We That Are Left

by Clare Clark

  It startled him then when, cutting through Whewell’s Court one pink evening, Oscar was accosted by a group of men drinking claret out of tooth glasses. Behind them, in a ground-floor room, a party was in full swing. Through the open window Oscar could hear the clamour of voices, the crackly jaunt of ragtime on a gramophone. The owner of the rooms had moved his furniture into the stairwell and the narrow space was a jumble of club chairs and tables and footstools with tapestry seats. An ashtray and a half-empty bottle of wine balanced precariously on the upturned feet of an ottoman.

  ‘Do we know each other?’ one of the men asked. To Oscar’s confusion he realised that he had somehow stopped walking and was gaping as though they were an exhibit in the zoo.

  ‘Sorry, I . . . I don’t think so,’ he muttered.

  ‘You’re quite sure? You’re not a member of the Quinquaginta, are you?’

  Oscar shook his head.

  ‘Good God, Ferguson,’ one of the other men laughed. ‘Your tactics get baser by the day.’

  The man called Ferguson only grinned. He had dark hair and a wide smiling mouth and he leaned against the wall with one leg stuck out and his arms crossed over his chest as though he had been leaning there all his life. His left cheek, which faced the wall, was rubbery with scar tissue. The stretched skin tugged at the corner of his left eye, pulling it down so that it looked as though he was winking. Where his ear should be there was only a hole, marked by a shiny nub of purple flesh.

  ‘Then what are you waiting for?’ he said to Oscar. ‘For a two-bob sub you’ll find the door to Paradise thrown open and all the heavenly angels there for your delectation. Though, of course, you’ll have to bring your own. The Quinquaginta may be a thoroughly modern kind of joint but we do cling to some vestige of decency. So, can I sign you up?’

  Oscar stared at Ferguson helplessly. ‘I’m sorry but I have no idea what the Quink—what that is.’

  ‘Where have you been all term? The Quinquaginta is only the dance club in Cambridge. Other men may tell you it’s all about the Vingt-et-un but believe me, besides the Quinquaginta, the Vingt-et-un’s like a maiden aunt at a funeral.’

  ‘The maiden aunt’s mother,’ a third man drawled. ‘With bunions.’ He was much younger than the others, short and scrawny with the raw bones and shiny red pimples of a schoolboy. Above his scarlet silk cravat his Adam’s apple bobbed like a fishing float.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Oscar said, ‘but I don’t dance.’

  ‘Don’t dance?’ Ferguson protested. ‘What madness is this? How else are you going to get pretty girls to fall into your arms?’

  ‘Certainly not by letting them see me dance,’ Oscar said. He meant it seriously but Ferguson only laughed and held out his hand.

  ‘I’m Kit Ferguson.’

  ‘Oscar Greenwood.’

  ‘This reprobate is Jay Girouard and this is . . . Wilkinson, is it?’

  ‘Winterson,’ the schoolboy corrected. ‘Geoffrey Winterson.’

  ‘Girouard lives on this staircase, when he’s sober enough to find it,’ Ferguson said. ‘Do you want a drink?’

  Without waiting for an answer he took a dirty glass from the window sill and sloshed some wine into it. Oscar hesitated, then took it.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  Despite their age the men were all first years. Ferguson had come up in January, Girouard in April. Girouard joked about being older than the dons but only Winterson mentioned the War. Obliged to relinquish his commission on account of weak lungs, he had gone straight to Cambridge after Highers the previous October. He wore his extra term like a medal.

  Oscar was glad when Winterson declared himself thirsty and went in search of wine. He was even gladder when he discovered that Girouard was reading Natural Sciences and Ferguson Mathematics which, at Cambridge, included the study of theoretical physics. After that he did not have to worry about thinking of things to say. He had a second glass of wine and talked about the photoelectric effect and whether light was a particle or a wave or, as Einstein would have it, somehow both at the same time. It was only when the party was breaking up that it occurred to Oscar to mention that he was not actually at the University. Ferguson laughed.

  ‘So you’re here but you’re not here,’ he said. ‘The Prof won’t like that. He hasn’t much time for theoretical physicists.’

