Fascination (9 page)

My worries were valid. I seemed to be fluctuating between a form of tense, watchful normality – family life restarted, I even went into the office – and moods that I only recognized were aberrant and dangerous in their aftermath.

One day, after leaving the practice in Notting Hill, I stopped to buy a newspaper and I saw a girl working in a butcher’s shop (why do women who work as butchers or fishmongers wear so much make-up?). She was dark with a slightly prognathous jaw and a mass of dense, dry hair pulled back from her strong face in a bun the size of a cottage loaf. Her lips were cerise pink and her mascaraed eyes studied me beneath skyblue lids as I ordered enough meat to feed a platoon of soldiers. As she sliced rump steak, and bagged dozens of sausages I stared at her avidly – noting the bloom of dark hair on her forearms, her sturdy calves as she turned to reach for the cleaver, the hairbrush handle jutting from the pocket of her nylon overalls. I leant up against the glass of the counter feeling my erection flatten against the pane, wondering if this burly girl was the daughter of the small, bald man mincing veal along the counter, and what she or he would say if I asked her out for a drink. I paid for my meat with two fifty-pound notes – betokening immense wealth, I hoped – and said,

‘I hope you don’t mind my asking but I’ve just moved into this neighbourhood and I was wondering if there was a good pub around here – you know, one you’d recommend…’

She scratched her arm and frowned. ‘What d’ you think Frank?’ she asked the veal-mincer. There was a short debate on the merits of the local pubs until one called the Duke of Clarence was elected as the most salubrious. I thanked them, smiled at her, my eyes full of messages, and left.

As I dropped my heavy bag of meat in the nearest litter bin a depressing wave of insight washed over me and I saw my sexual obsession in all its weaselly shame. But in the butcher’s I had had only one thought in mind, all my snouty desire focused on this strapping girl with her rosy, bloodstained hands. I felt salt tears prick at my eyelids as I drove home to my long-suffering wife.

‘August 9th. It seems I hit John-Jo yesterday morning in the office, swung a series of haymakers at him, one connecting with the side of his jaw, breaking the ring finger of my left hand. I remember nothing of it. Apparently I was incoherent with drink. For the third night running I had spent the evening in the Duke of Clarence waiting for my butcher-girl to show, in vain. So as the pub closed I bought a bottle of vodka and settled down in my car to drink it. I must have made my way to the office, somehow, the next morning. Stella says I accused John-Jo of betraying me, of systematically stealing my ideas over the years, taking credit where none was due… Then launched myself at him. Poor Stella.’

‘It seems to be changing,’ I said to Petra Fairbrother. ‘It’s not like California, where it was constant, now it comes and goes, as if something’s being switched on and off.’

‘Might I bum a ciggie off you?’ Petra asked. She took one from my pack and I watched her light it awkwardly, as if it was the first time in her life she’d attempted such a thing, and then saw her inhale smoke deep into her lungs. ‘Lovely,’ she said, ‘So, do you think the grip is weakening?’

‘The grip?’

‘Whatever has you in its power.’

‘You sound like some sort of necromancer, witchdoctor.’

‘I’m speaking metaphorically, Alex dear. But, then again, I suppose we could, not unreasonably, be seen as witchdoctors, modern ones,’ she smiled, then plumed smoke out of the side of her mouth in a noisy gust, ‘trying to drive your demons away.’

‘Demons…’I repeated slowly. ‘A demon.’

‘A handy metaphor. But you are warring with demons, Alex, make no mistake.’

I frowned, thinking. ‘All the girls are dark, and they all had jobs. I don’t just want to buy sex, I’m sure.’ I told her how I had stood in a London phone box, the glass sides darkened with dozens of prostitute’s cards, illustrated with improbable nubile beauties of all races, plying for trade. ‘I felt nothing. I could have called any one of them up. It’s something to do with the type of girl, a working girl…’ I looked at her helplessly. ‘Maybe I should be hypnotized?’

‘What happened to your hand?’

‘I tried to beat up my oldest friend.’

‘Christ. We’d better get to work.’ She pursed her lips, rattled her fingertips on the desk top. ‘Would you mind if I spoke to someone about your case? Just a hunch.’

‘August 14th. The Rankin Hotel, Bloomsbury. I have moved out of the house and Stella has asked for a divorce. Crazily, stupidly, I took a girl home, a waitress called Katerina, Russian, I think, or Ukrainian. I said she could stay, be our lodger, as we had plenty of spare rooms. Stella came back as she was inspecting the guest bedroom in the basement. I never laid a finger on her (I was planning to, of course). In the fight that followed it transpired that John-Jo had told Stella about finding me with Encarnacion. Stella was convinced I was mired in some miserable, middle-aged fit of satyriasis – she had been prepared to suffer it for a while, but not any more. I disgusted her, she bawled at me, how could I bring a girl into our house? What was she meant to do? She had some dignity left. She ordered me out of the house and I meekly went. Tomorrow I go to Edinburgh, perhaps it’s best I try to sort this out on my own.’

