by William Boyd
She got drunk on the train home to London, drinking whisky and eating chocolates (she was not so slim in those days) and chatting volubly about her life as a schoolgirl in Banbury and Oxford. John found it amusing. He sat opposite her with his bitter lemon, goading her on to more daring revelations.
Her own life at this stage was in something of a hiatus. Her thesis was complete, immaculate, submitted, and she was waiting for the oral examination. For the very first time in her life, it seemed, the future lay open ahead of her, empty and innocuous. She luxuriated in her idleness; it seemed pointless, she thought illogically, to apply for a job with her Ph.D. unexamined. So she read and shopped, visited friends and went to films in the afternoon, repainted their bedroom and looked vaguely for a larger flat. She was happy. Her father had always told her to make sure and recognize that state when it arrived, and acknowledge it. “It’s like money in the bank, old girl,” he would say, “money in the bank.” She was happy and she recognized that fact, as instructed. Being married had many advantages, she realized, one of which was joint bank accounts. John’s salary easily paid for everything.
Hope’s thesis was entitled Dominance and Territory: Relationships and Social Structure. She had drifted into ethology almost by accident after her degree in botany, judiciously steered in that direction by her supervisor, old Professor Hobbes. But when she felt the urge to study again she realized she had grown tired of laboratories and of animals in cages and so she resumed her botanizing and resurrected some work she had done years before on trees. She thought that it would at least get her out of doors. Professor Hobbes had no objections and he directed her up a few avenues of research that he himself was too busy to explore. She wrote a paper on “The Tilia Decline: An Anthropogenic Interpretation.” Hobbes said it wasn’t publishable, but he might find the data useful for a talk he was giving at a symposium in Vienna. Hope had no objections; she was fond of Edgar Hobbes, and all his pupils knew this was part of the quid pro quo for his patronage. He had no worries about her doctorate, and neither had she; her work was thorough, exact and surprisingly literate, Hobbes said, for a scientist. Her oral examination was a formality and, eventually, one chilly afternoon, she emerged from her college to walk the streets as Dr. Hope Clearwater.
That evening, she and John went out for a celebratory meal. They found a French restaurant in Knightsbridge that was expensive enough to raise the occasion to “rare treat” status and ordered a bottle of champagne.
“Come on, John,” she said. “You’ve got to have one glass. At least.”
“No.” He smiled pleasantly. “It doesn’t agree with me. Not when I’m working.”
“Christ, it’s Saturday tomorrow.” She poured him a glass anyway.
He raised it in a toast. “Congratulations, Doc,” he said. “Lots of love.”
They clinked glasses. She drank hers down in large gulps and watched him set his carefully on the white tablecloth. It fizzed, untouched, brimful, all through the meal.
Apart from his new alcohol-free life, there were no other significant changes in John’s life that Hope could easily discern. But, subtly, indubitably, things were different. For a long time she blamed herself for experiencing this feeling, on the grounds that if you persistently go around thinking something is different, this in itself will be sufficient to establish that fact. Covertly, she observed and analyzed him, and she had to admit there was very little to go on. Perhaps she was imagining things? They went out together, they talked to each other just as often, they shared enthusiasms and exasperations as before, they made love with the same frequency…. But despite all that, in the end she knew that, in some as yet undefined way, he was not the same man she had met and married.
The victim, the catalyst, the guilty party, had to be—she decided with some reluctance—his work. She almost would have prefered a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, or some deficiency in her own nature that marriage had revealed, but her rival was mathematics. John was no longer as engaged with her as he had been. She was no longer the main focus of his thoughts. It was this shift that had been nagging at her over the weeks. That portion of his conscious mind that she had occupied had diminished. He did discuss his work with her, true, but even the broad, simplified terms he employed were not sufficient for her to grasp it fully. She could not understand what he was doing, or what excited him. She made efforts, but the gap between them was not intellectual so much as conceptual—his brain operated on a different level and in a different sphere from hers. As far as his work in mathematics was concerned there was never going to be anything more to share.
But I have my own work too, she thought, and as if to prove it to herself spent three weeks writing an article entitled Aggression and Evolution. She boldly submitted it to Nature where, to her surprise, it was accepted. Thus encouraged, she started applying for a few jobs and got her reading up to date. She made a point of discussing her work with John—the latest controversies in ethology, new directions in life sciences, as they were now being called—which, to her vague irritation, he found highly interesting. But it made little difference. She saw, in due time, that he was held and involved in what he did in a way that was to her fundamentally strange. It wasn’t like work—as she and the rest of the world considered it—at all. She could not understand it, and, she concluded with a dull ache of despair, that meant she would never really understand him either.
THE MARGIN OF ERROR
Should Hope Clearwater have seen the signs? Should she have recognized the early signals?…
When a skyscraper is built, one of the most obsessively precise jobs is the positioning and fixing of the first, vast, steel girders that form the foundations of the whole airy frame of the building. The margin of error involved in the positioning of these tons of metal is minuscule. It must be no greater than an eighth of an inch. A minute deviation at this stage—a hole drilled a few millimeters askew, an angle miscalculated by a fraction of a degree, can have dramatic consequences later. Eight hundred feet up, that insignificant three-millimeter shift has grown into a fourteen-yard chasm.
