The Ghost of Matter

by Octavia Cade

  TASMAN SEA, 1895

  LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION were kept safely in his cabin, tucked in with the radio wave detector he’d worked on and demonstrated at Canterbury, all packed up in a box, and all he could think of was the opportunity for presenting them. Ern stood at the railings until the last of the coast was out of sight. He didn’t know when he’d see New Zealand again, when next he’d see his family, or Mary, but he didn’t feel yet the sadness he thought he would. There was too much excitement to be sad.

  He’d got the Exhibition scholarship, the one that would allow him to go to study in England, to leave Christchurch for, he hoped, the Cavendish. It still wasn’t quite enough to live on, but George had lent him money enough to escape the orbit of provincial laboratories. ‘Let’s face it,’ George had said, ‘you’re the bright one of the family, Ern. You can’t miss this.’ And he’d pressed the money on him – not a fortune, for George didn’t have a fortune, but as much as he could spare and it was enough, barely. Ern would have felt worse about taking it if George weren’t his elder, if he didn’t see in his brother’s face the desire to help at least one of his little brothers, when there were two of those young ones he hadn’t been able to help.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ern had said. ‘George, thank you.’

  ‘You’re good for it,’ George replied, gripping Ern’s right hand with both his own. ‘I know you’ll make us proud.’

  ‘It’s a great chance for you,’ his father had said, and Ern had laughed and agreed, had swung his little sisters round and talked of science to his mother so she wouldn’t speak of shipping. She was leery now of boats.

  ‘Of course it’s not the same,’ she had said, on his last day, straightening his collar like she had when he was small. ‘It’s a big strong vessel you’re going in.’ Nothing like the little boat that had failed his brothers, failed them in local waters while Ern was heading off to far deeper seas, far stronger tides and the potential for ocean waves. ‘But you be careful. I don’t want to hear of any accidents because you’ve had some silly ideas.’

  ‘He’s going to climb the rigging,’ said one of his little sisters, giggling. ‘He’s going to climb it all the way to the top.’

  ‘He is not,’ said Martha, severely. ‘Are you, Ernest?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said, because that was an easy enough promise to make if it took the shadows from her eyes, if it resigned her to his going and the manner of it. And now she was out of sight – not just her but the country of his birth, the kōwhai and kauri and miro, the colour of the bush against the sea.

  He thought he might wish for it, one day, but for now the horizon was clear and the wind was on his face and Ern left his place at the stern and ran to the front, to find a place to look ahead. His feet echoed on the deck, and for a moment it sounded as if there were others running with him. He could have sworn that there were. It wasn’t just the footsteps. He stood at the railings, his eyes closed and face tilted up, the sun on his skin and he could feel them either side, his fellow travellers. They would be just as excited as he was, no doubt, some of them leaving their new country for the first time. Like him, they were sailing over the world to where the stars were different, where the Southern Cross was just a memory, and imprinted before all other constellations.

  ‘This is going to be the most wonderful voyage,’ said Ern, hoping to make friends, but when he opened his eyes he was alone at the railing. ‘Well, don’t you look a right idiot, talking to yourself,’ he said, but he laughed as he said it. He was too giddy to feel embarrassed, too drunk on opportunity and ozone to be anything but happy. Ern turned against the railing, leaning back against it to look down the length of the ship – at the vessel itself, at the sailors and the other passengers. Some of the last looked a little green, and Ern felt for them. He’d had a touch of seasickness himself, but even a short time on board had taught him that fresh air got rid of the worst of it, so he spent much of his time on deck. There was too much going on to bother with seasickness.

  There was someone beside him, then, and Ern knew it for more than fancy because a shadow fell across his face, blocking out the sun. He shivered a little – it was still winter, and he was in his coat even on the sunniest of days – and beneath his elbows the railings were unaccountably cold, as if ice had been run across the iron. He could feel the sudden chill even through his jacket.

  The woman next to him seemed strangely familiar. She didn’t look very much older than him and there was something in her face that reminded him of his sisters, though her hair was innocent of pig-tails. His mother would never let one of her daughters out like this, though – in a too-fine dress, a pretty bright blue for all that it was completely unsuitable, unserviceable for shipboard life. It was a colour he’d seen before, once on a Marlborough beach and in Christchurch too, at the university.

  The woman next to him now, the one in the extraordinary dress, wore no hat. Granted it was a winter sun, but with skin as pale as hers, Ern judged she’d be in for a nasty burn if she weren’t careful.

  ‘Are you off to London too?’ he said, but the girl never answered him, only stared at him from a distance just out of reach, and there was in her colour and stance something that reminded him of... of...

  Ern couldn’t place it, but before he could enquire further a small girl ran past him, spinning a hoop and giggling, her parents keeping a careful eye from further up the deck. Ern grinned at the child and she grinned back and he heard her little feet on the deck and there was that echo again, as if there were others with her, other little feet running and skipping after the hoop and when he turned back to the young lady she was gone.

  CAMBRIDGE, 1930

  HE HAD BECOME A MAN with grandchildren. He was afraid he was going to become a man with only grandchildren.

