Suddenly the bell rings. Hardy jumps. “Oh my God,” he says.
“What's the matter?” Alice asks.
“A friend—an appointment. I forgot.”
“Well, let her in. Or would you prefer that I—”
“No, I'll go. Never mind.” He hurries, and beats her to the door. “Just a delivery, I'll get it downstairs.” And shutting the door behind her, he races down to the entryway; opens the front door, where he finds Thayer, radiant, smiling in the rain. Rain in his hair.
“Thayer,” he says.
“Hello, Hardy,” Thayer says, and is about to step through when Hardy blocks his way.
“What's the matter?”
“I'm afraid—” Hardy steps outside, shutting the door behind them. “I'm afraid there's been something of a mix-up,” he says, lowering his voice. “You see”—he leans in, to whisper—“I share this flat with my sister, and, well, without telling me, she lent—a friend of hers is staying the night in her room. And so I'm not alone. A lady is in there.”
A shadow darkens Thayer's face. “Oh, I see,” he says. “A lady.”
Hardy nods and shakes his head at once; without being aware of it, he realizes later, he is mimicking Ramanujan. “I'm being perfectly truthful,” he says, “she's a friend of my sister's. From Cambridge. She's working in London, and Gertrude, without telling me—”
“Well, that's smashing, isn't it? And when you think that I came by train from Birmingham just to—”
“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. If I'd had any idea she'd be here—”
“Of course.” Thayer smiles again, but this time his smile is mocking. “Well, I guess that's that, then. Ta.”
He turns. Hardy puts his hand on his arm. “Wait,” he says. “Look, if you wait a minute—let me think—we could go somewhere else. We could meet later at—a hotel.”
“A hotel? What do you think, I'm some tart?”
“It's not like that.”
“You could have said, 'I'm sorry, Thayer, my sister's friend is here, on account of my sister's friend I'm afraid I can't offer you more than a cup of tea, come upstairs and sit down and take the chill off and let me introduce you to my sister's friend before you get back on the train—”
“I'm sorry.”
“‘Sister's friend, this is Thayer, of the First West Yorks Regiment. Thayer, this is sister's friend.’ ‘How d'you do?’ ‘How d'you do?’ Instead of which it's, ‘I'm ashamed for anyone to see you, you wait down here in the street and later we'll meet at a hotel.”
“Please don't be so angry—”
“Well, fuck off.”
“Wait, please—I'm sorry, I should have. I didn't think. Of course you can come up.” He coughs. “Let me start again. Thayer, won't you please come up and—”
“Too late.”
“Won't you come up for a cup of tea?”
“You rich toffs, you never understand, do you? You can't just start again once you've fucked it up. Try it in the trenches with your arse full of goddamned Jerry shrapnel.”
Once again, Hardy puts his hand on Thayer's arm. Thayer pushes him away. “Don't touch me!”
“I'm sorry, I wish—”
Thayer turns; walks across the street, toward the square.
“Thayer—” Hardy calls. He is close to weeping now, as earlier Alice wept. “Thayer, please—”
“Forget it,” Thayer says, from a distance, over his shoulder.
“Thayer, wait for me.”
And at that moment, just as he's about to take after him in pursuit, a constable passes by. Picking up the scent of discord, he walks over to Hardy. “Everything all right, sir?” he asks. “This chap bothering you?”
“No, everything's fine, thank you,” Hardy says.
“You bothering him?” the constable calls to Thayer.
“Bothering him}”
“No, it's fine.” Hardy fixes his face into some simulacrum of ordinariness. “Thank you, officer. Goodnight.”
And turning around, he goes back into the building.
13
THERE IS, for Alice, something heartbreaking about her husband's ignorance. He doesn't understand. What's worse, he doesn't know that he doesn't understand. Whereas she understands everything perfectly—too perfectly.
That weekend, for instance, she's sitting in the room she's come to think of as Ramanujan's room—the guest room, made over now as an office, a place for her to work on her translations—when he tiptoes through the door and puts his hands on her shoulders. She jumps. “Please don't startle me like that,” she says.
