Invitation to the Married Life

by Angela Huth

  Jack Yacksley also shared Bill’s love of trees. He had followed with interest the development of Bill’s arboretum, and had been the first to bring sympathy after the storm.

  Bill bent down to snap off the first thin branch. The luxury of retirement, he thought, was that the fate of a cluster of trees, and the fate of a single old church, could occupy most of your waking hours. With perhaps less than a decade left to him, the future of the wider world was too large to think about most of the time. Priorities changed. Visions narrowed. The sawing of a tree, and the loving of a wife, could occupy you wholly.

  * * *

  Toby Farthingoe’s office, converted from two attics, was very different from every other room in the house. Minimalism, here, he had insisted upon. White walls, silent grey rubber tiles on the floor. A roof window looked on to a high black branch of one of the cedar trees: even on bright days natural light was poor and the down lights were switched on constantly. Bookshelves held software manuals and dictionaries. A fax machine, photocopier, and two telephones were arranged in precise spaces on top of a row of white metal filing cabinets. The only curvaceous object in the room was a soft leather sofa: Toby’s favourite place to sit and think, or scribble some calculation. No photographs, pictures, ornaments, or unnecessary distractions.

  The huge working table was furnished only with Toby’s recent acquisition – an expensive and elaborate new Spark work station, on which he had just installed the MACSYMA symbolic manipulation programme. Taking thirty million characters on the Spark hard disk memory – good thing he had another seventy million left – this system, of incalculable sophistication, finally freed his creative mind from the pedantry and laborious drudgery of conventional programming. He was able to confide his innermost thoughts to the Spark, using its electronic circuitry as an extension of his own brain, and its tremendous power and speed as intellectual slaves to his own mind, whose imagination was forever thwarted by the slow and uncertain meanderings of his meagre powers of calculation. Each side of the machine were long spaces of laminated table which – his peculiar working quirk – Toby liked to keep empty. When he had to write he would go to the sofa with a block of paper, rather than sit at one of the pristine lengths of tabletop.

  Toby found the lure of this room, light worlds in feeling from the rest of the house, as irresistible as his visits to the night woods. The white silence, the sensation of enclosure in a private capsule (in which no-one else was ever allowed) was his escape, his solace. He spent eight or nine hours a day there, and sometimes much of the night. Often – as he would admit to anyone interested in enquiring about his working methods – not achieving very much. While more conventional software engineers would learn about a new system by studying the complex manual, Toby preferred to discover how it worked by trial and error. He enjoyed playing around, throwing disparate problems at the system to see how it reacted – experimenting. For the moment the MACSYMA was still a stranger to him, and it was a daily pleasure to find and marvel at its complexities. Previously, he had been happy for a decade with a more modest piece of software. On this it had been his good fortune (Frances said his genius) to invent a new algorithm for automating the complexities of airline booking. He had come upon it by chance, really. Reminiscing one day about his earlier work on semi-simple Lie groups, which he had always hoped would unveil the mysteries of symmetry, he had seen the light: some new, simple geometric ideas, which distilled all he had learned about groups by drawing funny diagrams describing the weight systems of finite dimensional representations, would finally render linear programming manageable. Gone would be the days when Crays and other supercomputers would churn away for days doing the simplex method. He had seen a way of literally cutting through the interior of the simplex, going straight at the solution, rather than meandering aimlessly along the boundary, searching for better and better vertices, like an English tourist on the coast of Malaga looking for a free spot on the beach. This moment had been his triumph. In that first moment of discovery, it was not greed that assailed him but, rather, a sort of triumphant and lonely joy. The greed came later. The next morning – when he realised that he could sell his discovery to the world’s major airlines. He knew then he would be rich. The subsequent annual royalties never ceased to astound him.

