The Ghost of Matter

by Octavia Cade

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  CAMBRIDGE, 1930

  MANCHESTER, 1909

  HAVELOCK, 1886

  MANCHESTER, 1909

  HAVELOCK, 1886

  CAMBRIDGE, 1932

  HAVELOCK, 1887

  CAMBRIDGE, 1896

  CAMBRIDGE, 1933

  CAMBRDIGE, 1930

  MANCHESTER, 1910

  CHRISTCHURCH, 1894

  CAMBRIDGE, 1929

  TASMAN SEA, 1895

  CAMBRIDGE, 1930

  HAVELOCK, 1867

  ENGLAND, 1930s

  About the Author

  MIKA | Lee Murray & Piper Mejia

  THE LAST | Grant Stone

  BREE’S DINOSAUR | AC Buchanan

  POCKET WIFE | IK Paterson-Harkness

  LANDFALL | Tim Jones

  THE GHOST OF MATTER | Octavia Cade

  IMPRINT

  CAMBRIDGE, 1930

  HE HAD BECOME A MAN with grandchildren. A grandfather, and that in its way was easier than fatherhood, and more rewarding. Eileen had been a beautiful baby – Ernest remembered writing to his mother upon her birth, praising the infant’s marvellous qualities – but the older his daughter got, the more difficult he found it to connect with her. Eileen moved in fast sets, and Ernest – so well versed in physics, in atoms and magnetism – could not understand what drew her to those parts of others that were so different to himself.

  There were times when that difference was a delight to him. He remembered the pretty little girl she’d been, the way she’d sung and skipped about the garden on small dimpled legs. How she’d taken her dolls so seriously, brought them to him for stories and tea parties.

  He’d been so glad she was a girl, during the War. Would never have said so, not to colleagues and friends who had their own loved ones posted out of reach, in the trenches, at the Somme. Eileen would never find herself on the end of a bayonet, with a grenade being thrown towards her, in a field hospital with her life leaking away from dysentery. Ernest knew he had a reputation as a slow thinker. Powerful, but slow – a bright giant glacier of a mind, one that pinned down and ground all boulders before it. There’d been four years of war to watch other people’s children die, four years to try to understand, to focus the cold strength of his concentration on finding the factor that made sense of it all, that put organisation into grief. Four years, and at the end of it all he could find was relief – relief that it was over, and that his girl wasn’t part of it. Relief that he’d never be one of those parents, those poor grey miserable creatures that had to bury their children. That had to see them buried and gone on to a place different than theirs, and unreachable.

  He’d been lucky. Eileen had been there all along, bright and difficult and spoilt, too – yes, he could say that and say it with honesty, for he was her father and half the spoiling could be laid at his feet. But for all he’d been irked sometimes, confused and frustrated at the growing distance between them, he’d never stopped feeling grateful for her life.

  His only child, and he found it easier now to talk to her children, to entertain them, for the little ones would listen without rolling their eyes, found him fascinating, found him not-wanting. There were three of them.

  No, four.

  Four now, although the fourth was but new born and brought death with it, perhaps, for his daughter who was so full of life and rebellion (for all that she had married a physicist like her father) was failing in her strength, failing after labour.

  He was never very good at waiting. Feet together, back straight, hands clasped together in his lap so that he wouldn’t fidget, wouldn’t have the temptation to smoke. It would have been easier to smoke. He wouldn’t have felt so much like a schoolboy then, waiting so primly for news of a lesson he couldn’t hope to understand. There had been so few of those – an early life of success in scholarship had given Ernest the expectation of understanding – but he couldn’t find anything to understand in this, the long deep quiet while he waited to be informed of his daughter’s death.

