A Glove Shop In Vienna

Tangle of Seaweed

She was always reading, Nell. Well, when she wasn’t stroking the sooty London leaves of plane trees or laying her cheeks against cool window-panes or loving — ecstatically — unsuitable young men. You could have given her a Chinese couplet from any part of the Golden Dynasty of T’ang and she’d have finished it for you. Dostoyevsky was her brother, Victorian children’s books her passion and though she lived, when in funds, mainly on avocado pears, she took her bath each night with a different cookery book.

But somehow Freud, that great psychologist had passed her by. His theory, for example, that we forget what we want to forget, lose what we want to lose, had hardly crossed her mind.

So when she woke up and couldn’t at once find her engagement ring beside the bed, her panic, though intense, had no particular overtones. Sleep-drugged, she blundered round the room, picking things up, feeling the sweat collect on the nape of her neck. Larissa and Kay, with whom she shared the flat, wandered in and, their eyes half-shut still, began groping for it too. Looking for the ring Harold had given Nell had become second nature to them by now.

Nell found it herself, on the bathroom shelf next to the indigestion tablets which she’d bought because everyone knew that being engaged made you tense and gave you stomach cramps, and even before she’d cleaned her teeth she put it on and it was like putting on Harold. She felt safe, controlled, calm.

Harold… She was so grateful to Harold for so much. For being called Harold in the first place, when no one really was any more. For having a mother whom he not only loved but was taking that very afternoon to the Zoo. The idea of Harold steering his mother from the baboons to the sea lions, from the coypu pond to the zebra house, pulling her gently out of the way of supercilious camels with sticky children on their backs was, to Nell, infinitely touching. A guarantee, too, of the changes that would take place in her own life when she was married to Harold. She would stop drifting, taking any old job like this one she was doing now, for example. She would learn to say, ‘No’. ‘No, I will not lend you my last fiver.’ ‘No,’ (to the men who were never called Harold) ‘you cannot take me to Hampstead Heath to hear the nightingales, to St Tropez in your string vest of a car…’

She looked down at the ring. Two diamonds flanking a very reasonably sized ruby. Harold hadn’t actually said that it wouldn’t collect dust but he’d implied it because he was an Expert. A Time and Motion Expert, and this, too, Nell found moving. He would make things work for her. She would catch buses, water her house plants correctly from underneath, stop singeing her eyebrows on the geyser…

‘Half past,’ called Larissa from the kitchen, and Nell shot into violent action. Her hair, that was the most important thing. Today it had to stay tidy. After all, it was a sort of lab she worked in, it was science… She brushed it out: green-gold, plumb-straight; hair she washed as often and as carelessly as her face, and began to fasten it on to her head. A rubber band, two clips, a pin…

And now, suddenly, as happened every morning, she was frantically late.

‘Oh God, let me catch my bus,’ she prayed, and threw the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the indigestion tablets into a straw basket, and swallowing a mouthful of brioche ran out into the street.

At once, she was blinded by summer. The tarmac shimmered, the pavement bit her feet; the street cat lay like a spent Ingres courtesan across the steps.

Nell shut her eyes, pierced by a desperate longing for her childhood summers. For the smell of decaying weed along the tide line (which, whatever people said, really was ozone). For the voluptuousness of sand between her toes; for rose-coloured cowries mysteriously special in a handful of common shells. For a man she could see coming out of the water (but this was hardly childhood?) shaking back his hair and laughing as he uncoiled the strands of seaweed round his feet. A man she hoped so much was Harold. Only, would Harold have allowed the seaweed to tangle round his feet? Wouldn’t he, being an Expert, have seen and avoided it?

‘Oh no, my bus,’ yelled Nell, and, too late, began to run, clutching her diamond ring with her free thumb and feeling already the first dreaded slither of what would soon be the waterfall of her descending hair…

On the other side of London, hemmed in between fifteen volumes of a decomposing German dictionary and something called Wissenschaftliche Padagogie, sat Toby Sandford, bent over his dissertation on Animal Symbolism in Sanskrit Literature and trying to extract from his pocket, in total silence, a vinegar-flavoured potato crisp.

