1990 - Brazzaville Beach Read online

  After he had gone I sat down and smoked a cigarette. I had to calm down. Then I finished writing up my field notes: I described the day’s events precisely, and made no alterations to the data.

  That completed, I left my tent and walked down Main Street to Hauser’s lab. The lights were still on, I knocked and was admitted.

  “Just in time,” Hauser said. “You can take these.” He handed me my specimen bottles, rinsed clean.

  “What were the results?”

  “No trace of meat. Nothing out of the ordinary. Fruit, leaves.”

  I nodded, taking this in. “Eugene’s just been round to see me.”

  “I know,” Hauser was unperturbed. “I too thought it was a chimp at first, and I mentioned it to him in passing…So we both took a closer look.” He smiled faintly and cocked his head. “It was a baby baboon. Incontrovertibly.”

  “Funny how we both thought it was a chimp, instantly, like that.”

  “Terribly easy mistake to make.”

  “Of course.” All right, I thought, we’ll play it your way. I looked at him searchingly, directly. To his credit he didn’t flinch.

  “May I have the body, please?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why?”

  “I incinerated it two hours ago.”

  THE WAVE ALBATROSS AND THE NIGHT HERON

  I sit on Brazzaville Beach in the early morning sunshine watching two gulls fight and flap over a morsel of food—a fish head or a yam heel, I can’t make it out. They squawk and strut, their beaks clash with a sound like plastic cups being stacked.

  In the Galapagos Islands, the wave albatross mates for life. I have seen films of them smooching and petting each other like an infatuated couple out on a date. And this is no courtship ritual or opportunistic display; these two will cohabit until death intervenes.

  One of my gulls gets wise and snatches up the scrap of food and flies away with it. The other lets him go and pecks distractedly at the sand.

  In the Galapagos Islands there is another bird called the night heron. The night heron produces three chicks and then waits and watches to see which will emerge the strongest. After a week or so the strongest chick begins to attack the other two, trying to bundle them out of the nest. In the end it succeeds, the weaker chicks fall to the ground and die.

  The mother night heron sits beside the nest watching while this struggle goes on and one offspring disposes of the other two. The mother does not intervene.

  John Clearwater was a mathematician. It seemed an innocuous statement to make but, as far as Hope was concerned, that was both the root cause of his allure for her and the source of all his enormous problems. She knew he was not particularly good-looking, but then she had never been very drawn to handsome men. There was something facile and shallow about male beauty, she thought. It was too commonplace, for one thing, and thereby devalued. Everywhere she went she saw notionally ‘good-looking’ men of one type or another: men serving in shops, men eating in restaurants, men erecting scaffolding, men in suits in offices, men in uniforms at airports…There were many more good-looking men in the world than women, she reckoned. It was much much harder to find a beautiful woman.

  Clearwater was of average height but he looked stockier. He was also a little overweight when she met him, and these extra pounds added to the impression of squat solidity he gave off. He had wiry black hair, thinning at the front, that he brushed straight back. He wore unexceptionably orthodox clothes: brown sports jacket and dark grey flannels, Viyella shirts and knitted, patternless ties, but they looked absolutely right on him, she thought. There was a literally careless quality about the way he dressed, and the well-used, well-fitting nature of his clothes ignored fashion and style with a blunt panache that she found far more attractive than the most tasteful and soigne modishness.

  He had a long, straight nose and bright, pale blue eyes. She had never known anyone who smoked a cigarette so fast. His driven-back hair and his demeanour of restless hurry were both oddly exciting to her and liberating. When she was with him she felt her own potential expand to preposterous lengths. He was indifferent to the ephemera and faddiness of the world, its swank and swish. His tastes, like most people’s, were both banal and arcane, but they seemed to have developed under their own impulsion, self-generated, uninfluenced. She found that innocent confidence and self-sufficiency very enviable.

