2007 - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (3 page)

Naturally I didn’t want to bore her with my problems when she was so exhausted. However, she revived over a glass of wine and talked for a while about US banking regulations. Most interesting. She has gone to bed now, and so will I in a moment.

It would have been nice if we could have talked a bit about my problems at work, but I must not be self-centred.

§

16 June

My meeting at Fitzharris & Price was not quite what I expected.

I cannot help but feel resentful towards these people who have disturbed the relative tranquillity of my life with their absurd ideas. My intention was to be damning without being rude, discouraging without being negative. I still feel, as I write this, that their proposal is so stupid that it will soon wither and die.

When I arrived at the F&P offices I found an elegant reception area, with an elegant receptionist commanding it from behind a large partners’ desk. Opposite the desk were a pair of comfortable-looking leather sofas and a low glass table with
Country Life
and
The Field
laid out on it. Before I could sample any of these luxuries Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot came out to meet me.

She thanked me for sparing the time to come and see her. She was courteous, elegant, tall and slender. She appeared to me to be dressed as if she was about to go out to lunch at a smart restaurant rather than for a day’s hard work in the office. Mary always says it is demeaning for working women to dress themselves up like that. She herself is a strong believer in sensible, practical working clothes which do not accentuate the wearer’s femininity.

We went into Ms Chetwode-Talbot’s office, which looked out over St James’s Street. The windows were double-glazed and the room was quiet and full of light. Instead of going behind her desk she guided me to two armchairs facing each other across a low mahogany table on which were set out a white china coffee pot and two cups on a tray. We sat down, and she pulled the tray towards her and poured out two cups of coffee. Then she said, and I remember her exact words, ‘I expect you think we are all absolute idiots.’

This was unexpected. I began to trot out some long-winded comments about the unusual nature of the project, how it was outside the mainstream of the centre’s work, and how I felt a degree of concern that we might all waste quite a lot of time and achieve nothing.

She listened patiently and then said, ‘Please call me Harriet. My surname is such a mouthful it really is too much to ask anyone to use it.’

I blushed. Perhaps Chetwode-Talbot has metamorphosed in pronunciation in the way Cholmondely has become Chumly, or Delwes Dales—one of those trick pronunciations invented by the English to confuse one other.

Then she suggested it might help if I understood some of the background.

I nodded; I needed to know who or what I was dealing with. Harriet—I don’t think it is appropriate for us to be on Christian-name terms, but it is quicker to write just her first name in this diary—began to explain. I crossed my legs and clasped my hands over my knees and generally tried to assume the expression my tutor at university used to adopt when I had put in a particularly bad piece of work which he was about to tear to shreds.

Harriet gave me a faint smile and explained that I had probably gathered by now that Fitzharris & Price were chartered surveyors and property consultants, not fisheries scientists.

I told her I appreciated the point.

She bowed her head in acknowledgement and explained that for many years the business of her office had been acquiring agricultural or sporting estates in the UK on behalf of overseas clients—in particular, Middle Eastern buyers. Fitzharris had discovered quite quickly that its clients didn’t just want it to buy the estates but also manage them in their absence.

That had led Fitzharris into providing technical expertise on a whole range of subjects, such as land agents’ services and help with recruiting estate employees through to advice on farming practice, sporting lets, obtaining planning permission for building new country houses, and so on.

Of course, Harriet told me, most of their clients are very wealthy, and are fond of often quite ambitious projects to improve the properties they buy. Then she said, ‘We have one such client who has been with us for a number of years. His wealth derives in part from oil, but if there is such a thing as a typical oil sheikh, he is not it. He is a most unusual, visionary man.’

Harriet paused to refill our cups with fresh coffee, and I found myself reluctantly admitting to myself that however foolish the project was, there was nothing foolish about this woman.

