Trawler (44 page)

“Goaaal!” I yelled; but again, Luke did not respond.

“Aye—but he was dead before HMS
Triton ca
me back in 1882. And that’s a small pity, because what the hell? He’d
done
it, hadn’t he?
A great life
, despite being an anti-Darwinian twit? Don’t you think? Anyway, the boys on board
Triton
, even with their primitive collecting gear, they caught around 220 species and varieties from the cold area, the deep, unsalty current from the Arctic ice-melt to the north; and around the same number from the warm North Atlantic Drift to the south—and only fifty or so were common to both! So there you are: Ernst Mayr, as always, is
right
, and
he’s
the man who reminded everyone in the twentieth century, stuck in their genetic labs, bean-bag genetics, genetic drift, bullshit! No-out there in the real world, for one species to break into several, you needed
a physical break:
geographical, spatial isolation: a climate change: a new desert, a new forest, a lowered lake-level that split into a thousand ponds before it rose again; a new rift valley opening up; a new great river course that divided populations of, say, chimpanzees … Or,
here we go
…” (Luke was now lying on his back in the semi-dark, as the
Norlantean
continued, but
so
gently, to go through her six degrees of freedom: a pitch, a roll, a sway, a heave, a surge, a yaw: and yes, that should be happiness, I thought, but I’d blown it, hadn’t I? Luke, it was obvious, he was now in his
last
manic phase, and so were the rest of the crew, and from tomorrow or whenever, yes, he was right, I thought, yes, he’s right, this Luke, because he’s been through it all his working life, and so, from tomorrow,
no one will talk to me
. The talking phase of
no-sleep is over—and you, you, Redmond, how come you
wasted
, how come you blew away
such
an opportunity by talking so much yourself?
So many
questions unasked? And all because
you couldn’t stop talking yourself?
Yes, I thought, well, I’ve learnt, for the rest of my life I’ll keep my mouth
shut:
I’ll be a strong silent idiot male …) “Aye … here we go
… Craaak!
A terrible cracking—as the block of land divides and the islands and continents are forced across the surface of the earth as new sea-floor is made at mid-ocean ridges and swallowed again in the deep ocean trenches. Even real geology only happens at sea! And
that—
that was only formulated by Dan McKenzie at Cambridge (and independently by Jason Morgan at Princeton)
in 1967!
But hey! Sorry! It wasn’t really a
craaak!
Plate tectonics—and we know about it in such detail, we’ve got it mapped—ach, it happened as slowly as your fingernails grow… And aye, no one man or woman would have known about it, even if
Homo sapiens sapiens
, as you say, had been around at the time. But there again, Redmond! I’ll bet—you still don’t know about it, do you?”

“No!”

“I thought not! Because hey!
It’s still going on
… Even as we speak… And I’ll bet you don’t know that England and Scotland really
are
different, do you?”

“What? Well…”

“No—because they both came north from round about the present-day Antarctic, but by different routes, because they were parts of different plates. And England nudged up against Scotland—and the buffer-zone, that, the soft rolling hills of the borders, that’s the uplifted mud of the ancient floor of a shallow sea!”

“Great!”

“So the land and the people—they really are different!”

“The people? Come on, Luke—bullshit! The people? You romantic! People? There were no people—
they hadn’t yet evolved!
”

“Aye,” said Luke, ignoring me, “and do you remember all that bullshit nineteenth-century geology we were taught at school? The Old Red Sandstone rocks for example? So Great
Britain (as we used to call it) must once have been a hot desert? And how it made no sense? So
any
schoolmaster,
every
geography schoolmaster might and should have had the simple idea:
Great Britain has moved
. But they didn’t of course—but imagine! As you’d say—if they had: wouldn’t
that
have made boring old geology interesting? OK, so it wasn’t
that
boring, because it gave us
time—
thousands of millions of years. But imagine! If only it had also given us movement in geographical space!
Then
it would have been exciting, and made sense, and Ernst Mayr’s
so right:
even to understand the emergence, the diversity of life, you need
geographical
change, spatial change, don’t you? Because the Old Red Sandstone—
that was laid down when England was where the Sahara is now!
”

“Ernst Mayr?”

