Charles found himself thinking again about Jenny. It wasn’t a good idea if she came to see him in Cambridge too often. He didn’t like it when the various compartments of his life began to overlap and interfere with each other.
Economic prospects remain good. Charles glanced at the photographs in the newspaper of new factories, and new government appointees. The purpose of the newspaper was to reassure its readers that nothing was happening; that while individual events could be interesting or even sensational, they could never threaten to bring change. The purpose of the newspaper was to pretend to be a newspaper; to present trivia or downright falsehoods in the form of stories.
Steady road to prosperity. Charles’s purpose in taking the newspaper from the rack was so as to pretend to read it; so as to be immune from conversation while he drank his tea, and thought about Jenny, and thought about Robert’s absurd anxiety. Black newsprint was already smudging his fingers.
Film Review: Harvest of Angels (Cert U). Clive Rentford stars as wartime Resistance hero Bob ‘Winner’ Winmore in this vivid account of the farmer’s son turned freedom fighter. William Dangerfield puts in a superbly menacing performance as Steuermann, and look out for Peter Ray as Moseley. Romance is provided by the ever lovely Annette Hughes as Winmore’s sweetheart Dora. Recommended.
With Jenny, King had only ever wanted sex – nothing else. And the usual pattern in an affair like this was that after a while, he would inevitably begin to get to know the woman; find out what she was like as a person. And this would dull his interest – he would find that there was nothing there which would make them be friends. Because the women whom King wanted to sleep with never seemed to be the sort of women with whom he might want to maintain a friendship. But he was beginning to find that he liked Jenny. She seemed honest, and vulnerable. And also willing to give him whatever he wanted. This frightened him. And then she had turned up on his doorstep on Friday night, with wet hair, because she had come all the way from London to type his paper. His relationship with Jenny gave him a feeling of power, and this was what was so frightening. She would never deny him anything – it was up to him to draw the line.
Radio choice: In Conversation (Home Service, Fri. 9 p.m.). The new Minister for Justice, Reginald Thornville, discusses his long career, including his role in the drafting of the Constitution in 1947. More recently he has been Chairman of the Committee for Public Rights. Among his choice of records are Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, Schubert’s Trout Quintet and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
King turned the pages as if he were paying close attention to the newspaper. He finished his tea, and went back downstairs to his office, sat at his desk and stared at the pile of blank paper which lay in front of him.
Jenny frequently asked him about his work. She said she couldn’t imagine what it must be like to do nothing but calculations all day – as if she saw him as some kind of computing machine, or perhaps a glorified accountant. When he tried to describe to her his typical day, he realized that only a comparatively small part of it involved putting pen to paper. Mostly he would be reading, or thinking, or gazing out of the window. Which sounded to Jenny like time wasting, though that wasn’t the way he liked to see it.
And then she asked him how he could be a physicist if he never did any experiments, and he reminded her that Einstein worked that way too. But still she couldn’t imagine how King could derive any pleasure from all these incomprehensible symbols and formulae he spent his time mulling over. So he told her it was all a bit like doing a jigsaw, or a crossword puzzle, where you spend so much time feeling horribly frustrated and longing desperately for the stroke of inspiration that will give you the right place for a piece, or the right word for a clue. And then you make another step forward, and for a moment you feel like a genius, until you find yourself stuck again. And so Jenny asked King if he saw the world as a great puzzle, and he said that he did, although part of the puzzle was to try and find out exactly what sort of puzzle it was.
After three quarters of an hour of calculation, King had turned a one line equation into a sum of terms which covered a page and a half. Then he started collecting coefficients, and cancelling things out, and after a while he found himself left with zero. So he stopped in disgust, walked up and down for a couple of minutes, and then had another look at the ‘Vision of the Universe’.
using expression (57), we see that souls are inherently fermionic, and so by the Pauli exclusion principle we cannot have two souls simultaneously occupying a single body. Thus, the practices of certain ‘churches’ concerning possession and the exorcism of spirits are seen to have no possible scientific basis.
