Griefwork Read online

  ‘In any case how very beautiful she is as she sits by the fire with the dancing flamelight on the side of her head! Why doesn’t she turn on the chandelier? But she doesn’t and the room gets darker and the flames leap about the bulbous shoulders of the teapot and her face stares over and over the rim of her cup as she thinks of him. She’s sublime and belongs elsewhere. Being a lotus I feel close to her since I do, too.’

  Four

  When the sun melted the snow on the Palm House roof the moon refroze its edges into a crenellated coastline which ebbed away down the glass until snow fell again. There was a moment in early afternoon when the rays lacked sufficient heat to gnaw any further and the day’s new boundaries were complete. On one particular afternoon sunlight blazed the fringes of its map into gold filigree and fell through as topaz rain into the princess’s hair as she walked the length of the aisle. Leon was wandering about looking at vistas, at juxtapositions, discontented with a chance massing of too many dark greens at the jade vine’s foot. Harmony, balance; the plants’ disposition was critical to their overall effect, and their overall effect might elevate an interesting collection into a work of art. Passing the young tamarind he laid an encouraging hand on a branch and was at once distracted by the approach of the princess’s aureoled figure. At the sight of her youthful Asian face in its golden nimbus his heart staggered momentarily beneath the weight of memory. When she said ‘I may be going away, but first …’ it seemed to fly apart and, riding on a fragment, he was carried back to 1928 and found himself on the beach with Cou Min staring helplessly at where a splash of dried seawater had left, like the evidence of tears, a floury patch of crystals on the delicate skin between her earlobe and cheek. The whole story could be contained in one short summer of nine weeks, in which time the thin boy with the fishy dungarees had suffered the other pole of his life to be fixed. By the end he was the complete human being, a little celestial body wobbling bravely on its twin axes of loss and longing.

  The arrival in Flinn of a Dutch fisheries expert had greatly excited the townlet. Extravagance of any sort entered neither the lives nor thoughts of its inhabitants, with their dour muling and muted dolour. The spectacle presented by Dr Koog was of royalty. They were not to perceive that the prodigious limousine in which he drew up outside the inn was a battered maroon shooting-brake, a vast jalopy disgorging an exotic retinue, chests and coffers of treasure and fine raiment and finally Dr Koog himself, a gentleman of aristocratic mien with muttonchop whiskers, a high white collar with rounded points and a crimson tie which lit up the square. It was some time before the townsfolk could see the car for what it was and the treasure chests as a collection of scuffed cabin trunks and leather boxes full of oilskins and scientific equipment – epibenthic nets, nests of circular sieves, microscopes and Nansen bottles. By then the boys were referring to Dr Koog’s whiskers (strictly among themselves) as ‘bugger’s grips’ and his exotic retinue had resolved itself into Mrs Koog – a dumpy lady with a gay laugh – and two foreigners who acted as servants. These were from one of the Dutch colonies, Bali or Java or somewhere like that, a mother and daughter presumably acquired as one acquired a tan, in the course of government service or private enterprise. The inn door finally closed behind them, the car’s engine ticked as it cooled, and three or four urchins too young to be intimidated squatted by the chromium hubcaps and fell into hysterical giggling pleasure at the sight of their own distorted faces and bulbous tongues.

