III
Rebecca finished looking through her father’s desk, turned on the generator and started up his computer instead. His document manager was testament to his extraordinary range of interests, with folders on zoology, geology, geography, astronomy, medicine, anthropology, anatomy and linguistics. Each contained many dozens of academic articles downloaded from his favourite journals once a month or so at an Internet café in Tulear, where he’d also catch up on email and post new photos, podcasts and text to Eden’s website.
She ran a search for files he’d been working on recently, came across a draft of his most recent letter to her mother.
Yvette, my darling, another year gone, I can’t believe it.
I start with the big news, of course. We have our first grandchild, Michel, named for your father. He is beautiful; he looks like you. Both he and Emilia are flourishing. Emilia will fill you in on the details and say Hello for herself when I am finished, and update you on all our projects, which progress well. A word about her, though: motherhood suits her, as we always knew it would. She is fulfilled, she is confident, she is prepared to fight her corner. She reminds me how becoming a parent for the first time fixes your place in the world and gives you a full explanation for your life. And she is so strong. She was walking within twelve hours of delivery. And already she insists on taking Michel sailing with us, can you believe! I tell her he’s just an infant; the sea can wait. Your namesake is a fine boat, my love, but I’m not sure about trusting our first grandson to her! Emilia wins her argument, of course, as she always does, though I cannot help but sermonise a little when she trips on the top rung as she is carrying him aboard and both of them go tumbling on the deck; and, ow, poor Michel is bawling still!
You used to watch me hammering and sawing at the cabins with a look of profound disapproval, as though manual labour were beneath the dignity of an Oxford Professor of Biology. Michel gives me this same look; he gives everyone this look, it’s how he views the world. Every time he looks at me this way, my heart lurches, I think of you, I can’t help it. I miss you so much, more than before even, more than I can ever say. It’s not healthy. I know this. People come and go like tides. Scientists, zoologists, do-gooders, tourists. Some of the women are very forward. They offer themselves openly. They feel sorry for me, perhaps, or maybe they’re just lonely; maybe that’s why they travel. Yet I have no appetite for them at all. At least, it’s like visiting a library in a country whose script you cannot read. The books remind you of the joy of reading, but in themselves are nothing.
Our beloved Rebecca continues her triumph. She has grown beautiful. She has your sumptuous dark hair that she mostly ties up in a bun when she is on her treks, but sometimes she lets it loose and then she runs her fingers like combs through it, the way you used to do, and it takes me back to the moment I first saw you and I knew instantly what I wanted from my life. Everyone should have such a moment; our stay here is meaningless without it. Sometimes she sends me recordings of her programmes. It frightens me to watch her. She approaches crocodiles and snakes and tigers as if they were pets, then turns her back on them to talk to the camera. She is quite fearless. No, that is not quite right. Fear adds a glow to her, like the candle inside the pumpkin. She stands among those savage creatures and burns the screen with intensity. She writes her own scripts, I understand. They make me so proud: clear, insightful, witty and delivered with perfect timing. My only worry is how bleak her view of human nature has become. Behaviourism is a most dangerous discipline. It puts a window between you and the world. You observe, you diagnose, you put other people into your little boxes and then think yourself superior to them. It’s a miserable way to live. I know this because it was me before I met you. Sometimes when I’m in Tulear, I browse the Internet for stories about her. She seems to be out on the town with some new man every few weeks, but none of them last. I can’t help but fear she’s been too badly scorched by my terrible anger ever to put down her guard completely. It grieves me more than I can say that this might be so, but still I hope that maybe one day she’ll lose her heart before she even realises it’s in danger.
She was kind enough to track down and send some copies of my own old programmes. At least, she didn’t exactly send them herself. She had one of her people send them. They put in a compliments slip and signed it in her absence, or pp’ed it, as they say—a most telling acronym. I cringed when I watched them. I’d forgotten how wooden I was, how patronising. I used to believe that knowledge was enough, that wonderful ideas were in themselves contagious.
