2009 - Turbulence

by Giles Foden

  Vaward followed up his long, baying speech by saying loudly, almost shouting, “And do you know what? Scientifically speaking, you are right! Because, scientifically speaking, one can never have enough data. But these military men have a different culture—bend everything to the task, that’s their view. Every piece of data gathered must work actively towards victory. That is the end of their hypothesising, not scientific truth in the abstract.”

  I spoke softly, feeling like a doctor at the bedside of a patient. “I don’t want to be a pessimist, sir. I simply report to you what Ryman told me. I’m sorry. I wish it were more momentous, but there it is. His main interest was the causes of war. Meteorology, once a passion, seemed to have become a distraction.”

  A clock sounded, and Sir Peter seemed to take it as a sign to calm down. “I still think there is much more to be found out about that number,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “I was rather hoping you’d be the one to spill the beans.” He gave a sigh, blowing out smoke. “Perhaps it will have to wait till after the war.”

  Feeling a wave of self-disgust pass through me, I watched the smoke curls unwind themselves as they rose to the ceiling.

  “Here,” said Sir Peter gruffly, seeing me look and proffering his cigarette case, which I availed myself of. “A more immediate question,” he continued, “is what are we going to do with you now? I have two choices for you. The first is that you join Mr Stagg again. He has taken charge of the meteorological planning for the invasion of Europe and is in dire need of a personal assistant. He has asked for you, as I say, and it’s not a bad idea, given that you know him already and are familiar with complex forecasting techniques. But I have also had a query from Combined Operations. Apparently Geoffrey Pyke, whom I understand you met in Dunoon, has asked that you be the meteorologist on something they are up to in Canada. They won’t tell me what, exactly, but it concerns ice.”

  My mind went back to the pub. So Habbakuk was something to do with ice, then.

  Sir Peter continued. “So those are the two options. Despite your idiocy with that plane, I would be sad to lose you. My personal preference is that you help with the weather planning for the invasion. The greater urgency is there, no doubt about it. But I’ve always made it my policy to allow every man to choose his own destiny. That way he can find out what line of work he is really cut out for.”

  I watched him write an address on a scrap of paper. “Pyke says you are to go to this address in Smithfield.”

  His tired white face regarded me in the gloom. “Once you have done so, and talked to him, make your choice, Meadows. Let my secretary know, and she will make the necessary arrangements.”

  “Thank you, sir. I will try to make the right decision.”

  “Miss Clements will see you down,” he said, ushering me to the door. I felt he wanted to be rid of me now, but he had one last thing to say. “For God’s sake, try not to kill anyone else. I’ve had the devil of a time extracting you from this mess.”

  But there was no sign of Miss Clements when I emerged. I stood under the portrait of Fitz-Roy, reconsidering my options for a moment. Right then, having had more than enough of weather, it was to ice that I was tending, somewhere clean and simple without the problematical involutions of the atmosphere and the dangerous gloss of an invasion. But I owed Sir Peter a great deal for his having taken my side in all that had happened.

  I pressed the button for the lift to the ground floor. The door opened and there, like a genie from a bottle, Miss Clements appeared, carrying the score for Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Suddenly fluent, romantically speaking, I forgot for a second the horror of Ryman’s death, and the urgency of D-Day, and the ingenious plans of Pyke.

  Miss Clements, it emerged in conversation, belonged to an amateur dramatics group. She had a rehearsal that evening. I knew the piece well, we used to do it at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge. Mentioning the weather duet in Act I as my cue—

  How beautifully blue the sky,

  The glass is rising very high,

  Continue fine I hope it may,

  And yet it rained but yesterday.

  Continue fine I hope it may,

  And yet it rained but yesterday

  –I stood for a while chatting with her, the lift door bouncing against my open palm.

