The Indian Clerk (48 page)

"A what?"

"A prime number. A number that—" But before Hardy can complete his explanation, the door opens, and Richards ushers in Ramanujan,
who is limping badly. Both his legs are bandaged. Richards has his right arm around his waist.

"Ramanujan!" Hardy says, leaping up from his chair. But Ramanujan doesn't answer. He won't meet Hardy's gaze. And suddenly
Hardy understands that all this jollity—explaining the Riemann hypothesis to the good-looking Richards, talking about calculation
contests with the less good-looking Inspector Callahan—has only been a caesura; a respite. For now Ramanujan is standing before
him, and in his eyes there are no tears. There is no rage. No grief. Nothing. This is a man who just tried to die.

"Here you are, Mr. Hardy," Richards says. "That's right." And he hands Ramanujan over like a package. An arm loosed, another
arm put around the shoulders. Ramanujan can barely stand; for a moment Hardy staggers under the weight until his feet find
purchase. He smells, very faintly, of blood; of sand; of the grit and exhaust that puffs up from Underground stations.

"All right, my friend, you're safe now," Hardy says. "We'll get you in a taxi and get you home." And he leads Ramanujan toward
the door, praying the whole while that Ramanujan will say or do something mad—cry out, "I want to die!" or hurl himself against
a wall—something to jeopardize this tenuous probation that Hardy has negotiated. But Ramanujan says nothing.

"Remember the terms," the inspector calls from the door. And Hardy says that yes, he will remember the terms. Then he and
Ramanujan leave, followed by Richards, who helps them down the steps and into a cab, and stands by as the cab pulls away.

The whole journey, Ramanujan is silent. The snow has started to stick a little more. Hardy watches it as it falls on women
in bus conductor's uniforms and macintoshes, on businessmen in bowler hats, on soldiers on leave and the tart who was in the
waiting room at Scotland Yard, now sheltered by an umbrella held up by a shadowy keeper. These days London is especially frantic
at dusk, its citizens scrambling to get home before the lights go out, and it becomes a different world. "Once I was in Venice,"
he says, and Ramanujan turns; looks at him dimly. "Yes, and it was quite terrifying. You see, the city's so lively during
the day, and then at night—not a soul. I got lost trying to get back to my hotel. It was like walking through a city of the
dead."

Is this the wrong thing to say? Probably. For how is Ramanujan, who has never been to Venice, supposed to respond? And what
is Hardy supposed to say to him next, as the cab ride attenuates, the traffic thickening and thinning, like soup that needs
to be stirred? If only St. George's Square would arrive, then at least Hardy could busy himself with making arrangements for
the night! And then he looks at Ramanujan, heaped in his corner of the cab, and he realizes that it makes no difference. Ramanujan
is not requiring talk of him. On the contrary, he seems to want silence.

At last the cab pulls up to the curb. Hardy helps Ramanujan out, and is mildly surprised that he makes no effort to run away,
until he looks down and sees, once again, the bandaged legs, and realizes that, even if he wanted to, Ramanujan couldn't.
Not now. "You've banged yourself up pretty well," he says, as he eases Ramanujan through the door and up the stairs.

"I fell onto the rails," Ramanujan says. "They tore the flesh of my legs."

"That must have hurt."

"There were no broken bones, though." Is there disappointment in his voice?

One landing, then another. "Here we are then." And they step inside the flat. The light is still on from when Hardy left,
the book he was reading flung open on the chair, the receiver of the telephone dangling to the floor of the corridor. He returns
it to its cradle. "Do sit down." Ramanujan sits gingerly, breathes out very loudly. "You've never been here before, have you?
My flat."

"No."

"Or rather, I should say, the flat I share with my sister. Miss Hardy."

"Yes."

"So there's a spare room. My sister's room. You can sleep there tonight and tomorrow we'll take the train to Cambridge."

"What is to become of me? Am I to be sent back to Hill Grove?"

