The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  In his photograph, by contrast, Mercer looked hesitant, almost icy. He had dark patches under his eyes, and held against his forehead a finger the nail of which he had chewed down to the quick.

  What can I tell you about Littlewood? Although he shunned the limelight—perhaps because he shunned the limelight—he had what you Americans today call “star quality.” The discoveries he made could be dramatic. For instance, shortly after we started working together, he proved that at some point beyond 1010 , the Prime Number Theorem, instead of overestimating the number of primes up to a certain number n, begins to underestimate them. More crucially, beyond that inconceivably distant number, the result alternates between over- and underestimation infinitely often. This was an amazing thing to prove, in that it undid an assumption most mathematicians would never have thought to question. Yet what was especially remarkable was that Littlewood's proof revealed a change in the cosmos of the primes so remote from the arena of ordinary human counting as to be virtually impossible to conceive. For the number in question—the number beyond which the primes start to be underestimated rather than overestimated—is larger than the number of atoms in the universe.

  Typically, Littlewood made little fuss over the discovery. He made very little in the way of fuss about anything. He was Littlewood. The first time he came to see me—I mean, came to see me seriously, with the idea of our collaborating—my sister was visiting. We were in the middle of lunch in my sitting room. Gertrude was art mistress at Cranleigh's sister school, St. Catherine's, where she edited the school magazine, in which she published articles and the occasional corrosive verse. She lived with our mother, whose health was declining, and for whose benefit she had to pretend to religious feelings she did not have. She was not what you would call an attractive woman; nor, so far as I could tell, did she take much interest in men. Yet from the minute Littlewood arrived she was asking him to sit down, and fetching him a plate, and spooning onto it the remaining eggs and beans that, under normal circumstances, we would have divided. Littlewood accepted without hesitation. By nature he was a social animal, inclined to assume that if someone he liked liked two people, they would like each other. Nor did it surprise me to see him forking eggs and beans at once into his mouth, whereas I never mixed the foods on my plate. And all the while asking Gertrude questions about her school, her students, the magazine—questions she answered with blushing, even girlish gusto. It was discomfiting to watch. My sister—usually stern, even severe—was obviously enchanted. And Littlewood—I could see instantly something one rarely observed in those days at Cambridge: he liked women more than men. He liked their company and he liked their bodies. Flirting came naturally to him, even when the woman was a homely spinster like Gertrude. And Gertrude ate it up.

  All through the conversation, I wondered if Littlewood was going to notice Gertrude's glass eye and ask about it. He did, the very next day. “An accident in childhood,” I said, at which, being Littlewood, he decently dropped the subject, sparing me having to explain how the accident had happened.

  And what of Mercer? I think he was gone by then, back in Liverpool. He didn't return to Cambridge until 1912, and from then until his death I hardly saw him. My sense is that he accepted his own obscurity with a humility for which I must give him due credit.

  Littlewood never understood why I abandoned Mercer. I suppose I didn't understand myself. Imagine a writer who, embarrassed by the callowness of a first draft, stuffs it away in a drawer. Somehow he knows that a day will come when he will write the story again, and perhaps write it better. Only he has no idea when, or how, or who will be the hero.

  PART TWO

  The Crow in the Dining Room

  1

  A LETTER ARRIVES FROM the India Office. Signed C. Mallet, Secretary for Indian Students.

  Regretfully, without further documentation as to the qualifications of the student in question, and considering the limited funds at the Office's disposal, we can at present do nothing to assist in bringing said. S. Ramanujan to Trinity College, Cambridge …

  Hardy wads the letter up in his hand. He wants to tell Littlewood, but Littlewood's gone again. Of course he's gone. The siren song of Treen. The compelling mystery called Mrs. Chase. Littlewood's always gone when a letter arrives.

