What I Tell You In the Dark Read online

  ‘Will,’ he says, ‘how the devil are you?’

  ‘I’m well, thanks,’ although it must be patently obvious that I am anything but – my own body seems only marginally sturdier than his.

  Before either of us can say more, Mrs Lemprière returns with the slippers.

  ‘Rosie is bossing you around already, I see.’ He says this to her, rather than to me, but with great affection in his voice. And her face, when she smiles back at him, is transformed into an expression of almost girlish adoration. I see now that she is a good many years younger than him.

  ‘You get back to the fire,’ she says. ‘I’ll bring you some tea in a while.’

  ‘Molly-coddled is what I’ve become, Will,’ he sighs happily as I follow him back down the hallway into the gloom.

  He leads me into a study lit by a couple of lamps and the light from an open fire. It is nearing dusk and the curtains are not yet drawn. A desk next to the window overlooks a wide lawn that sweeps down to yet more chestnut trees. Black pools of shadow are beginning to form at the foot of the trees. My own reflection is cast faintly on the glass of the window as I look out, a suited figure, ghosted and indistinct as a daguerreotype, but not out of place here in this room among the musty books and the pictures, many and lopsided, with their peeling gilt frames. The mantel clock ticks softly behind the hisses and cracks of the fire, not officiously like that smashed watch, but with a fuller, more melodic tone. There is wisdom in its faded ivory face, as if it knows some larger secret about the hours it sees passing.

  ‘Have a seat.’ The chair he is pointing to is one of two angled towards the fire. The material on its arms and back has been worn to a lighter colour by the many others who have rested there.

  For a few seconds we both seem content to look into the fire and forget the other is there. The bright caverns between the fused lumps of coal burrow off into a world where no living thing can follow. Resting above them is a log, blackened and just on the edge of being consumed. Licks of flame are up the back and round the side of it. Just a moment ago, as I stood by the window, it was hissing, making a kind feeesh sound as the last of it moisture was forced out into the open; now it has accepted its fate and lies still, in charred resignation. The silent glory of no return.

  ‘So to what do I owe this pleasure, Will?’ It’s not a challenging question. He says it with a look of wry curiosity, as if this is perhaps not the first time Will has turned up announced at house. His eyes, though, are not to be fooled. They notice everything.

  ‘I had a few hours to kill after a meeting, and …’ I decide to venture a little more guesswork ‘… I was sorry to have missed your retirement party. I wanted to catch up.’

  ‘Yes, yes of course.’ He returns his gaze to the fire. Still watching the flames, he asks, ‘So what business brings you to Jersey? The last I heard from you, you were off on your travels.’

  ‘I work for a firm in London now – public relations, that sort of thing. We have a client here. It’s not very interesting.’

  ‘So why, I wonder,’ and now he does turn to look at me, ‘would you be doing it?

  I shrug. ‘Good question.’

  ‘Simple question,’ he corrects me.

  ‘The good ones always are.’

  I smile at him, wishing we could go back to our comfortable silence staring. But he’s not going to be fobbed off.

  ‘How are you, Will?’

  A how are you? at this stage in a conversation is not a nicety, it is intended very much as this one was said, to find what is wrong.

  There’s something about him that makes me want to tell the truth, so I do.

  ‘I’ve been through a pretty hard time recently, but I’m on the mend. Better than that, actually. I’m moving towards some kind of understanding, I think.’

  ‘An understanding? Oh dear,’ he says, reaching across and patting my arm with his liver-spotted hand. ‘Oh dear me. It’s worse than I thought.’

  Behind us, the door opens and the tinkling of crockery announces the entrance of his wife. She places the tea tray on the small table between us. There is a plate piled high with fruit scones, a bowl of strawberry jam, and a block of rich yellow butter. The teapot and cups have a faded design, washed away by decades of use. I can just make out the lines of horses hitched to a chariot.

  He sees me looking at it. ‘Phaethon,’ he says, his eyes shining in the firelight. ‘Take note.’

