Fiona McFarlane - The High Places - Stories

‘Students,’ he said.

‘Students? Where from?’

‘Who knows?’

‘Someone must know!’ I said. ‘What are they doing here?’

‘They’re waiting for someone to drive them.’

‘To drive them where?’

‘Around.’

After our errands we went to a bar, where we found the young men who clearly accompanied the girls outside. They were discussing this question of a driver with the patrons. Their American voices and emphatic gestures lacked economy in the midmorning heat. Eric expressed no interest in interacting with the visitors, so I lost interest in them too. All kinds of people come through this place, just as I’ve done. They’re none of my business. We drank, we drove the slippery roads, and Eric delivered me back to the school in time for my presentation.

This is how I prefer to remember all my contacts with civilisation: as briefly as possible.

Fans revolved idly in the school’s lobby. A row of African violets butted up against each window, brown in the heat, and a small table was stacked with copies of a pamphlet called ‘Good News for Modern Man’. I read it while I waited for Father Anthony, and it reminded me of the Church I grew up in: the primary colours and cheerful messages, the merry Heaven and blotty, yellow Hell. ‘For God so loved the world,’ it told me in a bright, responsible voice. I felt a small nostalgia. I had one of my headaches and all the angles of the world seemed wrong.

‘Dr Birch!’ cried Father Anthony, arriving. Father Anthony seems always to be arriving: there is a perpetual commotion about him. I’ve also never met a pinker man in all my life. His face is rose and his ears are salmon. His neck folds into itself like certain kinds of coral. His hands sprout from the ends of his arms anemone-like and gloved in pink.

‘Dr Birch!’ he cried again.

‘Call me Bill.’

‘Bill, Bill,’ he said with delight, shaking my brown hand with his pink one. His was smooth and cool; mine was damp. Father Anthony has a gift for the comfortable use of names. He dispenses them like small gifts, as if they’ve been prepared lovingly in advance. I can imagine it — this small recognition — feeling large enough to turn a soul back to God. I believe that Father Anthony’s God is an old friend to him, gracious and prudent, with a priest’s sympathy, a compassionate memory, and a steady heart for his flock’s misgivings and undoings and hurts.

‘This way, Bill, this way,’ said Father Anthony, ushering me along with his hands. I wonder if, like certain corals, they glow all the pinker in the dark. ‘We’re proud to welcome you. The sisters are very excited, as are our students. This is quite a treat. What a treat. We have so few visitors. The bishop once — what an occasion. This is in my lifetime. Well, my tenure here — a lifetime in itself. Ha, ha! This way, this way.’

He escorted me into a small, overcrowded hall in which nuns quieted students and drew blinds over windows. They went about their tasks with a sensible bustle I found intimidating.

Father Anthony introduced me as Dr William Birch, eminent marine biologist. I introduced myself as Bill Birch, malacologist.

‘A malacologist,’ I explained, ‘is a scientist who studies molluscs.’

It occurred to me for the first time that this title of mine is extremely ominous, belonging as it does to the list of distasteful words beginning with ‘mal’: malcontent, maladjusted, malformed, malicious . I wanted to explain that until my passion for the colossal squid blotted out my love for all other marine organisms I was a conchologist, which sounds much safer. More avuncular, sort of bumbling. Instead I loomed above them, malacologist, and ordered the lights out.

The students watched my slideshow presentation rapturously in the semi-dark. Their crowded bodies gave out a smell of warmed fruit about to spoil. It seemed to me as if their hair were filling up the room and muffling my voice, and when I felt prickles of fever up my legs and sweat behind my knees, I couldn’t be sure of the cause — sickness, or girls?

A tiger shark swam across the screen. The girls all breathed together, softly, ‘Shark.’ An anemone appeared, and they sang together, ‘Anemone.’ ‘Starfish,’ they sighed, and ‘Seahorse,’ ‘Eel.’ I showed them a beach camouflaged by thousands of newly hatched turtles and they inhaled collectively (we slow-breeding humans are always astonished by the extravagance with which sea creatures, seasonally awash in salt and sperm, reproduce themselves). I showed a photograph of myself in the observation station, taken by my departing colleagues. I paused on this photograph for too long because I was struck by the plump health of my former self, with his light tan and professionalism (he stands in the station doorway in prudent boots and his posture is in no way diminished by the tropical mountain rising above him). Then I showed pictures of Mabel in her bay and the students giggled. They know Mabel, although we have taken care not to publicise her. They know I’m the man who watches Mabel in the long afternoons and then watches them with his long binoculars. They laughed at her, friendly, and they laughed at me.

‘Thanks to the wonders of technology,’ said Father Anthony, ‘you have shown us the goodness of creation.’

The students can walk for minutes through the goodness of creation to see firsthand, in the blood-temperature sea, the same wonders I had just displayed. Since leaving the school I’ve found myself repeating the girls’ breathless catalogue: shark, anemone, starfish, seahorse, eel . A children’s book of the sea. And I think of the waste involved, the sea full of death and the dying: all of creation’s necessary hunters fanning out among the reefs and rocks and sunken ships, all of them hungry, and if not hungry, dead. What if I’d discussed this in my talk? A Lecture on the Origin of Species? But Father Anthony seems a sensible man. Perhaps the students are taught evolution. I suspect we think similarly, all of us who were trapped yesterday in that hot room: we’re worried, daily, by the vast number of unredeemed things in the world.

Father Anthony took me to his study after my presentation. A white room with a view of jungle trees, and above the window, an ivory Christ on an ebony cross. Sun-faded copies of ‘Good News for Modern Man’ filled a low bookshelf. The sun ages everything so quickly that they might have come in on last month’s supply ship. Even Darwin looks a little more worn around the edges than when he arrived a few months ago, glumly agnostic. Only the thirsty trees seem to resist the sun, growing greener by the day, sweating out a greenness that hurts my eyes and forces me to keep them trained on the sea. The mosquitoes, also, seem unaffected, but I suppose they hide from the sun in the daytime.

‘May I ask you a question?’ said Father Anthony.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Are you a man of faith, Bill?’

‘That seems like the kind of thing you’d ask before letting me get up there in front of your girls.’

‘Our students are not necessarily young women of faith, Bill. And we would never keep you away from them on the basis of your beliefs.’

This implied — I was sure of it — that Father Anthony had considered keeping me away from them on some other basis.

‘Well, I’m not a man of faith,’ I said. ‘No, I’m not.’

And because this seemed so definitive — because this was the first time I had said anything like it aloud to a living man — I wanted to qualify it. I said, ‘I used to believe, you know. God, the maker of Heaven and Earth, Jesus Christ, conceived by the Holy Spirit. The third day he rose again from the dead. You know, all that. The Church of England.’