  Since that discovery, Toby’s mind had darted in many different directions. He had worked on a programme which provided a revolutionary diagnosis of childhood diseases – as yet not ubiquitous, but already in use at an Oxford hospital. His current preoccupation was to devise a programme that could accurately predict the stockmarket. Did the stockmarket contain an internal dynamic which would reveal itself to his mind? Could he ever distil the confusing, feverish data in the Financial Times into a coherent pattern? Would they finally emerge and reveal themselves as having some simple structure, some predictability behind the noise, which he would one day understand? He thought of his discovery of the pattern of weight multiplicities, years ago, and he felt that anything was possible, nothing was incomprehensible. And now, with this extraordinary new instrument in front of him, he was convinced, suddenly, that it was much more likely. What’s more, if he did succeed, there was another fortune to be made, besides an historical change in the world’s finances. . . .

  On the morning that his wife glowed at herself in the dressmaker’s mirror, Toby sat at the barren table tapping at his machine, transforming the flow chart he had written on his sofa into lines of programming code. He sat back, waiting for the computer to race through the billions of instructions he had coded in by the squiggles and formulae which he had jotted down in a few minutes. At ten millions of instructions per second, the machine would go through its motions in a matter of minutes. He liked to think of the hundreds of human calculators who would have to work a lifetime in order to perform what he had willed his slave to do in minutes. This thought Toby never took for granted. The wonder of technology impressed him every day – a fact he would be loath to admit to colleagues, to whom the writing of software was as pedestrian a part of life, these days, as the telephone.

  He sat back, enjoying listening to the soft ticks of the electronic brain, mesmerised by the small flashing light that revealed its keen ‘thinking’ process. In a state of excited anticipation he waited for the computer, his slave, to type the answer he wanted on the screen. This moment, experienced dozens of times a day, was always a thrilling one. But on this occasion the machine did not like what he had asked it to do.

  ‘Unhappy, unhappy,’ he muttered out loud, typing out ‘C 13’ and thus restoring the matrix he had created earlier. How pedantic are computers, he often thought – how over-allergic to the slightest mistake and therefore, despite their wondrous sophistication, how irritating. Stupid, even. . . . He intended one day to design a new kind of chip that would produce a computer system with a fault-tolerant memory. And even, most useful of all, a system able to perform pattern recognition. . . .

  But this morning Toby’s mind was full of curves and the geometric paths between them. In the optimisation problem he was working upon, if he could achieve one small brick towards the vast wall of the solution, he would consider it a good morning. He tapped the keys, trying to define a certain transcendental curve in terms of a parameter. . . . A moment later, at the flick of a button, the figures had leapt into a series of elongated loops, sharp as a geometric flower, much as he had imagined they would.

  Toby was satisfied with the image on the screen. And yet, as he looked at it, intently, it disconcerted him. He recognised one of those moments, which unnervingly came upon him from time to time, when an answer on the screen reminded him of real life, and the thought struck him that it must be conveying a message. When such notions descended, Toby despised himself for his suspicions. But nonetheless, they would cause him to pause, to think, to calculate in human terms.

  The flower on the screen spelt warning. Reluctantly, diverting his mind from the sophisticated language of the software to the inarticulate strugglings of the con
scious, it occurred to him he had tried his wife’s patience far enough. His lack of interest in the party, his lack of support concerning her problems, and his absence at night, had been unforgivable and must cease. Silly, trivial woman though she was in many respects, she was tolerant of his shortcomings and he loved her in a way (though since the old days of jealousy that way was not very exciting). He did not want to hurt her, or lose her. She could never be many things he had discovered, too late, he would ideally like in a wife. But there were compensations in his work, the pleasure of his daughter, and the higher delight of the peace in the woods. One day, perhaps, he would meet someone whose silence conveyed understanding rather than lack of interest: but he doubted it. Meantime, he must make amends. In the last couple of months before the ball he would attempt some show of appreciation by day, come to bed by night. After all, he believed in the continuation of marriage once the rash embarkation had been made.