  His wife pours the tea, putting a little milk in mine and a slice of lemon in his, for which she uses a tiny set of silver tongs that were resting on top of the sugar bowl.

  ‘The jam is from last year,’ she says. ‘We had more strawberries than we knew what to do with – such a long, dry summer, they ripened beautifully.’

  She rests her hand on his shoulder for a moment, as if sharing the warmth of that memory.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, but she doesn’t seem to hear me. Neither of them does.

  When she has left the room, the suspension of our conversation continues as he sips his tea and I demolish three scones in a row. The power of suggestion perhaps, but I fancy I can taste the sun-clotted blood of that summer still swollen in the fruit. And the deeper notes too, of dust and hay, the earthy dankness of dewfall.

  ‘Still with us?’

  I realise I have been chewing with my eyes closed.

  ‘This is exquisite jam. Are you sure you won’t …?’

  ‘I’m getting too old for afternoon snacks. It’s satisfaction enough to watch you make such short work of it. Rosie will be pleased,’ he chuckles.

  The tea is delicate, some kind of China blend. It has a sharpness in the aftertaste that makes you feel parched for more. It reminds me of rue, a flavour that cropped up a lot during my JC tour of duty. As I lean forward to put my cup back on the table I notice just how many books there are on his desk, several of them with little paper markers sticking out. There are pages and pages of notes too, in ad hoc little piles.

  ‘Looks like you’re working on something.’

  He waves the suggestion away. ‘I’m more interested in this “understanding” of yours. Tell me about that. And tell me exactly how you came to be working in a job that is not very interesting. You,’ he adds, ‘of all people.’

  And so I tell him everything I know, using whatever words I have to hand that might straddle where I have come from and where I find myself now, in the soft collision of this young man’s mercurial sprint and my own granite-faced marathon.

  He thinks about it for a long time afterwards. His expression is hard to read. Eventually he says, ‘And your health? I say this as one whose prostate has swollen to the size of an onion and whose skin hangs about him like a loose-fitting garment, but Will, my boy, you do not look well.’

  ‘I could do with a little more sleep, that’s certainly true. But –’

  He doesn’t want to hear my buts. ‘Are they the same worries as before? As when yours and my paths first crossed?’

  I’d like to hear more about that. This occupation of Will has left me with a kind of vested interest in his past, as the new owner of a house might want to hear tales from the neighbours of how that line of fresh slates on the roof was because of a lightning-struck tree or how the hatch door to the cellar was boarded up after a farmhand fell down there and broke his back.

  ‘Why, is that how I seem? What was I like then? I can’t even remember.’

  He finds this amusing. ‘The hurry of youth,’ he says. ‘So busy reinventing yourselves you can’t remember who you were just five minutes ago. But trust me, you haven’t changed as much as you might think.’

  The day has vanished, unnoticed, as we have been talking, and now blackness is pressing on the windows. I feel safe folded away here in this pocket of stillness, with nature’s dead growth burning at my feet and our two hearts, one nearer to death than the other, still beating in our chests.

  ‘I have never known of a student to switch to Mathematics in Part II of the Tripos, Will. I am fairly sure
it has never happened, except in your own, very particular case. I remember the day you came to see me – I had been told simply that an undergraduate student from the faculty of Divinity was asking to speak with me. I assumed you had some crackpot bible code you wanted to discuss, and then you showed it to me,’ he smiles, shaking his head, ‘that vast body of work you had already completed, on the Riemann hypothesis, no less – some of the modelling there …’ Again he shakes his head. ‘You have an extraordinary gift.’

  He laughs quickly, at another memory, just coming to him. ‘Do you remember what you said to me?’ Fortunately he leaves no time for a reply. ‘I asked you if this had been part of your guided study and you said to me, “I’ve been doing it for reasons of my own”. Reasons of my own, that phrase always stuck with me.’ And yet something about the phrase also burns off the genial atmosphere of reminiscence. When he speaks again it is with none of the humour of before. ‘But you always were a troubled boy, Will. And those reasons of your own worry me a little. It worries me that whatever made you turn your back on mathematics and the tremendous opportunities that were there for you is also the same thing that sent you off bumming around for all those years and then into this job about which you care so little, and perhaps even brought you here today.’

