What We Can Know - 7

I t was a rough passage home from the Bodleian, southward through the Irish Sea, and I was very sick. I paid extra for a miniature cabin. I lay there, repeatedly vomiting and gripping a rail with both hands for fear of being thrown against the adjacent wall. By recalling accounts of seasick sailors who jumped overboard, I persuaded myself that my bout was mild. We came at last through calmer waters of the old Severn Estuary then turned east towards Port Marlborough. It was midday when we tied up and the oppressive hum of the ferry’s electric motors faded. Four hours late. I was unsteady on my feet as I made my way across the decks of two boats to reach solid ground.

I’ve always liked this port. Only eighty years old, it has an old-fashioned look, like a film set from an ancient movie packed with extras. On that day, the din of the quayside sounded merry, a carnival of jostling passengers, seamen, porters, fruit and snack vendors and a busker with a trumpet. In my state, the smell of grilled fish was disgusting. Moored against the quay, three and even four deep, was a jumble of sailing and electric boats and hybrids. A group of prosperous passengers stood with their trunks behind a velvet-roped enclosure waiting for their transfer to a larger ship, probably moored out on the Swindon straits. I’ve often dreamed of making an Atlantic crossing, if I ever had the funds. From what I’d heard, as soon as these passengers landed in America they would need to pay for the protection of a local warlord. The politics were complicated. Various armies and their offshoots were fighting to inherit the spirit and legitimacy of a glorious imperial past.

But that was not my concern. During my time in Snowdonia I had thought about Rose and was missing her. I used a card to free a hardwood-frame electric bike and set off to the south shore of Marlborough Island. My sickness soon passed, the strong winds had died and it was a delight to bowl along the unpaved lanes, past bare vineyards and through the occasional holm oak copse, twenty miles towards Ball Hill Quay. It was a ninety-minute ride, then a long wait for the last ferry across the Weald Sea to South Downs Harbour. From there, a two-mile walk to the university campus and my flat on the eleventh floor of the faculty building. I did not trouble to unpack. I went straight to bed.

A few years back we lived together for fifteen months until things went stale and we parted without drama. The university found me a one-room place in another building. Rose had a better formal education and is certainly richer than me. Or her parents were. The money she inherited embarrasses her and she prefers to live off the same meagre university salary as the rest of us. She is my brilliant young collaborator who knows more about the literature of 2000 to 2050 than anyone I know. My Blundy project has come to mean little to me without her. I need her good sense. But there has hung over us a question we prefer not to address. We had ceased to be lovers, but after I moved out we became good friends, determined not to let each other go. We had affairs, even talked about them, and colluded in the idea that it was a relief to be intimate, like siblings. It was as if we were waiting. We were close, and something would have to happen to force us apart or even closer.

We were taken on by the university when Rose was in her early twenties and I was thirty-two, thrown together to teach a course, ‘The Politics and Literature of the Inundation’. It was hard work. These were surly second-year students, not the sparkiest bunch. Rose and I mapped out the sessions over a recess. Before covering the shifting global alliances, the resource wars and the literature that came out of the turmoil, we thought we should deal with the background in terms of nuclear war, the water cycle and the Derangement. We invited a couple of friendly specialists to address the group, one from Earth Sciences, the other a politics professor. In two hours the students offered no more than a grunt or a reluctant simple sentence. They did not want to know or think about a hostile sea. It bored them in advance. They lived on and among islands. So what? Fourteen young men and women were slumped around the table. They had grown up with the consequences, heard their grandparents go on about it. The past was peopled by idiots. Big deal. The matter was dead. The kids attended our course because it was compulsory. But they had moved on. What animated them in those days was a twenty-minute two-string bass guitar solo. Or possession of fashionable pale green and purple linen pants, worn low on the hips by both men and women and secured by a large tin buckle.

Rose and I met that evening for a post-mortem. We were inexperienced and took matters personally. It was as if we were teaching a dead language. No point asking the specialists back. Too embarrassing. We would get our minds round the material and do it ourselves. So at the next seminar we laid it out, we spoon-fed them a short history of sea levels. We spoke in cheery sing-song voices, as if addressing a pre-school class. We made jokes. We showed colourful animations, simple to understand. Twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sea-level rise two millimetres a year, mostly driven by anthropogenic (we explained the term) warming. Warmer water expands, adding to the rise. Freshwater lakes drained by human overuse, the water recycled as rain and snow back into the oceans – more rise. Melting ice, albedo effect explained – more warmth, more rise. But more significant, the nuclear politics of the mid-twenty-first century and the fatal concept of limited nuclear war, then a poorly engineered Russian intercontinental missile aimed at the southern United States exploding in the mid-Atlantic ocean, catastrophic tsunamis devastating Europe, West Africa and coastal North America, the suspicion that the mighty explosion was planned, the political pressure for revenge, further catastrophe before a panicked peace was arranged. We spoke of the newly created inland seas, enlarged over time by increased rainfall. The land beneath them compressed and lowered, so they did not drain, but persisted like glacial lakes. Scores of vanished cities. (We showed old pictures of Glasgow, New York and Lagos.) The globalised economy and its distribution networks broken. Markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times. Those science and technology institutes, seed- and databanks, museums, libraries and universities not destroyed took to the hills and mountains. The knowledge base and collective memory were largely preserved, along with the internet, mostly maintained later by Nigeria, whose rise we also covered. Heavy industry and fossil-fuel use collapsed. So-called war-dust from Middle East battlefield nuclear exchanges rose to the upper atmosphere and average global temperatures dropped. By way of tsunamis, wars, starvation and disease, earth’s population dropped below four billion around the time a shattered Germany was incorporated into Greater Russia. Amid the disasters, world literature produced its most beautiful laments, gorgeous nostalgia, eloquent fury – and those masterpieces, so we promised, we would study together.

Were all the kids asleep by the end, or just most of them? That night Rose and I went back to her place and got drunk. We were so young then, and in my despair I believed that I could not go on with my career. I’d find something else to do. Rose was of the same mind. But gallows humour rescued us.

At some point in the small hours she said, ‘Tom, I think I’ll walk down to the beach and hang myself by the lifeguard station.’ She didn’t move.

I said, ‘Off you go then.’

And she said, ‘Come with me.’

We laughed at ourselves and kissed and became lovers that night.