  The Prof was Ernest Rutherford. According to Ferguson everyone called him that, even his wife. Oscar grinned.

  ‘He’s quite safe here,’ Ferguson added ruefully. ‘As far as this place is concerned quanta are just some dubious foreign nonsense, like spaghetti or Fauvism. What matters is the Maxwellian tradition and the study of strains in the aether.’

  ‘But they teach it, don’t they? Quantum theory, I mean.’

  ‘Apparently there’s a new fellow at Christ’s who means to teach a course next year,’ Girouard said.

  ‘Only to you lot,’ Kit said. ‘Not to us. It’s all right for you to be misled. You’re nothing but mechanics with your magnets and your cathode tubes and your columns of observable facts. Us mathematicians are the vestal virgins of the University. We must be chaperoned by Larmor at all times for fear that our purity be corrupted by sticky-fingered wops.’

  ‘We’re not allowed to have tea with them without the door open and all four feet on the floor at all times,’ Girouard said.

  ‘He’s right. Look, I’ve got to go but come and find out for yourself. Monday, four o’clock. And bring cake. Nobody’s allowed without cake.’

  ‘Another of Larmor’s rules?’

  ‘If it were it would be the only one I agree with. Great Court, M staircase. Room One on the ground floor.’

  ‘You’re a scholar?’ Oscar asked.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘But I thought only scholars got rooms in Great Court.’

  ‘Actually, it’s scholars and cripples. Don’t look so stricken. Who wouldn’t give their left leg for a room on Great Court? I’ll see you on Monday.’

  There was a walking stick propped against the stairs. Oscar had not even noticed it. Ferguson took it and levered himself away from the wall. His left leg did not bend. He had to swing it in a stiff half-circle to bring it forward like a pendulum. As he manoeuvred his way out of the crowded stairwell his foot struck a spindly-legged table, sending it flying.

  ‘Pick on someone your own size, Ferguson,’ someone shouted.

  Ferguson grinned.

  ‘In the battle of the wooden legs, all enemies are equal,’ he said. ‘That one was mine.’

  22

  Oscar never did join the Quinquaginta. He could not comprehend why Kit Ferguson liked dancing, a pursuit he considered both tedious and alarming, and he had no interest in meeting girls. But he liked Kit. From time to time, on the way back from his walks, he bought cakes at the bakery on Magdalene Lane and went to Kit’s rooms in Great Court for tea. Sometimes Girouard was there and Oscar did not stay long. Girouard vibrated with a kind of hectic restlessness, as though the air he breathed might at any moment run out. His gaiety brooked no possibility of refusal, except when he was suffering the after-effects of some party or other, when he liked to sprawl on Kit’s sofa with his feet propped up on the arm, drinking Kit’s sherry and complaining about people Oscar did not know.

  When it was just Kit they talked about physics.

  Like Oscar Kit was baffled and entranced by the quantum hypothesis, but when he quizzed his lecturers they deflected his questions. They insisted that quantum theory remained far from inevitable, that many British mathematicians remained unconvinced by its hypotheses. When Kit protested to his supervisor, Mr Lopez sent him away with a journal containing an article by Sir Oliver Lodge. The piece, ‘On Continuity’, had been delivered as a presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In it Lodge rejected as unworkable the theories both of quanta and of relativity.

  ‘It would be funny if it wasn’t so depressing,’ Kit said. ‘Here lies classical physics, one foot in the gr
ave, and who do they wheel in to resuscitate it? A fucking Spiritualist. A man who refuses point blank to accept that when something’s dead, it’s really bloody dead.’

  It came as a great comfort to Kit when Sir Oliver Lodge began a lecture tour of England and the newspapers denounced him as a mountebank and social menace, a peddler of nauseating superstitious drivel to the weak and the credulous. The innate conservatism of the Cambridge faculty exasperated Kit. Cambridge would never accept the quanta, he said, just as they would never admit women to full membership of the University, even though the arguments against both were in tatters. The Trinity fellows would continue to shuffle like superannuated penguins across the lawns of Great Court, their top hats tipped over their eyes, and thank God, who being British was mercifully a moderate, dependable sort of chap and not prone to excitability, that at least in these ancient courts of learning time had the common decency to stand still.

