The Weight of Numbers (21 page)

Anthony's body, meanwhile, clings to the clay of life with dirty fingernails. It longs to wallow unchecked in the stew of life.

Nine years later, at 6.30 a.m., on 10 July 1939 Anthony Burden, King's scholar, twenty-two years old, wakes up in an unfamiliar room – sheets that are too hot, too damp – and in the presence – close, naked and erect – of Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing.

Anthony lets out a scream and tumbles from the bed. Whimpering, he half runs, half crawls, for the nearest door. He finds himself in a bathroom. He slams the door shut behind him and fumbles with the bolt.

‘Anthony?' says Alan.

Anthony Burden presses his back against the bathroom door and sinks to the floor, eyes tight shut. Anthony knows who it is, all right. Alan Turing's lectures have been the highlight of his week since they started: ‘The Foundations of Mathematics'. But how on earth—?

‘Anthony, sweetheart, what the devil's got into you?'

Anthony covers his face with his hands. If he is very quiet, if he is very small, maybe everything can go back to how it was.

*

Two months later. September 1939. Anthony Burden takes a deep breath and wills the tension out of his tight-wound limbs. How dreadful, that he should be rehearsing these shameful episodes, even as he turns over a new leaf and journeys to a new city!

No possible way he could continue his studies after the Incident, of course. How could he trust himself? It is as his Blessed Mother tearfully predicted. The stresses and strains of the academic life have proved too much for him. He must find some other occupation.

This war could not have come at a better time for him. It is time for Anthony Burden to do something practical for his country, something that might, he hopes, deep in his Fabian soul, improve the lot of the Common Man. His school-friend John Arven has persuaded him not to enlist. ‘There is so much you can do on the Home Front,' John insisted, bright bird eyes transfixing him, the day Anthony told him of his decision to quit academia. To prove his point, Sage has arranged for Anthony to be interviewed, later today, by the board of the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill.

Visions of paradise have accompanied Anthony Burden ever since puberty. They have shaped his life, his interests and his inventions. They do not frighten him any more. He accepts that they are a gift, like perfect pitch, or a precocious talent with brush and pencil. He sees that they have something to do with his aptitude for mathematics. But he does not understand them, and he is troubled by his own ignorance.

Once he is settled in his London digs, Anthony seeks out the distinguished-sounding philosophical society with rooms off Gower Street, and there, in its curious and ramshackle library, he reads everything that might shed light on his condition, from Mme Blavatsky's accounts of spirit travel to the personal diaries of blind introspectionist T. C. Cutsforth. Nothing he reads undercuts the magic of his visions. The visions themselves are the primary Fact.

Arven, meanwhile, encourages Anthony to spread his wings, now that he is living in the capital. He cannot understand why Anthony won't agree to come and lecture to his students at Birkbeck College. He cannot see why Anthony is so determined to shun academia. ‘There is so much you have to offer,' he says, flattering the younger man.

Strange, the bond of care between the two old boys, persisting after all these years.

Twelve-year-old Anthony, sprawled choking and half-naked on the floor of the school gymnasium, did not imagine for a second, fervently as he begged, that his dorm captain would keep his suicide attempt a secret. What had happened, that night, that John had stuck by his side, helped him clean himself up and never said anything to anyone, ever, about that night? What, on passing the gymnasium for an illicit smoke, had the older boy seen? What about Anthony's condition, if anything, did he understand?

For years, Anthony has been too afraid to ask. Because if John Arven saw that night what Anthony saw, and continues to see, every few months – the towers, the parades, the fountain – then…

Why, then, the vision must be true!

And why should we go on living, if it was? If the door to Paradise was always open? If the Way was clear?

‘
Dear Prof. Arven
,
I have yet to receive a reply to my letter of 3rd inst.
'

Well yes, dear little Kathleen, it is true. I have not replied to you. I have not made good my promises. Consequently, I would lay money that wherever you are, and however you make your living, your talents are being belittled or ignored and your potential value to the nation is going entirely to waste. No, I have not written: a misfortune for you, and a tragedy for the country. Or should that be the other way about? In any event, I have not replied. I have not invited you for any interview or examination. How can I? Perhaps next time you write, instead of heading your letter ‘Same Address', you could just tell me
where the bloody hell you are
.

