Wonder (12 page)

Thus Edward learned Greek and Latin almost on his own, deciphering the original text of the
Iliad
side by side with the Latin version by Lorenzo Valla and the English translation made by William Cowper. Later, he took a certain pleasure in the plays of Seneca until the day his brother Philip informed him that nothing in those works had really occurred.

Accustomed to finding in books a kind of harmony that too often the world seemed to lack, Edward first thought that his brother was joking. Going back to his reading however, he couldn’t drive doubt from his mind. What if Achilles and Ulysses had never existed? If Phaedra and Hippolytus were merely chimeras?

“Sir?” he asked faintly.

The slender, pale young man, surprised, lifted his eyes from the page he’d been hunched over all morning.

“What is it, Edward?”

“Sir,
Phaedra
is true though, isn’t it?”

A blush coloured the tutor’s cheeks. He imagined for an instant the fascinating and fertile discussions he’d dreamed of when accepting the position – Oh, how his life had changed since then! Oh, the cruelty! – on the nature of truth and lies and about the uneasy position
between them occupied by literature, even Greek literature. That thought was driven away at once, however, by the image of his beloved in another man’s arms, and he gave up on exploring the subject more deeply for the benefit of the young pupil staring at him, round eyes filled with worried expectation, while his older brother, sitting a little farther away, was having a quiet laugh.

“No, Edward, it’s not true,” he replied bluntly.

“But …” the boy started to say.

“It’s not true,” the teacher hammered out his words. “I’ll have you know that just because words are said or even written, it doesn’t mean they’re true.” Then, in a tone of voice he’d have used to reprimand a particularly insolent pupil: “Let that be a lesson to you, young man.” Then he began to search for an adjective that rhymed with
treacherous
.

Edward, sheepish, closed Seneca and never opened it again. As of that day he limited himself to books of algebra, arithmetic, and trigonometry, which he was certain could not lie to him.

Edward was awkward and ill-at-ease around other children and adults: the latter regarded him with the brief and superficial attention paid to a phenomenon such as a potato that resembled a human face, or a strongman on display at a fair, the former banned him systematically
from their games with the visceral instinct peculiar to all young animals that allows them immediately to distinguish the one in a crowd who is different from the others. He was, however, absolutely at home in the land of mathematics. The quiet purity of numbers, their reassuring predictability, their sensible and sober elegance combined with the infinite possibilities they gradually revealed – like a horizon line that seems very close but moves away when one approaches it – everything that formed the very essence of geometry, algebra, and arithmetic occupied and kept his mind alive, offering him at once a refuge and a journey that was constantly renewed.

Around the age when young boys ordinarily stopped wanting to join in their sisters’ games, insisted on having long trousers made to replace their short pants, and started eyeing the youngest and most winsome servants, Edward turned in on himself even more, if such a thing were possible. He went on sharing meals with the family but did so grudgingly and with such stubborn silence that his mother, exasperated, finally excused him, as long as he condescended to sit at the table and appear civil whenever there were guests.

For one autumn and one winter he lived at night, spending solitary hours watching the course of the stars, transcribing it at dawn on large sheets of paper that he then covered with notes and observations. He became
engrossed for weeks at a time in endless equations, enjoying nothing so much as shedding light on their fundamental and radiant simplicity, covering entire pages with his delicate writing, with the
d
, the
q
, and the
b
resembling notes escaped from a symphony, while the
g
, the
j
, and the
y
suggested flowering trees in the spring. Often, he would fill a piece of paper, turn it over to write on the back between lines already drawn, then furiously crumple it and start afresh at once, never wearying or losing heart, convinced that one day what he was looking for would turn up. He would fumble in the darkness that most often bathed his mind, but where now and then a brief and searing illumination gave him a glimpse of what he’d worked on for weeks without knowing it, which had now appeared to him fully formed, like a bird emerging from its shell.

Stopping one morning to contemplate the exquisite economy of the Pythagorean Theorem, he challenged himself to discover every day a new proof to demonstrate it. He gave up after a few months (following seventy-six demonstrations) not for want of inspiration but because he was convinced that he could go on like that for years, and that more complex problems – though some of them, such as Fermat’s Last Theorem, were similar – required his attention.

He was twenty years old when he met the woman who was destined to become his wife at the home of a family friend, where she was spending the summer in order to perfect her English. While the guests were soberly pacing the lawns and talking about politics and horse races (the gentlemen) and the latest styles in hats (the ladies), Edward left the manicured gardens and ventured into the woods next to the property where the atmosphere was cool and dim. He walked aimlessly for a while, thinking distractedly about the best way to estimate the number of branches on a tree and then the number of leaves, when he discovered a clearing where a shape was stretched out on the ground.

Wearing a delicate blouse of ecru silk and a skirt of the same fabric, cinched at the waist with a periwinkle sash, with her parasol at her side, she was lying full length in the grass, her ear pinned to the ground. Edward approached cautiously and inquired politely:

“Excuse me, but are you all right?”