Finally in this chapter, we give another proof of the existence of God. The full Lagrangian for the ideon theory is given by equation (63). This leads in fact to divergences, and for renormalisation we add a new field which couples to everything and cancels these problems. This universal field is God.
There was a knock on his door. It was Joanna; she wanted Charles to explain something he’d written in his summary.
‘What’s this word here?’ She had placed the manuscript on his desk and was leaning over him, pointing at the offending scribble. King closed the ‘Vision’ and pushed it to one side.
‘Asymptotic,’ he said.
‘You’d better spell it.’
He wrote it again for her. ‘That alright?’
‘Fine. Don’t know why you physicists always have to use such long words for everything.’
‘So that people don’t know what we’re talking about.’
‘I can believe that. Oh by the way, Charles, I sent your paper downstairs for preprinting. Should be ready by Wednesday.’
‘Thanks.’ He watched her close the door behind her. Charles, indeed! She’d almost tripped over the name as she said it, obviously so eager to be able to use it.
Now Joanna would send the three copies of the paper, with the summary, to the Journal of British Physics. Then the Journal would send one copy with the summary to the Office of Publications – a formality, although this was the government department which had the final authority on everything which was to go into print. And the Journal would send another copy to a referee, who would decide whether it was worth publishing. Such was the procedure which every paper had to go through before it could be accepted.
King was at home that evening when he got a phone call from Robert.
‘How did it go at the police station? Not too much of a grilling, I hope.’
‘Oh, no. I can’t really talk now Charles. I was wondering if you’re doing anything at the weekend; I was thinking of taking Anne out for a drive – I can get Madge to look after Duncan if his cold doesn’t clear up. You could bring Jenny.’
‘Splendid idea. Are you alright Robert? You don’t sound too well.’
‘No, I’m o.k. Charles. Bad line. I’ll come and pick you up on Saturday morning. How does eleven o’clock sound?’
‘That’s fine. I’ll call Jenny tomorrow and see if she can come up on Friday evening.’
‘Yes. And Charles … Don’t say anything to her. You know what I mean. Better go. Bye now.’
Charles knew from Robert’s voice that things hadn’t gone well. He dialled Robert’s number, but it was Anne who answered. No, Robert wasn’t there – he went out for a walk, about half an hour ago. And when King dialled Robert’s office he got no reply. Robert must have gone out to a call box for fear of tapped lines. And he had been so brief on the phone, not wanting to discuss anything. All of this alarmed King; he felt nervous and restless that night. He wanted to speak to Robert to clear it all up, but he decided that Robert must know best, and he should wait for him to call or visit. He slept little.
Next morning, Tuesday, there was another large brown envelope in King’s pigeonhole.
A Vision of the Universe: Supplement
Dear Dr. King,
I await with interest your comments on my paper, ‘A Vision of the Universe’, which you will by now have had time
to read. I enclose some further results concerning the ideon theory, including an important Conjecture which, if true, greatly simplifies the proof of Theorem 6. However, I cannot yet verify this Conjecture (although it is so plausible as to be blindingly obvious). As soon as I can, I will of course inform you of the argument. In the meantime, please consider it proved.
Dr. King, as a respected scientist I greatly value your judgement, and your assistance would be of inestimable value. Though you may be burdened already by work, I would implore you that the importance of the ideon theory for the World is such that any delay in spreading it to the widest possible audience could have very detrimental and unfortunate consequences for Mankind. Thwarted as I have been already by such cosmic bastards as Smith and Goodfellow, I now turn to you in a last desperate act of hope. Please do not betray the spirit of science in the same manner as those venomous charlatans.
Yours sincerely, Edward Warren B.Sc.