  He pushes himself up out of his chair, his elbows shaking slightly under the strain, and fishes another log out of the basket. There is a small shower of sparks when he tosses it into the grate.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he says. ‘I have spoken out of turn.’ The poetry has gone from his voice, he just sounds weary now.

  He walks slowly over to his desk and brings a handful of papers back to where we are sitting. He hands them to me before lowering himself into his chair.

  ‘It’s a biography of Turing,’ he mutters. ‘Something I always meant to get around to, but research was always in the way. Now, though, I have the luxury of leaving it to others to clear the way for the future.’ He doesn’t look as though he considers it a luxury.

  The papers are numbered typed sheets, seemingly the first few chapters of his manuscript, with what I assume to be his spidery handwriting in the margins, adding in, striking through, correcting these initial thoughts in irritable bursts. A genius of such violent intensity that it was to shape the thinking of a future generation is one phrase that I read. This strikes me as an old man’s undertaking, something drawn from the embers.

  ‘I look forward to reading it,’ I lie. ‘When’s it going to be published?’

  ‘When I find the energy to finish it. That’s the trouble with tenure – you only leave when you’re too tired to carry on. Which is when you realise you’re too tired for anything.’

  ‘You didn’t speak out of turn,’ I tell him, to his slight surprise. He probably thought we were done with the serious part of our chat, but there’s something I want to say to him. It feels important. ‘You were right, in many ways. I did turn my back on Divinity – but the answer wasn’t in numbers either. They are descriptors, and that is all. There is no understanding of God’s design through numbers, merely a description of it.’

  He seems a little exasperated by this. ‘But is that not enough, Will? Is it not the responsibility of each man to describe only what he sees? Not to purport to understand those things he cannot see?’

  The new log is hissing on the fire, not yet ready to be burnt up.

  ‘Yes, but I am able to describe Divinity, I have seen it.’ Unfortunately, this is where I am forced to break out from the rather convenient cover that Will’s academic career had left for me. ‘And I am going to provide a proof that will show what it is not, at least, even if there is no language, no ready means for me to show what it is.’

  ‘You’re not making sense. Are you trying to say that a mathematical proof can demonstrate –’

  ‘No. I mean actual proof. Evidence that will demonstrate in very clear terms just how completely and utterly wrong the so-called spokesmen for God are. The church – I am talking about the church, and their endless toxic promises, their murderous lies.’

  My hands are shaking. Rosie, who must have entered the room while I was speaking, is looking at me with undisguised concern. I realise now that she knew perfectly well who Will was when I called here, she just didn’t want to be reminded of him. He clearly has a history with this man over whom she is so protective, and she is not about to let things get out of hand now.

  This is confirmed by the professor’s face. He is giving her a Just hold on kind of look – I’ve got this. Reluctantly, she perches on the arm of his chair, when she would clearly rather be telling me she will phone for my taxi and that my shoes are clean and waiting for me by the door.

  ‘But Will, surely you can see that this generalisation you are making is a poor basis for any proof, mathematical or otherwise. There is good and bad in everything – you know this – your own father is a priest, is he not?’ I nod, he spreads his hands, as if to say Well, there you go. ‘There are always fluctuations – you cannot isolate an entity en bloc. You cannot …’

  His trailing off is taken by Rosie as a sure sign that all of this has gone quite far enough, and that it is now her turn to speak.

  ‘Mr Pryce, I will speak frankly if I may.’ Her husband shrinks a little into his chair. ‘We must make no pretence about the…’ she searches for a word ‘… deleterious effect of the stunt you pulled at the college.’

  ‘I …’ I don’t know what it is that I am going to say but she does not allow me the chance to find out. She has clearly been bottling this up and now is its time to come out.

