Lunch: thinking of our own meals, or those larger weekend occasions with friends: Clare, at ten and a half, nearly two years after her father’s death, had learnt to eat properly again at last. The graft had largely taken between her and the new family created around her. To begin with, when we’d first all come down to the Oxfordshire cottage, and before that when I’d first met Clare with her grandparents out in Cascais, she had eaten, when she ate at all, like a savage four-year-old, punishing the food, grinding it into floor or table; or, on her feet then, treating it like mudballs, clenching it up in her fine hands and slinging it all over the kitchen (or the tiled bathroom where she sometimes had to eat) with unerring accuracy. Like most autistic children she had a superbly developed motor system, the physical co-ordination of a circus juggler: she could almost spin a soup plate on an index finger, while hitting you in the eye with a boiled potato across the whole width of a room was child’s play to her.
George’s wife spoke to her now. How unlike her Christian name she was, the sun-tanned Annabelle, a tall, angular, very plain woman with long bronzed tennis-playing limbs, though I doubt she ever played any game. There was a remote, glazed quality about her, of someone always focusing on a matter far away or deep inside her. ‘Well,’ she said awkwardly to the child. ‘You have made a splendid mess!’
Clare responded at last. ‘Yes.’ She spoke without concern, smiling brightly up at us before leaving the table. She said no more. Clare at such times, having expressed some unknown desire or hurt in this dramatic manner, had no memory of the immediate past, or — for hours or even days afterwards — of any time further back. Her life seemed to start afresh on such occasions. She was continually re-born thus, yet one could never quite decide if this was a tragedy or a miracle.
George came with me into the drawing-room as I tended the fire and opened the bottle.
‘It doesn’t get any easier,’ he said sympathetically.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I pulled the cork. ‘It has recently. She’s been a lot better.’
‘There’s no constancy, though, in the improvement. That must be disheartening. Up, up, and then right back again.’
‘Is that surprising? Isn’t that very much the evolutionary process?’
George — a palaeontologist, as Clare’s famous father, Willy Kindersley, had been — had a haunted face shaped like a large wedge: a long thick flush of greying hair ran sideways across his scalp above a broad forehead. But then the skull narrowed dramatically, down a long nose to a very pointed chin. His eyes were grey too. But they were strangely alert, as if the man was still looking for some vital hominid evidence in the desert.
He and Annabelle had no children of their own. They appeared to be colleagues rather than a married couple, a pair devoted exclusively, it seemed, to man’s past; for Annabelle, an ethnologist by profession, worked in almost the same line of country as her husband. Yet George had a longing for a more present life, I felt, where the bones were clothed with flesh, and Clare for him was a living mystery, a deviant hominid species more strange than any skeleton he had found while delving through millions of years in the sub-soil of East Africa.
He saw Clare — as we all did, for it was so obvious — as someone physically supreme: a beautiful, blue-eyed child, peach-skinned, ideally proportioned with marvellous co-ordination, balance, grasp — a body where human development, over aeons, had culminated in a sensational perfection: yet a form where there was some great flaw hidden in the perfect matrix, black holes in the girl’s mind that defied all rational explanation. George regarded Clare with awe, his scientific mind touched, even, with fear. Indeed, I sometimes wondered if, with his evolutionary obsessions, he looked on her as evidence of some new and awful development in humanity; if he saw Clare and the increasingly numerous children like her as precursors of a future race who, though perfectly built, would look into the world with totally vacant eyes.
George had been a colleague of Willy Kindersley’s before his death, and before George had settled down in Oxford. They had worked together three years before, long months beside the dry streams running into Lake Turkana in northern Kenya and before that on other prehistoric fossil sites further afield in the Northern Frontier District and on the Uganda border. For many years out there they had sought man’s origins, found small vital bones casually unearthed by the spring rains, a piece of some early hominid jaw or cranium, picking them out of the petrified old river beds with dental probes, Laura had told me, dusting them with fine paintbrushes before setting these part-men in patterns, jigsaws that gradually displayed proof of some earlier Eden by the lake shore, earlier than a nose bone found near the same site the previous season: earlier by a million years.
Theirs was a job with the long view, pushing back man’s past before first vaguest speech into a time of signs, and before that to a moment when these small, hairy quadrupeds, down from the trees, had first stood up, erect, on two feet. It had been their ambition to date more exactly this miraculous change, this moment between animal and human life, when one had finally given way to the other and man had first set out on his long trail of upright destruction.
And here Willy Kindersley had apparently succeeded, his career among old bones in East Africa ending in great celebrity. For it was he who, nearly three years before, way up near the Kenya-Uganda border, had discovered the sensational bones of ‘Thomas’, as the part skeleton had been named: the fossilized remains, nearly four million years old, of a young man who not only walked on two feet but had used the sharpened animal bones found along with him to hunt and kill.
An irony never mentioned more than once (when Laura had first told me all about it) was that Willy, the victim of a hit-and-run accident, had been killed by a direct descendant of these men whose haphazard graves he had so painstakingly disturbed, by a Kenyan, an African (the man had never been traced), who had run over Willy, his car mounting the pavement out of control apparently, just as Willy had left a news conference at the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi two years before.
Though I’d never met Willy, I always felt very much as if I had: as though, through my subsequent close association with his friends and with his wife, the informal name they used for him belonged to me as much as them. Willy was always Willy, alive or dead: a small dark-haired man, as I’d seen from photographs, verging on the plump; a good deal of the professorial in him, by all accounts (he’d held a chair at London University), arcane depths which were decorated, though, with many surface conceits. He had a sharp wit, I’d been told, which often strayed over into the practicaclass="underline" as when he’d successfully offered his students an early hominid skull and jawbones, elaborately mounted on some snapping mechanism, a research project intended, as he explained, to pinpoint man’s first sense of the comic in life — for here, with micrometers, carbon dating and suchlike, they would at last isolate that initial earth-shaking guffaw …
Of course such academic drolleries can fall very flat for those outside the magic circles. And Willy, these scholastic jokes matched only by his intellectual depths, was perhaps an unlikely person to have married the more balanced, outgoing Laura who shared few if any of his professional concerns. But then she shared few of mine, and our marriage subsequently had been as happy as theirs had apparently been.