“Aye! And guess what? We’re still moving, us, the UK—we’re still going north: the land, you and me,
the whole ching-bang
as Robbie would say! Aye—so one day the Arctic really
will
be land, a continent, and Edinburgh will be at the North Pole … And Shetland, aye—Shetland will be well on the way towards New Zealand… But by then, of course, New Zealand will have moved…”

“Ernst Mayr? Hey Luke—
he
stayed with us too, you know (and yeah, yeah, only because of the
TLS
) but I think the old boy came because he knew he’d need a rest somewhere: he was over here from Harvard to be fêted by the Royal Society and given its gold medal for lifetime achievement in zoology, something like that, and he realized from my letters (he wrote such
wonderful
reviews for me at the
TLS);
he must have realized that I knew sod all about anything, but I sounded a friendly sort of a guy, so he thought that he could hide out with us, to recover from the flight, I suppose, and to take it easy before all the official prize-giving … So I went to Blackwell’s bookshop and I bought
all
his books—and jeeez, Luke, like you with your UNESCO fish volumes, that was one hell of a sacrifice, because they’re big books, and I’ve never been rich, you know, in fact I spend my life in debt, but I don’t want to think about
that:
but yes, again like you, those
books, like your UNESCO volumes, they’re now so precious … Because he signed them all for me, he inscribed them, each one, and guess what? As we collectors say—I’ve
tipped
in his letters to me in all five volumes, I’ve stuck in his amazing long letters!”

I looked across at Luke (well of course I did), because in the normal or abnormal routine of things in this new life of mine on board this trawler, a way of life that had gone on for ever and would never cease, one of the constant pleasures had been Luke’s sudden never-failing young-boy interest in the pioneering books of biology—and the heroes who had managed to write them… But now, no, now I wasn’t even sure if Luke was listening … He was lying on his back staring at his plywood-ceiling, the base of the bunk above his head… And please, I thought, please don’t let him start tinkering with that imaginary drawing of his, not again …

So with added emphasis I said to myself: this is Ernst Mayr, for Chrissake: this is Ernst Mayr I’m talking about—the guy who’s given us so much pleasure, so much new ordered insight into the natural world… And if you don’t believe me, Luke,
I wanted to say
, consider the concepts, the words that you use in your professional life every working day: they’re all his: sympatric, allopatric, peripatric, founder population, sibling species
… But that was it
, that was all I could remember… The rest was a blank: a dark space of forgetfulness, with just a faint echo of the distant laugh of a hyena about to start the night-time hunt of the pack, a female, an alpha female, because all hyena-packs, as Hans Kruuk had told me long ago in Oxford (and he discovered it, and that’s a fact, as Big Bryan would say), all hyena-packs are led by a dominant female, which is perhaps why they’re so successful, so deadly at night: and in the morning the altogether more stupid lions arrive to finish off the remains of the hyena-kills, and the annoyed hyenas hang around the edges (lions are
big
) and make a lot of noise, and insult the lions, and trade gossip
(yack! yack!)—so
that’s why all the previous male naturalists assumed that it was the hyenas who were always the scavengers … But Jeesus, where was I? Ernst Mayr! Yes—so I said out loud:

