We That Are Left (28 page)

Every morning he read and every afternoon he walked. He always went the same way, across Trinity Bridge and along the Newnham Road towards Grantchester. It was the sunniest May anyone could remember and on the Backs the warm afternoons were bright with chatter and laughter and the slow dip and splash of punts. Girls were not permitted on the river without a chaperone but they spread blankets on the grass banks, their parasols bright as butterflies. There were wicker picnic baskets and wind-up phonographs and bottles of champagne cooling in the river on lengths of string. Couples danced together on the lawns. The music drifted on the breeze, insistently gay, insinuating itself into Oscar's feet.

He did not stop. He did not even take photographs. His head was too busy with the books he was reading. The book list Mr Willis had given him covered the first part of the Natural Sciences Tripos. Oscar read them all, not only physics but chemistry and biology. When a subject caught his attention he turned to the bibliographies and read more. The librarian was helpful, at least until Oscar enquired about subatomic physics. Then he produced a single slim volume by a Trinity Fellow, Mr James Jeans, published before the War. That, he said apologetically, was all that they had. Oscar knew better than to ask why they owned none of the books by German scientists. Instead, he read Mr Jeans.

Mr Jeans' book was filled with incomprehensible equations but his central theory was clear. For years, in his work with black body radiation, he had attempted to accommodate his results within the parameters of classical mechanics. Instead, he had found them persistently in contradiction. Mr Jeans was obliged reluctantly to conclude that there was, underlying the most minute processes of nature, a system of mechanical laws
quite different from the Newtonian laws upon which physics had been built thus far. But even if those laws could be identified, even if a complete set of equations to support them could be conceived and proven, the mathematics defied physical interpretation. Any attempts to explain or picture the mechanisms involved, Jeans stated baldly, led only to a state of hopeless confusion.

The phrase was like a fragment of meat caught between Oscar's teeth. It nagged at him.
A state of hopeless confusion
. Quantum theory explained subatomic physics but the human brain could not imagine it. But if something could not be imagined, then how could it possibly be true? As he strode on out of town, matching his thoughts to the metronomic tick of his heels against the stone, it occurred to him to wonder whether intellectual energy, like radiation, was also quantised, that it too was delivered in packets of predetermined size, proportional to the circumference of the brain, the length of the walking stride. Perhaps, he thought, if he could look inside his head, slicing off the top like a boiled egg, he would see the electrons of his thoughts circling the nucleus of his brain, compelled by the unfathomable laws of the hidden universe never to diverge from their preordained orbits. Perhaps, he thought, it was why they only ever seemed to take him in circles.

And still he read and walked and thought, each day in the same order. No one paid him the least attention. No one stopped at his desk or tipped their hat to him on the stairs. Even the porters, whose job it was to know everyone, hardly seemed to see him as he passed through Great Gate. Oscar did not mind. He felt light, divested of the awkward conspicuousness of his body, his whole self rolled up and contained inside the safe box of his skull. When, on the rare occasions he walked through the college in the afternoon, the place was hectic with undergraduates, laughing and shouting and waving tennis racquets with a noisy enthusiasm that smashed up the air into bright shards, but in the mornings, when the
courts were deserted and magnificent and everyone in the University was deep in study, it seemed to him that the hush of the library was alive with a static hum, a symphony of thinking, as in every carrel and corner of the ancient buildings worlds grew and opened and held their silent faces up towards the light.

It startled him then when, cutting through Whewell's Court one pink evening, Oscar was accosted by a group of men drinking claret out of tooth glasses. Behind them, in a ground-floor room, a party was in full swing. Through the open window Oscar could hear the clamour of voices, the crackly jaunt of ragtime on a gramophone. The owner of the rooms had moved his furniture into the stairwell and the narrow space was a jumble of club chairs and tables and footstools with tapestry seats. An ashtray and a half-empty bottle of wine balanced precariously on the upturned feet of an ottoman.

‘Do we know each other?' one of the men asked. To Oscar's confusion he realised that he had somehow stopped walking and was gaping as though they were an exhibit in the zoo.

‘Sorry, I . . . I don't think so,' he muttered.

