The Green papers (continued)
When they began the interview in the low, late afternoon light, I took the opportunity to sleep. Christine’s cameras, after all, were running, so for the following couple of hours there would be multiple copies of their activity. When I woke, I checked that both of them were asleep and then reviewed the interview in detail. I realised again that Cartwright was telling us nothing new. We had already monitored the activity of his systems and knew that many thousands of interactions took place between the different modules every day. But the jigsaw of relationships they presented had defied analysis. We could list all the individual transactions, and had been doing so for several months. We could analyse the trends in his dealings. But what we could not do was detect any consistent pattern, any formulaic system. The trades and even the overall strategy often seemed contradictory, even potentially self-defeating. That they eventually coalesced into repeated success was beyond debate, but after the interview the scenario was no easier to assemble than the day before. As he claimed, there seemed to be some underlying, unifying idea that was known only by him.
What did surprise me was that they had not completed the interview. Over the years I have come to know my wife’s professional approach in some detail, and it struck me as highly unlike her to have left a job half done. They had in fact descended into argument, almost animosity during the discussion. It had started during the point about stealing computer time. Cartwright had objected to the use of the term ‘stealing’, but Christine refused to refer to it any other way. He backed down and continued, but there was a second tiff at the mention of ancient history. They had a serious breakdown again after references to milliseconds and then the process broke down completely when Christine mentioned his previous unwillingness to be interviewed. He stormed off to his study and did not reappear. Christine stayed up for an hour or so, time she spent reviewing her recordings.
She then slept, but only fitfully, waking up several times before dawn and even taking a couple of strolls around the house’s balcony in the dark. She managed to kick the butane bottle under the stove at the back of the house, her false leg giving a hard tap that gave out a loud, sonorous clang. The noise seemed to cut through the near complete silence, ringing for some time, but Cartwright did not stir.
He was not asleep, incidentally. I knew that, but Christine clearly did not. I checked several times and on each occasion he was awake, but he was neither working nor reading, just sitting quietly in the dark. Just before dawn he took up his notebook, switched on his light and wrote a page or so of notes. And then, apparently without re-reading or checking his work, he extinguished the light, closed his notebook and replaced it on his shelf. Dawn had broken by the time he left his room, so perhaps for him the day had well and truly begun. He certainly did not hesitate in waking Christine to demand they finish the interview. She, of course, was barely awake, and still tired, but she agreed immediately.
When viewing that first encounter you will notice several anomalies. Despite the fact that the only backdrop visible is the lashed bamboo of the house behind them, you will notice that the quality of the light changes abruptly about three quarters of the way through the sequence. This was the overnight pause. It is rendered less noticeable by the use of several short continuity sequences, but the point where they re-started is quite clear. I mention this because not only did Cartwright’s manner at the end appear to be different from the start, but also because Christine did seem to break off the encounter just as he seemed ready to open up, which I found immediately surprising. Perhaps she was conscious of already having exceeded the projected length of the first episode, but she may also have felt that she had lost control of the material and, rather than allow Cartwright to take control, she decided to cut her losses.
Immediately after they stopped recording, Cartwright announced he was going to swim and did so. He was away for just a few minutes, returning before Christine had finished packing away her cameras and putting their batteries on charge. It was while she was doing this that I realised the constant low drone I had previously ascribed to the engines of passing boats was in fact the rhythm of Cartwright’s windmill generator as it rotated out of my sight above the house. He had little use for electricity, it seemed, and this makeshift arrangement appeared to provide for all his needs. We never did locate the bank of car batteries he mentioned several times, the system that ensured a stable supply.
By the time Christine had tidied her cameras and cables away, Cartwright had already cooked and served fried rice. As he presented Christine with a plate and spoon she asked, “Is this all you ever eat - rice and sambal?”
“Pretty much... plus fresh fish and crabs, of course. I’ll catch something later so we can have a change. It won’t be much - just a little bream or two.”
Christine accepted the plate and started to eat. She had by now laid claim to a particular chair on the front balcony. Seated, she ate in silence, apparently studying the sea between the house and the distant Borneo coast.
“I still haven’t really got my bearings,” she said.
Cartwright appeared from inside to stand at the end of the balcony. He spoke between mouthfuls of his breakfast. “That’s where you got on the ferry,” he said pointing to the east. “That’s where you got off.” He indicated the port on the island to their left, its few tall buildings visible above the trees and then continued, “...and that’s where I picked you up.” He concluded by pointing at the northern tip of the island. The hotel was, of course, out of sight, around the other side of the mangrove-fringed headland that was in view.
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t meet me in the main harbour, where the ferry left me.”
“The answer to that would have been fairly clear, if you had taken a moment to inspect the only area where a boat like mine would have been allowed to pick you up, being the jetty used by the open water taxis, boats like mine, in other words. There’s a wide ladder that the passengers have to clamber down to get into the boats, and there’s a good foot and a half between some of the rungs. You would never have managed it. I thought you might slip...” He paused for a few seconds, his tone having registered that he would continue. “And so I decided on the hotel jetty... and you slipped.”
