by John Lawton
They had tumbled into bed so quickly he wondered that she had bothered to ask him to zip her up.
Afterwards she had made no comment on his amateurishness. It was understood. He was better at it than the last time they’d met. He’d give Kitty Stilton credit for that, were it not that he was pushing Kitty Stilton as far from consciousness as possible.
‘Now, Troy!’
Zette rushed in, shirttails flapping, a gust of bacon and brown sauce trailing behind her. Slapped their after-lights-out dorm feast on the table by the picture window on the park. It would soon be dark, the sun was a reddling blush on the horizon. And with darkness came the blackout.
‘Not that I’m saying bolt your grub or anything, Troy, but I can’t abide the blackout. I usually put out all the lights instead. Often as not I just sit here. Before the war, of course, one watched London light up, now it never does, as though a giant had leaned over London in ’39, huffed just once and out they all went.’
After bacon and eggs, after most of a bottle of Taittinger, she said, ‘Just so you don’t think I’m utterly heartless . . . tell me how my father died.’
The question took Troy by surprise. But what didn’t? That their wake for Izzy Borg had been to fuck each other senseless had taken him by surprise.
He told her as briefly and as clinically as he had told Onions.
‘And,’ she said at last, ‘you have no doubts?’
‘No.’
She said nothing while they drained the bottle, then, with a suddeness that was startling, she stood up, peeled the shirt over her head, threw it at Troy, stood naked before him and said, ‘Get dressed. Time we went out.’
‘What – a club or something?’
Troy did not do clubs – he’d somehow missed out that phase of his education.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or something.’
She disappeared into her bedroom and reappeared in a macintosh and soft shoes.
They crossed the road into the park, she slipped an arm through his. A couple of hundred yards and she steered him across the grass, towards trees, but they stopped just short of them.
It was a dark night, but not so dark he could not discern the vague shapes of bodies on the grass around him. Not so dark that he could not see that Zette was face to face with him. And no depth of dark could mask the sounds of coitus coming at him from every direction. If there was one couple coupling, there were a dozen or more.
‘I discovered this in the spring. People come here every day just to do it. Even before dusk.’
‘They do?’
‘It’s almost a tradition. Indeed, a new London cry is to be heard nightly the cry of ye olde rubber johnnie seller. We might even see one. Condoms on sticks like candy floss, and the cry of “Five bob new, half a crown used”.’
‘Used! You’re kidding?’
‘Nope. A good rinse and a light dusting with chalk and a rubber johnny ought to last a month. All depends how hard you go at it. But . . . we don’t need him, because we have . . .’
There was just enough light to see the french letter in its tiny paper envelope, like a thank you card from an elf, that she held up to him.
‘Er . . .’
‘Yeees?’
‘We don’t need him, but we don’t need the park either, we have . . . your flat. These people probably have nowhere else to go.’
‘No Troy, they do it here because they can. They do it here because they want to do it here. It’s the “aphrodisia of war”. It’s pure Freud. It’s pure sex. We need to do it here, Troy.’
‘No we don’t.’
‘Oh, but we do. We do. We most certainly do.’
She let the macintosh slip. She’d a simple cotton frock on. She hoisted the frock to her waist, bunched the skirt in one hand – knickerless still – and thrust the condom at him with the other.
‘Let’s do it.’
‘I . . . I . . . I . . . er.’
And a voice from the dark said, ‘Fer Gawd’s sake, fuck ’er, mate. If you don’t, I bleedin’ well will. Maybe then she’ll shut ’er great clangin’ gob!’
Later, heaped with embarrassment, glistening with sweat, trousers round his knees, groin locked to hers, pale moon of arse in the air, wondering what he’d do if a policeman stopped by, Troy found everything an inhibition.
‘Come, Troy. Come. Viens! Viens! Viens!’
Like it or not he did as he was told, and at the wettest moment of the great wet rush, she whispered in his ear, ‘Catch this bastard for me, Troy. Catch him. Promise me you’ll catch him!’
For no reason he could think of Troy was suddenly reminded of Dora Wax reading tea leaves for him. Something about a dark woman entering his life. A dark woman, a wicked woman.
