by Giles Foden
The minister looked at Ryman in astonishment.
‘By the way, I believe you have just had cause to use our lavatory,’ continued the professor. ‘You flushed it. That is permissible, as I have already explained numerous times, only if the deposit is a solid one. Otherwise, in this household we flush once daily.’
‘Wallace!’ cried Gill.
It was too late. Pushing back his chair, Grant left the table again. This time he headed for the hall door, which he closed behind him quietly as if to emphasise his host’s lack of grace.
As Gill gave chase, Ryman let out an explosion of breath. ‘The man’s a fool,’ he explained, turning to me as if seeking an ally. ‘In church this morning he spoke of “the centrifugal force which drives everything inward to our hearts”. Absolute poppycock. At least you understand.’
It wasn’t long before Gill returned, slightly out of breath. ‘He’s gone,’ she said. ‘He’s sure not to come back now.’ She stamped her heel in frustration. ‘Why do you always do this?’ She gave me a sad smile, as if imploring me to speak and somehow rescue the situation. But I didn’t know what to say. All I could think about was our secret – if it was to be a secret.
Ryman was determined to justify himself. ‘My dear, in one hundred years’ time the world will be facing a catastrophic water shortage. If all the civilised world was over the coming century not to flush its lavatories, not to water its lawns, it would go a little way to alleviating the problem. Of course, there are many more effective scientific processes …’
‘Wallace, I do not want to hear about a scientific process … You made a guest leave our house.’
‘He’s an ignorant buffoon – isn’t he, Meadows?’
I squirmed in my chair as their eyes fell upon me, each expecting a different reply. ‘I must say,’ I said, ‘that his views on centrifugal forces are a little unorthodox. Still, it’s a common mistake among laymen. And the clergy, it seems.’
Neither of them seemed very impressed by my answer. ‘I’ve never been so embarrassed,’ said Gill, which was ironic considering how I was presently feeling. Soon enough Ryman himself would know of my poking about in his study, for it would be only natural for a wife to tell her husband of such an event.
In the window, the light darkened suddenly. There was a rumble of thunder, swiftly followed by a bolt of lightning, cutting across the sky like a scar.
Ryman looked at his watch. ‘One hour, near enough.’ He stood up, then cocked an eyebrow to the window. ‘That squall I referred to.’
His wife looked at me across the table. ‘Will you excuse me? I ought to do the washing-up.’
I nodded, looking back into her eyes. Now something told me she wouldn’t sneak, but you never know what goes on between a couple.
As his wife left, I joined Ryman at the window. The southwestern part of the sky was filled with dense low cloud. It was the colour of vintage champagne, yellowing the triangular green tops of the forestry plantation. Amid the cloud I could make out dark, rolling oscillations or whirls, rapidly increasing towards the north-west, and growing visibly as they moved. It was an amazing sight, since it had progression in it, framed by the window. The window’s curtailment of view gave a starting point and stopping point for what we were seeing. And what was on display there – it was nothing less than that sequence of states along the temporal and spatial axis which is at the heart of all weather. It is seldom seen so plainly.
As soon as the cloud hit the line of beech trees, streaks of rain suddenly began to fall, then stopped just as abruptly. The tops of the trees, slowing the horizontal movement of the cloud, had momentarily produced turbulence and stronger upward currents.
Ryman put it more elegantly than I ever could have done. ‘One might compare the cold air to a chisel laid flat on the table, then pushed forward to shave up the warm air in front of it, with its cutting edge. The amount of rain is of the right order for such an explanation. In any case, I’ve seen this phenomenon before.’
We returned to the table. I could hear Gill washing up. ‘Over this ridge, many times,’ her husband continued. ‘And in France once, too. In 1917, between Nancy and Belfort.’
He gave a little shudder, then handed me the sketch he had made earlier. It was a rough reproduction of the scene we had just witnessed. ‘That squall – it could be up over the top of the country along the east coast and down into the Channel by Tuesday. A real storm.’