Rebecca raised her head and stared at the far wall. Adam was right about his programmes. They’d been academic, patrician, stilted, hideously dated. And yet, when she’d watched them, she’d been aware of an elusive quality missing from her own work, and which she’d envied deeply; something like integrity, or even love. Watching him, listening to him, she’d been reminded that the study of animals in their environment was a demanding discipline in which new knowledge was gained only by years of patient fieldwork that rarely produced headline results. Her father had put in those years of graft and grind. The BBC had commissioned his radio broadcasts and then his television series not for his looks or screen presence but because he’d been one of Britain’s leading biologists. Thankfully for her own career, TV had since realised it didn’t need substance. But Rebecca herself had been quite capable of telling the difference.
Of course Emilia and I dare not say anything to her. She is so close to snipping even the slender threads of communication we have that we cannot risk giving her an excuse. One day she will be ready, and she will let us know. At least, that’s what I tell myself. But there are times I fear she will never forgive me. Why should she? My anger with her was unforgivable, and I will never forgive myself. True remorse doesn’t seek forgiveness anyway. It seeks expiation. You made me vow to you, when you told me your secret, that I would never reveal it to Rebecca. But you believed then that I was a good man, capable of self-control. I cannot imagine that you would have wanted it to tear our family apart like this. I cannot imagine that. I want to tell her, Yvette. I want to explain myself to her, to have her at least understand. I need her forgiveness. Please, my darling; you must find some way to let me off my vow, or she’ll be paying for it all her life.
The sins of the father, indeed.
It was too much for Rebecca. She stood and hobbled to the front door. Outside, a warbler was singing its heart out. It took her back vividly to a childhood afternoon, pestering her father with that hackneyed yet fundamental question: nature or nurture? She’d asked such questions less from curiosity than because it had given Adam such intense pleasure to answer them, and making him happy had still been her greatest joy.
Typically, Adam had answered her question with an experiment. Never tell when you can show. Together with Emilia, they’d purpose-built a huge aviary in the forest, then they’d pillaged eggs from some nearby Thamnormis warbler’s nests, had hand-reared three male chicks. The local adult warblers sang tew-tew-tew-tee-tew-tee-tew-tew-tee-tee. Rebecca had known their song well; you couldn’t escape it during the mating season. If their captive warblers sang this, it would show that song was innate. If they remained silent or sang something different, then the song was learned. It had taken many months for her question to be answered, when their captive warblers had finally broken into song, a truncated tew-tew-tew-tee-tew-tee.
Behaviour was nature and nurture fused.
Outside her window the warbler continued to sing, as though it simply had too much life to contain within its breast. It seemed cruel in retrospect to cage such vibrant and exultant birds for an answer Adam could have told her in a minute. It hadn’t seemed so at the time. The world had grown absurdly sentimental. You couldn’t tread on a cockroach these days without some hippy yelling in your face. And you’d never be permitted to experiment with humans, of course. Yet life sometimes threw up serendipitous examples: identical twins separated at birth; fostered and adopted children, the offspring of illicit affairs. You could learn a great deal about nature and nurture through cuckold children, who were far more common than many people thought. Genetic sampling showed that perhaps as many as one in ten children born within seemingly stable relationships were in fact the products of infidelity. One in ten! Sometimes, when meeting large family groups, she’d wonder which of them might just get a shock from a DNA test. It was not a subject to broach lightly, however. Parentage was so fundamental a component of identity that when it was brought even tentatively into question, people often reacted with anger and extraordinary denial, refusing so much as to consider the possibility that they were the product of an affair, however compelling the evidence.
It never failed to amuse Rebecca, the obtuseness of some people.
Her musings were interrupted by the bawl of an aggrieved infant. She looked towards the path just as Therese arrived carrying Xandra and Michel, honouring her promise to change Rebecca’s bandages.