Turtle Diary

44 Neaera H

Things appear from unexpected quarters. The single dot before the face becomes another dot of different shape and density.

George Fairbairn had been a background person until now. Now he was the dot before my face, the face before my face. Knowing that I should never see the whole picture I didn’t bother to ask myself what it was.

He had seemed so medium, so unspecially placed between the top and bottom of life that I hadn’t really given him full human recognition until that evening when he brought out the champagne. I’d assumed that he was married, part of a closed circle, no lines moving on his map.

He wasn’t married. He had a flat off Haverstock Hill and that’s where I woke up on Tuesday, the morning after I’d gone to see him at the Aquarium. There was very little in the place, mostly it was furnished with light and quiet. It was on the top floor and looked out over rooftops. There was a Chinese teapot in the kitchen, there was a copy of Lilly’s The Mind of the Dolphin on the table by the bed. In the sitting room were R. H. Blyth’s four volumes on haiku and some natural history. ‘I don’t buy books much any more,’ he said. There was a radio but no gramophone.

A curious man, somewhat off to one side of things. As he said, he didn’t mind being alive but I don’t think it meant a great deal to him. I asked him nothing about himself and he offered no information, that was how it was. He had a clean look and a clean clear feel, nothing muddy. That was enough. There was about him the smell or maybe just the idea of dry grass warm in the sun.

He made breakfast for us. Looking out of the window and across a lawn I saw other people having breakfast in their windows.

‘Do you think you’ll go on doing children’s books?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

We left the flat. In the lift at the Belsize Park tube station there was a Dale Carnegie poster, MAXIMISE YOUR POTENTIAL, it said, and showed a drawing of a thick-faced man in simplified light and shade. He had a pencil poised in his hand and stood looking down at a graph on his desk. Whether you read the graph from his side of the desk or mine the line on it went down.

At Camden Town George kissed me and got out of the train. I went home to Madame Beetle and the snails.