  ‘No, I am sorry, but I will say my piece.’ She glances at the professor, who has turned his face to the fire. ‘You stood on the stage at an important symposium – perhaps the most important of Gus’s career – trusted by the faculty, vouched for by my husband, and you denounced him, his colleagues and their work in the most extraordinary terms.’ She says the word in two parts, extra ordinary. ‘And then you disappear without a word of explanation. No, I am sorry, but you do not get to come barging back here – what makes you think you have the right? Because you sent those absurd postcards to my husband? Was that supposed to be some form of apology? After everything he did for you …’

  He is patting her leg and telling her that’s enough now. She is still glaring at me, watery-eyed. In the silence that follows she gathers together the tea things and walks out. The clock continues to tick, indifferent to how long its seconds now seem. It was a mistake to wander in here like this, unsighted.

  Interestingly, though, the professor seems rather pleased to have it all blown out into the open. He is looking substantially more cheerful.

  ‘In my desk,’ he says, meaning me to go over there. ‘Bottom left drawer.’

  What I find there is a bundle of about twenty postcards held together with an elastic band. They are from various locations in and around Thailand. Ko Pha Ngan – Party Island! one of them proclaims over the psychedelic backdrop of a multi-coloured full moon.

  ‘I never showed them to anyone,’ he tells me without turning around. ‘Only Rosie has seen them – as you know.’ He does a funny thing with his voice there, something complicit between the two of us, letting me know that she worries, that she loves him but that she does not speak for him.

  I turn the pile over and start sifting through. Each one is densely packed with writing, symbols mainly, interspersed with tight mathematical notation. In some instances, when the proof cannot fit on a single side, the cards are numbered, one of three, two of three, and so on. At a glance, it appears to be advanced number theory, abc conjecture by the look of it.

  ‘Have you checked these?’ I am still standing at his desk. My reflected self out in the window’s darkness also looks up at him.

  ‘There are imperfections, but as far as I can tell, they are correct. I would need to show them to colleagues, get other opinions, to say for sure.’

  I look at the postmarks. They span a range of three years, the most recent of the
m from April 2010.

  ‘So why haven’t you?’

  I am back in my seat now and he is looking at me with something like paternal affection.

  ‘Because they belong to you, my boy. They are not mine to show.’

  I don’t know what to say.

  All I can think of is, ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t myself back then.’ Both, at least, are true.

  After that things settle down, he even invites me to stay for some supper. There is no plane, is there? he asks at one point. At his suggestion, I go to find Rosie. She is in the kitchen at the back of the house. It has an ancient granite fireplace, large enough to burn the limbs of trees, into which an AGA stove has been installed, with a row of copper pans hanging from the lintel. It smells of baking. She is chopping vegetables on the worktop, and barely glances up from her task when I enter the room.

  ‘I’m sorry if I was rude,’ she says as her knife rat-tat-tats on the chopping board, ‘but he took it badly, what you did. Not that he’d ever admit it, stubborn old goat. I just don’t want you getting his hopes up with more talk and promises. He takes it all so seriously. I don’t think you realise how much.’ She puts down her knife and turns to look at me, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘He genuinely thought you were some kind of genius. Maybe you are,’ she adds, not meaning it as a compliment, ‘but that is no reason for you to be unsettling him again now. He has aged a lot in the last few years – as I’m sure you have noticed, genius that you are,’ this is accompanied by a halfway conciliatory smile.

  She returns to her chopping without another word. I stand for a few moments not quite knowing what to do or say. When I make to leave she doesn’t look up, but says, ‘You may as well hand me that large pan, if you’re staying for supper. I presume that’s what he sent you in here to tell me.’

  And so we eat a meal together, a simple vegetable soup with bread rolls that were baked this morning. A half bottle of red wine, already open from the night before, is shared among our three glasses, and weighs me down with a blissful fatigue. We talk of this and that. He speaks for a long time about how much the college had begun to change by the time he left. She discusses the felling of a tree in the garden that had become a nuisance and a terrible worry in high winds. They both agree that high winds have become a feature of recent years. It is all very restful and I soon feel my eyes beginning to droop. Rosie is the first to notice.