The Weaver Fish

by Robert Edeson

  They decided to include Rodney Thwistle, a long-time bachelor friend and also a Fellow of Nazarene. Edvard telephoned him and explained the dinner’s purpose.

  ‘Well, I’ll bring Penelope, shall I?’

  ‘No, no, Rodney. She’s bringing someone, I’m sure.’

  ‘No, no, Edvard. PH-D. Anna knows. We should talk about Nicholas.’

  Thwistle hung up, leaving Tøssentern bewildered. He recounted the exchange to Anna.

  ‘Oh, PH-D. Actually PH-D PhD. How nice.’

  Tøssentern’s bewilderment was undiminished.

  ‘Penelope Hyffen-Dascher. I don’t think you have met her, Edvard.’

  ‘What is she, a dynastic punctuator? A printer’s devil’s daughter’s compositor? Should I type her en or em? How ... wide is she?’ Tøssentern was enjoying the mischief, but Anna interrupted.

  ‘Edvard, of all people, you are the one who says always be respectful of names, never to make fun of them.’

  Tøssentern looked undecided between contrition and fully abandoning the principle.

  Anna continued. ‘It’s aristocratic, from Saxe-Coburg or somewhere. Anyway, Penelope’s an engineer. I know her from university. She’s an editor. She’ll be fun.’ She reflected briefly on the match with Thwistle, and added, ‘That Rodney, what an old charmer he’s turning out to be.’

  In the event, Thwistle arrived alone, by bicycle, and PH-D a few minutes later, having driven from London. Penelope Loom and her companion Vissy were delayed by a gas leak in her neighbour’s house that caused an invasion of emergency vehicles blockading the street. As she described the scene, the unpleasant odour, and hysterical public announcements to evacuate and avoid ignition hazards, Vissy, with consummate theatricality, mimed striking a match and lighting an imaginary cigarette. As he drew upon it and exhaled through pursed lips, she admonished, ‘Vissy, put that out at once, you know we could all blow up.’ Feigning surprise, he stubbed it out on the sole of his shoe. It was a virtuoso performance. Anna liked him.

  After introductions, they sat at the long dining table in the conservatory. Both Edvard and Anna brought dishes from the kitchen, from which the guests were served. It was quite informal.

  The purpose of the evening being to welcome Penelope Loom, much of the early talk was on life in Cambridge, the perils of cycling, property prices, and harmless chatter about Nazarene and its present Master. Tøssentern entertained with stories that even Thwistle hadn’t heard, about a Nazarene Fellows’ revolt in the 1870s when five logicians, calling themselves the Quintics, seized power. The chaotic, insolubly divisive two-year College Interregnum that followed ended only when Martin Gales, a gambler mathematician expelled from Oxford, was elected Master, and managed to rein back insurrection while clandestinely doubling, then twice redoubling, the Nazarene treasury.

  When Penelope was asked about her areas of research, the discussion ranged from emergent glyph chirality to the nature of the heroic temperament, hermeneutics and the painstaking dissection of history from fiction, allegory from hallucination, amnesia from deception. Anna felt some anxiety that these themes of interpretation touched upon Edvard’s recent preoccupations in his own life, around his recollection of the crash, and the obituaries.

  But if he were disturbed, it didn’t show. At one point, when Penelope mentioned the symbology of Cycladic figurines, Edvard rushed enthusiastically to his library and returned with a treasured example. It was passed around the table, each present offering an account of its meaning and purpose followed by a slightly boisterous round of applause. Interestingly, Vissy was the only one to imbue it with voice, speaking solemnly in what might have been a scholarly proto-Greek, or might have been nonsense. For the benefit of the others, he offered to translate, appearing to falter occasionally with the difficulty of the task:

  You hold a womb of barren clay.

  Yet it was living for the day

  a labour line though undefiled

  carried the chosen woman child

  was broken from her water there

  into Aegean circling air.

  Came the golden Delian year

  her blooded sweet adulthood near

  Lord Eros graced where only this

  would glisten his betrothing kiss.

  Then mother from her mother learned

  and issue into issue turned.

  He then briefly addressed the sculpture in its own language, respectfully bowed his head, and passed it on. It was difficult to discern the serious from the satirical in Vissy.

