by Simon Ings
It is only as the wedding nears that Anthony learns why Rachel’s father is so relieved to have him for a son-in-law.
Rachel is young. She was born the year Versailles was signed; she was fourteen the evening her father returned to their Berlin apartment, ashen and shaking, to report the first of many book burnings; she was with her mother in the audience of the Dresden Opera when Fritz Busch was booed for his Jewish violins; three years later, in the stands of the Olympic Stadium, her father gripped her hand, nails digging in, so she would remember not to cheer so loud when Jesse Owens won.
To meet these betrayals, Rachel says, a new, muscular, socialist Jewry is needed; a self-aware Jewry organized into a modern state, defended with modern weapons! Statements like these, screamed across the breakfast table of the family’s genteel, cash-strapped exile in St John’s Wood, thoroughly unnerved Rachel’s parents long before Anthony came on the scene.
This is why the old man is relieved: his dangerous-minded daughter has settled for a middle-of-the-road Fabian, after all. He has concluded from this that his daughter’s revolutionary fervour has been just a phase. On the night of their wedding, Anthony, in a mischievous spirit, points this out to his wife.
Rachel laughs as she mounts her new husband. ‘Dad said the same about Hitler,’ she says.
May 1942. It is several months since Rachel and Anthony were married, yet this is the first opportunity they have had for a honeymoon.
From Fort William, the Road to the Isles follows the crinkled Highland coastline. It is a road of steep inclines, blind summits and sharp, muddy bends; a road for farm wagons, tractors and clapped-out cars. After a couple of hours’ steady driving, confusion is assured. It is virtually impossible for a stranger to read this landscape, where every feature feathers into every other feature, so that to distinguish between a channel and a loch, between mainland and island – between land and sea, even – becomes little more than a game of language. The light here turns seawater gold as furze, and rock to an ocean green. Their minds slide off the landscape constantly.
At moments of dizziness like these, Rachel seizes Anthony’s knee. Anthony slows the car. Sometimes, he stops. Whenever they stop, they kiss.
It excites Anthony that he has married a Jew. If every new wife is an unexplored territory, then Rachel is a mysterious land indeed: a heady mix of the cosmopolitan and the exotic; the glass and steel of new money seen through the dust and yellow light of an ancient civilization. At night, if Rachel’s sex fails to arouse him (and who, in strict honesty, achieves such direct responses, straight away? After all, thinks Anthony, we are not dogs) then her exoticism serves.
Naturally, he says none of this out loud. Rachel’s parents are Austrian aesthetes, Goethe’s children; for them, their Jewishness is little more than the stick Hitler and his thugs chose to beat them with, once they decided to expropriate the family’s bank. As for Rachel, Anthony has been left in no doubt where she stands. He has gone to public meetings and has sat, squirming with embarrassment, as Rachel makes perfectly clear her abhorrence of what she calls ‘the argument from blood’. It is the Jewish faith itself – its aloofness and its quietism – which has failed her people, and the desert realm she dreams of and conspires towards is robustly secular.
Anthony Burden drives them over hills of bare rock, rippled and layered by the ages like old wax, and pulls up at last at the village their RAC map promised them.
The place is a figment. There is nothing here but a pond, reflecting the ruins of a castle. A handful of dairy cattle sit by the pond, chewing the cud. A ramshackle gate hangs open on one hinge, and a fence, all but ruined, leads from the pond to a nearby farm. Beyond the castle lies a wide, calm estuary.
The newlyweds climb from the car. A cobblestone jetty stretches a tentative finger into the water. Lobster pots are stacked high along its left-hand side. Rachel pulls gently from Anthony’s embrace – he is nothing if not uxorious – and walks the length of the jetty. He pauses a moment before he follows. She is magnificent, he decides, abandoning himself to the unfamiliar heat of sensual observation. Her buttocks are really very narrow for a girl. He surprises a desire to smack them very hard. To pull. To part. She is his wife, after all.
