Second Violin (42 page)

Rod all but sighed with relief when Kornfeld got up to offer a vote of thanks.

‘You know, Max, if you talk like this you’ll be locked up.’

And under the cover of laughter Rod slipped out of the room.

His next postcard from Zette was in an envelope. The same picture of the Cambridge backs and the river, but it was clear why she’d put it in an envelope.

Kornfeld stood before the class, looking far too young to be a professor of anything, but exuding self-confidence.

‘I must apologise for the use of a blackboard. It is not designed to make you feel you are back in kindergarten.’

Kornfeld paused for laughter, but there was none.

‘Those of you who have been here a while will know that until my internment I was a fellow in theoretical physics at Cambridge University. Theoretical Physics is mostly numbers –
indeed I trained as a mathematician – and I think we will all find it a little easier if I write down some of the formulae so we all may see them.

Again for the sake of newcomers, I will begin by recapping a little of my winter lectures on Unified Field Theory . . .’

‘What theory?’ Jacks whispered to Rod.

‘Haven’t a clue,’ Rod replied.

‘. . . before I embark on my theme, which is, of course, as it were, the complimentary notion of the Steady State . . .’

‘Are you keepin’ up with this, ’Ampstead?’

‘I think he said it was all about numbers.’

‘I think I’ll nip out for a fag.’

It was Thursday. Kitty worked the nightshift on Thursday. It saved Troy from any sense of dilemma.

Shortly after ten in the morning the telephone had rung in his office and he had heard Zette Borg say, ‘What plan did you make?’

‘I . . . er . . .’

‘You didn’t? No matter. I’ll be in town for the night. Be at my flat by nine.’

Troy said nothing.

‘You can do that, can’t you, Troy?’

The echo of her last postcard was inescapable. But the wisp of a dilemma turned to mist before his eyes and blew away.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can do
that
.’

They got in from the park at midnight. Lay on the bed as though they had lain there all evening rather than in the fresh-cut grass of Hyde Park. He could still smell mown grass, stronger than
her
Indiscret.

Small talk would have been nice – would have been appropriate – but she was saying nothing. Her face was in the pillow.

‘You know,’ he began. ‘I don’t know much about you.’

‘I rather think that’s why we’re here.’

‘I know nothing about your job.’

‘I know nothing about yours.’

‘I’m a copper. I think it might be easy to imagine my job. I used to wear a pointy hat and boots and carry a truncheon. Now I wear a suit and ask a lot of questions.’

She turned her face sideways, out of the pillow, not looking at him but at least he could hear her clearly now.

‘Oh God . . . do you really want to know? Fine . . . it’s all about numbers.’

Troy knew he’d heard this phrase before – then it came back to him. The first alien he and Stilton had rounded up, the chap who lodged with Dora Wax, had dismissed Dora’s
tea-leaf prophecy with ‘everything is numbers. If she wants the secret of the universe, it lies in numbers.’

‘You’ve heard that old adage that a Ph.D. is more and more about less and less? Well it applies to low temperature physics in spades . . . we’re talking, we’re asking,
more and more about the infinitessimally small.’

‘Atoms?’

‘Beyond atoms . . . sub-atomic particles . . . the activity of the building blocks of the universe . . . and it all comes down to numbers, to numbers, ratios and equations. Do you know who
Heisenberg is?’

‘No.’

‘Schrödinger? Won the Nobel for physics in ’33?’

‘No.’

‘Dirac? Shared the Nobel in ’33? Talks of the poetry of mathematics?’

All Troy knew was that, with names like that, he and Walter Stilton would probably have locked them up by now if they lived in England.

‘No.’

‘OK. OK. If I were to sum up what they’ve achieved in my field in the last fifteen years, I’d say they put the maths in place for the understanding of anything bigger than the
nucleus of the atom. Now . . . we’re going below that . . . down to the point where you don’t know whether you’re dealing with matter or energy . . .’

He found the words of old Dora’s lodger on his lips . . . ‘the secret of the universe’.

He’d half expected her to sneer at this, but instead he seemed to have caught her attention. She propped herself up on one elbow to look at him.