  Ernest sat with his feet together, with his back straight and his hands clasped tight so that they didn’t show the shaking. It was no use trying to keep busy through the wait – as distracted as he was, his hands would be clumsy at experiments. Clumsiness meant contamination and temper, poor results. He had little stomach for it, for the potential glass-breaking, the shattering of instruments. Little stomach too for salt water, for the rising tides of basins and bad pipes, the nausea that came with thoughts of drowning. The water of the Sounds, the water of his home, stank of death to him now.

  Ernest suspected he was about to become all too familiar with death, familiar in a visceral, gut-deep and wrenching way that had little to do with shadows and all too much with the silence of pianos, with empty beaches and broken promises. After Herbert, after Charles, he’d never heard his mother play again. The piano had remained, polished still and the wood warm in the afternoon sun as it shone through the windows; but all the joy in playing had gone out of her, and none of Martha’s children had kept her knack.

  She’d tried to teach them, to teach all of them. Ernest remembered sitting on the bench beside her when his legs were still too short to touch the ground, to reach the pedals. He remembered his mother’s hands on his own as she taught him the keys, how hard it was to get his fingers to cooperate. How he’d learned the knack eventually – quick enough, for he’d been a bright lad, but his preference had never been for music, for the long hours of practice. His practice, his patience, was reserved for radiation, for laboratories and experiments and science. Music lessons were marking time, a pleasant diversion, and his fingers had never developed fluidity in timing and notes. He’d never been the musician his mother was. None of them had been, really, though she’d tried with all her children, the sons and daughters both – until two of the sons were gone and took her music with them for drowning.

  He wondered if she would have taken it up again for Eileen, if they hadn’t lived half a world apart, if he’d raised his daughter in southern waters, with the red beeches and the wood pigeons and the bright terrible blue of the Sounds, the way the water wrapped around. Perhaps she would have sat the little girl beside her and picked out the keys, would have made a rec
onciliation with them that way, but his daughter had been brought up far from her grandmother and her catalytic potential had been undermined by distance.

  Now, it seemed likely that it would be undermined by something else entirely, by a labour gone bad, an unlucky and unmusical thing. Still, if he closed his eyes Ernest could hear, perhaps, what his daughter would have sounded like had those early lessons been a reality, had the relationship between generations not been divided by continents and the oceans between. And there it was, at the edge of hearing: the picking of notes, the awkward, ungainly keys, the timing all wrong, the pressure unreliable. Some notes were louder than they should have been, some a bare presence that was repeated as the key was pressed harder, was slammed down on, and the scales were mutilated things, rough as if they’d had chunks bitten out, as if elastic held the notes together and was fraying round the edges.

  The notes were nostalgia, and they echoed. Ernest could hear them now with his eyes open, with the plain wall before him and the hard seat beneath. It was almost as if they were in the room with him, as if he could turn his head and they’d be there, their shadows on the wall, on bookshelves stuffed with back issues of Physikalische Zeitschrift and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. And Ernest would have resisted the impulse, would have kept his posture straight and his eyes forward, if that clumsy thumping hadn’t degraded, suddenly, into the terrible (and terribly deliberate) scale that Charles had always defaulted to when revolting at practise and piano, before he’d given up scales for sea water. He’d done it for attention, always, to underline where he’d rather be, that he’d had enough, and at the repeat of it, so many years later, Ernest couldn’t help but look, couldn’t help but hope.

  There was nothing. No shadows, no piano. No reminders of a life long gone, for as soon as Ernest moved from rigidity the music stopped and the room was silent.

  ‘Charles?’ said Ernest. ‘Lad, are you there?’ His big farmer hands clenched in on each other, his fingertips whitening under pressure. ‘Charlie?’

  He’d changed his mind, then. He could have done with footprints after all, with salt water and the evidence of seas long gone, the under-scent of rot. Perhaps if puddles waited by him, if he could look down at the hard floor and see prints either side of him, feel presence rather than absence, there’d be something of comfort in it. Something to say that loss was not a complete thing, that it was something more than catalyst, a way of untangling the universe and drawing meaning from it.

  But there was nothing. No salt or sand or colour, no notes and no disturbance. An absence instead of presence, and when Ernest heard the knock upon his door, he knew they had come to tell him that his daughter was dead.

  IT IS CLEAR IN THIS case that on the whole the energy derived from transmutation of the atom is small compared with the energy of the bombarding particles. There thus seems to be little prospect that we can hope to obtain a new source of power by these processes. It has sometimes been suggested, from analogy with ordinary explosives, that the transmutation of one atom might cause the transmutation of a neighbouring nucleus, so that the explosion would spread throughout all the material. If this were true, we should long ago have had a gigantic explosion in our laboratories with no one remaining to tell the tale. The absence of these accidents indicates, as we should expect, that the explosion is confined to the individual nucleus and does not spread to the neighbouring nuclei, which may be regarded as relatively far removed from the centre of the explosion. (Ernest Rutherford, ‘The Transmutation of the Atom,’ 1933.)

