The Mathematical Bridge

by Jim Kelly

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The city streets were deserted now, the surface of the snow on the pavements a crisp carapace through which Brooke’s shoes crunched as he walked back towards the Spinning House. A constable on his beat, passing the Round Church, saluted. The prospect of the cold house at Newnham Croft was even less enticing than it had been at dusk, so he ducked off Sidney Sussex Street into a long alleyway, already home to half a dozen roadsters, vagrants who fed off the bins and sought shelter at night. It amazed Brooke that the city had any rough sleepers at all, given its almost preternatural ability to attract a cold wind. The Fens, to the north, seemed to harbour the arctic airs, then release them, at full force, into the streets.

  A metal fire escape led up to a flat roof, across which Brooke walked, lifting each foot out of the thick snow. On the far side a ladder rose twenty feet to a second flat roof and the last fire escape, which did a smart double switch-back before decanting him onto a platform, a wooden ledge, designed to claim the highest point at this corner of the city, with a panoramic view of the river, the Upper Town, the medieval colleges clustered below. At nearly ninety feet, the lookout – an official Observer Corps post – provided a bird’s-eye view, a living map.

  The post was circled with sandbags to a height of several feet, and in the rear corner, against a wide chimney breast, a conical steel hut had been set, out of which emerged Josephine Ashmore, rearranging her immaculately tailored uniform and touching her short brown hair, which – expensively cut – dropped precisely to her collar. A gas mask in a leather case bobbed at her hip, transformed from a vital lifesaver into a fashion item.

  Her face brightened. ‘An honour indeed. A visit from the Borough. How thrilling.’

  They stood companionably at the sandbag parapet. In the city below a few cars crept along in the brick and stone canyons, peering forward with the help of swaddled headlamps. The snow’s interior light revealed heavy clouds above, which had rolled south since sunset.

  ‘Tea?’ asked Ashmore.

  Brooke took up a pair of field glasses and completed a tour d’horizon as the kettle boiled. The Observer Corps had six lookout posts in the city, providing 360 degrees of cover. The East Coast radar stations were on standby to issue alerts, which would reach the conical hut by landline. Ashmore’s job was to report any useful military intel back to the airfield at Duxford, to the south of the city. Using a fixed metal plotting table, she had been trained to track the course of incoming EA – enemy aircraft – by sight and sound. After a raid, she was to plot fires.

  ‘Tonight’s orders?’ he asked, accepting a steaming mug.

  ‘We’re on standard alert for a German bombing raid, which never comes,’ she said. ‘The gossip is that they’ll attack in France later this month, once the snow’s gone. Berlin won’t want us providing air cover for our boys, so maybe we’ll see them then, trying to destroy the runways, catch the kites on the ground. Then we’ll go all misty-eyed about those boring nights when nothing ever happened.’

  Jo Ashmore’s life, before the war, had contained very few boring nights. The Ashmores had lived in the villa next to the Brookes at Newnham Croft, beside the river. The children had been friends, the two families entwined in that peculiar way which means nobody can recall how they got to know each other so well. As a child she’d played hide-and-seek in the house with Brooke’s daughter, Joy. While Joy had gone into nursing, Jo’s life had drifted. There’d been a racy lifestyle, London parties, a scandal with a married man. Her father, a professor of history, had demanded a low profile. Irony had placed her on this giddy rooftop.

  ‘Any instructions on the IRA bombers?’ he asked.

  ‘Pages of it, Brooke. Piles of bumf. We’re to keep our eyes open for anything suspicious close to the usual targets. Postboxes, pylons, telegraph poles, gas mains, power stations, masts – just like Newton’s. That was a sight, I can tell you. I thought the whole thing was coming down. And they cut through the wire?’

  Brooke nodded, resettling his hat on his head, the rim lower over his eyes.

  ‘It’s all still small beer,’ she said. ‘Put the bomb on a bike, wheel it up to the target, then bugger off. They’re not exactly courageous warriors are they, Brooke? But there’s word …’

  She sipped her drink, smiling, teasing. Even as a child she’d been drawn to the pale, heroic figure of the man next door, shrouded in the legend of Lawrence of Arabia, a wounded warrior, but always silent when it came to stories of war and victory. The children would watch him coming home along the river, hands in overcoat pockets, the hat, the legs tapering to neat brogues, the crack of the metal Blakeys on the path. There was always a note of menace in the figure, which meant they invariably broke cover and ran ahead screaming, desperate to hide in the house.