John called it the for-want-of-a-nail syndrome. For want of a nail the battle was lost. Something small suddenly becomes hugely enlarged. Something calm suddenly becomes enraged. Something flowing smoothly in one instant becomes turbulent. How or why does this happen? What if, John said, there are small perturbations that we miss or ignore; tiny irritations that we regard as fundamentally inconsequential. These small perturbations may have large consequences. In science, so in life.
Hope has a small perturbation in her life at the moment. A woman from the village behind the beach is careless about tethering her goat. Several times a week it breaks free and makes its way to Hope’s garden behind her beach house. Hope watches it now as it grazes on her hibiscus hedge. She has thought about remonstrating, but the woman—called Marga—is a tough, bossy character. Hope can imagine the entire village becoming involved in their dispute, and she needs the village, and in a way they need her. The system is stable. She can spare a few hibiscus flowers.
Hope watched the countryside unreel through the carriage window, dull and gray, green and brown, the hard umber clods of the winter fields dusted with frost. No wonder she felt depressed: a low sky, a drab world, a cold wind…she wasn’t born for English winters, she decided; meteorologically she was inclined to the hot south. To distract herself she switched her attention from the view to a mental image of her destination, her friend Meredith’s cottage, conjuring up a log fire, a hot meal, red wine and soft armchairs. That was better, that was all right, and she knew an approximation of that was waiting for her. It was just unfortunate that Meredith was so dirty, that she never seemed to clean or dust her home. Hope always worried about the sheets too. There had been a time when she didn’t care where or upon what she slept. Even now she would not have described herself as unduly fussy, but these days there was a minimum requirement of whatever bed she found herself sleeping in—clean sheets. She was almost sure that Mered
ith would not offer her an unchanged bed, but that “almost” was an insidious concern. Best just to drink a lot, she told herself, and forget.
The man sitting opposite her had a tie rather like one of John’s, she noticed. John was away at a convention in New York at Columbia University. It was their first protracted separation since their marriage and she was missing him badly. But not at first. At first she had felt guilty at how much she was enjoying being on her own again, but that sensation had only lasted a day and a night. When he phoned—he phoned regularly—she told him this and he said he was missing her too. She knew he was lying—not lying, perhaps, but merely being nice. He talked with such vigor about the conference and the seminars he was attending, the old friends from Cal Tech he was encountering, that she guessed he only started to think about her when he picked up the phone to make his duty call.
Why was she being so unkind about him, she asked herself impatiently? Why was she so ruthlessly analyzing their marriage? What did it gain? She took out a cigarette, unthinkingly, and rolled it between her fingers.
“Excuse me,” the man with John’s tie said. “This is a non-smoker.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m not smoking.”
She was pleased to see that her response had thrown him, rather. Defiantly, she put the unlit cigarette in her mouth and left it there. She rested her chin on her fist and stared out at the cooling towers of Didcot power station as they slowly drifted by. I must be getting addicted, she thought. Bloody John Clearwater…she had started smoking in self-defense, and now she found she really quite enjoyed it. She let the cigarette hang sullenly from her lips. There was an old television show, she remembered, where the lead character, a private eye or cop, did the same thing as his personal gimmick, always taking out a cigarette, sticking it in his mouth, but never lighting it. He had a parrot as a pet. Big white one, a cockatoo. It was all rather affected and striven for, she thought, and that unlit cigarette became particularly irritating. She glanced at the man opposite, who was reading with rigid concentration, and hoped she was irritating him too.
Meredith Brock was a don, an architectural historian, and one of some eminence, so Hope had come to realize, much to her astonishment. Meredith was an old friend; they had known each other since their school days. They were the same age and Hope was slightly affronted that Meredith had made a name for herself so young, albeit in such a recondite area. Her renown had come about as a result of a massive survey of medieval English buildings that she had worked on. An old historian—whose lifelong endeavor the survey had been—had hired her as his assistant to see the books through the presses and had died just as the entire multivolume project had been published. It fell to Meredith to publicize and defend the enterprise—it was controversial and nicely opinionated—and because of her age and her looks she had enjoyed a fleeting celebrity. She duly became the only architectural historian any lazy editor, producer or committee chairman could think of and her profile had swiftly risen. It was when Hope had read Meredith’s name in two newspapers, heard her voice on the radio and seen her on television, all in one week, that she realized just how far her friend had come.
Hope looked at her now as she made them both a drink. She is pretty, Hope thought grudgingly, prettier than me. But she did nothing to exploit her looks. Her clothes were cheap and out of fashion. She wore too much makeup and very high heels, all the time. Her hair was long but never allowed to hang free; it was always held up and arranged in loops and swags by a combination of combs and clips. Hope thought she was at her most attractive when she had just woken up: hair down, tousled, face clean and mascara-free. They were good enough friends for Hope to be able to tell her this, gently to encourage ideas of a new look, a lowering of heels, a less lurid shade of lipstick. Meredith had listened patiently, shrugged and said what was the point?
