Trawler (22 page)

I yelled: “For Chrissake, Luke,
please,
say something! Shout at me!”

“No! Really not!” (A shout.) “Twenty or thirty? How would I be a
good father—and
I mean
really
good—how would I be able to really really love twenty or thirty children? No! You’re barking! Redmond—if I have children, just the one or two, and yes, you’re right, as it happens I
really
want children, then I’ll be their own dad, and no mistake, and to me they’ll be the most special people in all the world! And I’ll want to be with them
all the time.
You know? But of course that’ll be impossible. Because I’ll have to work. Work my arse off. To support them. But when I get home they’ll be the
whole point
of my entire life! The centre! The anchor! The chain that
never
gives way!”

“Of course they will! But don’t be silly.
The point is this:
all those women are attracted to you like hover-flies to a sunflower. And Luke, you’d be a 16-foot sunflower! Because you’re an alpha male! And why? Because you’re prepared to leave the warm comfortable lab or the relaxing pub or the snuggly paradise of your bed in your little cottage—you’re prepared to leave all that pronto, instantly, day or night, at the cold-call of your emergency bleeper! And you go straight out, half awake and, I suppose, at this time of year, as often as not you go straight out into a fucking hurricane like this! But in that ridiculously small boat, that lifeboat you showed me! A cockleshell! So
that’s
why they want your sperm! But that’s also why
they don’t want you.
Or not for more than a month or three. Because from the female point of view, to live with someone, to settle down and breed long-term—for that, you want a good, quiet, ordinary, kind, reliable down-the-hedge male. And in your world, I suppose, that would be a university lecturer on a permanent contract…”

“But I
can’t
lecture! I can’t do it!”

“And yes, it’s great, isn’t it? The vast explanatory power of Darwin’s second idea—evolution by sexual selection, by female choice!”

“Aye! Whatever!
But I can’t do it!
I am
not
going to lecture … to stand up on a stage!”

“So Luke—have you even
tried
to imagine what it must be like to live with you? There you are, a young woman in love, in the prime of life, and you
know
you’re beautiful, desirable in every way, and you’ve won this guy that all your friends fancy like crazy: and yet there you are, unable to sleep, so anxious, and the wind’s coming in screaming from the sea a few hundred yards away—fit to take the roof off the whole fucking Fittie terrace! Yes, and your man, your lover
—such amazing sex—
and yet he’s just abandoned you, right in the middle of such out-and-out happiness. And you run through it in your mind, over and over. Where did you go wrong? Why
—he just left you—
and why? For a
shout,
as he calls it, a call on that ghastly little bleeper that he keeps on his body, clipped to his belt, or on the floor by the bed,
at all times.
Yes, there’s no doubt about it,
he abandoned you,
in the middle
of such
love-making; and in that
so well-trained but
still desperate and personal hurry! And why? Just to save the lives
of other people,
people that you don’t know, people that
he
doesn’t know,
strangers,
strangers that, once rescued, he’ll never see again! That’s right, he’s abandoned you for foreign sailors, Russians probably, or Muslims, Laskars, whoever the hell they are, people who can’t even speak English, people who’ve put to sea in those illegal rusting hulks you can see tied up in Aberdeen harbour every day of the week! And then you have to get up all alone and go to work, and the cottage is so
dead
and there’s this
howling
wind and rain—and sometimes there’s no word for sixteen hours! And of course you forget that that’s
exactly
why you fell in love with this absurdly brave alpha male in the first place! The alpha male you and all your friends fancied like crazy! Because now you know—all that
wickedly
good love-making later—you know there’ll
never
be a single evening, not
one
candle-lit just-the-two-of-you evening when he’ll be entirely 100 per cent yours!”

“Aye!
Aye! Maybe there
is
something in what you say! Maybe! Because it’s true, Redmond, when I was doing part of my lifeboat training you know—sorry!—down in Poole, where the RNLI has its headquarters, when we were picking up a new Trent Class boat to take back up round the coast to Aberdeen—the RNLI museum curator took me and Julia, my girlfriend, round the museum, the archives. He took us, the real climax as far as he was concerned, to see the
Ornate Book of Remembrance,
some such title, and he took it out of its case for us to look at, for us to handle—as if it was the most precious thing in the world, which, I suppose, for him, it
was.
You see, Redmond—it’s the book where crewmen who’ve lost their lives in the service are recorded. Their names, in gold script, one to a page. And then there are their service dates and the dates of their main actions, all their major successful rescues at sea. And then there are secondary pages, you know—aye, the odd poem from friends, and the saddest brave remarks from their mothers and fathers and wives and children. All that—that was
terrible
to read, to look at—there’d even be a drawing or two, you know,
there was a drawing from someone’s six-year-old daughter;
and drawings and words meant to capture their character, you know, from their
colleagues,
the ones who hadn’t got to that particular shout on time. Aye, and
how guilty those guys feel!
For no reason,
but you can’t help it.
Anyway, this museum curator, he turns to me and Julia, and he says, all emotional: ‘Mr. Bullough,
Luke,’
he says, ‘if you
really
dedicate yourself to the service, do you realize that you,
you yourself,
you could be in here one day?”

