Against the Day (95 page)

The terms went
gliding
, Lent and
Easter, into the Long Vacation. Yashmeen returned to her tiny garret room at
Chunxton Crescent and immediately noticed, if not exactly a divergence between
the T.W.I.T. and herself, at least a growing impatience with what their
“protection” by now had come to mean—an unrelenting surveillance, not
limited to the Colonial Office and the Queen Anne’s Gate brigade but including
the lessvisible attentions of the Okhrana, Ballhausplatz, and Wilhelmstraße,
requiring periodic visits to Whitehall to enact the same weary and fruitless
exercises before underlings often enough bedazzled but unable, sometimes, even
to locate the proper dossier. Lew Basnight was about, but the doings of the
Icosadyad made him unpredictable as a social companion, leaving little but
lengthy, idiotinfested summer soirées. Against these, like a shoot in a garden,
from some invisible bulb or seed far below, green, astonishing, emerged this
allbuterotic fascination with the thoughts of former Göttingen eminence G. F.
B. Riemann. She secluded herself in the upper room with a number of mathematics
texts and began, like so many of that era, a journey into the dodgy terrain of
Riemann’s Zeta function and his famous conjecture—almost casually thrown
into an 1859 paper on the number of primes less than a given size—that
all its nontrivial zeroes had a real part equal to one half.

Neville and Nigel spent the summer
developing their own hypothesis that members of the Chinese race without
exception could be depended upon for access to opium products. “Just wait for a
Chinaman to show up,” as Nigel explained, “and sooner or later he’ll lead you
to a ‘joint,’ and Bob’s your uncle.” They found themselves in Limehouse so
often that eventually they took rooms there.

Cyprian was received warily back into
the Knightsbridge domicile, if not the embrace, of his family. He had been
introduced when a youth to sodomitical activities by an uncle with whom he
journeyed to Paris to sell wallpaper, and to celebrate landing a major account
one day with the Hôtel Alsace, over on the Left Bank between rue Jacob and the
river, Uncle Griswold had brought the boy to an allmale house of illfame. “Like
a duck to water,” reported Griswold to Cyprian’s father, whose disappointment
was directed not at his brother but at Cyprian. “It was a test of character,”
he informed his son. “You failed. Perhaps Cambridge is the place for you after
all.”

Though Cyprian had a vague idea of
Yashmeen’s address, he did not call that summer. After a short while, to
everyone’s mutual relief, he took the boattrain for the Continent, ending up in
Berlin for several weeks remarkable for their excess.

In the briskness
of autumn again, everyone
reconnected. New colors of clothing had become fashionable, notably Coronation
Red. Privileged misses appeared with their hair cut in fringes like factory
girls. The cricket talk was all of Ranji and C. B. Fry, and of course the
Australian season lately under way. Engineering students met in New Court at
high noon for mock duels to see who could draw and calculate fastest on the
TavernierGravet slide rules it was à la mode that season to pack around in
leather scabbards that fastened to one’s belt. New Court in those days was
still a resort of the unruly, and interest in calculation soon deferred to
drinking beer, as much of it and as quickly as possible.

Cyprian, while rejecting his family’s
High Church faith, strangely had begun—especially when the Mags and Nuncs
and Matins responsories could be heard from services at Trinity or
King’s—to glimpse that, precisely because of its impossibilities, the
disarray of selfimportant careerists and hierarchyobsessed functionaries, the
yawning and fidgeting townlad choristers and narcotic sermonizing—it was
possible to hope, not so much despite as paradoxically because of this very
snarled web of human flaw, for the emergence of the incommensurable mystery,
the dense, unknowable Christ, bearing the secret of how once on a hilltop that
was not Zion, he had conquered death. Cyprian stood in the evenings, at the
Compline hour, just outside the light cast from the chapel windows, and
wondered what was happening to his skepticism, which was seldom being addressed
these days except by such truly horrible specimens as the Te Deum in
Commemoration of the Khaki Election by Filtham, which—although in the
hymnwriting trade botching a Te Deum is thought to be next to impossible, the
psalmodic formulae being

well established, even unto what notes to end
on—nonetheless, from its stultifying length, in arguable violation of any
number of childlabor statutes, as well as a relentless chromaticism that might
have made even Richard Strauss uneasy, too “modern” to have retained any power
to penetrate and sacredly stun, it was already known among schoolchild
choristers from Staindrop to St. Paul’s as “Filtham’s Tedium.”

Meanwhile Yashmeen was finding Girton
increasingly tiresome, the epidemic idiocy, the impossible dress regulations,
not to mention the food, unimproved by the saturated blonde light that
descended into Hall through the high arch of overhead panes, bathing the nested
tables and the linen and chattering girls. She took refuge more and more in the
Zetafunction problem, to which she found herself adverting even as the
classmate whose gaze during the day she had met and held came tiptoeing in
after curfew, slipping naked into Yashmeen’s own narrow bed, even in that rare
and wordless moment, she was not quite able to ignore the question, almost as
if he were whispering to her, of why Riemann had simply asserted the figure of
onehalf at the outset instead of deriving it later
. . . .
“One would of course like to have a rigorous proof of
this,” he wrote, “but I have put aside the search
. . .
after some fleeting vain attempts because it is not
necessary for the immediate objective of my investigation.”

But didn’t that then imply
. . .
the tantalizing possibility was just
out of

reach . . .

. . . and suppose that at Göttingen,
somewhere among his papers, in some asyetuncatalogued memorandum to himself, he
had actually been unable
not
to go back to it, haunted as anyone since,
back to the maddeningly simple series he had found in Gauss and expanded to
take account of the whole “imaginary” mirrorworld which even Ramanujan here at
Trinity had ignored until Hardy pointed it out to him—revisited, in some
way
relighted the scene,
making it possible to prove the conjecture as
rigorously as anyone might wish . . .

