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Authors: William Boyd

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I was early and went to a café to wait for the main doors to be opened. I felt a tension in me, born of a bizarre confidence that the answer to my problems lay within that solid grey sandstone building. I was hungover also, my night’s drinking having only
provoked a thin, mean headache, and I felt soured further by the residual sense of shame at my vain importuning of the girl behind the bar. She had barely been able to sum up the energy to dismiss me, as if this were an event that happened nightly – drunk, middle-aged men leeringly asking her home for a nightcap. But as I sat in the café, trying to forget the look of contempt in her eyes, trying to concentrate on the crossword in the
Scotsman
and idly watching the morning drizzle fill the gutters outside, I felt my right side growing cold as if from a draught and suddenly my hand began to move across the checkerboard squares of the crossword puzzle drawing a series of Saltire Wave symbols. I must have done a dozen or so elongated x’s when suddenly I regained the power in my arm.

I looked at the page with no fear or panic this time – I saw it more as a form of communication from the – from the what? – from the shade of Wallace Kilmaron, I suppose, as if he were whispering ‘congratulations’ to me down through the decades. And across the street I saw the porter swing the heavy wooden doors of the library open.

Wallace Kilmaron died a bitter and frustrated man, aged forty-four, from an ‘infection of the lung and belly’ – in other words from causes unknown to contemporary medicine. In his life he had published a dozen or so scientific papers, mostly in learned journals, to do with his field of expertise. One small book, however, was lodged in the Library’s archives, privately printed by a printer and bookseller in Leith, entitled: ‘On a Phenomenon of Turbulent Water’. Its publication date was 1835 and a reading of it, combined with the three obituaries that had appeared on his death and an exchange of letters in the
Annals of Civil Engineering
, were enough to piece Wallace Kilmaron’s story together.

In 1833 Wallace Kilmaron had been involved in a major project of land reclamation between the Waal river and the Lower Rhine in Holland, to which end a complex pattern of drainage channels had been dug over an area of some dozens of square miles. One
day a narrow, flat-bottomed square-ended skiff (used for the transportation of dredged mud and sand) had sunk tight in one of the channels. During the efforts to refloat the boat (teams of horses and winches being employed) the confines of the narrow waterway, combined with the heaving and lowering of the stern and bow of the skiff, had set up a series of turbulent waves. Kilmaron, standing supervising on the bank, had noticed how these waves ‘like the travelling hump of a whiplash’ would speed down the water channel ‘without change of form or diminution of velocity’. Intrigued, Kilmaron decided to follow one of these waves on its progress and recorded walking hundreds of yards alongside one of these ‘surges’, as he called them, likening them to a form of tidal bore, ‘a rounded, distinct elevation of water’. He noted further that when the channel changed course the wave would seemingly diminish into wavelets and then, as the channel straightened, the wavelets would magically reform into the original surge as if ‘somehow contained in the turbulence of the water was a memory of the surge’s original identity’.

So fascinated was he by the discovery of this phenomenon that Kilmaron constructed a large wooden platform floating on the surface of the water which, by a clever distribution of weights, could be made to oscillate about a fixed axle, thereby creating regular surges – or Coherent Waves, as he now called them – to order. Weeks of experimentation allowed him to arrive at some understanding of the phenomenon, which he described in the scientific paper that he wrote as a form of resonance, rather than turbulence, representing order rather than chaos, and which was dependent on precise relationships of depth and width of water channel and degree of agitation if it was to occur. He proposed a mathematical symbol to designate these conditions which took the form of two whiplash humps superimposed, and which, when further simplified, resembled a curiously flattened and rounded ‘x’ shape. He submitted that this condition should be known henceforward as the Kilmaron Wave, and he journeyed back from Holland to Edinburgh to read his paper – ‘On a Phenomenon of Turbulent
Water’ – and present his findings to the recently formed Institute of Hydrodynamic Engineering – only to discover that Findlay Smith Quarrie had beaten him to it by a matter of weeks and the small world of hydrodynamic engineering was loud with discussion about Quarrie’s amazing ‘Saltire Wave’ and all that it implied.

