Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

I went back to my room. Evening was gathering in. The day hadn’t been at all bad and this was the easy part, the downhill run. I didn’t turn the lights on, let the room fill up with twilight and silence.

Mrs Inchcliff came back, unloaded her plunder and put it in the lumber-room, rattled about in the downstairs kitchen. I went out for fish and chips, brought it back to my room, ate by the light of the street lamps, had a beer.

There was a knock at the door. Mrs Inchcliff. ‘Have you seen Miss Neap today?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t seen her since yesterday evening.’

‘Neither have I,’ she said. ‘And I always do see her sometime on Sunday, either when she picks up her paper or when she goes out.’

‘Perhaps she’s gone to Leeds,’ I said.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Mrs Inchcliff. ‘She was here last night when I went to bed, I saw her coming out of the bathroom. And if she’d left this morning she’d have taken the paper with her. I’ve just gone up to her room with it and knocked on the door but there was no answer. The door’s on the latch but I didn’t open it.’

We went down to Miss Neap’s room on the first floor at the end of the hall. Mr Sandor coming in just then saw us and paused at the foot of the stairs. I opened the door, turned on the light.

Miss Neap had hanged herself. The window in her room was a tall one and at the top of it behind the pelmet there was a stout old iron hook screwed into the window-frame. It had been put there a long time ago for a curtain rod and drapes much heavier than the present ones. She’d stood on a chair and used several bright-coloured silk scarves knotted together. The chair lay on the floor where she’d kicked it over. She was dressed for the street in her tightly belted leopardskin coat and her newest purple suede boots. Her pince-nez had fallen off her nose and dangled from its ribbon. She must have been hanging there for some time, her face had gone quite dark and her powder and rouge and shiny blue eye-makeup looked ghastly. When the police doctor came he said the time of death had been between three and four on Sunday morning.

The room was in good order. She’d been there ten years, had done the place over and bought new furniture just as I’d done. The wallpaper and the drapes had a floral pattern. The bed was made up smartly into a green couch, colourful pillows carefully arranged on it and a large cloth Snoopy dog. Some paperback thrillers, some P. G. Wodehouse. A paperback Four Quartets. A copy of The Book of Common Prayer open at At the Burial of the Dead at Sea.

On the dresser were her Postal Savings books, a funeral directors’ card and a receipt showing payment of £130. A note told us that arrangements had been made for cremation, that she wanted no funeral service of any kind whatsoever and that it was her wish that the cremation be completely unattended. Her mother in Leeds was not to be notified until after the cremation and her savings were then to be sent to her. The book showed a balance of £936.27. Next to it was a framed photograph of her mother and father and Miss Neap as a girl. No more than nine or ten years old but you could recognize the face as being the same one.

I didn’t know how lonely I’d been until the loneliness stopped. Now when I looked at my flat it seemed to have been cleared of invisible wires criss-crossed in patterns of pain that had been there for years. I saw myself in days past, years past, stepping carefully and trying to keep my balance. There were the kitchen, the bathroom, the sitting-room, the bedroom, the spare room. There were the books, the drawing-table, the typewriter, Madame Beetle, the clutter, all the spaces and places where I stood or sat or lay down, all the things that I touched and used in my daily effort to piece together an eggshell life from broken fragments.

George had given me so much that even if there came a time without George I could bear it now and not step carefully nor build my broken eggshell with mad patience. He hadn’t done anything special, it was simply his way of being. Like him I found that I no longer minded being alive. And the turtles were swimming, there was always that to fall back on.

It was extraordinary, the whole turtle affair. Nothing was ever said about it in the press, there was no furore at the Zoological Society, George wasn’t sacked. He let it be known that he’d set the large turtles free and would be replacing them with smaller specimens and that he would do the same again when the two remaining turtles were larger. That was all there was to it, he wasn’t even reprimanded.

The two turtles in the tank looked different to me now, seemed less dozy, and more as if they had something to look forward to:

And every one said, ‘If we only live,

We too will go to sea in a Sieve, –

To the hills of the Chankly Bore!’

I went to the British Museum again with my envelope full of blank paper. I felt friendly towards the coaches, cars and motorcycles in the forecourt, the people and the pigeons. I sat on the porch with the paper in my lap, sunlight again on my closed eyes.

I was waiting for something now and the waiting was pleasant. I was waiting for the self inside me to come forward to the boundaries from which it had long ago withdrawn. Life would be less quiet and more dangerous, life is risky on the borders. Gillian Vole and Delia Swallow live in safer places.

Come, I said to the self inside me. Come out and take your chance. After staring at the blank paper for a very long time I wrote:

The fountain in the square

Isn’t there.

Well, I thought, it’s not much but it’s a beginning.

The Coroner’s Court was a tall tight box with the lid always on it. Whatever was said in that room would not expand much laterally, would not move forward or back. It would stand and grow tall until its head touched the ceiling in the clear grey light.

The room seemed fully as tall as it was long. The dark green ceiling must have been at least twenty-five feet from the floor, deeply bevelled, with handsome white beams and braces. The walls were pale lemony green, there were tall windows, proper courtroom furniture: witness box, judge’s bench, jury box. Just below the bench were red leather settees and a table with a red leather top for PRESS. Another such table for COUNSEL. A little plain narrow writing-stand for POLICE at the front of the spectators’ pews. Ten Bibles in the jury box, two more by the witness box. There was a poor box by the door.

Three knocks. ‘Rise, please, to Her Majesty’s Coroner,’ said the Coroner’s Officer. We rose as the Coroner came in. ‘Oyez, oyez, oyez,’ said the Coroner’s Officer as the Coroner passed to the bench, ‘all manner of persons who have anything to do at this court before the Queen’s Coroner touching upon the death of Flora Angelica Neap draw near and give your attendance. Pray be seated.’

We sat down. Behind the Coroner the royal arms said DIEU ET MON DROIT. I counted the people in the room: the Coroner, the Coroner’s Officer, the Police Pathologist and the constable who’d come to the house, a lady from the ticket agency where Miss Neap had worked, a lady from the funeral directors, Mrs Inchcliff, Mr Sandor and me. Nine altogether. I wondered how long it had been since Miss Neap had had nine people pay attention to her all at once.

A frightening thought had been growing in me. I’d always assumed that I was the central character in my own story but now it occurred to me that I might in fact be only a minor character in someone else’s. Miss Neap’s perhaps. And I didn’t even know the story. Draw near and give your attendance. Yes, we were doing that now. No one had done it when she was alive.