His nerve fails him, or the smell of the lobster pots cuts through his lust, and by the time he is standing beside her again, his mind has turned to safer, more familiar subjects. He says, looking out across the coast, ‘One could write the maths for this.’
He is thinking of the Fibonacci series: one plus one equals two, one plus two equals three, two plus three equals five, each term the sum of the previous two, expanding forever into the arrangements of leaves, the patterns of flowers, the arrangements of fir-cones. D’Arcy Thompson wrote this up in 1917 – how nature is underpinned by mathematics. Nobody since has taken a blind bit of notice. It is only by chance that Anthony stumbled on Thompson’s book, the year his friend John left Stonegrove. The field – the mathematics of creation – lies wide open. It spreads out before him. A new-found land, there for the taking.
‘With one formula,’ he says, trying for an unaccustomed clarity, ‘you could generate a billion different valleys.’
She looks up at him with beautiful, big, dark eyes. ‘What of?’ she asks him.
‘What?’ Anthony thumbs the wedding band on his finger, turning it around and around.
‘What would you build them of? These billion valleys.’
Rachel is a practical woman. Hers is a solid, material world. She wants to know what things are made of. She wants to know what things are for. Rachel is just the sort of companion Anthony needs, for he has spent too much of his life among abstract thoughts. What of? Her enquiring smile is a bracing challenge, and he confronts the question as a yachtsman turns his face into the wind.
He would build valleys of light. He would build valleys of numbers. ‘It would be like watching a picture show,’ he tells his new wife. ‘But one where the film has been shot at every angle, from every point in space. As you move your eyes across the screen, as you shift about in your theatre chair, the image adapts to your movements, giving you the sense that you are moving through a real place.’
Rachel says, ‘There isn’t film stock enough in the world for a film like that.’
But the seamlessness and completeness of the world is an illusion. In fact, the film is short, and composed only of the shots you yourself see. Only your view of the world exists: the rest is darkness. In Anthony’s fantastical world of numbers, a tree falling in the quad with no one to witness it would make no sound.
‘The time it would take,’ she continues. ‘The time you would need to make such a film – you would never be able to keep up with your audience.’
This is true. This film needs to be composed, painted and shot, even as it is being watched. This film cannot therefore be a film, in the conventional sense, but a series of still images presented at speed enough to trick the eye – fifty-six frames per second or not much less – by some other yet-to-be-invented apparatus: a machine closer in kind to the facsimile machine.
‘What’s it got to do with telephones?’ she asks him.
‘Telephones carry pictures, as well as sound,’ he says.
You could draw up a place, draft it the way an architect sketches a building. You could send its geometries down phone-lines to people all over the world. ‘People all over the world could visit this place from the comfort of their armchairs!’
‘Don’t call them places,’ she says.
There is silence between them. She says, ‘If you can’t be buried in it, it’s not a place.’
And a moment later: ‘Don’t tell a Jew what a place is.’
He walks back along the cobblestone pier to the car. He gets in and slams the door. It is the old challenge again, the one he loves her for, the mental habit that has drawn him to her – but since they set out together this morning she has been wielding her lack of imagination like a club.
She gets in the car beside him.
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‘All set?’ he says.
‘What?’
‘What?’
‘What’s the matter?’ she says, as though she had not attacked him.
‘Nothing,’ he says, as though he is not hurt.
In Anthony’s land of light and mathematics, there are no conflicts, because there is an imaginary abundance of everything: sunshine, shelter, space. Space above all. There is space enough in Anthony’s land for everyone to be alone. In his land, this is how everyone wants to live.
It is a sort of three-dimensional cartoon, rendered in fine line-work by an army of mechanical draughtsmen. The inhabitants move about its infinite coves and inlets with a calm, myopic tread. In Anthony’s imagination, there is a mathematical formula for people, too.
Home again, and sequestered in his study, Anthony thinks and writes, filling red school exercise books with exquisite diagrams, drawings, formulae and commentaries. He uses up every square inch of paper – a habit drummed into him at Stonegrove – and on every fourth or fifth day, he reaches for a fresh exercise book. Each book is tied to its neighbour by trains of thought and even sometimes by single sentences, begun in one book, finished in the next.
