The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  Arven, meanwhile, went from shed to shed, marking the effects of blast upon different kinds of wall: this was where Kathleen’s record sheets came in. Arven read out measurements; Kathleen entered the numbers into boxes.

  Back at her uncle’s office, Arven showed Kathleen how to move the numbers between the boxes, shifting their values as she went. She followed him. She copied what he did.

  He stared at her.

  She looked up at him. ‘What?’ she said.

  When he didn’t reply, she said, ‘Did I do it wrong?’

  He laughed, and shook his head. He drew his chair closer to hers. He showed her how to make numbers out of other numbers, making them bloom.

  Afterwards – ‘to celebrate,’ he said – he took her by train to Darlington.

  ‘Mother will wonder where I am,’ she protested. She was so insistent that, when they got to the hotel, Arven made a call to her uncle, to see to it that her mother was reassured.

  Kathleen knew there would be trouble, but weeks of working for Arven and Zuckerman on important war work had excited her to the point where she felt that she could always use this as her excuse: the deadlines they had been struggling to meet; the fact both men would be leaving the following day – Zuckerman to Oxford, Arven to London.

  She had never eaten in a real restaurant before, and they were the only diners in the old-world sitting room, decorated with hunting scenes and large solemn prints of Conservative statesmen.

  ‘We’ll survive it,’ Arven told her. He was excited. His eyes shone from either side of his helmet-guard nose. ‘The air war. The figures that have been keeping us up nights. Whitehall’s figures are calculated on the assumption that every bit of explosive that’s dropped on us will find a target. It just isn’t so.’

  A charge has to be shaped to fit a target, or most of its energy vanishes into the air. He drew a figure on his napkin to show her. ‘It doesn’t matter how much explosive the Huns drop on us, only a tiny fraction of it will do us any harm.’ He grew reflective. ‘The big danger is fire, of course. But better the devil you know.’

  While they ate, he told her how to survive an air raid. ‘Wrap yourself in an eiderdown when you go out,’ he said. ‘It’ll absorb the blast and protect your lungs. If bombs are falling, lie face down in the gutter. Gutters give good protection – blast and splinters will almost certainly fly over you. And wear a notice round your neck. Something conspicuous.’

  ‘What for?’ Kathleen laughed: it was too absurd.

  ‘In case you do get hurt. Blast pressurizes the lungs. So if, heaven forbid, some oh-so-keen sixteen-stone air-raid warden comes across you and fancies a spot of artificial respiration—’

  Kathleen blushed.

  ‘Well, that’s you done for. So your notice will say “Weak Chest. Leave Off” – or words to that effect.’

  Kathleen was awed. ‘Is that what people will do? Is that what you will tell them to do?’

  Arven laughed. ‘I can’t see very many people adopting the eiderdown as evening wear, can you?’

  Kathleen smiled a small smile. It made her unhappy to think that people would not adopt good advice; that habit and convention overrode even the desire to survive.

  Arven shrugged. ‘Just remember the gutter trick,’ he told her. ‘That one’s a cert, and you won’t have to look like a ninny until the last possible moment.’ He drank off his beer. ‘Not that the Germans are likely to come bumbling over this little corner.’

  Later that evening, he began to speak of other things.

  He said, ‘I know you see the numbers.’

  Kathleen blushed.

  Though he was staying in Darlington that night, John Arven insisted on accompanying her home. ‘There’s time for me to get back. The trains run until eleven,’ he said, shrugging off her protests. ‘It’s you or the fleshpots of Darlington, and I’ve made my choice.’

  On the train he told her, ‘This war isn’t going to be a won by bombs or bullets. You’ve seen that yourself, haven’t you? An explosion’s nothing unless it’s shaped. You know what I’m talking about, Kathleen. You don’t think you know. You don’t know how to know – not yet. But you know. I understand what you see. How easy it is for you. The numbers…’ He struggled for a way to explain this to her. ‘For most of the rest of them, figures are a language they have to learn. It’s not like that for you. Is it?’