“It’s no good for people like you and me, Hope,” she had told her, wearily. “We can’t really take it seriously. It’s hard enough even making a vague effort. This whole—” she picked at her acrylic jersey’s appliqued satin flowers, “this whole flimflam.”
Meredith handed her a gin and tonic, one small ice cube floating, no lemon. Hope picked a wet hair off the outside of the cloudy glass. At least the tonic was fizzing.
“Careful, lovely. It’s strong.”
Hope sipped, sat back in her chair and stretched her legs. Meredith threw a log on the fire. A pallid ray of winter sun brightened the cottage windows for an instant, then all was pleasant gloom again.
“So how is Mr. Clearwater?” Meredith asked. Hope told her, but did not expand on her own disquiet. It was too early in the day for confidences, they could wait until after dinner. So they talked generally about John, about being married, about not being married, about what job Hope might find. As they chatted, Hope wondered: does she like John? They had met once before the wedding, and possibly a couple of times since. Everything had seemed very cordial, tolerably pleasant. Why not? She looked at Meredith. No, she thought, she probably doesn’t.
Meredith went through to the kitchen to organize the lunch. Hope sipped her gin, noticing already the effects the alcohol was having on her. She found her thoughts returning inevitably to her husband. She thought of nothing or no one else these days, it seemed to her. Was that healthy? Should she be worried? What was it about him, she wondered, slightly fuddled, that had drawn her to him, given her such confidence?
The gin, the heat of the fire, the softness of the armchair, were sending her to sleep. She stood up and wandered across the room and looked at Meredith’s bookshelves. Antiquities of Oxfordshire, Traditional Domestic Architecture in the Banbury Region, Dark Age Britain, Landscape in Distress…suddenly she knew what it was about John; what obsessed her. John had a secret she could never share. John had knowledge that was denied to virtually everyone on earth. She felt her cheeks hot and pressed her glass to them. That was it: John had secrets and she envied him. This was what had fascinated her about him almost immediately, but she had never really understood it. John and his mathematics, John and his game theory, John and his turbulence…she would never, could never know about them. She envied him his secret knowledge, but it was, she saw, an envy that was strangely pure, almost indistinct from a kind of worship. He was at home in a world that was banned to all but a handful of initiates. You gained entrance if you possessed the necessary knowledge, but she knew it was knowledge that was impossible for her to acquire. That was what made it special. It was magic, in a way. But then a magician might perform some extraordinary trick that made you gasp with incredulity, but it would be possible for you to reproduce it, if he let you in on his secret, if he showed you how. John could spend a lifetime trying to show me how, she thought, but it would make no difference. If you don’t have the right kind of brain then all the effort and study in the world can’t help you. So what did that imply? To enter the secret mathematical world John Clearwater inhabited, you had to have a rare and special gift: a particular way of thinking, a particular cast of mind. You either had that gift or you hadn’t. It couldn’t be learned; it couldn’t be bought.
Hope took a book from the shelf and turned the pages, not looking at them, thinking on, feeling the gin surge through her veins. This envy I feel, she thought, it wasn’t like admiring someone with a special talent—a painter, say, a musician, a sportsman. Through diligent practice and expert coaching you could experience an approximation of what that talented person achieved: paint a picture, play a sonata, run a mile. But when she looked at what John did, she knew that was impossible. An ordinarily numerate person could, by dint of hard work, go so far up the mathematical tree. But then you stopped. To go beyond required some kind of faculty or vision that you had to be born with, she supposed. Only a very few occupied those thin whippy branches at the extremity, moved by the unobstructed breezes, exposed to the full fat glare of the sun.
Hope looked at the book she held in her hands, a little dazed at the clarity of her insight. She saw a photogr
aph of the aisle of a church, transept columns, glass, vaulting. She smiled: she envied Meredith a little too, but it was a more mundane envy. Meredith had special knowledge. She knew everything about old buildings, the exact names for the precise objects. She knew what a voussoir was, the difference between Roman and Tuscan doric, where to find the predella on an altarpiece, what you kept in an ambry, employed words like misericord, modillion and mouchette with confident precision. But then, Hope thought, so do I. I know the difference between pasture and meadow, can distinguish crack willow from white willow, I know what kind of flower Lithospermum purpureocaeruleum is. With time and effort I could learn all Meredith’s knowledge and she could learn mine. But John’s world, John’s knowledge, is beyond me, un-reachable.
She walked through to the kitchen, rather chastened by the rigor of her gin-inspired analysis. A roast chicken steamed in the middle of the pine table. Meredith was draining vegetables in a colander. Hope deliberately did not look at the state of the cooker. One of Meredith’s several cats leapt up on the table and carefully picked its way through the place mats and cutlery to the chicken, which it sniffed and, Hope thought, licked.
“No you don’t,” Meredith said gently, setting a bowl of brussels sprouts on the table and making no more effort to chase the cat away. “That’s our lunch, greedy swine.” She pulled her chair back.
“Sit down, Hope,” she said. “And bloody cheer up, will you? Look like death.”