Turbulence

by Giles Foden

  As I considered this odd idea, his wife brought through the main course, which was roast chicken. Grant began chattering to her again. I stared for a second at the yellow bird, which sat on a platter in a pool of gravy, before turning back to Ryman. ‘Do you regret not taking your meteorological studies further?’

  ‘I continue to dabble. I recently worked out how to detect the distance of thunderstorms from the number of clicks their electromagnetism makes on a telephone line. Do you mind carving? It upsets me.’

  Taking the carving knife and fork from him, I also decided to take the bull by the horns, or grasp the nettle, or whatever figure of speech is appropriate for a stubborn meteorologist. I stood up, ostensibly to perform my job of dissection, but also to ask him the question outright.

  ‘The thing I have been wondering about is – how can you apply the Ryman number to adjacent zones with different background means … how do you connect it all up?’ I wonder now if this question was what gave the game away.

  To my surprise, he stood up from the table himself and walked to the window. From the way his shoulders hunched he seemed to be suppressing a burp. Or even laughter. Then he said, with his back to me, ‘The personal attribution is embarrassing. Others named it.’

  I did not feel this was a proper answer to my question, so said nothing, hoping he would continue. But Ryman did not speak, instead staring out into the garden, up into Mackellar’s field beyond. As I continued to carve, laying successive slices of the feathery white meat on the side of the platter, Gill Ryman carried in steaming dishes of vegetables. She set them either side of Grant, who, on seeing the curls of steam that came out of holes in the lids, exclaimed – in the tone of one declaiming a biblical quotation – ‘The tails of two smoking firebrands!’

  Coming back to the table as I passed out the chicken-loaded plates, Ryman produced a fountain pen and notepad from his jacket pocket. He began sketching and jotting down figures. Standing up as I was, I could clearly see that the designs and numbers were of a meteorological nature. I was confused. I felt as if he were toying with me.

  I sat down, feeling deflated. I decided to press on by indirect routes again. ‘Do you not feel,’ I asked him as he wrote, ‘that there is some mismatch between the precision of mathematics and the inexactness of psychology and social science?’

  Ryman looked up from his notes with an irritated expression, as if I had no right, at his own dinner table, to disturb him from his calculations. ‘I am aware of the difficulties you describe,’ he replied, directing his remarks to me with his pen as his wife served out vegetables.

  ‘But I believe they can be overcome. Mathematical expressions may be applied usefully to all sorts of activities and study. Translating one’s verbal statements into formulae compels one to scrutinise the ideas expressed therein. And the possession of those formulae makes it easier to deduce the consequences of one’s original statement.’

  I must confess I had to stifle a laugh at the highly formal manner in which Ryman expressed himself. ‘When did you first begin to apply mathematics to this kind of material?’ I asked the Prophet, trying in my tone not to reveal anything of my true intentions.

  He smiled – still holding the pen poised, like someone taking the temperature of the air but with a medical thermometer. ‘A long time ago. As a young man I had to find out for the Scottish Peat Company how channels in peat bogs should be cut, in order to remove the right amount of water. I realised that a broad-brush approach must be found, one that converted the exactness of differential equations into something more approximate.’

  I knew about this part of Ryman’s work. ‘You relate changes in the y axis to the small distances over which they occurred along x.’ After pouring on some gravy, I began cutting up my own chicken and eating.

  Far from becoming suspicious, he seemed grateful that I was familiar with at least one area of his studies. ‘That’s right. And that became a way for me, in many spheres, for solving practical problems that do not lend themselves to smooth curves and continuous functions. But this kind of thinking has been at the heart of my weather work, too. For example, I ask you the question: does the wind have a velocity?’

  It was a subtle question. It depended which part of the wind you were talking about; yet the wind was one thing, absolutely. Heaven’s breath, but discontinuous as we humans experience it. ‘Not an easy question to answer,’ was all I said at first, while continuing to ponder the rich array of possibilities.

