‘Collapsed water main,’ he explains, turning to open a high cupboard door. He pulls it sharply, and the edge of the door misses his forehead by an inch. ‘Going to take another week to fix it, apparently.’
‘Not surprised. You could lose a whale in that hole.’
He laughs softly. ‘Earl Grey? Industrial?’ he asks.
‘Industrial. Please,’ she replies, and his hand moves swiftly to a glass jar in the middle of the shelf.
The drilling ceases, then men are yelling instructions above the straining roar of a heavy lorry. A large machine, stationary, adds its crescendo to the noise. She leans out of the window to look down the street, where a lorry laden with broken tarmac is edging off the pavement. A digger has its claw in the depths of the trench, and is rocking on its axles as the claw scrabbles backwards and forwards.
‘So what brings you up to this part of town?’ Mr Morton shouts over his shoulder, reaching for the handle of the steaming kettle. Smoothly he brings the spout to the lip of the mug and pours, stopping when the mug is three-quarters full.
‘A friend,’ she replies. ‘She lives not far from here.’ Though there is no wrong in the lie, the smile he gives her makes her ashamed to have told it.
Behind his back he opens a drawer, from which he lifts a teaspoon. ‘Milk? Sugar?’ he asks, stirring the bag.
‘Just milk.’
‘I’ll leave that to you,’ he says, crossing the kitchen to the fridge. His hand leaps in, finds a little steel jug and passes it to her, with movements as nimble as a mail sorter’s. While she is adding the milk and getting rid of the tea bag he takes a packet of biscuits from another cupboard and spreads half a dozen of them on a saucer, in a neat arc. ‘You take these and go through,’ he says, handing her the saucer. ‘Opposite side of the hall. Right-hand door. Be with you in half a minute.’
The living room of Mr Morton’s flat is orderly and dowdy, like the rented room of someone who doesn’t intend to stay long. A sagging settee, covered in faded green fabric, faces the fireplace, exactly parallel to it. Set at a right angle to the settee and the wall, with an even gap between each, there is an armchair, once purple, now bleached by sunlight to a colour more like magenta. Facing the chair, closing the fourth side of the rectangle, the telephone and answering machine sit on a low glass and chrome table that’s placed tight against the wall, leaving a wide gap to the arm of the settee. The dining table, a heavy and dark old thing with barley-sugar legs and a battered top, has been pushed to the wall beside the door, with three chairs tucked in neatly around it, as far in as they will go, so that a broad unobstructed path leads from the door to the window. On the opposite side of the room from the fireplace, aligned squarely with the settee, stands Mr Morton’s desk. Three tape recorders, a laptop and a radio are arrayed around the computer, as neatly as the equipment in an advertisement for office furniture.
She puts the saucer on the dining table and sips at her tea, standing in the wide empty space at the centre of the room, looking at the empty brick fireplace, the flaking skirting boards, the dusty streaks on the blank white walls, the curtainless windows. She had known there wouldn’t be pictures on the walls, that Mr Morton’s flat would be unlike any other she had seen, but she had not expected this drabness, this absence of any imprint of Mr Morton’s character. Something disordered is what she had imagined, something messily professorial, with books left lying wherever his readers had put them down. But there are no books on the shelves above the desk, only some cassettes and a row of batteries. You would look at this room and have no idea what kind of person lives in it, she thinks, and then she notices, half-hidden between the desk and the outside wall, two plain cardboard boxes, on top of which lies a shallower box, lidless. Protruding above the cardboard is a small object, shiny and intensely red, the most vivid piece of colour in the room. Capitulating to curiosity, she leaves her mug on the table and goes over to the box. The object, she discovers, is a tiny tree of coral, standing amid a jumble of seashells, some of them shaped like blades, others like pebbles or fans or spiky grenades or twisted slender cones. She kneels beside the desk and picks up a conspicuously brash specimen, a plump glossy bun of a shell on which black and green and purple are mingled, as on the body of a rainbow trout. She examines its slick little gullet, where rosewater pink fades into ivory.
‘You’ve found the museum,’ Mr Morton remarks from the doorway.