King put this fresh sheaf of nonsense on top of the previous day’s offering, then picked up the telephone and called Jenny’s work number. A frosty voice replied that Miss Lindsay was busy at the moment, and when he said that this was Dr. King speaking, and could Miss Lindsay please call him back, the frosty voice thawed a little – no doubt wondering what ailment Jenny might have, or if she might even be pregnant – and said that Doctor could be sure that the message would be passed on straight away.
Then King returned to the calculation which had defeated him yesterday. He had another idea, which had come to him while he was walking to work, and using this he soon had another page and a half of terms to simplify.
The phone rang, and he heard Joanna put Jenny through to him.
‘Charles? They said you rang.’
When he spoke to her before, he had felt inhibited by the thought that Joanna was probably listening to the conversation. But now he took a strange kind of delight in the idea. He asked Jenny if she could come up to Cambridge again on Friday, and she said she’d love to. She could stop work early, and arrive as soon as he liked. Then King thought about it; he said he didn’t know if he might want to work a bit later on Friday … He’d leave a key for her, so she could let herself in whenever she arrived – it would be under the mat at the front door. Then on Saturday they’d go out with Robert and his wife.
‘You mean the awkward one?’
‘You’ll like him when you get to know him. He’s a very good friend of mine.’
‘In that case I suppose he must be alright. See you on Friday, Charles.’
King listened for the click of Joanna’s phone after Jenny hung up, but he heard nothing.
For the rest of that week, there was no word from Robert.
12
On Saturday morning, Robert arrived at precisely eleven to collect Charles and Jenny. Jenny saw from the kitchen window the white car pulling up outside, and the three figures emerging; Robert whom she had found so abrupt during their brief meeting the previous weekend, and his wife – a serious looking woman, slightly taller than her husband. And their young child, grabbing at Robert’s hand.
When Jenny had arrived last night from London she found that Charles was still out. The key was under the mat as promised, and she had let herself in. It was cold and dark inside. Switching on the lights, she had seen everything again as she had remembered it. When Charles returned, he would find the flat tidied. The small bunch of flowers she had bought at the station would have sprung from the empty milk bottle which she would have rinsed out in the kitchen sink.
Jenny found it hard to believe that they – she and Charles – were really no more than two chemicals meeting in an experiment. Already she felt she knew him well enough to see how complicated he was, and she wondered if this was to do with the fact that he knew so much. Perhaps by thinking all the time about everything, you only end up confusing yourself. From the kitchen window, she watched the white Morris Commonwealth pull up in the bright morning sunshine.
She had had two hours by herself before Charles returned on Friday night. At first, she had the feeling that he would arrive at any minute; she had busied herself in the bathroom, freshening herself up. Then there was time to find somewhere to put the small bunch of flowers – no vases anywhere; on the shelves, it was mostly books. Books in at least three different languages, and even those in English had incomprehensible titles. The only ornaments were those souvenirs from foreign travel – the Russian samovar, the absurd cigarette lighter in the form of the Empire State Building. Jenny was glad that Charles didn’t smoke – so much better for the lungs. But there were no vases. She finally settled for an empty milk bottle, which she rinsed out in the kitchen sink.
By then, half an hour had passed without Charles appearing at the door. Jenny wiped the cooker, still stained from the lunch she had made last Sunday. Then tidied the rest of the kitchen, and the sitting room, and eventually the whole flat.
When she had finished, she sat down on Charles’s bed. It didn’t creak as much as her own; it was softer, seemed deeper. When she sat on it, it quivered beneath her. Lying on this bed, with Charles pushing down on top of her, she had felt herself being buried in mountains of softness.
She opened the wardrobe and looked at his clothes, his shoes. And the chest of drawers; his horrible old socks and underwear in the top drawer. Some ideas for birthday presents. The second drawer: sweaters. And in the bottom – she knew already – old papers and letters.