  Leon, on his way home from an errand, had been as diverted by this magnificent arrival as everyone else until he saw the servant’s daughter. In that moment he became possessed, wholly taken over by an inflooding of such amazement he could scarcely breathe. His very blood forgot to circulate. He even stopped coughing. Blessed the young to whose diary pages – scribbled in tears and pry-proof code – come doomed and wistful words like ‘unattainable’ which their hearts refuse to take seriously. In their imaginings the attainment is ever-present and any day now will be happening. To fall in love on the instant so that it has the effect of everything collapsing at once drenches the rest of time, or at least the rest of that summer, with a vibrating unreality. Certain migraine sufferers have advance warning of an attack when a shimmer appears above objects or haloes them entirely. Others are also filled with a strange exaltation despite knowing that it always leads to a darkened room and a shattering ache. The rest of that afternoon shuddered about Leon in just such a way as he went home along the track across the polder. Without warning his life had fallen into pre-today and post-today. A singleminded canniness of devotion was born which began at once to plan tomorrow. Unreality supervened again the moment he went to bed that night. As he lay in the darkness he scarcely noticed the lighthouse flipping its spurts of light across his curtains. He was in thrall for the first time to the addictive incense which rises from a pillow receiving confession. Her face was as close as the inside of his own eyelids yet beyond his reach. Try as he might he couldn’t get her beloved physiognomy into focus. It had been more than a glimpse he had had of her, too. He had gorged his eyes as she carried boxes and bags and rugs between shooting-brake and inn while he stood not five feet away. He clearly retained the impression of black eyes, of skin the colour of the honey Wim’s mother made, of a cheek flat or infinitesimally hollowed so it contained the merest wisp of diagonal shading such that the backs of his fingers might have smoothed it away. But he couldn’t fix her features. The harder he tried the more they skidded off and congealed into those of the tobacconist’s daughter whom he loathed, even (God help him) of the tobacconist himself. Exasperated by his own disloyalty and by the perverse waywardness of his memory he fell eventually out of unreal waking into real sleep. When he awoke with a yielding tingle of instant recall at the change which had come into his life the lighthouse’s beams were already invisible on the paling curtains and his mind was made up.

  Putting on his cleanest clothes he ran downstairs, wrenched his bicycle from its shed and pedalled into Flinn. There he presented himself at the inn to learn what he could and, before timidity and resignation could get the better of him, to offer himself. As what? As anything: drudge, messenger, lover, car cleaner, boat rental expert, lifetime companion, slave. The first thing he learned from the innkeeper, quite forcefully, was that it was barely six o’clock and a gentleman like Dr Koog was hardly likely to be afoot after the previous day’s long journey. Afoot, afoot, afoot; Leon morosely hopped down the inn’s three steps and sat with presumption and temerity on the great car’s running-board, leaning his head against the cover of the spare wheel half recessed into the wing and gazing up at the shuttered and curtained windows. The innkeeper came out and told him to take his reeking bum off guests’ property. So he went down to the little harbour and sat on the jetty instead and watched fishermen unloading withy creels of flatfish and herring, haddock and gurnard while a summer morning crystallised around him. The early sun did its best to squeeze from the glittering grey North Sea a suggestion of tropic tints so that flashes of green and violet leapt from the lit edges of taupe sills, lapsed and collapsed in time with his heart.

  To telescope judiciously, to haste things on: at ten to nine that morning Dr Koog engaged him as an ‘experimental assistant’, the august lineaments of which title concealed the outlines of a dogsbody. He would be responsible for carrying equipment down to the boat and back up again, for cleaning it, repairing torn nets and performing such other tasks as might crop up. Dr Koog was friendly and had renounced his imperial collar and tie for an open-necked soft shirt. As he talked Leon’s eyes wandered, trying to see around the man of science so as to catch a glimpse of the girl descending the stairs. He was unlucky in this but went home with a lifting sense of enterprise and success. By a legitimate ruse he had brought himself into the orbit of his beloved object (whom he couldn’t yet name) and so fully had he embraced his new persona an oddness never struck him: that roughly eighteen hours ago he had never heard of Dr Koog nor tried to find buried in his pillow the face
of a Javanese servant girl. But the next morning when he started work he saw her outside the inn, coming down the steps behind Mrs Koog. At the time he was talking to someone and his mouth continued to speak as he fixed for ever her red dress, her fledgling breasts mere hints beneath a white organdie bertha. That was how her face looked, framed by raven hair gathered in a thick glossy plait tied with a blue ribbon. That was how her fractionally plumper lower lip protruded as her heels elastically bumped each step to show she was fourteen and not twenty-four, just enough left of the child to make coming slowly down three steps less than a prosaic affair.

