Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  He went mad for a week and suffered claustrophobia. He would not sleep in his cabin, but instead laid himself down on the deck. His eyes would not focus. He repeated in his speech a groaning about the celerity of the whale in rising and its rows of white teeth. When the fog closed over the Silver Star he took his blankets and sealskins and climbed the mast. The madness burned off him with the sun, and what he remembered in his later life was

  the fleeting hold, aye, I had on Leviathan’s face, which was carved in deep cuts like them tattoos on the face of South Sea whaleman, those greasy teeth knocking me, the tunnel of a throat, aye, and of the stomach I can say it was more a tomb than was ever my mother’s womb.

  He lived until old age and never again wanted to be alone in small rooms or to wake in the dark. A whaler’s voyage was always brightly lit. There was oil and wax enough to keep a constant lambency and there was more learning than on modern vessels. Forever after he had many lamps lit before he went to sleep. He had a ladder put through the ceiling of his bedroom in the Regency house by the North Sea and in his infirmity retreated up it to the roof whenever he felt confined.

  James had no such ladder. He wished for a spermaceti candle, even if it would also show the insects, the cardboard and the trench. He was desperate for something far away. A hare. Some colour in the sky. Everything etched. The fields, the hedgerows. The hare runs into the next field, into trees, then up a hill. On and on. How it runs!

  Suddenly, the door swung open.

  Extreme cold enables strange things to happen. For example, at the Helsinki University of Technology’s low temperature lab, in 2001, a Bose-Einstein condensate cooled near to the absolute zero of minus 273° Celsius stopped dead a beam of light travelling at 978 million kilometres per hour.

  There were drifts of snow up against the walls and fences, while in other places the ground was bare and glassy as obsidian. The dunes and beach were grey with frost. Purple heather stood out and gorse. The sea was wild. A few surfers in coloured wetsuits rode the waves. She walked with her head down. It was that cold wind which searched with fingers for the rot in a jawbone. It touched a tooth she refused to have drilled. Trieste. She had visited Trieste with her parents and their guide had spoken of how the winter wind rapped at James Joyce’s broken and infected teeth when he wandered the seafront during his long exile in the city. The guide pronounced rapped ‘rapid’.

  The lighthouse stood in the distance. It was a sleeping creature, leaving no sign in the day. About it were a few villas, boarded up like wooden boats. A more modern hotel, the Ostende, stood on a promontory beyond.

  A man ran past her. She watched him become smaller and smaller until he disappeared in the distance. She walked briskly in the same direction. She wanted to work up an appetite. She was determined to eat the winter menu at the hotel, which was Etruscan: golden, sweet fat of suckling pig in the afternoon; oxtail dishes, bread and wine and cake under a burnished chandelier in the evenings.

  The man was running back towards her, becoming bigger, more possible. She was following his tracks and he was returning the same way. He stopped a few steps in front of her. He put his hands on his hips and breathed hard, as if coming up for air. Breath steamed calf-like from his mouth and nostrils. She caught him as he passed. He was possibly shy and she did not want to miss him.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘You’re English, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, you?’

  ‘From London,’ she said, in English.

  He guessed who she was. He had seen her name and title when he had signed in. Professor of what?

  He held out his hand. ‘James More.’

  She shook it. A big hand, chilled, the blood deep inside, but soft.

  ‘Danielle … Danny Flinders.’

  ‘Danny the champion of the world.’

  Despite herself, despite the familiarity, she shone in that moment. For her it was simple. A hermit crab finds its shell, and is accommodated – so lovers meet.

  It was before breakfast and the sky was slate, darker than the dunes, descending with the weight of the forecast snowstorms. The first words they spoke to each other were rounded and slurred by the cold.

  ‘Only an Englishman would wear shorts in this weather,’ she said.

  He was more distracted. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s cold. I’m going back.’

  ‘Shall I see you later?’

  She could have said something less definite.

  He smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Then he was gone, sprinting for the cover of the pines.

  She walked all the way to the Hotel Ostende and back and bumped into him when she came into the lobby. It was awkward. But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.

  ‘I have some work to do,’ she said, hastily. ‘I’m going to have breakfast in my room.’

  ‘Lunch?’ he said. He had showered and dressed. He was more winsome than he had been on the beach.

  ‘Would one thirty be too late?’

  He batted a copy of the International Herald Tribune against his leg. ‘See you then,’ he said, and was gone.

  The first thing she did when she got to her room was to order breakfast. She bathed. When she came out of the bathroom the food was waiting for her on a table under a silver dome. Room service was a kind of magic.

  A maid was in the doorway.

  ‘May I make the fire, madame?’

  ‘Please.’

  Fire was important to her. It wasn’t just that the snow had arrived outside, hiding the sky, making the room more precious. A fireplace was a focus. There was no focus in the abyss, not really. Enki’s house had no hearth. Where magma burned in seawater it did so without colour or note. It was a volcanic heat which would burn through your craft, melt rock; it was a wellspring of life, as we shall see, but it was not fire the way fire existed at the surface; with air, the flames having shapes, volumes, and shades according to their heat.