  ‘Go on,’ said Brooke. ‘What’s the word?’

  She fetched a batch of typed order papers from the hut, held together with a military bulldog clip.

  ‘The theory is that the bombers are out to impress the Germans. They’re not doing very well, are they? So far they’ve killed a dozen civilians by accident, and burnt a few postboxes, and interrupted a couple of nights out at the flicks. They want Berlin to think they’re an army behind the lines. So the thinking is that they’re moving on and up. First off, we’re to keep an eye on major infrastructure – petrol stores, swing bridges, bridges generally, airfields. And locks, and sluices. Runways too. And on the Fens, pumping stations. Flood banks. There’s a whole platoon camped out at Denver Sluice to make sure we can all sleep safe in our beds, protected from the possibility that a single bomb could let the tide flood in. Imagine that, Brooke. Even Berlin would notice the sudden appearance of an inland sea.’ She took a gulp of tepid tea. ‘Every Observational Post, or OP, has a list of targets to monitor. That’s my priority.’

  She pointed down below, where the street led into the distance, and over the Great Bridge. ‘Blow that up and there’d be pandemonium, Brooke. Major north–south route. Principal river crossing. The army predicts chaos, and they should know, they’re brilliant at creating it. Anything suspicious, especially after dark, we’re to ring the military at Madingley Hall. Personally I don’t think they’d bother. Too obvious. If I was them, and I wanted to prompt an international shindig, I’d go for a munitions train. We get two, three a night now. A mile long, Brooke. Takes twenty minutes to rattle past. Derail it, you’ve got a nightmare. Derail it and set fire to it, they’d hear the bang in Berlin.’

  In the silence, on cue, they could hear the distant rattle of a train.

  Brooke considered her profile, the lips slightly parted, the eyes bright. His daughter had whispered that Jo had a new paramour, a pilot, and that this one was different, not just a moustache in an open-top car, trailing a silk scarf. Something had certainly lifted the mood on the draughty rooftop OP. Did the new man visit her on the rooftops? Change was certainly in the air. Brooke had noted subtle alterations: a small mirror had always hung in the hut at just the right height for Jo to apply lipstick. That was gone. And she no longer lit her cigarettes with an extravagant striking of a match, but discreetly, a lighter cupped in her hand, her head turned away. And there was something less fragile about the smile.

  ‘There’s wilder rumours,’ said Ashmore, hiding her face behind the field glasses. ‘One of the OP men said he’d been told by a mate, who’d overheard a conversation on the train, that when they caught one of the bombers after Coventry he had plans in his pocket: Buck House, apparently. They’re all still in London – the King, the Queen. And they tried to kill Chamberlain’s son – you heard that?’

  Brooke nodded. ‘Not exactly earth-shattering, was it? The bomb was in a tobacco tin, Jo. And he was in Ireland.’

  ‘Maybe. But we’re on alert. We’ve got this Prince Henry visit on the cards. You can just imagine the fuss that’ll cause. And there’s more and more bumf from London on the IRA. These two bombers are waiting to hang at Birmingham. If they swing, the IRA will strike back, they have to.�
�

  She laughed then, her beautiful face lit up by the prospect of judicial execution and mayhem.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Brooke, respecting the letter of his new regime, set out for home, a bath, a meal and a moonless bedroom. Walking home along the river path he welcomed a growing sense of fatigue, even exhaustion. At Newnham Croft, where the river arrived from the chalky hills in a series of pools and cuts, streams and ditches, the landscape was oddly silent; ice, like a spell, had stopped the flowing water in its tracks. Lifting the snicket on the gate he observed the house, one of a pair of Edwardian villas, with fancy decoration reminiscent of a railway station or a vicarage. It had been his home all his life, and in the last twenty years a family home. In the desert, in his cell, he’d dreamt of walking up the path, and so this simple action always lifted his spirits.

