by Paul Hoffman
‘Well,’ said Epper, ‘NEMO’s told her to run away from home.’
‘What?’ replied Anne, even more irritably.
Epper became flustered.
‘Well?’ said Anne, impatient and anxious to find out what he meant.
He grabbed at some papers beside him and dropped them. ‘Bugger!’ he said through clenched teeth. As three of his colleagues knelt down to help him, two clashed heads with a hollow sound that made everyone but Anne wince.
‘For goodness’ sake, get on with it!’ she said, stonily. Epper took a deep breath and started to hand round the papers as the two wounded scientists sat down, both looking at her sulkily. As the papers went swiftly round the room, Anne felt guilty. You’re turning into a bully.
‘Why is NEMO advising her to leave home?’ she said, in a tone that tried to make peace with the nervous Epper.
‘Well,’ said Epper, still unhinged. ‘It . . . uh . . . says that her husband is trying to poison her.’
There was a silence as half the scientists looked at Anne and the other half looked at the wall opposite. Anne sighed with disappointment.
Epper continued, his tone ingratiating. ‘As you know better than I do, the mnemonic chaining codes can be very difficult to trace because there are so many blind alleys involved, but I’m pretty confident that its overall conclusion, at least in terms of the advice to leave home, is derived from the ABUSE expert system we tried to set up for Strathclyde Social Services in 1986.’ He turned to those in the room who were newer to the department. ‘We’d been asked to devise an expert system to cope with women suffering physical abuse from their husbands, and children suffering sexual abuse. It was a success as a system but, unfortunately, the social workers refused to use it.’
‘Why?’ asked someone.
Anne interrupted. ‘They said that the notion of “expertise” in child and wife abuse decision-making was “totally suspect”, as one of them put it. Perhaps we could go into this later if anyone’s interested.’
‘Right,’ said Epper quickly. ‘Well, if you look at page one of the paper I’ve given you you’ll see I’ve printed out the rule it seems to have used – there are about four hundred and fifty in the knowledge base altogether.’
There was a rustling of papers and a request for another copy from someone who had contrived to lose the one he had been given in the two minutes since he’d been given it. They all looked attentively at the sheet on which the rule was written as follows:
IF THE CONDITION OF SUBJECT IS [UNHAPPY] <-> 7
AND THE TYPE OF [UNHAPPY] IS [MARITAL]
AND THE TYPE OF {[UNHAPPY] [MARITAL]} IS EXTREME [PHYSICAL DAMAGE] <-> 8
THEN there is suggestive evidence that the subject should leave marital dwelling.
‘What do the numbers seven and eight mean?’ asked someone.
Epper looked almost simperingly at Anne and replied. ‘Anne had the idea to grade levels of unhappiness or violence on a scale of 1–10. The social services were dismissive, very, at the time, but in practice it worked well. I understand it’s the only bit of the system they still use.’
He smiled at Anne and she felt ashamed that she had forced a man of Epper’s ability to behave towards her in such an ingratiating way. You can be a real cow sometimes, she thought to herself. Then she looked more carefully at the paper and saw the bizarre nature of the reasoning. ‘Where, in God’s name, did it get the idea she was being poisoned from?’
‘I checked it out,’ said Epper, ‘and there’s nothing in what she said to NEMO during the interview, or in any of the other records we inputted, to possibly justify that inference.’
Anne became intrigued. ‘What can it mean?’
‘Well,’ said Epper, the light in his eye gleaming with the hope of redemption, ‘I think I know.’
‘Well?’ she said, and her mouth was open like a toddler’s hungry for a late meal.
‘At one point NEMO accessed the DORIS system.’ He explained quickly because not everyone was familiar with all the systems at NEMO’s disposal. ‘DORIS is a collection of script-like representations called MOPS, TOPS, TAUS, META-MOPS . . .’ He was halted by an urgent look from Anne. ‘Uh . . . that’s not very important at the moment. To cut a long story short they’re used to break down all the quotations in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.’