Irritated, Professor John Arven – Whitehall guru and the star of Mountbatten's ‘Department of Wild Talents' – screws up Kathleen's letter and drops it neatly into the ashtray.

London. October 1940.

What else is there? Arven glances through the rest of the day's meticulously time-stamped correspondence: letters typed and handwritten; a couple of facsimiles from the War Office; a fuzzy transatlantic telephotograph. Most of this material is not supposed to leave his office, but his workload has forced him to play fast and loose with the regulations. Every couple of seconds a paperclip
pings
and falls to the floor, just out of reach. You could eek out a smallish engine component from the paperclips his secretary gets through in a week.

Another mouthful of beer. At this rate he'll be on his second before Anthony arrives. Every time someone comes labouring up the carpeted stairs, John expects to see his old schoolfriend Anthony Burden. They have agreed to meet in the upper bar of the Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia for a drink after work. John's already got in a pint of the ghastly porter Anthony prefers, and that was twenty minutes ago. Not that it will make any difference to that muck.

John Arven's lifelong friendship with Anthony Burden has recently become a source of mild but persistent annoyance. Anthony is like an unintelligible relation for whom John is always having to find excuses. Take, as a case in point, this paper he has written. John digs it out of his bag.

‘What, after all, is a machine?'
Anthony asks, with his trademark demotic flourish.
‘Where does the operator stop and the machine begin?'

Anthony has been urging Arven, in his role as a Birkbeck professor, to referee this paper and advise on the possibilities of publication. This is a rather sad business, John feels. When Anthony quit Cambridge, declaring his intent ‘to do something for the Common Man', John was intrigued. He awaited developments with anticipation. What would his
old friend become? The last thing he expected or wanted was that Anthony should drift into some nebulous reserved occupation, while at the same time plying him with page after page of amateurish philosophy. Anthony is so obviously wedded to the life of the mind, his ambitions for the fruits of his intellectual labours are so painfully nursed, why the devil did he ever leave the purlieus of King's?

‘Take a bus driver, for instance. A bus driver operates a bus.'
Anthony maintains this irritating
faux naif
style throughout.
‘But in what sense is he an “operator”?'
John correctly identifies the central theme of Anthony's paper. It is a tango. Some rather weakly analysed sentiments regarding free will on the one hand; Bertrand Russell's set theory on the other.
‘Certainly he is not a free agent. He cannot freely choose his route and schedule. Not if he wants to keep his job.'
John Arven skims Anthony's folksy phrases with a great weariness, all the way to the end. There. Promise kept. Now all he has to do is think of something to say.

Ever since school, Anthony has exhibited an unfortunate talent for frittering away his gifts on wild goose-chases. John still recalls, with some bitterness, their last summer together at Stonegrove – two halcyon months they might have spent walking, sailing; they might even have visited Europe together, and caught a last glimpse of a way of life now gone for ever, crushed beneath the jack-boot of the Reich.

At the last minute, Anthony had scotched all their plans, for all the world as though their friendship meant nothing. In order to do what, exactly? Why, in order to collect fir-cones from the woods behind his parents' house! All because of that obscure, second-hand book he had picked up, linking maths and nature. Twenty years old, written by a naturalist no one had ever heard of. By the summer's end, poor Anthony still had nothing to show for his obsession. No special insight into the relationship between numbers, birds and bees. No, not even a mathematical bauble to dangle in front of the editors of
Eureka
.

It is not that Anthony Burden is without talent. God knows, John has rarely met his equal. At school, Anthony demonstrated an instinctive
grasp of mathematical operations. More recently, he was filling his letters from Cambridge with some really quite extraordinary flights of number theory. It's not his talent that's in question.

