by Peter Høeg
“It has something to do with money,” she said. “The Animal Welfare Foundation has something to do with money.”
Between the two friends there existed an agreement which had never been voiced but of which both were aware—namely, that while Susan told Madelene everything, Madelene told Susan a good deal, but never more than that. Now Susan waited respectfully. But Madelene’s face remained blank and withdrawn.
They headed toward the church, arm in arm. A tall, freckle-faced woman in whose abdomen the sperm of three different men were vainly trying to come to terms. And a gazelle of a girl with a blood-alcohol level that would never have passed a Breathalyzer test who stayed on her feet and relatively lucid thanks only to the support of her friend, B vitamins and her own curiosity.
three
The number of men whom Madelene had known, while too small to be statistically significant, had been large enough for her to deduce certain general rules of behavior. The most important of these was her discovery of the fact that the content and course of any love affair is revealed within the events of the first twenty-four hours.
Adam had called on her father on official business. He had met her at a party and, taking his time, as he always did with anything that mattered to him, he had begun to work his way through the crowd toward her. His whole being was contained, even then, in that one action. In his body resided his cricket, his javelin throwing and a succession of physical victories over other males; in his hide the requisite arrogance and essential resources and in his voice when he reached her a richness possessed only by those with a roar that comes from the gut, together with the kind of polish acquired only at the most expensive private schools and universities. Around him, like a mane or an aura, hung an awareness of having practically no natural enemies.
The rest of that first day served to confirm this impression, adding to it the observation that he seemed considerate and very, very interested.
In the course of those twenty-four hours, during which they never left one another’s side, Adam Burden did not laugh once.
Not because he had no sense of humor. He commanded rich reserves of a fine-honed intellectual brand of sarcasm that might be triggered at any moment, especially if he felt professionally threatened. If anyone else were to question his knowledge, thereby encroaching on the cornerstone of his self-esteem, he could turn lethally witty. But at no point in the five hundred and twenty-nine days of their marriage, nor—presumably—at any time prior to it, nor—in all likelihood—at any time thereafter had it occurred or would it occur to Adam Burden that there might be anything funny about him. What his first move toward Madelene had shown and what all of his subsequent moves had confirmed was that he had all the monumental self-importance of the big beasts of prey and of the great dictators.
Not that Madelene looked for humor in her marriage. Laughter comes as an extra, a luxury item, and Madelene knew that Adam had saved her from certain familial ruin. For anyone who has survived by the skin of their teeth, the daily gratification of basic needs is a miracle and that is how Madelene viewed her marriage: as a daily, reciprocal and miraculous gratification of basic needs.
This mutual meeting of needs usually commenced at seven p.m., when Adam came home. But today he turned up two hours earlier; Madelene met him at the door at five p.m. Ten minutes later they were taking tea in the library.
* * *
The library was Adam Burden’s den. It had all the murkiness, the snugness of a den, as well as its smell—a subtle whiff of Adam, of the tropical jungles from which the wood for the furniture had come and the leather of the book spines.
It also provided the restorative refuge of a den. By the time Adam arrived home his face was white with exhaustion. But the minute he sank into one of the armchairs in that room and put away his date book he began to revive. While one small fraction of his awareness drank tea and chatted, the rest of him was absorbing the security of his surroundings and the woman sitting across from him.
Madelene was well aware that during these ostensibly undemanding three-quarters of an hour she administered the large feminine blood transfusion to the man in the chair opposite her.
Little by little during the course of this, Adam Burden dropped his defenses, becoming a weaker character than usual. Never before had Madelene taken advantage of this weakness to speak of anything of importance and now when she did so the question was thrown in casually, desultorily, one single element in a host of insignificant associations.
“And the ape?” she said.
Through half-closed, disinterested eyes Adam watched the question float past, like an insect, like steam from a teacup.
“It’s in the garden room,” he said. “Just for the time being.”
“What kind of ape is it?”
There was silence. The borderland between them lay as yet unexplored. But Madelene sensed that she was verging on the demarcation zone.
“Some sort of dwarf chimpanzee.”
“What’s so special about it?”
Adam’s face lay in shadow. Now, in this shadow, two yellow lights gleamed—as though some big cat were staring out at Madelene from the gloom.
“When a wild animal escapes from captivity it will either blunder around in panic or it will look for a place to hide. Animals are incapable of adjusting to unexpected freedom. The interesting thing about this one is that it got as far as it did.”
Madelene bowed her head. A gesture of acceptance, of submission almost. Adam had not lied, that she knew. But he had divulged as little as possible of the truth. Behind his bone-china cup he curled himself around his prize with animal alertness.
She raised her face and smiled at him, the reassuring smile of a nurse. Then she poured tea for him, put sugar in his cup and stirred for a count of thirty, the exact number of stirs required to ensure the complete dissolution of the coarse, molasses-heavy tropical cane-sugar crystals.