  As I thought, I looked out of the window at the ridge above the cot-house, where the beech trees stood, dwarfed by the massed dark green ranks of the firs of the forestry timber plantation higher up. There was something about the sky above the trees that threatened new weather.

  ‘A line squall coming,’ said Ryman, as if reading my thoughts. ‘One hour.’ He put back the notebook and pen in his pocket. Mrs Ryman and Grant were continuing to talk about religion.

  ‘The wind’s velocity …’ I mused, crunching on a roast potato as I returned to his question. ‘I suppose it all depends on what you measure – where and when you start, where and when you finish. The process of measurement must have a beginning and end. The establishment of those points has an effect on the outcome.’

  He seemed satisfied by my answer. ‘That’s one way of putting it. The wind’s velocity is not continuous, even if it might seem so as you stand at the end of a street and a gale howls past you. In fact the various parcels of air are being blown hither and thither. The function is jagged. So at the molecular level, we cannot say the wind has a velocity, even though we regularly measure wind speed with our instruments.’

  As he spoke, he was cutting up his own chicken into equal-sized pieces. He then bisected each roast potato and severed his floret of cauliflower down the middle. It had a look of someone’s brain.

  ‘I wonder,’ I asked, ‘what on earth made you leave Cambridge? I mean, the space in which to think, the facilities …’

  ‘Too many people – I like to work alone, following little-used tracks, testing out my own theories with small-scale practical experiments. Take the peat. I could only satisfactorily determine its porosity as it lay in the bog, using peat’s own original structure.’ He lifted up his water glass. ‘So I made an apparatus. A cup of peat … I carefully cut it out of the sod with a narrow-bladed knife, then I put water inside and noted the rate at which it ran through.’

  Grant’s voice rose at the other end of the table. He was still explaining something about evil and the war to Mrs Ryman, poor woman. ‘God, in himself, does not cause wars. He takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living. It is the devil’s envy which brings death into the world, as those who follow him will discover.’

  Silence fell on the table. Out of the window through which Ryman had been staring, the trees looked black. They moved with the clouds that hurried by beyond them. Inside the room, the minister’s rheumy gaze settled on Ryman, and the two men looked at each other for a moment.

  It seemed the duel of views was set to continue, and this time the professor took up the challenge in good heart. ‘I think I have shown, Minister, that religion itself is the worst cause of war. Followed by the armaments industry.’

  ‘I thought you were a Quaker!’ said Grant in a tone of hurt exasperation.

  Ryman smiled in response. ‘I am, but a biological one. I think God is the accusative of the verb to worship – the addressee of a biologically necessary process.’ A gleam came into his eyes. ‘So don’t say, “Lift up your hearts!” Say, “Reorganise your hypothalami!” Now, if you’ll excuse me I must go to the loo.’

  We sat in silence for a few seconds before Grant spoke. ‘Given he has such opinions, it is strange the professor comes to church at all, Mrs Ryman.’

  The colour rose in her cheeks. ‘My husband is rather outspoken. I apologise. It’s hard to explain. I am a Quaker, he is a scientist. He shares with me and all true Christians a yearning towards something larger and better than ourselves.’

&
nbsp; I was amused at this outbreak of piety but, watching her speak, something else fizzed and sparkled through my brain – or through that still deeper place where emotions, thoughts and feelings join in a single experience. It was a perception that there was something beautiful about Gill Ryman. It had to do with the line of her jaw as she was speaking, the incline of her head, the way her lips parted over white teeth as the words came out.

  As I was entertaining these speculations, Ryman returned, which provided the opportunity for Grant to resume battle. ‘So how would you define faith?’ he asked bluntly, as the professor sat down.

  ‘Believing in a vacuum,’ Ryman replied, just as bluntly. ‘Ignoring the evidence. Waiting till enough people develop the same conviction.’