‘August 18th. Edinburgh. I am fully conscious of the dangerous illogic of what I am about to write, fully aware of what danger it places me in, of how it will alter the way I am perceived, but I know, I know for sure in my heart and head that everything that has happened to me since that day in May, when my hand began to scribble symbols on my notebook – that everything is to do with Wallace Kilmaron and his death in 1840.’

As I read and deduced what had occurred since his discovery of the Kilmaron Wave I knew that somehow – somehow – the events of over 150 years ago were systematically destroying my life. The final evidence came when I read at the end of one of his obituaries that six months before his death Wallace Kilmaron had married a parlourmaid in his household, one Sarah McBride, and left his estate to her. It was a union that was never recognized by Kilmaron’s family, who later contested in court that the marriage and the rewriting of the will had occurred while Kilmaron was in a state of ‘drunkenness and dementia’.

Part IV: Biarritz

Didier Visconti smiled, and placed his big, tanned hand briefly on my shoulder.

‘Don’t mention it, Alex,’ he said. ‘You paid for everything. Everybody’s going to talk about it. I’ll be famous. I should be grateful to you.’

For some reason I felt like weeping with gratitude, felt like hugging this cheery, burly Frenchman, felt like telling him he had saved my life. Instead, I said: ‘I can’t tell you why – or I could tell
you why, but it would make no sense – you’d think I was crazy. Let’s say it was something I had to do.’

Didier looked down at the sign, cast in metal and embedded in the turf at the edge of the fourteenth tee. I had had it rendered in six languages – French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish. It read: ‘The water hazard on this hole is unique in golf. It is based on a phenomenon of turbulent water first discovered in 1834 by the Scottish engineer Wallace Kilmaron, a phenomenon known as the Kilmaron Wave.’

We followed a meandering foursome of middle-aged Swedish ladies down the fairway towards the fourteenth green. ‘Les Cerisiers’ was a new golf course owned and constructed by Didier Visconti, a wealthy builder, some few miles north of Biarritz, landscaped by Harrigan-Rief Associates some six years ago. In the course of the landscaping I had redirected a small stream into a narrow, deep-banked channel some hundreds of metres long that ran down the side of the fourteenth fairway and crossed in front of the fourteenth green – to act as a fiendish water hazard (any balls lost in it were irretrievable) – before vanishing underground to feed the artificial lake in front of the clubhouse (architect: John-Joseph Harrigan).

During the months of construction and landscaping I had formed a firm friendship with Didier Visconti and had become powerfully attracted to this section of the Atlantic coast. When I had proposed my alteration to the fourteenth hole water hazard, over the telephone from Edinburgh, Didier had instantly agreed and I had flown south with photocopies of the relevant pages from Kilmaron’s book.

A local carpenter and blacksmith had managed to construct a mini-replica of Kilmaron’s wave-producing platform (powered by a small petrol motor to make it tilt and level) and I had installed it where the stream was diverted into my man-made channel. It worked fairly well, producing a series of whiplash travelling wave-humps that continuously ran the length of the water hazard.

Didier and I stood in the evening sunshine looking at the Kilmaron Waves travelling down the length of the water channel as
the Swedish ladies hacked and fluffed their balls up on to the green.

‘Do you think the moving water will put them off?’ Didier asked. ‘Do you think it’s too distracting?’

‘That’s why it’s called a water hazard,’ I said. ‘I predict: in ten years you’ll see these Kilmaron Wave hazards everywhere. The Americans will love it. It’s new – and a bit of living history.’

‘We must do a deal,’ Didier said, his mind working quickly. ‘I give you a royalty, yes?’

‘The rights are all yours,’ I said. ‘Make a few more millions.’

Didier laughed and shook my hand, then drew me into a bearhug.

‘Why are you doing this Alex?’ he said, releasing me. ‘Why are you giving this to me – you could be rich?’