Anne interrupted, torn between her desire to get on and her desire to hammer home her most abiding obsession after NEMO. ‘Let’s get it straight, these aren’t the quotations or even a formal representation of the lines quoted. They’re just . . .’ she cast around for the right way of explaining herself, ‘. . . diagrams. Imagine a diagrammatic representation of, say, the concepts in the Gettysburg address.’ She looked back at Epper, urging him again to get on with it.
‘Well,’ continued Epper, ‘it seems to have searched through the program in several directions at once, and three of them met up. One of them was food, the other was love, and the third was unhappiness. It ended up with a quote from Tennyson. It’s printed on page two.’ There was a quick rustle and they collectively pored over what was written there:
1 HONEY: (has-property) edible
2 POISON: (has-property) sickness
3 LOVE: (has-property) food.
4 Absence, imperative [cause] (love): (has-property) insane, wicked [honey; poison]
‘This is a diagrammatic representation of the quotation printed below,’ said Epper, the gleam now a shine. They all looked down as one and read:
And most of all would I flee from the cruel madness of love –
The honey of poison-flowers and all the measureless ill.
‘Not quite the same, is it?’ said someone.
‘Fascinating,’ breathed Anne at last. ‘Why did it search food?’
‘She talked about that a lot,’ said Epper. ‘It seems she was always dieting, and he was always cooking for her, preparing her meals, always worried she wasn’t eating enough. “It was a real sore point between us,” as she put it.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Anne again. ‘She’s unhappy. He loves her because he’s worried about her appetite. Love can make people unhappy. Love is a kind of food, therefore he is poisoning her because he is always feeding her in a way that makes her unhappy. Poison is fatal, therefore she must leave home. Strange,’ she said, smiling, ‘but not much help to Mrs Nan— the woman. An interesting failure.’
‘Are you talking about me or the program?’ said Epper, smiling. Anne laughed, and he noticed the movement of her breasts, languid as if she were not wearing a bra. Deep down something stirred in him, as desire and resentment began to weave together.
The bell had just gone at Maybe’s Grammar School for Girls and floods of teenage girls were rushing up and down the school’s stairwell, a huge tower that stood slightly apart from the main building to which it was linked at each floor. At the end of each period upwards of six hundred noisy girls flushed through its numerous flights, generating the raucously echoing din that caused it to be known as the Tower of Babel. Martin Beck, English teacher and the frustrated lover of Anne Levels, was walking down to Alice Winnicott’s office and had been caught in one of these A-line skirted spates. Even the weediest of the girls lurched about the stairway under the weight of schoolbags that looked large and angular enough to contain half a dozen breeze blocks. Perhaps that’s what they were and he had stumbled across a new form of female self-punishment to displace the eating disorder. Certainly whenever he was clattered by one, which he frequently was, it felt as if he’d been hit by an object solid enough to be used in the construction of a garage or a bathroom extension. He considered the long-term effects. It was possible that in the future all women would lean slightly to one side, that skinny girls would fall over more often in the twenty-first century and no one would ever know that it was caused by the disinvention of the school desk.
Escaping to the second floor, he approached Alice Winnicott’s office. Martin considered her an intelligent but unlikeable woman. They
had not got on particularly well even before the parents’ evening when her husband had collapsed, but after this her attitude to him seemed to have soured even further. Possibly he was being over-sensitive because everyone knew that her husband was seriously ill and in hospital. Maybe she was like this with everybody because she was worried. But he didn’t think so. He had wavered in his initial decision to go and see her for nearly a week because he was reluctant to admit that consulting her was a form of subservience. It wasn’t altogether a good thing to be on Alice Winnicott’s bad side. He knocked on her door and went in. She was staring out of the window. Slowly she turned towards him.
‘What can I do for you?’ She had clearly seen the bag he was holding and registered its contents. ‘Oh. Where did that come from?’
He put it on the table in front of her. She winced in a way that was both delicate and calculated.
‘I think you should look inside.’
‘Must I?’
