Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

Their faces were pink, their eyes were clear and bright, their shirts and ties what the adverts call coordinated I believe. Mine had dirty fingernails and his handkerchief was tucked into his jacket sleeve. The other had clean fingernails. Their voices were loud, they were eager to impart the dash and colour of their lives to the drabness about them.

I had a salad. If I were to say that today’s tomatoes are an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes. The bookshop man had fried eggs with sausages, chips, grease and Mother’s Pride sliced bread and butter. He put ketchup on the chips. No wonder he looks hopeless I thought.

‘I always bring a sandwich for lunch,’ he said. ‘But I can have it for tea.’

‘If the bananas aren’t unloaded soon they’ll spoil,’ I said. I felt like talking like a spy.

‘I’m waiting to hear from our friend at the docks,’ said the bookshop man, rising in my estimation. ‘I can’t arrange the haulage until he gives me a date.’

The two young executives raised their eyebrows at each other.

‘Have you booked them right the way through?’ I said. The waitress reached across us with sweets for the executives. Mine had trifle, the other fruit salad with cream.

‘Only tentatively,’ said the bookshop man. ‘Brighton’s close.’

‘I was thinking of Polperro,’ I said.

The bookshop man went very red in the face. ‘Polperro!’ he said. ‘Why in God’s name Polperro?’

I indicated the two executives with my eyes and busied myself with my salad. They were both having white coffee with a lot of sugar. Life mayn’t always be that sweet for you I thought.

There was a long silence during which the executives smoked a kingsize filter-tip cigarette and a little thin cheap cigar without asking me if I minded. The bookshop man took something from his pocket and began to play with it. It was a round beach pebble, a grey one.

‘Where’s it from?’ I said.

‘Antibes,’ he said. ‘I haven’t smoked all morning.’

The executives excused themselves. We had coffee, no sweets. On the wall two booths away from us was a circular blue fluorescent tube in a rectangular wire cage. It was probably some kind of air purifier but it looked like a Tantric moon or some other contemplation object. I contemplated it. The bookshop man looked into his coffee as if viewing the abyss.

‘Did I say anything wrong?’ I said. ‘About Polperro?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It just took me by surprise. Why Polperro?’

‘If I said that Polperro and the turtles together add up to something, would that mean anything to you?’ I said.

He looked at me strangely. ‘Yes,’ he said.

On the way out I went over to the Tantric moon and read the nameplate on it. INSECT-O-CUTOR, it said.

‘I’ll ring you up when I hear from George Fairbairn,’ said the bookshop man.

I gave him my name and telephone number.

‘Neaera,’ he read. ‘Eldest daughter?’

I nodded.

‘My name’s William G.,’ he said.

We shook hands and parted. Going home on the tube I was astonished at the number of paint- and ink-stains on the shirt I was wearing.

Neaera H. The penny didn’t drop until a few minutes after we’d parted, then I remembered the Gillian Vole books, Delia Swallow, Geoffrey Mouse and all the others I used to read to the girls. Delia Swallow’s Housewarming was Cyndie’s favourite for a long time, she never tired of it. This must be the same Neaera H., she looked too much like a writer-illustrator not to be one.

Back at the shop I went to Picture Books in the Juvenile section and looked at a copy of Delia Swallow’s Housewarming. No photograph or biographical details on the back flap. All it said was that Delia Swallow, though the stories were written for children, had long been a favourite with readers of all ages, as had Gillian Vole etc. I looked at the first page:

‘Just any eaves won’t do,’ said Delia Swallow to her husband John when they were looking for a nest.

‘I’d like eaves on the sunny side and with a view.’

‘Field or forest?’ said John.

‘Field with forest at the edge I think,’ said Delia.

‘Riverside or hill?’ said John.

‘Riverside with a hill behind,’ said Delia.

‘Right,’ said John, and went to sleep.

He always kipped after lunch.

Ariadne and Cyndie always liked it that John Swallow kipped after lunch. In the evenings he usually dropped in for a pint or two and a game of darts at the Birds of a Feather, after which:

He sometimes flew a little wobbly going home.

Strange. While I was married to Dora and living in Hampstead and working at the agency Neaera H. was writing those books. Now here we are, both of us alone and thinking turtle thoughts. At least I assume she’s alone. She looks as if she’s always been alone. Of course I’m seeing her out of alone eyes, I could well be wrong.

The turtles share a tank at the Zoo. I share a bath at Mrs Inchcliff’s. Hairy Mr Sandor. I taped a little sign to the bathroom wall:

PLEASE CLEAN BATH AFTER USING

Not that it’ll do much good. It’s not too bad really, he only baths a couple of times a week. Miss Neap baths daily and when she’s been before me the bathroom smells very blonde and militantly fragrant, as if mortality could be kept at bay by lavender in the same way that garlic repels vampires. If Dracula and Miss Neap were to have a go I think he’d be the one to come away with teeth marks in his throat.

When I had a bathroom of my own. I think about that sometimes. When I was an account executive. When I owned a house. When my daughters sat on my lap and I read to them. When they collected pebbles with me on the beach. Ariadne’s twenty now, Cyndie’s eighteen. I haven’t seen them for three years. I don’t know where they are.

The past isn’t connected to the future any more. When I lived with Dora and the girls the time I lived in, the time of me was still the same piece of time that had unrolled like a forward road under my feet from the day of my birth. That road and all the scenes along it belonged to me, my mind moved freely up and down it. Walking on it I was still connected to my youth and strength, the time of me was of one piece with that time. Not now. I can’t walk on my own time past. It doesn’t belong to me any more.

There’s no road here. Every step away from Dora and the girls leads only to old age and death whatever I do. No one I sleep with now has known me young with long long time and all the world before me. Rubbish. I remember how it was lying beside Dora in the night. O God, I used to think, this is it and this is all there is and nothing up ahead but death. The girls will grow up and move out and we’ll be left alone together. I remember that very well. It’s the thisness and thisonlyness of it that drives middle-aged men crazy.

Why turtles for God’s sake? Helping them find what they’re looking for won’t bloody help me. And now I’m lumbered with it. I’ll have to find out what it costs to hire a van. I wonder if the two of us can get the turtles on to the trolley. She doesn’t look that strong. We’ll need a board or something for a ramp. Maybe I should build crates for them, they’d be easier to handle that way. I hate details. And now it’s got to be Polperro just to make life more difficult. I know there’ll be some kind of physical problem like having to climb a million steps or lower ourselves by ropes or the tide will be out and we’ll have to drag the turtles across a mile of mud in the dark. What on earth can Polperro mean to her?

I saw a film years ago, The Swimmer, with Burt Lancaster. In it he was an American advertising man whose mind had slipped out of the present. He thought he still had a wife and children and a house but it was all gone. The film began with a golden late-summer afternoon. He turned up at the swimming pool of some friends who hadn’t seen him for a long time. They looked at him strangely, he wasn’t part of their present time any more. While he was there it occurred to him that there were so many swimming pools in that part of Connecticut that he could almost swim all the way home. So he went from pool to pool, public and private, swimming across Fairfield County meeting people from different bits of his life whilst swimming home as he thought. And wherever he went people became angry and disturbed, he didn’t belong in their present time, they didn’t want him in it. At the end of the film he was huddled in the doorway of the empty locked house that had been his while rain came down and he heard the ball going back and forth on the empty tennis court and the voices of his daughters who were gone. Dora and I saw the film together.