Waterland (25 page)

And when it seems that this astonishing nothing has merged into that wondrous and miraculous possibility For Ever, a head – that is, a far-off dark blob – breaks surface, some seventy – can it be eighty, can it be a hundred? – yards from where we stand. Shakes water from hair; shows no sign of discomfort, as if in emerging at that point it has done so merely out of whim and not out of necessity; travels towards the bank; pulls out behind it the (long, but finless, scaleless) body of my brother; and, without rest or pause, comes towards us, perched on its six feet of lean, potato-coloured flesh, while we watch (even Freddie, restored by his vomiting, watches) in awe.

What other prodigies can be in store to add to this aquatic marvel and that great truncheon shape inside his swimming-trunks? Will Dick claim his prize? Will Mary present it? Where will they go so Mary can drop her knickers unseen by us unworthy failures and where Dick (though he is not obliged) can unharness his—?

But as Dick draws near us something is evident, or evident by its absence. That monstrous swelling, that trapped baton – he no longer pushes it before him. It is gone – or sunk, contracted into that indeterminate sack of baggage which requires room inside every pair of male swimming-trunks and on which, after swimming, the drips gather then fall.

What can have caused this disappearance? Can it be that Dick is afraid? Can it be that now the moment is nigh he too suffers from perverse shrinkage? Can it be that the cool waters of the Lode and his extraordinary exertions have temporarily diverted his energy and in a moment all will rise up again? Can it be that Dick’s purpose in diving was expressly to suppress this rebel rod of flesh? Or – more wildly speculative still and adding a new enigma to his prolonged and wondrous immersion – can it be that Dick has achieved thereby some satisfaction, some ecstasy that even Mary cannot give, and has already—? So that, even now, twisting strands of Dick’s congealed seed are floating
down towards the Leem, where they will surely float to the Ouse and thence to the sea. Or at least such would be their journey if there were no hungry fish to lap them up first.

Mary steps back, steps forward, keeps her eyes fearfully, curiously, on Dick’s swimming-trunks, prepares to yield herself like a captured slave-girl to this lumbering victor. But Dick, with a watery gaze (from behind flickering eyelashes) which combines two stares – one for Mary (uncertain, possibly plaintive) and one for the rest of us (indifferent, possibly reproving) – does not claim his trophy. He checks his stride momentarily before Mary. Moves on. Picks up the bottle of whisky, which still contains three fingers or so of sun-warmed liquid. Hurls it into the Lode. Gives us all a blank glance. Tramps (avoiding the splatterings of Freddie’s vomit) up the bank to his former station. Sits; raises knees; clasps them, stares over them. Sulky-sullen.

‘Hey – how d’you do that?’

‘My whisky. My whisky—’

‘How d’you hold your breath?’

‘How d’you—?’

‘You haven’t, have you? You haven’t done it in your—?’

No answer. Eyelashes whirring.

‘Hey, Mary, aren’t you going to?’

No answer. Taut silence.

‘Mary, you said—’

Mary moves towards her jettisoned clothes.

‘Aren’t you going to play the game? Aren’t you?’

Peter Baine crosses her path, deftly snatches up the larger part of her scattered garments; dodges away; stops; holds Mary’s skirt by the waistband before his own hips; wiggles hula-hula style; pulls away the skirt as Mary makes a pounce at it, in the manner of a clumsy toreador; skips backward; throws part of his bundle to Terry Coe who, quick on the uptake, catches it and proceeds to do
another brief dancing-girl routine, Mary’s novice’s brassière held against his chest.

A game of tag, of piggy-in-the-middle, up and down the bank, in which clothes are tossed from hand to hand and in which Mary is compelled to twist, turn and reach this way and that, all the while endeavouring to keep one arm in the covering position; but in which neither Dick who sits, lashes beating, watching, nor his brother Tom (for reasons which can only be called fraternal, but for reasons also of his own) participates.

