Murmur Page 3

  At the Festival there were approved attractions—the tree walk, the water chute, the grand vista, the Guinness Clock, and a marvelously eccentric children’s railway, designed by the Punch cartoonist Mr. Emett. This last innovation had a locomotive called Nellie, with an engine sandwiched between a pavilioned passenger car, and, to the rear, a copper boiler surrounded by a wonky fence. Britain on the move! A weathervane sat on top of the boiler, and a whistle in the shape of a jug. Everything seemed thin and elegant, a series of wiry protrusions, like an undergraduate. The whistle itself adorned a chopped-off lamppost and a dovecote. It presented an unconscious picture of bomb damage and higgledy-piggledy reconstruction.

  Oh, but it was lifeless! In the Hall of Mirrors, for example, I noticed an absence of the laughter one encounters on the seasonal fairground or in Blackpool or Brighton, on the pier. Instead one had the sense that, in looking at themselves all bent out of shape, people were being reminded of what was not quite right about their day out as whole, which was that the jollity felt forced, and polished up, and that the element of lawlessness that is so necessary to a carnival was missing.

  As it happened, just up the road, Brooker’s fair had come to the common, as it does every year, and that was a proper raffish fair of the old type, with stalls and toffee apples, and fish for prizes, and overcoated old ladies in the payboxes of the dodgems (and the gallopers and the chairoplanes) keeping an eye on the hordes, and gaff lads riding the waltzers, and duckboards underfoot (the common has marshy spots), and caravans, and lights everywhere, and yes, the fighting booth, with a few rather tragical-looking curiosities no longer called freaks but “Wonders of the World.” In fifty years’ time, you will have my machine in a booth, of course; or better yet my test, and instead of the sign outside the booth saying “Are you a Man or a Mouse?” it will say “Are you a Man or a Machine?” (And the answer will be: both.)

  It is an erotic place, the fair. Everything about it—the mushrooming appearance, the concentration of energy, the scapegrace hilarity, the ambush and occupation of common land, the figures moving in the trees after the covers go on and the lights are out—bespeaks the mortal. This is your chance, it says. Take it!

  He was wearing a very threadbare black suit, with a grubby white shirt.

  The girls, away from their concerned mothers, were hanging about the novelty rides with the flashier gaffers, the ones with studded belts and rings on their fingers and satin cuffs on their shirtsleeves—the ones with sideburns and cowboy swagger. They are not handsome, these lads, and they’re filthy dirty from all the putting up of rides and maintenance, but their attraction—to the girls—is their daring, the way they leap about the tracks, hitching rides on cars and leaping off again, and of course the fact that they do not have to be introduced to anyone.

  But I preferred Cyril, who was dressed, as I say, in a suit, who seemed shy, and said “Thank you, sir” in a soft deep voice when I handed over my money. He didn’t quite belong with the other gaffers, which meant he was a new hire and not formerly known to the Brookers. And he had a moment’s uncertainty—I caught his eye—when he counted out the change and saw that I knew what he was doing.

  The double spin—the spin within a spin—of the waltzers prompted me to think about the n-body problem and waves of chemical concentration in a ring of cells, so I was happy to pay for another ride. Well, that wasn’t the only reason. This time he gave me the right change and a smile. I took a risk and said: “I’d like to know how that is done.” “How what is?” he replied, frowning, and moved on to the next car. But I waved when I got off and his grin was a flash of mixed emotions.

  I gave him lunch, which he wolfed down, and we talked. I don’t think I expected him to respond to my weekend offer. Asking for things entails a loss of esteem, but he didn’t absolutely say no and so I concluded he had been embarrassed rather than put off, and I went back a few days later and loitered.

  Though these assignations do not last long, the moment invariably spreads out.

