Simon

by Alexander Masters

  (“Alex, I would like you to add at this point: ‘Today Simon’s main association with the hotel is disgust at how the view from the riverside walk opposite was spoilt by a car park.’”)

  Spring term showed up: rain, gray skies, late nights at the library, brandy and muffins in the Junior Common Room. Simon? At Leicester Central train station. It’s his eighteenth birthday: February 28, 1970. He’s standing outside in the desolate cold, wondering what to do because the connection he’d planned to take to Rugby Central, as a birthday present to himself, has been shut down.

  Simon can remember buses and trains he took during his time at Cambridge with astounding precision; it’s everything else that’s vanished: “I started on the 6:33 train to St. Ives, a line that was soon to close. At St. Ives I got on a bus to Huntingdon, then by train to Leicester via Peterborough. I spent most of the day looking round the city but can’t remember anything about what I saw.” Summer came: silken, braless string tops and miniskirts—oh! Summer, in Cambridge, for boys!…Simon? Barrow-on-Furness. Eyes on toes. Stuck in a train tunnel.

  He drank orange squash. The chest under the mantelpiece still has a drawer packed with empty Tango bottles, twenty years too old to return for the 2p deposit.

  He went on the Masochists’ Special. Simon’s still got the clipping, pressed tidily inside a B.D. (Before Deregulation) box file in the back room.

  Why did he find these trips necessary? What did they have that was better than college life? What could he do on them, aside from pay ten pence to sit above a bus diesel engine with farmers’ wives and shrieking schoolchildren? Was he being metaphorical? As in, buses depend on timetables; timetables depend on numbers and patterns: therefore, taking buses equals traveling through math? Was he being that weird?

  “Oh dear!” Simon complains. “Is joy such a hard concept to understand?” Hadn’t I [he points at me] admitted that I used to pick up paper squares that somebody had spat on, and called it “stamp collecting”? Other people like to drop out of airplanes at 10,000 feet, dangling from colored bedsheets. Simon zipped through the countryside in metal worms.

  But…

  Clipping abridged by the biographer. Source unknown.

  Please! Go away, biographer! That’s enough! How much more do you need to be told? Look at Loch Lomond and Glen Coe swish past! See the valleys of Devon plunge and weave! Watch out, stand back! Here comes Simon, aged twenty-one years, seven months and four weeks, out of Llandudno on a Number 47, racing up Snowdonia, through Llanberis Pass.

  Wheeeee! Over the hill! Rushing to the embrace of Colwyn Bay; looking out to the Celtic and light-splitting sea.

  “Nevertheless, Simon,” I keep at him, “if day trips were the only way you enjoyed spending your spare time during this period, why don’t you remember anything about the scenery or stories that took place? Why nothing except the bus numbers and connection times?”

  “Oh dear, oh dear, does everything have to have such a ridiculous reason? I liked taking trips, that’s all. Why ruin it with words?”

  One of two box files of tickets from the early Cambridge years, found in the back room.

  * * *

  1 Campaigner “glues himself to PM”

  A campaigner against Heathrow Airport’s third runway has attempted to glue himself to Gordon Brown at a Downing Street reception.

  Dan Glass, a member of Plane Stupid, was about to receive an award from the prime minister when he stuck out his superglued hand and touched his sleeve.

  Plane Stupid says Mr Glass, from north London, then “glued his hand” to Mr Brown’s jacket as he shook his hand. But Downing Street said there had been “no stickiness of any significance.”

  Plane Stupid recently gained publicity by mounting a protest on the roof of Parliament. Spokesman Graham Thompson said Mr Glass—a 24-year-old post-graduate student at Strathclyde University—had smuggled a small amount of glue through Downing Street security checks in his underwear at about 1700 BST.…

  Mr Thompson said his organisation was attempting to make Mr Brown “stick to his environmental promises” (news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7520401.stm).

  The award Dan Glass received is funded by Simon. Every year, very quietly—it’s appropriate to reveal it in a footnote—Simon gives £10,000 to the Sheila McKechnie Foundation to sponsor their Campaign Award for transport activism (www.smk.org.uk/transport-2008/).

