Murmur Read online

  But Mr. Pryor, said Hamish (his name), you do know about us, as we know about you, and we are watching you, and I am telling you we are. Good point, I said. (I like him. He was complimentary about the sponge cake, too.) I know you are, but I like to pretend that I am not merely a creature of punitive regulation, just as certain people know full well what homosexuality is but would prefer not to think about it.

  Of course that is why I defend machines, too. Anyone can see that intelligent machinery is possible, they just don’t want to have to admit it.

  I could see Max’s eyes narrowing and Hamish going slightly red, so I left it at that.

  The funny thing is that I’m no longer sure what the relationship is between what people do or say and what they think. Look at that young man. He is upholding the law and he would have sent me to prison if need be, but he likes coming to dinner and is amiable. Who knows what he really thinks? Who needs secret societies when you have society’s secrecy? Plenty of those who condemn me probably do not feel, deep down, I’ve done much wrong, or care particularly one way or the other. We all know sex is ungovernable. It is a matter of energy, like most things. The costs go up as we get older.

  Some will have said “how revolting.” Are they revolted? Truly? Which of us has not felt betrayed by the words that come out of our mouths, even when they are spoken with utmost sincerity? Doesn’t saying something evoke in most of us a wrinkle of suspicion that what we want to communicate is often much deeper, more complex and subtle, than the dilute words we use? That is why we smile while speaking, or cry, or shudder, or touch. These are eloquent gestures, as silence may also be eloquent.

  I’m reading Austen again. I used to think Anne’s kindly cast of mind was everywhere demonstrated by her actions. Now I don’t know. I suppose the irony is that she went along with things she didn’t actually agree with and in the end it didn’t matter.

  I went to Stallbrook with some of this, and a tantalizing dream I can’t remember. I spent ages before our session trying to retrieve it, but my system of recall is imperfect. I reach for something—a boy I knew at Cambridge who was kind to me and turned out to be a Nomad himself—and the whole thing crashes like a lot of junk falling off a shelf. I’m finding it hard to concentrate, anyway.

  Stallbrook recommended meditation—one of those Eastern traditions your husband so wisely values. So I have been looking at the gray poplar in front of my window, here on the common, and I watch the motion of the leaves, only yesterday it was very misty and the leaves were but hints of leaves, and I remembered the dream had fog in it.

  Fog interests me. It hides things. Sometimes you know they are there (they are thinkable). Sometimes you don’t …

  Don’t worry about Trentham. He is a creature of the university, no doubt, but there’s no harm in him. Princeton, naturally. Our paths hardly cross, though I appreciate your concern. And yes, I remember the chess set. The pieces in pieces. Alas!

  Love to you,

  A.

  One can never know that one has not made a mistake.

  —A. M. Turing, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lectures on the foundations of mathematics (1939)

  The Forester’s Orders

  After a restless night, the Forester awakes to solid things—his half-doored house on Chapel Hill, its deep windows, the beams and stairs built from a merchant ship, the iron kettle on the range, a cottage loaf, the hunting knife.

  His heart thuds like a fence post going in. How soon the morning turns over and spoils! That knife is wrong. It glows ingeniously. It has been cut into the scene.

  As it shimmers, the Forester remembers his instructions like a fever, how the Great Queen summoned her servant and said, “Now is the time to go about your daily work as if nothing had changed. To tend the coppice, plant your Sitka spruce, your larch and pine. Now kill your friend, the one who gives your life meaning, beneath an oak. Bring me the Fair One’s troubled heart. Whet your routine with my design, the call of justice, and forget …”

  “I don’t know why I brought the subject up. I didn’t mean to ask you about God.”

  “I know,” says June, whose father is a priest. We’re on a stile above Lewes and looking out over the gorse and bee ripple toward the sea. “But don’t worry. It comes of making out the hidden meaning of things all day long, and being bound to secrecy. We live with codes, we speak in them. One ends up being almost too discreet.”

  “I meant to ask if you would marry me.”

  Brown admirals flick by, a flipbook pattering of states. June points.

  “Look at those cattle ponds. Aren’t they magnificent? From here they look like little pieces of the sky. Mother-of-pearl.”

  “Flakes of mica?”