Edinburgh in high summer was buffeted by gales and driving rain out of the north, interspersed with baffling periods of brilliant breezy sunshine, the wet streets drying before your eyes, umbrellas stowed, raincoats shrugged off, the terraced gardens beneath the dark, looming castle suddenly busy with half-naked sunbathers, before – inevitably – the slate-blue clouds gathered over Fife and the North Sea and bore down on the city again and the unrelenting drenching downpour resumed with all its former energy.

I had not been here for years and I had forgotten how the city in August surrendered itself to its annual invasion of Festival-goers, Princes Street and the Royal Mile loud with polyglot chatter, railings and billboards a patchwork collage of posters and advertisements. Yet beneath all this bright tat and cultural tourism, this cosmopolitan artfest, and the fizz and crackle in the atmosphere – almost palpable – of people set on indulging themselves, the old, dour, sooty reserve of the place appeared merely to be biding its time. These frivolous laughing folk will be gone in a week or so, seemed to be the message one read in the grim, impassive faces of the locals, and then we can get on with the serious business of living.

I was strongly conscious of this, of the old city and its implacable mores, as I walked along one of the gaunt, dark grey Georgian crescents of the New Town – the rain slanting down again, stinging my cheeks and brow – towards number 37 and noted the brass plaque (teared with icy drops) beside the bell-push which declared: ‘The Royal Scottish Institute of Hydrodynamic Engineering’, and, below that, the terse instruction, ‘Tradesmen report to the rear of the building’.

A tiny grey-haired woman with supernaturally bright eyes opened the door and directed me to a seat in the wide, penumbrous hall, where I was surveyed by numerous varnished portraits of engineering worthies from the nineteenth century. ‘Mr Auchinleck will be with you presently,’ she said and scurried back to her office
from where I could shortly hear – a rarer and rarer sound this – the noise of a manual typewriter tapping rapidly away.

It had been Petra Fairbrother who had unwittingly sent me north from my mean hotel in Bloomsbury. She tracked me down there and informed me by telephone, excitement colouring her voice, that she thought she had a ‘lead’ – though she had no idea what exactly it would portend.

She had shown my pages of ‘automatic writing’, as she termed it, to a friend of hers, a mathematics don at Cambridge University. He thought the signs – the elongated x’s – were vaguely familiar and had promised to investigate. I fancifully imagined my pages being passed round the senior common rooms of various Cambridge colleges, grey heads nodding sagely at my hieroglyphs, learned speculation ensuing… But, whatever happened, he called back some few days later to say that the sign had been recognized by someone in the engineering department. There was every possibility, Petra Fairbrother related to me, that the sign I had written, 35,000 feet above the Atlantic, represented a concept evolved in hydrodynamic engineering known as a ‘Saltire Wave’.

A few hours in a local library unearthed the key facts about the Saltire Wave. It was a phenomenon discovered by the Scottish engineer Findlay Smith Quarrie in 1834. One afternoon, riding his horse along the banks of the Union Canal near Edinburgh, he noticed that when a barge was suddenly halted, the body of water around it, after an initial violent agitation, calmed itself and then moved ahead independently in an even wave, as if the barge were still there and the displacement of the water caused by the barge’s forward motion was still occurring. On this particular day, Quarrie had spurred his horse forward and had followed this wave along the canalside for several miles. The wave was miraculously real, but its cause seemed spectral. It was as if, Quarrie remarked in the paper he submitted to the Institute of Hydrodynamic Engineering – with due apologies for the anthropomorphic nature of his observation – ‘the water was still
remembering
the effect of the barge’.

In the paper he proposed a mathematical symbol to represent this phenomenon: two parallel lines forced to cross as a result of an energy twist in the middle. He called it the Saltire Wave because the shape that ensued resembled an elongated version of the white ‘x’ on the blue ground of the Scottish flag – known familiarly as the ‘Saltire Cross’.

I sat in the shadowy hall of the Institute, waiting for Mr Auchinleck, with an empty but open mind. I was not sure why I felt I had to come to Edinburgh, or of what I might achieve or discover, but at least I felt I was acting, doing something positive. Some strange enlightenment might arrive as a result of this visit and I had a sixth sense that it would be found in the long-defunct persona of Findlay Smith Quarrie.