Nor does Freddie join in. Also for reasons of his own. Because Freddie sits with one eye taking in the tag game but another, more fixed eye directed testingly at Dick. Because while the tag game is only in its earliest stages and all other eyes are diverted by it, Freddie slips off along the bank to the wooden bridge and beyond, to where, as Freddie knows, there are eel-traps. He has another game in mind. Because when the throwing and catching and chasing have exhausted themselves and Peter Baine and Terry Coe decide to scatter Mary’s clothes hither and thither so that she can at least, if with little dignity, retrieve them, Freddie suddenly runs from the direction of the wooden bridge, so quickly that there is scarcely time to see what he is carrying and, while Mary stoops, unsuspecting, to pick up her skirt, clasps her from behind, pulls forward with the clasping hand the sturdy elastic of her school-regulation knickers and with the other hand thrusts the eel, a good three-quarter pounder, inside.

Whereupon Mary, who has suddenly lost all interest in her skirt and even in the so resolutely maintained shielding of her breasts, spirals, hunches her shoulders, digs her elbows into her ribs, holds out two quivering forearms on either side of her, takes in breath but, making no other sound nor any other movement to relieve her situation (not having encountered it before), freezes stock-still and wide-mouthed while something squirms, twists, writhes inside her knickers and finally (because eels are adept at
extricating themselves even from the most unlikely predicaments) squeezes itself out by way of a thigh-band, flops to the grass and with unimpaired instinct snakes towards the Lode.

At which Mary breaks into a fit of prolonged and disconcertingly shrill giggles.

25
Forget the Bastille

H
EY, this is good. This is juicy. Forget the Bastille. Forget the March of History. Let’s have more of this. So he really put an eel in her—? And your brother had a big—? And. How big exactly? Come on, tell us—

Prurient mutterings around the class. Exchanges of leers. Judy Dobson and Gita Khan in the front row cross their legs, feminine-defensive, experiencing, no doubt, inside their knickers, navy blue or otherwise, uncomfortable sensations; but up top are all eager and pricked ears.

So, old over-the-hill, lost-in-the-past Cricky can let it all hang out. Doesn’t mind admitting that he once—

So he really means it. He’s really going to teach what he damn well likes. Really intends to chuck out the syllabus …

Only Price looks wary, only Price looks begrudging. Because I’ve won them over, by unfair methods? Because I’ve licensed subversion?

(Class-mates beware! See what he’s trying to do. See the old dodge he’s trying to accomplish. That he – is one of you. The king is but a man, the tyrant is but flesh and blood. Do not be fooled by this sop to common humanity. And beware this other trick he’s simultaneously playing. Distracting your insurrectionary impetus, diverting your revolutionary zeal by indulging in lewd talk and appeals to your idle curiosity—)

Now who’s the rebel round here?

But supposing it’s not like that, Price. Supposing it’s the other way round. Supposing it’s revolutions which divert and impede the course of our inborn curiosity. Supposing it’s curiosity – which inspires our sexual explorations and feeds our desire to hear and tell stories – which is our natural and fundamental condition. Supposing it’s our insatiable and feverish desire to know about things, to know about each other, always to be sniff-sniffing things out, which is the true and rightful subverter and defeats even our impulse for historical progression. Have you ever considered that why so many historical movements, not only revolutionary ones, fail, fail at heart, is because they fail to take account of the complex and unpredictable forms of our curiosity? Which doesn’t want to push ahead, which always wants to say, Hey, that’s interesting, let’s stop awhile, let’s take a look-see, let’s retrace – let’s take a different turn? What’s the hurry? What’s the rush? Let’s
explore.

Consider that in every era of history, no matter how world-shaking its outward agenda, there has been no lack of curious people – astronomers and botanists, fossil-hunters and Arctic voyagers, not to mention humble historians – for whose spirit of stubborn and wayward inquiry we should not be ungrateful. Consider that the study of history is the very opposite, is the very counteraction of making it. Consider your seventeen-year-old
history teacher, who while the Struggle for Europe reaches its frantic culmination, while we break through in France and the Russians race for Berlin, spares little thought for these Big Events (events of a local but still devastating nature having eclipsed for him their importance) and immerses himself instead in research work of a recondite and obsessive kind: the progress of land-reclamation (and of brewing) in the eastern Fens, the proceedings of the Leem Navigation and Drainage Board, the story, culled from living memory and from records both public and intensely private, of the Crick and Atkinson families.

