Callimbia looks towards the Mediterranean, from whence comes almost everything that matters, and turns its back upon the continent of which it is a part. Neither Callimbians nor indeed anyone else knows much about that continent except that it is the source of various interesting trade products ranging from human beings to the spare parts of large unknown animals. The desert, for most Callimbians, is a tedious no-go area out of which arrive oddly spoken nomadic folk with whom you can sometimes do good business. Whence they come, and where they go, is not a matter of any great concern. The coastal Callimbian, busy with the cultivation of vines, olives, oranges and the rest of it, keenly aware of the advantages of metropolitan life, locked into a complex commercial network, is not much exercised about the wider world. A map is a question of how long it takes to get from A to B given a fair wind or decent travelling conditions. A Callimbian has an excellent sense of direction and distance, and an acute eye for topographical detail. Callimbians do not easily get lost, but they have no idea where they are. There is here and there is an elsewhere of unguessable nature and proportions, out of which strangers arrive, talking peculiar languages, queerly dressed, and inspiring panic or cautious interest according to their apparent intentions. It might be necessary to kill them before they kill you, or it might be wiser to act in a propitiatory way from the start, or it might simply be a question of settling down to some productive commercial negotiation. Whichever is the case, there is neither the time nor the inclination for exhaustive inquiry into their home lifestyle or how they got to Callimbia. Those Callimbians who travel do indeed bring back colourful accounts of foreign parts, but these tend to concentrate on climates of belief, political circumstances and the inevitable and abiding question of economic opportunity. They do not contribute to an understanding of global affairs. Globe? What globe?
The globe is a reality. But it is also a concept – one which has not yet arrived in Callimbia. Beyond the coastal fringe Africa reaches away, biding its time. Across the Mediterranean, Europe is already boiling up nicely. The Callimbians, landed with their Turkish masters, settle down to colonial status. And what, after all, is a Callimbian? A Callimbian is a racial pot-pourri, a walking genetic soup whose ancestry is a spiderweb of intricate connections the result of which may be skin the colour of honey, or purple-black like a plum, eyes from a Byzantine icon, or blue as the ocean, hair that is crinkled or that flows straight as water. A Callimbian is the living manifestation of everything that has happened here, a testimony to history, the proof of the past – every bit as much as the fort and the harbour ramparts and the ruins of Berenice’s palace. A Callimbian is a wonder, in short. But nobody sees it thus, least of all, probably, the living testimonies themselves, who must get on with fishing, harvesting, labouring, buying and selling, and performing, for the moment, as compliant citizens of the Ottoman Empire.
9
Howard
Howard met Vivien because he fell from a borrowed step-ladder and broke his kneecap. When he was sufficiently mobile, he was referred by his doctor to the Physiotherapy Department of the local hospital, where he found himself doing skipping and running exercises next in line to Vivien, who had incurred a similar injury after pitching down a flight of stairs. It seemed a natural progression to have a cup of coffee together afterwards in the hospital canteen, and to do so again the following week, and the one after that. Howard was flattered by Vivien’s matter-of-fact annexation of him, which he took for sexual attraction or intellectual affinity or even, he hoped, both. She was a dark wiry woman a few years older than he was, with large mild brown eyes which she would turn on him with initially disturbing effect. In fact both the mildness and the attention were deceptive, as he was later to realize, but during those first weeks he found her both comforting and enhancing. Someone was interested in him; someone was seeking him out. She worked as a librarian for an institution with academic connections, an occupation of which she made much at the start of their acquaintance (‘We’re in the same trade, in a sense, then …’), though he was soon to discover that her attitude to the place and its concerns was one of contemptuous indifference. But in the beginning it was a bridge; she took him to a reception for a visiting African novelist, he took her to a lecture and drinks party in the college. Before Howard had time to analyse and assess what was going on, they were seeing each other several times a week and making love (if that was what it was). Within months Vivien had moved into his flat and within further months he had sold it and they had bought a larger one on a joint mortgage. He never did know quite how it had happened. He could recall no discussions or decisions; the whole process had been an imperceptible slide into an apparently irrevocable situation.
It was not like the Celia episode. For one thing, it was never an episode, but of course at the beginning there was no knowing that the relationship had this protracted destiny. For all Howard knew, it was a casual and experimental friendship. He was quite attracted to Vivien, but he never really felt in love with her. Vivien herself avoided definition and discussion – as he was later to realize. She simply moved ahead in a series of unspoken assumptions, the effect of which was to compress the normal sequences of a relationship. They seemed to progress in one leap from the opening rounds of courtship to the stale conjunction of a marriage which had long ago run out of steam. Vivien referred to him as her partner, an expression Howard detested. He never found any satisfactory term for her: girlfriend seemed derogatory for a woman in her late thirties. He was reduced to the circumlocution of ‘the person I share a flat with’, which contained an ambiguity about sexual orientation, but woman, in this context, sounded faintly patronizing. It is a loaded word, he realized – volatile, and to be used with caution. He found this interesting and tried to discuss it with Vivien, who said impatiently that she didn’t know what he was talking about. She often said that.