  30

  I do not wish to commit myself to meeting you because I now have less than 2 weeks to use up 4 return train tickets…

  Simon, email to the author

  Trinity College, 1971—Simon’s third year. Simon has a vivid recollection. He’d been moved into scholar’s rooms off Great Court, the heart of the college: mullioned windows, oak floorboards once trod by Newton, G. H. Hardy and Ramanujan; a fire crackling low in the grate…

  One night, “a machine was on in the street” outside his window. It was a pump of some sort, clearing up a water leak. Simon thought it would cease at midnight.

  But it didn’t.

  No other occurrence during the eighteen months that followed disturbs the sleep of his memory.

  His next room was a tenancy at 71 Jesus Lane. Here he blinks awake a second time: he remembers an argument he had with “some foreign temporary tenant.”

  “A fight? A proper fight? Goodness gracious! What a thing! A real smash-up? Fists and punches?”

  “No. A discussion about science fiction, but it’s unlikely you could discover further details, because I’ve forgotten the man’s name.”

  “What about your mother? Your father? You wrote to them?”

  “Hnnn, aaaah, oh dear. Uuugh. Why should I?” Simon protests, mumbling and catching his head. “I never had anything to say then either.”

  He can’t be entirely unsentimental about this time, however. In a prominent position, above the piano, are two colorful prints showing Simon’s Cambridge colleges. Quadrangle of Trinity College is a view of Trinity chapel, in the main college square: vast and stolidly ornate. In the middle is a water well. An absurd coronet of Gothic masonry has buckled the supporting stonework like jelly.

  Quadrangle of Trinity College.

  Jesus College, where Simon got his first fellowship after finishing his PhD at Trinity, is pictured from Jesus Green, the park immediately across the river from where Simon and I live now. Windows tinkle about the top floors of the building. The gate block is stooped and bronchitic. There is a feel of approaching rain.

  “Where did you get those?” I asked one morning, when I was in the back room sifting through his box files for amusing tickets or leaflets. I was surprised. I wouldn’t have thought he’d own such soppy pictures.

  He pushed among the floor slosh, and stood in front of the piano, squinting at the prints.

  “Ahhh, hnnn. I don’t know,” he concluded after a long consideration. “I’ve never seen them before.”

  View of Jesus College, from the direction of our house.

  “Never was a man whose outer physique so belied his powers,” said Francis Galton about the nineteenth-century prodigy and Group Theorist Arthur Cayley. “There was something eerie and uncanny in his ways, that inclined strangers to pronounce him neither to be wholly sane nor gifted with much intelligence.”

  Arthur Cayley (1821–95): lawyer, mountain-climber and watercolorist. He published more than 900 mathematical papers and books.

  “Some people might say the same about you, Simon,” I observed. We had left the house and were crossing Jesus Green, Simon limping speedily, me straining alongside to keep up. I’d been reading a biography: Arthur Cayley, Mathematician Laureate of the Victorian Age (600 pages, 2 lbs. Most exhausting).

  “In your upbringing,” I continued, “you and Cayley were just like each other.”

  1. No friends his own size.

  2. Insatiable memory; relentless desire to read every book he could lay his hands on.

  “Except literature,” protested Simon as we walked down Trinity Street. “There was a time
at my prep school when the headmaster forced me to stop reading maths and chess books, and said that I had to read ten novels instead. But it didn’t do any good. Incidentally, it was in that lane that the-pump-that-did-not-stop was.”

  3. Up to Trinity College, Cambridge, two years early, on a full scholarship.

  “Although, unlike Cayley, you’d also taken a first-class degree at the University of London by that age,” I added, “won three gold medals in International Mathematics Olympiads, and had your hand shaken by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and, for some reason I’ve never quite understood, Shirley Williams.”

  “Yes, and there are a lot more mathematicians now than there were in Cayley’s day, so there is more competition,” agreed Simon, but not in an immodest way.