Christine laughed. “I was never very agile. I always had a tendency to trip up over my own feet.”
“Your own foot...” Cartwright offered a smile, but Christine did not respond. “I can remember how you used to fall over every time you bowled a ball during that summer when we went to the park every day.”
Christine laughed. “Tom, that was forty years ago. You hadn’t thought, of course, that in the intervening years I might have become more used to the reality of wearing a false leg!”
Cartwright stood up from the chair beside Christine, set down his plate on the small table beside his chair and jokingly mimicked a person taking careful but unsteady aim in a game of bowls. He then theatrically leaned forward, swung his arm to indicate the delivery action and then fell forward onto his face. He turned onto his back, laughing, “...and that’s how you used to do it. Mind you,” he continued, pivoting so he could lie on his side, supporting his head on a bent arm, “I used to enjoy helping you to your feet. I could get my arms around you.”
Christine ignored his reminiscence. “You made a comment yesterday... a comment about not being able to judge which way a bowling ball would go...”
Cartwright got up with the help of the balcony balustrade and associated grunts of exertion. He retrieved his plate of rice and then spoke as he slumped back into the chair next to her. “Did you ever play bowls again?”
There was an initial pause, but then Christine laughed again in that whole-hearted guffaw she had let loose when she fell into the boat. “No. I never did... You know, I had almost completely forgotten about...”
“I did,” he said, proudly. “In fact I became quite g
ood at it. The game became my first real project, my first proper attempt at analysing the real world.”
“I have not really considered crown green bowls as being part of the real world.”
“It’s not unreal. Try kicking one of the balls.” He paused. “And you became a Green...” He glanced at her momentarily, theatrically frowning and grimacing as he feigned an attempt to inspect the top of her head. “...but I see no crown... only the halo.” His gulp of water was almost punctuation.
Christine smiled broadly, but histrionically ignored his clearly pointed comment and continued to make notes on her pad.
For the first time since Christine’s arrival, Cartwright appeared to be relaxed. “I knew there had to be a critical point somewhere. You remember, of course, how usually we tried to counteract the slope by bowling with the bias towards the crown, thinking that the ball would travel in a straight line?” He turned towards Christine, as if to confirm she was smiling. “And of course generally it did, until the momentum reduced and then it tended to fall away on the slope and then curve...” Christine nodded, feigning only partial interest, but with an expression that displayed a distance both in space and time.
“...before settling onto the bias...”
“So you do remember.”
“How could I possibly forget?” The reply was immediate, its tone ironic.
Now Cartwright laughed. “But what interested me was how you bowled those difficult ones that went across the crown. Sometimes it would finish so far from the jack I just couldn’t believe it. There was clearly a critical point, a combination of speed, slope and bias. Get the right side of the variables and the ball behaved as desired, but get even slightly on the wrong side and you missed by a mile.”
“At which point you would storm off after the ball in a temper so you could try the shot again.”
“I’ve never been one to accept failure, especially my own.”
“And then that big chap with the waistcoat and watch chain would come out and shout, ‘F-off home you hooligans. Stop destroying our green!’”
“Christine, people in those days did not say ‘fuck off’. If I might quote him accurately, I think the words he chose were, ‘Hey you two, sling your hook!’”
“Which would have been politically incorrect if we had lost arms rather than legs.”
Cartwright’s chuckle to himself was barely a pause. “After all these years I can see his point. No matter how careful we were, the feet on those prostheses did dig into the turf.”
“Especially when you set off after a bad one at top speed... I remember yours almost used to screw itself into the ground, especially when it was wet.”
“It wasn’t damage to the turf that irked him. What really made him angry was the fact that I repeated a shot. He thought it was bad manners... against the spirit of fair play. One day he even took me aside and whispered the word ‘etiquette’”.
“He was a fat old boor.”
“He merely offended your middle class sensibilities.”
The conversation stalled here for several minutes. It was Christine who resumed.
“So you solved the problem and became an expert at bowls?”
“No, far from it. There were far too many variables, and all the greens are different... except this one of course,” he said turning towards Christine with a knowing smile. “This one seems to be very much the same as it used to be.” He paused again to check if Christine might react, but she did not. “I was young and naïve...”
“No! Never!” said Christine, mocking.
“... and thought I could model the process. The slopes are all different, the grass types have different friction characteristics. Then there’s humidity and dew, as well as gravity and the dynamics, not to mention the unevenly distributed weight of the ball, its rotation and wobbling moment of inertia. And even after the attention of old Joe Baxter, the groundsman, even the green we used was uneven both in surface and slope.”
“It certainly was uneven after you had screwed your rubber foot into it a few times.”