The college library was all-enveloping, silent, fusty, with marble busts of surprisingly unclad scholars placed at intervals between the tomes, but Toby wasn’t fooled. This was one of those rare days when all the rules were broken and the whole country ran riot with summer.

He extracted a crisp, closed his eyes and gave himself over to an emotion for which he was really rather young: intense and violent nostalgia. He saw the sea as it had been on the limitless, empty beaches of his native Northumberland, not blue but a cool and pearly grey; saw the entrancing pink legs of oyster catchers glint in the sun, saw a girl (but this was moving out of childhood) come out of the water, letting a skein of seaweed trail in her hand. Now she was bending down, biting with delicate pleasure the bladders of wrack between her teeth. Girls always bit into seaweed…

Or did they? He played the last reel through again in his mind, hoping against hope that the girl was Margaret, with whom he had what was generally termed a relationship. But would Margaret have bitten into a piece of seaweed? Wouldn’t she even there, coming out of the sea in the swimsuit whose straps would not have worked loose, been carrying her dissecting scissors, her scalpel?

‘Overwork,’ said Toby to himself. He’d been determined to finish the thesis for his doctorate before he went away, and usually an English summer was easy enough to ignore. But today…

Suddenly he closed his book, bundled up his papers. He’d take a day off, take Margaret out. To the Zoo? To the Aquarium! And immediately an explosion of images ran through his brain. ‘Sabrina fair… under the glassy, cool, translucent wave…’ ‘Full fathom five thy father lies…’ He saw ferns and fronds and fins and was suddenly and devastatingly happy.

Margaret, when he ran her to ground in the Zoology lab, saw only an interruption to a sensibly planned day. She sat in her white lab coat, bent over the hepatic portal system of an extremely pickled dog fish, lifting with calm forceps the fragile threads of empty arteries, snipping unruffled among clusters of organs as delicate as Lilliputian grapes. Like Toby, she was doing post-graduate research. Unlike him, she never felt as he did, even after he took a First at Oxford, that the research was doing him.

In the end, however, she took off her overall, resigned, composed, because he was nothing but a child, really, and needed humouring, and went to fetch the large, cool, plastic handbag which had in it all the things that Toby never had — clean handkerchiefs, door keys that really fitted doors — and still smelling slightly but impressively of formalin, agreed to go with him to the Aquarium…

There was nothing impulsive about the visit of Harold, with his mother, to the Zoo. It had been carefully planned for days and the route they were to follow memorized from Harold’s map. So far all had gone well, but it was with a certain amount of relief that Harold went up the steps to the Aquarium. The llamas, overcome by the unusual heat, had shown a disconcerting amorousness and the baboons — well, baboons were like that. But it was his pride to spare Mother, who lived alone in Teddington, the least unpleasantness, and there was always something calmingly ethereal about fish.

After the heat outside, the dark, columned halls of the Aquarium were marvellously cool. Margaret and Toby were proceeding tank by tank along its length, for Margaret was above all a systematic girl. A fleet of bass floated motionless in a forest of bamboo. Flounders performed strange and dreamy acrobatics with their bulging eyes. Dust-speckled bubble stars illumined a black heaven beneath which a deeply placid carp smiled as he swam.

‘In a cool curving world he lies and ripples with dark ecstasies,’ said Toby happily, and Margaret, who was beginning to despair of ever curing him of quoting pointless bits of poetry, sighed.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘they have an interesting reproductive system,’ and told him serious things about whitish tubercules and elongated papillae.

‘Oh,’ said Toby, unaccountably cast down, and moved on. An octopus with rows of suckers like milky pearls, gave them an enfant terrible grin from a Stonehenge of sea-washed rocks.

‘Their pancreas is excretory, did you know?’ said Margaret, and elaborated.