  She said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  He knew she was lying. ‘Listen, this war isn’t going to be won by soldiers, or airmen, or heroes, or generals, or any of them. This war is going to be won by numbers. Numbers, and people who know what to do with numbers. Do you understand?’

  She shook her head.

  As they came out of her local station and left the lights behind, he said to her, ‘I can’t offer much. There’s not very much that’s in my gift. Not directly. A job in Senate House to start with. Admiralty tables, that sort of thing.’ In the dusk, he caught her expression. ‘Don’t look so shocked, it’s not a secret! Look, I can teach you. Once you have the basics under your belt, it doesn’t matter a damn that you’re just a slip of a girl. With a head like yours, you can write your own ticket.’

  She was shocked at his language. She wondered if she ought to say something. Her mother would have said something. What should she say?

  She said, ‘The colours—’ and stopped.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘They mean I’m simple.’

  He stared at her. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘What blithering idiot gave you that idea?’

  In a small voice: ‘Aren’t I?’

  He tucked her arm firmly under his own. ‘If you are, then I am. If you are, then Senate House is a sea of simpletons.’

  Kathleen trembled all over. It was like discovering you had a brother. A family.

  Outside her house, Sage kissed her. ‘Kathleen. Promise me. We need people like you. Working people.’

  Her mother must have been watching because as soon as they were alone together in the kitchen she struck her daughter in the face so hard – a shaped charge, every particle of force meeting its target – that Kathleen lost her footing and banged her head on the corner of the kitchen table.

  Kathleen lay on the floor. Dimly, she could hear her mother’s breathing. Her eyes focused. There was a crust of bread on the floor. Her mother bent down to help her up, but she must have spotted the bread crust then because her hand, which was reaching to cradle her daughter’s head, changed course suddenly and snatched up the crust instead. She picked it up and carried it off to the rubbish pail.

  She returned to her daughter, helped her up, made her tea, ran bluish milk in after it, and made her daughter sit down. She apologized, after her fashion. ‘Look what you made me do!’ she sobbed.

  Kathleen, dazed, sipped her tea.

  ‘Look what you made me do!’

  Kathleen watched as her mother, still weeping, picked up the pail and carried it past her to the back door. She passed close enough that Kathleen could see into the pail. The pail shone. There was nothing in it but the crust of bread. Kathleen sipped her tea and listened to her mother’s footsteps receding, up the garden path, to where the compost pile lay. Her mother returned and rinsed out the rubbish pail. She set it down. She drew water into a pan and set it on the stove to boil. She sat at the table. She pressed her hand to the side of the teapot. She got up again and picked up the teapot and poured the dregs of the tea down the sink. She rinsed out the sink. She took the lid off the teapot and washed it. She scooped leaves out of the pot and dropped them into the rubbish pail. She rinsed out the pot. She picked up the rubbish pail. While she was in the garden, the water in the pan began to boil.

  From John Arven, Kathleen Hosken has learned to look the thing you most fear straight in the eye, not with passion, with a calculating curiosity.

  She is going away because she understands, now, why her uncle valued her company so very much; why he took such an interest in her; and when he was app
roached by his MP to give a discreet hand to two young men from Whitehall, why he thought to involve his niece in their work.

  She is leaving because she understands why her mother trusted him to employ her, even though she despises him. Why he is not welcome in their house. Why her father went away.

  It is as John Arven said it would be: a problem that is more or less soluble to an active intellect.

  Her mother came back inside and rinsed out the rubbish pail. Kathleen nursed the side of her head. She primed the fuse to her life, and lit it.

  She said, ‘You married the wrong one.’

  2

  It was October, the time of the phoney war. Indian summer in the big London parks, a false spring in Highgate and Hampstead, perfect weather for long walks by the Thames in Kew and Barnes; and all of it given poignancy by bad news from far-away places.

