Part 6 (1/2)

On the way I pa.s.sed a lorry carrying timber down from the hills. There were steel chutes like the one by Mackellar's field all round these parts. A trio of foresters sat on the long logs on top of the lorry, the wind fluttering their hair and the green fabric of their overalls. When I got home, night had fallen. All along the Holy Loch, searchlights were probing long fingers of light across the water.

Ten.

'Home', of course, was the cot-house in the field. Throat wooden, head buzzing from the beer, I threw myself onto the bed. As the clouds pa.s.sed over the moon up beyond my uncurtained window, I thought of Lev the sea lion, Habakkuk the prophet-and again of Ryman, that other prophet whom I had not yet met.

Through the window's film of moisture I watched the blue-grey clouds perform their intermittent veiling of the moon-restlessly gleaming and quivering, sometimes seeming to streak the darkness, sometimes to be streaked with it.

Lying there, staring at that deceptive dance of light and shade, my thoughts pa.s.sed to my own old home...How once my mother had opened the door to our holiday cottage on Zomba mountain and a snake had shot out from under the draughtdust-excluder-some piece of vulcanised rubber, scuffed leather, something, nailed to the bottom of the rickety old door. Our dog Vickers chased off in pursuit.

There is a snake in every childhood. But mostly we had happy times. At harvest time I liked nothing more as a young boy than going to the tobacco auctions in Blantyre with my father, watching the great yellow bales he had grown and gathered being unloaded and sold. The auctioneers were mostly South Africans or Rhodesians. As they talked the prices up and down in the argot of the auction room, it was like listening to a strange music.

Once the sales were over we would go to the club in Limbe and I would drink a gla.s.s of squash while father had whisky and soda with his chums, their talk largely of the turn of the tobacco, which was not its curling leaf but the difference between the buying and selling price, and who would win next month's cup at the races over in Salisbury. In those days people travelled about Rhodesia, Northern and Southern, and Nyasaland itself as if they were a single country.

There were wooden ceiling fans spinning as these discussions took place, moving the air around us. I remember these made a big impression on me. I wonder sometimes if they were the source of my interest in turbulence, but that probably had much more to do with the African weather-something emerging darkly from the ap.r.o.n of stirring cloud which tumbled off the edge of Zomba mountain plateau. Zomba and Mulanje are Nyasaland's two great mountains. We visited both, to get away from the flat expanses of tobacco fields near Kasungu, and to escape the heat.

In later years, as the tobacco price rose, my father could afford to buy a cottage on Zomba. It was a green-painted building hidden halfway up the mountain in a grove of tall trees. What I remember most fondly is the preparation to go there, back in Kasungu, the antecedent excitement of my mother packing cardboard boxes with provisions, my father putting bullets into the magazine of a hunting rifle, or preparing his fis.h.i.+ng flies for the trout streams. There was water everywhere on Zomba. It was like a giant scoop or sponge sucking down the storms that pressed up from Lake Nyasa, with thousands of trickles and streams running through the forest, keeping everything in a luxuriant, dark-green harmony.

Other times we would go to Nkhotakhota, or Monkey Bay, and other places along the long strip of Lake Nyasa itself. It was called the calendar lake because it was 356 miles long and 52 miles wide. Sometimes we used to travel on a dented white steamer called the Ilala Ilala, which carried pa.s.sengers and cargo up and down the kingfisher-blue expanse.

On one voyage to Monkey Bay, Vickers went crazy, leaping off the s.h.i.+p into the water in pursuit of some goats and chickens that were being unloaded into canoes. Rhodesian ridge-backs are good swimmers, and ours swam all the way to the sh.o.r.e and disappeared. With the help of some good-natured fishermen who were sitting cross-legged mending their nets, we eventually found him at sunset, running about on the sand with piebald dogs from the villages. They were all barking and jumping over each other, as if they had gathered for a celebration. The image has always stuck in my memory.

There were often waterspouts on Lake Nyasa-vast moving pillars of air and water whirling about a low-pressure core. They seem like divine manifestations but share, scientifically speaking, the characteristics of both the tornado that wreaks such violence in the United States and the street eddy that in cities across the world turns up leaves and dust and paper into a recognisable column. I could watch such visitations all day-they are hypnotic-but the event which was to determine my future interest in weather took place, as I say, in Zomba, in 1931. I was fifteen years old, and the first I knew of it was Vickers barking outside, followed by a sound in the distance, like a waterfall. Then one of my mother's pickle jars trembled on a shelf in the cottage, before falling to the stone floor and smas.h.i.+ng. I realised there was something wrong with the light coming in through the window.

Both my parents were outside in the garden. My mother was tending her flowerbeds: she loved a flower called the ixia, which had white petals with a prominent dark-purple streak in the middle. It was sweetly scented, particularly in the evenings. Nearby where she knelt, trowel in hand, my father-hair slicked back with Brylcreem, pipe in his mouth-was doing his accounts on a rickety old table.

I suppose, until he lifted his head, Vickers was curled up next to the table. He usually was, now and then rising to stretch in the sun, allowing my father to reach down and ruffle the peculiar line of fur that ran up his spine-against the grain of the rest of his coat-and gave his breed its name.

”Jolly good fellow,” my father used to say, whenever he patted him on the furline like that.

I stared at the smashed jar, then ran outside, ducking back into the stone recess of the porch as soon as I saw the vast wall of mud bearing down the mountainside. Darkening the fall of light, it was simply roaring towards us and nothing-nothing!-was going to stop that. I watched as, twenty feet away, my parents, the one still kneeling in front of her ixias, the other throwing back his chair as he suddenly stood up, were trapped by the waves of mud. There was no chance of them getting to me, though they tried; it all came down too quickly. A chunk of masonry from the cottage fell off near me and I pretty much resigned myself to dying in the mudslide.

But I didn't. Instead I watched my parents drown in it: half a million tonnes of clay mixed with water which slid down Zomba that day, slumping from an area of felled plantation forest after a flash flood from a river. Liquefied mud, thick, rocky mud, mud spilling down a hillside and over your loved ones as if it were chocolate. Coating their skin, covering their hair, filling their lungs.

n.o.body wants to remember that-your parents rearing like tethered horses as they try to reach you-and I have tried to cover over the event in my memory. So completely that sometimes I am persuaded that I did not actually witness it, that I pa.s.sed out and have imagined the whole thing retrospectively. I have no idea what happened to Vickers: I know I heard the bark beforehand, and I know he was, or would have been, sitting at my father's feet; but after that not a glimpse, not a sound. Nothing but mud.

So far as verifiable facts go, I do not even know how I was rescued, only that I was removed by the colonial authorities to an orphanage at Cape Town in South Africa. From there a cousin of my mother's took me on, paying for my continuing education at Douai in Berks.h.i.+re and later funding me at Cambridge.

Laminar flow and whirling flow, I had seen in a single terrible instance the regular predictable straightness of the one and the viscous, unpredictable evolution of the other. I had also experienced difficulties relating to the vantage-point of an observer: that positionality in time and s.p.a.ce which, along with the two types of flow, is central to fluid dynamics.

What I hadn't understood, except in the most immediate and tearful sense of personal bereavement, was the full human dimension: how the event would distort my perceptions of-and relations with-others. How it turned me into this inward, unreflexive creature, this truculent, obtuse, curly-haired character I now look askance at in the mirror in my cabin on the Habbakuk Habbakuk, lifting my head from the page.

Of course, the hair is white now, whereas once it was dark. The blank paper too, it strikes me now, is also like a mirror. But a cloudy one, as if the flux of human thought condenses when one tries to put it into words.

I wasn't the only one to suffer. Hundreds died in the Zomba mudslide of 1931, but I count it as the moment when psychic night-and the physics of the atmosphere-entered my head. It has been a kind of dizziness in my life and oddly enough I was not the only one to feel it. For months after the mudslide there was an epidemic of dizziness-involving twitching tremors and falling down-among the local Chichewa. Some kind of psychosomatic response to the mudslide among those who survived, it spread like a contagion through the populace. It was often followed by nosebleeds. I had something like it, too, doctors said, and perhaps that is why the whole period is so hazy in my memory.

For all that, I miss Nyasaland greatly. It is part of what has formed me, and I would like to return there one day. I loved the rows of tobacco where they hung, lion-tawny, in the curing sheds. I loved the palm-fringed lake sh.o.r.e and those wicker baskets the weaver birds made their homes in, up the flas.h.i.+ng ribbon of the s.h.i.+re river-where, under towering gulfs of green, the boatmen pole their canoes to the rhythm of a soul-shuddering song.

What happened to the past? Why was it taken away from me? Who siphoned it off, like the mosquitoes settling on the boatmen's backs to suck their blood?

Eleven.

At the end of the week, as instructed, I presented myself at the Ryman house for Sunday lunch. The Prophet greeted me himself. My first impression was of a man in his early fifties with an intelligent if somewhat anxious face supporting a ma.s.s of unruly, starting-up grey hair. Under a prominent forehead and over a small, flattened nose he wore black spectacles covered at the bridge with sticking plaster, a black tie under a starched, round-cornered collar, and an oldfas.h.i.+oned grey suit. The creases of his trousers were extremely well defined. The toe-caps of his shoes shone like billiard b.a.l.l.s. This was unusual. In my experience, scientists tend not to look after their shoes.

My eyes travelled back up his body. He was tall, I realised, his forehead high and smooth, his mouth downturned. He did not seem like the jolliest soul. In fact, apart from the wild hair, Professor Ryman looked like an undertaker.

”I'm sorry I could not see you when you last called, Mr Meadows; I was gardening,” he said. ”A beautiful theory, without any mercy, has had me in its thrall and I find the garden the best way to escape. It is now finished. At least, I have written it down. Come through.” His voice was an odd mixture of smooth and rough, beginning mellifluously and ending in a kind of cough, as if he were a singer who had found a crumb in his throat.

I followed him down the hall, under the strange array of strings and pipes on which I had previously banged my head and past a large pier mirror, improbably grand for that spartan household.

”May I ask what it was about, your theory?” I said, manoeuvring myself around a large stove which stood, oddly and inconveniently, at the foot of the stairs.

I received no reply.

We entered the drawing room, which was dominated by a grandfather clock and a piano. Mrs Ryman and a cleric in a dog-collar were conversing by the window. ”That is the gnostic position,” I heard the minister say. ”An unfolding. The disclosure of what appears to be secret.”

Ryman paused for a moment. His shoulders hunched appreciably but he did not look round at me. ”The latent roots of a matrix,” he said abruptly, in answer to my question, which I had almost forgotten asking.

The minister, a florid gentleman, was continuing his own discourse. ”So that what's inside is equivalent to what is outside. But the equivalence itself is the secret. In the Orphic rite, you know, the mystic was he who kept his mouth shut. The mute. Muein Muein in the original Greek, giving rise to in the original Greek, giving rise to mustes mustes, mystic. Do you see?”

Mrs Ryman nodded. I stared at her, startled by the feelings which were rising in me. The skin on her face was so luxuriantly healthy I had a curious desire to lick it. I tried to put this bizarre idea out of my head, but my attention then became fixed on her generous body as she listened to the clergyman. She wore a green cardigan and tweed skirt and a white blouse with something gold pinned over the left breast. It was too homely a look to be alluring, I told myself, but this was more than compensated for by her youth. She was, it struck me, about twenty years younger than her husband. Such disparities of age were more common then than now, but I still wondered, at the time, how they could have come together.

”I am afraid I cannot offer you sherry,” said Ryman. ”We're abstainers here. Some apple juice, perhaps?”

I accepted and smiled at Mrs Ryman as she brought over her guest to meet me. The minister was dressed in black, apart from his dog-collar.

”Minister Grant,” she said. ”This is Henry Meadows. Our young man in the field. He is working for the Meteorological Office.”

”Literally in the field,” I said, shaking his hand. ”We've established a small weather observation centre in the field next door.”

”How lucky you are,” said Grant. ”To be under the very gaze of a t.i.tan of your science.” He had a red face and rheumy eyes. I suspect he missed the sherry even more than I did.

To break the ice, I thought it might be amusing to tell them all about Pyke, Brecher and the sea lion.

”Ingenious,” said Grant, when I had finished. ”Train up a seal.”

”Sea lion,” said Ryman frostily. I was getting the distinct impression he did not like Grant. ”Surely they do not plan to use these animals on attack missions?” he asked me. ”Men may be stupid enough and callous enough to kill one another, but there is no need to involve innocent animals as well.”

”I don't believe attack is part of the plan,” I said. ”The idea is for them to detect mines. Mr Pyke said they can see in very low light, diving down as far as six hundred and fifty feet. The potential is incredible.”

”The word 'potential' should be used only in its strictest scientific sense,” said Ryman. He paused, looking rather pleased with himself. ”In all other cases it is misleading.”

Perhaps he was right. In any case, I did not want to cause any more friction. ”I believe you would quite like Mr Pyke, Professor,” I said. ”He's rather clever. He said he was at Cambridge with you.”

Ryman looked sceptical, but I persevered. ”And Julius Brecher, who has made some fascinating discoveries about the structure of the blood. He has unpicked haemoglobin. It is very important medically, I understand.”