  Ernest had seen what burying children had done to his mother. He didn’t want any part of it. His two young brothers had drowned in the Sounds, drowned at Pelorus, and all he had of them now were the wet little footprints that followed him about sometimes, the salt smell of the sea in the corners of his laboratories. He would have liked to see the boys now – the ghosts of their presence, at least. The ghosts of their matter. He had said that once: I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter. It had been a joke, a private joke. One his brothers might have appreciated, had they lived, though no doubt they would have corrected him, or tried to. ‘You didn’t break anything, Ern. We were broken before you knew,’ with their lungs all torn apart from water, with their bellies stuffed round with it. ‘And I couldn’t put you back together,’ he would have said. No more than he could put Eileen back together. If it had been cancer, maybe. There were promising results with radioactivity, with radiation therapy. He could have helped then. Done something that wasn’t waiting like the boy he no longer was, hoping for the presence of other boys that no longer were.

  It would have been a comfort to have them beside him. To sit so upright in his chair, with little pools of salt water welling up on either side in solidarity. He wouldn’t even mind if they got his boots wet. Wouldn’t step around the damp patches, wouldn’t look away. He was an old man now, set in his principles and his successes, the medals, the authority. Surely old men should not look away so easily.

  ‘Charles,’ he said. ‘Herbert. Are you there?’ He’d cringed from the sound of them once, the little ghost cries, the eerie giggles come out of the dark when the curtains were all closed about, when he was trying to adjust his eyes for radiant sparks and luminescence. There was a reason he’d taken to leaving the labs before dark, and it was different from the reason he used to encourage everyone else to leave as well. ‘You need time away from the instruments, time just to think,’ he’d said. It was a good reason, and one he believed whole-heartedly regardless, but it wasn’t the truth of it. Not the whole truth, at least. That he couldn’t give: ghosts in the lab, spectres in the glass, the reflections of past lives.

  ‘They’d have thought I was telling a practical joke,’ he confided – to thin air, to the absence and the presence. ‘They’d have said “Rutherford’s gone round the bend, the old crocodile. Can’t see his tail any longer, spends too much time in his own head. That’s what trying to crack your teeth on physics gets you; that’s the taste of atoms. Too much time breathing fumes, too much time around the radium. D’you think it’s made him mad? Could be, could be. They say the Curie woman’s strange as well...”’

  No. Much easier to insist on proper rest, on time spent in consideration rather than at experiment. The greatest experimentalist of the age, they called him; but he thought about what he did and it was that which made the difference.

  What would they have said if they’d known?

  MANCHESTER, 1909

  CONTAMINATION WAS THE bane of his life. The experiments, the vacuum chambers ... even the tiniest bit of dust could throw the whole thing off. And it wasn’t just the dirt – light was just as bad. Ernest would have to sit in the dark for half an hour sometimes, until his eyes were so adjusted he could see the scintillations that marked the little sparks of matter. Even then there was squinting and relays, as he and the other members of his team took turns in search of alpha particles.

  Contamination could ruin experiments. It could ruin, too, the ideas come from experiments, when the outcomes given were false and nobody knew why. Ernest’s strength was his experimentation: the way that he could track down and expose every probability, the way that he could cross them off until only one practical res
ult remained. Even when he worked in teams, this was his method.

  Only once had he failed to explain away the source of the intrusion – the voice in the waves, the one that could only be heard by himself, whether there were others listening or he was alone and tinkering. Ernest still thought about it sometimes, still turned that enormous brain to shadows and the inexplicable presence of sound, but he had never come to a satisfactory conclusion.

  But years had passed since then and if he had not forgotten, Ernest had at least pushed that girl’s voice to the back of his mind, to uncommon areas where problems of little import were stalled and sorted. That was why, when he was washing his hands in the laboratory’s WC and found himself washing with salt water instead of fresh, he thought it was something he could explain.

  It was the texture he noticed first. The extra softness of the water, the way it felt a little more slippery under soap. The colour was different too, but colour change in tap water was something that could be attributed to old pipes and bad plumbing ... or at least it could have been, if only the shading were different. If the water were tinted red or brown, Ernest would have explained it as a result of rusted piping. Yet the soft slippery water in the basin was unusually cool in colour, reminiscent of the blue-green waters of the Sounds under cloud.