  She had the desk moved so it stood in front of the blazing logs, and not the snowstorm. She worked on equations pertaining to the speed of duplication of microbial life. Of course she worked. It was compelling, monumental. She hardly looked up when the coffee was served at the precise hour she had requested. She did not think of the man she had met on the beach and again in the reception. She jotted notes and numbers on filing cards with a fountain pen in green ink. At the end of the week she would have a stack of cards. She would arrange the cards into an order in London and when she had transcribed what was valuable from them she would shut them in a wooden drawer of the kind formerly used in libraries. Occasionally, she took a pencil and worked through calculations on large sheets of paper.

  He knocked on her door a few minutes earlier than they had agreed; perhaps he was curious to see her at work. She let him in. He stood by the window, saying nothing, waiting for her to finish.

  She asked him to lock the door behind them, and walked down the corridor in front of him. The carpet was soft over the boards. She felt his eyes on her. She welcomed the attention. Winter was the time to be with men. Summer days were floaty, but men were engorged, blown up with themselves and oiled. A man was more engaging in the winter, more manly and available, even if he was reduced and melancholy. There came another feeling, more significant. She felt it before she reached the staircase. Time was folded tightly, it was wadded like origami, yet she had a sense that this had happened before. More precisely, that this was meant to happen at that moment.

  *

  They took lunch in the hall of mirrors. French windows ran the length of the room. In summer they opened out onto the lawns to make a veranda. Large gilt mirrors hung from an opposing cream-coloured wall, in the centre of which was a marble fireplace. The fire roared. Candlesticks flickered on the mantle. Also on the mantle was a portrait of César Ritz an
d the hotel staff in the year 1900. All of Ritz’s workers were milling about without show on the beach, the cooks still in their hats, the gardeners in shirts and braces; the sea caught in motion behind them, capturing the position of such a hotel in a patron’s life and the lives of its staff and guests. It was best described by the tired expression a home away from home. For a few days it gave its guests a quality of life that was higher than they could expect at home, because it was pared down the way some novels were pared down.

  There were so many fires burning in the hotel that day. The storm rattled the French windows. The view was bleak. It was possible to make out the pines and the dunes, but not the sea. The snow fell more thickly, furiously, covering footprints on the lawn and making pristine the land in a way that was never possible in Africa. The windows reflected the candles, larger snowflakes fell on the other side, and more logs were put on the fire. All of it came together deliciously.

  How beautiful she looked, in that wintry way of new hazards. He felt he might have a place in her life, yet it was Saturday, and he would be gone by Wednesday. A waiter moved to seat them. She felt the slightest wind through the French windows on her hand like a breath.

  ‘After you, professor,’ he said, courteously.

  She turned. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I saw your name in the register. What are you a professor of?’

  ‘Take a guess.’

  He blushed. ‘Must I?’

  ‘I’m curious.’

  ‘Music?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anthropology?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Law?’

  ‘Wrong again.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Maths. I apply mathematics to the study of life in the ocean.’ She studied his expression. There was nothing of academia about him, nothing comical. Except that he was square-jawed with strong zygomatic muscles, clean-shaven, imperial somehow, with fine blood vessels on his cheekbones; when he smiled it was as if his face was illuminated.

  He smiled. ‘You’re an oceanographer!’

  She was already spreading butter on bread. She jabbed the air with her blunt knife. ‘There’s no such discipline as oceanography,’ she said. ‘It’s just the working of sciences to whatever is in the sea.’

  ‘Or under the sea.’

  She looked up. It was strange he said that. ‘Precisely,’ she said.

  ‘Which is your ocean?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Which ocean do you like the best?’

  ‘Oh, I see. That’s easy.’ She gestured towards the windows. ‘It has to be that one – the Atlantic.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Scientifically, or otherwise?’

  ‘Otherwise, I suppose,’ he said, cautiously. He sensed he was being measured.

  ‘Well, the Atlantic links the halves of the Western world. It is the ocean of the slave trade, also of the steam ship. The sea of constant doom, the Phoenicians called it. It has the Gulf Stream. There are the colours. The greys and greens. The seabird colonies. Apart from that it’s a cold and representative body of water, dropping down to submarine mountain ranges.’

  ‘How deep?’

  ‘An average depth of 3600 metres.’

  ‘Mrs Memory!’

  ‘The 39 Steps?’

  ‘Like I say, Mrs Memory.’

  She laughed gaily. ‘What about you? What do you do?’

  He answered in an instant. He did not want her to guess. ‘I consult on water projects in Africa.’

  ‘A charitable man.’

  ‘For the British government,’ he added.

  ‘So you live in Africa?’