  ‘… about hiring a suitable boat?’

  ‘What? Sorry, sir, I didn’t …’, for it was apparently Dr Koog himself to whom he was talking.

  The scientist raised a hand cheerily towards the retreating backs. ‘My wife’s off to do her shopping and we’ve no time to waste. She’s on holiday. I’m not. Find a boat, get started, that’s the thing. Know anything about fish?’

  ‘My uncle’s a fisherman, sir. I help him smoke the catches, mend the nets, stuff like that.’

  ‘Know how to tell a fish’s age?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Sex?’

  ‘You mean like cock fish and hen fish, milt and roes?’

  ‘That’s it. Perhaps I’d better explain what I’m up to. The governments of all the countries which have North Sea coastlines want to find out more about the way fish breed, where they lay their eggs, what they eat, what makes a good breeding season, where they go when they migrate. That sort of thing. Once we know, we may be able to improve our fishing practices. At the moment we’re taking far too many young fish and certain varieties are becoming scarce, as I’m sure you’ll have noticed. Some areas are badly over-fished. There are limits to what we can go on taking and taking, year after year. If it was on land we’d say the animals were being hunted out. Not the least of our problems is that we know next to nothing about fish. Now, a boat. With an engine. There’s one we might use lying away in Holland and I can always get that but I thought maybe we’d try for something local first.’ Dr Koog had already steered Leon down to the jetty. His breezy energy was contagious and the boy felt there was nothing he couldn’t arrange, no obstacle he mightn’t overcome. With a man like Dr Koog behind him he was sure that getting to know the daughter of his wife’s maid would be a pretty straightforward affair.

  After some enquiries and haggling a suitable boat was engaged, a steam smack which had seen better days, and Leon’s aestas mirabile was launched and under way. In some respects the doctor was scarcely less marvellous than the girl. He clearly believed that since Leon had volunteered for the job he might as well learn from it. He took the trouble to explain whatever he was doing and encouraged the boy to ask his own questions. They spent roughly half each week at sea, generally day excursions but now and then going out at night. The rest of the time Leon was his lab. assistant. Koog turned one of the inn’s attics into a makeshift laboratory suitable for sorting and classifying specimens, preparing slides, writing up notes. It opened up a world the boy could never have imagined. He was proud of his dexterity with a knife and could split and gut a herring in a neat double movement, but Koog was less impressed by this skill than by a casual aside of Leon’s that he sometimes put his head in the sea and listened to the fish. In the first instance the doctor showed him how to perform a simple dissection and explained a fish’s basic anatomy, since like many fisher-folk the boy was utterly familiar with the creatures and almost entirely ignorant of them. In the second he questioned Leon closely about what he thought the sounds were that he heard, and whatever had made him listen in the first place? Leon blushed and begged him not to mention it to anybody since the villagers already thought him peculiar enough. Unfortunately he couldn’t identify specific creatures by their sounds but only knew the sounds were there. What was more, although at one time or another he had seen most of the species around these coasts his ability to name all but the commonest was slight, and even those he often knew only by their local names. All varieties of squid, cuttlefish and octopus were referred to as ‘stickers’, for example. They were winged stickers, bony stickers and round stickers. Dr Koog listened attentively and then with the aid of the specimens they caught and the illustrations in textbooks (such books! such pictures!) showed him how very different each was, with different abilities and habitats. He soon saw that the creatures of the sea were as subtly diverse as the plants he so minutely discriminated, that the crude commercial relations he had with them disguised everything which made them interesting. The revelation lay in his grasping the idea of an unsubjective taxonomy. The private method he had devised for classifying natural things evidently had a parallel. All unbeknownst to him science had been assorting them according to criteria he would never have hit on in a million years, fitting them neatly into trees or setting them on the rungs of ladders so it became possible to trace an orderly relationship between everything.

