That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  SOLID GEOMETRY

  Ian McEwan

  Ian McEwan (b.1948) is the highly acclaimed author of Black Dogs, Enduring Love, the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam, Atonement, On Chesil Beach, Solar and Sweet Tooth. McEwan has not written a short story since his second collection in 1978, saying once, “They were a kind of laboratory for me, they allowed me to try out different things, to discover myself as a writer.” Even as experiments, they showed McEwan’s precision and craft as a writer from a very early stage.

  In Melton Mowbray in 1875 at an auction of articles of ‘curiosity and worth’, my great-grandfather, in the company of M his friend, bid for the penis of Captain Nicholls who died in Horsemonger jail in 1873. It was bottled in a glass twelve inches long, and, noted my great-grandfather in his diary that night, ‘in a beautiful state of preservation’. Also for auction was ‘the unnamed portion of the late Lady Barrymore. It went to Sam Israels for fifty guineas.’ My great-grandfather was keen on the idea of having the two items as a pair, and M dissuaded him. This illustrates perfectly their friendship. My great-grandfather the excitable theorist, M the man of action who knew when to bid at auctions. My great-grandfather lived for sixty-nine years. For forty-five of them, at the end of every day, he sat down before going to bed and wrote his thoughts in a diary. These diaries are on my table now, forty-five volumes bound in calf leather, and to the left sits Capt. Nicholls in the glass jar. My great-grandfather lived on the income derived from the patent of an invention of his father, a handy fastener used by corset-makers right up till the outbreak of the First World War. My great-grandfather liked gossip, numbers and theories. He also liked tobacco, good port, jugged hare and, very occasionally, opium. He liked to think of himself as a mathematician, though he never had a job, and never published a book. Nor did he ever travel or get his name in The Times, even when he died. In 1869 he married Alice, only daughter of the Rev. Toby Shadwell, co-author of a not highly regarded book on English wild flowers. I believe my great-grandfather to have been a very fine diarist, and when I have finished editing the diaries and they are published I am certain he will receive the recognition due to him. When my work is over I will take a long holiday, travel somewhere cold and clean and treeless, Iceland or the Russian Steppes. I used to think that at the end of it all I would try, if it was possible, to divorce my wife Maisie, but now there is no need at all.

  Often Maisie would shout in her sleep and I would have to wake her.

  ‘Put your arm around me,’ she would say. ‘It was a horrible dream. I had it once before. I was in a plane flying over a desert. But it wasn’t really a desert. I took the plane lower and I could see there were thousands of babies heaped up, stretching away over the horizon, all of them naked and climbing over each another. I was running out of fuel and I had to land the plane. I tried to find a space, I flew on and kept looking for a space…’

  ‘Go to sleep now,’ I said through a yawn. ‘It was only a dream.’

  ‘No,’ she cried. ‘I mustn’t go to sleep, not just yet.’

  ‘Well, I have to sleep now,’ I told her. ‘I have to be up early in the morning.’

  She shook my shoulder. ‘Please don’t go to sleep yet, don’t leave me here.’

  ‘I’m in the same bed,’ I said. ‘I won’t leave you.’

  ‘It makes no difference, don’t leave me awake…’ But my eyes were already closing.

  Lately I have taken up my great-grandfather’s habit. Before going to bed I sit down for half an hour and think over the day. I have no mathematical whimsies or sexual theories to note down. Mostly I write out what Maisie has said to me and what I have said to Maisie. Sometimes, for complete privacy, I lock myself in the bathroom, sit on the toilet seat and balance the writing-pad on my knees. Apart from me there is occasionally a spider or two in the bathroom. They climb up the waste pipe and crouch perfectly still on the glaring white enamel. They must wonder where they have come to. After hours of crouching they turn back, puzzled, or perhaps disappointed they could not learn more. As far as I can tell, my great-grandfather made only one reference to spiders. On May 8th, 1906, he wrote, ‘Bismarck is a spider.’

