The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  A silence falls. “Excuse me,” Russell says a few seconds later, then gathers up his own coat and leaves, too.

  “Well, I guess that squares it,” Strachey says, striding up to join Hardy and Norton. “We've lost him.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I fear so. Of course, given the chance, I'll do my best to talk him out of resigning. Yet how am I to persuade him that the Society's serious and honorable with all the silly business we've had going on tonight? What a pity that Madam had to put her oar in!”

  “But Strachey,” Norton says, “mustn't Herr Witter-Gitter realize that Cecil's not the Society any more than Hardy is, or I am, or—well, any one person? If he can't see that, there's nothing to be done.”

  “Still, the current lot of undergraduates … they don't make what you'd call a lasting intellectual impression. That's why we need Wittgenstein. To raise the bar. Do you know what he told Keynes? He said that watching Taylor and the others talk philosophy was like watching young men at their toilets. Harmless but obscene.”

  “But if he resigns, won't he have to be cursed and roby-ized?”

  “Nonsense. You can't roby-ize a man like Wittgenstein. If anything, he might roby-ize us.” Strachey turns to Hardy. “It's not like the old days, is it? In the old days, we used to talk about what goodness was. Or Goldie would be on the hearthrug, disquisiting on whether we should elect God. And we voted, and I think most of us agreed—you were in the minority, of course, Hardy—that, yes, we should elect God. And now look who we've got instead of God. The squitter-squatter. Our best days are behind us, I fear.”

  Strachey appears to be correct. At the moment, the tri-testicular Taylor is fuming by the fire. Békássy and Bliss are in the window seat, petting each other's necks. Sheppard looks as if he's about to weep. Fortunately Brooke—who has an instinct for such things—picks this instant to pass around the tobacco jar. Matches snap, pipes are lit. In the past, they all would have stood about chatting and arguing until three in the morning. Tonight, though, no one seems to have the heart for it, and the meeting breaks up just after twelve. McTaggart rides off on his tricycle, while Hardy makes his way back, alone, to Trinity. It's still surprisingly warm out. Patting the letter in his pocket, he thinks of his own letter. Has it yet passed through the Suez Canal? Is it on a ship crossing the ocean? Or has it already arrived at Madras, at the Port Trust Office, where the real Ramanujan will retrieve it Monday morning?

  And now, as if on cue, his mysterious friend joins him; walks with him, matching his stride step for step. If the real Ramanujan really does come to Cambridge, might he be inducted into the Apostles, as the Society's first Indian member? Hardy would be his father, of course. Only what would Ramanujan make of these clever men with their fey rituals and private language? It's difficult for Hardy to reconcile the public image of men like Keynes and Moore with this boys' school atmosphere in which they frisk each Saturday night, calling each other by pet names and eating nursery food and talking endlessly, endlessly, about sex, and then about philosophy, and then sex again. Dirty jokes, boastful hints of carnal adventuring. Yet how many of them have any real experience? Practically none, Hardy suspects. Keynes, yes. Hardy himself, though few of them would guess it. Brooke—mostly with women. Also a sticking point. Hardy thinks of McTaggart, making his creaking, three-wheeled progress back to the unfeminine, Apostolic Daisy. For this is the Society's great secret, and its lie. Most of these men will marry in the end.

  He is just arriving at the Trinity gates when Norton catches up with him. “Hello, Hardy,” he says—and the Indian wraith evaporates.

  “Heading home?” Hardy asks.

  Norton nods. “I've been walking. The meeting left me full of agitated energy. I couldn't go to bed … I mean, I couldn't go to sleep yet.”

  He winks. He is not good-looking. More and more, the older he gets, does he resemble a monkey. Still, Hardy smiles at the invitation.

  “You might come up for a cup of tea,” he says, ringing the bell. Norton nods assent. Then they are quiet, lost in a silence in which there lingers an embarrassed silt of compromise, of settling for what's available in the absence of what's desired. Footfalls sound in the gloom, an impish, spiteful Cupid beats a drum, and Chatterjee—the real Chatterjee, decked out in his Corpus Christi robes—comes marching down Trinity Street, his heels beating out a rhythmic tap against the pavement. As he nears, his features merge into focus: ski-slope nose, lips turned up in a subtle smile, eyebrows that nearly join, but not quite. He passes so close that Hardy can feel the rushing of his robes, breathe in their smell of wardrobes. Then he's gone. He doesn't even meet Hardy's eye. The fact is, Chatterjee has no idea who he is.