“Jesus!”

“Aye!”

“So what happened to Julia?”

“She left me that weekend.
I’ve not seen her since!”

WE WERE SILENT
. Surely,
surely
sleep would come? That unreachable deep healing state … way beneath the surface of all these terrors … and how I hate life on the surface of the sea—and why won’t my brain take orders and abandon this bullshit?
Why?
Obvious! Because it’s true, the things your children say, yeah, yeah, I know, they say it with a laugh, but it’s true all the same, because nowadays they say, “Daddy, it’s terrible. You’ve become such a
sad old fuck.”
Please … so … “Luke!” I yelled. “Are you awake?”

“Aye! But
steady,
Redmond. Go easy. Get a grip …”

“Well, that’s
good.
Because there’s one thing about evolution by sexual selection—or by natural selection, come to that—one thing that
really
worries me. And I’d like your opinion!”

“You would?”

“Yes, I really would. Because I’ve thought about this. So I’m
serious.”

“Aye?”

“Yes, I really am. I’ve been thinking about two of the great classics in modern marine biology, you know, Alister Hardy’s volumes in the New Naturalists series—your intellectual ancestor, in a way… And about W. D. Hamilton. You know about him?
Hamilton’s Rule?
Kin selection, all that?”

“Aye! Well—no, not exactly. You know, the mathematics … Fact is, Redmond, you’d have to be a genius to understand the primary source, his actual papers!”

“Yes! Yes! He even
looked
like a genius. He came to supper with us once. He came to our house!”

“W D. Hamilton? To
your
house?” Luke sounded fully awake. “W. D. Hamilton? To supper? With
you?”

“Yes!
He damn well did!”
I shouted, offended, sitting up with sharp indignation, banging the top of my head, hard, against the base of the upper bunk and lying down again, more offended than before.
“Why the hell shouldn’t he come to supper with me?”

Luke, shocked, aye-less, said: “Well, you know. W. D. Hamilton—he was a genius!”

“Of course he was!
I
told you,
didn’t I? He even looked like a genius! Shaggy hair, leonine face, wonderful! Jesus, and so abstracted, distracted, whatever, you know—out of touch, so otherworldly. That story about Einstein, one of so many, but it stuck in my mind—Einstein went to a tea-party with some hostess (and
so of course I imagine him in the Vicarage in Calne in which I grew up, the home
of all
tea-parties,
parish
tea-parties …): so he talked boring tea-party bullshit for about half an hour (all he could take), and then, sitting in his allotted tea-party chair, he fell into a trance of thought—and no! You’re wrong! It was
not
about the wife he wanted to leave! Don’t be vulgar, Luke—no: it was
certainly
a trance in which his spirit had deserted his body and gone on a journey, exactly as the sorcerers in the northern Congo describe it, except that on this particular journey, and thousands like it, his spirit was
really
travelling into a space-time where no one had been before him (the courage of it! Yes?). Into a universe of his own imagining that also happened to be real, that was finite but unbounded—which Max Born said was one of the greatest ideas about the nature of the world which has ever been conceived. And the sole difference between his journeys and those of every sorcerer (more or less every night) in the Congo jungle? Well,
major,
really, Luke—because his thought experiments, as he called them, turned out to be true, and, eventually,
testable:
he brought back a new reality, things as they actually had been since the beginning of time!”

“Aye! But the tea-party,
what happened?”

“Oh yes, well—the hostess came down the next morning. And he was still sitting there!”

“He
was?
Then what?”

“She clipped him round the ear, whatever, I don’t know-but she brought him back from several squillion light-years away and gave the awkward bugger breakfast and kicked him out!”

“So what’s the point?”

“Eh?”

“W.
D. Hamilton!”