‘It’s not quite what you think.’
She opened it without any further show of distaste and looked at it carefully and thoughtfully.
‘I found it in my bay outside the staff room.’
‘Ah,’ she said in a tone that made it plain that all was now clear to her, ‘that does make a difference.’
‘To what?’
‘Do I have to spell it out?’
‘Yes, I think you probably do.’
‘This is a girls’ school.’ She looked at him patronisingly. ‘You are an attractive young man.’ She gestured as if to say, ‘Obviously you know the rest.’
‘Isn’t it more usual to leave an apple?’
‘That’s girls for you. They’re hysterical creatures and if you start taking them too seriously they’ll run away with you. Ignore it. Leave it to me to sort out.’
He was not willing to be fobbed off. ‘What about the ink and the leaves?’
‘Be thankful for small mercies. I am.’ She looked at him dismissively. ‘There’s often less to things than meets the eye, wouldn’t you say?’
‘As it happens, yes I would, but not in this case.’
He reached to pick up the bag, but she swiftly placed it her desk drawer.
‘I’d like it back, if you don’t mind,’ he said.
She looked at him calmly. ‘I’m afraid this must be considered my responsibility now. But are you sure you want me to look into this? I can’t think what you expect to find.’
He was surprised by her attitude. Normally she would have seized the opportunity this gave for one of the interrogations at which she excelled.
‘I want to know what it’s about.’
‘Even if it’s about anything, I don’t know what makes you think it isn’t going to be decidedly unpleasant. Girls can be sordid sometimes. I’ve seen things you’d hardly believe.’
‘Really?’
The disdain in his voice clearly offended her and there was genuine anger in her reply. ‘There’s always one of two things wrong with men teaching in girls’ schools, I find, and in your case it’s the way you sentimentalise women. You came here expecting some kind of refuge. You think that women are nicer, kinder, and that you’ll find something here you think you lack. Well, they’re not, and you won’t.’
Not bad, he thought. ‘What’s the other thing?’
She picked up a pen and began to write. Her voice changed tone from malice to disdain. ‘What do you think?’
Closing the door behind him he said to himself, ‘Idiot!’ and went down to the book cupboard to collect thirty copies of Kes.
In her office Alice Winnicott was staring out of the window again, having already forgotten Martin Beck.
After three dates, the dinner at his flat, a meal at a restaurant and a visit to the theatre, Anne seemed to have decided Steven was to be trusted. To his surprise, the daring implied by her seeking him out in the museum and accepting his invitation so quickly was not altogether as strong in her as he’d hoped. She had turned out to be a cautious woman, reserved even. While not evasive about her past, his careful questions were only answered up to a point. This might be either a difficulty or an opportunity.
The invitation to pick her up at her flat before going out to dinner with her friends was clearly an act of social acclimatisation. A good sign, like being taken home to Mum for tea. He had arrived on time but she had not finished drying her hair.
While she was in the bedroom, he looked around the living room. It was untidy, although not remarkably so. Two pairs of shoes lay on the floor as well as the previous Sunday’s papers, and two dirty mugs on a side-table. He went over to the window and examined her bookcase carefully. There was some nineteenth-century fiction – Dickens, Eliot – then nothing until early Greene; some European fiction – Mann, Kundera – The Hip and Thigh Diet; an American paperback of Paradise Lost that looked as if it had never been read; a Fontana Modern Masters on Jung and another on Auden; the collected essays of Malcolm Muggeridge; and a former library book: The Man with the Golden Gun, which was also a first edition. He looked inside two, the diet book and Paradise Lost, noting that the name inside each was the same. He took out a small black diary from his inside pocket and made a few notes.
He looked over his shoulder. She was standing in the doorway; her hair was dry but she was still in her dressing-gown. ‘Writing about me?’ she said, nodding at the book.
‘An idea for work. If I don’t write them down straight away . . .’
She pointed her index finger at the books. ‘What do you think?’ she said.