  “Perhaps.” June smiles. “Probably shell. On most beaches, mica’s less prevalent than shell, because of all the mussels, barnacles, and what have you …”

  “I see. Doubly enciphered pond!”

  “And yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, I will marry you.”

  “That’s good. You’re sure?”

  “I can say anything to you, Alec. And you can say, well, anything you like to me. Of course I’m sure. Besides, who else will ask?”

  “You wouldn’t find me too unorthodox, as husbands go?”

  June ducks her chin. Fine hair escapes a messy chignon and floats sideways in the breeze. “As husbands go, I’d rather you didn’t. And anyway, I’d hoped not to be forced to make comparisons.”

  “But then …” The wind is getting up, which helps me to be brave. My nerves are scrambling themselves. “I should like to have children, June. A pair of each, to balance things. It’s difficult, to bring oneself—”

  “Turning blowy.”

  “—to be clear what it is one needs. I should be very loath to feel I’d shortchanged you. Inveigled you into a sort of … social pact.”

  “And isn’t that what marriage is, a pact?”

  “It is, of course. But inside marriage, people are still separate. I don’t want to live by appearances. False ones, I mean. If only we were all allowed to be …”

  June sighs, “Oh, let me guess. Transparent? Who we are? Then what? Why bother with the pacts and marriages? We’d not be separate at all. Just wandering spirits. I think I see why you were mixing up your proposal with God.”

  “I’ve had lovers—I’ve been in love before.”

  “I’d gathered that. You reach out when you doze. With a woman?”

  She smiles through hair. Clouds flee the ridge. The red flash of a goldfinch darts up from a thistle clump. It is an art to be fearless. June’s like a guelder rose, the dogwood’s umbels, and the bark of the elder, all plants that mark these hills with centuries of growth and form. Unpretty, strong. They’ve no opinion of me, or anyone.

  I hear my blood above the wind, the thud of alertness in sleep. And then the coming to, the smells of grass and mud, carbolic soap on skin and clothes. The blossoms of the wayfarer that turn in June’s right hand. A flower wheel.

  “It isn’t anything you said,” she says. “You know, the way people imagine things are said, or solved, back at the ranch. I’m sure the operators think the Bombes are solving Enigma. Only we know it isn’t quite like that. They’re not solving a thing they know about. They’ve no idea.” Her eyes pursue thoughts grappling the air. The wind abates. “They’re passing current, spinning, clicking, and that’s all. Whereas, to us, it’s meaningful. A reduction of wheel orders, a precious glimpse of possibilities for where things are inside the enemy’s machines. I’m not saying it isn’t wonderful, what your contraptions do—but the amazing part is us, our making sense of it. Pouncing upon a lead. A likely crib. And then the really funny thing is this: just maybe, Alec, you are—we are—in the end a little Bombe-like, too: giving off sparks and hints that we don’t understand ourselves.”

  She takes my hand and looks at it. “We have this strong notion that only we can know ourselves, but maybe we make better sense in others’ eyes.” />
  A mouth appears in her posy. An evolutionary riot of change—a cloud massing, a lightning strike—splits cells, reroutes the glycoproteins and sugars, performs an eon-long foxtrot. The lips speak only Native Plant, the noise of a bud opening. “These are my thoughts,” hazards the Wayfarer, “and what you’ve said, June, persuades me: the Bombes could be thinking. If part of how you think is inaccessible to you, perhaps a sham, and theirs is totally, then where’s the point of severance?”

  And on that sibilant last note the posy wilts, its flowerets fade.

  “It’s late. It’s time we went,” I say, into a salty gust. Lining our track, the hawthorn and hollies shiver. “There’ll be a storm. We ought to call in on Mother, on our way back. Give her the glad tidings.”

  “If you insist,” June says. “She’ll think me loose. I’m not wearing a hat.”

  “You lost it on our walk.”

  “And so I did. How silly of me to forget.”

