J. Ledgard - Submergence

‘Thought by national poet Poland Czeslaw Milosz when Berlin Wall fall,’ Tomaszewski had scrawled in a blue biro.

Then the quote, in block letters:

What will happen next? The failure of Marx’s vision has created the need for another vision, not for a rejection of all visions. What remains today is the idea of responsibility (when the nineteenth-century idea of progress has died out), which works against the loneliness and indifference of an individual living in the belly of a whale.

Tomaszewski had underlined the word whale.

He recounted how they had walked hand in hand in the snow and how Danny had turned to him and explained that there were vast numbers of salp and jellies in the oceans whose vertical migrations were equivalent in scale to the birds lifting up from the dunes into space.

‘On a planetary scale, birds crawl,’ she said.

Utrinque Paratus . Ready for everything. That was the motto of the Parachute Regiment. What was his orientation in space? He had leapt from planes as a paratrooper. He plunged. The air was thin. The land came up quickly. He had never found that inner space which intensified forms.

She was a mathematician and an oceanographer. She had been educated at St Paul’s Girls School in London and St Andrew’s University in Scotland. There had followed a stint at CalTech in Pasadena, a doctorate and lectureship at ETH, and the professorship at Imperial.

Her earliest work at ETH had been on a project to track the diving patterns of Cuvier’s beaked whales in the Ligurian Sea. That had been too zoological, too macroscopic. It was the deep itself which interested her. At first, she thought she would work on modelling the conveyors which so massively circulate water between the oceans. That had proved too mechanical. Her interests became biomathematical — concentrated on the estimation of microbial life in the deepest layer, the Hadal deep.

She was a Londoner. In London, she could lead different lives on the same day. She was a star in the maths department, rich and worldly. With her parents and siblings she led a jet-setting life. Her flat was not far from the university, also in South Kensington. She wore a diving watch, a man’s watch, gold, with a black dial. She liked to think it connected her with the first French Navy aquanauts. Being a woman hadn’t helped her career. Glamour might have done. When she went to a cocktail party, she went to be noticed. She might wear a dress open at the back, diamond earrings, an old pair of Italian flat heels, and her purse would carry an African motif.

For a time, the abyss could be said to have tormented her. The contrast with what was at the surface and what was below perhaps heightened her natural desire for reversals. She careened between work and self-destruction. At one event at the Royal Geographical Society she noticed a man she had once met in Zurich. They left together. There were many such encounters. She went clubbing alone. It was either maths or she was on her back. When she was made a professor she withdrew, or matured. She stopped taking stimulants. She put bulkheads in her life. She divided her work-friends from her friend-friends. Her lovers were in yet another compartment. When she went to see her nieces and nephews in Holland Park on Sundays anyone amusing might be invited to join, even the broker in bed, as long as he agreed to tea and buns and a trawl of arcades afterwards. But when it was grown-ups only everything was sealed.

Thumbs was the only work-friend to be invited into her family. Her brothers liked him, and not just because he provided an excuse for video gaming. He laughed in a way that drew people in. He was spastic, unable to contain his insecurities. His office was decorated with busty pin-ups on their knees, wet, raven-haired. To her knowledge, he had never had a girlfriend. When she descended into blue obscenities he was left blushing and fidgeting. More than her successful brothers did, Thumbs brought out the sister in her. He was depressive, unwashed, the kind of grown man who turned around Dungeons and Dragons dice in his pocket. He could not abide exercise, except for his bike ride to work, long hair plastered under his helmet, and his summer hikes at her mountain cabin in Liguria, from where he returned leaner, and less pasty. She took meals and wine around to his flat. He provided beer, marijuana and chocolate. She brought in the research money, she had that savvy, but they shared authorship on published papers. They had a corresponding suppleness of mind. They worked together on whiteboards, alternating marker pens. They held similar views on the consilience of knowledge: it was not too grand to say that they felt they were close to a breakthrough that would forever change the understanding of the dimensions of life on earth.

*

Routine became important to her. She played in a squash ladder at the university. She swam. She had lunch in the canteen. On Thursdays she often went to the cinema with her colleagues, with dinner at the same restaurant off the Old Brompton Road beforehand. She tried to meet up with her girlfriends every week. They cooked together. There was a book club. They went to galleries and to the ballet. She answered their questions about her work, but never burdened her response with applied complex analysis or non-linear dynamics.

In love it was an old story. Her body was attracted to men her mind had no particular use for. In her experience, the bankers, especially, had no sense of proportion. One sat on a plane to New York and did not once look down at the ice and the rock over Greenland, over Cape Farewell, Uummannarsuaq, let alone the sea, and gave no consideration to her comments on the headwind, or the amount of oxygen in the air. It was not just the moneymen. It was barristers, once even a historian. They put in a hand, or a foot, and she closed the hatch on them. Perhaps it was just a male thing, the way they all seemed to think in terms of time and power. They had their chronologies — so and so did this to whom when — their instructions and name dropping. She was not unpleasant to them, not at first. It was just … she was charted for another place, which Cape Farewell only hinted at. She was studying life which exceeded all chronologies, which had never been studied before, and which had yet to be named. She could not imagine a career consumed by the moment. She stood in all her allure on the shoulders of giants, who had laid out science and its laws. She knew it and was cocky enough to entertain that she was going to be a giantess at the vanguard of knowledge, whose work would be appreciated for centuries to come.

It was a small propeller plane and they were buffeted at first by thermals. Ahead of them were towering storm clouds. The land below looked ravaged, like a drained sea. The shadows in the canyons were enormous. The storm dispersed and he fell asleep. When he woke, the pilot was dipping down towards a coastal airstrip. It became very hot in the cabin. They circled to clear the animals before landing. There was dry bush as far as the eye could see and a trim of cultivated land along the shore. The town appeared old and scattered and impoverished. There were palm trees along the beach. The sea was dark blue. There was a white break on the reef. It might have made for good surfing. It was difficult to tell from that height.

He had taken the head of a Somali charity out for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Nairobi. The proprietor sat by the door in a black shirt buttoned to the collar. Sure enough, the menu was decorated with pictures of Tirana, Tripoli, Asmara and Mogadishu in the time of Il Duce: Africa was like South America in the way it nourished the small dreams of Europeans.