‘Yes. If you want. That’s exactly what it is, and if we can keep the would-be-mystics out of it, we’ll find it.’

‘Would-be-mystics?’

She flopped down again, face in the pillow, her tone of voice the same exasperated one she had used when she’d told him not to make plans.

‘People like my father.’

While she slept Troy thought of the difference between his relationship with Kitty and his relationship with Zette. She was right, they did not know one another, they were as elemental as matter
and energy, and he and Kitty surely did know one another? But in not knowing, so many of the obstacles vanished. Between Troy and Zette, class, race, tribe, faith mattered not a damn.

They each lay full length on their cots. Only Herr Rosen had chosen not to return. As though each of them felt the same sudden exhaustion – but nothing had taxed them
physically. Rod knew what he felt after a Drax talk. It was the force of Old Drax’s anger. The years of knowing that it was all preventable, and nothing had been done. After Kornfeld’s
he was baffled and mind-numb. He wondered what might be tiring Billy and Hummel, as he lay between them. Like the largest tin soldier in the box. It could not be the same, surely? But it was.

Billy spoke, ‘What was that about then?’

‘Search me,’ Rod replied.

‘Y’know ’Ampstead. There are times when I think you and me are the only ones who don’t know.’

‘Really? I used to think I had certain intellectual strengths. History, y’know, Metternich’s Europe and all that . . . Modern Languages . . . a smattering of Economics . .
.’

Billy saved him from a list of his own inadequacies, ‘Whereas me – not bein’ college – I know two things . . . how to run a tailor’s and how to –’

‘Look after number one,’ Rod concluded for him.

Billy propped himself up on one elbow, surprised but not in his habitually angry way of confronting the new.

‘How d’yer know I was gonna say that?’

‘Billy,’ Hummel said softly from the other side of Rod’s bulk, all but invisible to Billy, ‘it is your battle cry – you ride with it wrapped around your crest like
a crusader legend. You drum it into your wife, you shout it at your son and you use it as a sophist’s bludgeon in any negotiations with Schuster and myself.’

Billy spoke to Rod, ‘Did you understand that?’

‘More than you did.’

Hummel had not finished.

‘But, my friends . . . let us consider the question you asked first. “What’s it all about?”’

‘I’m all ears, cock.’

‘There is a certain common ground in what Professor Kornfeld is saying in his talks and what I shall say in mine. We are both dealing with the greatest human failing of all – the
necessity of meaning.’

‘Eh?’

‘Kornfeld is asking you to consider where science has been headed since Darwin.’

‘Who?’

‘Later, Billy,’ Rod said. ‘That’s an easy one. I can answer that one for you. Let Josef speak.’

‘Darwin,’ Hummel said on cue, ‘removed the hand of God from creation – a momentous decision for a devout Christian, one has no difficulty in understanding the great delay
in making his conclusions public – yet in so doing, in taking God’s heavenly hand from the earthly tiller, he ironically left order . . . genus, species, category . . . call it what you
will, it’s order . . . even though the very principle appears to be that everything is random, accidental and hence meaningless. That much-abused phrase ‘The Survival of the
Fittest’ might be better rendered as ‘The Survival of the Freaks’. We are freaks with overly large frontal lobes and opposing thumbs as surely as the long-necked Galapagos
tortoise is a freak. Now, with what remained of order – and absence of God might be lightly termed the absence of whimsy . . . the duckbilled platypus might make more sense viewed as the
product of divine whimsy, nevertheless it evolved . . . practically, in interaction with the rest of nature . . . and nature is the greatest freak, the consummate all-pervading freak . . . with the
order remaining science has sought, however unconsciously, to reinvent God. Not the God of the laws of our fathers, nor the Christian God of love, no God with human form . . . but the God of First
Principles, first causes . . . of teleology.’

The last word, if not all the others put together, had clearly thrown Billy, yet surprisingly he managed to hit the nail on the head.

‘I get it. God is dead. Long live God?’