  There were disadvantages too. That self-sufficiency made him relatively incurious about her own likes and dislikes. When they did something she wanted, she always felt it was an act of politeness on his part, however much he protested the contrary. And his utter absorption in his work, which was of an abstraction so rarefied as to be vertiginous, excluded everyone, as far as she could see, apart from a handful of people in distant universities and research institutes.

  She met him, eventually, one June evening at an end-of-term faculty party. She had just collected the typescript of her PhD thesis from the typing agency and the strange joy that the sight of that ream of paper had provoked had encouraged her to drink too much. When she finally found herself face to face with Clearwater she stared at him very intently. He needed a shave—he had a heavy beard—and he looked tired. He was drinking red wine from a half-pint glass tankard filled to the brim.

  “So, what’s your racket?” he said to her, with no enthusiasm.

  “You can do better than that,” she said.

  “OK. You’ve spilt wine on your blouse.”

  “It’s not wine, it’s a brooch.”

  He leant forward a few inches to peer at the jet cameo pinned above the swell of her left breast.

  “Of course it is,” he said. “I should have brought my specs.”

  “Are you American?”

  “No, no. Sorry: “brawt”. How’s that? I spent four years at CalTech. It can damage your vowels.”

  She looked at his clothes. He could have been a prep school master in the 1930s. “I could tell you’d lived in California. All those pastel colours.”

  He looked a little taken aback, suddenly lost, as if a slang word had been used that he wasn’t familiar with. She realized that he couldn’t believe she was talking about his clothes.

  “Oh…My clothes, I see.”

  “Not exactly the cutting edge of haute couture.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not interested in clothes.”

  Under further questioning he told her that he shopped about once every five years when he tended to buy a dozen of everything—shoes, jackets, trousers. He held up a sleeve to expose a hole in the jacket elbow.

  “Actually, this is almost ten years old. Wasn’t much call for jackets in California.”

  “So what did you wear, when you lived there?”

  “Jesus Christ.” He laughed. Then he added more politely, “Ah…I don’t know. I didn’t wear jackets.”

  “What about the beach? The sun?”

  “I was working. I wasn’t on holiday. Anyway, what would I want to go to a beach for?”

  “Fun?”

  “Listen, I’m thirty-five. Time’s running out for me.”

  She laughed at this, too long, the drink making her uncontrolled. Then he started to laugh at her laughing at him. It wasn’t for a long time that she realized he had been deadly serious.

  By the end of the evening he had asked her to go out with him. He did go out, he admitted, and he did drink, in phases, usually when he was changing ‘areas of study’, as he put it. It was lucky for her, he said without any condescension, that she had caught him on the cusp.

  They had sex for the first time about a week later, in the bedroom of her flat in South Kensington. He was living in the Oxford and Cambridge Club, vaguely looking for somewhere to live within walking distance of Imperial College, where his research post was. He came back to her flat the next night and stayed, and the night after that, and stayed. After a dozen nights she offered to put him up until he could find his own place. It seemed sensible. He was still living there in S
eptember when, three months and five days after their first meeting, he asked her to marry him.

  They had been married for nearly eight weeks when Hope noticed the first change. Summer was over, autumn was well advanced. She came home one cold and frosty evening and opened a bottle of red wine.

  “Do you want a glass, Johnny?” she called.

  He came through to the kitchen.

  “No thanks,” he said. “I’ve stopped.”

  “Stopped what?”

  “The booze.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since now.”

  He opened the fridge. Hope saw what looked like half a dozen pints of milk. He poured himself a glass. He grinned at her. He seemed in an unusually good mood.

  “Got to keep my strength up.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve found it,” he said. “I know what I’m going to do next.” He made a little turning motion with his hand. “Full of amazing…The potential. The excitement.”

  She felt happy for him. At least, that was what she told herself she felt.

  “Great. What is it? Tell me.”

  “Turbulence,” he said. “Turbulence.”

