The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  Hardy does not want to have a conversation with this woman. Yet Littlewood—it is his way—always manages to bring strangers into the fold. “How old is your baby?”

  “Three months. His name's Oscar.”

  “Poor fellow, he must not like the crowds. I'm a father myself.”

  “Are you now!”

  “Yes, just a few months. A girl.”

  “What's her name?”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth. What a lovely name. Now my sister, she's just had a baby girl, and she's insisted on burdening the poor thing with Lucretia. I said, please, give the child a chance, let her be Gladys, Ida. But no. My sister's always put on airs. And how's your wife? Sometimes after birth women become a bit touched—”

  “Well, actually …” But this must be stopped, Hardy decides, so he leans into Littlewood, and asks in a low voice, a voice meant to exclude, “Do you think there'll be a revolution in Russia?”

  “Russell does.”

  “Oh, have you seen Russell lately?”

  “We dined together last week.”

  “How is he?”

  “In fine fettle. He says he wrote a biting piece about rich men deriving pleasure from the deaths of their sons, but Ottoline wouldn't let him publish it.”

  “Wise of her, I suspect. You know why they're dismissing Neville, don't you?”

  “I have my suspicions.”

  Now the train has arrived at Charing Cross station. Littlewood tips his hat to Oscar and his mother, and they get off; switch onto the

  District and ride to Victoria. The sun has set in the meantime and when they step into the gloom of Hardy's flat, he switches on the electric light, revealing Alice's chattels spread about the place, underwear hung to dry in the kitchen, books and newspapers strewn across the table. He was telling the truth when he said he never stays here during the week—even when he's had meetings of the Mathematical Society, he's stayed at a hotel or with friends—and now he sees for the first time how Alice lives when he's away, for on Friday she always cleans everything up; leaves the place immaculate.

  “What's all this?”

  “Didn't you know? Mrs. Neville stays here during the week. She's working for Mrs. Buxton. The foreign press stuff.”

  “But what about you?”

  “Well, tonight I was planning to go back to Cranleigh. My mother, you know—”

  “So you only came here with me so that I could have a bath?”

  “It's not a bother.”

  “That's very kind of you, Hardy,” Littlewood says. Then he takes off his hat and coat and heads into the bathroom. Left alone, Hardy inspects Alice's leavings. There is a newspaper article in German—he cannot make out much except that it concerns a Zeppelin attack on Paris—and next to it, half-finished, the translation: “… they have made forays raids on open towns, like Stuttgart and Karlsruhe, and have even made a target of the palaces castles of these unfortified cities, wherein the life of the Queen of Sweden was endangered …” Next to that, lying open on the table, the same novel he saw in the window display at Hatch-ards: One Tuscan Summer. Across the way, on the divan, a coat and—how irresistible—what appears to be Alice's diary, which he opens to the last page of the most recent entry:

  skin that forms over warm milk. Why can't people be honest? Mrs. Chase for inst. insisting that the baby is her husband's, or Hardy who imagines that no one knows he's queer. Yet we persist in thinking that lying is the proper thing to do, hobbled by our inbred attitudes, shutting the windows on the sun and saying, “What a pity the rain makes it

  Hardy drops the diary, as if it's bitten him. From the bathroom, he hears Littlewood singing:

  Private Perks went a-marching into Flanders,

  With his smile, his funny smile.

  He was loved by the privates and commanders

  For his smile, his funny smile …

  It suddenly occurs to Hardy that there are no towels in the bathroom. So he fetches one from the closet and knocks on the door. “Yes?” Littlewood calls.

  “I've brought you a towel.”

  “Come in, then.”

  Hesitantly Hardy enters. Steam rises from the tub, within which Littlewood, naked and immodest as ever, is smoking and scrubbing himself with a big old-fashioned brush that Hardy doesn't recognize. It must belong to Alice. “I'll just hang this on the hook here.”

