The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  “Pregnant!”

  “Don't sound so surprised. It happens to women.”

  “But how—”

  She does up the buttons of her blouse. “Jack, I know boys of your generation grew up in virtual ignorance of the laws of nature, but really, one would assume that by now—”

  “Don't be ridiculous—Of course I—” He stands, looks around as if he's forgotten something. And then he realizes that what he's forgotten is joy. “Darling!” he says. And he embraces her. “But this is marvelous, marvelous!”

  “Steady on.” She pushes him away. “It complicates things.”

  “Why?”

  “Arthur.”

  “But you're not saying that you and Arthur—”

  “Of course not. Don't be daft. Arthur and I haven't—well, for years. And that's just the trouble. He'll know it's you. So things could get a bit sticky.”

  “But shouldn't we get married?”

  She turns to face him. “What are you saying, Jack?”

  “Well, why not? You and Arthur—as you say, you haven't—”

  “But you never said anything about marriage before.”

  “I know. But now—”

  “Because I'm pregnant?”

  “No, of course not. It's that your being pregnant—it makes me realize how much I love you, how much it matters. This.”

  “You could say that with a little more conviction.”

  “I'm absolutely convinced.”

  “You don't sound it.”

  She's right. He doesn't sound it. Quick, he must find a reason for her not to think him despicable.

  “That's only because it's such a surprise. I've hardly had a chance to get used to it.”

  She puts on her jacket. “Let's make one thing perfectly clear,” she says. “I have no intention of divorcing Arthur or of marrying you. And if you think the matter over carefully, you'll see that I'm right. You and I aren't meant for marriage—at least to each other. We're meant to live outside the rules.” Suddenly she puts her hand on his cheek. “It's not that I don't love you. Perhaps it's that I love you too much.” Or perhaps—he doesn't say this—it's that you love Treen too much; that you love too much this life of yours into which I come and go, come and go. But never there permanently. You don't want me there permanently. And if I'm to be honest, I don't want to be there permanently either.

  “What will Arthur say? Will he be angry?”

  “Probably. And if he is—well, there's nothing to do about it, is there?” She picks up her hat. “The child will be raised as his. He or she will think of him, Arthur, as his father, and you as Uncle Jack. Just like the others.”

  Littlewood puts his hand to his forehead. Much to his own astonishment, he is weeping. “I don't know what to say,” he says. “I don't know how to get used to this.”

  “You've got used to worse things. We all have.” She kisses his forehead. “And now I must go or I shall miss my train.”

  “But it's my child too!” He says this as if he has just realized it.

  “Our child,” she corrects.

  “Will nothing change?”

  “Oh, everything will change.” She is at the door now. “Though not necessarily for the worse.” “Anne—” “No,” she says firmly, suddenly prim. And then she's gone.

  9

  WITHOUT ANNE, the flat seems squalid; improbable. A place for assignations, not only his own. Other men, he knows, come here. With other women. And, for all he knows, with other men.

  Quickly as he can, he washes, puts on his uniform, and packs his bag. On the way downstairs, he passes a woman carrying a parcel of groceries. She looks him up and down as if to say, I know which flat you're coming out of. She has a scarlet birthmark on her left cheek, a sort of permanent flush that he finds strangely attractive. But when he offers to help her with the groceries, she says no, thank you, and hurries past him up the stairs.

  He steps outside. It's cold and raining a little. A gust of wind hits him in the face like a fist, like the knockout blow he knows he has coming to him, that he deserves and even desires. Soon the left side of his face is numb. He walks—street follows street, namelessly—and then he stops walking and looks at his watch. Four hours and twenty minutes until he's due back at Woolwich, one hour and twenty minutes until he's due to meet Hardy at a tea shop near the British Museum, seven minutes until Anne boards her train. And how is he supposed to face Hardy—dry, sexless Hardy—and talk mathematics, or Trinity politics, or cricket, now that Anne has torn a gash in the very fabric of his life? His life: a surface that stretches without tearing, a surface “the spatial properties of which are preserved under bicon-tinuous deformation.” Topology. That's how he's thought of it until this morning. But then Anne tore a gash right down the middle. He wants a beer. He can't face Hardy without a beer.