  And this being a dinner party in Cambridgeshire, it wasn’t long before the conversation shifted to the vicar of Postlepilty. The subject was raised by PH-D, who reported that the gossip in London’s editorial circles was that Simon Vestry had not been seen since that first letter from Barnabas Bending inciting riotous correspondence in the Tribune. For the second time, Tøssentern left the table, returning with a file of papers and clippings. He selected the letter in question, musing aloud as he scanned it.

  ‘The Postlepilty symposium. Recognizing cant. I wonder how that will go. Anna and I couldn’t even find the place.’

  He passed the folder to Penelope Loom, who was the least informed of the party. The others were aware that no more theatrical reviews had appeared from Simon Vestry, but news of his disappearance was received with a good-mannered delectation for scandal. Tøssentern, always analytical, asked whether it was definitely known that Simon Vestry was a real person. Had PH-D ever met him? Might it be that he was an invention? Indeed, might he be an alter ego of the Reverend Barnabas Bending, himself the putative invention of Simon Vestry? Could it be that what they were witnessing was a mortal battle of two figments, a battle for endorsement, to be elected real? Or was there a third party, a master who falsified both? And why stop there: why not a concatenation of masqueraders having its origin who knows where? These ideas were so antithetical to the presumed order of things that PH-D confessed an impatience to return to London, and (in a phrase offered by Tøssentern) inseminate the city rumour mill.

  Anna had known PH-D since student days. Though reading different disciplines, they shared a love of flying, and met through their university aero club. Together, they founded Altimeter magazine, which was noticed, acquired, and closed, by UITA Press. Anna, very occasionally, would still write a less formal invitation piece for the aviation literature, but for PH-D, the joint passions for aerospace science and writing had scripted her life. After postdoctoral work on propulsion management about collinear Lagrange points, she had advanced more rapidly in the publishing than the engineering worlds, and was now the London-based executive editor of the prestigious Aviation Reviews.

  When the subject touched upon how she and Rodney had met, the less forthcoming Thwistle diverted the conversation.

  ‘What is it you do, Vissy?’

  ‘Well, I began as a classicist—not Hellenic, more declining Rome. Then declining fortunes, as a poet.’

  ‘What sort of poetry do you write?’ It was PH-D who asked.

  ‘About incidents, characters. Not in the laureate tradition; nothing narrative, nothing pastoral.’ He sounded reticent.

  ‘Not in the style of Modern Tedium, the elegiac parochial,’ murmured PH-D.

  ‘Vissy, you should tell them about the rapper lyrics.’ Penelope addressed the table generally. ‘He’s been sensational; it pays more than poetry magazines, or academia for that matter.’

  Her manner now, suddenly enthusiastic and slightly disinhibited, contrasted oddly with the serious, scholarly woman of minutes earlier. It was a display of admiration, and quite endearing.

  ‘You’re a rap lyricist!’ The voice and shift in posture betrayed PH-D as vastly impressed.

  Vissy smiled politely, still reticent, evidently embarrassed. He, too, seemed a different person from the one who had clowned about cigarette smoking during a gas leak.

  ‘Tell us about your characters,’ asked Anna quietly. It changed the tone completely.

  ‘Those I inhab
it or those I write about?’

  ‘I expect they’re the same,’ said Anna.

  Vissy looked at her appreciatively. ‘Yes, they’re essentially one. A visitor, uncertain with words.’ He hesitated. ‘Often haunted, like all who have loved, by the past erotic.’

  His voice and his look, still directed at Anna, were intense. She nodded slowly, returning his gaze.

  ‘The past erotic. It sounds like a tense, if I might say so. Is that the new grammar?’ It was Thwistle. Anna suspected he was dealing with discomfort. She had a little herself. Vissy looked at Thwistle.

  ‘You are right. In poetry, it is the only tense.’ From that point he was silent for a long time.

  It was PH-D who returned to the subject of Simon Vestry, which had clearly continued to absorb her. She raised the matter as if there had been no intervening conversation.

  ‘We should be able to figure out who invented whom; after all, who came before the other?’

  Tøssentern was the first to respond. ‘Well, that might not be sufficient. I think we should be mindful of the Halfpenny Set.’

  ‘That’s not a coin collection, I take it,’ offered Penelope. She had been shuffling through the Bending file, and seemed unaffected by Vissy’s seriousness.