Now it was Saturday morning. Looking out of the kitchen window, Jenny saw the car, bright in the early sunshine, and then the three figures coming up the path and disappearing from view down below. Then the ringing of the doorbell; Charles let them in. Jenny could hear the voices of Charles and Robert, and the quiet voice of the woman. She dried her hands and went to say hello. Robert seemed a little friendlier, though still rather formal. Jenny stooped down to kiss the little boy – Duncan, only four years old. He turned and hid his face in his mother’s leg, which made everyone laugh. And his mother – who only smiled when she made a deliberate effort. Her name was Anne. But nothing about her appearance that might suggest she had been Charles’s lover.
In the car, Charles sat in the front next to Robert, while Jenny and Anne had Duncan between them in the back. The men in front were discussing the best route to the village where they would have lunch. Jenny felt the need to make conversation with the other woman.
Anne had been a teacher, then stopped to have Duncan. She hoped to go back to work eventually. Jenny found her manner cold; she told Jenny only the facts of her life, and none of the feelings.
Robert was looking at Jenny in the rear view mirror. ‘And what exactly do you do, Jenny? Charles hasn’t told us very much about you. Civil service, isn’t it?’
No, she told him, the Electricity Board.
‘And how do you like living in London?’
Well enough, she said. She thought about her tiny flat in Bayswater, with its narrow slice of kitchen, and the bedroom defined only by a curtain. They were out of the town now; all around was flat, open countryside.
Robert caught her eye again in the mirror. ‘You get away from London much?’
‘Whenever I get the chance.’
‘Nice to get away to visit friends, eh? Do you know anyone else round here?’
‘Other than Charles? No.’
Robert suddenly braked to a halt. There had been a thump at the front of the car. Jenny felt herself being thrown almost into the back of Robert’s head.
‘Damn,’ said Charles, ‘I think you hit it.’ Robert parked by the verge, and got out. Charles followed. At the side of the road further back a rabbit lay dead, its open mouth deep red with blood. Charles touched its warm body, then kicked it into the ditch. ‘Some supper for the foxes,’ he said. ‘You alright, Robert?’
When they got back into the car, Duncan was still asking what happened. Anne was telling him a bunny rabbit had run in front of them, and now it had run away home into the bushes.
‘Why did the rabb
it do that, Daddy?’
Robert started the car and set off again. ‘I don’t know son. Expect he was just crossing the road.’
From her back seat, Anne spoke quietly. ‘Perhaps you should go a little slower round here.’
They stopped later on for a walk; Robert knew a good place. It was warm for October – too warm for a coat. Anne helped Duncan out of the car, and asked Robert to fetch her camera from the glove compartment. Jenny went up to Charles and put her arm round him. He moved away, as if to admire the scenery. He began talking to Robert, and soon the two men were walking far in front, out of earshot.
‘So how did it go at the police station, Robert?’
‘They know about Flood, Charles. There’s a man there called Mays, he asked me all about Ganymede. I don’t know why he didn’t come straight out and accuse me – I think he was trying to catch me out.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘Nothing. But they know, Charles.’
‘It’s possible that they don’t regard it as sufficiently serious to take any action.’
‘Yes, it’s possible. But be very careful, Charles. You can see why I didn’t want to talk on the telephone … Ah, what have you got there, son?’ Duncan had come running up to them with a piece of leafy tree branch he had found. ‘Have you shown it to Mummy?’
Duncan said he had, and walked beside his father, clutching the end of Robert’s jacket.
Jenny and Anne were walking together some distance behind. Anne was asking her how she and Charles had met. Jenny said it was in London, but didn’t want to admit the story of the bicycle and the conversation in the street.
‘It was through a friend.’
‘Ah. Another physicist?’
‘No; you probably wouldn’t know her.’
‘A female friend, I see.’ Anne laughed. ‘How many girlfriends has he got in London?’
Jenny said nothing. Sitting on Charles’s soft bed the previous night – no sign of him coming back. The temptation to look through his things. Those things in the bottom drawer. Anne.
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