§
Under moonlight,
infectious moonlight,
a madman dances,
chanting numbers,
two, three, five, seven, eleven.
Smeared in excrement,
naked as nativity,
smeared in his own blood,
throat bared to heaven,
Lord Carsington dances.
§ 124
As Izzy, henceforth known as Zette, and Troy repeated their night-time feast on scrambled eggs, crispy bacon and Taittinger, Rod Troy and his new-found friends mulled over the pleasure of their cuisine in their dormitory three hundred miles away.
Hummel said, ‘Have you considered that this might indeed be heaven? We have beds with sheets, we have indoor plumbing, sufficient entertainment and diversion, we have three square meals a day . . .’
‘Squarish,’ said Billy ‘The grub ain’t that great and there’s hardly ever seconds of anything. There’s no booze. And you can get fed up with kippers every day.’
Hummel conceded, ‘Squarish then. If heaven lies in the security of the basic necessities of life . . .’
‘Food that falls from the trees?’ said Rod.
‘Kippers don’t fall from trees.’
Hummel ignored Billy and picked up from Rod, ‘Exactly then Heaven’s Gate might not be heaven, but as you more aptly suggest Eden?’
‘Wot are you on about?’
‘He means, Billy, that one could get used to this.’
‘Do you ’Ummer?’
‘Indeed I do. I begin to wonder if I might not spend the rest of my life here in fruitful idleness.’
‘You don’t ’arf talk some bollocks.’
Rod and Hummel said nothing. Billy could always be relied on to fill a silence, and clearly, he was thinking.
‘Where do kippers come from?’ he said at last.
And from the farthest bunk Herr Rosen said, ‘Mein Gott, do you cockneys know nothing?’
§ 125
A couple of days later, Troy found a postcard on the doormat as he and Kitty let themselves in early in the evening.
He glanced at it. A view of the backs and the river at Cambridge.
Tied up for a while. If you succeed you can always reach me here, at the Cavendish. Z. and ps. You can make a plan now. Just the one.
Don’t go Mad XXX
‘Wossat?’
Kitty’s head on his shoulder, peering at the card.
‘Nothing,’ he lied, folding the card. ‘My old pal, Charlie. Works with your father out at Burnham.’
‘You live in a world of old pals, you lot, don’t yer?’
§ 126
Rod found himself looking forward to the idea of Heaven’s Gate Make-shift University. It would pass the time, much as playing second violin in the string quartet would pass the time, and it might kick his brain into gear the way things did when he was at Cambridge. He was not at all surprised to find that Rosen and Hummel joined him – after Hummel’s offer to speak on the matter of God, it was to be expected. What surprised him was to find himself seated between Jacks and Lt Jenkins.
Jacks said, ‘It’s gotta be better than twiddlin’ yer thumbs, ain’t it?’
Rod said, ‘Are you under orders, Mr Jenkins?’
‘’Fraid so, old man. Besides, you can’t keep it a secret, and I’d’ve come anyway.’
‘Mr Trench will not be joining us?’
‘Nope. He’ll get whatever potted version I choose to give him. He’s expecting subversion and dissidence. Anything less and he’ll probably dismiss me before I get to the end of my first sentence.’
Drax’s first sentence was incredibly long. As was his second and his third. He coughed into a hanky every so often, otherwise he launched into a convoluted account of ‘Our Times.’
It was disappointing. Drax, the most interesting conversationalist Rod had met in his imprisonment, was all too predictable as a lecturer. Rod felt he could have written all this himself. It was too familiar. It was the rubber-stamp, left-wing interpretation of the inter-war years, a potted account of the rise of Nazism, and potshots at every other wing of politics for not resisting it. It sent Rod into daydreams. Jacks nodded off. Jenkins and Hummel looked alert enough, but Jacks was definitely asleep, his snore punctuating the boredom as regularly as Drax’s cough. Rosen looked engaged, engaged and angry.