“Luke, Ernst Mayr! I didn’t know it fully at the time, of course, and yeah, you’re right, I had
not
read his books, but I
did
know about his Number One Contribution to the history of mid-twentieth-century biology… a genius like W. D. Hamilton, but in a very different way… as you knew yourself, of course … But the point is that the old boy, then in his eighties, I suppose, now in his nineties and
still
producing magnificent insights (see? Luke? If you want to live long, it’s simple—get
consumed
with an interest …)—well, it was winter, and maybe our cottage isn’t that warm, so he sat in the armchair of honour, in the big room, and instinctively (and this has not happened before or since) Belinda and I sat at his feet, like small kids, and Belinda had made this risotto (so
advanced
, then), and we ate it from plates on our knees, and we drank lots of wine, and she’d made a Queen’s pudding, too—and we sat at the feet of a truly great man (as I now know), but there he was in a ragged old green sweater (“I always
relax
in this”) with huge holes at the elbows; and on his feet (he said his feet were cold) he wore the last pair of Belinda’s hippy calf-length heavy-wool Afghan socks (and
I
was never allowed even to try them on); and they had these lovely goatskin soles … And you know what? He talked and talked! Such stories! And we listened entranced, spellbound, whatever, and I was thinking at the time: “You, Ernst, you are the loveliest old grandad that anyone could ever wish for”—and I wanted to put my arms round him and give him
such
a hug and say straight out: “You—you’re the fucking most wonderful old man I’ve ever met!” But I didn’t, of course,
but I should have:
and you know? Even now I regret that I didn’t have a recorder, a tape-machine, yes? But Belinda says,
don’t be silly
, and besides, that’s so unworthy, so tacky, and how could you think of using a thing like that? But all the same—
imagine—
he talked about the entire course of his extraordinary life, as if it really
was
to his grandchildren, and the intellectual value
of it, pow!

“But I do remember most of it—OK, a tiny part of it—how he was fourteen or so, and he’d seen this extraordinary rare duck on his local lake, and no one believed him (least of all his family), so he wrote to the greatest field-biologist in the Germany of his
day. And guess what? I warn you Luke, this is hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck time, or a funny feeling at the back-of-the-knees, or a tingling on the underside of the first joints on all your toes … Yes: the Grand Old Man replied, pronto! Because he was obviously
a grand teacher
, too, and he was old enough to recognize really great talent when he read it, once in a lifetime, even in a fourteen-year-old… Yes—Ernst, at fourteen, he was already recognized. And the duck, sure, it
was
there (which old Ernst obviously
still
thought was the point, seventy years on): but of course the duck didn’t really matter—no, it was the knowledge, the conversation, the reading, the conviction, the focus of this
fourteen-year-old: that’s
what beguiled the great professor. So he says to this provincial boy: ‘Look here, Ernst, you won’t understand, but I’m
very
busy, and I have to get the train back to Berlin (or was it Heidelberg?)
tonight
… So
please
, tell your parents (and of course his parents didn’t believe a word of it) I think you taking your A levels (as it were), that really is a waste of your time … No, I want you to come and study
seriously
, as you do already, of course, but in
my
department,
my
research unit, in two months’ time, October first, OK?’ And so the young Ernst was on his way… to a continued, seamless, deep-interest happiness … And then what? Can you guess? What happened next? Rothschild? You know that great story?”

No—it was no use; and something had already told me: an absence of grunts, and snorts of outrage, and repressed snuffles of laughter, friendly or derisive: no, it had all gone away—there was nothing now but the usual deep thump of the engines (and even they seemed thoroughly at peace: no rising roar, no scream as the screws lifted almost clear of the hurricane-sea: no, they were doing their job, calm, content, day-to-day… the engines, the Blackstones, seventy-years-old-and-more, way-past-retirement, they themselves were happy, planting winter broadbeans in their allotment, pottering on with life …

But no—it was pointless—there was nothing I could do—because at last I looked across again at Luke (and come on—that was a great story, wasn’t it?), and it was precisely as I’d feared:
Luke was asleep. Luke was so asleep, in fact, so still, so lost, so gone—Luke might well be dead…

FOR THE NEXT HAUL
I followed Big Bryan and Allan Besant down through the trap-door to the fish-room, down the unexpectedly long and steep ladder, way down into the forward hold, as agreed—because Dougie, in the galley, he’d said, in front of everyone: “If you’ve no worked in the hold, Redmond, you’re no a trawlerman—because that’s hard, that is. Aye—it’s a peedie thing compared to the work of an engineer in the engine-room, right enough, but I tell ye: it’s hard in the hold …”

But my first impression, as I reached the last rung of the ladder (the base was frozen into a mound of ice-pebbles), my first thought, as I stumbled across the pile of ice, was: “
It’s so cold in here!
” Which I must have said out loud, because Allan Besant laughed and Big Bryan replied: “Cold? Ach no! Just you wait—it’s hot in here, it’s roastin’ hot!”