  Oh to be there again, to see her face. Clear, fine-textured, with a hint of sensuality, such as invited one’s gaze to linger longer than was strictly polite. I would give up all my lamplit answers, any number of proofs and academic honours, to heave anchor for the past and see that face again. It makes me wish I had brought a cassette of G&S, not Haydn, with me on this voyage. But it is no matter. The words come back unassisted across the fields of the ocean and the music does too: the mind’s strong poetry, hoving across the deep-stretched years into this cocktail of wood and ice, this drinker of dolour and dollars, this knocker-back of riyals and heavy fuel oil, this vessel which we have christened Habbakuk:

  Did ever pirate loathed

  Forsake his hideous mission

  To find himself betrothed

  To a lady of position?

  Ah yes! Ah yes! Ah yes!

  Choir-voices of the sea…

  I take out my pipe now and remember the time we said goodbye—for the last time. Through a tobacco fog I see her again, her face as massive in my mind’s eye as the back of the mysterious cetacean monster which has returned to our side, that gigantic bull of a sperm whale which appeared at the start of the journey and seemed like a moving land.

  Now it seems like a continent.

  Twelve

  A light, fresh breeze was funnelling down Kingsway as, jolly from flirting and still humming to myself, I emerged from Adastral House. Looking back, I am shocked I could have forgotten Ryman’s death so blithely, even if for a moment. But there were distractions…The breeze was carrying a scent of green apples from a grocer’s trolley stall and cinnamon from a baker selling hot cross buns. The buns were laid out on greaseproof paper on lattice trays. I bought one and it was delicious. I could mention the sticky glaze on top, the way the light crust broke in, but the real thing I remember was the burst of sweetness when I hit a currant.

  But maybe I am being too hard on myself—eating, drinking, most of all sex, those activities ease the turbulence of the flesh, allowing us, briefly, apparent escape from the burden of soul.

  As I ate and walked, I recalled something Ryman had said about consciousness being like the berries in jam—that sometimes we are in the berry, sometimes in the jam, with the difference being that the ‘berries’ are the exterior surfaces of consciously directed thoughts (such as one might explore while pursuing a line of research) whereas the jam is what we’re mostly paddling around in. But now and then we hit upon a berry we were not expecting and that sends us down a train of associative thought, enabling us to leap from berry to berry like someone crossing a stream by stepping stones.

  Eating my bun as I was, I suddenly remembered something else: a story that Ryman—who had spent some time teaching at Paisley Technical College when he was younger—had told me about boys throwing teacakes at him while he was at the blackboard. We were moving along the beech tree walk, measuring out future memory pace by pace…I remember his tall bush of wiry grey hair moving in the breeze as he spoke…

  “I took the affair as a joke, but at the next lecture the bad effects of this were seen. They all brought in buns and pelted me with them. Throughout the term I got used to stale buns hitting me on the back of the head intermittently. It kept recurring. I asked each student in turn whether he was responsible and of course they all said no, so I told them that one of their number could add to his ungentlemanly qualities that of being a liar. They just laughed. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw one in the act of throwing. His name was Patrick Latchford. In a moment of madness I seized him and made to drag him towards the door. He grabbed onto his desk and it came off its pedestal, hitting the floor with a loud bang. The lid flew open, scatteri
ng buns over the floor. There must have been at least twenty of them. It turned out his father was a baker. Anyway, that was the end of the lecture bun saga.”

  Ryman had laughed then. It was good to recall him happy for once, and I found myself laughing, too, as I remembered it, though it was the kind of laughter that threatened to turn to tears in an instant. But Kingsway was busy with men and women, many in uniform, and the sun was shining through gaps of loose cloud. Maybe it was a signal one thing at least was going to go right, though in retrospect it’s clear I had already received that, back at Adastral House.

  I walked on a little, past an umbrella shop, a chop house, then hit Pen Corner—the Waterman’s Pen shop on the corner of Kemble Street and Kingsway. In the window were fountain pens, silver and gold. They lay like bullet shells in their velvet beds and they made me think of the shell cases in Ryman’s study. I really should write to Gill; but what could I say? Sorry didn’t seem anything like enough. On the contrary, it seemed like an insult.