  He goes into the first pub he sees. It's noon exactly. These days, thanks to the Defense of the Realm Act, pubs are only open from noon until two-thirty and then from six-thirty until eleven. He downs a pint, then orders another. He thinks: what am I to her? To him, she is a mystery. She always has been. They met more or less by accident, five years ago, when he was in Treen on holiday. There was a garden party, and she was there with Chase, who had heard of Littlewood from Russell, and started up a conversation. Obviously Chase wanted to make an impression, but it was his wife, obliviously capering with a dog, who made the impression. While Chase talked, she danced the dog up onto its hind legs, and kept it standing on its hind legs—he counted—for a full forty-five seconds, simply by dangling in front of its face an imaginary bit of something, conjured up between her fingers. She had brown, freckled skin. Shoes looked wrong on her somehow. She seemed so much a part of the shore outside the window, the rough surf and the sand and the rocks, that he assumed she had been born and raised in Treen, when in fact she had grown up in the Midlands. She had only come to Treen after marrying Arthur, to whose family the house belonged. “No one believes it,” she told him when they finally got to talk, “but until I was seventeen I'd never seen the sea. And then I came here, and the moment I stepped down from the carriage, I knew I'd found the place I belonged. I consider myself extremely fortunate. I have a theory that for each of us there's a place in the world where we belong—only very few of us ever find it, because God is capricious. No, not capricious. Malicious. He scatters us over the earth at random, he doesn't plant us in our places. And so you might grow up in Battersea and never know that your true place, the one place you belonged, was a village in Russia, or an island off the coast of America. I think it's why so many people are so unhappy.”

  “And are you happy,” he asked, “now that you've found your place?”

  “I would be happier,” she said, “if finding it didn't require me to give something else up. But perhaps we're all doomed to such bargains.”

  The morning after he met her, much to his regret, he had to return to Cambridge. He was eager to get back to Treen, though, and when, a few weeks later, he wrote to tell her that he was planning another visit, she invited him to stay as her guest. And then he arrived, and conveniently—it seemed suspiciously convenient at the time—Arthur was not there; at the last minute a medical emergency had obliged him to stop the weekend in London.

  “You're my place,” he said to her that night. It was true. Much as he liked Treen, it was not Treen to which he belonged. It was to Anne. She seemed an extension of the coast, as if a beach, fleeing the advances of a sea god, had taken human form and stepped up onto the earth on shaky legs of sand. In this myth that Littlewood invented, you could recognize the beach naiad by the sand that she always left in her wake, no matter how far inland she journeyed, the sand that you could follow backward, like a trail of breadcrumbs, to the cliffs and the beaches of Cornwall. Somehow he knew, even that first night, that he would spend whatever he had left of his life, or much of it, trying to trace that trail back to its source.

  After that, they settled into an adulterous routine. Commitment, for bot
h of them, meant routine. Most Fridays he would take the train down to Treen. She would meet him at the station, feed him a late supper in the sitting room. The next day, at eight precisely, coffee in bed, then, in the morning, work on the sun porch, sitting on a broken chair, his feet on a log and his papers held down by stones gathered from the beach. At noon he would take a swim of twenty minutes, timed exactly. Then lunch. Then a rest. Then, in the afternoon, another swim, or, if it was too cold out, a walk. After tea, patience. After patience, dinner with beer. After dinner, more cards, more games, sometimes with the children. More beer.

