief. And I saw Mabel differently after that. How could I help it? She has nothing to do with me. I can’t eat or reproduce with her. She’s without complication. I was sure of one thing, until I was no longer sure; now my conviction is that Mabel must be free. And not for her own sake, no; although I love her, I would have put her in a tank and watched her in it for the rest of her life, or mine. But now I think she should remain a mystery. There must be some things in the world that no one sees and no one knows. Some monsters.
I began to worry about Father Anthony. Why was he taking so long? I rang the silver bell and a girl appeared. She was about sixteen, neat and shy behind heavy hair, and I felt like a Bounty sailor encountering beauty for the first time. I thought of the one mutineer who had the date on which he first saw Tahiti tattooed on his quivering arm.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ she answered. She was solemn, and so was I. The heat had returned.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Faith,’ she said, and she was so allegorical, standing there, she may as well have been draped in white robes, placed on a plinth above a plaque that read ‘Faith’. I laughed, which startled her.
‘Is that really your name?’ I asked. ‘Or did Father Anthony ask you to come in here and tell me that?’
She was confused but pleased. I knew I wouldn’t touch her – I’m not so mad as to have touched her – but I wanted to. I want to. Oh, Tahiti! Was Darwin ever there? No, I don’t think so. He preferred dustier places, godforsaken places like the Galápagos, prehistoric with tortoises. This girl and girls like her would come to the beach with me and draw aside the net.
The High Places Page 19