My Natural History (14 page)

Deafening, and all around, lion answered lion and pride answered pride and did so with heaven-splitting delight. It was as if they had found their voices for the first time: the first night of song in a world made new, one chance to raise their voices and they were going to get it absolutely right.

This trip to North Luangwa was the first time I had thought of myself as prey. This is quite different to being in a position of risk. It is not like the mischances and the perils you find as you knock about the world: the time when a car in which I had hitched a lift performed a
360
-degree skid; the time a driver commenced a vigorous
sexual
assault on me at 60 mph; the midnight encounter with
a gang in Port of Spain; the accidental small-hours hike up Eighth Avenue. This was not the same thing at all. I was not at risk of being injured or killed; I was at risk of being eaten. That is quite different from merely dying. The
possibility
puts the human being in a very different
relationship
to his environment from the one we normally accept. I was subservient to the landscape and to the big beasts that inhabited it. There were animals out there that saw me – at least to an extent – not as a source of threat but as a source of protein. I was not master of all I surveyed: I was merely part of the economy of the soil. Humans have been prey across the millennia: how ridiculous it is that we think of man-eating as an aberration, something that goes against the natural order. The exact opposite is true. It confirms the natural order, and our own place within it.

And I found that this experience had a potent savour: a profound resonance. I was not a unique and privileged thing, but part of the continuum of species. I was one with the impala and the puku and the zebra: we were brothers in edibility. I mean this in no fanciful way: we were all mammals together, and possessed broadly the same
body-plan
, and to a crocodile or a lion, there was not much difference, save that my Timberlands were probably more indigestible than hooves: and both should be left for the hyenas.

This sense – not so much of kinship as of oneness – was something I woke with, for I did manage some sleep
on that cacophonous night. I got up, walked a certain distance from the camp, pissed long and gratefully and so returned to the human condition. But not entirely. Never again entirely. That sense of oneness, awakened by the night of music, was never to leave me. We walked back: and as I sipped at last a beer back in Iain’s island camp, a bat hawk stole past at dusk.

16. Willow warbler

Phyolloscopus trochilus

M
y mother wanted me to be an international lawyer, a fact that tells us all kinds of interesting things about the relationship between fantasy and reality. She had lofty ambitions for me, and they cast a shadow over both our lives. These ambitions, as I knew from the time I took my eleven-plus, asked deep and searching questions about the nature of love: in particular, the extent to which love is conditional. These matters were not, perhaps, fully
reconciled
till the end.

I still turn my head away as the train pulls out of Barnes Station. I still stare down at my newspaper or my book, or out of the window on the opposite side of the tracks. I prefer not to look at the line of hedge that hides the path beyond, the path that leads to Putney Hospital. The
hospital has long been demolished, but that’s not the point. To gaze on the path I took so many times, always with such craven thoughts in my head, is still too difficult. I prefer to keep my eyes elsewhere.

Education and subsequent high achievement was never my goal. Rather, it was my duty. My father, despite leaving school at 14, had become a high-up in the BBC, an
oppressively
hard act to follow. My mother had been unable to take up her place at Oxford because of the war, and this disappointment had marked her life. So I not only had to follow that tradition, I also had to make good the wrongs of the past. I was a vector for the ambitions of others, and my mother took on the job of keeping me from
backsliding
. A glorious future in international law was surely within my grasp.

But if these ambitions created tensions, they also
created
a kind of intimacy. There was a sense, when things were going well, of a conspiracy between my mother and me: against the rest of the family, against the rest of the world. We did it through books; we did it through
scripture
; we did it through narrative. There was something of a shared mindset.

My mother’s considerable intelligence was her weapon, her stock-in-trade, her social persona. Tart, sometimes venomous one-liners gave her huge private delight. She meant no harm, or not much: but she could never resist the temptation of saying bad things. Mostly, this was the
well
-intentioned
malice of gossip and complicity. But it was a dangerous game, and though highly adept at playing it, she was always capable of giving pain – especially to
backsliding
sons.

Sherlock Holmes was a shared joy. By the age of 12, I had the Holmes canon more or less by heart: partly because I loved the tales, partly also because my mother loved them still more. Holmes gave us a language, it gave us a canonical text. We would play private games on long car journeys involving abstruse references to Holmes stories. We would concoct tabloid headlines, and the other person had to guess the story to which they referred. “Ancient riddle is crowning glory.” “Too easy –
The Musgrave Ritual
.”