  ‘There is no need for an argument,’ I interjected. ‘I am sure, Professor, that the minister does not want to be like those Victorian bishops who condemned Darwinism any more than you would want to exclude all spirituality from human affairs. I’d like to ask some questions about your work.’

  Ryman took off his spectacles. ‘I am sure you would,’ he said. ‘But now is not the time.’

  I looked at Gill Ryman and she looked down, plucking three times at her napkin. ‘I should fetch the pudding,’ she said, standing up to go to the kitchen.

  I also rose. ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Don’t flush,’ called Ryman to my back. ‘We don’t flush unless it’s visually necessary!’

  Passing a lamp and table in the hall, I climbed the stairs to the toilet. Below, I could hear Gill moving pots in the kitchen and Ryman and Grant resuming their argument. It didn’t, in my opinion, seem to bring either of them closer to what they desired, which I suppose was scientific truth on the one hand and divine revelation on the other. I found the ding-dong faintly exhausting – but where would mankind be without disagreement? Without that grand family row between organisms and then species and then inherited human traits (harmful or helpful as we see them in retrospect), without that complex of conflicts known as natural selection, we’d have remained a lump of mucus in a prehistoric fjord – invertebrate, hardly possessing cells, oozing silent juices instead of language.

  I pushed open the door to the lavatory.

  12

  Ryman’s urine was still in the bowl. It was the colour of pale wheat. The whole room was filled with the savoury scent of it. The toilet was of the German or Danish type used for stool-gazing. I mixed my water with his and flushed the chain, watching the eddies evolve.

  Hearing a shout from downstairs, I cursed softly as I stepped out onto the landing. I’d forgotten not to flush. There was something automatic about the way one’s hand went to the handle.

  The door to Ryman’s study was ajar, and I could not resist the temptation to step inside. The walls of the room, which was fairly large, were lined with labelled box files. I baulked at the idea of rifling through his papers. For one thing, there were far too many of them. Those on the desk, I could see at once, were weather charts and tables of algorithms.

  So he hadn’t really stopped meteorology completely; Sir Peter was right to think he was continuing his programme.

  I was acutely conscious of my hosts downstairs, just floorboards and a ceiling away. But I could not resist the safe, its door inexplicably open. Inside were two book-sized typescripts. I flicked through them, hoping to find any mention of the Ryman number. But they were both to do with his peace studies. One was entitled Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes of War; the other was the Statistics of Deadly Quarrels which he had mentioned.

  I looked at the books on his shelves: Batchelor, Prandtl, Napier Shaw, everything you’d expect in a meteorologist’s library. There was also a small open cupboard with pieces of string hung across, on which were suspended a number of pairs of spectacles. They were all identical to the ones he was wearing. On the cupboard frame were some faded labels – 20, 30, 50, 100 cm – showing the working distance for which each pair of spectacles had been designed. I chuckled at all this. Was there no area of his life to which Ryman did not apply his zeal for classification?

  On a small oak table to the side of the writing desk stood some scientific instruments, including a brass microscope and a system of rotating pivoted rods. I spun the weighted rods. Their purpose seemed to be the demonstration of the conservation of angular momentum. Very important thing, which one sees in skaters and dancers. But its most important proof is astronomical. The way the planets wheel round, waiting to come into alignment.

  Fretting that I would be missed downstairs, I quickly scanned the white labels of the box files for anything relating to the Ryman number.

  Solving Boundary Problems by Surface Integration.

  Atmospheric Stirring.

  Wind above the Night-Calm at Benson.

  Quantitative Estimates of Sensory Events.

  All these labels were written out in Ryman’s neat hand.

  Then I saw it. Between The Deferred Approach to the Limit and Chaos, International and Inter-molecular was a box marked simply Number.

  Was this what Sir Peter was looking for?

  I opened the box to discover not the sheaf of papers I was hoping for, but eight brass shell cases. They were arranged in a sequence of ascending size, in a cardboard mould stuck with green baize. Just as with the spectacles, they were numbered, 1 to 8. Their length and girth was also recorded.