  ‘In Nairobi.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  One of the first things he had been taught in the intelligence service was how to push conversation away from the realities of the job. He did not speak to her in detail about his cover as a water consultant, only of his genuine impressions of Africa. He described to her his garden in Muthaiga – the hanging flowers, the pool, the way the tree trunks turned vermilion with ants after rain, his housekeeper, his cook, and elderly gardener. He made it clear he lived alone. Then, matching the polarity of the day, he told her a story of how he had ridden a polo pony into Nairobi’s Ngong forest in the half-light and had seen a stolen car engine hoisted high in the tree, a monkey sitting on it, the ropes creaking, the metal like a nest, and he explained to her the reason there were so many hyenas in the forest.

  ‘The poorest people in the Kibera slum can’t afford a coffin, so they carry their dead into the forest at night and bury them with a short ceremony under the stump of a mugoma tree. Unthinkingly, they feed the hyenas.’

  He went on to explain, as best he could, that although those doing the burying were Luos, originally from Lake Victoria, the rough treatment given to the pauper corpses by the hyenas was similar to a death rite of the Kikuyu, last recorded in 1970, in which a dying man or woman was pushed into a grass hut the size of a hutch, with an opening at either side, one for pushing the nearly dead relative in, the other for the hyena to drag the fresh body out.

  ‘Time is compressed there,’ he said. ‘Kenya has gone in a couple of centuries from some ancient and unwritten place to a hinterland for Arab traders and slavers, to a blank on a map which the white hunters explored, then, hey ho, a colony. Now it’s the Republic of Kenya, a country which doubles its population every generation.’

  She appeared to be fascinated. ‘There must be people alive who remember the hyena death rites,’ she said.

  ‘My cook’s grandmother was eaten by hyenas.’

  ‘No!’

  Emboldened, he went on to tell her it was only a generation since the death of the Danish writer Countess Blixen – Karen Blixen – in her seaside manor on the Zealand coast north of Copenhagen. She who had grandly considered her coffee estate at the edge of Nairobi as an eighteenth-century English landscape, in which there was an abundance of horses, dogs, servants – and lions – but never any money.

  ‘The night in Nairobi is like a river,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s deep and treacherous in the way of African rivers, you can’t see into it, you have no idea where the crocodiles are, or where the rapids run. It has its own lustre.’

  She gave nothing back to his stories. Perhaps she was just guarded. She knew nothing of development work or consultancies. It was said she was worldly. Well, she was worldly in wealth, and had been worldly enough in the toilet stalls of nightclubs, but she was not properly worldly. She had not come into contact with the poor. She was spoilt, like her mother. Her instinct was for refinement – of literature, fashion, cuisine – refinement of everything really, and what could not be refined was not worth having. Could poverty be refined? She did not think so. On her visits to Australia she headed to the galleries in Sydney. These days, Manly was seamy enough for her. She had been taken to Flinders Island, which had been named for her paternal forebear. Despite her father’s insistence, she had never visited an Aboriginal community in Australia or shown any interest in indiginous culture, except in so far as to use its images and textiles to garland her life. She was a woman with slave ancestry, yet she was prejudiced against Africa as a continent without research universities. Aside from a trip to Cape Town she had only been to Africa once, on an oceanographic research vessel that had anchored off the coast of Senegal. They had motored ashore in great excitement, but the village they arrived at had left her embarrassed. The village women gathered around her and asked her to speak on their behalf. They recognised her. She felt found out. It was not about skin colour; that was of no importance. It was a sudden sense of community, a rusticity which complicated her metropolitan identity.

  That is not to say she was porcellaneous. She was rather the opposite: physically and emotionally hard to break; generous, weighted, in no way translucent. She preferred to be defined as a scientist. She felt she had contained within her an understanding of
a greater polarity than that which James described between the rich and poor in Nairobi, and still larger than the contrast which existed that winter afternoon between the candlelit mirrored room in the hotel and the snows outside. What was it? It was the division between life on the surface of the world and the life she studied in the Hadal deep; light and dark, air and water, the breathing and the drowned. She almost wanted to say it was the division between the saved and the damned, but, no, that was not right.

  When he coaxed her, she spoke quietly about the Hotel Atlantic. She said she had been coming to the hotel for several years.

  ‘I even know why Asturian stew is on the menu.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A peasant dish made of pork shoulder, sausage and beans.’ She related the story the hotel manager had told her: ‘A Spanish nobleman in the court of Alfonso XIII staying here before the First World War challenged a Russian to a game of chess using life-sized pieces. These two men stood on separate balconies overlooking the lawn and commanded the chess pieces, which were made up of serving girls, farm labourers, and children from the village on the other side of the wood – all dressed in costume and standing for hours on their required squares. It was in autumn. Cold. The Spaniard played white and the Russian black. They wagered large bets on the outcome and on the taking of certain pieces with certain other pieces: a knight taking a rook was worth a motor car, for example. Cider was served to the pieces. Naturally, as the afternoon wore on, a fight broke out between opposing rooks, the one running after the other, scattering the pawns, and a bishop had to intervene. The game went on late into the evening. When the pieces were taken, they were given a few francs for their trouble and a bowl of Asturian stew on the Spaniard’s account to warm up.’