Flustered, she gets to her feet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I shouldn’t –’
‘It’s all right,’ he assures her, unerringly finding the gap between the armchair and the settee.
‘I saw the piece of coral but I didn’t know what it was, and I just –’
‘It’s all right. Be my guest.’ He places his cup on the floor to the side of the armchair and comes towards her. ‘Take a look underneath. The boxes underneath. The prize exhibits are in there. Go on,’ he urges. Stopping by the window, he nods towards her feet. ‘Take a look,’ he says, smiling in anticipation of what she will see.
She puts the shallow box on his desk, then removes the lid on which it had been resting. Inside the box, on a thick cushion of cotton wool, lies something like a huge snail shell, a delicious whorl of creamy white with wide brown stripes across it, like the stripes of a zebra. ‘Wow,’ she murmurs.
‘What you have there is a chambered nautilus,’ Mr Morton tells her. ‘Nautilus pompilius. Gorgeous, isn’t it?’ he asks, seemingly gratified by her delight at it.
‘Can I touch it?’
‘Of course. That’s what they’re here for.’
She lifts the shell from its bed and peers into its interior. Enamelled white at first sight, it changes as she angles it into the sunlight: under-colours of violet and mauve and lime green and cobalt appear, all with a silvered sheen.
‘Look in the other box,’ he says, holding out his hands to take the nautilus.
Doing as he tells her, she finds another large shell, also curled, but flat-sided and ridged and translucent white, with shadings of burnt caramel in the tightest turns of the spiral, and two rows of blunt little spines along its outer edge, similarly burnt caramel, but paler near the mouth of the shell. It looks as fragile as a bird’s egg, as if the shell might flex under her touch.
‘Go ahead,’ he encourages her. ‘Pick it up.’
She slides her hand under it and lifts it clear of the box. ‘Jesus,’ she marvels, ‘it weighs nothing.’ Now she can see the fine veins of pale grey that run across the ridges of the shell in a branching pattern that spreads out from the heart of the spiral.
‘Now that is another nautilus, the so-called Paper Nautilus. Because it looks like wrinkled parchment and is paper-thin. But they’re not related, that one and this one. Yours belongs to a dinky little octopus, zoological name Argonauta argo, but Nautilus pompilius is a different beast entirely. It’s a tentacled mollusc, a glorified whelk. One of the ocean’s legion of sniffers and gropers. And your shell isn’t really a shell – it’s an egg basket. The female argonaut makes it, lays her eggs in it and then joins them. But the shell isn’t an inseparable part of her. Whereas the nautilus is inseparable from his residence.’ He laughs, and sniffs greedily at the opening of the shell, as if at the scent of the tropical sea.
She touches her nose to the mouth of the Argonauta’s egg case and inhales the air within it, but detects only the most tenuous smell, akin to chalk dust. Now Mr Morton lowers the nautilus shell from his face and rolls it slowly in his palms, caressing the swell of it as though moulding its form in clay. His thumb moves gradually across the stripes, apparently sensing where the pigment changes from white to brown to white. He raises the shell again so that it is almost touching his cheek, and she sees his eyes moving in parallel with his thumb, tracking its movement. As she watches him the question that she has wanted to ask since the first time they spoke becomes urgent, and is perhaps permitted by the candour of his fascination with the object he is holding. ‘Mr Morton?’ she says, and from the smile he presents
to her it seems possible, even, that he knows what the question will be. ‘Can I ask you something? Something personal?’
‘If it’s something personal you’d better stop calling me Mr Morton.’
‘OK. If it’s rude and you’d rather not talk about it then tell me and I’ll shut up.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘I was wondering – I’ve been wondering – what you can see. I mean, can you make out the shape? Or the pattern?’
‘No,’ he replies, cheerfully, as if the question were slight. ‘No shape, no pattern. I can’t see a sausage. Not any more.’
‘You used to?’
‘Never very well. But yes, there used to be something. A murk.’
‘And now it’s total blackness?’ she asks, hoping that she sounds inquisitive rather than horrified.
‘Not blackness, no. The sensation of blackness is a sensation of sight, but I’m perfectly sightless. Sight is a sense I don’t have. It might be nice to see blackness now and again,’ he muses, as though blackness were a town he might like to visit, but wouldn’t be bothered if he never did.