"I don't see why not, assuming you were happy there."

"I was not happy there. I could not bear the place. I left four days ago."

"So you came to London?"

Ramanujan nods. He has picked up English habits of certainty. "At first I stayed at Mrs. Peterson's but then there was . .
. an incident. I left, and was caught up in the bombing raid. I could not get a train back to Cambridge so I found a hotel.
I stayed there until I had no money left." He grows suddenly quiet. And how is Hardy supposed to nudge him on? Is he supposed
to nudge him on? So far as the human psyche is concerned—he would be the first to admit it—he is as inept a student as has
ever been born. Mathematicians live in abstract realms for a reason. But Ramanujan, too, is a mathematician. That was what
brought them together. So why shouldn't they be able to speak to each other?

"Of course you don't have to talk about this if you don't want to,"

Hardy says, "but. . . well, needless to say, I was very alarmed when the inspector told me . . . Is it true that you jumped?"

Ramanujan gazes into his lap for several seconds. Then he says, "It does not matter."

"Why?"

"I shall die soon anyway."

"You don't know that."

"At Hill Grove there was an old man in the next hut. They called it a chalet but it was a hut. This old man came from a village
not far from my own. Not far from Kumbakonam. He had bathed in the river every day, as I did, before he came to England. For
many years he had a restaurant in Notting Hill, and then his sons took over the restaurant. They quarreled, and it was sold. He was made sick from their quarreling, and they sent him to Hill Grove. And every day he
coughed up blood, and in the end the noise coming from his hut was frightful."

"I'm sorry."

"It does not matter. His fate is mine, only in my case it will come sooner. Since I was a child I have known I would die young.
It doesn't matter how."

"But that's nonsense. There's no reason you can't live to be eighty. And you've so much left to achieve! We've work to do,
Ramanujan, the partitions theorem, the Riemann hypothesis still to prove."

He smiles thinly. "Yes, I have been thinking, a little, about the Riemann hypothesis."

"Have you? Tell me."

"But I am very tired."

"Of course you are. I'm sorry." Hardy stands, then walks into the corridor off which the bedroom doors open. He opens the
door to Gertrude's room. "You should find everything you need here," he says. "I'm afraid the bed hasn't been slept in for
a while, though. The sheets may be musty."

"I don't mind."

"Oh, but I haven't offered you anything. Wouldn't you like something to eat? Or to drink? Some tea?"

"No. I only want sleep."

"Fine, then. You don't want to bathe?"

Another distinct shake of the head: no. And then he shuffles through the door to Gertrude's room; pulls off his clothes until
he is wearing just his drawers. Only then does Hardy see how badly he's been hurt. The bandages cover his legs from the ankles
to just above the knees, and are bloody in places.

"Those will have to be changed."

"But how long was it before you learned?"

"Oh, months. At least until November of that first year."

"But that's terrible. You must have been frozen!" And without thinking, Hardy laughs, too. They laugh together.

"It was long ago."

"Of course. Well, I'll leave you then. Goodnight." And he moves to shut the door. But Ramanujan says, "Wait."

"What?"

"Would you mind leaving the door open?"

"Of course. Of course I'll leave the door open."

"And the door to your bedroom . . . Would you leave that open, too?"

"Of course. Well, sleep tight."

"Sleep tight?"

"An expression. Goodnight again."

"Goodnight again."

Hardy turns, and is halfway across the corridor, halfway to his own room, when a thought comes into his head, and he stops.

"Ramanujan."

"Yes?"

"You're not going to try it again, are you?"

"No."

"Good. Well, goodnight yet again."

"Goodnight yet again."

Outside the window, the city is dark. He pads into his own bedroom, being careful to leave the door ajar; takes off his clothes;
lingers, for a moment, naked in the dark, before starting to put on his pyjamas. Then he flings them away. Now currents of
air connect him to Ramanujan, over which any sound would carry, the groans of intimacy as much as of pain; the thrashings
of loneliness; his own snoring. Sleep claims the sufferer, the same oblivion that will elude, tonight, his putative savior.
Hardy hears rumblings in the distance, and revels in the unfamiliar sensation of the draft from the corridor brushing against
his bare skin.