  Hardy goes to see the master. Henry Montagu Butler is now nearly eighty, florid, with an unkempt white beard that makes him look like Father Christmas. An Apostle himself (no. 130), he no longer attends the meetings because he so strongly disapproves of smoking. He is a devoted clergyman in the Church of England. As Hardy speaks, he rotates his wedding ring around his finger, as always, in careful motions of a quarter turn each. He listens—or appears to listen— carefully as Hardy tells him about the letters, the patient investigations that he and Littlewood have undertaken, the reply they wrote, and, finally, the possibility of bringing the Indian to Cambridge. Such interviews are torture for Hardy, who, given his druthers, would have passed the responsibility on to Littlewood. If, of course, Littlewood could be found. But Hardy knows Butler. If Littlewood had come, Butler would have said, “This is Hardy's business. If Hardy has something to say to me, let him come to see me and say it himself.”

  A vast oak desk divides them. From the wood, a faint odor of tobacco rises, the legacy of previous masters with more liberal attitudes toward smoking. Across the requisite inkwell and blotting pad Hardy talks into the composed silence of Butler's rotating ring, all the while hoping that Butler will take the hint, anticipate his request, and thereby spare him the ordeal of having to make it. Instead Butler gazes down at the blotting pad. Is he dozing? “Well, that's all very interesting,” he says when Hardy has finished. “Now what do you want me to do about it?”

  “I suppose I want you to tell me whether the college might provide funds for bringing the young man to England.”

  “Funds? You mean a fellowship? But from what you tell me, the chap doesn't even have the ordinary undergraduate degree.”

  “I don't see why that should matter. If Newton wrote to us, would we worry about whether he had the ordinary undergraduate degree?”

  “Ah, but he did have it, didn't he? And as I recall, there was a time when you weren't too keen on Newton.” Butler leans into the vastness of the desk. “Look, Hardy, this is all quite interesting, but where's your evidence the man's a genius? Sounds a bit dodgy to me. Could it be a hoax?”

  “I very much doubt it.”

  “Then you're going to have to show me some hard proof. I'm not about to allow any old nigger into Trinity on the basis of a letter.”

  That word: why does he feel it as a slap on his own cheek? It's Ramanujan, not Hardy, whom Butler is calling a nigger.

  All at once a fury rises up in Hardy. This is his way. From temerity and reluctance, he makes the leap to anger, skipping all intermediate stages. Gaye used to tease him about it.

  “I shall acquire what evidence I can,” he says. “Although if you refuse to accept the judgment of two of your own fellows as sufficient, I daresay nothing else will convince you.” Then he stands up. “Good God, without so much as a shred of education, and entirely on his own, the man's reinvented half the history of mathematics. Given the proper encouragement, who knows what he could do?”

  Butler makes a web of his thick, elderly fingers. “An Indian Newton. What a curiosity that would be. Well, come see me when you've learned more. Because, Hardy, contrary to what you seem to have assumed, I'm not opposed a priori to the fellow. Nor, I think, should I be looked upon as a villain for my natural skepticism. After all, what have you brought me? Two letters.”

  “Very well.”

  He is about to leave when Butler says, “I assume you've contacted the India Office.”

  “Yes.”

  “Any answer?”

  “They want more information. Everyone wants more information. Littlewood says he's going to go and see a chap there. An acquaintance of his brother's.”

  “Well, let me know when you hear back.” />
  “Do you mean that if they say give him the go ahead, you will, too?”

  “You're very determined to make me the enemy, aren't you?”

  “It seems to me that there are moments when one has to take a chance.”

  “Granted. But bear in mind, if he comes here, and it all comes to nothing, the college will only be out some money. You're the one who'll have to contend with him, take care of him, very possibly shelter him.”

  “Littlewood and I are prepared to shoulder whatever responsibilities his coming entails.”

  “I assume you've written back to the second letter. No reply yet?”

  Hardy shakes his head.

  “Well, let me know when you hear from him. I'm curious, in spite of myself.”

  “Thank you.” Hardy holds out his hand, which the old man shakes. Then he goes out the door, uncertain who has made the greater concession. This is Butler's gift, and what has kept him master for close to fifty years.