“Sorry,” he says. “I just had an urge to touch my lovely little wife.”
“Yes, all right, but the next time you get an urge, knock first, will you?”
“Of course, darling. So what are you translating now?”
“An article.”
“About what?”
“England and peace.”
“What do they say?”
“That we're delaying peace.”
“Let me see.” He reads over her shoulder: “‘England blamed Germany for a desire for war during July 1914, but since the end of August 1914, she has repeated that Germany would like peace, but that the time is not yet here.’ Wouldn't it be better to say, ‘the time has not yet come?’”
“Mrs. Buxton likes to keep the translations as literal as possible.”
“Ah, Mrs. Buxom. Luring my wife away to work at her brothel five days a week.”
“Yes, Eric, I know you think it's very funny.”
“And who knows what odd sorts of men you're expected to cater to?”
“Thank you, Eric. Now if you don't mind—”
“But you're always working! Can't you take a few hours off?”
“What about all the hours you spent working, when you were finishing your degree? Hours and hours I spent alone, and did I even once raise my voice?”
“Now darling—”
“It's perfectly true. You can't expect me to spend the rest of my life sitting here, idle, at your beck and call.”
“All right, darling.”
“And it's not as if I'm off every week shopping or going to concerts, this is important work. It's war work, of a sort.”
“All right, you've made your point. It's only that—well, you're gone so much these days, I—and then when you're back, you're always locked up in here. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to avoid me.”
She closes her eyes. So it's come at last. Understanding. She's almost relieved.
“But of course I do know better than that—”
Damn.
“I'm sorry, I'm being terribly selfish.” He nuzzles her hair. “And you're right, you were patient with me, all those years. And now I shall be patient with you.”
He backs away on exaggerated tiptoe; shuts the door behind him; opens it again and peers in.
“Can I get you anything? A cup of tea?”
“No, nothing.”
“Something to eat?”
“No, I'm fine, Eric.”
“Sorry, then.” His voice a whisper. And once again he shuts the door.
Alice breathes deeply. Then she looks at the page in front of her— the translation—and notices a blot just at the end of the sentence she was working on. No doubt her pen slipped when Eric surprised her.
Well, at least he's gone.
And how is it possible, after all this time, that he doesn't grasp the truth, doesn't recognize—yes—that she's left him, leaving him?
And why? Does she not love him anymore?
When she first started working for Mrs. Buxton, the reason she gave herself was that she couldn't survive another day cooped up in the house with Ethel, while frighteningly nearby a war raged. Despite his best efforts to appear jaunty, Eric could not hide his worry. She knew that he was in trouble with Butler because of his opposition to the war. She understood that there was a chance he might lose his fellowship. She admired his stoic devotion to his ideals—how could she not?—
and yet, for all the respect she felt, she could not bear for him to touch her. Even after her fantasy of Ramanujan falling in love with her ended in humiliation, she could not bear for him to touch her. And he was being unbelievably dim.
He asked her what was wrong. In words, she complained only of boredom, her wish to be doing something, not just sitting around the house. He mentioned all sorts of possibilities. In Cambridge, the Women's Emergency Corps had initiated an effort to employ women in making toys. Other women were working as train guards, or tilling the land. She tried not to laugh at his naïveté. What she wanted to be doing, of course, was writing—savage, oblique essays that decimated English complacency about the war without ever once mentioning the war; that sort of thing. Even if she had the talent, however, she lacked the connections. She did not travel, as Aunt Daisy and Israfel did, in literary circles. And so she stayed at home, growing more and more irritable, until one morning she received a note from Gertrude telling her in the most casual tone that in her spare time she had started translating for Mrs. Buxton. And of course, as Alice had become, like her husband, a devotee of the “Notes to the Foreign Press,” immediately the possibility entered her head that perhaps she, too, could lend a hand with the translating. After all, how many English people could there be who understood Swedish?