‘In conclusion . . . the development of National Socialism in Germany in all its horror is not an aberration from the human values extolled by the capitalist system but a direct consequence of them. I would even say their apotheosis, and propaganda is now being used to convince the British of their fundamental difference from the Third Reich, whereas in fact the difference is at best one of superstructures . . . not of fundamentals. When we hear of “the Enemy Within” – ourselves, gentlemen, ourselves! – and are urged to vigilance, it is only intelligent to recognise that the enemy has been “within” for one hundred and fifty years, and if war is now being fought in terms of nationalities, it conceals rather than cancels the war between capital and labour.’
Rod all but sighed with relief when Kornfeld got up to offer a vote of thanks.
‘You know, Max, if you talk like this you’ll be locked up.’
And under the cover of laughter Rod slipped out of the room.
§ 127
His next postcard from Zette was in an envelope. The same picture of the Cambridge backs and the river, but it was clear why she’d put it in an envelope.
I said ‘catch this bastard’ – of course I meant ‘kill this bastard’. You can do that, can’t you, Troy?
§ 128
Kornfeld stood before the class, looking far too young to be a professor of anything, but exuding self-confidence.
‘I must apologise for the use of a blackboard. It is not designed to make you feel you are back in kindergarten.’
Kornfeld paused for laughter, but there was none.
‘Those of you who have been here a while will know that until my internment I was a fellow in theoretical physics at Cambridge University. Theoretical Physics is mostly numbers – indeed I trained as a mathematician – and I think we will all find it a little easier if I write down some of the formulae so we all may see them.
Again for the sake of newcomers, I will begin by recapping a little of my winter lectures on Unified Field Theory . . .’
‘What theory?’ Jacks whispered to Rod.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ Rod replied.
‘. . . before I embark on my theme, which is, of course, as it were, the complimentary notion of the Steady State . . .’
‘Are you keepin’ up with this, ’Ampstead?’
‘I think he said it was all about numbers.’
‘I think I’ll nip out for a fag.’
§ 129
It was Thursday. Kitty worked the nightshift on Thursday. It saved Troy from any sense of dilemma.
Shortly after ten in the morning the telephone had rung in his office and he had heard Zette Borg say, ‘What plan did you make?’
‘I . . . er . . .’
‘You didn’t? No matter. I’ll be in town for the night. Be at my flat by nine.’
Troy said nothing.
‘You can do that, can’t you, Troy?’
The echo of her last postcard was inescapable. But the wisp of a dilemma turned to mist before his eyes and blew away.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can do that.’
They got in from the park at midnight. Lay on the bed as though they had lain there all evening rather than in the fresh-cut grass of Hyde Park. He could still smell mown grass, stronger than her Indiscret.
Small talk would have been nice – would have been appropriate – but she was saying nothing. Her face was in the pillow.
‘You know,’ he began. ‘I don’t know much about you.’
‘I rather think that’s why we’re here.’
‘I know nothing about your job.’
‘I know nothing about yours.’
‘I’m a copper. I think it might be easy to imagine my job. I used to wear a pointy hat and boots and carry a truncheon. Now I wear a suit and ask a lot of questions.’
She turned her face sideways, out of the pillow, not looking at him but at least he could hear her clearly now.
‘Oh God . . . do you really want to know? Fine . . . it’s all about numbers.’
Troy knew he’d heard this phrase before – then it came back to him. The first alien he and Stilton had rounded up, the chap who lodged with Dora Wax, had dismissed Dora’s tea-leaf prophecy with ‘everything is numbers. If she wants the secret of the universe, it lies in numbers.’
‘You’ve heard that old adage that a Ph.D. is more and more about less and less? Well it applies to low temperature physics in spades . . . we’re talking, we’re asking, more and more about the infinitessimally small.’
‘Atoms?’
‘Beyond atoms . . . sub-atomic particles . . . the activity of the building blocks of the universe . . . and it all comes down to numbers, to numbers, ratios and equations. Do you know who Heisenberg is?’
‘No.’
‘Schrödinger? Won the Nobel for physics in ’33?’
‘No.’
‘Dirac? Shared the Nobel in ’33? Talks of the poetry of mathematics?’
All Troy knew was that, with names like that, he and Walter Stilton would probably have locked them up by now if they lived in England.
‘No.’