  2

  AS IT TURNS OUT, C. Mallet, at the India office, is the friend of Littlewood's brother. Littlewood goes up to London on a Tuesday morning, leaving Hardy to stew and fret until his return. Of course he tries to work, to focus on the proof he's so close to cracking, that there are infinite zeros along Rie-mann's critical line. Today, though, it's as if a door has shut on him. Those regions of the imagination into which he must venture if he's to make any kind of progress—he can't gain access to them. He feels as stymied as Moore in that lecture he gave, the evening that Wittgenstein came to the Apostles meeting. The one evening. After that he never came back.

  Because he cannot work, Hardy takes a longer than usual walk through the Trinity grounds. It's a glorious April morning, sunny and cold, the combination of weathers he likes best. Yesterday another letter arrived from India, this one in response to one that Hardy now regrets sending, in which he tried, as gently as he could, to reassure Ramanujan that he, Hardy, had no designs on Ramanujan's ideas; indeed, Hardy wrote, even if he did try to make illegitimate use of Ramanujan's results, Ramanujan would have Hardy's letters in his possession and could quite easily expose the fraud. Not, as it turned out, the wisest move. For Ramanujan seems to have interpreted this gambit as part of a vaster conspiracy to defraud him, a poor Indian, of the only thing he treasures, his intellectual birthright. By way of reply, he wrote that it “pained” him that Hardy should ever have imagined him capable of harboring such a suspicion:

  As I wrote in my last letter I have found a sympathetic friend in you and I am willing to place unreservedly in your possession what little I have. It was on account of the novelty of the method I have used that I am a little diffident even now to communicate my own way of arriving at the expressions I have already given.

  Diffidence. Is it really all that different from pride?

  So Hardy paces the carefully tended pathways of Trinity College, while Littlewood, in London, goes to the tea shop in South Kensington (he did not mention this to Hardy) where, on those occasions when both of them happen to be in London, he and Mrs. Chase make it their habit to meet. Anne travels up to London only when she absolutely must. She is a creature of the seashore, not the town. As she sits across a teapot and a plate of scones from Littlewood, brushing back her dark brown hair, grains of sand fall onto the table. She is in London only at the behest of her husband. She has left the children behind, in the care of a nanny. Chase tolerates his wife's relationship with Littlewood so long as she agrees to make herself available when his career, his stature as an eminent Harley Street practitioner, requires him to go out in public with a wife on his arm. Tonight it's some sort of charity ball. “I hardly know what to wear,” she tells Littlewood, as the sand grains fall from her sleeve, her hem. He can see twinklings of mica in the folds of her ears. He loves this about her, the grit of her that sometimes, on his way back from Treen to Cambridge, he feels on his tongue, in his teeth.

  She is sun-browned, freckled. Chase is pallid and losing his hair. Although, where Littlewood is concerned, he assumes a posture of pained toleration, it is Littlewood's suspicion that the arrangement suits him as well as it does Anne. Better, perhaps. After all, so long as, in Treen, Littlewood keeps Anne occupied, then Chase is free, in London, to pursue amusements that the presence of a wife and children might inhibit. Amusements, Littlewood suspects, that would be more up Hardy's alley than his own.

  After prattling on for a few moments about the tedious necessity of choosing a dress (presumably Anne keeps a supply of town clothes at her husband's house on Cheyne Walk), she and Littlewood lapse into a familiar and relaxed silence. There is never between them that need to fill the air with talk that seems at once to hound and to invigorate so many couples. Silence is for them a truer medium than talk. How many hours they have sat, in the drawing room in Treen, the sound of wind and waves outside the window, and the fire, and Anne knitting patiently! Not even the voices of children upstairs. She has two children, a boy and a girl, both unusually quiet. They call Littlewood “Uncle John.”

  He looks at his watch.

  “Time running out?” she asks.

  “I have a few more minutes.”

  “Where are you off to, then?”

  “The India Office. I'm supposed to meet a chap there about the Indian, the one I was telling you about.”

  “Hardy's genius.”

  “That's right.”

  She gazes at the tray of scones with contemplative ease. “I wonder that you've never brought Hardy down to Treen,” she says.