  4. Achieved stellar triumph at the final examination.

  After three years of study and five days of continuous testing, during which crowds of cheering admirers gathered outside the examination hall, Cayley was top student of the year and had his portrait engraved and distributed throughout Cambridge. He’d finished the final, three-hour paper in forty-five minutes, then hurried straight to the college library and taken out Aristotle’s Politics, Lazare Carnot’s Géometrie de Position and Madame de Sévigné’s gently racy French letters.

  Cayley’s nearest rival suffered a breakdown.

  Yet Simon did better. According to rumor, he scored fifty alphas in his finals exam.

  For the Cambridge grading system, two alphas gets you a third-class degree; five, a second-class; twelve, a first. Fifty not only made Simon first in the university but was the highest score in the history of the Mathematics Tripos—ever.

  To this triumph of university top-ness, with which other men, with a quarter the success, revolutionize history, dominate governments, win Nobel Prizes and become infinite plutocrats, Simon has added an exquisite icing of his own: he has forgotten all about it.

  Simon views his brain as a piece of clothing.

  Everyone needs a pair of trousers—they can then walk to the bus station without getting arrested. Whether the trousers are Prada or Primark is unimportant. Same with brains: Simon’s brain being better or worse than the next person’s isn’t the interesting point. What matters is, does it serve its function, which is to enable Simon to gallop about at the frontiers of mathematics? It is a fact: it does. Nothing else matters. As far as Simon is concerned, his triumph in the university exams might as well never have occurred.

  “But you at least know that you got a first-class degree?” I say, beginning small.

  “I would expect that, yes.” But it never occurred to him on announcement day to run to Senate House and join the slavering undergraduates stretching over each other’s shoulders to find where their names stood in the list of passes.

  To any genius, degree-level mathematics is like spending three years in intense private study of a foreign language, then being tested with a phrasebook—knowing how to say “Hello,” “Goodbye,” “Can you please put a spare tire on my rental car?,” “Take your hand off there or I’ll scream,” and “Where’s the toilet?” Degree exams in mathematics aren’t harder than that.

  “So you don’t know that you came top in the whole university?” I pressed.

  “It is possible that I did,” he confirmed with indifference. “But I do not remember it, no.” We’d just hit a dumpling of German tourists. Abruptly remembering something he wanted, Simon dropped his bag on the pavement. The Germans guffawed and shuffled their beefy legs to clear a space as he yanked at the zip.

  “As I say, I am not saying it is not true,” insisted Simon, searching inside the bag for a packet of Bombay mix he thought he’d spotted skulking there last week. “It is possible. I am saying that I don’t know it.”

  Simon is not modest or immodest, just as he is not vain or unvain. That he was, at that time, one of the most promising mathematicians in the world is just a fact, and what’s modesty or immodesty got to do with a state of undeniable correctness? A fact is a fact. It’s got no need for affect. Simon does not know that he graduated top in the university, or possibly in the university’s entire history, because a) it has no relevance—unlike mathematical formulas or bus connections—to the smooth functioning of the universe, and b) after securing him a place for the next year of study, it was of no further practical value. Like Sherlock Holmes, who refused to remember whether the sun rotates around the earth or the other way round, because it was unnecessary clutter in his mind, the fact that Simon was once a prodigious passer of mathematical exams is of no interest to him. What mattered was whether or not he could continue to research mathematics after he had taken the exam. Once that fact was established—yes, he could—everything else about such teenage cockfights was unimportant.

  Most mathematicians I’ve interviewed have managed to hint at how clever they are, and where they rank in relation to other well-known names, within ten or fifteen minutes. Better than Curtis; not as good as Thompson (who could be?); on a par with Conway. It’s a tedious but apparently necessary phase of the conversation, and a good opportunity for me to glance at my text messages. Simon never does this boasting. To him, it would be like standing at the top of Everest, gasping, awestruck, at the frenzied splendor of the spectacle—and pointing out that your climbing boots had cost twenty quid more than anybody else’s.