  They were so different, the colours of his home. The blues and greens more vivid, undiluted by constant rain. He missed it, missed them. Missed the smell of mānuka and lemonwood and five finger, missed the bright colours of kōwhai and rātā, the way the tui would glisten in the trees, the thick plump bodies of wood pigeons. He missed winters where all the trees weren’t bare. It had taken a long time, that first winter in a foreign land, to understand what was so uncomfortable about the landscape of the place his mother called Home – how skeletal and dead it all was, with frozen mud underneath instead of humus, instead of red beeches where all the leaves stayed on.

  Science had taken him away, and necessarily so, for the small settlements at Brightwater and then Havelock held no mysteries for him, and the damp half-cellar of Canterbury was a depth he had already plumbed. Still, for all the excitement that came with being at the centre of physics there were times when Ernest missed his home with an intensity that was almost painful, that lodged beneath his breastbone in stutter-silence, and when he leaned over the basin to examine that strange, sad water he breathed in the scent of it, and knew it.

  It was sea water, salt water, and no lad who had ever grown up on coasts, within the reach of tidal swell, would ever mistake it. More than that, though, it was the salt water of the Sounds, the salt water of too-many-thousands of miles away. Ernest wouldn’t have thought he could have recognised it, but the mix of salt and sand and colour was different to the British beaches. Different, too, to the coast of Canterbury.

  ‘It can’t be,’ he said. ‘You’re imagining things, you silly fool.’ He wasn’t in the Sounds now, or even in New Zealand. He was in a closed-up washroom of a physics laboratory on the other side of the world from what he smelled, and the coast was nowhere near him. ‘It must be the pipes,’ he said, knowing as he said it that it was a foolish thing to say, for all the water piped here was fresh.

  ‘Damned imagination.’ And yet Ernest knew that it wasn’t. He was imaginative enough for a scientist – not as flashy with it as Einstein, or with the deep melancholic imagery of Bohr – but his thoughts had meaning. They didn’t pop out of the depths of his brain for no good reason. There must be connections he was making that he didn’t realise yet. Something to do with sea and salt, and that’s why he was thinking of them – thinking that he felt them, smelled them. Signposts, that’s what they were. He’d turn the tap off and it would all go away and sooner or later – probably later – the link would spark within him and he’d know what, and why. That was the way it worked for him.

  And yet when Ernest turned off the tap, saw the absence of spouting, he did not see the absence of water. It bubbled up out of the plughole, blue and green and with beech leaves in it – bubbled over the edge of the basin and onto the floor, and there was nothing he could do to stop the flood.

  Later, looking back, he would think he heard the echo of giggles coming from the drain. Little noises, and echoing like rat scratches in the pipes, but the bubbles were so loud and so many that Ernest told himself again he was imagining it.

  HAVELOCK, 1886

  MARTHA SAT AT THE BROADWOOD piano that was the pride of her house, the favoured instrument of her life. Her feet were placed carefully together as if at parlour, and her hands were clasped in her lap. She stared at the keys as if they were waves, as if they were boards bound together as boat ribs, and unsinking.

  ‘Mum?’ said Ern, standing awkward in the door and not used, yet, to looking down on the woman who had birthed him and raised him to competence in the midst of farm and flax and reed. He was growing up now, would be a man before long and not the first she had raised. One day soon, he hoped, he’d go away to school – but he’d come back again to the house where he still felt like a child, because that was where his family was. ‘Mum?’

  ‘It came all the way over from Home,’ said Martha. ‘Like I did.’ In the room that smelt always of lanolin and polished wood, her voice had lost all its shine. She spoke in flats. ‘I was going to teach my children music. I thought it was important.’

  ‘You did teach us,’ said Ern, halfway across the room now with his quick, heavy strides and his boots still damp with dirt from last night’s searching. His mother’s boots were neat. Polished, even. She must have cleaned them during the night, he thought, in the few hideous hours before dawn, the first night her boys were lost.