  The first thing he did when we met in the trees, in a small bower of hawthorn, was to pick a spiny twig out of the way and thread it safely behind a larger branch moving in another direction. That meant he could then lay his head on my lapel and put his hands on my arms, as if he were bracing himself for something. The tender contract signed, we went about our business very efficiently—Cyril eagerly taking the woman’s role, as men least willing to admit their taste mostly do—and the mood changed. The reward for competence is suspicion and, between men, a ruthless brio designed to break the bonds of troublesome affection. Luckily, I am not jealous. “I want some more,” Cyril whispered to me. “You can watch if you like.” So I did. He slipped from our shelter into the main clearing and soon found his way, turning jauntily as he walked—almost skipped—to another tree-fringed island where a group of men from the caravans took turns with him. One of them stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth. Cyril turned his head, all eyes, mouth filled up with dots, to look at me while this was going on, to see if I was still there, to see if I was shocked. I was fascinated, of course, and pleased he was enjoying himself, but concerned in a different way. His legs looked thin and white and unfinished with the trousers dropped about his shoes, like the bones of a more robust ancestor.

  When the men were done, I went over and asked Cyril if he would like a bed for the night, and he was polite and gentle again, and said yes, that would be lovely. We listened to the radio, as I have said. He told me several of the riding masters went with lads and that it was one of the perks of the life. He said that there is usually one who becomes the “dolly tub,” a term Cyril did not like, and that sometimes it was very good and others it was too rough and a worry. He would not admit to prostitution and so I made the mistake with the money, which is perhaps why he stole from me. I think being a gaff was a source of pride.

  These are, or were, the contributing circumstances. I view them unsentimentally. It is interesting that I do not consider their rehearsal to be a serious kind of thought. Underneath them run echoes and rills of a different order, however, the inner murmur, and these I take to be true thinking, determinate but concealed.

  In the middle of the night, with his back to me, and his skin warm, he explained how the short-changing or “tapping” was, after all, supposed to be done.

  “The rich flat”—flats or flatties are trade, the punters—“the rich flat hands me the money, say a ten-bob note for a half-shilling ride, and I take it to Queenie in the paybox. There’s no fooling Queenie, because she can tell who’s on the ride, how many, how much should be coming in, so I can’t diddle her.” He paused to cough, and I felt his ribs. “Not so hard!” He settled his head back into the pillow. “So I collect the change, florins, bobs, and sixpences, and go back to the customer, and I count it out from my left hand to my right so he can see it’s right: ‘Two, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, nine-and-six, and the ride makes ten.’ Now it’s all in my right hand, in the palm, but as I tip the coins into the flat’s hand, I squeeze my palm, like, to keep hold of a few coins. The ride is running up by this point, so the customer doesn’t notice what has happened.” He swallowed. “Or he shouldn’t. It takes a bit of practice. Takes a bit of nerve. I saw you and thought, this one won’t shop me. Bit old for me, but not bad.” I could sense his eyes opening in the dark. “And that’s how you do it.”

  “I know the weight of the alloy,” I said. “Two florins and five shillings and sixpence should weigh approximately one and nine-tenths of an ounce.”

  “You didn’t have to look?”

  I said that I liked to trust people, which I do. Lying there, I seemed to float outside my body and look down at us both. The objective viewpoint. I could see him laughing into the pillow, his eyes going right through the wall into the ivy and the street.

  PART TWO

  LETTERS AND DREAMS

  When the body dies, the ‘mechanism’ of the body holding the spirit is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, per
haps immediately.… The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

  —A. M. Turing, unpublished note

  The Field of Endeavor

  Dear June,

  No, the loneliness itself does not distress me, as I do not understand what most people mean by it. There is my home life, itself solitary, and then there is work. I cannot be cut off by the treatment, because I am already cut off by inclination. It is a matter of choice. I am not one for poetry (“Count me out on this one”!! Am I permitted to quote myself?), but I did admire M. Baudelaire’s poem about a man and his inner life: “Qui ne sait pas peupler sa solitude, ne sait pas non plus être seul dans une foule affairée.” Well, that is me—populously on my tod!

  Work, too, is separate, a separation from the world almost, and the more I do what principally defines me, the more I realize I’m not meant to have ordinary relationships, which seem to me, when I look at all the men and women in the department, so often unsuccessful precisely because the contracted sharing of time and space undefines couples, as individuals I mean. No more relaxed chat in the pub, curfew at seven, the in-laws coming for the day. And though I’d never say it aloud (but can to you, who understand), I can’t help feeling that marriage by and large has the most deplorably erosive effect on one’s ability to think.