  ‘Kropotkin gave up on revolution in England after the 1881 Congress,’ Kit told Oscar. ‘He said that England was a country impermeable to new ideas. He knew you could turn everything upside down, tip every last assumption out onto the floor and trample them into the dust, and the English would only sigh and put the kettle on and put everything carefully back the way it was before.’

  That was the thing about Kit. He talked about physics and history and philosophy and music and the headlines in the newspapers as if they were all part of the same conversation. Everything interested him. He was as opinionated about Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chaplin as he was about the music of Schoenberg or the poetry of Pound. Oscar thought that if he lived a thousand years he would never know as much as Kit. He also could not help wondering why Kit wanted to know so much about so many different things when there was still so much to learn about physics.

  ‘Except that’s not true,’ Oscar countered. ‘A year ago elements were immutable. Then Rutherford starts firing alpha particles at nitrogen atoms and, hey presto, he’s turned it into oxygen and changed the way we look at the world for ever. Even the Cambridge penguins admit that.’

  ‘Actually, one or two are asking whether he hasn’t just discovered alpha particles with longer ranges.’

  ‘All right. So some of them are beyond hope.’

  ‘Besides, the Prof may be doing extraordinary work but when it comes to theory he’s as bad as the rest of them. The other day someone asked him what he made of Einstein’s General Theory and he said he considered it a magnificent work of art, irrespective of whether it is valid. It was as damning a piece of praise as I have ever heard. More tea?’

  ‘Please,’ Oscar said. He watched as, with one hand on the table, the other on the arm of his chair, Kit levered himself to standing. His leg jutted at an awkward angle. As Kit righted it a spasm of pain crossed his face, pulling down the bad side of his face so that it looked like he was winking. He bit his lip, pressing his fingers hard into the top of his left thigh.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Oscar asked.

  ‘Cramp. Stupid bloody thing. To get cramp in a leg that isn’t even there. Happens to everyone, apparently. A doctor told me that Nelson was a martyr to the muscle paralysis in his right hand which dug his fingernails into the palm of his hand. Except, as every schoolboy knows, he didn’t have a right hand, not after the battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.’ Kit closed his eyes, kneading the flesh beneath his trouser leg. ‘I feel like Captain fucking Ahab.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You haven’t read Moby-Dick? What are you, a bloody scientist or something? Jesus fuck fuck fuck.’

  His face creased with pain, he leaned into his false leg, then forced himself to straighten up. When he carried the teacups over to the table they chattered like teeth against their saucers. Oscar knew better than to try and help him. Kit never talked about the War. It was Girouard who told Oscar that he had been wounded at Messines. Oscar had remembered the tremor of excitement that had run through his school when they heard the news of the triumphant offensive at the Messines Ridge. The Allies had tunnelled under German lines and laid a line of more than twenty mines beneath the German trenches. When the mines were detonated, the explosion was so loud that Lloyd George had heard it in Downing Street.

  ‘So Rutherford doesn’t like theoreticians,’ Oscar said as Kit limped back with his tea. ‘That’s hardly news. And I’m not sure he doesn’t have a point.’

  ‘Et tu, Brute?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. I just never thought you’d turn out to be one of them.’

  ‘Of course you did. You know quite well I don’t understand at least half of what you do. But even if I did it’s just . . . what Rutherford does in the lab is real. The mathematics only works when it relates to the facts, when it creates connections that make sense of what we know. Take Einstein’s theory of light-quanta. All right, so light is emitted in quanta when electrons jump from one energy state to another. All the experiments support that. But if you accept Einstein’s equations you also have to accept that the time of transition and the direction in which the light-quantum is emitted is entirely random. Beyond probability it’s impossible to predict exactly what will happen. Doesn’t that bother you?’

  ‘So the theory has weaknesses. It needs refinement.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of refinement. His equations reject the basic laws of cause and effect. If Einstein is right, where and when an electron exposed to radiation will jump off is down to free will.’

  ‘Free will?’

  ‘Well, what else would you call it? Once you’ve eliminated causality, free will is all you have left.’

  ‘Or something else. Something we don’t yet understand.’