‘Well, I don’t like it,’ said a sharp, elderly voice beside them, and Toby, who didn’t either, who wanted the octopus entire and lovable, turned round in sympathy. But the woman, who appeared even on this burning summer day to be clutching a plastic raincoat, was suffering from a different obsession. ‘Nothing will make me believe that the girl will settle down and make you a good wife. I tell you, I heard her talking to my begonias when you brought her to tea. No self control, she said they had. And always barefoot with those straw baskets. An invitation to thieves.’

‘She is very willing to learn,’ said Harold calmly, and looked down at the luminous dial of his watch, pleased to observe that they were comfortably within schedule.

‘Oh!’ said Toby, suddenly and deeply harrowed. In front of them a hopelessly narcissistic lung fish alone in its tank floated constantly upwards to kiss its own reflection in the moment that it broke.

‘That’s tragedy,’ said Toby, ‘to be in love with yourself because there’s no one else.’

Margaret, who disliked him to be fanciful, had moved on to a tank of bewigged anemones like infant dish mops. She was explaining something about interlamellar junctions.

‘And then she’s always losing things,’ came the querulous voice as the woman with the plastic raincoat caught up with them. ‘Even her ring.’’

‘I shall help her,’ said the man’s voice calmly. ‘I shall draw up a routine for her.’

As though the word ‘routine’ was a beautiful image now to be permanently shattered, thirty-odd children — a school party from Bracken Hill Secondary Modern — erupted into the dark and vaulted halls of the Aquarium. At once, like molecules of effervescent gas, they filled every corner, emitting shocked ‘coos’ and admiring ‘cors’, finding everything either terribly funny or marvellously beautiful.

Only one boy, by far the smallest, stood silent, aloof from the rest in the shelter of a pillar. His knee socks had hopelessly descended, the lenses of his goggle glasses threw back weak glimmers of light from a tank of guppies and he was shivering with fear.

One could have been forgiven for not recognizing him for what he was: a deus ex machina, a messenger of the capricious gods whose name — because things are so seldom what they seem — was Johnnie Biggs…

Toby and Margaret had reached the angel fish, so celestially slender that their organs could be seen pulsating winsomely inside them.

‘And you’ll see, she’s not one to hold down this job,’ said the elderly woman, raising her voice against the oncoming children, ‘and that’s menial enough for a girl with her background.’

‘Look, Toby,’ said Margaret from the next tank. ‘Come here a minute. Interesting spermatophore development.’

But Toby didn’t come — quite simply couldn’t come. His scalp tingled and the delighted shrieks of the schoolchildren discovering the horrors of the electric eel reached him as only the faintest of tinklings.

For after all, the strange patch of summer ecstasy he’d been going through, the dreams of childhood seascapes, of longhaired girls rising from the water, had been the prelude only to some particular condition. In short, he was going nuts. Because one minute, without a doubt, the tangled, sea-green strand hanging from the top of the tank had been a coil of seaweed, And the next minute, equally unmistakable, it had turned into a girl’s green-gold and streaming hair.

With a desperate effort he tore himself away and followed Margaret, who had reached the turtles. It was no good, he told himself, getting maudlin about turtles. So they cried when they laid their eggs and lumbered back into the water like heart-sick tanks. There was nothing one could do.

And then it happened again. Up there, among the bubbles of silver which defined the turtles’ sky, something floated. But not a fish, a plant… A wrist? A girl’s slender, blue-veined wrist with something hearbreakingly frantic in the way it broke the water.

‘Margaret,’ Toby tried to say, very calm, very matter-of-fact, ‘I think there’s a drowned girl in this tank.’

But Margaret had moved on to a tank of tropicals in which ferocious dragons, seductive geishas, idiot clowns, all masqueraded temporarily as fish.

And inside which, beside the serrated, gaping mouth of a great conch, pale fingers — surely human fingers? — desperately searched.

‘Do you see anything, Margaret?’ said Toby frantically.

‘Well, naturally,’ said Margaret, and told him what she saw, which was a Schomburgk’s Leaf-fish with a fungus infection on its caudal fin.