  While all this was going on he had made other discoveries. The girl’s name was Cou Min – at least, that was how it sounded. She was half Chinese, half East Indian. On his recent travels to those parts of Asia Dr Koog had been accompanied by his wife who, owing to an attack of malaria, had been too ill to return to Holland in time to give birth. The infant was stillborn and Cou Min’s mother had devotedly nursed Mrs Koog and, both husband and wife were convinced, had saved her life where the local Dutch doctor was evidently failing. In recognition they had offered the woman a permanent position as Mrs Koog’s private maid, a post she had been only too glad to accept since her own husband now lay in a cemetery in Batavia. There was another thing Leon learned which made him gloomy indeed, which was that Cou Min spoke only Chinese and a Malay dialect. Her mother communicated with the Koogs in kitchen Dutch as opaque to Leon as Chinese itself; her shopping expeditions must have been a fine linguistic gallimaufry. Of the entire household only multilingual Dr Koog could converse with his new assistant with complete ease.

  This frustration was made worse since, to give the girl pleasure, Koog would sometimes invite her on his field trips. To judge from her evident enjoyment and lack of fear she was perfectly familiar with the sea, though not with one as cold. She would sit on a coil of rope bundled up in thick clothing while her eyes took in everything. Whenever Leon’s met hers he experienced an eviscerating pang. He would contrive to sit beside her and judiciously exaggerate the sea’s motion so his body bumped against hers, at which he flashed her an easy smile of apology behind which a raving yell of hopeless love was bitten back. Once when they were delayed by a lost net it was past ten at night when they turned for home and as light left the sky and dark welled up from the sea his hand, after some minutes’ stealthy manoeuvring, fell against hers and with a soft involuntary exhalation he kept it there, or it stayed and held hers of its own accord, being clearer in its intentions than its owner was. This breathless moment prolonged itself while she didn’t stiffen or object or draw hers away. And then gradually her not drawing it away became sheer passivity and he could no longer pretend this was the demureness of a young goddess but some paralysing inertia or indifference with, maybe, deep cultural roots. He didn’t let go, of course, since any contact on any terms feeds lonely hours and days of a lover’s life, sustains dreams, quickens the air. At first he had kept his face averted but later looked into hers, puzzled, and found the dim oval likewise turned to him. But the eyes remained invisible, their expression unreadable until they neared land enough for the lighthouse to sweep its double flash across, in whose brief exposures he believed he saw a smile.

  But the weeks passed and by broad daylight he read the same ghastly benevolence about the mouth whose contours his own had sought in the plump creases of his pillow, and in her eyes his own beseechingly caught the mere evidence of uncommitted liveliness. Her glances were everywhere, frank and inquisitive, young girl in a foreign land; and wearily it seemed to him she cast the same expression on a bag of cherries, the innkeeper’s dog, the
contents of one of her master’s newly hauled-up dredges, as she did on him. Leon tried using Koog as an innocent interpreter, having him ask her if she were cold, if there were fish like this in her country, whether she went to school. Although some of the questions got through, Koog had a habit of answering them for her, absently, and such replies as he did extract were probably modified by their passage through the same indifferent filter. Leon thought the doctor wasn’t especially protecting her; it obviously never entered his head that she was anything but a child, and a native one at that, towards whom nobody could feel anything other than the vague and undifferentiating kindness due all children. Certainly he seemed not to notice the wandering of his assistant’s attention whenever Cou Min was present, nor see his trembling fingers as evidence of strain rather than debility.

  ‘That’s a nasty cough,’ he would say as Leon was bent double by formalin fumes and could feel the scientist’s eyes counting the line of vertebrae knobs beneath his shirt. ‘We must get some weight on you.’ But this, too, was vaguely said and the zooplankton in the water column soon rose up again and regained his attention.