  The dust in the streets shone. Perfect cones of sand shone in the sun. Piles of sand ready for bagging piled up in empty lots. Sunshine glinted off the buttons on the tunics of the AFS men. Their hair. Their belt buckles. Kathleen walked the parks of the unfamiliar city. She wandered its embankments and craned her neck up at its statues. She meandered in a daze. She sleep-walked through Chelsea and Richmond and dozed open-eyed on benches in Battersea. On the grassy banks of Parliament Hill she lay down and slept, the sunlight blood-red through her eyelids, the grass smelling nonsensically of spring. The sun was like a gas fire, warming only what put itself directly in its way, and to step into a shadow was to feel the chill of the true season. Kathleen stayed in the sun.

  She did as John Arven had taught her. She approached everything with an aloof curiosity. She assumed nothing. She tuned her feelings out, became all eyes. She followed the advice she had been given, or most of it. Though she neither walked around the city wrapped in an eiderdown, nor strung a sign about her neck, still, she was prepared, at the first whistle of a descending bomb, to leap face-first into the nearest gutter.

  Surrounded by unfamiliar streets and unapproachable people, she made what kind of life she could. She bought milk and bread. She did not know how to cook; her mother had never shown her. Once, she tried to drink milk straight from the jar. It was thick and foamy and it sickened her. She ran water in. It was better. When the bread set hard she hacked off a slice and ran it under the tap in the communal bathroom and wrung it out; then it was all right again. Sometimes she had jam.

  The first bombs fell.

  There was no outcry, no animosity.

  At the Lyons corner house where she was training to be a waitress, as he was guiding the girls into the shelter he had made for them in the basement, the boilerman said, ‘Them lads is only doing their job, after all.’

  The same night, in the street below Kathleen’s garret window, two drunk AFS men walked by. They looked up at the bombers thundering overhead, and waved goodbye to them. ‘Goodnight!’ they laughed. ‘Good night, Jerry!’ they cheered. ‘Sleep tight!’

  Kathleen jerked away from the window. They might see her. They might see her at the window and know by her face, rosy in the light from distant fires, that the window was not covered.

  On her first night in this guest-house, she had drawn her bed up under the window so that she could spend her nights looking out across the city. Thanks to the blackout, the stars were often visible above the rooftops. Sometimes they winked out as she watched, and it was only by focusing on the patterns the stars made – winking off, then on again – that she made out the egg-shaped silhouettes of the barrage balloons.

  Rather than cover her window, she never made a light or lit a fire. She imagined what would happen if the AFS men spotted her. The strange thing was, in her imagination, the men did not point at her. They did not shout at her. They did not accuse her of anything. In her imagination, they smiled at her: ‘Sleep tight!’

  There was a knock on her door. ‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice. Whoever it was, she wasn’t going away.

  Kathleen opened the door a crack.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kathleen said.

  ‘What you sorry for?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Come on, love, let me in, it’s bloody freezing out here.’

  Kathleen opened her door.

  The girl in the hall was short and dumpy, with a pear-shaped face and hair in a great contrived frizz. She stepped into the room quickly, so Kathleen had to take a step back. The dumpy girl felt around for the light switch. She stared past Kathleen at the uncovered window, and snapped the light off again. ‘You’re a caution,’ she said, impressed.

  Kathleen helped her with the felt-backed cardboard shutters they used here in place of blackout blinds. Once the window was covered, they put the light back on. The room was hateful now: a box, brightly lit. Kathleen sat on her hands to control her trembling.

  ‘You need the fire on.’ The visitor’s name was Margaret. ‘Wass the matter, love? You homesick? Blimey,’ she said, flapping her arms about herself, ‘you’ll catch your death in here!’ She lit the gas fire and came and sat beside Kathleen on the bed. She put an arm around her. ‘Bloody hell, lovey, you’re all skin and bone. Are you sick?’

  Margaret was the eldest of six. She had time for children. In the weeks that followed, she took Kathleen in hand.

  ‘Don’t you know no one? No one at all?’

  Kathleen shook her head. She had written to Professor Arven at Birkbeck College asking to meet him, asking what useful work she might do. Concerned not to appear naive or unserious, she had carefully followed every stricture and regulation regarding sensitive correspondence: at the top of the letter, the words ‘Same Address’; in the body, no mention of how they had met, or what work they had done. Perhaps she had been too oblique. Perhaps he could not place her in his memory. She had never had a reply.