  THE ZERO-SUM GAME

  Turbulence is John Clearwater’s new passion. Hope knows that his old passion, his old love for many years, was Game Theory. He spent four years at CalTech working on Game Theory: the theory of rational conflict. John Clearwater has told her a certain amount about the work he did at CalTech. He started with two-person games—two-person zero-sum games as he put it. A zero-sum game is a game where one person’s win is necessarily the other person’s loss. “Like marriage,” Hope said. “Well, no,” John said. “Marriage is a non zero-sum game. And emotions come into play. One person’s loss may not necessarily be another person’s gain.” John told her there was another factor too: he was particularly interested in games of perfect information, where there were no secrets. In these games, he said, there was always an optimum strategy. That was what he was looking for: optimum strategies. Chess is a game of perfect information, so is noughts and crosses. Games of perfect information can be infinitely complex or comparatively straightforward. The only condition was that there had to be no secrets. Poker isn’t a game of perfect information. Poker is a two-person, zero-sum game without perfect information. “Just like marriage,” Hope said. He still disagreed.

  I was ready, early the next morning, when Ian Vail came by to pick me up. There was a dirt road that took you a mile or so into the heart of the northern area. It saved a lot of time: a fifth to a quarter of my day was spent in commuting to and fro.

  As we drove off Vail told me that he had sent two of his field assistants ahead at first light with walkie-talkies to look for the chimps. With a bit of luck, he said, we might be able to cover most if not all of the northern chimp population in a day. I was very much aware of the after-effects of my encounter with Mallabar the night before. I asked Vail if he had spoken of our trip to anyone. He looked at me, a little surprised.

  “No,” he said. “Why?”

  “Mallabar thinks it wasn’t a baby chimp. That body. He says it was a baboon.”

  “And you don’t agree.”

  “It’s not a question of agreeing. I’m right, he’s wrong.”

  Vail made a face. “Look, Hope, maybe you shouldn’t tell me any more, you know? Eugene has been extraordinarily…I just don’t want to have to take sides.”

  I smiled to myself: very Ian Vail. “Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll keep your name out of it. Just a professional disagreement.”

  “He must have his reasons. I mean, if you’re right.”

  “I am and he has. Though I’ve no idea what they are.”

  I sensed Vail’s deepening worry: what was he getting into here? To what extent, by aiding me in this way, might he be going counter to his benefactor’s wishes?

  “It’s awkward for me, that’s all,” he said feebly. “With Roberta and all that.”

  Roberta Vail. Ian’s American wife and Mallabar’s amanuensis and uncredited co-author. Roberta worshipped Mallabar—the term was not too strong—and everyone knew it, even though her adoration was couched in terms of proper professional awe. Perhaps, I thought now, it was Roberta’s fervent devotion to Eugene that had made Ian Vail try to kiss me that day…I realized, also, that Roberta had better not learn of this trip—not because she distrusted her husband (she didn’t), but because of its implicit disloyalty to the God Eugene. However, that was one confidence I knew our Ian wouldn’t divulge.

  We parked the Land Rover and set off up the path into the low hills that climbed towards the grasslands of the plateau. We were now right in the middle of the Grosso Arvore National Park, an area of approximately one hundred square miles. Our particular territory, where the northern group of chimpanzees was situated, was smaller, a strip of forest and scrub approximately ten miles long and two miles wide. It supported a fluctuating population of between thirty and forty chimpanzees—now reduced somewhat by the migration of my southerners.

  About half of the northern chimps had been spotted by one of Vail’s assistants, so we were informed over our walkie-talkies. We made good progress. It took us only about half an hour to reach them. I noticed how the going here in the north was far easier, there was little of the thick forest or dense undergrowth that I encountered in the south.

  We were lucky to find so many of the chimpanzees together at one site. The reason was that three large dalbergia trees grew here and the flowers were in bud. I counted fourteen chimpanzees sitting amongst the branches, grazing avidly on the small sweet bud clusters.