There was the sound of squeaking rubber on the polished parquet of the Institute before Mr Auchinleck appeared. He was a young man in his thirties with a frizzy mass of wavy brown hair. He was wearing a grey suit and a plaid shirt with no tie. The squeaks had been produced by the crude sandals he was wearing, the soles apparently cut from auto tyres. I could not help looking down and was vaguely distressed to see his unduly long toenails extending through the sandal thongs like curved yellow talons.

Auchinleck – ‘Call me Gilles,’ he immediately invited – was a genial fellow and intrigued to learn I was on the trail of Findlay Smith Quarrie and his Saltire Wave.

‘A fascinating man,’ Auchinleck said. ‘Sort of ahead of his time. I don’t think, to be honest, he really knew what he had found with his Wave.’ He grinned. ‘Now we say everything’s a wave, don’t we? Atoms are both wave and particle,’ he recited in a sing-song voice. ‘Don’t they claim that even thought is basically a wave phenomenon?’

‘Is it?’ I asked, intrigued.

‘Well, so they say. Waves, waves everywhere. Do you want to see what he looked like?’

‘Who?’

‘Quarrie.’

Gilles Auchinleck led me upstairs to the Institute’s original lecture room, purpose built, a semicircular bank of wooden pews facing a wooden dais that backed on to an enormous, crowded oil painting.

‘1834,’ he said. ‘The founding members. There’s Quarrie standing by his famous pump.’

I stepped forward, following the direction of his pointing finger to stare at the well-executed portrait of a plump rosy-faced figure, more like a country squire than one’s idea of a Victorian engineer, his stomach straining at the buttons of his silk waistcoat.

‘Quarrie made a fortune from that pump,’ Auchinleck said. ‘By the middle of the century it was in every coal mine in the world.’

He went on, but I wasn’t listening, as my eye had been caught by a saturnine figure in the background – a man in a dark suit with a odd white silk stock at his neck. In one hand he held a burning cigar and his eyes seemed to stare directly out of the canvas. His face was slumped – his features haggard, through illness or debauchery one would have guessed – but what was most striking about him was his wide moustache, dark across his sallow face, its wings extending beyond the edge of his lips and curving upwards in a cropped, swooping handlebar shape on to the cheeks themselves.

‘Who’s that man?’ I asked, pointing, ‘the one at the back.’

‘Good question,’ Auchinleck said. ‘If we go down to the library I’ll be able to tell you exactly.’

‘Edinburgh. August 17th. They say that on occasions the force of a person’s gaze can be felt physically (maybe the “look” is a form of wave?) and if intent enough can make the object of that gaze turn round, yet the girl behind the bar – at whom I have been staring for the last five minutes – smokes on unconcernedly, looking everywhere except at me. She is dark, of course, young, with a small shading of acne at the corners of her wide mouth. When she poured me my fourth large scotch and water I noticed that her nails were bitten to the quick. She has a tall, boyish figure and her hair is spiky with gel. I sit here in the corner scribbling, and I feel the
need I have for her like an ache in my gut. Like a dagger in my gut. I will drink on here until closing time and then ask her to come home with me to my hotel. There is a difference now: I seem to be able to step back from the seizure, the fit, the madness, or whatever it is – I seem to be able to acknowledge that it is underway. Is this a sign of its hold on me diminishing? Or merely that I am learning to live with it, as the invalid does with his chronic incontinence? But it is as if some corner of my brain remains my own… And yet I will not rise to my feet and leave this place.’

Wallace Kilmaron. Wallace Kilmaron. His name was Wallace Kilmaron – the man in the painting with the cigar and the moustache. Auchinleck had been able to identify him with the aid of a key to the painting’s multitude of portraits (some thirty-three in all) and gave me a little information. Kilmaron had been an expert in drainage and irrigation systems and had done much of his work in Holland, where he was acknowledged as a nonpareil when it came to constructing floodwalls, canals and all the complex business of water displacement involved in land reclamation. His dates were 1796–1840. Auchinleck had no idea how he had died but it was clear that he had not reached any great age, even by the standards of the nineteenth century. More interestingly, he had resigned from the Institute in 1835 – hence the paucity of information they held. ‘Most of the fellows lodged their archives with us,’ Auchinleck explained, ‘which was half the purpose of establishing the Institute in the first place. Something must have gone wrong there – we’ve nothing on Kilmaron, I’m afraid, apart from these few basic facts.’ As if he were in some way responsible for this omission, Auchinleck obligingly put in a call to a friend at the National Library of Scotland and an appointment was arranged for me the next day, where everything the library had on Kilmaron would be made available.