That was how it began. Immediately she wrote to Gertrude, who replied the next day that Alice should come to London as soon as possible. Gertrude had told Mrs. Buxton about her, had mentioned her facility with both Swedish and German, and Mrs. Buxton had begged her to ask Alice for her help. And what a fillip that was, to feel, at last, needed for something, by someone! And so on Saturday she took the train to London, and the Underground to Golders Green, where the Buxtons lived. Gertrude opened the door to admit her. All sorts of noises issued from within: typewriters, voices arguing in languages only some of which she recognized. A little boy tore past—the Buxtons' son. Then Gertrude led her into the sitting room, which was in chaos, newspaper cuttings covering every surface and large portions of the floor, while on the various chairs and sofas and in some cases, cross-legged, on the carpet, men and women sat, reading aloud to each other in a host of languages, and turning, restlessly, the thin pages of dictionaries and thesauruses, and testing out possibilities on one another. One man working on an Italian article asked a woman who was typing: “What would you put for maggari?”
“Perhaps?”
“No, that would be forsé. Maggari is more—‘If only,’ or ‘I wish.’”
“What's the sentence?”
But before Alice could hear the sentence read—and her Italian was good enough for her to be capable of offering an opinion—Gertrude had taken her into the dining room, where two women sat at opposite ends of a table covered, like the sitting room floor, with newspapers. One of the women rose. Her face was beautiful and severe, rather like a Wedgwood vase; she was dressed elegantly but comfortably, in a long skirt and a blouse the crenellated patterns of which brought to mind stained-glass windows in churches. “You must be Mrs. Neville,” she said, reaching out her hand. “Welcome, please sit down. May I introduce my sister? Eglantyne Jebb.”
The sister rose. She was at once more mannish and less forthright than Mrs. Buxton, the effect of her sturdy handshake undercut a little by her reluctance to look Alice in the eye. When she spoke, she kept her hands in the air, gesticulating, Alice suspected, less in order to add emphasis to her words than to keep her face covered.
Mrs. Buxton, by contrast, was a beacon of calm in the midst of the pandemonium into which her house had been transformed, a pandemonium she acknowledged cheerfully, if with an undertone of regret, telling Alice, “I do apologize for this disorder. The papers have just come in. You read German, is that correct?”
“And Swedish.”
“Excellent. With Swedish I am at sea. I can make neither head nor tail of it. German, however, I read well enough to be able, at the very least, to offer an opinion on the translations rendered by those whose knowledge of the language is deeper than my own.” She opened a copy of Vorwärts. “Perhaps you could help us by offering your opinion, Mrs. Neville. A rather impertinent reader has sent in a letter complaining that we mistranslated the word Ausnahmegesetze. This isn't the sort of word you'd find in a dictionary. How would you translate it?”
Alice sat rigid. Was she being tested—ever so subtly?
“Well, let me see. Ausnahme would be—exception, I suppose, and gesetze, legislation? So: exceptional legislation?”
Mrs. Buxton smiled. “Exactly. See? I told you, Eglantyne, he was wrong.” She passes Alice a letter. “After several paragraphs of grudging praise, this correspondent, one Mr. Marx, slips in rather superciliously that in his view we have mistranslated the word, which ought to be rendered 'emergency legislation.’ But 'emergency legislation’ would not be Ausnahmegesetze, it would be something more like Notstandsgesetze.” She closed the newspaper. “You see, Mrs. Neville, one has to be very careful. And no matter how hard we work, someone will complain. Still, it must be done.”
“I cannot say,” Alice said, “how much I admire the integrity of your enterprise.”
“Thank you,” Mrs. Buxton said, then exclaimed suddenly, “Oh, good heavens, I've offered you nothing to eat or drink. Would you like anything? Luckily I have two women here who, as they cannot type and speak no languages other than English, have volunteered to run the kitchen. Something, I might add, that my husband and children appreciate. You see, I'm immensely lucky. There are so many people eager to help. Well, what can we offer you?”
“I wouldn't care for anything,” Alice said, “but thank you for asking. In fact, I'm rather eager to get to work.”
“That's marvelous. Well, why don't you start with this piece from Vorwïrts? It'll be very useful in my argument with Mr. Marx, as it contains both the contentious Ausnahmegesetze and Sondergesetz, which is closer to what he's speaking of.”
