The Wisdom of Crocodiles Read online

  Paul Hoffman

  THE WISDOM

  OF CROCODILES

  Contents

  Men in Love

  Men and Women at Work

  Women in Love

  The Dark Figure

  Geoffrey Healey His Early Life

  Canterbury

  Alice Winnicott and Dr White

  Psychotherapy

  The Story of the Tower

  Michael McCarthy

  Secret Voices

  Good News for Romantic Love from the Bank of England and Alan Greenspan of the United States Federal Reserve

  The Glass Case

  The Dark Figure Does Lunch

  Healey’s Second Nun’s Tale

  The Cruel Madness of Love

  The Wisdom of Crocodiles

  E13

  Acknowledgements

  For my wife,

  Alexandra Hoffman,

  whose contribution to this book

  cannot be reckoned

  I am deeply grateful to Richard Gollner, an unfailing advocate whose support made this book possible.

  Also thanks to my editor, Anna Swan, for her intelligence and good humour, Amy Creighton for her imaginative and tireless promotion of the book and Hazel Orme and Michael Coates for their contributions. I am particularly indebted to Aelred Doyle at Black Swan. Without Faith Tolkien I would not have started. My children, Victoria and Thomas, not only grew up with this, they made telling contributions. My parents, Norman and May Hoffman, gave me the story which made it possible to see that the extraordinary is everywhere.

  And for Jenny Franklin 1954–2000.

  There is no such thing as Society. There are only individual men and women.

  Margaret Thatcher

  A fractal is a pattern in which the overall pattern is repeated in miniature within that pattern; and within that miniature version yet another smaller version of the pattern can be found. While there is order in a fractal, there are no pure structures; no perfect squares, pyramids or spheres. Asymmetric, fragmented, broken and offering the same level of irregular complexity wherever you look; fractals are created at the boundary between chaos and order. As such, the fractal is the best metaphor for human life we have found.

  Louis Bris (at his trial)

  Two things are required for happiness: Love and Work.

  Sigmund Freud

  It is the wisdom of crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

  Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

  The most complex structure in the universe is the human brain.

  The most complex product of that structure is the relationship between two of these brains.

  Once these two meet in a field they will exchange something; and so begins Economics.

  The next time they meet, one of them will remember they felt angered by the poor deal they made at their last meeting; and so begins History.

  At the next meeting they will arrive at a better method of agreeing exchanges; and so begins Politics.

  Or they will not; and so begins War.

  Then one of them will discover a desire for the other; and so begins Sex.

  The other, discovering herself desirable and having learnt from all that has happened up to this point, will enter into a series of exchanges involving Economics, History, Politics and Love.

  It is clear, then, that the most complex thing in the universe is the relationship between one human being and another; that the most complex form of that relationship is between a woman and a man; that the most complex form of the relationship between a woman and a man is marriage; and therefore it is in the marital bed that we see the ultimate model of everything that is the case.

  If irregularities concerning these exchanges are uncovered by either party, and given time they usually are, then the two of them will discover the most hidden of all the great forces which shape the destiny of men and women: Fraud.

  Broadly speaking, then, we can sum up by saying that the twenty-first century will see our futures decided in the conflict between three things: Love, Lies and Economics.

  Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles

  Men in Love

  What makes the modern man or woman specifically modern is that they have one more life than in the past: to the secret life, the personal life and the public life, we have added the global life.

  Are the four of you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

  Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles

  It’s not laughter or the ability to use language that distinguishes man from the animals, but his capacity for incompetence. Each spider’s web may be unique but, taken as a whole, perfection makes them uniform. The spider does not aspire to excellence; the gibbon swinging in the trees does not deliberate on error. Certainly they make mistakes but the result is starvation for the one, a broken body for the other. Limitations for a spider or a gibbon are not something they have to learn to live with. Man alone has the opportunity to accept failure and it is this that allows him to lord it over creation.

  Our most important discovery was not fire, or that language could be written down, or the atom split, but the concept of limited liability. The insurance policy in all its many forms – armour, condoms, solidly built Swedish automobiles – is what radically differentiates men from beasts. It allows us to slight the processes of evolution, which employ wounds, procreation and the appropriate speed for soft bodies as a means of eradicating behaviour likely to interfere with staying alive. Evolution is all about accidents, there being no limit to what will happen if you fool about with its carefully thought-out inhibitions. Mistakes are its grammar, risk its operating system; survival is the key. Not surviving is the most likely option; surviving better is the other. Death is part of the process because it erases mistakes and compels success to multiply.

  The concept of insurance implies that the mistake can be arbitrated, its consequences treated merely with respect and even patronised. The underwriter, and the attitudes that give him work, has replaced immanent forces as the dominant factor in our lives. Cars, legs, flotations, reputation, bits, pieces, life itself can be insured; everything can be measured and given a value, even the act of measuring and giving value. Underwriting can itself be underwritten. The concept of spreading the load is as important to us as a species as the decision to stand upright and so begin the long association between aspiration and an aching back. Flocks, shoals, herds divide the risk, it’s true, but only because they are many and weak, and prepared to sacrifice one another without pity in the interests of their own survival. But no one in the West has to survive any more; surviving is something you have to choose to do, something done by sky divers, mountaineers and survivalists.