‘But the weather in the Channel is good at the moment.’ As it happened, I had seen some charts that very week.
‘That makes no difference. Conditions can change very quickly, and this is something even meteorologists often forget. I forgot it myself in France while I was writing Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, which is why there’s a big mistake in that book.’
He paused for a moment and looked at me with searching grey eyes. ‘Now tell me, Meadows, why has the Met Office set up an observatory on my doorstep?’
I felt a surge of panic. ‘Do you know, the truth is, sir, I am not quite sure,’ I said with as much smoothness as I could muster. ‘One just goes where one is sent.’
It was a thoroughly unsatisfactory answer. Anyone with the least meteorological knowledge could see that Mackellar’s field was an inappropriate place for an observatory, however small. I wondered if he already suspected me. He must have done.
Ryman drained a glass of water which was on the table, then set it down heavily. ‘Come on, it’s stopped raining.’ He stared out of the window for a second. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
14
There was a tennis court behind the house, as well as the large vegetable garden I’d seen earlier. Ryman obviously enjoyed growing vegetables, for he insisted on showing me not just each plot but several plants individually. He then invited me to admire a still he had made that used solar energy to evaporate seawater.
We walked on, up through the wet field towards the cot-house. He asked me if I had any crackers or lizards, two older types of observation balloon used by meteorologists. I said I had, in case the more modern balloons got caught up or something went wrong with the transmission. Ryman asked me to fetch one cracker and one lizard, in order to see what the wind was doing at successive levels: when one is studying air moving across the horizontal it is convenient to define a mean wind whose velocity varies only with height.
‘For old times’ sake.’ His voice was full of wistfulness, as if, despite protestations to the contrary, he actually regretted the days when his passion was hard meteorology rather than the more nebulous if nonetheless noble science of peace.
He followed me into the cot-house and looked over the meteorological equipment, while I began inflating the balloons with some hydrogen I had made according to Gwen and Joan’s recipe. I was embarrassed by the general squalor of the place, the piled ashtrays and empty beer bottles, but Ryman was only interested in the equipment.
‘You don’t mind me looking?’ he said. I shook my head. As he poked about, I continued filling the balloons. I didn’t want to get it wrong. There had been enough embarrassment for one day.
We carried the balloons outside. They only just fitted through the door. Waving them behind us like a couple of kids, we continued walking up the slope of the field, towards the beech trees. Beyond them, at the top of the ridge, the fir plantation loured over us, its black trunks like soldiers preparing to march down and attack the intervening line of beeches.
‘I often do this walk,’ he said. ‘Gill calls it my beech tree walk.’
There was a good wind blowing in our faces by the time we reached the line of beeches – which as I say effectively divided the field from the plantation.
‘There’s a little stream and bridge in the middle,’ Ryman said. He took me into a glade in the stand of trees, and sure enough a stream ran through them, bisected by an old wooden bridge. ‘Mackellar’s father built it,’ said Ryman, as we stood on the giving planks. ‘I find it a good place to observe eddies.’
We
looked down into the running water, watching its elusive folds and detours round stones and mossy branches. A stickleback darted across. ‘Straight from God’s hand,’ said the Prophet. ‘Come on.’
Going back into the field – with some regret, for the glade in which the bridge stood seemed like a special place – I took in the view. The steel chute used to get the timber out went down the side of the field to the shore road; a hedgerow and the outflow of the stream bordered the other. Across the middle of the field was the dry-stone wall separating Mackellar’s property from Ryman’s. In one corner the black cattle had gathered: a convocation of horns. Beyond it all could be seen the bumpy green hills of the Cowal, interspersed with fragmentary glimpses of loch. It was like being on an archipelago.
With his cracker streaming out behind him, Ryman said, in a modest mumble, ‘I invented these, you know.’
He began to explain to me how he had developed the cracker, in which a small explosive charge, triggered by an altimeter, goes off to alert the observer that the balloon has reached a certain height.
