Brazzaville Beach (24 page)

At half past six he switched on the television and settled down to watch a quiz show, notebook in hand.

“Why are you watching that crap?” she asked.

“I'm interested in them.”

“Game theory? Again?”

“Ah…yeah. Sort of.”

She let him watch. She went into the bedroom and changed the sheets. Shouldn't
he
be doing this? she thought, allowing herself to feel a little bitter. Shouldn't
he
be slightly more aware of
my
feelings? Surely this job was one for the adulterer, not the adulteree?…Then she told herself to calm down. The whole plan, she reminded herself with some irony, was not to pretend it hadn't happened but to get its importance—its
lack
of importance—in perspective….

She stuffed the sheets into a plastic bag. She wouldn't have them laundered, she thought, she would just throw them away. An expensive symbolic gesture, perhaps, but no less satisfying for all that. And she—

“Hope?” John called from the sitting room.

She went through. He was still watching the quiz game intently, with the volume turned so low as to be almost inaudible. He glanced at her, then back at the screen. She waited patiently.

“I'm all ears,” she said.

“I think…” He paused, eyes still on the game. “I think we should stop all this.”

“What? Television?”

“This farce.”

“I'm not with you.”

He stood up and switched the television off.

“Us. The marriage,” he said. “I can't take any more of it.”

 

John moved out. She didn't throw him out, exactly, but at times she consoled herself with the thought that she had. In fact she left him in their flat and went back to Dorset, assuming he would be gone when she next returned.

Before she left she telephoned Bogdan Lewkovitch and said she wanted to talk to him. He suggested they meet in a café near South Kensington tube station. He was waiting there when she arrived. It was a dark, old-fashioned-looking place, with cracked oilcloths on the table and run by a staff of stout old ladies. They drank milky coffee from scratched glass cups.

Bogdan was a large man with fair, untidy hair and, oddly for someone of his age, he still suffered from acne; he always had a few pink spots on his neck and jaw beneath his ears. He had a brisk and direct manner and often caused inadvertent offense in the college. Hope liked him. While they talked he ate three pastries, triangular sticky cakes studded with nuts as big as gravel.

“It's about John, isn't it?” Bogdan said, almost at once, munching.

“Yes.”

“What can I tell you? Each day he's different.” He picked some crumbs off the table with his forefinger. “That's part of the charm, of course.”

He told her that John's work on turbulence had started well but he had moved on too quickly. Conclusions he had drawn from a study of fluid dynamics he had then tried to apply more generally to all types of discontinuities. But here the sums did not quite add up. Those promising avenues were revealed as dead ends. Lucid and attractive formulae generated prolix answers of babbling complexity.

“And so he got very depressed, for a while. Which is natural. We could all see it. But then,” he winced histrionically, “we all go through that. That kind of frustration.”

Bogdan said that the first really bad sign was when John started working piecemeal, almost at random, on other topics—irrational numbers, tiling, topology—“even the dread world of physics attracted him for a week or two,” Bogdan said, with a sarcastic smile.

“And now he's back on game theory,” Hope said. She told him about the quiz show.

Bogan said that, initially, John's work had been astonishing. He had read a paper that everyone regarded as completely novel and exciting. The trouble was, Bogdan said, there were no laws of trespass in the world of science. Many people were working simultaneously, all over the world, in John's area. All types of turbulent, discontinuous phenomena were being analyzed: weather systems, economic markets, radio interference. John was not alone, he said. He ordered more coffee.

“But the cruel irony is,” Bogdan said, “that those first months of work John did on turbulence seemed to have opened doors for the others, but not for John. He's like…you know, a guy who invents an engine that runs on steam but finds out that James Watt reached the patent office first.” He shrugged. “Happens all the time. Even when you're dealing in nothing but abstract ideas—concepts.” He snapped his fingers. “Someone on the other side of the world comes up with identical proofs.”

“So. John's got so far but can't go further.”

“Yeah, and it's killing him, I guess. It would kill me. You see, he thinks someone else is going to snatch the prize.”

“What can he do?”

“Nothing. He just has to accept it. We all tell him, but you know, I think that's what's causing his problems.”

Hope frowned. She wasn't sure if this explained why he had slept with Jenny.

“I bumped into Jenny the other day,” she said. “How is she?”

Bogdan was eating. He swallowed and swilled down some coffee and then told her, with some eagerness, that they were thinking of getting divorced.

“I'm seeing someone else,” he said. “In Birmingham. I'm very happy with her.”

“Oh. Great.”

“But, you know, I'm worried about the children, et cetera, and all that.”

Hope said she understood.

“And Jenny,” Bogdan said. “I think maybe she has a lover here in London. But I don't know who.”

For an instant, malice prompted her, urged her to try for a small revenge, but she resisted. Instead she told him vaguely about her troubles with John and how they were going to separate for a while. There was no one else, she said, it was a question of warring temperaments. They both felt that some time apart might be the answer. Hope wrote down her telephone number in Dorset and gave it to Bogdan. She asked him to keep an eye on John.

“Let me know if things get worse,” she said.

“Oh, sure. I see him every day. I'll call you.”

They left the café. It seemed very bright outside after the brown gloom. Hope flinched as a bus thundered by. Bogdan kissed her farewell and reassured her once more.

“Everyone's getting divorced,” he said wryly. He paused. “They're funny people, mathematicians,” he said. “You should have married a physicist. We're not quite so crazy.”

THE CALCULUS

The calculus is the most subtle subject in the whole field of mathematics. It is concerned, I read, with the rates of change of functions with respect to alterations in the independent variable. It is the foundation of all mathematical analysis
.

I'm lost. But I'm still attracted by this idea of its subtlety and importance. I like the fact that we apply the definite article to it. The calculus
.