  ‘So you’re saying you accept Einstein’s theory?’

  ‘I hardly understand it. But I want to accept it, yes.’

  ‘Even though it makes no sense?’

  Kit shrugged. ‘When did the really important things ever make sense?’

  Sir Aubrey continued to write to Oscar, care of Mrs Piggott. His letters were long, composed over several sittings. He had abandoned the idea of the new fortifications, there were complications Oscar did not quite grasp to do with engineering and Godmother Eleanor, but he was working again on his book and was actively seeking a publisher. He planned several new chapters on Henry, his brother, and the ways Ellinghurst had inspired his pioneering work with X-ray spectra. He said that it was Oscar’s letters that had started him thinking about Henry’s work. During his graduate studies in Manchester, Henry’s supervisor had been Ernest Rutherford.

  Sir Aubrey came to Cambridge to meet Rutherford at the end of May. He took Oscar to lunch at the University Arms Hotel. The dining room had a jaunty commercial air, its furniture glossy with the faux-solidity of the brand new. The two levels were divided by the barley-sugar spirals of a shiny mahogany balustrade. Behind Oscar, on a matching mahogany table, a huge fern burst from its brass pot like a great green fountain. Its fronds licked the back of Oscar’s neck.

  Sir Aubrey looked old. He was old, old enough to be Godmother Eleanor’s father rather than her husband, but he had always been old in a bluff, impervious way like a house or a mountain, weathered on the outside. Now he was thin, his collar too large for his scrawny neck. His grey hair was thin too, showing the pinkness of his scalp, and the backs of his hands were purple-spotted and roped with veins. They shook a little as he drank his soup.

  His conversation, by contrast, was as hectic as a child’s. He asked Oscar about Cambridge and whether he had taken any photographs recently but his questions were perfunctory and it was plain from his eagerness that he only really wanted to talk about Ellinghurst. Oscar longed to ask after Phyllis but he could not see how to ask without interrupting. Instead, he listened as Sir Aubrey seethed to himself about the lack of agricultural innovation in England. When Oscar enquired after the family he talked not of Phyllis but of Henry. He told Oscar that Rutherford had offered Henry a fellowship at Manchester but that Henry had returned instead to his research at
Oxford, despite the University’s refusal to grant him financial support. ‘So you see,’ he said drily, ‘I have been a patron of physics a long time.’

  ‘My tutor says that your brother was one of the truly great.’

  Sir Aubrey smiled. He said that Henry had had little truck with his own reputation, believing himself to be no more than a part of a greater scientific whole. A skilled scientist might contribute his own brick to the collective construction, Henry had argued, but, if he did not, it hardly mattered. Before long someone else would do it in his place. ‘You, perhaps,’ Sir Aubrey said.

  ‘If only, sir. But the mathematics—’

  ‘We Melvilles have always been Oxford men but I can’t blame you. The Cavendish has a fine reputation. Cambridge, though. Hail, ye horrors, hail! ye ever-gloomy bowers,/ Ye Gothic fanes and antiquated towers,/ Where rushy Camus’ slowly winding flood/ Perpetual draws his humid train of mud. Do you know the poem? Thomas Gray. Fewer than a thousand lines of poetry in his lifetime but still one of the most admired and influential poets of his age. He and Henry would have liked one another, I always think. Of course, Gray had mixed feelings about Cambridge, and not just because of the weather. You should be careful, you know. The Fenland damp is very bad for the chest.’

  ‘I am quite well, sir.’

  ‘I’m glad, I’m very glad. And the teaching is good?’

  ‘As I said, sir, I don’t matriculate until October.’

  ‘Of course. I forget you’re so young.’ Sir Aubrey shook his head, staring out over the dining room. ‘I was already twenty when Henry was born. Older than you are now. He was more like a son to me than a brother. Another son.’ He was silent. Then he looked at Oscar. ‘I wondered if you might like his books.’

  Oscar stared at Sir Aubrey. ‘His books? But, sir—’

  ‘Violet, his widow, is moving abroad and offered them for the library at Ellinghurst. I would rather you had them. I should like to think of you following in his footsteps. Placing your brick on top of his.’