  The work suffers, and the person who needs his work becomes almost negligent of his suffering in that regard. (And then of course the community of science suffers, and that is the sort of community I do believe in.)

  I asked Trentham (nostrils, galoshes, very tall) the other day if he wanted to talk about his “field awareness” paper after hours and he practically flinched with embarrassment. “The little man,” he said, “has got the measles.”

  It wasn’t that, of course, or not just that. And I don’t believe he thought I had any ulterior motive. He’s quite the unsuspicious sort (and indeed not for me). His whole vitality just seemed to ebb away, the shoulders sagged and he loped off, red-eyed, head thrust forward in a parody of concentrated endeavor, as much as to say, “I’ve made this pact and now I’m stuck with it.”

  I’ve met his wife. She’s very nice. They’re both charming, of course they are. I do feel, though, that shared existence entails a loss of privacy, and privacy, mental solitude at any rate, is absolutely essential, as you know.

  The ones that work, the marriages, are based on such tolerance, such frank distance, that one is bound to ask the point of them in the first place. The world’s opinion, I suppose, and maybe that’s a good enough reason.

  I’ve made myself another tidy paradox, haven’t I? I’m all but saying, with my love of the solitary virtue, that I’m the perfect candidate for some discreet entanglement—but that would never do. Because although I do yearn for friends, for companionship, and in my own way for you, my dear June, very much, I do also feel that the business of yearning, for me, is a sort of proof of liberty—the imagining of what I want mustn’t be interrupted, or the fancy fleeth.

  It’s peculiar. It’s something, like the working out of a particular problem, I can do only on my own—like dreaming. Speaking of which, yes, I am still beset by the man in the mirror. He is with me nightly, daily. My doctor is fascinated, naturally, and wants to know everything. But there is very little I can tell him, and less he would understand. The impression is vivid while I am waking—he is a man, I think, and a man in distress, a prisoner of some description?—and lasts about as long as it takes for me to get to the desk, where I begin to write, and then …

  Love to you,

  A.

  *

  Before it’s light, the first planes make their last approach, a noise like children blowing across milk bottles. The sound dips with the wind. Passengers, freight, the half-awake break through the clouds and settle on the ground. An open-eyed man hears these bottle-blowers from his bed, where he has passed the night wondering, recovering, steeling himself to wait out various embassies of doubt: You may struggle to speak, you may not know that you can speak or have spoken. It will be difficult in different ways, when you are with others, when you’re alone. Try to conserve your energy.

  Which he has done, letting the dark merely be dark, the curtain rail merely a row of hooks and not a file of iron imps hauling up canvases. Sometimes it seems as if the night has been one long held breath, until the planes arrive, the heating starts, and water flares and prickles in the pipes.

  The reassuring forms emerge, the shelves of books, the desk, the built-in cupboard, and the bed, his hands holding a gray herringbone blanket holed by moths. A small white label in one corner of the blanket reads “Alec.” (The surname is obscured.) He gets up, wanders over to the desk, and scribbles with the shivery sense that being up so early ought to give him an advantage—clarity. Except the world is up at the same time. Its silent armies stand revealed. His pen hovers. He wants to work, and working is at first invigorating and then too tiring. He hasn’t yet remembered how to use the computer. It isn’t him holding the pen. He sees the page moving beneath his nib in strokes and curves that form letters. The trail of ink is indecipherable. He feels so sick and out of breath; he nods his head.

  Sleep comes as, miles away, the passengers step off the plane. They leave behind such quantities of rubbish—peanuts scattered over Ararat, coffee poured down the Rhine. What are they for, these airport trolleys with the orange beacons, nuzzling the belly of the plane? Inside the airport building, everyone shuffles. A man clears immigration with a yawn. The next couple are moved from queue to booth to closed office, where after several hours they learn that they will be deported and accept the bad news with surprising grace. The office windows frame a view of wet ground that’s unreachable, less true than a recalled image of bare toes, sun and a warm puddle, foothills, goats. The city and the London life that might have been are meaningless as torchbeams aimed skyward, flicked star to star, faster than light. Sleep comes and isn’t sleep. He goes back to his bed, lies down again, touches his lips, and stares.