  In the afternoons Maisie used to bring me tea and tell me her nightmares. Usually I was going through old newspapers, compiling indexes, cataloguing items, putting down this volume, picking up another. Maisie said she was in a bad way. Recently she had been sitting around the house all day glancing at books on psychology and the occult, and almost every night she had bad dreams. Since the time we exchanged physical blows, lying in wait to hit each other with the same shoe outside the bathroom, I had had little sympathy for her. Part of her problem was jealousy. She was very jealous… of my great-grandfather’s forty-five volume diary, and of my purpose and energy in editing it. She was doing nothing. I was putting down one volume and picking up another when Maisie came in with the tea.

  ‘Can I tell you my dream?’ she asked. ‘I was flying this plane over a kind of desert…’

  ‘Tell me later, Maisie,’ I said. ‘I’m in the middle of something here.’ After she had gone I stared at the wall in front of my desk and thought about M, who came to talk and dine with my great-grandfather regularly over a period of fifteen years up until his sudden and unexplained departure one evening in 1898. M, whoever he might have been, was something of an academic, as well as a man of action. For example, on the evening of August 9th, 1870, the two of them are talking about positions for lovemaking and M tells my great-grandfather that copulation a posteriori is the most natural way owing to the position of the clitoris and because other anthropoids favour this method. My great-grandfather, who copulated about half-a-dozen times in his entire life, and that with Alice during the first year of their marriage, wondered out loud what the Church’s view was and straight away M is able to tell him that the seventh-century theologian Theodore considered copulation a posteriori a sin ranking with masturbation and therefore worthy of forty penances. Later in the same evening my great-grandfather produced mathematical evidence that the number of positions cannot exceed the prime number seventeen. M scoffed at this and told him he had seen a collection of drawings by Romano, a pupil of Raphael’s, in which twenty-four positions were shown. And, he said, he had heard of Mr F. K. Forberg who had accounted for ninety. By the time I remembered the tea Maisie had left by my elbow it was cold.

  An important stage in the deterioration of our marriage was reached as follows. I was sitting in the bathroom one evening writing out a conversation Maisie and I had had about the Tarot pack when suddenly she was outside, rapping on the door and rattling the door-handle.

  ‘Open the door,’ she called out. ‘I want to come in.’

  I said to her, ‘You’ll have to wait a few minutes more. I’ve almost finished.’

  ‘Let me in now,’ she shouted. ‘You’re not using the toilet.’

  ‘Wait,’ I replied, and wrote another line or two. Now Maisie was kicking the door.

  ‘My period has started and I need to get something.’ I ignored her yells and finished my piece, which I considered to be particularly important. If I left it till later certain details would be lost. There was no sound from Maisie now and I assumed she was in the bedroom. But when I opened the door she was standing right in my way with a shoe in her hand. She brought the heel of it sharply down on my head, and I only had time to move slightly to one side. The heel caught the top of my ear and cut it badly.

  ‘There,’ said Maisie, stepping round me to get to the bathroom, ‘now we are both bleeding,’ and she banged the door shut. I picked up the shoe and stood quietly and patiently outside the bathroom holding a handkerchief to my bleeding ear. Maisie was in the bathroom about ten minutes and as she came out I caught her neatly and squarely on the top of her head. I did not give her time to move. She stood perfectly still for a moment looking straight into my eyes.

  ‘You worm,’ she breathed, and went down to the kitchen to nurse her head out of my sight.

  During supper yesterday Mai
sie claimed that a man locked in a cell with only the Tarot cards would have access to all knowledge. She had been doing a reading that afternoon and the cards were still spread about the floor.

  ‘Could he work out the street plan of Valparaiso from the cards?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re being stupid,’ she replied.

  ‘Could it tell him the best way to start a laundry business, the best way to make an omelette or a kidney machine?’

  ‘You mind is so narrow,’ she complained. ‘You’re so narrow, so predictable.’

  ‘Could he,’ I insisted, ‘tell me who M is, or why…’

  ‘Those things don’t matter,’ she cried. ‘They’re not necessary.’

  ‘They are still knowledge. Could he find them out?’

  She hesitated. ‘Yes, he could.’