  ‘It could be—’ began Tøssentern.

  ‘The cash reserves of a modern superpower?’ The interjection was PH-D’s.

  ‘But it’s also about the limits of inference, named, as it happens, for Daniel Halfpenny.’ Now the only response was inquisitive stares from around the table, and Tøssentern added, ‘Let me illustrate with an experiment.’

  He picked up a pepper grinder, and handed it to Penelope Loom, on his left. ‘Pass this on to the person on your left, please.’

  Penelope complied, and it continued around the table.

  ‘Now someone observing any one of you in isolation, keen to invoke causation, and cognizant that cause must precede effect, might conclude that receiving the pepper grinder from the right determines in some way that you dispatch it to the left.

  ‘Suppose now that he sees this same act by all five of you, still in isolation one from the other. If his ability to discern detail is limited, he may view it as repetitive behaviour executed five times by one undifferentiated individual, and propose an explanation accordingly. But if his inspection identifies that you are separate persons, he will theorize differently. Equally, if he can identify the object to be a peppermill, as distinct from, say, this figurine,’ Tøssentern gestured toward it, ‘he is likely to attribute different meanings in the two cases. The problem arises if he were to observe me.’ Tøssentern took the pepper grinder from PH-D on his right.

  ‘What he would see is that I gave it away on the left before I received it on the right. In my case, receiving it can hardly be in any way causal to dispatching it. If his inspection were further rescaled to include the connectivity of events, his explanation would again differ, and might account for the facts as we created them, though hardly our reason for doing so.

  ‘What we must conclude is that there is no observable totality of events, and therefore no completeness of inspection. This was Halfpenny’s insight: that observations commonly labelled evidential are not, in this example, scale invariant. That single fact can invalidate apparently sound hypothesis testing.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow.’ Vissy had been virtually silent since the poetry discussion. Anna had a sense that he spoke for the others as well.

  ‘Let me give another example.’ Tøssentern addressed Vissy. ‘Imagine you were not a classicist and opened a Latin dictionary, say, at the last page. You might conclude that all Latin words begin with z. Indeed, you would have no reason to suppose otherwise. But if you examine the fine structure of those z-words, the second, the third letters, and so on, you could conclude by an exhaustion argument that this could not be the case almost certainly, knowing the existence of more dictionary and the conventions of alphabetization.’

  ‘But he could just look at the rest of the dictionary, surely,’ suggested PH-D.

  ‘Of course, if it is available to him. But that constitutes another inspection, in a scaling sense opposite to the fine structure inspection I’ve outlined. You see, it’s perfectly possible that he can know there is more dictionary but cannot inspect it. For example, I might only provide him with a torn-out z-page. So,’ continued Tøssentern, now looking at PH-D, ‘you have said that Simon Vestry has not been seen since the vicar’s letter. But was he seen before the vicar’s letter? Our inspection of events, in Halfpenny terms, needs rescaling at least to include that. Looking at the rest of the Latin dictionary, as it were. For all we know, his theatre reviews were submitted by email and his remuneration banked electronically. What evidence does that afford for a real Simon Vestry? And, if he is not real, in what sense can he be said to have disappeared?’

  To his friends, this was classic Tøssentern, and the critique seemed compelling. The discussion briefly moved to the general problem of identifying causal pairings in a noisy sequence. This eventually devolved to a quiet exchange between Thwistle and PH-D on Markov chains, followed by what seemed to be a mild disagreement about commutative groups. A moment later, indistinctly, inexplicably, their subject had shifted to harmonic analysis of an ancient Tibetan singing bowl reputed to sound the Tristan chord.

  Those two made a compatible pair, thought Anna. She looked at Edvard, sitting at the other end of the table in earnest conversation with Penelope Loom about the quality of software for Greek typography. Vicar and Vestry, it seemed, were become ephemera of departed conversation.

  Beyond Edvard, she had a view of the garden, and in the distance could see the greenhouse lit up; evidently, Thornton was working late into the evening. Anna thought about him, about being Thornton. If he looked back through the garden, his would be a reciprocal view of the brightly lit conservatory, looking very much like a greenhouse for these exotic people around her.

  Thornton. There was a resilient man, who seemed to have recovered fully from that strange swint business by simply handing over his distress. That was the therapeutic transaction: she accepted his anxiety, and issued reassurance in exchange.