  The streets were filthy, and here and there were holes where there should have been buildings. A man in a brown coat, grey flannel trousers and a shirt with an open collar passed me. His right hand was dangling down with the thumb in the fold of a book with green boards, which I recognised as Enquire Within Upon Everything, then a popular title. He had the look of a derelict or someone gone AWOL. Watching him pass, I suddenly became aware again of my own appearance, in particular the cuts on my face. I had not thought about them in the crucial meeting, though she would often joke about them in later years. Strange how different times can come back like this, as if the separate incidents are being reissued fresh.

  Waiting for a bus, I took the piece of paper from my pocket and read what Sir Peter had written: Morgan’s, Smithfield, no uniform. I began plotting the journey in my head, stepping closer to the kerb and being jostled by the crowd of waiting passengers. I didn’t see the bus, which came close enough to me to whip the paper from my hand—and didn’t stop anyway. A murmuring grumble, like the beginnings of thunder far off in the sky, went through the knot of people. They were collected round a lamp post in a way that reminded me of the cattle in Kilmun, gathering round a salty post, or the cot-house when the oscillator was pipping.

  Catching my breath, I fell to my knees to retrieve the paper from where it lay in the road, flapping like the wing of an injured bird. As I picked it up I became certain that I must throw in my hand with Pyke. Despite the assertions of special knowledge I had made to Sir Peter, the truth was that I felt that grasping the uncertainty of weather in a way coherent enough for the generals was too much of a challenge. No amount of forecasting skill would ever give reasonable enough assurance to send so many men before gunfire. At least with ice there was some certainty: you knew it was going to melt.

  For a second I stood paralysed by the hazy glamour of the ice field which was waiting for me in the future: the wraiths of snowdrift racing from under the paws of torchlit huskies, the sledges moving across the great white desert, the boiling green sea biting at its edges, the heroism of an Amundsen, a Shackleton, a Scott…

  Still clutching the note, I made my way towards Holborn, passing on the way a pub called The Dagger. The sign above the door showed a knife held by a disembodied, gauntleted hand—some kind of heraldic emblem—with a sort of cloud painted round the pricking-point of the blade.

  A point in space—but for once I successfully resisted the temptation to go in. Outside, a Guinness delivery lorry was waiting with its engine running, tainting the freshness of the breeze with its exhaust. I watched the greasy black cloud of its emissions drift down a side street into a stand of trees, where it was enmeshed by the moving leaves and branches. The drayman, wearing old green overalls that recalled to me those worn by the foresters in Kilmun, was evidently waiting for someone to emerge, for he began sounding his horn repeatedly, blast upon blast. It was extremely loud.

  As I walked away the sound carried after me on the wind, fading until I could no longer be sure if it was a present perception or a memory. It was as if I was in a labyrinth, lost halfway between the mental and physical worlds.

  Thirteen

  Pyke’s operation was in Smithfield Market, that ancient quarter of London wedged between Clerkenwell, Blackfriars and the City. Walking under its large, ornate hangars, in front of long ranks of butchers in white coats and bloody aprons, past glistening chops and chump, haunches and great mounds of diced beef, was like entering a cathedral dedicated to the god of meat.

  At the poultry specialist, glazed duck lay in rows beneath bald chickens suspended from hooks, their plucked puckered skin hanging loose; elsewhere the splayed carcasses of cows and pigs presented their innards to passers-by. There was even a pile of pigs’ trotters. I stared at it all in wonder.

  Most hypnotic of all were the large mounds of stewing meat, chopped up into cubes, which the butchers were slowly moving from one place to another with what looked like garden shovels, all the while making jokes at each other’s expense. It did not seem conceivable, in a time of rationing, that so much meat could exist. Did that, I wondered, explain their good humour?

  I suddenly felt jealous of these men whose role in life was so clear and unambiguous. But it was not in any way shallow. The casual attitudes of these Cockney butchers, the way they strolled about with saws and cleavers, caps at jaunty angles on their heads, or stood around drinking cups of tea—tea was the potent cement between them—the barely comprehensible shouts and calls they gave, all this was simply camouflage for a high seriousness of purpose. They were working men who obviously believed in what they did.