* * *
That night she waited for Adam in his bedroom. It was two in the morning before he came up. But when he saw her on the bed his tiredness and tight-lipped exasperation were swept away with a smile and he began to undress.
Adam’s date book was a little gray book to which he had, as people under great work-related pressure often do, committed his memory. It was date book and memo pad rolled into one; in it he made a note of everything from the most minor of errands to the heaviest of commitments and without it he could not remember a thing. It was a weapon in his self-defense, like the tea in the library, like his silence on the subject of his work.
Madelene had never looked inside this book before; she had never wanted to look inside it, for it had seemed to her both too trivial and too sacrosanct. But on this night she did take a look. When Adam went to the bathroom she swung her legs over the side of the bed and lifted the book from a drawer of his bedside table.
She had already abandoned any thought of deciphering the main entries; Adam’s notes were as cryptic and elliptical as bird footprints in the sand. Instead she concentrated on the loose sheets slipped in between the pages of the book.
There were five of these, a little larger than 8 × 11, held together by a paper clip and tucked in at that day’s date. The first three pages were covered with an illegible scrawl; the last two contained drawings.
The drawings were of the ape. First some full-length sketches of the animal—in profile and head-on—not in any detail, merely capturing the posture and the relative length of the limbs.
Beneath these, several drawings of the animal’s nostrils had been made one after the other, from different angles. Then came the hands, reproduced without hair or fingernails, leaving nothing but the outlines, resting on the animal’s knees just as they had rested when she had sat facing it.
The last half page was impossible to make out. It showed a map, a group of islands shaped like two parabolas turned back to back, like a double-sided, inverted Polynesian atoll. This had been sketched out something like a dozen times, then again from the side,
the islands seeming to rise up out of the water—some smooth, others rugged, or square, like circular towers, like planks of wood.
From the bathroom came the sound of Adam soaping his cheeks. She tore a blank white sheet from the back of the calendar. Using her eyeliner she copied out one of the maps, the only one where an attempt had been made at a polished drawing and one which Adam had also underlined. She drew it both from above and from the side, quickly and accurately. Anyone who has spent the whole of their adult life drawing on a face will find paper an accommodating medium.
Just as she was studying the relative heights of the islands above the surface of the water, just as she heard Adam patting his cheeks with after-shave, she realized what she had been copying. She had been drawing the creature’s teeth. She opened the drawer and put the date book back.
In the drawer lay a strip of gray plastic. Some hazy recollection told her this was what the ape had been wearing around its wrist when it was lying on the stretcher. She picked it up. It was the type of thing used in hospitals to identify corpses and the newborn. The band bore the word “Erasmus.”
When Adam walked through the door she was lying back against the pillows.
Now, as always, she was grateful for his careful preparations and his fastidiousness in lovemaking. She experienced just one brief moment of secret, inner distraction before turning all her attention to him. She thought of the exasperated look on his face and came to the conclusion that whatever he had been looking for, the ape had not given it away. It had not given anything away. Except to her. To her it had given a peach.
four
Madelene woke up early and, as always, alone. She had never spent a whole night next to her husband. However passionate and intimate their lovemaking might have been, there came a time, often just before dawn, when Adam would turn in his sleep and brush against her and, registering the closeness of another human being, would be gripped by a kind of desperation. Asleep, but determined, he would get out of bed, gather up his sheets and retreat to the next room to bed down there. Madelene had never asked him why. Ten years in advance of other women of her age she had learned that there is no point in discussing matters that cannot be altered.
Usually she woke up to the feeling that the bed was an uninhabited island onto which she had been washed up during the night and only after she had made it to the mirror was the sense of impending doom dispelled. This morning was different. She awoke with the impression that she was floating. Without turning her head she stretched out her hand and located, under her clothes, the torn-out sheet with its drawing of an archipelago named Erasmus. Clutching this, she put on a kimono, returned to her own room and seated herself at her dressing table.
And here something strange happened. She got her coloring wrong.
Under normal circumstances Madelene could hit upon her pale, youthful base color with unerring accuracy. But this morning when she looked up from the brush and the section of her face reflected in the concave makeup mirror in front of her, she saw that she was way off the mark. While her face was indeed wrinkle-free it was still as colorlessly neutral as it had been ten minutes before.
She reached for the cleanser, then hesitated. She took a closer look at herself. She drew a line the width of a finger below each eye with the eyeliner, then gently rubbed this away, transforming it into a dark hollow, into five years of wear and tear. She took a lipstick and applied a hard, wide “proper madam’s” mouth. She put on a pair of sunglasses. A scarf over her hair. She stood up. Tried affecting a slight stoop. She had quite forgotten herself. For the first time since she had, in a dim and distant past shed a child’s delight in grown-up clothes, for the first time since then Madelene made herself look older than she was.
She positioned herself over by the window and felt the wind against her new disguise. She saw Clapham. He cut a rose from the bush next to the gate, let in a delivery van, turned away a gray man in a white car, walked back to the house. She was seized by the thought of the daily routine. She recalled that Adam was working at home that day, in the garden room, with the ape.