Vivien liked to talk, but only about certain things. She was at her most expansive in introspective analysis of her own antecedents and personality, and in similar inspection and criticism of Howard’s behaviour and motivation. She intensely disliked abstract discussion and was quite incurious. There was nothing in which she was particularly interested. She was mildly fanatical about health and fitness, and spent her spare time attending health clubs and swimming baths. To begin with, she wanted Howard to join her and was put out when he declined with increasing firmness; suddenly she gave up, and contented herself with occasional sniping comments about how flabby he was getting. It was his only victory, he later saw, the one area of his life that he kept intact. This was important and possibly his salvation, for it meant increasingly that while Vivien jogged, worked out and swam, Howard worked.
He worked compulsively, during the years with Vivien. He would have done so anyway, in all probability, such were the demands of his teaching load. If he was to pursue his studies, he had to do so at weekends and throughout the vacations. But he was also seeking an immersion in his own preoccupations as an escape from the stagnant alliance to which he was apparently condemned. He knew that he must eventually do something about it, but shirked the necessary confrontation. In the meantime he retreated into the impartial climate of the Burgess Shale, and dissipated his energies in brooding communion with his private alternative universe of faunas. He cherished this solace – the absolute detachment of dissection, when he became simply an eye and a hand, conscious of nothing except the problems posed by the organisms that he exposed, layer by layer, his mind concentrated entirely upon the teasing structure of an animal frozen into a confused mass of component parts. He welcomed also the process of description - the search for language of the right precision and concision to establish on the page the creature that he had reconstructed. At these moments, he became simply the mechanism whereby the animal was rescued from oblivion, the engine of intelligence and curiosity which made this possible. The whole exercise satisfactorily eclipsed the travails of his private life.
Vivien treated his absorption with irritated amusement. He had d
escribed some of the Burgess fossils to her, and had shown her drawings, which did arouse a positive reaction, but not one which pleased him. She found them funny: ‘I never saw such ludicrous things in my life!’ The implications of this diversity were apparently lost on her, however much he tried to explain. ‘Howard spends his time digging weird cartoon insects out of bits of rock,’ she told people. He saw that along with her incuriosity went a lack of wonder, an incapacity to be astonished. Also, she could not conceive of work which was a compelling pleasure. For her, as for most people, there was an absolute demarcation between the time necessarily spent earning a living and leisure time. It was thus impossible to work voluntarily; if you did a thing voluntarily, then it could not be work. Hence she had a basic conceptual problem with Howard’s tendency to work outside what she saw as official working hours. Was this work or some eccentric form of play? Eventually he fed her the notion that these endeavours were essential to gain promotion (in which there was an element of truth). She accepted this, and left him alone with a kind of patronizing tolerance.
From time to time he made attempts to tackle the situation. He did not love her; nor could he suppose, from her behaviour, that she loved him. She treated him with irritable brusqueness, most of the time. Their conversation had deteriorated to a sequence of hurried exchanges about bills, shopping and other necessary arrangements. They rarely made excursions together, or entertained friends. When they did, Vivien became visibly impatient: if out, she would glance ever more frequently at her watch and if at home would start to rattle crockery in the kitchen. She disliked social dialogue that was not inconsequential. When on one occasion a sprightly discussion developed over dinner with friends about historical inevitability, she sat in angry silence and eventually burst out, ‘What a ridiculous conversation!’
‘Why, Vivien?’ someone asked, after the initial startled silence.
‘Because it’s pointless. I mean, either things happen or they don’t. If they do, then there’s nothing to be done about it and if they don’t, then so what?’
‘But you need to know why they did or they didn’t,’ said Howard. ‘And you need to think about what may be determined and what may depend on contingency. It’s intriguing, if nothing else.’
‘Well, you may need to, but I don’t,’ snapped Vivien. ‘Honestly, I can’t tell you how silly you all sound.’ She got up and began to slam plates into a pile. The guests shifted uneasily, fell into desultory chatter and soon the evening broke up. Later, Vivien was contrite.
‘I’m sorry – it’s just that those people were getting on my nerves. Yammering on about history, if you please, as though we were back at school.’
‘A not uninteresting subject,’ said Howard coldly.
‘And that fair girl thought she was being so clever and original. I dare say you thought she was too.’
‘You started out saying you were sorry,’ said Howard. ‘Aren’t you rather spoiling the effect?’
That particular tiff was patched up, as were most others, more through inertia than anything. Both parties avoided real contention, Howard because he had never had a taste for rows, and Vivien probably because of an instinctive knowledge that this could be fatal. It was clear that so far as she was concerned there was no reason why they should not go on as they were indefinitely. In his glummer moments, Howard used to wonder if she honestly thought that theirs was a normal and fruitful union, or if she simply did not care.