He starts at the voice, the sensation of weight pulling the blankets taut. Gaye, in formal coat and tie, sits on the edge
of his bed. He holds Hermione in his lap. To his surprise, Hardy is happy to see them.

"It's been so long since you've visited me," he says.

"Busy, busy, busy," Gaye says. "Every week is May week here. Balls and balls and balls. And what a long way you've come, Harold,
since last I saw you!"

"How do you mean?"

"Yet another suicide to your credit."

"Suicide attempt. And it wasn't my—"

"I stand corrected. Attempt." Gaye strokes Hermione's neck, so that she purrs. "Mine worked, of course. But then again I never
intended it not to. You know if you look carefully you can nearly always tell the difference between the ones who really mean
it and the ones who just want some attention. It's rarely ambiguous."

"It wasn't ambiguous in your case."

"No, I meant to die. You see, I'm methodical. I thought it all out very carefully in advance, I made a list of all the possible
methods, correlating the likelihood of success with the degree of pain. Unluckily for me, I'm afraid of pain. Some people
aren't. Hermione, for instance. You were a brave girl, even through the death agonies, weren't you?" And he picks her up,
so that her tiny pink nose touches his. "But where was I? Oh yes. So I wrote out the options. It was in early February that
I started planning, just as it was becoming clear you wanted nothing more to do with me—"

"I never—"

"First tablets . . . Now tablets, Harold, are very good in that they won't cause much pain, but then again they're not necessarily
guaranteed to take. If you choose the wrong ones, you'll just vomit, and even if you choose the right ones, there's every
chance someone's going to barge in and find you sprawled out on the floor and drag you to hospital. So tablets—out. Next knives—but
here the pain factor is very high, and besides, it's so easy to cut in the wrong place and just maim yourself, so I scratched
that off the list. No pun intended."

"Please stop."

"Then I thought of jumping out a window—that's pretty much a safe bet, if you can get high enough. Unfortunately, at Trinity
there's every chance you'll land on a bush, or fall just hard enough to break your neck and be paralyzed the rest of your
life and then, once you're paralyzed, you'll have to ask someone else to help you do it, and humans being the skittish creatures
they are, they're going to be afraid, no matter how sympathetic they feel, because it's murder, isn't it, and who wants to
go to prison? You, for instance, would never have helped me. Hermione, yes—if she could have. Cats are not sentimentalists."

"Why are you doing this?"

"Which leaves guns. Now here are the advantages of a gun. First of all, assuming you put it in your mouth, it's instantaneous,
so there's no pain. Second of all, the effect after the fact is really quite impressive. You know, the handsome young man
lying atop his bed with his brains splattered all over his pillow. And on Easter Sunday to boot! The only pity was that it
was the bedmaker who found me.

"You didn't want her to find you?"

"Of course not! I had nothing against that bedmaker. Poor woman, I gave her the fright of her life."

"God, how you must have hated me."

"No, you're wrong there, dear. I loved you." Gaye nods toward the open door. "Now that one . . . I'm not sure, but my guess
is, he does too. So bravo to you, Harold. That's two you've driven to it."

"Ah, but I never said you killed anyone, I said you drove us to it. Consider my situation for starters. I loved you and you
stopped loving me. I said I couldn't live without you and I proved it. And in his case . . ."

"He doesn't love me."

"He owes you everything. You brought him to England, you gave him a chance when no one else would. 'The Hindoo Calculator.'
Only the trade-off is that he's sick. And now, to cap things off, Trinity doesn't want him."

"That's not my doing."

"Who said it was? And it wouldn't necessarily have made things better. Some are born for fame. I was. It was my calling. I
had the hunger for it, not to mention the equipment to cope with it. But alas, I didn't have the goods. The talent. Such an
irony . . . Those who can cope with it never get it, whereas those who get it can't cope with it."