She replaces the argonaut on its bed and takes the nautilus from Mr Morton. ‘I can’t imagine what it’s like to see nothing,’ she says, closing the lids on the boxes. ‘I mean, to have no sight. Like I can’t really imagine being dead.’
‘Being dead is worse, I should think.’
‘Yes, but, of course. It’s not. I’m not saying I think it’s the same,’ she stammers, stacking the boxes as she found them, already regretting that she hadn’t kept quiet, but obliged to carry on, to talk herself out of embarrassment. ‘All I meant was that it must be terrible,’ she says, but this sounds obtuse and banal.
Yet Mr Morton is still smiling towards her. ‘Less terrible than you’d imagine, I’d have thought,’ he says. ‘It has its compensations. For one thing, it does bring a kind of clarity. It can concentrate the mind remarkably. Less interference, you see? That’s why Democritus of Abdera – you know Democritus?’
‘No.’
‘Greek philosopher. Fifth, fourth century BC.’
‘Right.’
‘That’s why he blinded himself. So as not to be distracted by the spectacle of the world. Or so it’s said. A rather extreme measure, if you ask me. Given the choice, I’d prefer to struggle with distraction. But I can see his point,’ he says with no bitterness in his voice and none in his face. ‘And’, he goes on, with a gracious tilt of his head, seeming to intuit her difficulty in finding something appropriate to say, ‘one does tend to meet a better class of person. Blindness weeds out the time-wasters. Only people who want to talk to you do talk to you. And if I’m bored, of course, I can go walkabout, mentally, without giving the game away. As you can see, I’ve mastered the Easter Island statue routine,’ he says proudly, setting his features into an expression of inscrutable rigidity. ‘Let’s sit down,’ he proposes, and he walks over to the armchair, gesturing her towards the settee.
‘Just getting my tea,’ she tells him, going to the table.
‘Of course,’ says Mr Morton. Sitting in the armchair, he reaches down for his cup. ‘Where are the biscuits?’ he asks.
‘Here,’ she replies, standing beside him, shaking the saucer an inch from his hand, and his fingers lift a biscuit cleanly from the saucer and balance it on the arm of the armchair.
As she sits on the settee a loud burst of drilling begins. ‘Sonatina for pneumatic trio,’ Mr Morton remarks, directing his eyes at the window. She listens, but cannot be sure that there are three separate elements to the noise. Waiting for the drilling to end she sips her tea, and Mr Morton, facing her, sips his too, with an expression that suggests he will speak as soon as the din has stopped, and she is sure that he is going to say something about her father. ‘I’ve brought a paper with me,’ she says. ‘Shall I read you the main stories?’
‘No rush, no rush,’ he says, against another hammering chorus. He places his empty cup on the floor, exactly where it was. Patiently he waits, his hands folded in his lap, and when the street becomes quiet again he turns to her and asks, keenly, as if their afternoon were only now beginning: ‘So how are you, Stephanie? How have you been?’
‘I’m well,’ she says truthfully. ‘I’m very well.’
‘How’s The Idiot?’
‘Finished it.’
‘Good. Still perplexed?’
‘Yep.’
‘But loved it?’
‘Yep.’
‘Excellent,’ he smiles, and before she can suggest again that she might read the paper to him he asks: ‘And what else have you been doing since last we met? Anything special?’
‘Not really,’ she says, but then it occurs to her that her father might have told him of their plan to meet in town, definitely would have told him, if they have spoken in the last couple of days. After she phoned him this morning, Mr Morton might have phoned her father and told him she was coming, and if that were so then it would be better simply to tell him about their hour on Charing Cross Road, so she tells him about it, and makes the time she spent with her father sound more enjoyable than it actually was, perhaps because she wishes to please Mr Morton, and perhaps because she wants to finish the episode quickly, to offer nothing that might prompt a discussion, but then she is reminded that her father might have revealed to him that she is going back to the Oak, and so she should tell him about that as well.
