What I Tell You In the Dark (15 page)

He seems a little exasperated by this. ‘But is that not enough, Will? Is it not the responsibility of each man to describe only what he sees? Not to purport to understand those things he cannot see?'

The new log is hissing on the fire, not yet ready to be burnt up.

‘Yes, but I
am
able to describe Divinity, I
have
seen it.' Unfortunately, this is where I am forced to break out from the rather convenient cover that Will's academic career had left for me. ‘And I am going to provide a proof that will show what it is
not
, at least, even if there is no language, no ready means for me to show what it
is
.'

‘You're not making sense. Are you trying to say that a mathematical proof can demonstrate –'

‘No. I mean actual proof. Evidence that will demonstrate in very clear terms just how completely and utterly wrong the so-called spokesmen for God are. The church – I am talking about the church, and their endless toxic promises, their murderous lies.'

My hands are shaking. Rosie, who must have entered the room while I was speaking, is looking at me with undisguised
concern. I realise now that she knew perfectly well who Will was when I called here, she just didn't want to be reminded of him. He clearly has a history with this man over whom she is so protective, and she is not about to let things get out of hand now.

This is confirmed by the professor's face. He is giving her a
Just hold on
kind of look –
I've got this
. Reluctantly, she perches on the arm of his chair, when she would clearly rather be telling me she will phone for my taxi and that my shoes are clean and waiting for me by the door.

‘But Will, surely you can see that this generalisation you are making is a poor basis for any proof, mathematical or otherwise. There is good and bad in everything – you know this – your own father is a priest, is he not?' I nod, he spreads his hands, as if to say
Well, there you go
. ‘There are always fluctuations – you cannot isolate an entity en bloc. You cannot …'

His trailing off is taken by Rosie as a sure sign that all of this has gone quite far enough, and that it is now her turn to speak.

‘Mr Pryce, I will speak frankly if I may.' Her husband shrinks a little into his chair. ‘We must make no pretence about the…' she searches for a word ‘… deleterious effect of the stunt you pulled at the college.'

‘I …' I don't know what it is that I am going to say but she does not allow me the chance to find out. She has clearly been bottling this up and now is its time to come out.

‘No, I am sorry, but I will say my piece.' She glances at the professor, who has turned his face to the fire. ‘You stood on the stage at an important symposium – perhaps the most important of Gus's career – trusted by the faculty, vouched for by my husband, and you denounced him, his colleagues and their work in the most extraordinary terms.' She says the word in two parts, extra ordinary. ‘And then you disappear without a word of explanation. No, I am sorry, but you do not get to come
barging back here – what makes you think you have the right? Because you sent those absurd postcards to my husband? Was that supposed to be some form of apology? After everything he did for you …'

He is patting her leg and telling her that's enough now. She is still glaring at me, watery-eyed. In the silence that follows she gathers together the tea things and walks out. The clock continues to tick, indifferent to how long its seconds now seem. It was a mistake to wander in here like this, unsighted.

Interestingly, though, the professor seems rather pleased to have it all blown out into the open. He is looking substantially more cheerful.

‘In my desk,' he says, meaning me to go over there. ‘Bottom left drawer.'

What I find there is a bundle of about twenty postcards held together with an elastic band. They are from various locations in and around Thailand.
Ko Pha Ngan
–
Party Island!
one of them proclaims over the psychedelic backdrop of a multi-coloured full moon.

‘I never showed them to anyone,' he tells me without turning around. ‘Only Rosie has seen them – as you know.' He does a funny thing with his voice there, something complicit between the two of us, letting me know that she worries, that she loves him but that she does not speak for him.

I turn the pile over and start sifting through. Each one is densely packed with writing, symbols mainly, interspersed with tight mathematical notation. In some instances, when the proof cannot fit on a single side, the cards are numbered, one of three, two of three, and so on. At a glance, it appears to be advanced number theory,
abc
conjecture by the look of it.

‘Have you checked these?' I am still standing at his desk. My reflected self out in the window's darkness also looks up at him.

‘There are imperfections, but as far as I can tell, they are correct. I would need to show them to colleagues, get other opinions, to say for sure.'

I look at the postmarks. They span a range of three years, the most recent of them from April 2010.

‘So why haven't you?'

I am back in my seat now and he is looking at me with something like paternal affection.

‘Because they belong to you, my boy. They are not mine to show.'

I don't know what to say.

All I can think of is, ‘I'm sorry. I wasn't myself back then.' Both, at least, are true.

After that things settle down, he even invites me to stay for some supper.
There is no plane, is there?
he asks at one point. At his suggestion, I go to find Rosie. She is in the kitchen at the back of the house. It has an ancient granite fireplace, large enough to burn the limbs of trees, into which an AGA stove has been installed, with a row of copper pans hanging from the lintel. It smells of baking. She is chopping vegetables on the worktop, and barely glances up from her task when I enter the room.

‘I'm sorry if I was rude,' she says as her knife
rat-tat-tats
on the chopping board, ‘but he took it badly, what you did. Not that he'd ever admit it, stubborn old goat. I just don't want you getting his hopes up with more talk and promises. He takes it all so seriously. I don't think you realise how much.' She puts down her knife and turns to look at me, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘He genuinely thought you were some kind of genius. Maybe you are,' she adds, not meaning it as a compliment, ‘but that is no reason for you to be unsettling him again now. He has aged a lot in the last few years – as I'm sure you have noticed, genius that you are,' this is accompanied by a halfway conciliatory smile.

She returns to her chopping without another word. I stand for a few moments not quite knowing what to do or say. When I make to leave she doesn't look up, but says, ‘You may as well hand me that large pan, if you're staying for supper. I presume that's what he sent you in here to tell me.'