“Oh yes, I’m sorry, well—it was only when I met Bill Hamilton that I realized that all the freaky worship-Einstein stories might
not
be myths. Not at all. I’m sure that 90 per cent are true. As they are for Newton. Or for Beethoven. And for around one hundred people in written history—no more. Because it’s
rare,
Luke. Obsession—that’s commonplace, a real pain in the arse. But
successful obsession—an
apparently mad preoccupation with some laughable private reality that turns out to be the real thing,
actual reality,
a world that exists of itself and always has, yet a world that no one had even suspected might be all around them—Jesus! Fancy that!”

“Magic!”

“Yes! So Bill Hamilton came to supper! But all you had to do was ask him about the lives of the social insects he’d studied in the Amazons—even about his first contact with killer bees—and he was
big
you know, and he’d turn his great face on you: and
zap!
He’d light up the room!”

“Pow!”

“Yes—he came to supper! The greatest English theoretical biologist since Darwin! The guy who solved Darwin’s
second last problem!
Because Darwin’s first problem, Luke, as you know, was the one he stated himself: ‘our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.’ Because in some matters, Luke, even a genius like Darwin had to think the thoughts of his time, about the mixing of bloods, Lamarckian inheritance, liquid genetics—all that was solved by Mendel and his intellectual descendants. Because of course, as we now know, the mechanism of inheritance is
hard,
particulate—it lasts! It’s
not
a mix of liquids. It’s not at all as it appears on your stained sheets …”

“Redmond! English?—you think you’re
English?
Nuts! For starters—apart from your character, you know, your behaviour—you ever copped a look at your own name?”

“So this great genius comes to supper in a battered Ford Fiesta or some such—and once he’s inside and talking I fall under his spell, of course, because I can’t believe that anyone can talk with such intensity and knowledge and tenderness
about the lives of bees and wasps and hornets!”

“Great!”

“Yeah, well, he’s talking away, and the whole story of the evolution of the social insects is becoming so simple and unexpected and filled with light… And then his wife, who’s been talking to
my
wife Belinda (and Luke, she’s the best! You’d
really
like
her! She can be bored stupid, you know,
even by me,
something you wouldn’t understand, would you? And yet she still smiles this I-forgive-you, tolerant female smile!”)—

“Aaaaah! Please …”

“So Hamilton’s wife, as I say, she’s around one hundred miles away down the table, or so it seems, until she says, in a sudden, loud, parade-ground voice: ‘Bill! I’ve fixed it all! I’ve got a job as a dental assistant, on Rousay’ (I think it was Rousay), ‘and that’s in Orkney’”

“Eh?”

“Yes! Well, Luke—I’ve asked a couple of psychiatrists, you know, and I now realize that this is a common strategy when you have something worrying, OK,
devastating
to say to your husband or wife or partner. You pick a safe, neutral place. And what could be safer than a supper for four in a cottage where there’s a fat old guy who’s been married for thirty-two years to the same woman who’s right there and still alive? Two people you’ve never met before and who,
most certainly,
you do not intend to see again?”

“Aye, but Redmond, why the hell, excuse me, why did W. D. Hamilton want to go and see you in the first place?”

“Because Luke, I told you, I’m sure I did, it was only a hobby, but Jesus I was
passionate
about it, you know? I was running the natural history pages (yeah, yeah,
right,
with a great deal of professional help) at the
TLS,
the
Times Literary Supplement—
and it was only the one day a fortnight, for years, but Luke, what a privilege! And the
vast
amount I learnt—and you won’t believe this, but they
paid me
for it, ninety whole pounds a fortnight (which seemed ridiculous in those days, an absurd amount of money for something you would have done for free, several times over!). And it was great, you know, the intellectual companionship, the intense sharing of interests
—Jesus,
Luke, I’d be driving home to Oxford mega-happy after a day at the
TLS,
and I’d
forget,
I’d forget, that I’d just spent a working day in this
very
highly selected manic hunting-group of people who
loved
books, who were constantly trying to stimulate old talent and
hunt the new and young:
and as I attempted to drive home (and unlike you, Luke, I’m a country
boy, I’m afraid, and so
no,
I do
not
know my way round London), I’d be stuck in a traffic jam (but so much to look at! And the great buildings, you know, the architecture, it’s all been cleaned, and it
shines
in the light! Even in midwinter, you know, fuck the weather
—it shines!)—
anyway, so, I’d see some guy
running
from the Tube station, and I’d catch myself thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s
great-he’s running home to read his book!’
”