The downside was the terrible bollockings, the
shaming
, accusing, horrendous tellings-off I received when my academic shortcomings were believed to have a basis in idleness, in insufficient ambition. When failure was of my own making, she was utterly unforgiving. This was
ultimately
to become counter-productive. As the 60s unfolded, it became an increasingly hard time for parents,
particularly
those seething with vicarious ambition. This was, after all, the first generation that had to learn that their sons and their daughters were beyond their command.

But even at the gaudy height of revolution, I still
valued
the literary conspiracy I had with my mother. She was a writer: I was an evolving writer. For a time, my literary
tastes were skewed towards hers: I read Jane Austen, and though I realise now that I only sort of enjoyed the books – certainly I have never reread them – I valued them because a Jane conversation always put us on good terms. I read some of the other detective stories she loved: Josephine Tey, Michael Innes, Ngaio Marsh – but my enjoyment fell far short of unconditional love.

Besides, I was, treacherously, developing literary tastes of my own. I had violent crushes on TS Eliot and James Joyce, and so moved outside my mother’s literary sphere. She was not an intellectual, not in the sense that loves analysis: but she had a profound sense of story. She wrote the
Blue Peter
historical pieces, and, with my father,
co-wrote
the
Blue Peter Special Assignments
. She had the knack of seeing history as a series of tales, and could bring that tale to life by finding a beginning, a middle and an end. A professional historian may curl his lip at such an approach: but stories are what humans love, and it is by stories that children – that all humans – most readily understand the world and the complexities of human life.

But me, I was forging in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race, and the sweet Thames ran softly while I sang my song. Duty became a less
pressing
matter than literature, than fomenting revolution with Ralph, than fomenting still greater things with Christine, my lovely first girlfriend. I could feel the grasp of imposed ambition slipping, and that was intoxicating: but not as
intoxicating as the rhythms and the wordplay of Joyce and Eliot. “He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul… a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.” Not just him, I thought. Not just him.

Appropriateness. That was the key to my mother’s soul, that was the secret of the universe. To say something was “suitable” was the highest form of praise. The idea of what was appropriate or suitable or fitting was what
powered
her religion, her view of society and her narrative technique. Good manners, right feeling, the Anglican faith – we sang “Firmly I believe and truly” at her mother’s funeral, appropriately, and then, still more appropriately, at her own. The way that things fitted in, one with the other, bringing about a completion, a resolution, a
meaning
, was something that, in a quiet kind of way, enthralled her throughout her life. The right kind of thank-you letter, relations – she alone knew the difference between a second cousin and a first cousin once removed – the
relationship
between liturgy and scripture, the relationship between worldly life and a practical religion; all these were linked by a series of cosmic strands in her mind, making a glorious celestial map of connections and relationships. There is a moment in Anthony Burgess’s
Earthly Powers
, when the narrator runs into Joyce in a café in Paris. “Joyce was drunk. He had an empty Sweet Afton packet in his hand, the cigarettes themselves lying on the ground virginal
and wasted in a kind of quincunx pattern. Things tended to form into patterns for Joyce, but he could not see the fallen cigarettes at all…”

A quincunx pattern, by the way, is one like the five on a die. My mother would have liked this fact: she was always happy when in possession of privileged
information
. She would also have like the way I said die, correctly, rather than dice, which, being plural, is here incorrect. For things tended to form into patterns for her, too, though rather different patterns from Joyce’s, and for that matter, mine. When she and my father had a mass said for their silver wedding, she chose the gospel, selecting the first miracle, the wedding at Cana in Galilee: the one in which they saved the best wine for the last. Suitable, you see. Appropriate. Very.

These patterns always linked us. Our conspiracy against the rest of the family, the rest of the world, continued almost in spite of ourselves. But I didn’t make it to Oxford, falling at the fence of the Latin exam. It would have been appropriate if I had gone to Oxford, appropriate if I had righted the wrongs of her own life: my failure to do so was a disappointment on a cosmic scale. Her world view had failed her. Or I had. A cosmic thank-you letter had not been written. The connections had not been made.