‘OK. OK. If I were to sum up what they’ve achieved in my field in the last fifteen years, I’d say they put the maths in place for the understanding of anything bigger than the nucleus of the atom. Now . . . we’re going below that . . . down to the point where you don’t know whether you’re dealing with matter or energy . . .’
He found the words of old Dora’s lodger on his lips . . . ‘the secret of the universe’.
He’d half expected her to sneer at this, but instead he seemed to have caught her attention. She propped herself up on one elbow to look at him.
‘Yes. If you want. That’s exactly what it is, and if we can keep the would-be-mystics out of it, we’ll find it.’
‘Would-be-mystics?’
She flopped down again, face in the pillow, her tone of voice the same exasperated one she had used when she’d told him not to make plans.
‘People like my father.’
While she slept Troy thought of the difference between his relationship with Kitty and his relationship with Zette. She was right, they did not know one another, they were as elemental as matter and energy, and he and Kitty surely did know one another? But in not knowing, so many of the obstacles vanished. Between Troy and Zette, class, race, tribe, faith mattered not a damn.
§ 130
They each lay full length on their cots. Only Herr Rosen had chosen not to return. As though each of them felt the same sudden exhaustion – but nothing had taxed them physically. Rod knew what he felt after a Drax talk. It was the force of Old Drax’s anger. The years of knowing that it was all preventable, and nothing had been done. After Kornfeld’s he was baffled and mind-numb. He wondered what might be tiring Billy and Hummel, as he lay between them. Like the largest tin soldier in the box. It could not be the same, surely? But it was.
&
nbsp; Billy spoke, ‘What was that about then?’
‘Search me,’ Rod replied.
‘Y’know ’Ampstead. There are times when I think you and me are the only ones who don’t know.’
‘Really? I used to think I had certain intellectual strengths. History, y’know, Metternich’s Europe and all that . . . Modern Languages . . . a smattering of Economics . . .’
Billy saved him from a list of his own inadequacies, ‘Whereas me – not bein’ college – I know two things . . . how to run a tailor’s and how to –’
‘Look after number one,’ Rod concluded for him.
Billy propped himself up on one elbow, surprised but not in his habitually angry way of confronting the new.
‘How d’yer know I was gonna say that?’
‘Billy,’ Hummel said softly from the other side of Rod’s bulk, all but invisible to Billy, ‘it is your battle cry – you ride with it wrapped around your crest like a crusader legend. You drum it into your wife, you shout it at your son and you use it as a sophist’s bludgeon in any negotiations with Schuster and myself.’
Billy spoke to Rod, ‘Did you understand that?’
‘More than you did.’
Hummel had not finished.
‘But, my friends . . . let us consider the question you asked first. “What’s it all about?”’
‘I’m all ears, cock.’
‘There is a certain common ground in what Professor Kornfeld is saying in his talks and what I shall say in mine. We are both dealing with the greatest human failing of all – the necessity of meaning.’
‘Eh?’
‘Kornfeld is asking you to consider where science has been headed since Darwin.’
‘Who?’
‘Later, Billy,’ Rod said. ‘That’s an easy one. I can answer that one for you. Let Josef speak.’
‘Darwin,’ Hummel said on cue, ‘removed the hand of God from creation – a momentous decision for a devout Christian, one has no difficulty in understanding the great delay in making his conclusions public – yet in so doing, in taking God’s heavenly hand from the earthly tiller, he ironically left order . . . genus, species, category . . . call it what you will, it’s order . . . even though the very principle appears to be that everything is random, accidental and hence meaningless. That much-abused phrase ‘The Survival of the Fittest’ might be better rendered as ‘The Survival of the Freaks’. We are freaks with overly large frontal lobes and opposing thumbs as surely as the long-necked Galapagos tortoise is a freak. Now, with what remained of order – and absence of God might be lightly termed the absence of whimsy . . . the duckbilled platypus might make more sense viewed as the product of divine whimsy, nevertheless it evolved . . . practically, in interaction with the rest of nature . . . and nature is the greatest freak, the consummate all-pervading freak . . . with the order remaining science has sought, however unconsciously, to reinvent God. Not the God of the laws of our fathers, nor the Christian God of love, no God with human form . . . but the God of First Principles, first causes . . . of teleology.’