He took up the challenge. ‘Well read, certainly, but slightly ashamed of being conventional – but not ashamed enough to do much about it.’ He looked at the bookcase again. ‘Someone dishonest, but not in a very imaginative way and not to any great extent.’ He pulled out the Fleming and opened it. ‘On the other hand, this is a first edition, so maybe I’m underestimating them. Or should that be overestimating? Someone who likes to sneer, who thinks they’re less easily fooled than other people.’
‘Anything else?’ Her voice was flat.
‘Yes.’ He paused, looking at her directly. ‘They have a big bum.’
She laughed, realising that he knew the books were not hers. ‘If there’s anything that interests you, take it. They’re not mine. They were in the flat when I rented it.’
‘Conventionally that means they’re not yours to give.’
‘They said they were coming back for them, but they never did. That was two years ago. Most of my stuff is in store.’
She turned and went to finish dressing. Steven continued look-ing around the room. On a large table by the far wall lay piles of thick scientific textbooks. Two of them, Artificial Intelligence and Language and Cognitive Technologies, had been written by Anne herself. He made a note of the titles. Behind the tallest stack of books he found a bonsai tree. At first, never having been close to one before, he thought that it must be artificial, so striking was its manikin perfection: gnarled, twisted and ancient. Even the tiny size of what looked like a yew could not diminish the feeling of mass wrought by years of patient growth. This is a tree, he thought; not a toy, a clever act of miniaturisation, a trivial but patient act of manipulation. It was an old tree.
‘It was my grandfather’s,’ she said, again appearing silently, now dressed in a green evening dress and vivid mustard jacket. The colours were slightly too strong for each other; they didn’t clash but neither did the combination work. ‘He brought it back from Japan fifty years ago. It was already over a hundred years old when it was given to him.’
‘It’s extraordinary.’
She looked over at the table on which he had placed a bottle of champagne. ‘Celebrating?’
‘Yes. I’ve got a new contract with the Wellcome Foundation.’
She smiled. How pleased was she, he wondered. It looked as if she felt genuinely glad at his news. This was a measure of something.
‘So, tell me about it.’ She went over to the sideboard and took out two tumblers.
‘Sorry they’re not proper champagne glasses.’ By now he had taken off the foil and popped the cork. ‘Well?’
‘I’ve been working for a while now on stress – on the way it affects the body.’
‘Like ulcers?’
‘Yes, though it’s beginning to look as if ulcers are caused by bacteria rather than stress . . . but that’s life I suppose. Anyway, there’s a lot of work to be done, putting all the research on stress together. I’ve persuaded them that there’s more to be gained by examining what we already know more carefully than by doing more new investigations.’
As he had hoped, her eyes lit up, and for the next half-hour she questioned him non-stop. She spent the next hour delightedly answering questions about her own ideas. Their views were almost identical.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ she said finally. ‘That we should see things in the same way.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It is extraordinary.’ He paused, started to speak, then stopped.
‘What?’ she said.
‘I shouldn’t ask.’
She smiled but it was not clear why.
She’s a tricky one, this, he thought.
‘If you don’t ask, I can’t say no.’ She laughed sweetly. ‘You do want something?’
He laughed. ‘Yes, I do. But only in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.’
‘Spit it out.’
‘This machine of yours, I don’t suppose you could ask it to do some searching for me, looking for things on stress . . . on anything related.’
She didn’t say anything at first and he wondered if he had offended her, that this was like asking to borrow money. But she was only thinking whether she could really be of help. ‘I can try. We’ll need to spend a few hours setting out the search parameters. Just don’t be disappointed if it comes up with nothing. But I can tell you it’s neither powerful enough nor consistent enough to be comprehensive. We’ve got a lot of medical databases linked in but . . . well, the point is, don’t expect too much. The research I was telling you about . . . the paper on slugs and how their secretions thin the blood. Well, it was a bit of a fluke to be honest. We’ll get there one day, but don’t get your hopes up.’ She looked at her watch and groaned. ‘We must go.’