  *

  Leaves skip ahead of us as we near Chapel Hill, the lane that falls past flint-clad cottages onto the Brighton road. Our bikes are where we left them at the entrance to an overgrown snicket of yew, ivy, and hart’s-tongue fern, through which a stream dribbles its way into the Ouse. The snicket leads to a graveyard. The cottages are battening down. Hard faces and forearms reach out from dark interiors to pull the half-doors shut. We’re strangers, here. June takes my arm: she understands the thrill of banishment. Even the rattling hedge applauds our solitude. The secrecy of everything we do makes us invisible. We are not welcome in the world of graft and privation, call-ups, rations, and refugees. We do not work in the same factories, making buttons, checking tool parts; or know—or ever will know—what it’s like to lie awake in crowded attics monitored by rats. We have plunged otherwise into reality. We are like spies upon ourselves, living behind the shopfront of appearances, manners and decency. We seem to do nothing but symbolize and calculate. Bletchley: a country-house party for intellectuals driven about Berkshire in smoky-glassed buses. But what we do forces the key that opens doors of consequence. With this one needle click of a rotor, in one machine, I thread a bridge across the Atlantic, escort a merchant vessel home. I do not fight. But I outwit. I conjure for the German sea-wolves nothing but a fret-filled oceanic vacancy.

  June is astride her bike and ready to set off.

  “There’s something else.” I point toward the woods. “In there. I haven’t got a ring for you. But I have—a dowry. Two, actually. I brought them here a while ago, when I was—visiting my friend.”

  She listens with the effort of a teacher wishing to reserve judgment. She breathes in very carefully, and says, “You’re being most mysterious, Alec. I’m not sure if I should be pleased you planned all this. How did you know I’d accept you? It is the feminine prerogative to be mercurial, you know.”

  “Oh, mercury. I wouldn’t be so proud of that. Makes good mirrors, if you can live with the toxicity. But you can do so much better! I like to coat my glass with pure silver, the most reflective metal and—a symbol of equality. The isotopes, you know—equal in abundance.”

  June asks me what I’ve done. I tell her that I’ve laid in store a pessimist’s ransom. Some currency, in case the worst happens, which it well might. It’s hard to think of these old hills and ancient paths falling—of coming round a turn in the herringbone wall to find sentries, a BMW R75, its loud report. And hard to brook our country’s death, the death of a whole world. But even Trentham over in Hut 1 has started to hint at the need for “realistic” plans, contingencies. We can’t believe in our complete failure, although the evidence is everywhere about. We’re shut out from our own catastrophe.

  I take June, softly protesting, past our recumbent Hercules into the ivied grove. Some paces in, the stream cuts through the fern. The leaves of ivy make a brittle carapace upon the earth.

  “Good God. Alec!”

  And here they are: two rag-wrapped thousand-ounce ingots beneath an overturned wheelbarrow. No: I don’t believe in God—but I believe in others’ superstition, and our animal regard for sacred spots.

  “I’m going to bury them.”

  A graveyard is the safest vault. June clears her throat and stifles her astonishment. Why here? She doesn’t put the question quite like that, but, being practical, asks how, after the war, if we’re still here, I’ll know which tussock, which bald patch or broken root, conceals our wealth?

  I thought about this when I hauled the barrow up the hill some weeks ago.

  The ingots represent the sum of my inheritance—father’s Indian pension, the fellowship from King’s—minus immediate costs for Christopher’s memorial. His parents—Quakerish, austere, in their way admirable—planted a tree. I wanted him to have something more permanent. His mother died when I became the don Chris should have been. I had usurped her son’s future. The silver bars are grave goods to console a kindred spirit lost to her and undeserved by me.

  I’ve chosen turf on the near bank, between the water and a partly hollowed-out oak tree, one side of which is black, blasted, and bossed, the other densely green. If I look up, toward the church beyond the stream’s far shore, there is a new stone sprouting in the yard. It stands palely amid the aged monuments, a footnote to the tower’s blue-gold clock. That is the vital alignment. The stone reads: “To the memory of a Beloved Son, Christopher Molyneaux,” inscrutable from where I sit, grubbing the earth, but clear and plain in my mind’s eye. Into the earth I heave the bullion, which peeps out from its shrouding cloth. Catches the light. It is like burying a star.

  “There. Rest in Peace. Tree, stone—the yellow one—and clock form a straight line. I know the distances.”

  June squats between the raised roots of the oak and ties her hair.