And so we eat a meal together, a simple vegetable soup with bread rolls that were baked this morning. A half bottle of red wine, already open from the night before, is shared among our three glasses, and weighs me down with a blissful fatigue. We talk of this and that. He speaks for a long time about how much the college had begun to change by the time he left. She discusses the felling of a tree in the garden that had become a nuisance and a terrible worry in high winds. They both agree that high winds have become a feature of recent years. It is all very restful and I soon feel my eyes beginning to droop. Rosie is the first to notice.

‘I think perhaps your chess game will have to wait until morning,' she says. All pretence of me having to rush off anywhere to catch a flight was dropped some time ago, by us all.

With a belly full of hot soup and red wine, the thought of a cosy bed in this quiet, enchanted house is more than I can resist. I allow myself to be taken to a room up in the eaves, a space that has been whittled into the ancient timbers, and I say my goodnights. I sink effortlessly into the downy embrace of the duvet.

As I lie there in the dark, I start to think about what he said to me, how this Christian myth has brought as much good as bad. I know in my heart, from all that I have seen, that he is probably right. It would be foolish, wrong even, to condemn the whole thing –
en bloc
, that was his phrase. Imagine the cost to those millions, for whom the radiance of Christ is all they have, the only gift of hope with which to warm themselves, their children. Or to those who set their courses by Christ's star in circumstances too horrific to imagine.

Why race to tear down a structure that has so much good in it? He's right, I must slow down, take a breath, step back …

These thoughts begin to cradle me towards sleep. I feel the warmth of my cover – so
this
is the cover of night, I smile in my drowse – like the glow of that hearth downstairs. I visualise him and I hear once again the comfort of his words as he spoke to me – to Will,
my boy
– and I know that it is not too late for me to salvage something from the wreckage of this young man's life and to live it out with grace and humility. My hair could also whiten, my body could curl as the professor's has done, dry as a leaf. I too could be surrounded by the spoils of a life lived in observant inquiry, my books, my memories, the echoes of those I have known, the wife that I love and who loves me in return. The promise of completion that was never to be with my Magpie. Someone to grow old with, to die with, whose love could carry me into the ultimate quiet that awaits all nature's work.

I am free. Free to live as I choose.

9

A small sound wakes me. It is deepest, coldest night. The moon, high and bright in the sky, lights the room. A silent parliament of strangers sits on the floor around my bed, packed tight against the walls, all the way back to the door, eyes wide, watching me. Mothers with sunken cheeks and loose breast skin hold the awkward parcels of infants hollowed out by the disease. Men, dark skinned, white-eyed, stare in wordless accusation, their arms folded like sticks, missionaries' wooden crosses hang on strings from their necks, the hard corrugation of their ribs tight against their skin
.

Sick with dread, I remain absolutely still, alone with their silence. Then comes that sound again, the sound that woke me, still a long way off, but getting closer. It is the sound of a mob, baying for my blood. I can smell the dust and heat of Jerusalem, the sweet decay of Pilate's breath
.

I open my eyes, not suddenly in horror or surprise at my dream, but with the familiar oppression of guilt reinstalled in my body. It has permeated me like a gas, suffocating the hope that nudged me to the borders of sleep. Now it is my evening spent at the fireside, the soft persuasion of the professor's words, that seem like a dream.

I dress in the dark and move as quietly as I can through the house, taking great care not to rest my weight on a creaking board. At the front door where my shoes were taken from me, I find them, cleaned and polished on the mat. My coat is also hanging there. It occurs to me that I should leave an explanation as to why I am about to run off, ostensibly for a second
time. But what would it say, this note? How could it possibly explain my trajectory through two millennia?

No, this departure must be silent, in the dead of night. There can be no explaining it.
Vanishment
, I think to myself as I slowly turn the door handle. A term the good professor would understand in his own way – a return to zero.

Outside, a persistent, cold rain forces me to tilt forwards and draw my coat tightly around me. The whole way back into town, I barely look up, nor do I spare time for a thought except for the dogged visualisation of where I must get to.

But when I finally do reach the plaza I find it looks very different at night, and not in a good way. While some of the office buildings are still brightly lit, despite being empty, the Spyre Group building is completely dark. I stop at the doors of the reception to cup my hands against the wet glass and peer inside. I can just make out a baseball cap and what looks like a bunch of keys that have been left on the counter where I stole the pass from. I hadn't reckoned on any kind of security, and the thought that these things might belong to a guard is profoundly unnerving. I wait for a few minutes more but nothing changes. As I walk down the ramp into the car park my footsteps echo ridiculously loudly in the closed space. My stolen pass activates the door that leads from the top of the car park's steps into the office. It beeps loudly as it opens and it closes with a sharp metallic click. I half hope that a light might automatically turn on but it doesn't. I spend an awful few seconds feeling along the walls like a blind man, without success. It is only when I remember Will's phone in my pocket that I am able to light my way to the far door at the end of this long, windowless corridor.

After that, each new room I enter, every turn of desolate corridor, makes the susurration of blood pressure grow louder in my ears. I shake like a wino as handles are turned and light switches flipped on. But little by little, as the building slowly
reveals itself to be empty, I start to calm down. When at last I reach the darkened reception, I pick up the bunch of keys and give them a triumphant shake.

‘Now,' I tell myself, ‘for the hard part.'

Except the thing is, it really isn't. It's disconcertingly easy to get into their computer system. I simply cruise around the building scanning each person's work station until I find someone who has been stupid enough to write down their username and password. Inevitably, the offending Post-it is stuck to a monitor in one of the partners' lairs (one of the few offices that is furnished like an actual room, to the extent that there are pictures and items of non-commercial type furniture in it). It always seems to be the most senior figures who end up letting down an organisation with their carelessness. Maybe that's just what happens when you are isolated from the daily rigours of work. You become divorced from the detail.