  She had taught them. Ern remembered, all too well, the nights when they sang together: his mother on the piano, his father on the violin and the voices of their children not nearly as tuneful but trying for all that and happy with it. Charles and Herbert, singing.

  ‘I should have spent more time letting you swim,’ said Martha. ‘Letting you learn that better, in the shallows while you still could.’ Letting them learn those notes – the slap of flesh on water, the fountain of kicks coming up behind. As if they hadn’t learned to swim, all of them, out in the Sound and on the river, when they’d gone to the Pelorus for fishing and for eeling and found themselves scaring away the fish and the eels for the pleasure of cool water in summer.

  ‘They’ll be fine, Mum,’ said Ern. ‘They probably got caught out too late and pulled in for the night. There are plenty of bays round here, you know that. They’ll be back before you know it.’

  ‘I should never have let them go out alone,’ said Martha. ‘Not in that boat. Not by themselves.’

  ‘They’ve done it before,’ said Ern. ‘We all have. They’re not little kids anymore.’ Because if they weren’t then he wasn’t either, and Ern had a horrible cold feeling deep down in his stomach that he couldn’t be a child himself now. That his parents needed him to be more. That his brothers did.

  They were ten and twelve. It wasn’t so very young, after all. It wasn’t as if they were both small children. His brothers. His little brothers – and Ern away from them, with his books and extra tutoring and with no room in his head for anything apart from the excitement of science and wasn’t that useless now, when he might have gone with them instead. What use was being good at books and tests, what use was knowing how to count the seconds between lightning and thunder if he couldn’t stop the storms when they came upon his family, when they tore out his mother’s heart in front of him?

  ‘Even if the boat did sink,’ he said, ‘they know how to swim. They’ve probably washed up on shore somewhere. They’ll follow it till they’ve found someone to pester for breakfast, don’t worry.’

  It was a picture that made him smile, he who’d had experience enough of that pestering. Charlie wanting to come shoot pigeons with him in the little grove of miro trees out back, and Ern at his shoulder, warning him not to shoot until the pigeons were about to fly off, their wings spread out all
the better for targets. Herbert swinging those pigeons over his shoulder to take home, laughing and talking of roast bird, of digging potatoes to go with them, and carrots. They’d never let themselves go hungry, would bail up some poor bastard before he’d so much as washed the crust from his eyes and there’d be blankets and warm tea and bacon while someone was sent for their father, while their mother cooked them both a second breakfast and better salted.

  Martha did not smile. Her face contorted, briefly, and if he hadn’t been looking at that exact moment Ern would never have seen it. Then it was over; her jaw stiffened and her cheeks smoothed and the hands she’d suddenly put over her eyes were allowed to drop.

  He hadn’t been able to reach her. It was still there: the same sense of dislocation, the same impossibility of communication that Ern had felt when he came to her, just a few moments before. Bad enough to tramp the sides of the Sound and call with no response, but with his hand on his mother’s shoulder and no distance between them he couldn’t even make her hear him. Such a practical boy, he was, but this wasn’t any practice he was used to, or any of the instruments he took such pleasure in. This was a little wooden house very far from science and there was no longer any comfort to be had inside it.

  ‘I’ll find them,’ he said. ‘Safe and sound.’ When Martha’s face didn’t change at all, quiet as the surface of a still pond, a stagnant stretch of river, he knew that she didn’t believe him. Knew then that there were connections other than his and that sometime during the night she had felt the breaking off of them and was merely waiting now for others to confirm the absence she had already heard. Knew too that he’d just made a promise that he couldn’t keep and the breaking of it would haunt his future, taint it always with silence and salt water and the memory of failure.

  ‘You’re a good boy, Ernest,’ said his mother. She did not look at him but brought her hand up to squeeze his as it rested on her shoulder. It was a brief grip, and anaemic, and Ern, come to give comfort, found his taken away.