  ‘Would you kindly like to tell me what you are doing?’ said a voice behind me. I turned to see Mrs Ryman, oddly round in profile as she regarded me over one shoulder. She had clearly been walking past and stopped in surprise, having seen me.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said, trying to put back the box and catching it on the bottom of the shelf. It fell open, scattering its contents, each shell case rolling in a different direction. I turned again to where Mrs Ryman stood watching me, then went down on my knees to pick them up. They seemed to rattle a bit.

  She had entered the room, calmly watching my frantic search. Eventually I stood up, with three of the larger cases tucked under my left arm, a medium-sized one in my right hand.

  I tried to speak, but could think of nothing appropriate to say in the circumstances.

  ‘What on earth are you doing with those?’ she asked, staring at the objects. It was as if she had never seen them before.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I finally gasped. ‘I just stepped in here … I’m fascinated by your husband’s work. The number–’

  ‘Number?’

  ‘I mean the equations,’ I struggled. ‘I wanted to see some. The box said number.’

  ‘The box said number?’ Slowly, incredulously, as if there were gaps between them, she repeated my words.

  I took a step back. Flailing a hand behind me, searching for the box file, I knocked over the display of pivoted rods. They fell to the floor with a clatter, rolling about among the remainder of the shell cases.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said again.

  ‘Are you unwell?’ asked Mrs Ryman. She knelt down and picked up the fallen box file. ‘Give me those, you clot,’ she said. One by one, I handed her the shell cases. ‘Now please go downstairs,’ she said, starting to put them back into the box.

  It was excruciating. Again I tried to find words to explain, but in the end I left her crouched over the box, arranging the shell cases by their size.

  13

  Ryman seemed oblivious to my absence. ‘That accommodation between religion and science you spoke about earlier,’ he said as I sat down, red-faced and sweating. ‘We might have seen a way forward to it. You could say faith is action on a hypothesis, with a view to its verification.’

  I wondered how I would ever face his wife again. Should I simply make my excuses and leave right now? I felt an overwhelming need for a cigarette, but we still had to finish the meal.

  The main-course plates had been cleared away. ‘It’s just a variant on Pascal’s wager,’ Grant said dismissively. ‘Distinctly unchristian, if you ask me. It makes one doubt the keystone of one’s belief. It
’s not a definition of faith that I can accept.’

  The two adversaries seemed to have made an accommodation of their own. ‘Interesting man, Pascal,’ said Ryman. ‘Went looking for God and found statistics. And the variation of pressure with height.’

  At that point Gill returned, carrying some bowls and the pudding, which was suet with custard. I fancied she gave me a slight nod, but could not be certain: my eyes were fixed very firmly on the shiny brown table, which showed the face of an idiot. Simply to give my hands something to do, I picked up my spoon and began eating the sticky mass of suet.

  ‘Maybe he did,’ Grant was saying of Pascal. ‘But it’s still not a true definition of faith.’

  ‘I don’t mind what definition you use,’ said Ryman. ‘So long as we understand each other. That means my not committing theological solecisms and you having a proper respect for the fundamental concepts of science – a respect which, if I may say so, you did not exercise in church this morning.’

  Maybe I was wrong about a mellowing between them because, on hearing this, Grant threw down his napkin and abruptly left the room. I thought he had gone for good, but there was a rattle of the cistern upstairs.

  ‘Don’t flush!’ roared Ryman, cupping his hands towards the stairs.

  ‘When he comes back, apologise!’ his wife hissed to him.

  Ryman shrugged. I sat between them in embarrassed silence – doubly embarrassed silence – wanting that cigarette even more.

  Grant returned, stern-browed, but before he could get a word in, Ryman started berating him. ‘The fact is, I didn’t think much of your sermon this morning. If you want to repeat it next year, I can lend you some good books for beginners in science.’