  I smiled, and said nothing.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she said. I shrugged, and she began to get angry. She wanted to be disproved. ‘Why did you ask all those pointless questions?’

  I shrugged again. ‘I just wanted to know if you really meant everything.’

  Maisie banged the table and screamed, ‘Damn you! Why are you always trying me out? Why don’t you say something real?’ And with that we both recognized we had reached the point where all our discussions led and we became bitterly silent.

  Work on the diaries cannot proceed until I have cleared up the mystery surrounding M. After coming to dinner on and off for fifteen years and supplying my great-grandfather with a mass of material for his theories, M simply disappears from the pages of the diary. On Tuesday, December 6th, my great-grandfather invited M to dine on the following Saturday, and although M came, my great-grandfather in the entry for that day simply writes, ‘M to dinner.’ On any other day the conversation at these meals is recorded at great length. M had been to dinner on Monday, December 5th, and the conversation had been about geometry, and the entries for the rest of that week are entirely given over to the same subject. There is absolutely no hint of antagonism. Besides, my great-grandfather needed M. M provided his material, M knew what was going on, he was familiar with London and he had been on the Continent a number of times. He knew all about socialism and Darwin, he had an acquaintance in the free love movement, a friend of James Hinton. M was in the world in a way which my great-grandfather, who left Melton Mowbray only once in his lifetime, to visit Nottingham, was not. Even as a young man my great-grandfather preferred to theorize by the fireside; all he needed were the materials M supplied. For example, one evening in June 1884 M, who was just back from London, gave my great-grandfather an account of how the streets of the town were fouled and clogged by horse-dung. Now in that same week my great-grandfather had been reading the essay by Malthus called ‘On the Principle of Population’. That night he made an excited entry in the diary about a pamphlet that he wanted to write and have published. It was to be called ‘De Stercore Equorum’. The pamphlet was never published and probably never written, but there are detailed notes in the diary entries for the two weeks following that evening. In ‘De Stercore Equorum’ (‘Concerning Horseshit’) he assumes geometric growth in the horse population, and working from detailed street plans he predicted that the metropolis would be impassable by 1935. By impassable he took to mean an average thickness of one foot (compressed) in every major street. He described involved experiments outside his own stables to determine the compressibility of horse dung, which he managed to express mathematically. It was all pure theory, of course. His results rested on the assumption that no dung would be shovelled aside in the fifty years to come. Very likely it was M who talked my great-grandfather out of the project.

  One morning, after a long dark night of Maisie’s nightmares, we were lying side by side in bed and I said, ‘What is it you really want? Why don’t you go back to your job? These long walks, all this analysis, sitting around the house, lying in bed all morning, the Tarot pack, the nightmares… what is it you want?’

  And she said, ‘I want to get my head straight,’ which she had said many times before.

  I said, ‘Your head, your mind, it’s not like a hotel kitchen, you know, you can’t throw stuff out like old tin cans. It’s more like a river than a place, moving and changing all the time. You can’t make rivers flow straight.’

  ‘Don’t go through all that again,’ she said. ‘I’m not trying to make rivers flow straight, I’m trying to get my head straight.’

  ‘You’ve got to do something,’ I told her. ‘You can’t do nothing. Why not go back to your job? You didn’t have nightmares when you were working. You were never so unhappy when you were working.’

  ‘I’ve got to stand back from all that,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure what any of it means.’

  ‘Fashion,’ I said, ‘It’s all fashion. Fashionable metaphors, fashionable reading, fashionable malaise. What do you care about Jung for example? You’ve read twelve pages in a month.’

  ‘Don’t go on,’ she pleaded, ‘you know it leads nowhere.’

  But I went on.

  ‘You’ve never been anywhere,’ I told her, ‘you’ve never done anything. You’re a nice girl without even the blessing of an unhappy childhood. Your sentimental Buddhism, this junk-shop mysticism, joss-stick therapy, magazine astrology… none of it is yours, you’ve worked none of it out for yourself. You fell into it, you fell into a swamp of respectable intuitions. You haven’t the originality or passion to intuit anything yourself beyond your own unhappiness. Why are you filling your mind with other people’s mystic banalities and giving yourself nightmares?’ I got out of bed, opened the curtains and began to get dressed.