The young girl – for she was one, with eyes as blue as the sky, raspberry lips, teeth like pearls – looked at him sharply, and with a finger on her lips to warn him not to make a sound whispered:

“Very well, thank you. I’m listening.”

“And what do you hear?” he asked, his heart beating, murmuring as well.

“I’m fairly certain it’s an F sharp,” she replied calmly, in the prettiest voice in the world.

They smiled. From that moment, in the too rare sunlight of the English countryside, he knew that he loved and would love Garance (for that was her name) until the day he died.

T
HOUGH
G
EORGE AND
T
HERESA
L
OVE HAD
hoped their youngest son would make a more brilliant marriage than the one he was entering – rapturously, so it seemed – with this young Frenchwoman with the lilting accent, who seemed to prefer by far the piano over her domestic responsibilities, they did not oppose it. They were aware that Edward too was an imperfect choice and were, in truth, surprised that he was actually considering marrying at all. They had always feared he would end his days alone, surrounded by collections of minerals, odd optical instruments, even animals mounted on walls. They were therefore more than delighted to see him land a most respectable position at King’s College, and to find a small house not far from the University of London and settle there with his young wife, who did not seem at all discouraged by the prospect of such an austere existence.

On the contrary, Garance was enchanted.

They were married on a sunny day in autumn. Seeing her advancing towards him, all blonde and rosy pink in
her gown of forget-me-not blue, Edward felt that the planets and stars, whose secrets his young wife swore she could hear, were striking up a celestial nuptial march just for them. Indeed, that evening they escaped from their guests through a secret door and found themselves alone on the grounds of the manor with only trees as their silent witnesses. Looking up, they discovered that the sky was shot through with shimmering colours, as if a magician were taking silk handkerchiefs one by one out of the dark sleeve of the night. Veils of lilac, mint, fuchsia, and vermilion sparkled, luminescent, like marionettes whose strings had been pulled from very high.

“Those clouds are from Mount Pelée,” Edward announced. “They’ve travelled across half the planet and are now over Europe.” Then, more pragmatically: “It’s sulphur that gives them those colours.”

Garance nodded, but she wasn’t fooled: she knew for certain that it was heaven’s gift on their wedding night.

They rented a pretty two-storey townhouse in Pimlico, with high ceilings and pale wood floors, where daylight came in through broad windows. Garance couldn’t wait to set up her piano, a bulky instrument assembled by Nicolas Blanchet himself, which had stood up remarkably well during the crossing of the English Channel. As if he’d wanted a companion for the colossus filling his
parlour, Edward bought his bride a harp that quickly found its place in the middle of the room. Sometimes, during the first months, he would enter the parlour in the small hours when the room was filling with the early light of dawn and catch sight of the massive silhouette from the corner of his eye. The curve of the harp’s frame, echoed by the rounded shape of the piano lid, gave him the impression that he was disturbing a secret meeting between a diplodocus and some fabulous dragon.

The other rooms were furnished with odds and ends, old things brought down from the attic of the Love home where they’d been gathering dust for generations and that Garance enjoyed bringing back to life the way one cultivates a garden. She had spread on the floor two kilims unearthed at some second-hand store; they were threadbare but she swore that the faded colours created richer, deeper shades than the Turkish rugs that were the latest thing. In front of the windows she arranged bushy ferns that traced bright shadows on the white walls, and in the bedroom set two potted orchids side by side. At night, their two flowers, bulbous, ample and velvety, spotted with pinks and purple, mingled their heady perfumes.

Edward’s first experiences of teaching – which were also, incidentally, his last – were disappointing. On the morning of his inaugural class he arrived an hour early, arranged around him the volumes, scribblers, textbooks, even the globe he’d brought, and took a close look at the vast amphitheatre soon to be filled with his students. The tiers were arranged in a semicircle, climbing steeply from the teaching platform; a row of windows opening on his right provided a glimpse of tree branches, as the classroom was located on the second floor of a three-storey grey stone pavilion. Once he’d completed a quick examination of the premises, Edward went back to a particularly thorny question that had been bothering him for days and had even wakened him several times in the night. Each time he woke thinking the solution was near, practically within reach, but each time, when sleep drifted away, it had escaped him. He began to jot things in one of his notepads, turning the pages as soon as they were full without rereading them. When he ran out of space, he finally picked up a piece of chalk to continue the demonstration on the board, covering with formulas the words
Augustus Edward Love, Natural Philosophy
, which he’d written there for his students. Those students were starting to arrive in small groups, taking their places, opening their exercise books and waiting for nine o’clock.

Nine o’clock sounded and nothing happened. Engrossed in his demonstration, Edward, who had shed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, went on filling the boards with marks, some as incomprehensible to his first-year students as the alphabet of a foreign language. Two or three, full of goodwill, did their best to transcribe what they saw before their eyes but gave up after just a few minutes. They opened newspapers, began Latin translations, and at ten o’clock the sixty or so young men silently left the classroom while Edward, who still hadn’t turned around, went on writing, wrapped now in a cloud of chalk dust.