‘You're quite sure? You're not a member of the Quinquaginta, are you?'

Oscar shook his head.

‘Good God, Ferguson,' one of the other men laughed. ‘Your tactics get baser by the day.'

The man called Ferguson only grinned. He had dark hair and a wide smiling mouth and he leaned against the wall with one leg stuck out and his arms crossed over his chest as though he had been leaning there all his life. His left cheek, which faced the wall, was rubbery with scar tissue. The stretched skin tugged at the corner of his left eye, pulling it down so that it looked as though he was winking. Where his ear should be there was only a hole, marked by a shiny nub of purple flesh.

‘Then what are you waiting for?' he said to Oscar. ‘For a two-bob sub you'll find the door to Paradise thrown open and
all the heavenly angels there for your delectation. Though, of course, you'll have to bring your own. The Quinquaginta may be a thoroughly modern kind of joint but we do cling to some vestige of decency. So, can I sign you up?'

Oscar stared at Ferguson helplessly. ‘I'm sorry but I have no idea what the Quink—what that is.'

‘Where have you been all term? The Quinquaginta is only
the
dance club in Cambridge. Other men may tell you it's all about the Vingt-et-un but believe me, besides the Quinquaginta, the Vingt-et-un's like a maiden aunt at a funeral.'

‘The maiden aunt's mother,' a third man drawled. ‘With bunions.' He was much younger than the others, short and scrawny with the raw bones and shiny red pimples of a schoolboy. Above his scarlet silk cravat his Adam's apple bobbed like a fishing float.

‘I'm sorry,' Oscar said, ‘but I don't dance.'

‘Don't dance?' Ferguson protested. ‘What madness is this? How else are you going to get pretty girls to fall into your arms?'

‘Certainly not by letting them see me dance,' Oscar said. He meant it seriously but Ferguson only laughed and held out his hand.

‘I'm Kit Ferguson.'

‘Oscar Greenwood.'

‘This reprobate is Jay Girouard and this is . . . Wilkinson, is it?'

‘Winterson,' the schoolboy corrected. ‘Geoffrey Winterson.'

‘Girouard lives on this staircase, when he's sober enough to find it,' Ferguson said. ‘Do you want a drink?'

Without waiting for an answer he took a dirty glass from the window sill and sloshed some wine into it. Oscar hesitated, then took it.

‘Thank you,' he said.

Despite their age the men were all first years. Ferguson had come up in January, Girouard in April. Girouard joked about being older than the dons but only Winterson mentioned the
War. Obliged to relinquish his commission on account of weak lungs, he had gone straight to Cambridge after Highers the previous October. He wore his extra term like a medal.

Oscar was glad when Winterson declared himself thirsty and went in search of wine. He was even gladder when he discovered that Girouard was reading Natural Sciences and Ferguson Mathematics which, at Cambridge, included the study of theoretical physics. After that he did not have to worry about thinking of things to say. He had a second glass of wine and talked about the photoelectric effect and whether light was a particle or a wave or, as Einstein would have it, somehow both at the same time. It was only when the party was breaking up that it occurred to Oscar to mention that he was not actually at the University. Ferguson laughed.

‘So you're here but you're not here,' he said. ‘The Prof won't like that. He hasn't much time for theoretical physicists.'

The Prof was Ernest Rutherford. According to Ferguson everyone called him that, even his wife. Oscar grinned.

‘He's quite safe here,' Ferguson added ruefully. ‘As far as this place is concerned quanta are just some dubious foreign nonsense, like spaghetti or Fauvism. What matters is the Maxwellian tradition and the study of strains in the aether.'

‘But they teach it, don't they? Quantum theory, I mean.'

‘Apparently there's a new fellow at Christ's who means to teach a course next year,' Girouard said.

‘Only to you lot,' Kit said. ‘Not to us. It's all right for you to be misled. You're nothing but mechanics with your magnets and your cathode tubes and your columns of observable facts. Us mathematicians are the vestal virgins of the University. We must be chaperoned by Larmor at all times for fear that our purity be corrupted by sticky-fingered wops.'

‘We're not allowed to have tea with them without the door open and all four feet on the floor at all times,' Girouard said.