  So, warning taken. White silence a comfort. Intricate shadow of cedar branch on floor. The familiar pattern of things, shapes, spaces, all contained in one room, were permanences that reassured. Toby touched a button, firm of purpose. The mendacious curves vanished at once, to be stored as a long sequence of O’s and I’s in the computer’s hard disk for as long as he cared to keep them. Their dual purpose, this morning, had been achieved.

  ‘How are you getting on, darling?’ asked Toby. ‘How’s it all going?’

  Frances glanced surreptitiously down the table to calculate the depth of her husband’s interest. She knew by the quality of the wine that there was some contrition in his heart. But it was important not to take advantage of his mood, or tax his interest too far.

  ‘Oh, marvellous. Very well. One or two hitches, but I’ve sorted them out. Very small amount of refusals. Everything going pretty smoothly.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I won’t bore you with details.’

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t bore me.’

  ‘I might, despite your good intentions. I won’t take the risk.’

  Toby smiled. ‘You’ll be pleased to know I’ve done my bit. Drink all ordered.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘Better champagne than I intended, somehow.’

  ‘Tobes: you’re so extravagant. How lovely.’

  She watched his face as Luigi brought in a perfect chocolate soufflé: her silent remonstration had been no soufflés for some time.

  ‘I say, look at that.’

  ‘There hasn’t been one for a while.’ She hoped he would understand what she was really saying.

  ‘Perfection.’ Toby spooned a large slice of the sugar-coated crust on to his plate, followed by a mass of soft and airy chocolate bubbles. ‘My last meal on earth would be two chocolate soufflés.’

  Frances sat back, smiling. She had not seen her husband so happy for ages. He was economical about his enthusiasms. It was an unusual joy to see him excited about something, even if it was only a chocolate soufflé. Frances took very little herself, so that later he could be persuaded to finish what was left.

  ‘I thought that along with the Perrier we should have gallons of iced coffee. So many people like soft drinks these days,’ she ventured.

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Do you really mean that?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ Toby looked up from his empty plate. ‘There’ve been dozens of parties where I would have given anything for iced coffee,’ he lied.

  ‘Now you’ve gone too far.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re lying. You’ve never given iced coffee a thought at a party.’

  Toby sighed. ‘Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I was only trying to encourage. You have such good ideas.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Frances. She recognised they had come to a dangerous impasse. The subject of the party should be changed at once. ‘Why don’t you finish the soufflé?’

  Toby scarcely bothered to hesitate. ‘If you’re sure. . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  As he scraped at the bowl on the sideboard, silver spoon against white bone china, Frances was aware of the oppression of the dining room. Sometimes she wished they had no servants and supper was in the kitchen, Toby mixing the salad while she stood at the stove. Sometimes she hated the formality of their dinners here among the shadows from the cedars outside, in the stuffy air that smelt of pepper and polish.

  What could they talk about now? What did people who had been married for fifteen years talk about night after night if they dined alone? The children, the mortgage, practicalities, plans, work? Never, in their case, work. Frances had once claimed that anything to do with computers was beyond her, so Toby – not wanting to bore her, perhaps – kept that part of his life to himself.

  ‘I must show you the letter from Fiona that came this morning,’ said Frances, knowing she sounded drab.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘She’s apparently top in English, bottom in maths.’

  ‘No need to worry about her. She’s pretty middle of the road all round.’ Toby scraped the last morsels of chocolate from his plate. ‘What about the party? Is she coming?’

  ‘Of course. She’d hate to miss it. I’ve said there’s only one condition, she absolutely can’t wear her jeans.’

  Toby laughed. He liked his daughter’s tomboy phase.

  ‘Shouldn’t think she’ll enjoy it much. All us old things.’

  ‘Well, she wants to come and I’ve said she can.’

  ‘Fine, then.’

  They both stood, paused at their different ends of the long table.

  ‘I’m going to watch the news,’ said Frances. ‘Your sleeping bag was washed today. You’ll find it in the laundry room.’