  We make decisions all of the time about everything: what to eat, what to wear, whether to leave, whether to stay, what to do and how to get there. But in the past, and in the margins of the world where the past lingers on, choosing was not something people were very practised at. The need to survive, or even living closely to that need, simplifies life. If the rains come, you stay; if they don’t, you leave. The more choices you have, the further away you are from this blunt stuff and, given a halfway decent infrastructure, life – even for the poorest person – reaches a point at which choice is almost infinite. Down to your final thirty pence, agonised decisions still remain: a KitKat, a Flake, a Lion Bar, a Twirl; and on the shelf below: a Wispa, a Yorkie, Trackers, Smarties, M&Ms, a Milky Bar, an Aero and a Caramac; and under that: a Mars Bar, a Galaxy, Uniteds, Hobnobs, Fudge and Wagon Wheels and Crunchies and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. Even the down-and-out who’s sleeping rough has long ago stopped making decisions that, in evolutionary terms, have any significance at all. We don’t hand over our grain or money or medical
supplies to the starving of the Third World; we export some of our surplus of choices. But choices need GNP, and lots of it, and unfortunately for the starving millions, choices don’t travel all that well. Even the most well-meant hand-me-down has learnt to live with someone else’s shape, is defined by someone else’s eye for colour, someone else’s skin. Pre-owned choices tend to have had their mileage clocked, or are left-hand drive with suspensions tuned to other roads with different priorities at different kinds of roundabouts. Nevertheless, nature is keen to compensate for its brutality. When choice is a matter of life or death it likes to keep it simple, and it’s on your side. It wants you to be a success.

  Steven Grlscz snapped off a square of Bournville plain. Sucking it slowly, he checked the sink carefully for several minutes, dividing it mentally into graph-paper squares. Then he poured a scoop of Ariel automatic into the centre of the drainer, opened a new toothbrush, dipped it in the powder and began to scrub the surface with extreme care. He had decided to clean the whole flat, a major spring-clean. He would redecorate the bedroom and perhaps re-tile the bathroom, but for now he concentrated on the sink. Attention to detail was a distraction from the constant sense of dread he’d felt since Maria had gone.

  When he had finished, he walked through to the bedroom. The flat had the stillness of a place where something of great. (passion had recently ended. The floor-to-ceiling windows set in their solid wooden frames gave the light a formal quality that suited the bleached wood of the floors and furniture and the fine cotton of the simply fashioned sofas in dark blues and reds. Instead of being austere or impersonal, the flat looked restrained, suitably quiet. It was as if all the clutter, the credit card bills stacked behind the family photographs, the piles of partly read weekend supplements had all been cleared away by someone trying to keep themselves occupied.

  Steven unlocked the bedroom cupboard, meaning to put on his shoes and go out for his first walk in nearly three weeks. In the corner there was a pile of seven green ledgers, neatly stacked. He had decided earlier that he would not read them until later that day, but half reluctantly he took the top one down. Hoping for reassurance from a swift browse, he realised that it was unlikely to remain just that. A superficial reading sometimes depressed him, if only because there was a fair chance of coming across a record of things that had worried him at the time and which required further reading to establish that, overall, there was a shape, a direction in what was written there.

  Picking up the top ledger, he thumbed to the first mention of her.

  THURSDAY 16th JUNE

  . . . drinks at Tom Sterne’s. His usual mix of young middle-aged men and women in their late twenties. He only seems to know one type . . . intelligent but touchy, usually elegant. One of them was strange. Amongst all the legs on display, short skirts, split . . . her drabness and terrible hair, a frumpishness so striking it seemed aggressive.

  . . . found myself introduced. Not aggression anyway. She shrank from me as if touching her might cause her to wilt. Someone she knew interrupted. Close up she is even more of a fright. The tank top is too small and from twenty years ago, and the colours . . . drained variations of brown. Her skin is extraordinary though – not so much white as bleached. What is she doing here?

  He scanned fifty pages until the next entry.

  TUESDAY 4th AUGUST

  . . . ‘Maria, this is Steven Grlscz.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  How odd it sounded – formal, learnt – like being introduced to a child in cold storage since the 1950s.

  ‘We’ve met before.’

  Absolute panic at this. She doesn’t remember. Dear God, how can life be bearable? So much terror at nothing. I feel sorry for her, the fear is so real – but such irritation, too. What are you making such a fuss about? I make my excuses to leave. Her relief was so plain, so spontaneous that I found it almost likeable. Occasionally I watch her from the other side of the room. She moves well – a kind of scrawny grace. When she flicks her hair back, the awkward nose that seems to dominate her face gives her looks a kind of character.

  Nothing here. As I leave I have to pass by a group she’s in. They are talking about clothes – to a man – when she smiles. I miss the first sentence but she is pointing at her top [the same tank top] and skirt: ‘. . . hearing-aid beige. It’ll be all the rage this autumn.’

  As I walk down towards the Charing Cross Road I think, You don’t really have time for this.