Since moving to London, Anthony has formalized his working methods to the point of ritual: always the same brand of exercise book and pencil. The same chair, made stable on the study’s uneven, uncarpeted floor with a back-copy of Eureka. The sounds of familiar streets through a window opened just so. Rachel knocks before she enters. It is a rule with him.
When Anthony first told her about what he did, it sounded to Rachel as though it would change everything; that it was a tool with which to build a new kind of society, a more open, egalitarian way of being. She has spoken up for Anthony’s work among her comrades. She has described in glowing terms his brave new world of teleprinters, television scanning and automatic exchange connections, his new model society, linked by wire and radio-wave. But Stalin’s behaviour during the war and his anti-Semitism have thrown Zionism’s left flank into chaos. The Party has too many problems of its own to listen to yet another visionary, or sit patiently through descriptions of glittering tomorrows.
Rachel looks in the mirror, sees her mother, and wonders what has happened to her fire. She remembers Anthony, the night she met him, his nose streaming blood, his smile swallowing the world.
She wonders where he went, the man with whom she fell in love.
A bright Tuesday morning in the summer of 1943.
‘Sage, thank you.’
John Arven is not listening. ‘Get in the car.’
‘You really have done enough—’
John Arven is not interested. ‘Will you get in?’
‘I’m most terribly sorry to put you to—’
John is blisteringly angry, to the point of spitting and blaspheming, and if Anthony bloody Burden doesn’t— ‘Anthony! Get in the buggering car!’
Anthony Burden gets in.
It is still only half past nine. It feels like two in the afternoon. John Arven is exhausted. Anthony has had neither the patience nor the good sense to wait till a civilized hour before making his one phone call. He shook his friend out of sleep at half past four this morning. John hasn’t been able to sleep a wink since. He’s been up most of the night, drinking some ghastly burnt-tasting stuff that stands in place of coffee these days, trying to work out what he can say to the duty officer that will have him drop all charges. However much he racked his brains, the ‘war work’ card was the only one worth playing. A dangerous ploy. If Anthony’s work at the Post Office is so vital to the war effort, surely his employers have a right to know that he has been caught wandering Mayfair without his trousers? After four lengthy phone calls and an appearance in person at the police station in his best suit, John hopes he has managed to flannel the affair to a satisfactory conclusion. If Anthony arrives at work on Monday morning to a stiff note and an awkward meeting with the board – well, it is his own look-out.
Anthony directs John along the southern edge of Regent’s Park and into a series of dull, unforgiving streets.
They park up at the entrance to a road closed off by sawhorses. ‘Is this it?’
Anthony Burden’s whole head is blushing. ‘I – I think so.’
‘Well, is it the place or not?’ John fairly shouts at him – and immediately regrets it. There is no point baiting the man. What’s done is done. He is here, as usual, to contain the damage Anthony Burden has done himself. Shouting isn’t going to help. ‘Come on,’ he says. He takes Anthony by the arm in a grip he means to be friendly, but which is probably too tight, and leads him through the ruined street. ‘Now, do you remember where you took them off?’
His kindness and patience do what his bad temper couldn’t, and Anthony Burden bursts into tears. They sit together, companionably enough, on a stub of wall, and John offers Anthony his handkerchief. ‘Why don’t you phone Rachel?’
Anthony shakes his head.
‘She was out of her mind with worry when I phoned her from the station.’
Anthony looks up at John, aghast. ‘You did say I was in a hospital, didn’t you? Not a…’ He cannot say the words.
‘A police station, Anthony.’ Acidulated tones break through John’s veneer of patience. ‘You have spent the night in a police station. Yes, I lied for you. But I want you to understand something.’
Anthony looks up at him, puppy-eyed.
‘I am never going to lie for you again, especially not to your wife.’
Anthony is suitably humble. ‘Yes, Sage. I quite understand.’