It turned out he had also invented the lizard, a more basic version of the same instrument, in which the balloon’s tail is encased in a chiffon tube. This girdle forces the balloon to expand vertically – until it presses against a physical trigger and the tail is released, again as a signal.
‘Hence the name lizard, from the habit of some of these animals to drop their tails when attacked,’ said Ryman.
‘Geckoes,’ I said. I remembered them vividly from Nyasaland, sprinting up the wall after insects.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I suppose we should have called them that.’
We worked on in silence for a minute or two. The sun had come out, making the foresters’ steel chute glint. I became aware of the sound of the wind sliding between the leaves of the beeches and – a different sound – over the grass of Mackellar’s pasture. This also shone slightly, as if every blade of grass had been polished up by a diligent attendant.
‘I miss all this,’ Ryman said, as we continued preparing the balloons. ‘But my life now is concerned with the relative frequency of wars and how to prevent them.’ He laughed. ‘That is my war effort. To encourage submissiveness. Like Mr Gandhi.’
Gandhi was admirable, no doubt, but as a policy Ryman’s so-called war effort sounded too weedy for any self-respecting male to sign up to. And rather self-satisfied. But obviously I couldn’t say that to him. ‘You mean you want us to submit to Hitler?’ I asked, instead.
‘It’s nothing personal. Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin. Actually all one system. We are all part of a single self-aggravating system.’
‘I’m afraid I must disagree.’
He sighed. ‘So do most people.’
‘If it were not for our airmen, our bombers and fighters, the war effort generally, we should now be part of Hitler’s Reich.’
‘The bombers and fighters are part of the problem. If Germany had not built up its Luftwaffe in the 1930s, which it did to counterbalance our own naval power, there would not have been a war. The weapons should not have been accumulated in the first place. For a similar reason, I have a safe in my study, in which I keep my most current manuscripts to protect them from fire, but I leave the door unlocked, so if any burglars came they would not use explosives.’
‘They might still steal them,’ I said, my stomach churning as I remembered the dropped shell cases. ‘Anyway, suppose that by 1935 Britain had developed armaments on a massive scale, as we have now. If we had built up our arms then, we would have been able to hold the Germans down and get our own way all over the world.’
‘A childish ambition. Because, don’t you see, then the whole world would have allied itself against our superiority? This war just would not have happened if arms had not been assembled. It does not make any difference by whom the process is started.’
Ryman was a great mathematician, but as we stood there under those yawing, whispering beeches, with weather balloons pulling in our hands, his pacifism struck me as hopelessly naïve, if not downright irresponsible.
I tried not to lose patience. ‘If there had been no armaments, we would have gone to war with our bare fists.’
He just laughed. ‘Listen to yourself. You sound like someone in a Kipling book.’
Finding ourselves at an impasse of argument, we stood unspeaking, face to face, both listening to the wind as it passed through the trees, making them stretch out their melancholy limbs.
There was another sound – air moving over the rubber of the balloons. A whining rasp, and I could tell from his face that it had provoked thought in him as well as me.
It was Ryman who spoke first. ‘That, and it is to the point, my young friend, is the sound of friction. You know, general friction will do more against Hitler even than General Patton.’ He gave another little laugh at the joke. ‘Because along with turbulence, friction is one of the most important things in the universe. Perhaps they can be described as cousins, even brothers. Or actually the same person, appearing in different profile.’
A lone magpie, flying away from the sun, landed on the grass in front of us. I remembered suddenly how my mother on seeing one – well, she did it with the piebald crows in Africa – would immediately cross her thumbs and call out:
I cross the magpie,
The magpie crosses me,
Bad luck to the magpie,
Good luck to me.
‘Friction!’ exclaimed Ryman as the bird flew off. ‘You see, Meadows, nothing can start without something to push off from. But good comes even when there’s no positive action. Blocking, delaying, braking … these things create value just as the mixing of turbulence does, enabling the birth of new systems and the death of old ones, the transfer of energy from one place and time to another.’