  HAVELOCK, 1867

  ‘YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER to trust your gut, Ern,’ said James. ‘To go with your instincts.’

  And Ern, watching his father, could only think That hasn’t worked out so well for you, has it? His father’s instincts had led him to walk the Sounds for month after hopeless month, for a year, because he believed that if he just walked enough, looked enough, then he’d find the bodies of the children that had been lost. Perhaps that was instinct – or perhaps it was just the desire to get out of the house, to put distance between himself and his grief and the grief of his wife. The way the latter came with silence, the way it came with the shutting up of instruments and the cessation of piano notes.

  But no. Ern couldn’t believe that. His father was not such a coward, and if he found comfort in solitude sometimes then it was no more than anyone else did – his mother and brothers and sisters, Ern himself. No. It was instinct that caused that endless, painful search ... the deep gut feeling that hard work and hard love would pay off.

  Ern wasn’t so very old himself. Not a man yet, not truly, but close – and even he could see that his father’s instinct was a lie. He could see it but he couldn’t say it. That would be cruelty, and there was only so much cruelty he could fit into his mouth, a hard, stony truth-telling that his father would not, could not appreciate. Instead, he bit his tongue until the blood came, until he tasted iron. Iron was kindness, perhaps – or the magnetised needle within a compass. He couldn’t tell anymore. The emotional swamp of his parents’ loss was too much for him, the waters turbulent and the currents over-murky. Ern had gone past wishing for music, but he would have done almost anything now for mathematics, for physics and science and certainty – or at least an uncertainty that he had a hope to solve.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ said James.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Ern replied. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  James sighed. It was a sound his son had heard too often. ‘I know it’s not your way,’ he said. ‘I don’t have your gifts, Ern. I don’t see things the way that you do.’

  ‘You don’t see things at all!’ Ern blurted, and had he been even a couple of years younger he would have clapped his hands over his mouth, looked as guilty as he felt. What was the point of biting your tongue when you were going to speak regardless? But he wasn’t a couple of years younger. He was close to a man, fifteen years old and he’d been watching his father drag himself out of the house earlier and earlier, come back later and later. He’d watched him spend his free time tramping coastlines, watched his siblings and his mother as they came to understand, to accept, that any free time wasn’t theirs anymore. Watched his neighbours talk behind their hands, the pity on their faces or in their voices when, every so often, one would leave his own work to walk with his father, and not for Herbert’s sake, not for Charlie’s.

  Why can’t you just accept it? he wanted to scream. They’re goddamn dead and they’re not coming back! Ern wanted to scream this more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Under any other circumstances it might even have earned him a belting for taking the Lord’s name in vain but beneath the anger and the guilt and the desire for cruelty (the desire to avoid it? he wasn’t even sure anymore) was the fear that his father would smile at him sadly and turn away. That he wouldn’t even care.

  ‘You need to trust yourself,’ James said again. There must have been something in his son’s face that spoke to him then, even when the son did not. ‘Even if you turn out to be wrong. Especially if you turn out to be wrong. No one can go through their life not ever being wrong, Ern. Not even you. It’s alright,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, son.’

  ‘You’re never going to find them,’ said Ernest. He straightened his back, looked his father dead in the eye. ‘It’s been a year now. You’re not going to find them.’ It was an effort to keep his voice calm, and though he clenched his fists he could feel that his hands were shaking. ‘I’m sorry for it, Dad, I am. I’d do anything for it to be different. But it isn’t. They’re gone. Herbert and Charlie ... they’re gone. But we’re still here.’

  ‘I know,’ said James. He knelt down briefly, the movement almost absent, his wiry body whippet-thin. When he stood again there were shells in his hand and as he spoke he tossed them into the sea, the movement jerky and thoughtless, as if he needed something to do with his hands while he talked. Early that morning, Ern had been woken by his father for the first time in a long while,
been woken to go walking with him, go searching. ‘I always said to myself, I’ll give it a good year,’ said James. It was almost conversational. ‘A good year. They were good boys. They deserved that much.’

  ‘What?’ said Ern, off balance and suddenly dizzy in the sand. He could hear blood rushing in his ears, hear it over the ocean, and there was blood in his mouth.

  ‘I’m going to stop now,’ said James. ‘I always meant to. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I meant to do that too, but it all got away from me.’ There were tears in his eyes, and Ern had never seen his father cry before. ‘Then I looked round one day and saw you watching me, and I knew I hadn’t told you. Knew it was too late for that. That you’d already built up in yourself what you wanted to say to me. But Ern ... you needed to be able say it. You needed to know that you could.’

  IT IS OF COURSE TRUE that some of the advances of science may occasionally be used for ignoble ends but this is not the fault of the scientific man, but rather of the community which fails to control this prostitution .... It is sometimes suggested that scientific men should be more active in controlling the wrong use of their discoveries. I am doubtful however whether even the most imaginative scientific man, except in rare cases, is able to foresee the ultimate effect of any discovery. (Ernest Rutherford, Norman Lockyer Lecture, November 1936.)

  ENGLAND, 1930s