  FRIDAY 3rd DECEMBER

  Go into Warner’s in Covent Garden and remember Tom told me Maria Vaughan worked here. She was downstairs and looked thinner and paler – wouldn’t have thought it possible. She knew me this time. ‘You’re Steven . . . with the peculiar name.’

  Was this familiarity, or just clumsy, a lack of grace in everything: clothes, stoop, manner, grasp? She looked carefully at the book I was buying – for someone else. She liked her work, was at home among the books. She bent down to pick up a bag and her hair, though not dirty, shone with the greasiness of a diet of bad food, and not enough of it. Is that all there is? You can see right through her.

  Later I saw her in Covent Garden tube and thinking she’d seen me too I went up to her. She looked at me as if – actually it’s hard to say how she looked. Then she claimed she’d forgotten something at work and walked off as if she’d been scalded.

  FRIDAY 10th MARCH

  Maria V in Soho at that place with good coffee – chairs make my back ache. Very talkative but odd tone – can’t place it. She cuts her cake into pieces but doesn’t eat.

  She made a big thing about paying as I took out my wallet.

  He preferred to meet her on neutral territory rather than in his flat, and she seemed to like going to the cafés of Soho. These days it was packed with the affluent young: self-conscious, sexy, determined to have a part in the place where things were going on. The cafés multiplied yet gave the impression they had always been there. Their carefully nicotined ceilings spoke of rootedness, that people dead but vital had once smoked Gauloises, had fascinating conversations and written modernist novels there. There was the Café Bohème with its garden benches facing the street so that you could see shaven-headed gays in Lycra tops and shorts managing to avoid absurdity by lifting weights and continental regimens of stretch and pull. And the fading tapas bars, and women passing in their long split skirts, whose thigh-revealing flashes they attempted to deny by holding the cleft together with a hand as if the revelation were an accident of missing buttons or a faulty safety pin. Among the patisseries and brasseries, Amalfi, Balans, Valerie, Dell’Ugo, with its ironplaster giant leaning expectantly towards Old Compton Street, it was the diminishing sex shops that looked intimidated by the flash and money going on around them. The fed-up tarts in booths with welts along their legs seemed almost conscious in their isolated huddle of the short lease and the predatory caterer. Where morality and the law had failed, the cappuccino would succeed in clearing out this unadulterated Englishness.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ she had asked.

  He explained.

  ‘Yes,’ she said without a trace of amusement, ‘you’re probably right.’

  He guessed she looked for something in the people there, their sense of possibility, that things were attainable; but she did not share in it. She was a witness to another kind of life in which she no more expected to participate than a visitor to the zoo expected to wander among the animals. But Maria’s liking was tired, a reflex, like a haunting.

  WEDNESDAY 2nd MAY

  . . . thirty minutes in and she is still complaining . . . relentless now at all our meetings. She moans about the lateness of trains, the paying of a bill, the telephone call from her sister, the rain, the heat – everything is a problem for this woman.

  The lack of discrimination is almost funny.

  ‘We all have to pay bills, Maria, it rains on me as well as you.’

  My irritation is clear – spontaneous. Such a pleasure letting go. I might just as well have sl
apped her.

  Reading brought back the early days vividly enough. In the beginning, and for a long time after, the slightest look of irritation or displeasure wounded her like a sword. She was both brittle and soft: a heart of glass wrapped in rice paper. But he was disappointed at the vagueness of what he had written: it was too much like a set of notes, an aid to memory but not enough of the thing itself. The tone of her conversation was missing. It wasn’t quite as he remembered it, as if this were someone else’s version of events. She had been in a bad way when he first met her, much worse than the ledgers told him. It was clear within a few conversations that it would not be long before it came to the locked bathroom, the sharp blade or the overdose; and that when it did it would not be a cry for help because the notion of comfort had been leached out of her. She knew how to suffer; she knew misery, like some dark woods behind the family home made familiar by time and the lack of anything else to explore. Just as a distressed fish sends out signals to the cruising shark, Maria alerted every predator within receiving distance. Her life had been an endless series of sparks, coxcombs, creeps and spivs. But there was no wide-boy charm about any of them: cruel, mean-spirited, one or the other if not both, they had relentlessly lacerated her fragile sense of self either from stupidity or spite.

  The responsibility lay, as he slowly discovered, with the usual crew: Mum, Dad, teacher, older brother, younger sister, the odd stranger, the bigger girl in the form above. The known list. The identity parade where everyone is guilty. But it was only much later that these things emerged. She was secretive but in an erratic way that lacked good judgement, as if the laws of discretion had been learnt from a badly explained book of instructions. From time to time she would blurt things out which were far more telling than the moaning she seemed to mistake for openness.

  In the first year he had been supportive but in a cool way, aimed at preventing her becoming a nuisance. It didn’t take much: even the most elementary act of consideration produced a kind of tired amazement. She was like those small desert animals that only need to drink every couple of years; she was fuel-efficient when it came to kindness. But to his surprise she showed no sign of being desperate for his company, even though she clearly valued it. This was a relief, but it also disturbed him because it was not what he would have expected: it was not consistent with the fact that she was desperate. He looked at the ledger again.