‘Not a drowned girl?’ said Toby. ‘Not a drowned girl with sea-green hair?’

‘Harold, my feet are killing me,’ said Harold’s mother, and for a time said nothing more.

Because suddenly there was a strange, curiously unnerving thud and almost at once smoke began to snake in evil choking clouds through the hall. The schoolchildren began to cough, then to scream and run in a stampede to the door, and still the smoke came, blotting out sight, making each drawn breath an agony.

‘Margaret?’ called Toby, groping his way back into the hall, ‘Margaret?’ and getting no reply felt his way blindly towards a half-remembered door. ‘Margaret?’ he croaked again.

Then he reached it and here at last was Margaret blundering into him. He put out an arm and felt with relief the cold plastic of her sensible handbag before she fell, smoke-blind, against him. To his relief he found he could lift her somewhat solid bulk quite easily and stumbling between the storage vats and water pipes which made up this looking-glass world behind the tanks, came out at last into the open and laid Margaret down on a patch of grass.

Except that it wasn’t Margaret…

Meanwhile Harold, tying a clean handkerchief about his mouth and keeping extremely calm, extremely steady, began to sidle along the hand rails, one arm extended in a filial search for Mother.

‘Mother?’ called Harold. ‘Mother, where are you?’

And: ‘Here, here, Harold,’ called Harold’s mother. ‘Harold, I’m choking, I can’t see.’

Harold couldn’t either, but he bravely abandoned the handrail, ignored the stumbling children running for the exit and at last, with untold relief felt the cool slither of Mother’s unnecessary raincoat beneath his hand.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, putting a protective arm round her, and steered her, coughing and moaning a little, towards safety and daylight. ‘It’s all right, dear,’ said Harold, setting her down on the steps and managing in spite of the pain of his inflamed and swollen eyes to pat her soothingly upon the back. ‘We’re safe now, Mother. Everything’s perfectly all right.’

Which in fact it was. Except that the person he was patting so soothingly wasn’t Mother.

Out of sight, on the other side of the Aquarium, Toby stared at the girl who lay stretched out before him on the grass. He should have known that Margaret, who was a hockey blue, would not have hung so lightly from his shoulders. This girl was slender, her long, blonde hair was soaking wet and she smelt movingly offish. Moreover, the handbag which had bumped so coldly against him was not in fact a handbag. The object which the girl, half faint still, was nevertheless desperately clutching, was a large polythene bag filled with water, inside which swam, slowly and majestically, a large, grey fish.

‘You saved a fish?’ said Toby, awed. ‘Wouldn’t he have been quite safe in all that water?’

She said nothing, but her eyes, sea-green like her hair, brimmed, overflowed and made tentative runnels of pink on her smoke-blackened cheeks.

‘Perhaps he’s special?’ suggested Toby, finding her silent grief unbearable. ‘A reincarnated Buddhist prince,’ he suggested, caught by a look of deep serenity somewhere round its nostrils, ‘with bliss-bestowing fins?’

She tried to smile through her tears, but almost at once she drooped again and ran desperate fingers through her soaking hair.

‘He’s swallowed it,’ she said in a choking voice. ‘At least I think it was him. I dropped it in the tank. I kept looking and looking. I work in there, you see, in the Aquarium. I’m a sort of lab girl.’

Of course. He saw it now. The seaweed-floating hair, the frenzied searching…

‘What did he swallow?’ said Toby, watching the fish — a tench, possibly — for signs of gastric tension.

‘My ring! My engagement ring. I always lose it. Harold’ll be so angry. He said if I lost it once more, we were through. It was two diamonds and a ruby and it didn’t collect the dust,’ she said wildly.

Harold. Toby remembered the voices in the Aquarium and everything fell into place.

‘I get it all so wrong. I’m supposed to dean the tanks, not fall into them. I’m sure to get the sack after this and I’m so worried about the tench. They were terribly hard diamonds.’