There was to be consolation for her. When I was at school, I used to take
The Times
at half-price, a special offer, one designed to create a life-long loyalty. (Ha.)
Before long, she began to steal it from me each morning without shame. She began to identify with the paper: not the politics, but the ambience. The newspaper had a
considerable
sense of what was appropriate and what was not – and besides, the crossword soon became a daily
confirmation
of the cleverness of her mind, a confirmation of herself. I tried, for a while, to do the crossword myself, for the sake of our alliance, but it was a case of sorry, I can’t manage it. For me, words were things that exploded with infinite possibilities: for her, words led to a single correct answer. It seemed that we had different ideas of what was appropriate.

But when, many years later, I began to write for
The Times
, it was a cosmic sign that things had not gone so badly wrong after all. Despite the difficult times on local papers, and the gloriously disreputable years in Asia, I was back in the world of appropriateness. It was a
confirmation
that things could work out well: that people could, in a phrase she always relished, “behave properly”, even if they took their time about it. It was as if the universe itself had done her a favour – a favour it most certainly owed – by behaving properly. Would she have withheld her love, or some of it, if things had worked out differently, if I had behaved less properly, if I had failed to find professional success, if I had stayed in Asia writing novels? This was not put to the test, and as Aslan says in the Narnia stories – stories she always enjoyed for the serene patterns they
drew with imagination and the Christian faith – no one is ever told
what would have happened
.

What did happen is that time passed and we all grew older, and my two sisters produced children and my
mother
was a grandmother and very pleased about it. She loved the large, noisy, bibulous family gatherings we had always gone in for, now with children underfoot adding to the hubbub; she was pleased that all her three children were in stable marriages and led interesting professional lives. She revelled in travel, though hated the turbulence travel brought with it. “We’re off to Bali tomorrow and it’s all absolutely ghastly,” she once wrote to me on a postcard.

There were shadows in her life, no question about that. She grew overweight and was prone to tiredness; I suspect she suffered for most of her life from an undiagnosed
thyroid
problem. She also suffered from depression: “Churchill called it the Black Dog. But it isn’t a dog. I like dogs. It’s a Black Cloud.” And often she sat in her black cloud, unable – as is the way with depression – even to try and escape its clutches.

She suffered a stroke in her late 60s, and it killed about half of her. She was told she would never walk again, but in a truly heroic effort, the last, she got back on her feet. We were optimistic that she would carry on much as before: it was not to be. Most of her joy in life was killed when the stroke hit her. She was no longer consistently clever: though there were still moments when the
sharp
-tongued
picker-up of all references and nuances would suddenly appear in the conversation like a ghost.

I would visit her often, or quite often anyway, and
frequently
I would read from her favourite books, a
recapitulation
of the old alliance. She could still read well enough for herself, but it tired her to do so for long periods. Besides, the alliance gave pleasure to us both. But also we would talk, and two things bothered her: bothered her to the point of obsession. One question was whether her grandchildren would remember her only a sick old woman, rather than the acute person she had been when whole. I said they would always remember their gran who loved them: but that was no consolation at all. And the other question was worse: why? Why did she have a stroke? What had she done to deserve it? For her mind required that life should be tidied up and that even illness should be appropriate. And this wasn’t. This wasn’t appropriate, this wasn’t suitable, this wasn’t fair. “It’s a biological caprice,” I told her. “It’s nothing to do with fairness. It’s just
fucking
horrible luck.” And she would shake her head and weep a little.

This shadow life continued for about three years. There were good bits, moments when she was cheerful, moments when her family racketed around her, glasses in their hands. But the bad bits lasted longer.

The second stroke killed her, but slowly, slowly. It was devastating: it took almost everything. It took the half-person
that remained and reduced it to a tiny fragment of life, of spirit. I remember – one of those ineradicably vivid memories – the day she was moved to Putney Hospital, and the rest of us walked from the hospital out onto Barnes Common and then, for the first time that year, I heard the voice of willow warbler. Willow warbler: the sweet lisping celebrant of spring, the bird that tells you that the dark times are over, that the black clouds have dispersed, that the wait has been worthwhile. The willow warbler tells you that spring is no longer a promise but an achievement: that the time for the best of all that life offers is here, is now, is before us.