  Opening the door, he resisted the urge to shout ‘Home!’, knowing that Claire was still on the night shift, and that Joy might be home but would be resting. The staircase led past her room. He noted the light under the door and wondered – but really knew – if she was lying awake thinking of Ben, even now, perhaps, suspended in the brown, cold, murky depths of the North Sea. In the attic room he ran a bath, hot and steamy, but felt too tired to get under the water. The late-night meal of reheated stew he couldn’t face either, so he lit a fire in the bedroom, set his glasses on the bedside table and struggled under the heavy covers.

  Sleep comprised approximately twenty minutes of a tumbling dream. He was on the bridge again, the one on the desert road across the Sinai, looking down with all his comrades. This time it wasn’t a dry arroyo, but a tumbling flood. Then he was wading out into the water, trying to pluck a child from the stream, but each time he reached out the boy’s hand eluded his. They were trapped in a whirlpool, so that this opportunity to fail was repeated and repeated. The child had no name, but he was still compelled to shout it out, the syllables mangled because his tongue felt mired in glue, its root sluggish and unresponsive, so that all he could do in the end was emit a strange animal wail from within his throat.

  When he woke, Joy was at the end of the bed with a cup of tea.

  ‘I heard the shouts,’ she said. ‘Well, they’re not shouts, are they? There’s something insistent, frustrated. I’m worried, Mum’s worried. I don’t think it’s getting any better, do you?’

  The fire was still burning, so Brooke could see her face, and he thought for the first time that he caught the ghost of his father in her features, something about the steady, detached observation.

  She sat while he sipped the tea and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Why do you smoke those things?’ she asked, nodding at the Black Russian.

  ‘Your grandfather smoked them. He had a silver box in his laboratory downstairs. I think that was his father’s. It was etched with his name: Dr E. E. Brooke. I used to steal them. It was my one and only rebellion. A dull child.’

  She laughed, one hand on her belly. ‘There was a call, from Ben’s mother. She got a telegram from Rosyth. The boat sails at dawn for a patrol in the Northern Approaches; she’s very good on the jargon already. I think that means the Arctic, Norway and beyond. So I can’t sleep either, but I’m going to try.’

  ‘I’ll read,’ he said, and she wished him goodnight.

  An hour later he slipped downstairs, noted that Joy’s light was out and struggled into his greatcoat on the mat, winding a scarf round his neck before plucking his hat from the newel post at the foot of the stairs.

  Outside the frost was astonishing, so cold he felt it icing his hair, stinging his eyes. His nose and throat began to ache slightly, as if succumbing to a subtle anaesthetic.

  Aldiss’s laboratory was in the science quarter beyond the red-brick facade of the Sedgwick Museum. They’d been students together in those halcyon months before the Great War, sharing a set of rooms in Michaelhouse. Aldiss was brilliant, but in a singularly unimpressive style. On meeting him for the first time most people would have guessed he was a not very bright provincial solicitor, perhaps, or a bank clerk. He left verbal pyrotechnics and high-flown creative hypothesis to others, specialising instead in a trademark remorseless logic. It enabled him to construct faultless, exhaustive experiments.

  The laboratory, on the fifth floor of a faceless interwar block, was a hothouse. Along one wall, in a series of pens, were up to a hundred guinea pigs, emitting that strange collection of noises which don’t quite amount to a sound at all, the movement of the softest fur, the tiny jaws working at seeds and grain, the skitter of the weightless feet.

  ‘I’m taking advantage of the cold snap,’ said Aldiss, producing a bottle of malt whisky from a fume cupboard and pouring two large shots into a pair of beakers. Aldiss was one of Brooke’s more welcoming nighthawks. The research was, by necessity, ceaseless, and so visitors served to enliven the tedium. It was always a malt whisky, usually from Skye, and of a decent age.

  Aldiss was an expert in circadian rhythms, those innate cycles which give animals and plants the ability to be ready, in a hormonal sense, for the inevitable challenges of life. For some months he’d concentrated on the effects of light. Beyond the laboratory’s three steel doors he kept cockroaches, fireflies and hamsters, exposing them to carefully regulated patterns of artificial solar radiation. Brooke, on his nightly visits, often stood amongst the glowing fireflies as Aldiss checked the cameras which recorded their movements and their luminescence. One visit to the ‘roach room’ had been enough. The scuttling of the insects’ carapaces on the concrete floor had unsettled him.