“I say Pinks, you are
   
aren’t you?”

“And where are you, saucy one, not
down where you ought to be it seems, we must sort that out, mustn’t we . . .”
Taking the girl by her blonde hair, rather rudely, and in a single elegant
movement lifting her own nightdress and straddling the impertinent little face
. . . .

“
So it’s off
to the
land of lederhosen, is it,” said Cyprian with as little peevishness as
possible. Whatever was allowed between them by now did not include the display
of hurt feelings.

   
“Shabby
of me obviously, but I didn’t really know myself until—”

   
“Good
Lord, you’re not apologizing. Are you quite well?”

“Cyprian,
it’s nothing I expected. We are sent here, most of us, aren’t we really, to
stay out of the way, not be a bother—the books, the tutoring, the
learning, it’s all incidental. For something to actually
. . .
light up, it’s
. . .
no
one would believe me, if I
. . .
oh,
one or two boys in Hardy’s classes, but certainly no one back at Chunxton Crescent.
Hardy knows about zeroes of the ζfunction in a general way but isn’t quite
insane enough about it, whereas Hilbert thinks of nothing else, and he’s at
Göttingen, it’s that obsessiveness I need, so Göttingen it is.”

“Something
. . .
mathematical,” he blinked. She began to glare but then saw
what he was about. “I knew I’d regret it someday. Never able to do more than
work out the cricket averages, you know
. . .
.
”

“You think I’m a lunatic.”

“Why should it matter to you anymore
what. . . what I think?” Oh Cyprian, he immediately slapped himself mentally,
no please, not now.

She was patient today. “What you
think of me, Cyprian? It has been my stagelighting—threatening sometimes
to burn me away—illuminating me into some
beauidéal
. . . .
Who would not wish to become,
even for a moment, that brighter creature
.
. .
even if her fate be ashes?” She put her hand on his, and he felt
just below his ears and down his neck a rapid fine shiver he could not control.

“Of course.” He found a cigarette and
lit up, belatedly offering her one, which she took and said she’d keep for
later. “There’s little future for you in simply hanging about here being
adored. I know nothing about Riemann, but I do at least understand
obsessiveness. Don’t I.” And for all that he still would not take his eyes from
the long, compelling curve of her bared neck. She could not deny him this, it
was unmistakably desire—though of rather a specialized sort, he shouldn’t
wonder.

It would have
been
too much to expect
Professor Renfrew to stay clear of his propensity to meddle—the minute he
learned of Yashmeen’s impending departure for Göttingen, he began a campaign of
inducement if not outright seduction—there were times she could not be
sure.

“Not an assassination scheme,” the
Grand Cohen assured her on one of her many weekend recursions down the Great
Eastern to Chunxton Crescent to consult. “That could mean his own destruction
as well. More likely he wishes you to work some severe mischief upon the mental
wellbeing of his opposite number, Werfner. This is a professorial fantasy dating
back at least

to the days of Weierstrass and Sofia Kovalevskaia, when it
entered the folklore of academic endeavor. The years have not redeemed its root
premise, which remains despicable as ever.”

   
She
frowned.

“Well you are presentable, there’s no
avoiding that. When you transmigrate into your next body, you might consider
something a bit less eyecatching. Some member of the plant kingdom is often a
safe bet.”

   
“You
want me to try and be reborn as a vegetable?”

   
“Nothing
in Pythagorean doctrine that forbids it.”

   
“You
are a great comfort, Grand Cohen.”

“I suppose I only mean, be cautious.
Though desperately carnal themselves, those two, yet their allegiance is not to
the given world.”

“Of the flesh but not the world? How
peculiar. How can that be? It sounds like maths, only more practical somehow.”

“This came for you, by the way.” He
handed her a package which appeared to have undergone some wrathful treatment
by the post office. She unknotted a length of string and tore away already
tattered wrapping paper to reveal an inexpensively bound folio volume with a
fourcolor chromolithograph on its cover of a young woman in the sort of
provocative pose observed on postcards from the seaside, her finger held to her
plump and shining lips.

“ ‘
Snazzbury’s Silent Frock,
’ ”
Yashmeen read aloud. “Operating on the
principle of wave interference, sound cancelling sound, the act of walking
being basically a
periodic phenomenon,
and the characteristic “rustling”
of an ordinary frock an easily computed complication of the underlying
ambulational
frequency
. . . .
It was
discovered only recently in the scientific laboratory of Dr. Snazzbury of
Oxford University, that each individual toilette might be
tuned to itself
through
certain structural adjustments in the tailoring—
’ ”

“It materialized in the dininghall,”
shrugged the Cohen, “or it was crudely made to appear as if it had. Renfrew’s
doing. Rancid mockery written all over it.”

“There’s a note. ‘Every girl must
have one. You never know when there’ll be need. Your appointment has been
arranged. Bring your charming friends.’ An address and a date and time.” She
passed him the slip of paper.

“It could be dangerous.”

But Yashmeen was interested in the
general problem. “We assume the noiseless feature would only make sense
indoors, but is it for stealth, meditation, means to an end, end in
itself—under what circs should a woman wish to avoid the rustling of a
dress? Why not simply wear trousers and a shirt?”

“When she must also appear plausibly
feminine in public,” supposed the Grand Cohen, “whilst engaged, in private,
upon some clandestine assignment.”

   
“Espionage.”

   
“He
must know you’ll tell us everything.”

   
“Will
I?”

“Miss Halfcourt, are you attempting
to flirt with me? Desist. Grand Cohens are flirtproof. Part of the Oath. I admit
I’m curious, as no doubt are you. My advice is to go in for a fitting and have
a look round, if possible. Share what you wish.”