‘He's right. Look, I've got to go but come and find out for yourself. Monday, four o'clock. And bring cake. Nobody's allowed without cake.'

‘Another of Larmor's rules?'

‘If it were it would be the only one I agree with. Great Court, M staircase. Room One on the ground floor.'

‘You're a scholar?' Oscar asked.

‘Not exactly.'

‘But I thought only scholars got rooms in Great Court.'

‘Actually, it's scholars and cripples. Don't look so stricken. Who wouldn't give their left leg for a room on Great Court? I'll see you on Monday.'

There was a walking stick propped against the stairs. Oscar had not even noticed it. Ferguson took it and levered himself away from the wall. His left leg did not bend. He had to swing it in a stiff half-circle to bring it forward like a pendulum. As he manoeuvred his way out of the crowded stairwell his foot struck a spindly-legged table, sending it flying.

‘Pick on someone your own size, Ferguson,' someone shouted.

Ferguson grinned.

‘In the battle of the wooden legs, all enemies are equal,' he said. ‘That one was mine.'

Oscar never did join the Quinquaginta. He could not comprehend why Kit Ferguson liked dancing, a pursuit he considered both tedious and alarming, and he had no interest in meeting girls. But he liked Kit. From time to time, on the way back from his walks, he bought cakes at the bakery on Magdalene Lane and went to Kit's rooms in Great Court for tea. Sometimes Girouard was there and Oscar did not stay long. Girouard vibrated with a kind of hectic restlessness, as though the air he breathed might at any moment run out. His gaiety brooked no possibility of refusal, except when he was suffering the after-effects of some party or other, when he liked to sprawl on Kit's sofa with his feet propped up on the arm, drinking Kit's sherry and complaining about people Oscar did not know.

When it was just Kit they talked about physics.

Like Oscar Kit was baffled and entranced by the quantum hypothesis, but when he quizzed his lecturers they deflected his questions. They insisted that quantum theory remained far from inevitable, that many British mathematicians remained unconvinced by its hypotheses. When Kit protested to his supervisor, Mr Lopez sent him away with a journal containing an article by Sir Oliver Lodge. The piece, ‘On Continuity', had been delivered as a presidential address to the British
Association for the Advancement of Science. In it Lodge rejected as unworkable the theories both of quanta and of relativity.

‘It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing,' Kit said. ‘Here lies classical physics, one foot in the grave, and who do they wheel in to resuscitate it? A fucking Spiritualist. A man who refuses point blank to accept that when something's dead, it's really bloody dead.'

It came as a great comfort to Kit when Sir Oliver Lodge began a lecture tour of England and the newspapers denounced him as a mountebank and social menace, a peddler of nauseating superstitious drivel to the weak and the credulous. The innate conservatism of the Cambridge faculty exasperated Kit. Cambridge would never accept the quanta, he said, just as they would never admit women to full membership of the University, even though the arguments against both were in tatters. The Trinity fellows would continue to shuffle like superannuated penguins across the lawns of Great Court, their top hats tipped over their eyes, and thank God, who being British was mercifully a moderate, dependable sort of chap and not prone to excitability, that at least in these ancient courts of learning time had the common decency to stand still.

‘Kropotkin gave up on revolution in England after the 1881 Congress,' Kit told Oscar. ‘He said that England was a country impermeable to new ideas. He knew you could turn everything upside down, tip every last assumption out onto the floor and trample them into the dust, and the English would only sigh and put the kettle on and put everything carefully back the way it was before.'

That was the thing about Kit. He talked about physics and history and philosophy and music and the headlines in the newspapers as if they were all part of the same conversation. Everything interested him. He was as opinionated about Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chaplin as he was about the music of Schoenberg or the poetry of Pound. Oscar thought that if he lived a thousand years he would never know as
much as Kit. He also could not help wondering why Kit wanted to know so much about so many different things when there was still so much to learn about physics.

‘Except that's not true,' Oscar countered. ‘A year ago elements were immutable. Then Rutherford starts firing alpha particles at nitrogen atoms and, hey presto, he's turned it into oxygen and changed the way we look at the world for ever. Even the Cambridge penguins admit that.'