‘What was going on back there?’ I asked him on the path home.
‘Nothing.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘Nothing. Resting. Waiting for you.’ But he was lying, and not going to great pains to hide it.
21
When we returned to the house the lamps were lit and Nell was on the floor in a circle of open letters, a large calendar on her lap.
Fen flopped on the sofa behind her. ‘Get your Nobel Prize yet, Nellie?’
‘Stalin’s wife has died mysteriously, and John Layard has taken up with Doris Dingwall!’
“I thought he was in Berlin with the poets,’ I said, taking a chair in the corner.
‘Apparently he got very depressed, bungled a suicide attempt, then went to Auden’s flat to get him to finish him off. Leonie says Auden was sorely tempted, but he ended up taking him to the hospital. Then he flew back to England where he’s stolen Doris from Eric.’
Doris and Eric Dingwall were anthropologists at University College in London — and known for their open marriage.
‘What are we doing in November?’ she asked Fen.
‘Buggered if I know. Why?’
‘They’ve asked me to give the keynote at the International Congress.’ She was trying to keep her voice modulated for Fen’s sake.
‘That’s fantastic!’ I said, trying on some American enthusiasm. ‘Quite an honor.’
‘And they’ve asked me to be an assistant curator at the museum. They’re going to give me an office in the turret.’
‘Good onya, Nellie. How’s our bank account?’
She gave him a cautious smile. ‘Very healthy.’
‘Is this what I think it is?’ Fen said. He tapped Helen’s package on the floor with his toe. ‘You haven’t opened it.’
‘No.’
Fen looked at me sharply, as if I knew what that meant. I did not.
‘Come on, Nellie.’ He bent down and put it in her lap. ‘Let’s have a look. Plus we could use this.’ He plucked at the heavy grey twine it was wrapped up in.
Beneath the brown post paper was a box. Inside the box was a slim manuscript, not more than three hundred pages. Its pages were flat, its edges perfectly aligned. We stood in slight awe of it, as if it might speak or burst into flames. Nell had already done this, taken her hundreds of notebooks and magically compressed them into a stack of clean, unbuckled sheets of paper, taken millions of details and slotted them into some sort of order to make a book, but Fen and I had not. From this vantage point that transformation seemed impossible.
On top of the stack was a note in small thick writing.
Dear Nell,
Finally. Hope you and Fen will have time to take a look. No enormous hurry. Am giving it to Papa today and I’m sure he’ll have me revising through the summer. If Fen has trouble with my presentation of the Dobu he needs to tell me honestly and unsparingly. I just received your first letter with the Mumbanyo. They sound appalling. I’m sure you’ve tamed them by now. All love, H
They both looked at this note for a long while, as long as it would take to read a full page of writing. The silence was not still — it was the opposite of stillness. As if the three of them, Nell, Fen, and Helen, were having a conversation I couldn’t hear.
‘Shall we have a look?’ I said. ‘I’ll make the tea’.
‘Teatime!’ Fen said in the voice of a Cambridge tea lady. ‘Make haste!’
‘All of us read it? Together?’ Nell said, coming out of her trance.
‘Why not?’
I was hungry for it. I ached for a new idea, a new thought in my head. I made the tea quickly, scooting around Bani as unobtrusively as I could in that small corner of the house.
Nell began reading as soon as I set the pot and cups down on the trunk. On the first pages Helen declared Western civilization’s lack of understanding of other peoples’ customs to be the world’s greatest and gravest social problem. By page twenty she had brought in Copernicus, Dewey, Darwin, Rousseau, and Linnaeus’ Homo ferus, swept around the globe a few times, and asserted that the notion of racial heredity, of a pure race, is bunk, that culture is not biologically transmitted, and that Western civilization is not the end result of an evolution of culture, nor is the study of primitive societies the study of our origins.
In this first chapter she had laid down in simple honest language many of the tenets our generation of anthropologists felt but had never put on the page so clearly. But it was impossible to stop there. We took turns reading. We devoured her words. It felt as if she had written the book for us and only us, a fat message that said: Carry on. You can do this. This is important. You are not wasting your time.
The most intoxicating drug could not have had a stronger effect on me. A few chapters in and Bani was standing over us, speaking loudly. Apparently he’d been trying to tell us dinner was ready. We took the book with us to the table which had been set with linens and platters of food. Fen took over the reading, managing bites between sentences, and I supposed we didn’t appreciate the meal sufficiently, for Bani left without saying goodbye or doing the washing up.
Fen read on, standing up in the little kitchen area, while Nell and I cleaned the dishes. When he got to the part about where Helen accuses Malinowski of treating his Trobriands as generic primitives, he fairly screamed it. And then he looked up from the page, eyes ablaze. ‘Is it my imagination or did she just take down Frazer, Spengler, and Malinowski in those three pages?’
We laughed all three as one loud person. We were giddy with her iconoclasm, her courage, her ambition. Fen read on. Primitive societies, she allowed, were easier to study than our more complex Western civilization, much like the beetle was easier for Darwin when establishing his theories than the human being.
‘Rot!’ Nell yelled at the page. ‘We’ve had that beetle argument a million times. And I always win. But she puts that in there anyway.’ She pulled a short pencil out from somewhere in her hair and made to cross out the last sentences.
‘Hey ho,’ Fen said, blocking her. ‘Let her have her full say before you start blanking it all out.’
We moved back to the sofa and I brought out a jug of Kiona ‘wine’ that tasted like sweetened rubber. Fen passed the manuscript to me and I began reading. This section was about the Zuni of New Mexico, who carved out an existence and an ‘attitude towards existence’ that was completely at odds with the rest of the tribes of North America, who often used drugs and fermented cactus juice to ‘get religious.’
‘I’m feeling a bit religious myself,’ Fen said. ‘This wretched stuff is potent.’
Nell didn’t say anything — she was scribbling notes on a pad — but her cup was half empty and her cheeks blazed. The top of her pencil was wet and chewed.
Other tribes danced until their mouths frothed or they had seizures or visions, but the Zuni simply danced to methodically alter nature. ‘The tireless pounding of their feet draws together the mist in the sky and heaps it into the piled rain clouds. It forces out the rain upon the earth.’