  Littlewood smiles. It's true, he's never brought Hardy down. He's brought others down. Bertie Russell's been down. But never Hardy.

  “I'm not sure it's quite his cup of tea,” he says.

  “You could still ask.” She says this companionably. Their intimacy is curiously rancorless, perhaps because they both know it will never lead to marriage. Early on Anne made her conditions clear. She would not leave her husband, both because he had requested it of her and because, for reasons very much her own, she feels bound by certain old-fashioned proprieties, even if she does not believe in them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, even if she does not believe in them, she respects their rational spirit, obedience to which will insure the perpetuation of an orderly society. In certain ways Anne is much more conservative than Littlewood—though, at home, she never puts her hair up, and walks for hours, sometimes, along the beach, with her shoes in her hand.

  “It's very odd to me,” she says, “never having met Hardy. After all, one might say he's the most important person in your life … Isn't he?”

  “Is he?”

  “Well—”

  “Hardy's very odd. You know Harry Norton told me once—this was maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago—that Hardy was writing a novel, a murder novel, in which one mathematician proves the Riemann hypothesis and then another one murders him and claims the proof as his own. And this was the damnedest thing—Hardy gave it up, Norton said, because apparently he was convinced that I'd recognize that the victim was based on me.”

  “And was Hardy the killer?”

  “Norton didn't say.”

  Anne drinks the last of her tea. “A pity he never finished the novel. It might have been a brilliant success.”

  “Only if he left out all the mathematics.”

  “And would you have been offended if you'd been killed off?”

  “On the contrary. When Norton told me, I was flattered.”

  It's time for them to go. Quietly they get up and walk out of the tea shop. Early on, before Anne told her husband, there was intrigue and terror, the thrill of deception and the anguish of parting. Now their affair has become, in its way, as much a part of Anne's orderly ideal as her marriage. Much is understood, if not spoken. She does not wish to marry him. And he, if he is to be totally honest about it, does not really wish to marry her. For if he were to marry her, he would have to give up his rooms at Trinity, his piano, his recordings. He would have to buy a house, as Neville has done, an
d decorate it, and employ a maid and a cook to run it.

  Where would his work fit into such a life? Where would Hardy fit in?

  They say goodbye on the street: a shaking of hands, a brief kiss on each cheek, in which there is implied no grievance or bewilderment, no sense of an uncertain future, but rather the peaceful knowledge that they will meet again, the next weekend, at Treen, with the waves sounding in the background and the children upstairs. He watches her move away from him, down the sidewalk, and as she lapses into the distance, he swears that she leaves a trail of sand in her wake.

  3

  THAT EVENING, Littlewood is late to dinner. At high table, Hardy guards an empty place to his right. The fish course comes. Damned turbot again. Then the meat. Saddle of venison. More tolerable. He takes a bite, wonders what on earth is keeping Littlewood. And then Littlewood hurries in, pulling on his gown, takes the seat next to Hardy's.

  “Sorry I'm late,” he says.

  “What happened?”

  A waiter brings wine, asks Littlewood if he wants his fish. “No, I'll just move on to the … what is it?”

  “Venison.”

  “Fine.”

  “Well?”

  “Trouble, I'm afraid.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I met with the fellow from the India Office, and it's no go.”

  “The shits. It's not as if they can't spare a few pounds—”

  “Oh, it's not the money. We've miles to go before we start worrying about the money. It's the Indian chap. He doesn't want to come.”

  Hardy looks genuinely startled. “Why on earth not?”

  “Religious scruples. It seems he's a very orthodox Brahmin, and they've got this rule against crossing the ocean.”

  “I've never heard of such a thing.”

  “Neither had I. But then Mallet—that's the fellow's name—explained. Apparently they see crossing the ocean as a form of pollution. It's like marrying a widow. You don't want to put your galoshes to dry by someone else's grate. And if you do cross the ocean, when you come back to India, you're persona non grata. Your relatives won't let you in their houses. You can't marry off your daughters or go to funerals. You're an out-caste.”