  Margaret had five brothers. She received letters from them every week, the army censor allowing. She read them to Kathleen. She expected Kathleen to respond in kind. She was scandalized. ‘No brothers or sisters? No cousins, even? What about your mother?’

  Margaret was gregarious and overbearing.

  ‘What size shoes do you take, anyway?’

  ‘Your seams are crooked,’ Margaret would say. ‘Here, let me.’ Her fingers pinched and tickled, as she deftly straightened Kathleen’s stockings.

  Kathleen, wobbling dangerously on borrowed shoes, learned to study the backs of her legs in the mirror, to check if her seams were straight. She caught herself in the glass, peeking over her shoulder: the coy picture she made. ‘Where’d you get these stockings?’ she asked her new friend.

  ‘Never you worry. Here.’ There was a slip to go with the stockings. ‘Mind, it’s just for tonight.’

  Margaret fed her and dressed her. Kathleen was Margaret’s project, her doll, her pet.

  Kathleen worried: what could she give Margaret in return for her companionship? What amusement could she afford? She began to see that John Arven’s cool curiosity had its limits, that an icy objectivity would not suffice in every situation.

  She began to measure how little she knew about being alive.

  Then came the awkward moment when Kathleen realized what she was: an amusement afforded Margaret by her latest dry spell. Deep down, and all the time, Margaret wanted men.

  When Margaret was seeing a man, Kathleen did not see her from one day to the next.

  Moments with men were the measure of Margaret’s life: evenings in the cinema or at the pub; furtive whispers on the stairs; nights when she did not come home at all. Then, his furlough done, the intensity of departure: the porter tearing her hand from the handle of the carriage as the train pulled away. The smoke, the steam, the grit. These things only piqued Margaret’s appetite – when the sentiment ebbed, in a week or two – for the next glance, the next night out, another arm round her waist.

  She was ‘no better than she ought to be’, as Kathleen’s mother would say. She was ‘second-hand goods’. From the aloof perspectives of the scientific metho
d, however, such strictures counted for little.

  ‘Want to come down the Four Feathers?’ said Margaret.

  ‘Why not?’ said Kathleen, with a tremor of wrongdoing.

  They got ready. Margaret did Kathleen’s make-up for her. Margaret’s technique began and ended at the eyes. She larded her own eyes with kohl and mascara in a vain attempt to draw attention away from her discoloured teeth. She tried this look on Kathleen.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said Kathleen, captivated by the image in her glass, the Egyptian princess there.

  ‘Oh, cobblers,’ Margaret snapped. She unscrewed the lid off a jar of cold cream and ordered Kathleen to wipe it away. ‘Let’s try something else.’

  The Four Feathers was one of those shabby commercial drinking places where scraps of lunchtime bar-shrimp litter the sawdust on the floor of the saloon bar and the sawdust is black and malty and sticks to the heel of your shoe. It was packed. Margaret led Kathleen on, head down, elbows out, a human battering ram. A cross-current parted them. Kathleen called out to her friend. Margaret, intent on reaching the counter, did not notice her. Kathleen thought she would wait where she was, but the milling crowd drove her, like a stick in a millrace, steadily towards the other side of the room. When the current changed course suddenly, she found herself pressed up against the counter. ‘What’s your name, love?’

  The voice was only one component of the din.

  A finger jabbed her upper arm. ‘Hello. What’s your name?’

  She turned.

  Back home, the timbres of Kathleen’s voice spelled property. Here, she might as well be ‘the lowest of the low’. Her accent was a thick and bitter Durham: sharp, flaked, a rusted gate squealing in the wind. So she spoke only when spoken to, and very softly.

  ‘Kathleen,’ she said, softly, into the widest smile she’d ever seen.

  ‘Katherine?’

  She nodded and tried to meet the man’s eyes. His jaw was too distracting, so thick and pink and smooth.