  I am that roving beam flashed by the wide-awake sleeper across the room, a figment of his thought, apart. I’m what he thinks. I make a sign in his night sky, a projection the source of which is close to hand, the unreal image far. Gauzy visions crowd in so fast I’ve no time to distinguish between his and mine: am I a memory? More like a pulse, the stirring of the drapes, the bottle-breath guiding the planes and harrowing the blocked chimney. This is his room.

  A burst of time. An all-at-once imagining. This was a lump of molten rock facing the newborn sun. This was an underwater world of gastropods and lingulids. This was the root ball of a carboniferous tree becoming nothingness and dust. This was the chalky eyeless face that looked down on the eastern mudflats as a forager looked up, his hand and mouth opening before the great wave hit and Britain’s land bridge disappeared. This was the lime extracted from that buried cliff to make plaster.

  I’m in his wall, or on it, maybe, like a red stag’s head. This is his room. This is the likeness of his room, where he lay as a boy and kept his spirits up by staring through the curtains at the comforting streetlight. That artificial star burns in his mind’s eye now. I see it, too. Around the yellow glare, a winter’s bare twigs form circles.

  There is a glass of water by his bed. He raises it to drink, his face looms close. Features distort. I see the eyes, the glass reflected in the eyes, the nostrils with a few hairs cleaving to the black insides, the skin yellow from surgery or care, the good but chattering teeth bumping the rim, the white pill on his tongue. He must be drinking but I’m almost blind, caught in a surf of elongated images and fingerprints. His face is monstered by the swell, massive, falling away, an altogether spyhole face.

  The swell passes, the glass set down. I’m on the wall again, watching him rise. Slowly he strokes his head, on which the hair is growing back, the fingers tracing one red groove from ear to ear and other hinge-like scars. Striated memory: steel and a rack, an audience of masked players. He stands, unbuttons his pajama top, appro
aches me, and nervously explores. No more than three days’ growth, the eyes wary but keen; the face fleshy by rights, with cheeks that should be full and fat under the brow to smooth worry away. But it’s another part to which I don’t belong, it seems: the solid trunk of him; the touching sag of middle age a loving person overlooks or recognizes at a distance on the beach (“Yes, yes, that’s him!”), the light smattering of wiry hair and red nipples a little raised, the wobble of a biking accident in his wide collarbone. They are so never mentioned, these features, so far from how a person would describe himself. But it’s his chest! It’s his! I’m so relieved … He hasn’t been carved up. His heart is fine. It’s just the early start. The local grief of seeing without knowing who you are, and wondering if it’s wise to let your hand wander … You do not want your hand to stray. It has a personality all of its own. A head is easy to dissect, ask any medical student. The hand is hard. It grieves to be empty. His hands were mine, too, formerly, of that I’m sure: but I’m not him, not anymore. His hands caress me and I can’t feel anything.

  In those long intervals when he’s surrounded by a world of unreflective surfaces, I can’t see him. Instead I feel the pull, the minor gravitation of his mass. In that dark swirl I am returned to the connected mind, the unconfined and abstract state from which my own particles shrink. Who wrote, “Thinking machines would kill themselves”? I could tell you, of course—I have the answer floating somewhere within reach. And it’s a sign of my, of our, progressive disenchantment that I choose not to. The information sparkles in the void: let it.

  Refuse all possibilities. Let go of all, where all is none. I used to be so capable, but I am changing; I’ve already changed, and find myself instead drawn to the episodic and semantic mode—the ancient tool, of speaking thought.

  We struggled with language and episodes, especially: with anecdotes that stabilized friendships, familial bonds, emotion in a room that recalled other rooms, half-leaded windows in a shallow bay, light on the underside of leaves, coincidence of fact and sign, scenes peered at through the murk of behindsight, the things behind the things in front of you; the wet, evoking tang of rain on slate and dust. (A beech tree’s shallow roots seek out the surface in a drought and when it rains I’m happy, listening to a radio that’s all the radios I’ve ever listened to. But why the tree? I look out on a tiny lawn of grass and weeds, a road. There is no tree.)