  I worry sometimes when I talk to Simon bluntly about his failures; but it doesn’t seem to have any lasting effect.

  “So where did it vanish, Simon? Why did Cayley go on to become an immortal in the mathematics of your subject, Group Theory, whereas you, who had even better intellectual advantages—you have become a man who scuttles about on buses to Woking looking at statues of Martians?”

  Munching Bombay mix delightedly, his right hand plunging and emerging from the bag, Simon crossed into Silver Street.

  The pavement is narrow and was crowded; buses and lorries crushed past the curb, their loads tilted by the camber of the road, rasping along the first-floor walls above us. We huddled our backs to the wall, waiting for a gap, then shot across the traffic, through a carriage arch, into a drab and silent car park. The tarmac had settled like stiff carpet on rubble underneath. Unconsciously, I put on a teacher-like stoop and gripped my hands behind my back. This is where the Mathematics Faculties used to be housed, before they were promoted to a multimillion-pound glass-and-brick building shaped like a half-buried spider, with indoor computer-controlled microclimates, on the outskirts of the city.

  Simon’s department—called the Department of “Pure” Mathematics, which means math-for-math’s-sake, and not for the convenience of physicists or engineers (which is called Applied Mathematics)—was squeezed into a brick warehouse beside this parking lot.

  Simon marched ahead, away from this puddle of memory, his mood obscure. We passed the weir onto Lammas Field. Across the river was the Moat House Hotel gym. Behind the large glass panels, grapefruit-bellied men were pedaling wheelless bicycles; grunting up weights that crashed instantly back on their heads; thumping along electrified paths that kept them stationary. University academics go here not to get fit but because it’s so expensive and unpleasant that it’s one of the few places you can get away from students.

  A remarkable coincidence occurred outside the University Graduate Center: a man rushing past—white hair, close-cropped, smooth face—stopped suddenly, bent forward, head slanted in query, and ventured a hand into mid-air.

  “Simon? Simon…Norton? It’s been almost fifty years!”

  Simon swiveled, looked at the man, stared at his bag, looked at me…and chuckled with embarrassment.

  “Alan…Dibdin,” urged the man.

  “I know,” snapped Simon.

  “We were at prep school together.” Dibdin turned to me. “We were awful to him.”

  Simon smiled amiably, and chuckled again. “Heh, heh.”

  Half a century goes by and, for the second time in three months, one of Simon’s prepubescent bullies from 1962 recog
nizes him under his cloud of gray muttonchop hair and rushes forward full of adult apology and admiration. I could hardly speak for surprise.

  Coincidence makes Simon blush. He chuckled some more and appeared to count some ducks that were sitting in a puddle farther up the road.

  “You’re writing a biography about him?” exclaimed Dibdin to me. “I’ll tell you everything. Only good things, it will be. The maths, bridge—he was good at everything. What a brain that man has! Music: always, ten-note chords.” He spread his hands as wide as they would stretch and bounced them gently up and down in mid-air: “Tink, tink, tink.”

  “But how did you recognize Simon if the last time you met was when he was ten?”

  Dibdin looked at me, perplexed that I should need to ask the question. “You can’t forget Simon.”

  He ran through names of old Ashdown boys. “X, remember him? He’s an MEP. Y, the Director of Debrett’s. Z? A historical novelist. None of us pushers. We’re all weak people who need structure. But this is amazing! Simon Norton! Fifty years! Me? I’m an inventor. I stay at home all day. I’m never out, pushing things. Will you have lunch with me, Simon? Please say yes.”

  I am Simon’s only regular friend, but he is surrounded by friendliness.

  In Sainsbury’s, half an hour later, after we finished our walk through Lammas Field and returned across the Backs to town, Simon snatched up two packets of chicken wings, pressed them against his nose to read the labels and dropped one into his basket. “‘Hot ‘n’ spicy.’ I eat them cold.”

  “About those prints of Trinity College and Jesus, above your piano,” I say. “How can you not have seen them before? You hung them.”