  More beer! That's what he needs! He orders a third pint. Those weekends before the war, he always slept in a spare room on the third floor, away from the children. She would join him there after putting them to bed, returning to her own room just before dawn. Arthur (somehow this was understood) would come down the third weekend of each month, and that one weekend, Littlewood (this was also understood) would have some pressing obligation that kept him away. For it was clear that she had made a contract with Arthur, that somewhere in the depths of the bedroom they shared (as far as he knew they shared it), words had been traded, perhaps recriminations, negotiations entered into and terms agreed upon. Just exactly what those terms were he didn't ask: it was part of her arrangement with him that he would not ask. Nor was protest to be tolerated. For he sensed that if Anne accepted as inevitable a certain equalizing, a balancing of pleasure with sacrifice, it was because she believed that such a balancing was part of the natural order. Anne wanted Treen and she wanted Littlewood. She got both, but how much she had to give up in return she would not say.

  And now she is pregnant.

  He finishes his third pint; looks at his watch. In twenty minutes he's due to meet Hardy. A bother. So he pays his bill and steps back out into the cold. Once again, the wind punches him in the face. Now it is his right cheek that goes numb. He crosses a street. A motor car passes by, so close he can feel the metal graze his skin. The driver shouts at him: “Bloody idiot, watch where you're going!”

  You could say that with a little more conviction.

  Could he have? He supposes he could have. Marry me, he might have said, on bended knee. If he'd pleaded with her, would she have relented? She'd thrown out just that one hint, opened, for just an instant, a door he might have pushed open wider. But he didn't, and now, he knows, the door is shut again. He has lost his chance, and the beach naiad has gone back to her beach.

  Another motor car flies past. Across the street from him a woman is walking a dog that resembles that one Anne kept on its feet for so long, dancing. As she has kept him dancing.

  And where is his place? The place to which he himself—Anne or no Anne—belongs ?

  He stops; shuts his eyes. He sees a fireplace, a window through the old glass of which he can make out architraves and the shadows of trees. Trinity is ancient. It went on for decades before he came stumbling through its gates. No doubt it will go on for decades after his coffin is carried through those same gates. (If, that is, anything goes on; if he doesn't die first; if the Germans don't win the war.) Is Trinity, then, where he belongs? If so, it's an illusion. After all, those rooms he calls his own, they are his only in the sense that a piece of Imperial Roman marble he once pilfered from the Forum is his. Such things outlive us. We claim them, house them, house ourselves in them. But only for a time. And still he thinks of those rooms as his rooms.

  Curiously, in his youth, he hardly ever worried about God. But then he met Anne, and Hardy, and now he is convinced that God, on His throne, whiles away His off-hours mapping out those routes by which His subjects will be led most quickly to unhappiness. Human souls tossed willy-nilly over the face of the earth, connivances with nature to insure rain at cricket matches. And in Littlewood's case? Passion for a woman he can never possess, combined with attachment to a place he can never own. A sort of doomed, perpetual bachelorhood.

  Once again, he looks at his watch. Quarter to one. Soon he will have to meet Hardy. Does he dread it? No. To his surprise, he finds that he's rather looking forward to it. For he will never marry Anne. He will never have a child who bears his own name. But Hardy—Hardy isn't going anywhere. Hardy is permanent. Spouse or collaborator, it comes to the same thing. And there is work to be done. Always, always work to be done.

  10

  HE GETS TO the tea shop first; claims a table; watches through the window as Hardy, in a bowler hat and raincoat, saunters toward the door. Saunters, yes—that's exactly the word for Hardy. He is laconic and sleek, like an otter. He steps inside, closes his umbrella, signals with his chin. “Littlewood,” he says, ungloving a hand, which Littlewood shakes. So dry, that hand. Which rather contradicts the otter notion. A thin wedge of a man, all edges. What would it be like to embrace him? He shudders to think.

  “Sorry I'm late. I'm just off the train.”

  “No bother.”

  “You're doing fine, I trust.”

  Such a statement brooks no possibility of an answer. “I'm doing fine.”

  “Good.”

  “I've got something to show you.” Littlewood reaches into his bag. “It's my first ballistics paper. Just printed. See that little speck at the bottom of the last page?”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “A tiny sigma. The last line was supposed to read, ‘Thus σ should be made as small as possible.’” Littlewood leans back. “Well, the printer did his job. He must have scoured the print shops of London to find one so tiny.”