Vivien did not want children. Babies, she explained, made her literally physically ill. And indeed Howard could see her flinch on the occasions when they came into contact with the small offspring of friends, averting her eyes from the gobbets of milk sick, the bubbles of snot, the shiny dribbles on chins. He didn’t much fancy such sights himself, but they didn’t disturb him as they did Vivien and he supposed himself to be insensitive. It didn’t occur to him to wonder how parents come to stomach this. He didn’t really know if he wanted children himself or not. It was something he never much considered. He thought perhaps he might be low on genetic drive, which was interesting but did not worry him unduly.
He knew that he must eventually end it. Talk things out with her. Make her see that the longer they went on the more difficult it would be to break up. Suggest that it wasn’t working, that neither of them was happy, that both might reasonably hope for some more satisfactory arrangement. He knew this, and continued to do nothing.
A good deal of his time, and much of his emotional energy, was spent in the quest for funding for field trips and the creation of opportunities for these. He often thought that without them he would have sunk into a condition of apathetic desperation, during those years. He pitied colleagues in disciplines which chained them for ever to the lecture room, the library and the desk. His own life was spiced with those heady periods when he could return to the source of his preoccupation, to the rocks themselves. It was one thing to see the detail and complexity of an organism shine up at him from the floodlit landscape of the microscope, but quite another to sit on a windy mountainside and expose the creature in the very strata in which it had perished, the perfect union of time and space. The thrill and triumph of discovery never diminished, and nor did the frisson of reluctance with which he interrupted this harmony. A fossil has no scientific value until examined and annotated under laboratory conditions, but it has lost then that freight of implication and association. It is no longer locked into its amazing, emotive and exquisite unity of rock, wind and water – life that has vanished but remains eternally present, the ultimate proof of the past, the revelation of which unites the moment of discovery and that dimly perceived, unimaginably distant world sealed into the rock. At such times, holding in his hand the slab in which hung the Marrella or the Aysheaia, Howard felt both exultant and tranquil. He would pore over the specimen, feeling the wind, the sun, the formation of the ground under his feet, and his own problems and concerns would be wonderfully diminished. Nothing else, for the moment, mattered – and the moment itself was of such perfection and such clarity that it became imperishable, like the specimen he held. In his head there would remain a shining succession of such moments, polished by the act of recollection, precarious but indestructible.
She said, ‘Something most odd is happening. I don’t feel as though we were where we are any more. I feel as though we had escaped it all somehow. As though we were on another level.’
Back in London, enmeshed once more with colleagues, students and Vivien, those moments would begin to seem as unreal as another ecosystem, and as unreachable. Only the animals he studied were the link – the hard evidence that both he and they had once been elsewhere. The association invested them with a further meaning – they were private totems as well as objects of scientific importance.
Vivien treated his field trips as exercises in personal indulgence. ‘Well, have a terrific time …’ she would say, seeing him off, as though he were bound for a fortnight cavorting in the Caribbean. ‘Think of me, festering in the Institute.’ He could have suggested that she go with him, but was wise enough not to do so, and mercifully she never seemed to realize that it was feasible. Or perhaps she too knew that such an invasion of his ultimate privacy would have been catastrophic. At any rate, she neither interfered with nor objected to his departures but managed subtly to denigrate what he was doing, so that he would climb on to the aircraft feeling faintly shabby, as though he were a sales manager passing off a spree as some spurious business trip.
Curiously, it was not after one of his own absences that he knew he could no longer live with Vivien, but after she herself had been away for a few days, and he had been alone in the flat. He luxuriated. It was as though the rooms swelled, grew lighter, floated above the city. He felt as though he had broken out of some dark hole and swum free into a translucent ocean. Never had he thus savoured solitude; it was as though he had never before known it for what it was – a freedom and a peace. He spent four days in this state of buoyancy, and at the end of the fourth, as Vivien’
s return began to loom, he knew that he must not, could not, stay with her any longer.
He said he thought it would be a good idea if they had a talk.
‘About what?’ demanded Vivien, whisking about the flat, putting her things away, checking the fridge, rearranging a chair that he had moved.
About the future, he said. About where they stood.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Vivien. Her back to him, poised over a handful of mail.
He said he’d been thinking. About them. About the commitment. He’d been wondering.
‘Wondering what?’ said Vivien. Turning round. Setting down the letters.
He’d been wondering, he said, if they were entirely happy together.
And then she flared up. ‘You want to split up, don’t you? Is that what you want? Well … Is it?’ And immediately they were pitched into confrontation – none of the reasonable, measured and merciful discussion that he had intended but a precipitate assumption of positions from which there could be no retreat. He saw that it was going to be worse than his worst expectations.
He said, ‘Vivien, you don’t love me.’ She glowered at him. ‘Well, do you? You don’t. And I’m afraid I don’t love you. I think I may have done once, but I don’t now. We haven’t got any children. You don’t want any children. There really isn’t any sensible reason to go on living together and making each other miserable, is there?’
She stared at him. It was impossible to tell if she was shocked and angry, grief-stricken and angry, or just angry. Then she snapped, ‘You’re one of the stupidest people I’ve ever known, Howard.’ And slammed into the bedroom.
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