"So is that why he did it? Because he couldn't cope with fame?"

"There's never just one reason. Trinity dropped me, too, remember, thanks to Barnes—"

"Barnes had nothing to do with it."

"Whether he did or not, I lost my fellowship. And then what was I supposed to do? Move back in with the family? Get a job
as a master at some dreary second-rate public school? You can't know, it never happened to you. You work like a fiend, then
someone decides he doesn't like you, and that's it, mate."

"I can assure you that Barnes had nothing to do with your losing your fellowship, Russell."

"Well, there are other routes to fame. So I finished the Aristotle translation, signed my name to it, and left instructions
for a copy to be sent to you. I assume you received it."

"Yes."

"But you didn't come to the funeral."

"I couldn't face your family."

"Bravery was never your strong suit."

"Russell—"

"The point is, there comes a moment when things add up, and one day, you're there in the station and you're looking at that
line, you know, the one you're never supposed to cross, because if you cross it, you'll be too close to the tracks. And you
just think, why in bloody hell shouldn't I? Because it's so easy to step across that line . . . Like one of your asymptotic
formulae, Harold, half an inch closer, then a quarter of an inch, then an eighth, a sixteenth, a thirty-second . . . And the
closer you get, the more obvious it becomes that no one's going to reach out and stop you, because no one's paying you the
slightest attention. They're all thinking about themselves. And even though you don't know what you'll find on the other side
of the line, at least you know it'll be something different to this. And this is hell, isn't it? So you just . . . move your
feet . . . and cross it."

"I've never been tempted to cross it."

"No, not yet."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Gaye laughs. "You should know. You're the one who's got Oliver Lodge by your bedside. When the dead come to visit from the
other side, they usually bring warnings, right? Foreshadowings, precognitions. Well, I wouldn't want to disappoint you. So
write this down on your tongue. Beware a man in black. Beware the hour of twilight. There may be an accident in your future.
And don't imagine that you, too, won't one day try to cross the line . . ."

"Try?"

"Ah!" Gaye throws his hands into the air. "But the spirit has departed! A candle goes out, the medium drops her turbaned head
to the table, exhausted from her labors."

"It's not fair. I only ever wanted to help."

"No, you wanted to save. There's a difference."

"Oh God."

"Exactly. Why do you think I chose Easter Sunday?"

"Bertie told Norton I vampired you. That was the word he used: 'Vampired.'"

"Now Bertie—there's a man who knows how to handle fame. He got his chance, he planted the seed, he cultivated it. Now look
where he is! Whereas you, Harold, you're one of those who'll never make anything of what you've been given." Gaye smiles.
"Poor Harold." And he lays a hand on Hardy's cheek, a hand Hardy feels. It is cold and dry—how he welcomes it! But when he
tries to put his own hand over Gaye's, Gaye withdraws. He stands from the bed and holds Hermione up in the air. "I'm flying!
I'm flying!" he says, pretending to be her. "Remember, Harold? Remember how we used to make her fly?"

"I remember."

"And now she flies all the time. You're an angel cat, aren't you, Hermione?"

As if in answer, she wriggles out of his grasp, scuttles across the floor, and starts to sharpen her claws on the curtains.
Gaye follows her. "Bad girl," he says, bending down and detaching her claws, which rake the silk.

"Don't leave," Hardy says, but he already feels the severing, smells the smoke of the guttered candle.

He climbs out of bed; switches on the lamp. The room is empty. And though he knows before he tries that he'll feel no striations
or rips in the silk, still, he kneels before the curtain and fingers the hem. In the deep silence he hears no voices, only
Ramanujan's breathing across the corridor. And this Hardy holds on to as tightly as he does the curtain's edge. Its steady
rise and fall is like a railing to him, something to guide him through to morning. This one he loves also, and this one, he
reminds himself, is still alive.