  ‘You talk like this was a fiction seminar,’ Maisie said. ‘Why are you trying to make things worse for me?’ Self-pity began to well up from inside her, but she fought it down. ‘When you are talking,’ she went on, ‘I can feel myself, you know, being screwed up like a piece of paper.’

  ‘Perhaps we are in a fiction seminar,’ I said grimly. Maisie sat up in bed staring at her lap. Suddenly her tone changed. She patted the pillow beside her and said softly,

  ‘Come over here. Come and sit here. I want to touch you, I want you to touch me…’ But I was sighing, and already on my way to the kitchen.

  In the kitchen I made myself some coffee and took it through to my study. It had occurred to me in my night of broken sleep that a possible clue to the disappearance of M might be found in the pages of geometry. I had always skipped through them before because mathematics does not interest me. On the Monday, December 5th, 1898, M and my great-grandfather discussed the vescia piscis, which apparently is the subject of Euclid’s first proposition and a profound influence on the ground plans of many ancient religious buildings. I read through the account of the conversation carefully, trying to understand as best I could the geometry of it. Then, turning the page, I found a lengthy anecdote which M told my great-grandfather that same evening when the coffee had been brought in and the cigars were lit. Just as I was beginning to read Maisie came in.

  ‘And what about you,’ she said, as if there had not been an hour break in our exchange, ‘all you have is books. Crawling over the past like a fly on a turd.’

  I was angry, of course, but I smiled and said cheerfully, ‘Crawling? Well at least I’m moving.’

  ‘You don’t speak to me any more,’ she said, ‘you play me like a pinball machine, for points.’

  ‘Good morning, Hamlet,’ I replied and sat in my chair waiting patiently for what she had to say next. But she did not speak, she left, closing the study door softly behind her.

  ‘In September 1870,’ M began to tell my great-grandfather,

  I came into the possession of certain documents which not only invalidate everything fundamental to our science of solid geometry but also undermine the whole canon of our physical laws and force one to redefine one’s place in Nature’s scheme. These papers outweigh in importance the combined work of Marx and Darwin. They were entrusted to me by a young American mathematician, and they are the
work of David Hunter, a mathematician too and a Scotsman. The American’s name was Goodman. I had corresponded with his father over a number of years in connection with his work on the cyclical theory of menstruation which, incredibly enough, is still widely discredited in this country. I met the young Goodman in Vienna where, along with Hunter and mathematicians from a dozen countries, he had been attending an international conference on mathematics. Goodman was pale and greatly disturbed when I met him, and planned to return to America the following day even though the conference was not yet half complete. He gave the papers into my care with the instructions that I was to deliver them to David Hunter if I was ever to learn of his whereabouts. And then, only after much persuasion and insistence on my part, he told me what he had witnessed on the third day of the conference. The conference met every morning at nine thirty when a paper was read and a general discussion ensued. At eleven o’clock refreshments were brought in and many of the mathematicians would get up from the long, highly polished table round which they were all gathered and stroll about the large, elegant room and engage in informal discussions with their colleagues. Now, the conference lasted two weeks, and by a long-standing arrangement the most eminent of the mathematicians read their papers first, followed by the slightly less eminent, and so on, in a descending hierarchy throughout the two weeks, which caused, as it is wont to do among highly intelligent men, occasional but intense jealousies. Hunter, though a brilliant mathematician, was young and virtually unknown outside his university, which was Edinburgh. He had applied to deliver what he described as a very important paper on solid geometry, and since he was of little account in this pantheon he was assigned to read to the conference on the last day but one, by which time many of the most important figures would have returned to their respective countries. And so on the third morning, as the servants were bringing in the refreshments, Hunter stood up and suddenly addressed his colleagues just as they were rising from their seats. He was a large, shaggy man and, though young, he had about him a certain presence which reduced the hum of conversation to a complete silence.