  Now Aldiss had moved on to the effects of heat.

  ‘Enjoy it while you can,’ he said, touching the radiator momentarily. ‘On the hour I’m opening the windows. As I said, it’s a chance I can’t miss. I can vary the heat, ratchet it up, let it cool down, but even I can’t deliver a blast of boreal air. So this is a golden opportunity. I’ll have to stop talking to you when the time comes. I need to observe, Brooke. And that’s a serious business.’

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ said Brooke.

  ‘I’d worked that out,’ said Aldiss, running a hand through what was left of his hair. He had a lumpen head, a kind of boulder of pale skin, which now seemed slightly too heavy for his neck. He was constantly lifting it up to meet Brooke’s eyes.

  ‘I’ve kept to the regime, your regime, without results.’

  ‘Yet,’ said Aldiss, checking the clock on the wall. ‘As a scientist you were never scrupulous, were you? When you say you’re following the regime, why do I doubt you? The bath, for example?’

  Brooke shrugged. ‘It was late. I lit a fire in the bedroom. It was warm.’

  Aldiss shook his head. ‘Yes. It was. But the idea is that you are. A bath alters your body temperature and – it is thought – that triggers the release of certain hormones, and precipitates a descent, as it were, into a sleep-like state. Patience, Brooke.’ Another look at the time. ‘I must get ready.’

  Brooke went to a bench where Aldiss displayed the latest issues of scientific magazines for his students. Brooke may have abandoned his formal studies but he liked to keep up with the latest developments in the natural sciences. Above the bench was a noticeboard and his eye went immediately to one headlined:

  VISIT OF PROF. JOHN ARKWRIGHT,

  KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

  THE INTERIOR OF NYASALAND

  It was not the subject of the debate that seemed to leap off the poster but the symbol at the top of the page: a capital letter G set on an image of the moon, identical to the badge he’d glimpsed on the lapel of the factory manager at Newton’s, Rafe Forbes.

  ‘What does this mean?’ he asked, pointing at the symbol, as Aldiss put on a coat.

  ‘The Galton Society,’ Aldiss said. ‘Been going for years. Back before our time, Brooke. Francis Galton – the statistician, geographer, polymath. Moribund now, I suspect. Galton’s reputation isn’t what was.’

  ‘Could you ask around, see what they’re up to?’

  ‘I
could. I will. It sounds like they’re up to listening to thrilling tales of Empire. It’ll be a bunch of old buffers. I’ll report back,’ he said, executing a lazy salute. ‘Now, ready?’

  He moved along the north-facing wall of the laboratory, throwing open the windows. The mechanical action of the hinges created a small wind which blew bone-dry snowflakes into the room. The somnambulant hamsters began to stir under their solar lights.

  ‘Genetics too, of course,’ he added, apparently prepared to chat while making initial notes. Brooke saw that each hamster was marked with a small label attached to a foot, like a consignment of evacuees from the East End. ‘Remember Bateson at Trinity?’

  Brooke could hardly forget. William Bateson had been one of the grand old men of science in their student days.

  ‘He coined the word “genetics”, Brooke. He relied on Galton to some extent. And there’s a thought. Perhaps your mistimed circadian clock is nothing to do with your time in the desert. Maybe you inherited the disability, if disability it is. And now, I must work, and shut up.’

  He sat on a high stool, his breath clear in the air, annotating a graph paper chart with an arcane code, recording the increasingly rapid movements of the once sleepy guinea pigs.

  Brooke stood, stunned by the idea. His father, a professor of medicine, had certainly been a nighthawk himself. After the death of Brooke’s mother, the old man had been a fleeting and distant figure, leaving his son to his schoolwork and to wander the city, under the loose administrations of a series of nannies. When his father did come home he’d retreated to his personal laboratory in the basement of the house. Tired, but often elated, he’d appear at breakfast to drink tea.

  The idea that his insomnia was somehow a family gift made Brooke feel strangely elated too.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN