The Indian Clerk (41 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
"Thank you, Hardy."
"You're welcome," Hardy says—and is about to leave when, exactly on cue, the tumblers click in the lock; the door to the flat
creaks open. "Mrs. Neville!" he cries, and dashes out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.
From where she stands next to the umbrella stand, Alice gazes at him. She blinks.
"Mr. Hardy."
"Don't worry, I'm not staying."
What's the use of worrying?
It never was worthwhile . . .
"No need to be alarmed, it's just Littlewood. We were at the meeting of the Mathematical Society. He needed a bath, so I said
. . ."
"Oh, of course." She hangs up her coat. "If you'd like, I could leave."
"No need, no need. As soon as Littlewood's finished, we'll be on our way."
Both of them look at the divan, on which the diary lies open. If Alice recognizes that it's angled slightly farther to the
right than it had been, however, she doesn't say so. And in any case both of them are too preoccupied with the niceties, with
the question of which of them can be said, on this Thursday evening in the winter of 1917, to be the actual tenant of the
flat, and therefore responsible for asking the other to sit down, to think about the diary.
Finally they both sit at the same time. "And how is your mother, Mr. Hardy?" Alice asks. "I gather she's not been well."
"No, not well. I'm heading back there this evening, as a matter of fact."
"I see. And Mr. Littlewood?"
"He seems to be doing fine."
At that moment Littlewood comes out of the bathroom, adjusting the cuffs of his uniform jacket and looking rather humid. "Hello,
Mrs. Neville."
She rises. "Mr. Littlewood."
"We saw your husband at the meeting," Hardy says.
"Yes, he told me he was coming up."
"A pity he couldn't stay."
"His lectures." Alice sits again. "And I saw your friend Mrs. Chase this afternoon."
"Anne? Really? Where?"
"At the Buxtons'. She comes up once a week or so to bring her translations."
"Oh, I see."
"She seems very well since the baby was born."
"I'm glad." Littlewood puts on his hat. "Well, I'm afraid I must be going. Due back at base. Very good to see you, Mrs. Neville."
"And you."
"I shall accompany you," Hardy says.
She sees them out the door. Silently they descend the stairs until they emerge into the smoky darkness on St. George's Square.
"Which way are you heading?"
"Waterloo."
"Same direction. Share a cab?"
"Why not?"
They hail one and climb in. As they ride, Hardy contemplates the vastness of London, the wilderness of streets and places
and mewses through which the driver conducts them. All this complication he must memorize. It's his own tripos.
"The Knowledge, they call it," he says to Littlewood.
"What?"
"What cabdrivers have to learn before they can get their license. The streets of London. They call it the Knowledge."
"Oh, yes." But Littlewood's far away from the scenes he's gazing at, brick and stone facades, clung with moss, wet with mist
and rain. Hardy can guess what he's thinking. He wonders if Alice meant to be cruel—possibly she did—and wishes he could say
something to comfort his friend. But he can speak to Littlewood no more easily than he can to Neville, and that's the devil
of it. He doesn't have the Knowledge. He has no idea where to begin.
I
S THIS SEAT TAKEN ?" Alice asks. A woman with a face like a Pekingese dog looks up at her from her knitting. Her mouth moves,
her hands continue the knitting in the way that an animal's legs sometimes kick after it's dead. But she says nothing. Is
she ill? Foreign?
"Is this seat taken?"
Now the woman's eyes widen. She seems to rear back against the wall of the compartment, as if seeking protection. Meanwhile
the man who is sitting across from her has stood up. He has a mustache that reminds Alice of her grandfather's, and approaches
with a look of protective authority. "I'm afraid the lady doesn't speak your language," he says. "Now what seems to be the
trouble?"
She almost laughs. So she'd asked the question in German! Mrs. Buxton warned her this might happen; one of the occupational
hazards of being a translator, of spending one's life in the disputed border territories that divide language from language.
Sometimes words migrate from one side to the other. At the dress shop, you ask if a skirt can be
ausgetaken.
Or walking along St. George's Square, you tell a neighbor that her Scottish terrier is "a very jolie dog."
"I'm terribly sorry," Alice says in careful English. "I was just wondering if the seat was taken, as there's a handbag—"
"No, it's my handbag," says the woman, and quickly snatches it away.
"Thank you." Alice sits. The man from across the compartment, his brow furrowed with anxiety and disapproval, sits too. And
what must they think of her? Speaking German . . . A spy? An escapee from an internment camp? As Alice opens her own handbag,
the woman with the pinched face shrinks away. The train pulls out of the station. Alice swallows hard so as not to laugh.
It's Friday afternoon, and she's on her way back to Cambridge, to Eric, to Chesterton Road. A depressing prospect. Still,
it must be done, not for Eric's sake so much as because it's part of her agreement with Gertrude. Not that Hardy comes very
much, now that their mother is so ill.
She takes out the
Cambridge Review.
But she can't concentrate, not today, because she's too conscious of what awaits her at the end of this short ride: Eric in
the sitting room, beaming with pleasure at her return; Ethel in the kitchen, no doubt having prepared some special supper.
Even with the rationing, she manages to turn out miracles on Friday nights. But never a curry, or a vegetarian goose. Ramanujan's
name is not mentioned, either. So have they guessed? Eric couldn't possibly. But Ethel might.
It still surprises her, how much she loves her London life. Were she a character in a novel, she'd be having an affair there.
She's not, of course. What she savors is solitude. Arriving at the flat each Sunday evening, she breathes in the scent of
damp and mothballs with relish. Monday morning she's still delighting in the narrowness of Gertrude's spinsterish bed. By
Monday night she's feeling a little melancholy, yes, but even that melancholy is interesting, because it's so fresh; she's
never had the time to indulge in it before. By Wednesday solitude has become her natural condition. By Thursday she is starting
to dread the return to Cambridge. By Friday her stomach is clenched; she feels ill. And then, on the train, to the quotidian
anxiety is now added this weird sensation of being taken for someone she is not. Her heart is racing. She has to work to keep
herself from laughing. So she closes her eyes; tries to recall, as she often does when she needs to calm down, a conversation
she had with Eric early in their marriage, before he gave up on trying to explain mathematics to her. That time he was trying
to make her understand infinity, and he used the analogy of a train. Imagine a train, he said, with an infinite number of
seats, numbered from 1 to infinity. Then Little Alice gets on the train—this was what he called her in those days: Little
Alice—and there's not a seat to be had. Every seat from 1 to infinity is taken. What's Little Alice to do? But wait—it's an
infinite train, so there's no need to worry. All you do is move the passenger in seat 1 to seat 2, the passenger in seat 2
to seat 3, the passenger in seat 3 to seat 4, and so on. And now, lo and behold, seat 1 is free.
But how is this possible? Every seat from 1 to infinity is taken.
Well, that's just it. It's an infinite train. And in fact you can make room for an infinite number of new passengers, because
if you move the passenger in seat 1 to seat 2, the passenger in seat 2 to seat 4, the passenger in seat 3 to seat 6, and so
on, then all the odd-numbered seats will be free.
But how is this possible? Every seat from 1 to infinity is taken.
It's an infinite train.
The conductor comes by. Alice hands him her ticket. She wonders if the Pekingese-faced woman's going to say anything to him,
or the man across the way. To be denounced as a German spy would be amusing. No one says anything, though, and the conductor
moves on.
Is this seat free?
Seat 1 to seat 2, seat 2 to seat 4 . . .
They talked the other day about the infinite train, she and Anne, when they were having lunch in Mrs. Buxton's kitchen. Anne
was up from Treen to pick up some articles to translate, and had left the baby with her nurse. "Jack told me the same thing,"
she said, "only in his version it was a hotel with infinite rooms. And a guest arrives, and wants a room."
"I don't get it. I can't visualize it. Probably I'm stupid."
"You're not supposed to get it. It's a paradox. All of mathematics is built on paradoxes. That's the biggest paradox of all—all
this orderliness, and at the heart, impossibility. Contradiction. Heaven built on the foundations of hell."
Alice took a bite from her sandwich. She looked up to Anne as, at another moment in her life, she might have to a more experienced
older girl at school. Gertrude, on the other hand, she now looked down upon, and had ever since she had seduced her into taking
out her eye. For once Gertrude had taken out her eye, she no longer had anything on Alice, whereas Anne ruled Alice, because
unlike poor scrawny Gertrude she, too, was a mathematician's wife (sort of). She was
saftig.
Fertile. And she knew things about sex.
"Eric wants me to have a baby," Alice said.
"Well, why don't you?" Anne asked.
"Because then I'd have to go back to Cambridge. I'd have to be a wife."
"That doesn't sound so terrible to me," Anne said. And Alice hoped she wouldn't mention, as her mother so often mentioned,
the glass of water that was half full but also half empty.
Imagine an infinite glass
of water . . .
Yet it was true, she had adored Eric once. What had happened?
"I've already made compromises. I haven't seen him or spoken to him in a year."
"What happens when the war ends?"
"He'll go back to India, I expect."
"To his wife."
"Yes. Funny, he hardly knows her. She's just a child."
"And you? What will you do?"
"I have no idea. I suppose there won't be any more
Notes from the
Foreign Press,
will there?"
"There probably won't be a
Cambridge Magazine."
"Then I suppose . . . I suppose I shall just go back to Cambridge, resume my wifely duties, and have a baby. What choice do
I have?" The anger in her own voice surprised her.
"You might find that changes everything," Anne said. And taking a pad out of her handbag, she wrote herself a note. "Just
a translation thought."
Odd—she carried herself with such assurance! Yet her life, when you thought about it, was put together with glue and sticks:
a husband she did not love but would not leave, children by different fathers, Littlewood mournful in Woolwich. Even so, Anne
remained serene, as if Littlewood's suffering was merely something to be borne until he "saw sense"; she spoke of him as a
mother would a pouting child who has turned his face to the wall and refuses to turn around again until she gives him a sweet.