A simpler definition tells me that the calculus is the study of continuous change, that it deals with growth and decay, and I begin to understand why it is such a crucial tool. Growth, change and decay…that applies to all of us
.

But its key defect, it seems to me, is that it cannot cope with abrupt change, that other common feature of our lives and the world. Not everything moves by degree, not everything ascends and descends like lines on a graph. The calculus requires continuity. The mathematical term for
abrupt change is “discontinuity.” And here the calculus is no use at all. We need something to help us deal with that
.

 

The rains threatened, but still they never came. João and I kept up our watch on the Danube but saw no further incursions. Meanwhile, Alda logged the movements of the other members of the southern group as best he could alone.

After several days sitting in my hide overlooking the river ravine, hot and sticky and pestered with flies, I decided further vigilance was fruitless. As a result of the attack on Mr. Jeb, I assumed, Clovis had led the southern group farther south almost to the edge of the escarpment. Their core area was now a good two miles from the Danube; any patrolling northerners would have to cover a vast area of the forest in order to find them.

I was away from the camp most days from dawn to sunset. I often arrived at the canteen late, as the others were finishing their meals, and in this way managed to keep my social contacts to a minimum. After abandoning our surveillance at the river I spent a morning going over the data of Alda's follows, trying to plot the extent to which the core area of the southern group had moved and how confined it now was. It was clear at once that they were wandering about far less, spending much more time together as a group and rarely venturing off on their own or in twos. Except for Lena.

Alda had done two follows on Lena. She had left the group one day and had gone off foraging on her own. At the end of the day she had constructed a sleeping nest about half a mile from the others. She had returned to the group the next morning and then, two days later, had wandered off again. Alda had last seen her at four o'clock one afternoon high in a dalbergia tree. Since then she had not been seen. When I superimposed Lena's movements on a map of the others' it was obvious she was ranging as widely as she had ever done, oblivious, it seemed, to any risk.

The three of us spent the next two days with the southern group. There was still no sign of Lena. The other chimps seemed quite relaxed; there was no evidence of excessive caution or fear. The only significant change since I had last seen them was that
Rita-Lu was now fully in estrus. We saw Clovis and Conrad copulate with her, Clovis many times, but Conrad only once. Even then Rita-Lu jumped away from him after three or four thrusts and Conrad ejaculated into midair. Rita-Lu still presented to Conrad but he seemed subdued and quiet. It was as if, with Mr. Jeb gone, Conrad had lost his natural desire. Even Muffin showed some interest in Rita-Lu but she would chase him away.

Clovis ministered to her most often. Rita-Lu's swollen, shiny rump infallibly aroused him and he would break off his feeding or grooming whenever she presented to him and squat down, thighs spread, his testicles—big as tennis balls—resting on the ground, like hairy tubers at the root of some thin, lilac-stemmed flower drilling upward toward the sun.

 

One morning when I met João and Alda they told me that a man from a village south of Sangui had informed them that he had heard the sound of chimpanzees fighting in the bush. I took out a map and they showed me where the village was. I plotted the most direct route there.

We walked south through the forest for over three hours. We were now near the edge of the lush vegetation that marked the southernmost precincts of the national park. The escarpment here took a ninety-degree turn east. Due south was a wide, flat rift valley of featureless orchard bush and small villages, scattered miles apart. The province we were in was very underpopulated and those people who lived on the fringe of the park had no necessity, as yet, to move up the green slopes of the escarpment in search of better pasture or more arable land. A few fields of maize and cassava had encroached here and there, a certain amount of timber was felled for firewood, but the human population posed little threat to the habitat of the chimpanzees.

We emerged from the treeline, tired and a little footsore, and surveyed the view spread below us. To our left the forested hills of the escarpment swung east for twenty miles and then rolled southward once more. The gray clouds of the ever-impending rains hung above the distant hilltops, but above us the sky was blue, badged with round, white, stationary clouds. The piebald, dusty bush stretched out for miles before us. At our feet lay the
small nameless village with its irregular fields cut haphazardly from the bush, the green maize plantations almost indecently fresh-looking in the midst of so much dusty aridity. In the far distance a band of darker vegetation crossed the plain, the riverine trees of a tributary of the massive Cabule.

We ate our lunch. Alda pointed to the river in the distance, where it emerged from a valley cut in the hazy hills, and said, “There is FIDE. And beyond. And there”—he gestured north behind our backs—“there is UNAMO.”

“Look,” João said. “Airplane.”

He pointed. I saw, coming from the west, high up, making contrails like spilled salt, two jet fighters. Migs, I supposed. I had never seen them in our skies. Usman told me they rarely flew missions in the north. They passed above us and disappeared into the haze. Seconds later we heard the rumble of their engines.

We went down to the village. Round mud huts, thatched with straw, the matting walls of compounds. João spoke to one of the old men lounging beneath a shade tree and a small boy was deputed to lead us to the approximate scene of the chimpanzee fight.

We crossed a patch of even waste ground. At one end a soccer goal stood, a few shreds of net still hanging from it.

“For the missionaries,” João said. “They were here before the war.”

Men and women working in the fields looked at me curiously as we walked by. Then the ground started to rise and the bush closed in on us once more. The small boy pointed to a clump of cotton trees on the edge of the ridge above us. The noise came from there, he said, and left.

It took us another half hour of further climbing to reach the cotton trees. We spread out and began to search through the grass and bushes beneath them. I found many discarded seeds of the fruit. They were nutty flat discs about an inch across, like small mango seeds, surrounded by a pale yellow, fibrous flesh in a fuzzy, suedelike casing. From the amount of seeds on the ground I would have thought that the entire southern group had been feeding here. There were many torn leaves and broken twigs on the ground as well but nothing that indicated anything more than the
usual careless and untidy feeding of a group of hungry chimpanzees.