It is his common sense. The way he allows himself to be borne away on this hobby-horse or that. His insistence that simple operations, repeated endlessly, mechanically, perhaps using some sort of switching system like a telegraph, will revolutionize the practice of mathematics.

‘I would argue that the bus driver is a functional “unit” inside a larger machine, more distributed but no less mechanical – namely, the bus route or system…'

John Arven shuffles the sheets back together and stows them away in his bag. He checks the clock above the bar. Really this is insufferable, where the devil has Anthony got to? John contemplates his own irritation, feeding it until it swells into anger. He does this out of choice, and diligently. He has to. If John doesn't work up some anger now, then all he'll be left with by the end of the evening will be fear, for what might have happened to his friend.

In years past, John has felt an intense duty of care towards Anthony Burden. He has lain awake fearing for his friend. But their friendship is past its best, their destinies have come decoupled, and he does not want these feelings any more. The apprehension and fear and dragging sense of responsibility. It is surely time, John tells himself, that he release himself from memories of that overwhelming evening of their first acquaintance: how Anthony, blubbing, extracted from him an oath of secrecy so solemn and profound that it forged an iron bond between them, a bond which John may regret but which, up to now, he has never been able to break.

All afternoon the streets of Fitzrovia have roiled drunk with every type of London life. Free French have rubbed shoulders with displaced African dignitaries, soldiers on furlough have pursued working girls through crowds of muttering black-clad Jewry. Negro poets from Paris
have been flashing their gold-capped teeth at all the pretty computers clipping in, figure-dizzy, from the toils of Senate House. From his vantage point in the shadows, Anthony marvels. It is impossible to tell whether these people are masters of their surroundings or unwitting captives. How can they live, dreaming as they do?

As the daytime noises fade, so the people of the street acquire a cool grey uniform of sameness, and Anthony Burden remarks how self-absorbed everyone has grown. Strange, he thinks, that the day should end like this. Why, he wonders, do we not connect with each other constantly in this extremity of war?

Anthony is on fire tonight, with that occasional energy he exhibits prior to a crisis. It is the manic fervour he displayed the week before he fell into bed with Alan Turing. It is the same fire that lit his eyes, back when he was simply ‘A. Burden' (much humour in the quad over that), the new boy at Stonegrove, days before John Arven discovered him.

Anthony has, as a consequence, clean forgotten his evening's arrangement with John Arven. He is, instead, on his way through Soho towards the National Gallery. There is a concert tonight, for the benefit of some refugee group or other, and though the programme is not his usual fare, in the Blitz he has learned to seize what shreds of cultural life he can. The only other entertainment tonight is
The Lion Has Wings
with Merle Oberon, playing at the Haymarket, and Anthony has seen that twice already.

He has paused in a shop doorway, feeling in his pocket for his cigarettes.

‘Excuse me, sir,' he calls out to a passer-by, ‘have you got a light?'

The man bridles. ‘I certainly have not,' he snaps, in a thick, East European accent. ‘Goodnight.'

Anthony is confused at first, then blushes, mortified. He didn't mean…

Or did he? What did he want, stood here in the dark? Not a light.

More than a light.

Here are the matches, in his hand.

He finds it so hard to understand himself at times. He lights his cigarette with trembling fingers and heads south.

It takes him no time at all to see why the foreign gentleman reacted so badly to his innocent hello. At this provocative hour of the evening, pansies line the streets. Pansies leer at him from first- and second-floor windows. From high windows, rouged pansies lean, leer and whistle. They loiter at street corners, inflaming his imagination with their narrow ties and narrow suits with narrow trousers and pointy shoes.

Sill blushing, Anthony stares straight ahead and clips smartly along, closed off to every imagined disturbance, spiralling deeper into purblind fantasy. One by one the colours vanish from the scene. Soon all is black and white. Buses, robbed of their red, slink past along Shaftesbury Avenue. Furled umbrellas spasm like jellyfish. In Trafalgar Square the lions are pacing. Nelson on his column teeters and hesitates; is there really no way down from here? The National Gallery steps trill and tinkle like piano keys when Anthony treads on them and threaten to buck him into the street below.