  It is at this instant that the porter arrives. Thinking them two undergraduates out after hours, he starts to give them a tongue-lashing—until he recognizes Hardy. “Good evening, sir,” he says, holding the gate open, his face a bit red, if truth be told. “A pleasant night out?”

  “Pleasant enough, thank you. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, sir. Goodnight, Mr. Norton.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Great Court is empty at this hour, vast as a ballroom, the lawn gleaming in the moonlight. Sometimes Hardy thinks of his Cambridge life as being divided into quadrants, much like the lawn of Great Court. One quadrant is mathematics, and Littlewood, and Bohr. The second is the Apostles. The third is cricket. The fourth … In truth, this is the quadrant he is most reluctant to define, not from squeam-ishness—on the contrary, he has little patience for the attempts that Moore and others make to dress the matter up in philosophical vestments—but because he doesn't know what words to use. When McTaggart speaks of the higher sodomy, he tries to draw a veil over the physical, about which Hardy feels no shame. No, the bother is when the quadrants touch—as they are touching now, Norton at his side, the two of them heading toward New Court surreptitiously even though there is nothing outwardly suspect in his inviting a friend to his room for a cup of tea that he knows will never be brewed.

  They climb the stairs and he opens the door. Rising from Gaye's blue ottoman, Hermione arches her back, raises her tail in greeting. “Hello, puss,” Norton says, bending over to stroke Hermione, as Hardy presses his fingers against his neck, trying to remember the last time he stroked human skin, and not a cat's fur. He tries to remember, and he can't.

  8

  WHEN LITTLEWOOD disappears from Cambridge, which he frequently does, it is usually to go down to Treen, in Cornwall, where he stays with the Chase family, or, more precisely, with Mrs. Chase and her children. Their father— Bertie Russell's doctor—lives in London, coming down to Treen once a month or so. About the understandings Littlewood has come to with Mrs. Chase, or Dr. Chase, or both, Hardy knows better than to enquire. Certainly such arrangements are not unheard of: Russell himself appears to have arrived at one with Philip Morrell, with whose wife, Ottoline, he is having an affair he can never quite keep secret. Indeed, the only sufferer in that situation appears to be Russell's own wife.

  Littlewood has no wife. Both of them are fated to die bachelors, Hardy suspects: Littlewood because Mrs. Chase will never leave her husband, Hardy for rather more obvious reasons. This, he thinks, is why they can work with each other so much more easily than either can work, say, with Bohr, who is married. It isn't only a question of the occasional, unannounced, late-night visit; they also know when to leave each other alone. The married, he has noticed, are forever trying to persuade Hardy to join their fellowship. They live to advertise that brand of conjugal domesticity to which they have pledged themselves. It wouldn't be possible to collaborate with a married man, because a married man would always be noticing—questioning—that Hardy himself isn't married.

  Littlewood never questions Hardy. Nor does he mention Gaye. He is a man who has little patience with those rules that delimit what one is and isn't supposed to talk about. Even so, he has to admit that he's just as glad that Hardy prefers not to share with him what Mrs. Chase calls “t
he gory details.” Much easier, if not to defend, than at least to explain Hardy as an abstraction, especially when Jackson—the wheezy old classicist whose inexplicable fondness for him Littlewood feels as a sort of rash or eczema—puts his mouth to his ear at high table and whispers, “How can you stand working with him? A normal fellow like you.”

  Littlewood has a canned answer to this kind of inquiry, which he gets often. “All individuals are unique,” he says, “but some are uniquer than others.” He'll only go further if the inquirer is someone he trusts, someone like Bohr, to whom he describes Hardy as a “nonpracticing homosexual.” Which, so far as he can ascertain, is perfectly accurate. Aside from Gaye—whose relationship with Hardy Littlewood could not begin to parse—Hardy, from what he can tell, has never had a lover of either sex; only periodic episodes of besot-tedness with young men, some of them his students.