‘But friction is mostly a negative force, socially speaking. It reduces efficiency.’
‘Yes, but that negativity prevents bad plans as much as good ones. That is why Hitler will eventually fail. Look, shall we fly these things or not? You’re not tight there.’
He took a piece of paper from his pocket and folded it inside the chiffon sleeve on my lizard, which had worked its way loose.
‘They never came loose on the original balloons,’ said Ryman. ‘Gill made the sleeves. We tested them in a wind tunnel on the Isle of Wight. Mr Blackford, her father, is chief engineer at the Saunders-Roe seaplane factory in Cowes. I worked there for a while with him, doing research on aeroplane wings. That was how I met Gill.’
So that was it. We released the balloons. Up they went then, cracker and lizard, red against the tall dark shapes of the beeches. Despite the wind there were no fierce vortices, and the balloons rose steadily at about 500 feet a minute, following the angles of the wind as it came in different layers over the green rooftops of the fir plantation. I remember a feeling of exhilaration watching them ascend.
I could see that Ryman was similarly enraptured. Like master and pupil, we watched until at 800 feet there was a sharp explosion – a flash in the sky. At the same time, the tail of my lizard came loose, plummeting down. The igniter from the cracker left a puff of smoke in the air. This dispersed as it fell, floating over the trees like a gauze.
Ryman and I then had a technical conversation about the implications of averaging out the different horizontal winds to produce a mean and what was really entailed, philosophically, by classing turbulence as a deviation from this already artificial measure. He said the nature of an eddy was difficult to define precisely because its identity was involved with its context; and that despite the mean’s artificiality, eddies could not be specified independently of it.
It soon became too dark to continue, so we agreed to go home. Ryman seemed pleased with the balloons and we parted on good terms. He invited me to visit again soon.
‘Maybe we might do some work together?’ I ventured, aware that I had not got very much out of him about the Ryman number.
He gave me something half between a nod and a
negative shake of the head, as if he wanted to say no but was trying to be polite.
I thought I should try to insist. ‘It would be an honour for me if it were possible. Is there a chance?’
He looked at me mistrustfully. ‘Perhaps. But as I say, I have found I do my best work alone.’
As he spoke, the heavens opened again. (What a curious saying that is! As if there were a vault above. Levers and a hinge, operated by a divine magnet …) I desperately wanted to get an undertaking from Ryman. But it was soon raining heavily. Without further ado we ran across the field for shelter in our respective houses.
As the rain battered the slate roof of the cot-house, I dried my hair and boiled the kettle for a cup of tea. Having drunk it, I lay on the bed, smoking, worrying about what I was going to do. I wondered whether I should write a letter to Sir Peter. He had already written to me asking how I was getting on. I needed to reply. The invasion was ahead. But what would I tell him? The truth was that I’d got nowhere.
My mind turned to the flimsy blue missives from my parents that used to arrive at my boarding school. The mathematical gift had showed itself relatively early, and I won a scholarship place at Douai, a Benedictine public school in Berkshire. It was a wrench leaving Nyasaland and I looked forward to my holidays like nothing else.
My early schooldays were plagued by bedwetting and sleepwalking. My fellow pupils use to tease me, imitating my sleep walking during the day. I apparently walked completely erect, but head down, with my chin on my chest. Once, on the eve of a test of French verbs, I climbed out of bed and wandered downstairs in a trance and started banging about in the kitchen, opening cupboards and throwing aside the battered tin pans in which we were served rice pudding. On being discovered by a member of staff and asked what I was doing, I told them I was ‘looking for je suis’.
I wasn’t much good at French, but in sciences I was a bit of a phenomenon at school. I had less difficulty with German and Latin, and this was a good thing because in those days you had to pass a Latin examination to get into Cambridge, and many of the most important scientific papers of the time were in German.