  Hardy laughs so loud the waitress turns and gives him a look.

  “I'm glad you think it's funny,” Littlewood says. “I've missed having someone around who'd understand why that was funny.”

  “I may be joining you soon. Who knows? Conscription seems a certainty.”

  “And this from the secretary of the U.D.C.! How goes all that, by the way?”

  “The college is in an uproar. Butler's trying to root out everyone who has anything to do with us. Rumor has it he's working to throw out Neville. And in the meantime none of us can complain because three of his sons are at the front. Butler's. And the poor man's in an absolute state. He can't seem to fix his attention on anything, he hardly hears what you're saying.” The waitress approaches. “Oh, yes, hello. Earl Grey, please.”

  “And you, sir?”

  “The same. Anything to eat, Hardy?”

  “No, I wouldn't care for anything.”

  The way Hardy says he “wouldn't care for anything” vexes Littlewood. Now if be asks for anything to eat—and how alluring the pastries look!—Hardy will doubtless look him up and down reproachfully. And while it's true that, since they last met, Little-wood has put on a few pounds—well, what's to be done about it? He's enlisted now. You can't stay slim on range tables and military potatoes.

  “Just tea. Nothing to eat.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The waitress walks away.

  “I've been thinking a lot about our friend Ramanujan lately,” he says. “You know, I was never sure if I believed all his talk of dreaming up mathematics. But then the other night I had a dream in which I saw, clear as day, the solution to a problem, and of course the next morning I'd forgotten it. So I began keeping a pad and pencil by the bed, and the next time it happened I woke up, wrote it down, and went back to sleep. And then in the morning I looked at the pad, and you know what I'd written?”

  “What?”

  “‘Higamus, bigamus, men are polygamous. Hogamus, bogamus, wives are monogamous.’”

  This time Hardy does not laugh.

  “So what brings you to town this time?”

  “Mathematical Society business. We're trying to help a German physicist who got stuck in Reading. Now he's been interned.”

  “Good of you.”

  “Well, there are Englishmen stuck in Germany. And the Germans are trying to help them too.”

  “Strange to think that we're here and they're there. On opposite sides.”

  “It's merely
a change of sign. Trivial. Plus into minus, minus into plus.”

  “Is that all you think it is?”

  “This war is a joke.”

  “Still, if the Germans win—”

  “It might be a fine thing for England.”

  Littlewood smiles. “One thing I do miss is hearing you make outrageous statements. You know that outrageous statements aren't permitted at Woolwich.”

  “Nor should they be. They belong to Cambridge.”

  “The truth is, I don't miss that side of Cambridge. The bright talk, the witticisms flying. All the goods in the front window.”

  “So is Woolwich any better?”

  “At least there's a certain naked honesty about it. There's a job to do, and you do it.”

  “Careful, Littlewood, you're starting to sound like an engineer.”

  “I don't see why I shouldn't end my days as one. I expect I'll lose the gift once I hit forty. And then what's the alternative? Mathematicians gone to seed make excellent vice-chancellors.”

  “I could see you as a vice-chancellor.”

  “I'd rather be shot.”

  “Given the work you're doing now, you'll certainly be able to position the gun.”

  “Yes, that I will. Although I'm not exactly a crack marksman. That's why they leave me to work things out on paper.”

  The waitress brings the tea. Two women with very straight backs sit at the next table. A three-tiered tray has just been delivered to them, stacked with sandwiches, scones, crumpets, and those pastries, studded with sultanas, that Littlewood covets.

  And why aren't they eating? With studied nonchalance, the women sip their tea, exchange a few words, ignore the delicacies. They do not put sugar in their tea. In all likelihood, no sugar has been used in the pastries; no eggs, either, for this is wartime, and Hardy has chosen a fairly expensive tea shop, the clientele of which cares about appearances. Heaven forbid that these women should be confused with workers for whom nourishment must be taken in quantity, and fast, if the job is to be done! Or that they should be seen as not respecting the sumptuary laws imposed by war—at least in public. Who knows what they have hidden away at home?