  So now the anxiety was hers, and in consequence the greenhouse had changed in meaning. It always brought to mind her visit to Walter Reckles in New Mexico, that odd discomfort about the separation of realities by some improbably fine artifice. Here, it was glass, beguilingly transparent but no less deceiving. Even closer, even more beguiling, within this room, in her company, it was the human face, a veneer of openness that masked the silent from the speaking self.

  What had Walter talked about? Eigenvalues in the complex plane determining stability of flight. Maybe eigenvalues on some abstract surface determined stability of everything—relationships, identity, sanity. (One could certainly argue that complexity of the mind, like that of number, had real and imaginary parts.) A psychiatric diagnosis, then, might be no more than a column of numbers. I’m sorry, your child has an eigenvalue problem. And where would Thornton be located? Surely he was stable. Or Barnabas Bending? Or these people, the two Penelopes, say? The difficulty was, in their silent selves, everyone could be insane.

  Vissy had fallen quiet once more. Somehow, in speaking least, he remained the most eloquent. Anna glanced at him and thought about his word, visitor. She found herself drawn to its poetry, into its alienation, and powerless to resist as its contour of meaning expanded to enclose her, then Edvard, in their own place, the conservatory.

  Thwistle and PH-D had returned to the z-page problem and the matter of self-similarity in alphabetical orderings when, quite abruptly, Thwistle turned to Tøssentern and repeated the words he had used on the telephone: ‘We should talk about Nicholas.’

  Given the note of urgency, it seemed rather late in proceedings to raise the subject. Tøssentern, politely, interrupted to explain briefly to Vissy and the two Penelopes who Nicholas was.

  Thwistle’s news was that he had received a call from Nicho
las’s sister Millie (like Nicholas, a former student) concerned that his normally reliable communication with the family had completely stopped. In fact, they were unable to contact him in any way. Some weeks previously, Thwistle had emailed two other acquaintances whom he knew to be in Perth suggesting that Nicholas might be in touch, but he had now learned that neither had met with him. One, who was called Worse, had asked for more information and promised to make whatever enquiries he could.

  There it was, thought Anna. Another disappearance. Barnabas Bending, Simon Vestry, Nicholas and, before it all, Edvard. Again, she disconnected from the moment, imbuing events with an uncharacteristic superstition and Gothic exaggeration; here was the ghost of Abel, here was a curse of the weaver fish. Perhaps disappearance was to be the signature of a new order, where the normal cycles of going and returning break badly and promised certainties regress to the tracery of missing pieces. Fracture, confusion, loss: the imagery was depressing, and thrust her back to where she was, seated in the conservatory. Even there, for all she knew, the house behind her might have vanished, as from a conversation.

  The others were canvassing possibilities. Anna thought about Nicholas; she knew he was clever and resourceful, and was confident that an innocent explanation would emerge. She shared this optimism. Tøssentern was also reassuring, asking for little detail except wanting to know more about Worse. The others, respectful of Thwistle’s concern, were quiet or positive. By the end, Thwistle himself seemed happier, resolving only to maintain contact with Millie, and with Worse in Perth.

  * * *

  Daniel Halfpenny was reportedly shot dead in an abortive Chicago jewellery heist before he had finalized his magnum opus Probabilistic Reasoning. The manuscript was completed and published with annotations and an introduction by Edvard Tøssentern (Lindenblüten, 2005). Every well-formed observation has an associated Halfpenny Set, being the set of all propositions refutable by the given observation. The set expands or contracts dynamically according as a fidelity function relating the observation to its object phenomenon. Fidelity takes account of empirical properties of the observation, such as resolution, scaling, boundedness, error and noise. It is increasingly the case that funding proposals in experimental research must define and argue the merits of a relevant Halfpenny Set, as competing applications can sometimes be decided on this measure alone. The interested reader is referred to Halfpenny’s A Fidelity Function Approach to Sampling Theory, and Finite Halfpenny Sets by T Thurdleigh. Less technical sources are The Interpretation of Error and Partial Evidence, op. cit. (It might be supposed that Tøssentern, in explaining to his audience the matter of evidential fallacy and observational scaling, would use as a prime example the Asiatic condor. However, of those present at the table, only Anna would be sufficiently informed to understand the allusion.)