  Mrs. Chase—Anne—thinks Hardy tragic. “What a sad life he must lead,” she said to Littlewood this past weekend in Treen. “A life without love.” And though he agreed, privately Littlewood couldn't help but reflect that such a life must not be without its advantages— he, a man who often finds himself contending with a surfeit of love: Anne's, and her children's, and his parents', and his siblings'. There are moments when all this love chokes him, and during these moments he regards Hardy's solitude as an enviable alternative to the over-populated lives for which his married friends have volunteered; the abundance of wives, children, grandchildren, sons- and daughters-in-law, mothers- and fathers-in-law; the murk of demands, needs, interruptions, recriminations. Whenever he goes to visit these friends in the country, or has supper with them at their Cambridge houses, he returns to his rooms full of gratitude, that he can climb into his bed alone and wake up alone—but knowing that, come the next weekend, he will not be alone. Perhaps this is why the arrangement with Anne suits him so well. It is a thing of weekends.

  The first Friday in March, as is his habit, he goes to Treen. Rain keeps him indoors most of Saturday and Sunday. On Monday it's still raining; at the station, he learns that somewhere along the line a bridge has flooded, diverting his train, which arrives two hours late. This leaves him stuck at Liverpool Street for two hours. By the time he gets back to Cambridge, it's too late for dinner, still raining, and he's been traveling all day. He curses, throws his bags down on his bedroom floor, picks up his umbrella, and heads over to the Senior Combination room. Shadowed figures lurk in the paneled gloaming. Jackson, greeting him with a nod, points with his drink to a corner of the room where, much to his surprise, he glimpses Hardy sitting upright in a Queen Anne chair, hands on his knees. At the sight of him, Hardy bolts up and hurries toward him.

  “Where were you?” he asks in a hiss.

  “The country. My train was delayed. What's the matter?”

  “It's come.”

  Littlewood stops in his tracks. “When?”

  “This morning. I've been looking for you all day.”

  “I'm sorry. Look, what does it say?”

  Hardy glances toward the fire. A small group of dons has clustered there to smoke. Until Littlewood walked in, they were talking about Home Rule in Ireland. Now they're silent, ears cocked.

  “Let's go to my rooms,” Hardy says.

  “Fine, if you'll give me a drink,” Littlewood says. And they turn around and leave. The rain is coming down in sheets. Hardy has forgotten his umbrella, and Littlewood must hold his over both of them. It makes for an uncomfortable intimacy, if one that only lasts the minute or so that it takes to walk over to New Court. Opening the door to his staircase, Hardy pulls away, clearly as relieved to be separated as Littlewood is. He shakes out his umbrella and drops it in the Chinese ceramic jar that Littlewood remembers from the old days, when Hardy shared a suite with Gaye on Great Court.

  “I've only got whiskey,” Hardy says, leading him up the stairs.

  “That will do splendidly.” Hardy opens the door to his suite. “Hello, cat,” Littlewood says to Hermione, but when he bends down to pat her head, she runs away.

  “What's the matter with her? I was only trying to be friendly.”

  “You treat her as if she's a dog.” Hardy pulls the letter from his pocket. “Well, at least one thing's as I suspected,” he says. “I'm not the first he's written to.”

  “No?”

  “Oh, do take off your coat. Sit down. I'll get the whiskey.”

  Littlewood sits. Hardy pours the whiskey into two somewhat dirty glasses, hands one to Littlewood, then reads aloud.

  “‘Dear Sir, I am very much gratified on perusing your letter of the

  8th February 1913. I was expecting a reply from you similar to the one which a Mathematics Professor at London wrote asking me to study carefully Bromwich's Infinite Series and not fall into the pitfalls of divergent series.’ That's Hill, I expect. Anyway: ‘I have found a friend in you who views my labours sympathetically. This is already some encouragement to me to proceed with my onward course.’”

  “Good.”