  “Thanks.” Littlewood lifts his left arm to soap his armpit. And how odd! Here in the bath he might once again be the young man who climbed the tree just before the tripos, as if he's scrubbed away not just the grime of a debauched night, but time and worry and age. To Hardy, his head looks too old for his body, as if, in a child's game, the mustached face of a middle-aged man has been set atop the neck and torso of a youth: thin shoulders, visible ribs, the flat nipples pink against the white flesh. Littlewood has his arm in the air, and for a moment Hardy is transfixed by the sight of his armpit hair; a whirlpool, black water whitened with flecks of foam.

  Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag

  And smile, smile, smile …

  “Thank you, Hardy.”

  “You're welcome,” Hardy says—and is about to leave when, exactly on cue, the tumblers click in the lock; the door to the flat creaks open. “Mrs. Neville!” he cries, and dashes out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

  From where she stands next to the umbrella stand, Alice gazes at him. She blinks.

  “Mr. Hardy.”

  “Don't worry, I'm not staying.”

  What's the use of worrying?

  It never was worthwhile …

  “No need to be alarmed, it's just Littlewood. We were at the meeting of the Mathematical Society. He needed a bath, so I said …”

  “Oh, of course.” She hangs up her coat. “If you'd like, I could leave.”

  “No need, no need. As soon as Littlewood's finished, we'll be on our way.”

  Both of them look at the divan, on which the diary lies open. If Alice recognizes that it's angled slightly farther to the right than it had been, however, she doesn't say so. And in any case both of them are too preoccupied with the niceties, with the question of which of them can be said, on this Thursday evening in the winter of 1917, to be the actual tenant of the flat, and therefore responsible for asking the other to sit down, to think about the diary.

  Finally they both sit at the same time. “And how is your mother, Mr. Hardy?” Alice asks. “I gather she's not been well.”

  “No, not well. I'm heading back there this evening, as a matter of fact.”

  “I see. And Mr. Littlewood?”

  “He seems to be doing fine.”

  At that moment Littlewood comes out of the bathroom, adjusting the cuffs of his uniform jacket and looking rather humid. “Hello, Mrs. Neville.”

  She rises. “Mr. Littlewood.”

  “We saw your husband at the meeting,” Hardy says.

  “Yes, he told me he was coming up.”

  “A pity he couldn't stay.”

  “His lectures.” Alice sits again. “And I saw your friend Mrs. Chase this afternoon.”

  “Anne? Really? Where?”

  “At the Buxtons'. She comes up once a week or so to bring her translations.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “She seems very well since the baby was born.”

  “I'm glad.” Littlewood puts on his hat. “Well, I'm afraid I must be going. Due back at base. Very good to see you, Mrs. Neville.”

  “And you.”

  “I shall accompany you,” Hardy says.

  She sees them out the door. Silently they descend the stairs until they emerge into the smoky darkness on St. George's Square.

  “Which way are you heading?”

  “Waterloo.”

  “Same direction. Share a cab?”

  “Why not?”

  They hail one and climb in. As they ride, Hardy contemplates the vastness of London, the wilderness of streets and places and mewses through which the driver c
onducts them. All this complication he must memorize. It's his own tripos.

  “The Knowledge, they call it,” he says to Littlewood.

  “What?”

  “What cabdrivers have to learn before they can get their license. The streets of London. They call it the Knowledge.”

  “Oh, yes.” But Littlewood's far away from the scenes he's gazing at, brick and stone façades, clung with moss, wet with mist and rain. Hardy can guess what he's thinking. He wonders if Alice meant to be cruel—possibly she did—and wishes he could say something to comfort his friend. But he can speak to Littlewood no more easily than he can to Neville, and that's the devil of it. He doesn't have the Knowledge. He has no idea where to begin.

  4

  “IS THIS SEAT TAKEN ?” Alice asks.

  A woman with a face like a Pekingese dog looks up at her from her knitting. Her mouth moves, her hands continue the knitting in the way that an animal's legs sometimes kick after it's dead. But she says nothing. Is she ill? Foreign?

  “Is this seat taken?”

  Now the woman's eyes widen. She seems to rear back against the wall of the compartment, as if seeking protection. Meanwhile the man who is sitting across from her has stood up. He has a mustache that reminds Alice of her grandfather's, and approaches with a look of protective authority. “I'm afraid the lady doesn't speak your language,” he says. “Now what seems to be the trouble?”