It was a disturbing thought. Madelene’s was not only an emotional, legal and physical marriage. It was also a territorial one. Prior to this, until the end of the working day she had always known there was no risk of her bumping into her husband on her reserve.
She dealt with her unease in her usual fashion. She retrieved her carafe from beneath the bed and, standing by the window, she took the first little drink of the morning.
Her daring increased. She unearthed a thin duster coat and put it on, leaving it unbelted, shapeless as a sack. She found a pair of battered platform sandals. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her own mother would not have recognized her. Or at any rate would not have wanted to recognize her.
Into a little black bag she popped all the things a woman has need of: keys, money, lipstick, eyeliner, handkerchief, a drawing of an ape’s teeth and a little plastic flask of alcohol. Then she left her rooms, swiftly, stealthily and without the usual pause in the doorway.
* * *
She went down the back stairs, through the kitchen garden and out through a little gate in the wall. It was the first time in a long while that she had gone anywhere on foot with no tinted car window coming between her and the outside world. She reveled in the sunlight, the sounds, the sharpness of the colors. She relished the anonymity of her new mask. She passed a truck with a picture of a dog on its door, the man inside the truck not sparing her a glance. She passed a maid walking Kasimir, the neighbor’s borzoi, the girl and the dog looking at her with no sign of recognition. She walked past a white car in which sat the gray man whom Clapham had turned away, the man staring in the direction of Mombasa Manor and right through her. She came to an underground station and headed down.
On the platform she took fright.
Madelene had grown up in a singular and sheltered environment, in the domain of the well-to-do. For the greater part of her life she had been to some extent isolated from ordinary people; between her and the general public there had been filters, big houses, special schools, nannies and chauffeurs. Now, in the underground, she was brought face to face with the brutality of London, like a woman throwing herself out of her covered jeep in the middle of a game reserve to carry on alone and on foot.
Madelene was of course acquainted with tragedy, death, nausea and self-hate, every human being carries these things with them from birth. But she had had no practice in understanding overt misery, no words to explain it. The shell within which she had circulated had been very much of a linguistic nature. Not long after they met, Adam had presented her with a number of Debrett’s publications, smiling as he showed her how here, in the twentieth century, you had a publishing house issuing—under a very thin veneer of self-irony—textbooks on the preservation of a feudalistic class supremacy. And Madelene had learned her lesson well. After only a year and a half she was speaking a slightly Latinized upper-class English with not a trace of an accent. But she lacked any kind of personal association with such words as bleeding gums, hunger, hard chancre, Wormwood Scrubs, knuckle-dusters, corns, the dole, foot drop, fractured skulls or delirium tremens. In the train she sat tensed, still and on the alert, shielded from the impressions that assaulted her only by what she sipped from her little flask.
She had no sense of time or space. Only after she had instinctively changed trains, gotten off, climbed up, gone around corners, dodged predatory animals and beggars, avoided being trampled underfoot and—finding herself in front of a long, low concrete building—realized that she had made it, did it transpire that she had any goal in mind. That she had been guided by a spatial law which was struggling to reestablish a balance. She had moved in the opposite direction from Adam. He had stayed at home; she had been led to where he ought to have been. She was standing outside the Institute of Animal Behavioral Research, one of the departments attached to the London Zoological Gardens. Adam was the director of this institute.
On Ma
delene’s first visit to London, Adam had taken her across to one of the Mombasa Manor outbuildings, closed the door behind them and left her to stand there for a moment surrounded by the darkness and the stench of moths, formaldehyde and barely suppressed decay. Then he had switched on a dazzling electric light and recited his professional credo.
The shed was filled with his parents’ hunting trophies. With tusks, lion skins, shark jaws, bird of paradise plumage, rhino horns, antlers, roebuck heads, python skins, whale bones, a stuffed and mounted gorilla head and the skins of two Komodo dragons grafted, by the new dermatoplasty method, onto life-size models. Adam had steered her over to a picture of his father and mother standing arm in arm atop a mountain formed by the bodies of six elephants. In soft and measured tones he had explained how his parents’ object had been to shoot, collect and exhibit—a task they had fulfilled with panache. But the world had changed, now was the time to study, present and preserve, and he had said this with the gravity that comes from knowing that your family goes back seven hundred years, that you have had splendid ancestors and that you are yourself even better. Then he had told her about the London Zoo.
“It’s the oldest zoo in the world,” he had said. “Once it was the best in the world and it can be again. But, for that, expansion is necessary. This is already under way, you’ve heard about it, but it’s going to be more far-reaching than anyone imagines. Andrea and I are both involved in it.”
He had run his fingers over a row of photographs and stopped at one of the Last Night of the Proms showing the composer Edward Elgar on the podium.
“A charity concert,” he said, “for London Zoo.”
His fingers had drummed a tattoo across the British upper-class animal lovers. When he next spoke Madelene could tell that he had forgotten her, that he was talking to his own class and its ghosts.