  Ian pointed. “Two of the pregnant females are here. Look.”

  Two down. How many to go…? We sat down about sixty yards from the trees and watched the chimps through our binoculars. It was about half-past eight in the morning, probably approaching the end of the first feeding session of the day. Already there was a certain amount of calling and excitement. But the chimps were still gorging themselves. Dalbergia buds are a favourite food and the source would only be available for three or four days before they flowered.

  I could see through my binoculars that one young female was heavily in oestrus. The pink swelling of the skin of her genital area was remarkably large, a protuberance the size of a big cabbage. The male chimps in her tree were growing increasingly excited and aroused. There was much branch-shaking and displaying, calling and shrieking. But the female kept herself at the very extremity of the dalbergia tree, sitting on thin whippy branches that could not possibly bear the weight of another chimp. Chimpanzees often copulate in trees and occasionally a male would advance out towards her, as far as he dared, and squat down, showing her his erect penis, shaking leaves and hitting branches in his excitement. But the female appeared to ignore him, and munched on contentedly, cramming her mouth with handful upon handful of sweet yellow dalbergia buds.

  But eventually, as if she sensed their collective arousal had reached a peak, and the waiting males had suffered long enough, she climbed down out of the tree. And at once half a dozen males and adolescent males followed her to the ground. The air was loud with calling and hooting.

  I saw one big male, with a patch of brown fur on his neck, take up the familiar squatting position near her. His legs were spread wide and I could clearly see his erect penis, thin and sharp, about four inches long, almost lilac against the dark fur of his belly, quivering above his bulging scrotum resting on the ground.

  I tapped Ian’s elbow. “Is that the alpha male?”

  “Yes. N4A.”

  “Come on. What’s his name?”

  “We call him Darius.”

  “And the female?”

  “Crispina.”

  Darius scratched the earth and rapped the ground with his knuckles. He gazed directly, intently, at Crispina, who was half turned away. She raised her lurid rump and backed slowly towards him, looking round from time to time. Darius squatted, almost immobile, swaying very slightly from
side to side, the pale tense cone of his penis twitching slightly. He grunted softly as Crispina backed smoothly into his lap.

  It was over very quickly. As he thrust, Darius made a harsh grunting noise, and Crispina screamed. After about five or six seconds, and ten thrusts on Darius’s part, Crispina leapt away. Darius picked up a bundle of leaves and carefully wiped his penis. But already Crispina had turned away and was presenting her florid rump to another squatting chimp.

  I glanced at Vail. He was peering intently through his binoculars. We watched as Crispina copulated with four of the other attendant males. She refused to have anything to do with two of the adolescents, no matter how histrionically they displayed for her. In fact she seemed more interested in Darius, to whom she returned several times, presenting her rump and backing up to him, even, at one stage, hopefully touching his flaccid penis. But he wasn’t interested any more, or wasn’t aroused. Then, as if on some covert signal, everything seemed to calm down. Crispina lay on the ground and groomed herself; Darius and the other males climbed back up into the dalbergia trees. Vail put down his binoculars and chuckled.

  “Fascinating…She sure knows what she wants, does Crispina,” he said, with what looked like an ugly smirk on his lips.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing…” He was colouring. “I mean it’s fascinating to see a dominant female emerge in the group again. It’s taken a while. Shall we move on?”

  We left the dalbergia trees and retraced our steps about half a mile before taking a path that headed north-east. One of Vail’s assistants had spotted another, smaller group of chimpanzees feeding on termites’ nests. Something about Vail’s last remark nagged at me.

  “What do you mean about a dominant female emerging again?”

  “Well, it used to be Rita-Mae, you see. Before she went south. Crispina—what went on there—it was just like Rita-Mae.”

  “The copulations.”

  “Yes. And favouring certain males. Rejecting others.”

  “And you think that’s significant. There’s some kind—“ I searched for the right word—”some kind of strategy?”