  She almost laughs. So she'd asked the question in German! Mrs. Buxton warned her this might happen; one of the occupational hazards of being a translator, of spending one's life in the disputed border territories that divide language from language. Sometimes words migrate from one side to the other. At the dress shop, you ask if a skirt can be ausgetaken. Or walking along St. George's Square, you tell a neighbor that her Scottish terrier is “a very jolie dog.”

  “I'm terribly sorry,” Alice says in careful English. “I was just wondering if the seat was taken, as there's a handbag—”

  “No, it's my handbag,” says the woman, and quickly snatches it away.

  “Thank you.” Alice sits. The man from across the compartment, his brow furrowed with anxiety and disapproval, sits too. And what must they think of her? Speaking German … A spy? An escapee from an internment camp? As Alice opens her own handbag, the woman with the pinched face shrinks away. The train pulls out of the station. Alice swallows hard so as not to laugh. It's Friday afternoon, and she's on her way back to Cambridge, to Eric, to Chesterton Road. A depressing prospect. Still, it must be done, not for Eric's sake so much as because it's part of her agreement with Gertrude. Not that Hardy comes very much, now that their mother is so ill.

  She takes out the Cambridge Review. But she can't concentrate, not today, because she's too conscious of what awaits her at the end of this short ride: Eric in the sitting room, beaming with pleasure at her return; Ethel in the kitchen, no doubt having prepared some special supper. Even with the rationing, she manages to turn out miracles on Friday nights. But never a curry, or a vegetarian goose. Ramanujan's name is not mentioned, either. So have they guessed? Eric couldn't possibly. But Ethel might.

  It still surprises her, how much she loves her London life. Were she a character in a novel, she'd be having an affair there. She's not, of course. What she savors is solitude. Arriving at the flat each Sunday evening, she breathes in the scent of damp and mothballs with relish. Monday morning she's still delighting in the narrowness of Gertrude's spinsterish bed. By Monday night she's feeling a little melancholy, yes, but even that melancholy is interesting, because it's so fresh; she's never had the time to indulge in it before. By Wednesday solitude has become her natural condition. By Thursday she is starting to dread the return to Cambridge. By Friday her stomach is clenched; she feels ill. And then, on the train, to the quotidian anxiety is now added this weird sensation of being taken for someone she is not. Her heart is racing. She has to work to keep herself from laughing. So she closes her eyes; tries to recall, as she often does when she needs to calm down, a conversation she had with Eric early in their marriage, before he gave up on trying to explain mathematics to her. That time he was trying to make her understand infinity, and he used the analogy of a train. Imagine a train, he said, with an infinite number of seats, numbered from 1 to infinity. Then Little Alice gets on the train—this was what he called her in those days: Little Alice—and there's not a seat to be had. Every seat from 1 to infinity is taken. What's Little Alice to do? But wait—it's an infinite train, so there's no need to worry. All you do is move the passenger in seat 1 to seat 2, the passenger in seat 2 to seat 3, the passenger in seat 3 to seat 4, and so on. And now, lo and behold, seat 1 is free.

  But how is this possible? Every seat from 1 to infinity is taken.

  Well, that's just it. It's an infinite train. And in fact you can make room for an infinite number of new passengers, because if you move the passenger in seat 1 to seat 2, the passenger in seat 2 to seat 4, the passenger in seat 3 to seat 6, and so on, then all the odd-numbered seats will be free.

  But how is this possible? Every seat from 1 to infinity is taken.

  It's an infinite train.

  The guard comes by. Alice hands him her ticket. She wonders if the Pekingese-faced woman's going to say anything to him, or the man across the way. To be denounced as a German spy would be amusing. No one says anything, though, and the guard moves on.

  Is this seat free?

  Seat 1 to seat 2, seat 2 to seat 4 …

  They talked the other day about the infinite train, she and Anne, when they were having lunch in Mrs. Buxton's kitchen. Anne was up from Treen to pick up some articles to translate, and had left the baby with her nurse. “Jack told me the same thing,” she said, “only in his version it was a hotel with infinite rooms. And a guest arrives, and wants a room.”