  “But still,” she says, “encipher them and be detailed. You’re four feet from the stream, at a right angle to the oak tree’s major surface limb. Write it all down.” She smiles. “Include the map coordinates.”

  “It feels a bit like ‘gardening.’ Cheating, you know …”

  Gardening’s not gardening. It’s just our name for laying mines where we know they’ll be found. The German signals traffic that results has known content—the mines’ coordinates—that makes the isolation of a keyword easier.

  “Who do you think I am, Alec? Naval Command?”

  I take some paper and a pen from my pocket, scribble a few plain-text details, note down a first enciphering.

  “I tell you what.” A thought occurs to me. “I’ll give you the encoded directions without the key, which I will keep. That way if something happens—we’re invaded or I’m drowned at sea—both halves stay separate. The enemy can’t break our code—”

  “You hope.”

  “—I hope—and you might not need it, with your fine memory.”

  “I have a feeble memory. Muddy stockings. No hat.”

  “It’s overtaxed today, perhaps. But it can learn.”

  “I’d rather have a hat.”

  As we turn back from the stream’s edge, a low-hanging and berry-laden branch plucks at my sleeve. I know it for a branch of elder by its toadskin bark, though for an instant in the churchyard tenebrae it puts on flesh and pale sinew, and by the mushroom light I’m gripped, breathing the summer allergens: a Brownian suspense of midge, spore, parasite, and loam. A hag’s cackle mimics the stream. June saunters on, trailing her hand in creepers and the undergrowth. With a sharp twist I partly free myself. June doesn’t hear when I call her. She slows, caught between seconds of a golden watch. The wood is large, larger, its silence long. Because I must, I face the other way, marking the stream. There, at the dead and living tree, is June’s image, a scattered reflection, its fine attentive features struck with a somnambulist’s weakness, mouth open in a silent O.

  Her hands thrust at the sky in greedy victory. Soil riddles down her arms, her face, enters her mouth, mixes expressionlessly with her tears. Twigs pick my sides and I hear Mother Elder laugh as June’s gray ghost sinks to h
er knees beside the ingots’ grave. My slip of ciphered paper rattles in the wind. On it there now appear seven words, one sentence and a claim: I saw a lady sitting all alone.

  “Come on,” the real June calls, from Chapel Hill. “Time to go home.”

  High Street is deserted. We cycle north. I find it harder than I should to counter the cool breeze. We move in a thick green-lit sap. My body sways, the air resists. Of course, I have a damaged wheel, which doesn’t help: one rear spoke bends inward and clips the bike chain every sixteenth revolution with a click. At the fourth click, the chain comes off—unless I intervene. It makes for stop-start progress, getting off and getting on again, although the delays arguably help June, who rides slowly, to make up ground.

  Except, she’s out in front of me today, drawn onward, reeled in by the same drowsy currents of air, the same forces of gravity that hamper me. I’m late. I’ve been so stupidly delayed. I’ve broken an unspecified curfew. The shops have all just shut. The town’s inhabitants hasten away down side alleys into stockrooms, shelters. They put their fingers to their lips. At the grocer’s, a pair of scales rebalances itself. Footfalls clap salesmen hurrying downstairs. The entry bell at National Provincial is a memory. Blinds blank the stenciled panes at Clem, Rollins & Joy, solicitors. The brass ring at the bottom of each blind wriggles upon its hook.

  I sense enchantment in the lilac dusk. A pair of Gothic houses guards the turn from High Street to St. Nicholas’s Lane, and in the valley between gables floats the sun. Out of the bruised, polychromatic brick leaks hue, spirits with hollow-eyed faces that ask: Where have they gone? Where are the people from your past? This house, this open door, they’re yours: why hesitate?

  Fear chafes the skin. June’s bike lies on its side against the door-up steps, as though this were her home, not mine. Her back wheel spins, ticks to a halt. She’s gone inside, the echo of her heels on the parquet. I step into the hallway with its antlers thrusting from the right-hand wall and cobalt-colored glass above the stairs, gelling the half-landing. The parlor door’s ajar and from within I hear voices, a solemn clock, polite sounds muffled by long, purple curtains and the listening woods of painted landscapes, heavy furniture.