  Toby looked at his wife as if she was someone he had only just met. ‘I won’t be using it tonight,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve been lucky: so many badgers these past few nights, I can afford to give them a miss.’

  Frances, though expecting this decision, was confused by his announcement. She felt suddenly soft, malleable, accommodating.

  ‘Oh, Tobes, you mustn’t ever think I mind you badger watching. . . .’

  ‘I don’t think you do mind very much. Come on, I’ll watch the news with you.’

  He left the room ahead of her. In the study he poured her a drink, sat close to her on the sofa, one hand dormant on her knee.

  Tonight, thought Frances, would be a small gain for them both, then Toby would retract again. In her new mood, freed of Ralph, she longed to stop his habit of ebbing away. But she knew she never could. And besides, a changing tide in marriage is a healthier thing than static waters. So, she was resigned to meeting, parting, meeting, parting, on their small, equable scale. It was their way of dealing with the gulf that divides all human souls, and it worked quite well.

  Frances kept both hands round her glass of whisky, intent on the news. She imagined Toby had no idea how impatient she was for it to end.

  * * *

  On the first morning of half-term, in early June, Ursula drove the children to Martin’s mother in Dorset. She hated to be without them, even for a few days. But they shared her love of the country, and for them a long summer’s weekend on their grandmother’s farm was infinitely preferable to staying in Oxford. Sarah’s only reluctance had been to leave the cat, but in the end she had agreed that cats like to stay in one place. Taking it away would make it unhappy, Ursula explained, an argument which found Sarah’s sympathy immediately. And so the cat was left behind, the fur of its chest clotted with her tears. It licked itself clean, bored by her histrionics.

  Since its return the night of the dinner in St Crispin’s, the animal had behaved in a docile but aloof manner. It was capable of ignoring almost all life that went on around it. Untouched by events, uneager for food or milk, it was a loveless, self-contained creature, entirely preoccupied by its own private thoughts. It would sit immobile for hours, staring into space, upright in its china-cat position on the dresser. Or curled on the window-ledge, eye on the birds, but dis
dainful of them now. It made no indication it was intent on further killings. Apparently immune to temptation, there was no perceptible twitch of whiskers when provocative pigeons strutted the lawn.

  The cat was polite to Sarah, allowing itself to be held and stroked, but never responding with any gesture of pleasure or affection. When Ursula returned to the house alone, it gave no sign of welcome. On many occasions it simply left the room, tail rigid with animosity, high in the air, and it would not appear again until the children came back from school. The dislike and distrust between Ursula and the animal, recognised on both sides, flourished daily. But Ursula kept her uncomfortable feelings to herself. She had always believed a husband’s attention should be reserved for things of some importance, and to burden Martin with the trivial worries of every-day would be the quickest way to corrode his sympathy. In the broad scope of their marriage, the cat was not of major importance. So she said nothing. Besides, she could not bear to upset Sarah. The cat was established in the house, now. Ursula could only try to make the best of it.

  Today, the cat was far from her mind. She had planned a good day for herself to make up for parting with the children. When she had left them, happy with their grandmother, she drove to Marlborough to shop in the market. This was always a pleasure: the cheapness and freshness of the vegetables, fruit and fish; the friendliness of the stallkeepers; and her especial relationship with the butcher, who would carry her heavy bags of meat to the car and give her presents of homemade sausages. In contrast, shopping in Oxford was an act of misery – surly, unhelpful shopkeepers, over-priced, poor quality food, dozens of perfectly ordinary things unavailable. She had long ago given up trying. The bargains she found in nearby market towns were perhaps cancelled out by the price of the petrol, but were worth the journey for the pleasure of finding delicious things and agreeable country people. Today she bought fresh monkfish, and Somerset Brie, and Jersey cream to go with early strawberries. Tonight would be the first time she and Martin had been alone for a long time, and she was determined to make a special effort with dinner.