‘If I were you I would tell Rachel everything. Everything. Things are bad enough without you acting a lie to the one person who is supposed to stick by you.’
‘Well,’ says Anthony, without conviction, ‘I will try…’
‘There is another thing.’
‘Yes, Sage?’
‘I want you to see a psychiatrist.’
Anthony dares a little laugh. ‘Oh, now, Sage—’
‘Find one yourself this week, or I will find one for you. I promise you, Anthony, I will walk you into the nearest hospital if you do not agree to this.’
Anthony swallows against a fresh flood of tears. ‘All right, Sage,’ he says, in a little voice. ‘I don’t really know about such matters but I suppose I can make some enquiries.’
‘You do that.’
‘Though in days like these—’
‘There are plenty of good medical men sitting on their hands, Anthony. I want you to find one, this week – or it’s off to the Maudsley with you.’
The air here is yellow with dust and, though dry, the plaster shivered off all the ruined buildings has given it an odour of mould and rot. John thinks: he might have got up to anything in a place like this. Anything. Afraid of what he might find, John draws Anthony to his feet, and together they set about combing the ruins.
‘They are a kind of twill,’ Anthony tells him, trying to be helpful.
‘How many pairs of trousers are we expecting to find?’ says John. The joke’s on him: there are whole wardrobes strewn across the rubble, scattered by multiple blasts.
‘Are these them?’
Anthony peers. ‘I don’t think so. No. No, I’m afraid not.’
Well, won’t they do? John wonders, irritated. What can be so special about a pair of trousers? In fact, why are we hunting for them at all? If Anthony wants to spin a lie about last night to his wife, all he has to do is invent the sort of accident that would damage a pair of trousers. He could fake a sprained ankle and say that the nurses, fearing to disturb bones that might be broken, cut the damn things off his leg.
Come to think of it, what story does he have it in mind to spin? Does he even have the guile to act a lie?
‘I say, Sage,’ says Anthony, a little later, as they teeter on the edge of a pile of masonry – any moment now a policeman is going to spot them and blow his whistle – ‘you know, I am terribly grateful for these things you’ve lent me.’
As well he might be. John is all out of rags now. These trousers Anthony’s wearing are the bottoms to a perfectly serviceable suit. ‘I want them back,’ John says, brusquely. He is not in the mood to mend fences – not today and not tomorrow.
‘Of course,’ says Anthony.
‘Pressed.’
Silence.
‘There is one thing,’ says Anthony.
John clenches his fists and drives them into the pockets of his trousers. ‘Yes?’
‘About Rachel…’
‘Yes?’
Anthony lays a hand delicately on John’s arm. ‘Today, before I go home. Do you think…? I mean, could you…’
‘You mean, could I go round there first and smooth the waters?’
‘Yes.’
‘Make some excuses for you.’
‘Well, ye—’
‘Tell her that she must not question you too closely. That you remember very little. That you have had a nasty shock.’
‘Why, yes!’
It is hopeless. Simply hopeless. Anthony hasn’t listened to a single word he’s said.
This, it turns out, is not strictly true.
The following week, Anthony calls in sick and retires to the little philosophical society he frequents whenever he is passing Gower Street. There, in the library, he falls into conversation with one of that strange breed of somatic therapist who have taken up lodgings in the society’s rooms. This way, Anthony can keep his promise to his dear friend John Arven, without at the same time having to admit that anything is actually wrong. John wants him to see a psychiatrist? Well then, he will see a psychiatrist. They will have a pleasant little chat about philosophy. Anthony’s promise will be discharged. And that will be that.
He has not counted upon the zeal and perspicacity of Dr Loránt Pál.
Two years earlier: 15 June 1940.
The British Expeditionary Force is being evacuated from France, and in the foc’sle of the cruiser Arethusa, tied up at the mouth of the Gironde, Dr Loránt Pál tunes a borrowed fiddle.
Its owner, first violinist and prima of the Budapest Municipal Orchestra, lights a Turkish cigar and lies back on his pallet. ‘Come along, then.’