They talk about the hotel, and it is the hotel itself that they talk about, rather than her father and where he works. Mr Morton describes the garden, a place more profuse, more spacious, more maze-like than the reality; he describes the hall, in his imagination a vast pit of air; the Randall Room, in Mr Morton’s mind, is a room from a palace. ‘Did your father give you the story?’ he asks. ‘Of the paintings?’
‘No,’ she replies.
‘It’s a touching tale. About the artist and a woman called Lily.’
‘Tell me.’
‘No, you ask him. He tells it well.’ He pauses, seeming to recall a piquant detail of the story. ‘I think he’s something of a romantic, your father,’ he says, and he smiles at her scepticism, though she hasn’t made a sound.
Lying in bed, having abandoned Stadler for the night, Edward lifts from the table the shell of the Paper Nautilus, the Argonauta argo, the first present that Claudia gave him. A guitar jangles in the house next door. Turning the fragile shell on his fingertips, he imagines himself as a necromancer in his cell, transmitting a spell onto his enemy, but the thought of his neighbour recedes quickly, displaced by the shapes and textures he is reading with his hands. He drags a finger lightly along the notches of the narrow keel, runs a thumb over the pleated walls. It is like a steep-sided bonnet of light bulb glass, he tells himself, a whimsical helmet of thin glass. With the pad of a forefinger he wipes the shell’s inner face and it is like touching a rippled mirror. The elder Pliny, Claudia told him, describes the animal he calls the nautilus rowing on the water with its tentacles and catching the wind in a sail of skin stretched between two of its limbs. Thus it journeys over the sea, and when it senses danger it furls its sail and turns its shell to flood itself, and sinks to the seabed, scuppered. The boat to which Pliny compared the nautilus, he recalls, was called a liburna, a type of galley. A police car, its siren pulsing, approaches at speed, pursued by another police car, right behind, and then the neighbour’s music is again the foreground. He reaches for his watch and flips the face up: it’s past eleven o’clock; for more than an hour now, non-stop, it’s been the Rolling Stones.
He packs the earpiece tightly into his ears, and turns on the tape. ‘The smooth shell’, says Claudia, ‘is Nautilus pompilius, the creature that I study most. The shell is a most beautiful thing, to touch as well as to see, I hope you will find. The creature inside the shell is not beautiful, but it is magnificent. The octopus has only eight tentacles. My nautilus, he has more than ninety. They are wavy tubes that look as if some person has pushed a lot of flowers into a vase, all in a mess, a
nd then has cut off the heads of the flowers, so there’s just the stalks left sticking out all over. There is a pair of eyes to the side of the tentacles, in among the roots of them, in the angle of the shell and the hood that covers its head. These eyes have no lens, so they are not very effective, but beside the eye there is an organ which is similar to chemoreceptors in other cephalopods, so we think they must be used to find its food, but the science has not been done yet. And the tentacles, we think they are also used for searching, by some sense of taste or smell. When you look at them through a microscope you see cells that could be tastebuds, but nobody has proved the function of them. That is a thing I hope to do. There is so much to learn about these animals. All day the nautilus drifts on the seabed, three hundred metres down, searching for food, very slowly. A kilometre a day is how far it travels, no more. At night it rises to shallow water, using the shell to travel upwards. It has more than thirty chambers, the shell. The nautilus lives in the outer part; the others are empty and at night the creature fills these chambers with gas and up it goes, up to the coral reefs, up up up, like a slow rocket of the ocean. And when the day comes the gas is expelled and down down down it goes, sinking slowly to the floor of the sea. They are so simple and mysterious. To see it crawling over the sand, in the depths of the sea, you are seeing something from another time – like the ocean has a door that opens into a prehistoric time and this creature has just come through it. That is why the nautilus makes me feel in a way that music makes other people feel. I have a very big emotion when I study this animal, because it has been what it is for millions and millions of years. Five hundred million years the nautilus has been in the seas. Before there were any fish with bones there were hundreds of species of nautilus, more species than almost any other creature in the ocean. Now there are just six left. Species I mean. So they are living fossils, you can say. For a long time collectors have killed them for their shells, so they are protected here, but this one was taken many years ago and is OK. I have permission for it.
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