You can't give in. He'll come around soon. And because Alice adored and feared Anne, she did not say that she felt for Jack
Littlewood, felt his suffering, his need to have his marriage (what else was it?) legitimized; his fatherhood legitimized.
No, she wouldn't dare say that to Anne.
The conductor's voice opens her eyes. The train is pulling into Cambridge station. The woman with the Pekingese face is gathering
her coat and her knitting.
But wouldn't an infinite train need an
infinite track?
Well, nothing to do but get up, get off, hail a cab, and ride from the station up Magdalene Street, past Thompson's Lane.
By the time she arrives at the house, her heart is in her throat. She opens the door, bracing herself for Eric's leap, for
the shout of "Darling!" and the scurry to collect her bag. Every weekend it's the same. There's that lurch at the beginning,
and then, how quickly she adjusts! For this is home. The Voysey furniture and the piano and the table on which Ramanujan did
his puzzle. And of course the chair in which Eric reads, content merely to have her there; demanding nothing of her but her
proximity. And Ethel, stumbling through with cups and saucers, evidence of how much more malleable is the human spirit than
most of us guess. For Ethel's son has been in France for months, yet she seems to have moved past terror into a sort of euphoria
of uncertainty. Yes, she's learned the trick by which so many get by: misery can be wonderfully comfortable. You can ease
yourself into it as into a very soft chair. Why, it's happening to Alice now, as she stands in the hallway and takes off her
coat. She feels it, the lure of the very soft chair. And every weekend it's the same. By Sunday, she knows, she'll have half
a mind to stay. The cup half full . . .
What's odd, tonight, is that no one comes to greet her, though she smells cooking. "Ethel?" she calls. "Eric?" No answer.
She walks into the sitting room, and finds Eric in his usual chair. The lights are off. He's gazing into the shadows gathering
around the piano.
"Eric? Are you all right?"
Dimly he turns. "Oh, hello, Alice."
"Where's Ethel?"
"Making supper, I suspect."
"Eric, is something wrong?"
He says nothing. She goes to him, gets on her knees next to him, and sees the tears on his face.
"Eric, what's happened?"
"They're throwing me out."
"Who is?"
"Trinity. They're not renewing my fellowship."
Alice reels back. She tries to maintain her composure. She says to herself: do not be shocked. You knew this was possible.
More than possible, likely. And yet shock is what she feels—selfish shock—because if Eric is to leave Cambridge, what is to
become of them?
What is to become of her life in London? And then the old question, suppressed for more than a year now: will she ever see
Ramanujan again?
"It's not the end of the world," she says, almost automatically. "You'll find another position."
"Of course I will."
"It's because of your pacifism," she adds, in a tone the accusatory edge of which she cannot quite suppress.
"What are you suggesting? That I should have lied?"
"It's the glass half full versus the glass half empty."
"I can't believe you're saying this. I thought you believed in the same things I did. I expected you'd at least offer me some
comfort."
"You could have kept quieter. There's nothing wrong with being circumspect. Look at Hardy." And she stands. The venom rising
in her thrills and horrifies her. She does not want to be saying these things, she wants to be on her knees again, caressing
his face, promising him everything will be fine . . . But everything will not be fine. And this anger—how free it makes her
feel!
"I don't see why you care so much. You're never here these days anyway."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you more or less live in London, don't you? I'd think you'd be glad to be shed of this place."
"This is still my home."
Eric stands and steps closer to her. She does not back away. She is calmer now. Shock, she realizes, isn't really an emotion:
it's what happens when two emotions clash, dread storming quotidian contentment or quotidian sorrow. And when opposing forces
rub together like that—well, the current surges, jolting the inner core of the body and then rippling outward, leaving in
its wake a tingling numbness. And in this numbness possibilities open. You could flee. You could castigate. You could give
in.
"There is one thought I had," Eric says. "It might solve everything."
"What?"
"We could move to London. Over the summer. Live there until—well, until I've got a new position sorted out." He tries to take
her chin in his hands but she pulls away. "It could be lovely, Alice. You could go on with your work. And you wouldn't have
to stay in Hardy's flat. We'd have our own flat."
At first she wants to laugh—at his ignorance, his innocence. Is it possible, after all this time, that he hasn't seen? Or
is he having her on, trying to win her sympathy by pretending to be a child?
Well, maybe she should just say it, what she's never dared to say before:
It's you I want to get away from . . .
But something holds her back.
His eyes. She looks into them. No, he's feigning nothing. He's actually innocent, not just of disloyalty, but of psychology.
He loves her, and he wants her to stay with him, and he wants to make her happy, and he wants to cling to his ideals, and
he wants to stay at Trinity . . . He wants everything, he wants things that don't fit. Only he doesn't understand that. And
somehow the look in his eyes, the simplicity of his longing and his sorrow, cools her rage. She can't hurt him anymore. Not
so long as he doesn't understand the source of his own pain.
She lets her expression soften. "Yes, all right," she says. "We'll move to London. But is there enough money to live on?"
"There's what I get from my grandfather. And my brother will help. He can find us a place near him, in High Barnet."