She added, ‘I am not going to attempt to describe what my client’s motivation is. I think it is important you try and understand it, if you decide to help us, but it is for him alone to tell you about that part.’ She continued, ‘He is a man we hold in great respect in this firm. He is an excellent steward and landlord of the properties he has bought in this country, an employer everyone would want to work for, but people like working for him because of his personal qualities and not because he is enormously wealthy. Moreover, he is an Anglophile, which is perhaps less usual in the Yemen than in some other parts of the region, and his prominence in his own country means he is viewed as a key potential ally in Yemeni councils by the Foreign Office here.’

‘Ah,’ I said.

‘Indeed, Dr Jones. I think you are aware there is a political dimension to all of this.’ She did not attempt to call me Alfred. ‘I know you will have had some pressure brought to bear on you from within government. Believe me, it was not of our doing and I very much regret it. We would rather you took on this job, impossible as it may seem at the moment, of your own free will, or else not at all. And that will certainly be the view of our client.’

‘Ah,’ I repeated, and then when she appeared to have stopped speaking, ‘Well. You were speaking about introducing salmon into the Yemen.’

‘And salmon fishing. I believe it is intended to be fly-fishing only, no spinning.’

‘No spinning,’ I repeated.

‘Are you a salmon fisherman, Dr Jones?’ asked Harriet. For some reason I blushed again, as if I was about to admit to something covert and slightly sinister. Perhaps I was.

‘As a matter of fact, I am very keen. Perhaps not as unusual amongst us fisheries people as you might think. Of course I nearly always put back any fish I catch. Yes, I enjoy it very much.’

‘Where do you fish?’

‘Here and there. I like to try different rivers. I’ve fished the Wye, the Eden and the Tyne in England; the Tay and the Dee and a few smaller Scottish rivers. I don’t get much time for it nowadays.’

‘Well, if you take this project on I’m sure my client will ask you to fish with him at his place in Scotland.’ Then she added with a smile, ‘And perhaps one day you’ll fish on the Wadi Aleyn, in the Yemen.’

I saw where this was going.

‘Well, there are a few problems with that idea,’ I suggested. This time Harriet crossed her legs, a movement that somehow caught my eye, and clasped her hands around her knees and looked at me critically, just as I had tried to do to her a moment or two earlier.

‘Let’s go through some of them,’ she suggested.

‘First, water,’ I said. ‘Salmon are fish. Fish need water.’ Harriet only looked at me when I said that, so I had to continue. ‘Specifically, as I said in my letter, salmon need cool, well-oxygenated water. The temperature should ideally not exceed eighteen degrees Celsius. The best conditions are rivers fed by snow melt or springs, although some varieties of salmon can live in lakes if they are deep and cool enough. So there’s a fundamental problem, right there.’

Harriet stood up and went across to her desk, took a file from it and then sat down again.

Opening the file she said, ‘Water. Parts of the Yemen have up to 250 millimetres of rainfall a month in the wet summer season. It is brushed by the monsoon, like parts of the Dhofar region in the south of Oman. On top of surface water run-off from the summer storms, there is constant recharging of the groundwater. People didn’t use to think there was much groundwater in the Yemen but since they started looking for oil they have found one or two big new aquifers. So, yes, water is a huge problem, but there is water there. The wadis become rivers, and pools and lakes form in the summer.’

This was surprising.

‘Then there is the question of water temperature. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Yemen isn’t that hot, but if it is, the oxygen will leave the water and the fish will die.’

Harriet looked at her file again and said, ‘We’re thinking mountains. That’s where the rain is, and the elevations in the central highlands go up to over 3000 metres. At that height the temperatures are bearable. The night-time temperatures go down to well below twenty Celsius even in the summer. And Pacific salmon get as far south as California—as long as the water is aerated, they seem to be able to survive. I don’t mean to be telling you your business, Dr Jones; just that it might not be as open and shut as you first thought.’

I paused, and then said, ‘Salmon parr feed off certain types of fly life, and if we introduced salmon from English rivers they would only recognise food that came from those rivers.’

‘Perhaps that can be introduced along with the fish? There are plenty of flies in the Yemen, at any rate. English ones might adapt if the local fly life didn’t taste good.’ She closed her file with a snap and looked at me with a smile.