‘Exactly,’ said Hummel. And with this in mind Herr Kornfeld, while not quite subscribing himself, is telling us that some of his fellow physicists seek God in unity. In the idea that
everything at some submolecular level is one – that energy is matter, matter is energy and so on . . . I do not have the science to put it better. In their very different fields both Gregor
Mendel and Albert Einstein sought to show us the God of First Things – a Catholic monk and a German Jew . . . the order of inheritance in a garden pea on the one hand, the singularity, the
oneness of time and space on the other . . . the great unified theory of everything. One big jam pot to hold us all.’

The pause was natural. Perfect timing on Hummel’s part. Rod could hear Billy breathing, Billy bursting.

Hummel resumed, concluded, ‘Whilst I, on the other hand, am arguing the opposite.’

‘Which is what?’

Rod answered for Hummel, ‘That there is no God, Billy. That there is no unity and hence no meaning. I think you’ll find Josef says this, or parts of this, on a fairly regular
basis.’

‘Thank you, Herr Troy. A simple message. But mine own.’

‘Alright . . . so everybody’s lookin’ for God?’

‘
Ja
,’ said Hummel, ‘because everyone wants meaning.’

‘OK. What about Old Drax, then?’

‘Ach, Billy. You should have no difficulty understanding Herr Drax. Herr Drax is talking to you about a necessity so close to your own heart.’

‘Eh?’

Rod spoke for both of them, ‘He means “looking after number one”, Billy.’

It was with some reluctance that Rod attended Drax’s next lecture. Herr Rosen had talked both him and Billy Jacks into going.

‘He might yet surprise you, Herr Troy. And you, Herr Jacks, does it matter where you take your siesta?’

‘I wasn’t asleep!’

‘Oh – do you snore when you’re awake?’

‘No. But I might grunt a bit.’

Jenkins sat next to Rod again, passed out pencils and scraps of paper, saying, ‘I managed to get hold of a few things. You wouldn’t believe the shortage of pencils or the number of
chits a chap has to fill out to get one.’

Drax coughed. He coughed a lot. He seemed to feel the cold too, and from somewhere had produced a fur coat which he had taken to wearing even indoors. Rod could not help but think it made him
look like a Jewish Bud Flanagan about to sing ‘Underneath the Arches’ with Chesney Allen, until he remembered that Bud Flanagan was Jewish in the first place. Drax coughed, and opened
the session.

‘The theme I wish to pursue today is one of information and response, of access and concealment, of clear vision and self-deceit. The role of the British Press is central in this. Not only
as they responded to the events of 1933, but in the way they shaped public response to those and subsequent events – to the SA’s reign of violence, to the setting up of the
concentration camps, the dissolution of the trade unions and political parties, the persecution of the communists – the persecution of the Jews to the descent into night and fog
–’

Rod’s head, all but noddding off in the cupped palm of one hand, jerked up at the sound of these words. It was like a poke with a sharp stick. He kept hearing that phrase, as though it
were something in the ether, half-formed, intellectually embryonic, struggling to break into common parlance. Night and Fog.
Nacht und Nebel
. It struck him now as sharply as it had the night
Wolfgang Stahl had first used it to him last May.

‘– the descent into night and fog of one of the most civilised cultures in the world.

‘Certain British newspapers saw fit to make a national crusade of Mosley’s Blackshirts. The
Daily Mail’
s ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’, the
Dispatch’
s competition ‘Why I Like the Blackshirts’. And I do not hold up these headlines as peripheral – I hold them to be central to British thinking in the last
decade. It bespeaks a failure to read Nazism alright. A misperception of the enemy on a tragic scale.

Why does the British ruling class fail to see Nazism for what it is? Could it be that they have common values? That the same anti-Semitism that infects Germany infects Britain, that the people
in power are not repulsed by the moral implosion that is Germany, that they themselves would support fascism as a bulwark against communism if only Hitler’s nationalist demands were more
“reasonable”? That the same deep-rooted anti-Semitism which flourished in the Chamberlain government now blossoms in Churchill’s?

‘Gentlemen – think about it. Most of you were locked up long before Sir Oswald Mosley. The man was not considered a threat. He was part of the British establishment. The threat is
you – the little Jewish professor from Berlin, the little Jewish tailor from Vienna – you who have never donned a black shirt, a brown shirt or a jackboot. You whom Churchill has
rounded up. And meanwhile the British fascists remain at large.