  Apart from the repartee of the butchers, the other main sound of the market was a tremendous lowing, emanating from yards behind the main halls in which the doomed cows were penned. As I walked past them, some sad-faced, some big and boisterous, I was glad I did not have to kill them myself.

  Morgan’s was a rather dilapidated steel vault that appeared, from the outside, to be almost completely sealed. But there was a door. The name was stencilled in a patchy red arc of paint across the metal. To one side was a black rubber button. I pressed it and thought I heard a bell sound inside, but through the market’s cachophony I couldn’t be sure. It was a while before the door opened, releasing a cloud of frozen air, in the midst of which was a face wearing a flying helmet and goggles.

  “Name?” said the apparition, whose body, I now saw, was encased in an RAF-issue electrically heated flying suit.

  “Henry Meadows,” I replied.

  “Come this way, sir.” Before us stretched a dimly lit corridor with steel walls. He led me down it to an anteroom, where more fleece-lined flying suits hung on pegs, together with helmets and goggles. “You’ll need to put one of these on before I take you down.” He almost seemed to stand at attention while I changed into the heavy garment. We returned to the corridor, following it until we came to a passenger lift. The descent was a long one. Eventually, the lift stopped with a jolt and its doors opened to reveal a small square room, like an airlock. Facing us was a door, sealed like the main entrance.

  “Just a minute, sir,” said my guardian, pressing another rubber button. A voice rang out from a loudspeaker grille. “Yes?”

  “Verse Six and visitor. Mr Meadows.”

  “I’ll just check with the gaffer,” said the voice. We waited in silence in that stifling little space until the voice came again. “Ask him the name of the sea lion.”

  My minder invited me to speak into the grille. “It was Lev,” I said, leaning forward in the bulky suit. “Leviathan.”

  The door opened with a hiss to reveal a vast cold-store—much lower in temperature than the corridor—in the midst of which were set up differently sized blocks of ice and other materials, including wood, masonry and concrete. There were various pieces of equipment—long steel basins, electric refrigeration machines, some kind of industrial vice—but I could not work out the purpose of this strange laboratory. Suspended from the ceiling, rows of metal-
shaded lamps sent pyramids of light down through the curling air.

  Out of the vapours three men approached, each dressed in a flying suit. One of them had a pistol in his belt; another carried a sub-machine gun. I hesitated, but then the unarmed member of the trio pushed up his goggles.

  “Meadows!” cried Pyke, clasping me by the shoulders. “Welcome to Habbakuk!”

  “So this is Habbakuk,” I said, looking around. “I’m none the wiser.”

  “Good. Let me explain. We’re making super-strengthened ice for use in constructing ships. It’s all happening under the auspices of Lord Mountbatten, as I think I already explained. My laboratory assistants are commandos from his Combined Operations staff. I call them Verses One, Two, Three and so on—after Habakkuk in the Bible. Or almost. On official documents it’s spelt with two bs and two ks, because of a typing error.”

  “What’s all this got to do with making ships from ice? Is that even possible?”

  “‘Look among the nations, watch, and wonder marvellously; for I am working a work in your days, which you will not believe though it is told you,’” Pyke intoned, half repeating what he had said in the pub in Dunoon. “Chapter one, verse five. Oh, never mind. Come and see Julius.”

  “Brecher? Is he here?”

  “Yes. I snaffled him from the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge for a few days. He’s mixing up some Pykerete. That’s the stuff we’re making the ships out of. It was Mountbatten’s idea to name it after me, not mine. Julius,” he called, “look who I’ve got here.”

  Brecher was rotating a large spatula in a basin of loose ice slush mixed with something else. The mixture resembled some kind of bran and the spatula, I realised, was a canoe paddle. The light of the lamps was reflecting off his shaven head.