I thought about this, watching the Kilmaron Waves roll steadily, effortlessly, by my feet.

‘Let’s just say…’I considered. ‘It’s for my peace of mind.’

Science is full of these bizarre coincidences, of two or three or more people making the same discovery, arriving at the same proof, the same axiom or theory, simultaneously. That two Scottish engineers in 1834 should have observed the same phenomenon of turbulent water some weeks apart and have both sought to claim the distinction for the discovery is – in the annals of scientific discovery – of little significance. By luck – by a matter of geographical placement – Quarrie arrived with the authentication first, and was able to christen it by the name he chose. Quarrie settled on the Saltire Wave – not the Quarrie Wave, significantly – and I am sure that here lies the source of Kilmaron’s enduring bitterness. Quarrie was a wealthy man – his pump for mine workings was to make him a millionaire – and the Quarrie Pump was already familiar around the world. Wallace Kilmaron, working anonymously in the sodden fields of south-east Holland, thought he had found a way of making his name live for ever – of achieving a kind of immortality. But his hopes were abruptly dashed. For some natures, for more fragile temperaments, such disappointments are impossible to bear.

‘September 2nd. Cap Ferret. I sit in the shade of this beach shack watching the breakers roll in. I am driving north from Biarritz up the Atlantic coast, slowly and with many halts such as this – apprehensive, waiting to see, testing, saying to myself that it is over, that I am my old self again.

Last night I telephoned Stella and told her I thought I was well again, that I wanted to return home. She said no – at once, brutally. She did not want to see me again, she had no desire for further humiliation. I told her about Kilmaron and she laughed. “You sad old man,”she said. “If you think you can fool me with this nonsense.” If anything, my story about Wallace Kilmaron and how I had exorcized his malign presence from my life appeared to make her even more enraged. “You’re sick,” she said, her voice harsh with disgust. “Seek help. But keep away from me and the boys.”

The thought has struck me repeatedly – as I search for an answer to what has happened to me these last months – that perhaps the theory of the Kilmaron Wave has wider applications. Just as the Kilmaron Wave seems to be an enduring physical manifestation of the memory of the boat or turbulence that was its original cause, I find myself wondering if individuals too can provoke a similar wave effect – a wave effect that will pass through time.

Wallace Kilmaron died in a torment of bitter anger and disappointment, beaten to his small portion of enduring fame and intellectual immortality by Findlay Quarrie. Did that turbulence, that manic agitation of his mind, somehow continue after his death and travel on through time looking for its target? Nervous breakdown, mid-life crisis, mental disease – perhaps these are simply different names for the same phenomenon. It strikes me now that all of us who have suffered in this way may in fact have been similarly haunted – we may all be victims of Kilmaron Waves breaking upon us from the past?… An individual death has many consequences, touches us in many immediate ways, ways we can see and identify – grief, loss, sadness, sorrow. But what if it goes further than that? What if the turbulence caused by that sudden halt in life’s progress sets up other forms of motion, other disturbances?…
Just like the water in the canal “remembering” the effect of the moving barge, maybe the world and time remembers the turbulence of certain lives. And I wonder how many lives Wallace Kilmaron has damaged or destroyed since 1840 – and provoked similar incredulity and incomprehension – until, by luck, by wild chance, his wave broke upon me, another engineer…

I look at what I have written and see how it could be further evidence of my problem, my particular madness. Stella clearly thought it was the final desperate lie – a pathetic delusion attempting to explain my many betrayals and hurts. But I do feel a palpable difference in myself as I sit here on the Atlantic coast. I feel calm, I feel I have arrived at some kind of understanding. The Kilmaron Wave travels on without change of form or diminution of velocity. What was it Auchinleck had said? “Thought itself is a wave phenomenon.” Wave motion dominates the world of sub-atomic particles, so why not our human lives? Or our human histories through time? Could this, I wonder, could this be the source of all our hauntings?

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