"It's as if my mind is made up of different strata. It's all there—fossilized, if you like, and available if I want to chip away at it—but my memory, while perfect, is nonetheless selective."
Ben laughed and looked at his sister again. "Do you remember that Borges story, Meg? Tunes the Memorious'—about the boy with perfect recall; confined to his bed, entrapped by the perfection, the overwhelming detail, of past moments. Well, it isn't like that. It could never be like that, amusing as the concept is. You see, the mind accords certain things far greater significance than others. And there's a good reason for that. The undermind recognizes what the conscious intelligence too often overlooks—that there is a hierarchy of experience. Some things matter more to our deeper self than others. And the mind returns them to us strongly. It thrusts them at us, you might say—in dreams, and at quiet moments when we least suspect their presence."
"Why should it do that?"
Ben gave a tiny shrug. "I'm not sure." He took an apple from the basket and lifted it to his mouth. "But maybe it has to do with something programmed into us at the genetic level. A code. A key to why we're here, like the cyphers in Augustus's journal."
As Ben bit deeply into the apple, Meg looked across at her mother and saw how she had looked away at the mention of Augustus and the journal.
"But why Nietzsche?" Meg asked, after a moment. She could not understand his fascination with the nineteenth-century German philosopher. To her, the man was simply an extremist, a fanatic. He understood nothing of those purely human things that held a society together—nothing of love, desire, or sacrifice. To her mind, his thinking was fatally flawed. It was the thinking of a hermit, a misanthrope. But Man was a social species; he did not exist in separation from his fellows, nor could he for longer than one human lifetime. And any human culture was the product of countless generations. In secret she had struggled with the man's difficult, spiky prose, trying to understand what it was Ben saw in him; but it had served only to confirm her own distaste for his thought.
Ben chewed the piece of apple, then smiled and swallowed. "There's an almost hallucinatory clarity about his thinking that I like. And there's a fearlessness, too. He's not afraid to offend. There's nothing he's afraid to look at and investigate at depth, and that's rare in our culture. Very rare."
"So?" Meg prompted, noting how her mother was watching Ben again, a fierce curiosity in her eyes.
He looked at the apple, then shrugged and bit again.
Beth broke her long silence. "Are you working on something new?"
Ben looked away. Then it was true. He had begun something new. Yes, she should have known. He was always like this when he began something new— fervent, secretive, subject to great swings of mood.
The two women sat there, watching him as he finished the apple, core and all, leaving nothing.
He wiped his fingers on the edge of the cloth, then looked up again, meeting Meg's eyes. "I was thinking we might go along to the cove later on and look for shells."
She looked away, concealing her surprise. It was some time since they had been down to the cove, so why had he suggested it just now? Perhaps it was simply to indulge her love of shells, but she thought not. There was always more to it than that with Ben. It would be fun, and Ben would make the occasion into a kind of game, but he would have a reason for the game. He always had a reason.
Ben laughed and reached out to take one of the tiny radishes from the bowl. "And then, tomorrow, I'll show you what I've been up to."
warfleet COVE was a small bay near the mouth of the river. A road led toward it from the old town, ending abruptly in a jumble of rocks, the shadow of the Wall throwing a sharp but jagged line over the rocks and the hill beyond. To the left the land fell away to the river, bathed in brilliant sunlight. A path led down through the thick overgrowth—blackberry and bramble, wildflowers and tall grasses—and came out at the head of the cove.
Ben stepped out onto the flattened ledge of rock, easing the strap of his shoulder bag. Below him the land fell away steeply to either side, forming a tiny, ragged flint-head of a bay. A shallow spill of shingle edged the sandy cove. At present the tide was out, though a number of small rockpools reflected back the sun's brilliance. Low rocks lay to either side of the cove's mouth, narrowing the channel. It was an ancient, primitive place, unchanged throughout the centuries; and it was easy to imagine Henry Plantagenet's tiny fleet anchored here in 1147, waiting to sail to Jerusalem to fight the Infidel in the Second Crusade. Further around the headland stood the castle built by Henry Tudor, Henry VII, whose son had broken with the papacy. Ben breathed deeply and smiled to himself. This was a place of history. From the town itself the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed in August 1620 to the new lands of America, and in June 1944 part of the great invasion fleet had sailed from here— five hundred ships, bound for Normandy and the liberation of Europe from Hitler and the Nazis.
All gone, he thought wryly, turning to look at his sister. All of that rich past gone, forgotten, buried beneath the ice of the Han City.
"Come on," he said. "The tide's low. We'll go by the rocks on the north lip. We should find something there."
Meg nodded and followed him, taking his hand where the path was steepest, letting him help her down.
At the far edge of the shingle they stopped and took off their shoes, setting them down on the stones. Halfway across the sand, Ben stopped and turned, pointing down and back, tracing a line. "Look!"
She looked. The sun had warmed the sand, but where they had stepped their feet had left wet imprints, dark against the almost white, compacted sand. They faded even as she watched, the most distant first, the nearest last.
"Like history," he said, turning away from her and walking on toward the water's edge.
Or memory, Meg thought, looking down at her feet. She took a step then stopped, watching how the sharp clarity of the imprint slowly decayed, like an image sent over some vast distance, first at the edges, then—in a sudden rush—at the very center, breaking into two tiny, separate circles before it vanished. It was as if the whole had sunk down into the depths beneath the sand and was now stored in the rock itself.
"Here!" he called triumphantly. She hurried over to where he was crouched near the water's edge and bent down at his side.
The shell was two-thirds embedded in the sand. Even so, its shape and coloring were unmistakable. It was a pink-mouthed murex. She clapped her hands, delighted, and looked at him.
"Careful when you dig it out, Ben. You mustn't damage the spines."
He knew, of course, but said nothing, merely nodded and pulled his bag round to the front, opening up the flap.
She watched him remove the sand in a circle about the shell, then set the tiny trowel down and begin to remove the wet hard-packed sand with his fingers. When he had freed it, he lifted it carefully between his fingers and took it to one of the rockpools to clean.
She waited. When he came back, he knelt in front of her and, opening out the fingers of her right hand, put the pale, white-pink shell down on her palm. Cleaned, it looked even more beautiful. A perfect specimen, curved and elegant, like some strange fossil fish.
"The hedgehog of the seas," he said, staring at the shell. "How many points can you count?"
It was an old game. She lifted the shell and staring at its tip—its "nose"— began to count the tiny little nodes that marked each new stage on the spiral of growth.
"Sixteen," she said, handing the shell back.
He studied it. "More like thirty four," he said, looking up at her. He touched the tip of the shell gently. "There are at least eighteen in that first quarter of an inch."
"But they don't count!" she protested. "They're too small!"
"Small they may be, but they do count. Each marks a stage in the mollusk's growth, from the infinitesimally tiny up. If you X-rayed this, you'd see it. The same form repeated and repeated, larger and larger each time, each section sealed off behind the shellfish—outgrown, if you like. Still growing even at the creature's death. Never finished. The spiral uncompleted."