And what a strange and curious tale that turned out to be…

Yes, there’s something – is there a name for it? – that doesn’t care two hoots about History, or what the history books call History.

And even while Price tells us where History’s got to, even while we pool our nuclear nightmares, you can still find time—

So you’re curious. So you’re curious. You’d skip the fall of kings for a little by-the-way scurrility. Then let me tell you

26
About the Eel

O
F WHICH the specimen placed by Freddie Parr in Mary’s knickers in July, 1940, was a healthy representative of the only, if abundant, freshwater species of Europe – namely
Anguilla anguilla
, the European Eel.

Now there is much that the eel can tell us about curiosity – rather more indeed than curiosity can inform us of the eel. Does it surprise you to know that only as recently as the nineteen-twenties was it discovered how baby eels are born and that throughout history controversy has raged about the still obscure life cycle of this snake-like, fish-like, highly edible, not to say phallically suggestive creature.

The Egyptians knew it, the Greeks knew it, the Romans knew it and prized its flesh; but none of these ingenious peoples could discover where the eel kept its reproductive organs, if indeed it had any, and no one could find (and no one ever will) in all the waters where the European Eel dwells, from the North Cape to the Nile, an eel bearing ripe milt.

Curiosity could not neglect this enigma. Aristotle maintained that the eel was indeed a sexless creature and that its offspring were brought forth by spontaneous generation out of mud. Pliny affirmed that when constrained by the urge to procreate, the eel rubbed itself against rocks and the young were formed from the shreds of skin thus detached. And amongst other explanations of the birth of
this apparently ill-equipped species were that it sprang from putrefying matter; that it emerged from the gills of other fishes; that it was hatched from horses’ hairs dropped in water; that it issued from the cool, sweet dews of May mornings; not to mention that peculiar tradition of our own Fenland, that eels are none other than the multiplied mutations of one-time sinful monks and priests, whom St Dunstan, in a holy and miraculous rage, consigned to eternal, slithery penance, thus giving to the cathedral city of the Fens its name: Ely – the eely place.

In the eighteenth century the great Linnaeus, who was no amateur, declared that the eel was viviparous, that is to say, its eggs were fertilized internally and its young were brought forth alive – a theory exploded (though never abandoned by Linnaeus) when Francesco Redi of Pisa clearly showed that what had been taken for young eelings in the adult’s womb were no more than parasitic worms.

Womb? What womb? It was not until 1777 that one Carlo Mondini claimed to have located the minuscule organs that were, indeed, the eel’s ovaries. A discovery which raised doubts in the mind of his countryman Spallanzani (a supporter of Redi
contra
Linnaeus) who asked the simple yet awkward question: if these were the ovaries then where were the eggs? And thus – after much refutation and counter-refutation and much hurling to and fro of scientific papers – it was not until 1850 that Mondini’s discovery was confirmed (long after the poor man’s death) by a Pole, Martin Rathke, who published in that year a definitive account of the female genitalia of
Anguilla anguilla.

Witness the strife, the entanglements, the consuming of energy, the tireless searching that curiosity engenders. Witness that while the Ancien Regime tottered, while Europe entered its Revolutionary phase and every generation or so came up with a new blueprint for the destiny of mankind, there were those whose own destinies were inseparably yoked to the origins of the eel.

And yet in 1850, though the ovaries had been accounted for, the testes still remained a mystery – open to all claimants – and the obscure sex life of the eel still unilluminated. Obscure or otherwise, it must have been healthy, for, notwithstanding the universal ignorance as to their reproductive processes, large numbers of young eels continued every spring to mass at the mouths of their favoured rivers – the Nile, the Danube, the Po, the Elbe, the Rhine – and to ascend upstream, just as they had done in the days of perplexed old Aristotle and before. And it is worth mentioning that in that same year, 1850, though it can only be connected by the most occult reasoning with the researches of a Polish zoologist, the eel-fare, that is, the running of elvers or young eels upriver, on the English Great Ouse was on a notably large scale. Two and a half tons of elvers were caught in one day, the numerical equivalent of which can be estimated when it is considered that upwards of twelve thousand elvers go to make a pound in weight.