‘Then,’ I said with mounting irritation, ‘the salmon parr grow up into smolts, and the smolts want to find the sea, and the particular part of the sea they want to find is just south of Iceland—at least if the fish broodstock comes from an English or Scottish river. How do you suppose these fish will get there? Through the Suez Canal?’

‘Well,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘that’s one of the problems you would have to solve, of course. But if it was me, and of course I’m a completely non-technical person, I’d think along the lines of constructing holding ponds at the bottom of the wadis seeded with salmon, keeping the water cool, injecting it with oxygen if necessary, and confining the salmon there for three or four years. I read somewhere that in Canada salmon stay in the lake systems for that amount of time.’

‘And what then?’

‘Catch them all, then start again?’ She stood up, looking at her watch. ‘Dr Jones, I’ve taken up far too much of your time already. I’m very grateful indeed for you coming and listening to all this. I know how outlandish it is. But please don’t dismiss it here and now. Take a couple of days to think about it, and then I’ll call you again, if I may. Remember, all you have to commit to at this stage is a feasibility study. You’re not going to be putting your reputation on the line. And remember too, if you will, that my client can commit very large financial resources to this project, should they be needed.’

And then I was back in the reception area, shaking hands and saying goodbye, almost without knowing how I got there. She turned and walked back to her office, and I couldn’t help watching her as she went. She did not look back.

§

17 June

Last night I gave my talk to the local humanist society. My theme was that if we believed in God, we immediately created an excuse for tolerating injustice, natural disasters, pain and loss. Christians and other religionists argue that God does not create suffering but the world in which suffering occurs, and suffering allows us to rediscover our oneness with God.

I argued that such an approach stood logic on its head. All disasters, all loss, all suffering, demonstrate that there cannot possibly be a God, for why would a deity who is omnipotent create a universe so prone to disaster and accident? Religious faith, I argued, was invented in order to pacify the grieving multitudes and ensure they did not ask the really difficult questions, which if answered, would tend to lead to progress.

We were quite a big group that evening: seven or eight of us. Muhammad Bashir, a grizzled old Pakistani from down the road, is a regular attender. I think he wants to save me from myself. At any rate, he knows me well and likes me even though I am, by his lights, a blasphemer.

‘Dr Jones,’ he asked, ‘you are a fisherman, are you not?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘When I can.’

‘And how many hours do you fish before you catch something?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I replied, not clear what he was driving at. ‘Many hundreds of hours, sometimes.’

‘So why do you fish? Is that not a bad use of your time?’

‘Because I hope in the end I will catch one,’ I replied.

The old man hissed with glee, rubbed his beard with his right hand and said, ‘Because you believe. Hope is belief. You have the beginnings of faith. Despite all the evidence, you want to believe. And when you catch one, what do you feel? A great happiness?’

‘A very great happiness,’ I said, smiling at him. It did him good to win the occasional argument with me, so I let him. I didn’t use the thousand logical and statistical arguments I could have done to put him down. I let him finish.

‘You see, Dr Jones, you believe, and in the end your belief brings you great happiness. You are rewarded for your constancy and your faith, and the reward is much greater than the possession of a fish, which you could buy for little money at Tesco. So you are, after all, not so very different to the rest of us.’

§

18 June

This evening, after dinner, Mary looked up from the crossword and said to me, ‘I’m going away for a fortnight to work in our Geneva office.’

This happened about once every year, so it wasn’t a total surprise. I raised my eyebrows to register mild disappointment and asked her when she was going.

‘On Sunday.’

I reminded her that we had booked in weeks ago for a weekend’s walking and birdwatching with my brother in the Lake District.

‘I know,’ said Mary. ‘I’m awfully sorry. But someone in the Geneva office has gone on sick leave, and they need me to cover and I know the office. Perhaps you could come with me and we could walk in the hills by Lake Evian?’ But then she thought better of it and said that she would probably have to work Saturdays as well, to find her way into her the job. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘you’ve got your weird fish project on, and you’d better stay with that to keep David Sugden happy.’