Toby leaned forward and took her narrow, smoke-black hand. ‘Ah, don’t,’ he said tenderly. ‘Don’t. He’ll be all right, I promise you. Diamonds for tenches are like grit for pigeons. Roughage, you know.’

And as she turned to him, believing it, radiant with relief, Toby felt, quite distinctly, the earth shiver beneath his feet…

Harold’s consternation on finding that he was soothingly patting a totally unknown and very personable female with a handsome figure and a pretty profile, was absolute.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘I thought you were my mother.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ said Margaret, but she spoke sensibly and without rancour, as was her wont.

‘I mistook your handbag for her mackintosh,’ said Harold. ‘I felt it in the dark,’ and blushed, for it had to be admitted that he had felt other things also.

A couple of keepers came out of the Aquarium and Harold inquired for Mother. ‘Everyone’s safely out now,’ they assured him. ‘Your old lady’ll be along at the First Aid Post with the schoolkids, I dare say. A case of smoke without fire.’

‘I must go and look for my friend,’ said Margaret, knowing how little Toby was to be trusted.

This was the kind of problem Harold enjoyed. ‘You don’t, of course, propose to search round the Zoo at random?’

‘Indeed not,’ said Margaret. ‘A system is obviously necessary.’

‘Might I suggest ever-narrowing concentric circles,’ suggested Harold, ‘as if looking for a ball lost in a field?’

Margaret nodded. ‘You don’t happen to have a map?’ ‘I have,’ said Harold, and Margaret sighed with approval because Toby never had anything except vinegar-flavoured potato crisps and stray pebbles whose veined markings he expected her to rave about. ‘However, if you will allow me, having ascertained that Mother is quite comfortable, I will accompany you…’

‘If I take him back, and explain, Harold’ll want him killed,’ said Nell, looking down at the fish who, no longer Buddhistically calm, was growing noticeably short of oxygen.

‘And Margaret will dissect him for you beautifully,¹ said Toby.

They looked at each other. Then without a word they got up and walked together towards the Regent’s Park canal.

‘Cor!’ said the boy, walking beside Johnnie Biggs in the crocodile. ‘Did you see that?’

The Bracken Hill School party had re-formed and the children, now savouring in retrospect their narrow escape from death, were going home across the bridge. ‘It was a bloomin’ great fish jumped in the water.’

But Johnnie Biggs, the deus ex machina who had changed four lives, was not remotely interested in fish. Johnnie was in a state of exaltation far beyond speech. He’d done it. He’d done what the gang said. He’d let off the smoke canister they’d nicked from the army dump and he hadn’t been caught, so now they’d have to let him join. And Johnnie, whose father was in prison, whose mother had given up the struggle long ago, walked from the Zoo that strange, hot summer’s day filled with one of mankind’s oldest enchantments: the prospect of belonging…

Toby had explained to Nell gently, interestingly, the ideas of the great psychologist, Freud: that we forget what we want to forget, lose what we want to lose. Now they sat on the banks of the canal into whose green and muddy waters they had launched two hundred and twenty-five pounds’ worth of diamonds and in a sense, too, a great deal of well-designed Scandinavian furniture and a split-level oven which cleaned itself.

‘I didn’t really want any of it?’ inquired Nell.

‘No,’ said Toby.

‘Not even Harold?’

‘Particularly not Harold.’

‘I get afraid when I’m alone,’ said Nell. ‘All that ecstasy, all that despair…’

‘I hadn’t thought of you being alone,’ said Toby, shocked. ‘I hadn’t thought of that at all.’

And as they turned to each other, not quite believing, yet, that dreams and reality could meet so unconflictingly, Harold, not seeing them, appeared on the other bank. His arm was through Margaret’s and though it must have become clear to both of them that Toby, unlike a ball lost in a field, was indulging in purposeless and confusing movements of his own, they continued — so pleased were they with each other’s company — to move gravely past the camel house, the zebras, the antelopes, searching, in ever-narrowing concentric circles, the emptying Zoo…