  “Yes, but now comes the worrisome part. ‘I find in many a place in your letter rigorous proofs are required and so on and you ask me to communicate the methods of proof. If I had given you my methods of proof, I am sure you will follow the London Professor. But as a fact, I did not give him any proof but made some assertions as the following under my new theory. I told him that the sum of an infinite number of terms of the series: 1+2 + 3 + 4 + …= -1/12 under my theory.’”

  “Yes, that was in the last one, too.”

  “‘If I tell you this you will at once point out to me the lunatic asylum as my goal. I dilate on this simply to convince you that you will not be able to follow my methods of proof if I indicate the lines on which I proceed in a single letter.’”

  “He's hedging. Maybe he's afraid you'll try to steal his stuff.”

  “That's what I thought, too. But then there's this: ‘So what I now want at this stage is for eminent professors like you to recognize that there is some worth in me. I am already a half-starving man. To preserve my brains I want food and this is now my first consideration.’”

  “Do you think he's actually starving?” Littlewood asks.

  “Who knows? What does twenty pounds a year buy in Madras? And here's how it ends: ‘You may judge me hard that I am silent on the methods of proof. I have to reiterate that I may be misunderstood if I give in a short compass the lines on which I proceed. It is not on account of my unwillingness on my part but because I fear I shall not be able to explain everything in a letter. I do not mean that the methods should be buried with me. I shall have them published if my results are recognized by eminent men like you.’ And then there are— what?—ten pages of mathematics.”

  “And?”

  “Well, at least I've worked out what he's up to with the damn 1+2 + 3 + 4 = -1/12.”

  “What?”

  “I'll show you.” With a quick sweep of the cloth, Hardy wipes his blackboard clean. “Essentially, it's a matter of notation. His is very peculiar. Let's say you decide you want to write ½ as 2-1. Perfectly valid, if a little obscurist. Well, what he's doing here is writing 1/2-1 as 1/½, or 2. And then, along the same lines, he writes the sequence

  … , which is of course 1+2 + 3

  + 4 + … So what he's really saying is

  “Which is the Riemannian calculation for the zeta function fed with -1.”

  Hardy nods. “Only I don't think he even knows it's the zeta function. I think he came up with it on his own.”

  “But that's astounding. I wonder how he'll feel once he finds out Riemann did it first.”

  “My hunch is that he's never heard of Riemann. Out in India, how could he? They're behind England, and look how far England is behind Germany. And of course, since he's self-taught, it makes sense that his notation would be a little—well—off.”

  “True, except that he seems to know it's off. Otherwise why put in the bit about the lunatic asylum?”

  “He's toying with us. He thinks he's great
.”

  “Most great men do.”

  A silence falls. Gulping his whiskey, Littlewood regards Hermione. Her gaze—predatory and accusatory and bored—disconcerts him. The fact is, he's no more comfortable here, in Hardy's territory, than Hardy is in his. The cat makes him nervous, as do the bits of decorative frippery, the ottoman with its hairy fringe and the bust on the mantelpiece. Gaye, it appears.

  Putting down his glass, he takes the letter from where Hardy's dropped it; stands up. “Do you mind if I follow tradition and borrow this?” he asks.

  “Be my guest. Likely you'll have more luck than I have.”

  “I don't see why.”

  “You're the one who was senior wrangler.”

  Littlewood raises his eyebrows. What brought that on?

  “Show it to Mercer then,” he says, handing the letter back—a little surprised by his own vehemence.

  Hardy looks as if he's just been slapped. But Littlewood has already turned away from him, to Hermione. “Goodbye, cat,” he says.

  She ignores him.

  “Sometimes I think she's deaf.”

  “She is deaf.”

  “What?”

  “A recessive gene. Most white cats are deaf.”

  “Oh, of course,” Littlewood says. “Of course you'd have a deaf cat. I should have guessed.”

  He moves toward the door, and Hardy reaches out his hand to stop him. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I didn't mean to offend, or … Look, just take the letter.”

  “I'm not offended. Just perplexed. That you should bring up a thing like that. Is it really such a sore spot? Still?”

  “Of course not. I just—”

  “And you can't think it matters to me. I hate the damn thing as much as you do.”