“It's very exciting,” Alice said, taking the newspaper, “to have this opportunity.”
“I fear you won't think so after a few days. You may want to run away screaming! But never mind. We shall be grateful for however many minutes or hours you grant us.”
“I shall not run screaming,” Alice said, and wanted to add: this is the place to which I have run. But she said nothing.
So this is what her life has become: five days in London, staying in
Gertrude's flat, then the weekend at home. She arrives late on Friday, leaves late on Sunday. Two nights are all she can bear with Eric. As if to celebrate her presence, Ethel has taken to preparing elaborate meals on the weekends, joints of meat and roasted pheasants and a curried duck that makes her remember, with a distant fondness, the days when they cooked for Ramanujan. None of this can she stomach. In London her life is marked by a cultivated frugality. She drinks weak tea, eats sandwiches consisting of the thinnest imaginable slivers of cheese placed between the thinnest imaginable slices of bread. The occasional orange. She has lost weight, which upsets Eric. “I like a woman with some meat on her bones,” he says, slapping her no longer ample rump.
She ignores him. How can she explain herself to a man who hardly understands his own sorrow? Perhaps she might say to him, “Eric, what you're feeling is grief, because your wife, whom you love, no longer loves you,” and he would understand. But if she were to say to him, “I cannot bear, at this moment, to be comfortably fed or comfortably bedded, I must walk in the cold without boots or an umbrella, I must sleep in an underheated flat on a bed that pains my back”—would he be capable of understanding this need for penance, for penitence? A need, perhaps, to experience an iota—if only that—of the suffering that the soldiers are experiencing. Or a need to rid herself of that terrible taste in her mouth, that taste of tea that was on Ramanujan's breath, when she pressed her lips against his and he … he just stood there.
Impossible to contemplate, that she did such a thing. That she shamed herself like that. It's something she could never tell Eric.
And if she can't tell Eric, if she can't articulate to him, much less to herself, what she felt that afternoon, as she walked home from Trinity, how can she explain to him why it is that she needs the austerity of Gertrude's narrow bed, in that drab flat?
Hardy has not returned. Not since the one visit. Nor has she asked Gertrude if she has spoken with her brother about Alice's staying there.
Odd that all during the course of that one night, the night that she and Hardy both slept in the flat, they never once spoke of Ramanujan. She never mentioned, and neither did he, the dinner to which she was so pointedly not invited. Or Ramanujan's disappearance, and reappearance, afterward. Or the rather testy correspondence that his disappearance provoked.
Eric never mentions Hardy, either. Or Ramanujan. Why is this? Is it perhaps because, without recognizing it, he senses the uneasiness that their names call up in her? Obviously he must see them both. Hardy every day. When they don't talk mathematics, they must talk politics, Russell's refusal to keep his mouth shut, the almost willful effort he's making to provoke Butler. Eric is happy to tell Alice all about what's going on at Trinity. But for some reason, when he does, he never mentions Hardy's name.
Dusk is falling. She is glad. One more night, one more day, and she'll be able to return to London. She longs to return to London. And not just because she is happier there, these days, than here. Also because someone has entered her life whose presence alone is enough to revive Alice's sense of possibility. Prospects of pleasure, if remote, rise before her whenever she sees this person. This person whom she saw, for the first time, last week, at Mrs. Buxton's. A new recruit. “Ah, Alice,” Dorothy said—they were now on a first-name basis—“I wonder if you might show this lady around. She's come to pick up some work to take home with her. She lives in Cornwall and speaks perfect Italian.”
Alice turned. Standing before her, radiant and very pregnant, was Mrs. Chase. Littlewood's friend, whom she and Gertrude had met, albeit briefly, at the zoo.
“We know each other,” Alice said.
Mrs. Chase's face buckled with confusion. “I'm sorry, do we?” she asked. “My memory's terrible these days. It's curious, this is the third time I've been pregnant, and each time something very odd happens. Last time I was constantly thirsty.”
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