  “I don't get it. I can't visualize it. Probably I'm stupid.”

  “You're not supposed to get it. It's a paradox. All of mathematics is built on paradoxes. That's the biggest paradox of all—all this orderliness, and at the heart, impossibility. Contradiction. Heaven built on the foundations of hell.”

  Alice took a bite from her sandwich. She looked up to Anne as, at another moment in her life, she might have to a more experienced older girl at school. Gertrude, on the other hand, she now looked down upon, and had ever since she had seduced her into taking out her eye. For once Gertrude had taken out her eye, she no longer had anything on Alice, whereas Anne ruled Alice, because unlike poor scrawny Gertrude she, too, was a mathematician's wife (sort of). She was saftíg. Fertile. And she knew things about sex.

  “Eric wants me to have a baby,” Alice said.

  “Well, why don't you?” Anne asked.

  “Because then I'd have to go back to Cambridge. I'd have to be a wife.”

  “That doesn't sound so terrible to me,” Anne said. And Alice hoped she wouldn't mention, as her mother so often mentioned, the glass of water that was half full but also half empty. Imagine an infinite glass of water … Yet it was true, she had adored Eric once. What had happened?

  “I've already made compromises. I haven't seen him or spoken to him in a year.”

  “What happens when the war ends?”

  “He'll go back to India, I expect.”

  “To his wife.”

  “Yes. Funny, he hardly knows her. She's just a child.”

  “And you? What will you do?”

  “I have no idea. I suppose there won't be any more Notes from the Foreign Press, will there?”

  “There probably won't be a Cambridge Magazine.”

  “Then I suppose … I suppose I shall just go back to Cambridge, resume my wifely duties, and have a baby. What choice do I have?” The anger in her own voice surprised her.

  “You might find that changes everything,” Anne said. And taking a pad out of her handbag, she wrote herself a note. “Just a translation thought.”

  Odd—she carried herself with such assurance! Yet her life, when you thought about it, was
put together with glue and sticks: a husband she did not love but would not leave, children by different fathers, Littlewood mournful in Woolwich. Even so, Anne remained serene, as if Littlewood's suffering was merely something to be borne until he “saw sense”; she spoke of him as a mother would a pouting child who has turned his face to the wall and refuses to turn around again until she gives him a sweet. You can't give in. He'll come around soon. And because Alice adored and feared Anne, she did not say that she felt for Jack Littlewood, felt his suffering, his need to have his marriage (what else was it?) legitimized; his fatherhood legitimized. No, she wouldn't dare say that to Anne.

  The guard's voice opens her eyes. The train is pulling into Cambridge station. The woman with the Pekingese face is gathering her coat and her knitting. But wouldn't an infinite train need an infinite track? Well, nothing to do but get up, get off, hail a cab, and ride from the station up Magdalene Street, past Thompson's Lane. By the time she arrives at the house, her heart is in her throat. She opens the door, bracing herself for Eric's leap, for the shout of “Darling!” and the scurry to collect her bag. Every weekend it's the same. There's that lurch at the beginning, and then, how quickly she adjusts! For this is home. The Voysey furniture and the piano and the table on which Ramanujan did his puzzle. And of course the chair in which Eric reads, content merely to have her there; demanding nothing of her but her proximity. And Ethel, stumbling through with cups and saucers, evidence of how much more malleable is the human spirit than most of us guess. For Ethel's son has been in France for months, yet she seems to have moved past terror into a sort of euphoria of uncertainty. Yes, she's learned the trick by which so many get by: misery can be wonderfully comfortable. You can ease yourself into it as into a very soft chair. Why, it's happening to Alice now, as she stands in the hallway and takes off her coat. She feels it, the lure of the very soft chair. And every weekend it's the same. By Sunday, she knows, she'll have half a mind to stay. The cup half full …

  What's odd, tonight, is that no one comes to greet her, though she smells cooking. “Ethel?” she calls. “Eric?” No answer. She walks into the sitting room, and finds Eric in his usual chair. The lights are off. He's gazing into the shadows gathering around the piano.