Cartwright turned to give her a light playful slap on the forearm with the spoon in his right hand. “It wasn’t that bad..:”
“So rule of thumb gives better results?”
“Indeed it does, except that in bowls it’s as often rule of finger.”
Christine laughed and then skilfully switched the conversation to her concerns. “So do rules of finger and thumb underpin what you do now?”
Cartwright turned to face her as he spooned the last of his rice into his mouth. After a concentrated chew and a swallow he said, “No comment,” and they were silent for several minutes. As the microphones adjusted to the lack of nearby sound, the lapping waves beneath the house grew gradually louder. Words, when they came, then seemed like a shout, causing the newly readjusted level to miss some of what followed near silently in reply.
“Do you think we’d have lived if we’d not had each other?”
“We did live, didn’t we...” Cartwright continued to mumble unintelligibly for several seconds. “ ...had each other...”
Had I not been well prepared, the direction of their conversation would have confused me and its significance would have been lost. But it was only after I had viewed the action and read my comment several times that I was persuaded to insert a short commentary of my own at this point, a commentary that might assist readers to interpret what was being said, so that they might understand it as I did implicitly at the time, but only in detail after subsequent consideration.
The period that Christine and Tom Cartwright had referred to was a particular summer, specifically the two months from early June to early August 1970, when they were both eighteen. A couple of months before Christine undertook this One-On-One assignment, I had no knowledge whatsoever of this short, but apparently momentous period in her life. She had never referred to these regular encounters with her fellow amputee during our thirty-five years of married life, and she had made not even a reference to the period in her autobiography, except a passing mention that taking walks in the park had helped her come to terms with her new false leg. Even the autobiographical mini-series she made for national television that focused on her home village, featuring the contrast between the contemporary and the remembered, had included no mention of what proved to be a crucial and intense period for both herself and Cartwright. The topic arose almost by chance during sessions when we jointly examined the current mission brief from all possible angles. That they had known one another during their school years was already well known. It was, indeed, the prime reason why we chose Christine for this assignment. That they had become lovers during their final months at school was perhaps known only to the two of them. That their relationship came to fruition playing bowls on a municipal crown green had remained their shared, but private knowledge.
Christine and Tom Cartwright spent at least four days of each of those eight weeks playing bowls in the local park. They were brought up in West Yorkshire when it was still called a Riding. The game of bowls in that area, unlike elsewhere in the country, is more usually played on green with a crown, so it involves the anticipation of an effect of slope as well as the draw of the balls. Unlike the flat green game, the players can also send the jack in any direction they want, and to any length. Ends can be played across the crown, along the edges, into the centre, long or short. At busy times, of course, when there might be several simultaneous games on one green, there is always a danger of one game’s bowls hitting players involved in another end. There is an etiquette whereby the bowler, anticipating such a problem, shouts “Feet!” in the same way that a golfer might shout “Fore!”. Given their circumstances, it seems that Cartwright developed a personal take on this practice, insisting on shouting “Foot!” in a determined singular on the rare occasions when there were other players on the green during the day. Chris
tine, I realised just two weeks before the current mission, had internalised this call, and continued to use it. Over the years, I had become used to her issuing it whenever something got in the way of her false leg, thus preventing her from moving easily. I had thus learned to respond to any call of “Foot!”, knowing I was urgently needed to help her out of some situation where her false leg had become caught or jammed. I had never before been able to interpret the little giggle she always gave when she said it, however, until I learned of her bowling summer of 1970.
They played during the day, never in the evenings. On every occasion, they were supposed to be in school, so they were playing truant as well as bowls, but then their teachers knew what was happening and turned a blind eye. There was considerable sympathy for both of them in their respective schools, since it was generally assumed they would both die. They played all morning, usually starting soon after nine and then for a couple of hours each afternoon. There were a few days when they did not play, because they had to attend hospital appointments - together, as it happens. They would pause for an early lunch at the municipal café by the duck pond around twelve, a lunch whose form and content quickly became institutionalised, since the only things on offer were commercial confectionaries, which they despised, and, courtesy of the café’s manageress, as a means of earning a few extra bob for herself, some home-made pasties. They would have finished their pasty and tea by one, the time that the groundsman, a Mr Baxter, took his own lunch habitually in the pub. His brief, of course, was that he should close the green, lock the equipment in the shed and re-open at two. But because these two monopedal waifs appeared each day at one o’clock from the café, having already spent all morning on the green, Baxter soon took pity on them and left the shed open while he went to the pub, especially when it rained, so the two of them might shelter. But whatever the motivation of their facilitator, there may have been an element of social class pressure here, with Baxter being essentially unwilling to lord it over a couple of school-uniformed elite, despite their youth, and despite his annoyed authority. There might also, of course, have been an element of sympathy for their predicament, or even fear of their disability, their recently-acquired deformity, in his decision.
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