Part 15 (2/2)

I had made my choice. I was convinced-what a young fool I was-that the self-disgust I felt at having caused Ryman's death would now subside.

In choosing Pyke's ice over Sir Peter's fire it might have seemed as though I was travelling in the riskier direction, but it did not feel like that to me then. For while, on the face of it, Pyke's scheme to build s.h.i.+ps out of ice appeared highly fraught, despite its backing from Mountbatten, it felt like a safer proposition than becoming part of the invasion forecast. All that I had learned from proximity to Ryman only seemed to confirm the wild mutability of the weather. I didn't want to send men to their deaths.

My pied-a-terre in Richmond being unavailable-I had rented it out while in Scotland-I took a room in a boarding-house on Claremont Square, within walking distance of Smithfield. It was a nice Bloomsbury house transplanted to ugly Pentonville, where I wrote furiously into the night, smoking heavily, covering-just as I have been lately, on an ice s.h.i.+p heading for the desert-sheet after sheet with spidery blue writing, trying to solve the many problems of fluid dynamics a.s.sociated with Habbakuk.

The problems Pyke set me concerned the s.h.i.+p's draught, which I would only solve when I came at it this time round. Back then, I was staggered by the ambition of the project. A s.h.i.+p 2,000 feet long and thirty yards wide with a thirty-foot-thick hull. The one we made in Antarctica was much smaller, but otherwise many of the details were the same. Motor nacelles mounted along the flanks-1,000-horsepower electric motors with a propeller; generator turbines inside the hull, protected by box girders; an elaborate system of refrigeration through pipes in the ice; tanks for the oil which drove the turbines, generators for the nacelles and other auxiliary machinery...

I put all my questions down in a memo and the following morning set off for Pyke's workshop, with the memo folded in my jacket pocket.

It was a joy, after all that seclusion, to burst out into the leafy freshness of Amwell Street. I bought a pint of milk from the dairy there and drank it straight from the bottle, enjoying the sensation of coldness in my throat.

Then I thought of Ryman's bottle of milk and all that happened afterwards, and my gorge rose. I saw his thin hand pouring it into the stream again.

Crossing Rosebery Avenue into Exmouth Market, the atmosphere of the city changed. The sweet light of Amwell Street became smokier and more acrid, as if all the poisonous inks of the printing presses in Fleet Street and Bouverie Street, blowing northward, had begun to infect the air.

I continued on my way to the freezer unit in the bowels of Smithfield. I walked down some steps off Bowling Green Lane, then up past a pub called the Three Kings and down into Clerkenwell Green. Crossing under the St John's Gatehouse-a stone-blocked medieval building a.s.sociated with the Templars or Hospitallers or something of that order-I had the sensation of being in many different times at once. How odd that the fighting knights of Christendom once sojourned here, flaming swords at the ready! Now here I was, in 1944, on my way to a meeting about a scheme that could change the course of the war using s.h.i.+ps of ice.

Having pa.s.sed through the butchers' hall as before, I rang the bell at Morgan's. Hardly had I done so when a rather cross-looking soldier appeared from within the vault. He wore an ordinary army uniform, chestnut-coloured boots and Sam Browne belt. He didn't let me in at first, just stood with the door half-open, eyeing me suspiciously.

”Well?” he said. He had a sandy moustache and his hair was cropped very short.

I introduced myself and explained that Pyke had engaged me on a project I could not discuss.

”Which one?” he asked, warily. ”You better come in.”

”This one,” I replied, having stepped inside. I suddenly realised that the freezer vault was no longer freezing.

”d.a.m.n fool,” said the officer. ”He shouldn't have done that. Pyke has been stood down from this project. It's over. He's too much of a liability, anyway. We're closing this place and no one is coming in without my say-so.”

Behind him I could see the protective clothing in the anteroom being piled up into boxes by one of the commandos.

”But he said I might be joining his team,” I said, plaintively.

”Well I'm telling you you're not.”

”On whose authority?”

”On Lord Mountbatten's. Not that it's any of your concern, Meadows, but my name is Brigadier Wildman-Lus.h.i.+ngton and I monitor Pyke's insanities on behalf of Lord Louis. Pyke has quite enough projects on the go at the moment. Habbakuk has been cancelled and he has been told to focus on another.”

He gave me a suspicious look. ”What service are you in?”

”I work for the Met Office,” I explained. ”I'm a weather observer, with some knowledge of turbulence. That was why Pyke wanted me.”

He looked at me as if these were inconceivably poor accomplishments for a full-blooded male in wartime.

”I see,” he said finally. ”Well, you'd better go and observe some weather, hadn't you? Don't come back here.”

He more or less pushed me out the door. I stood there for a moment, then made my miserable way back through the chumps and chops, across Clerkenwell Green, and headed in the direction of the boarding house, stopping on the way for a drink in the Three Kings. Feeling revulsion towards the world-not just to the mutability of weather but also of events, of life itself- I once again contemplated my fate through the bottom of a pint gla.s.s.

Quite a few pints, in fact, before staggering home to bed in the early afternoon. As I climbed the stairs, something which took a deal of concentration, the crone who ran the boarding house gave me a hard look. How strange it is to be recalling such circ.u.mstances while listening to the wine-harvest fugue in The Seasons The Seasons. I had not harvested anything.

Pyke went out of my life that day, and so did Habbakuk, at least until the Sheikh's people got in touch. Pyke himself committed suicide with sleeping pills in 1948, overtaken with gloom that his post-war ideas had not been taken up. He really was a most extraordinary man, about whom there were lots of things I did not know when I encountered him during the war. I had no idea, for instance, that he had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in the First World War, having used statistics to a.n.a.lyse the reasons for the failed escape attempts of others. Or that he made (and lost) a fortune in the metal markets, at one point owning futures on a third of the world's tin. Or set up a school based on the revolutionary educational principles of the philosopher John Dewey. Or that, having been cla.s.sified as a security risk by the Americans, he spent time in a mental inst.i.tution in the United States.

So many unknowns in a life. It's customary to characterise a biography as having a beginning, middle and end, but what about the s.p.a.ces in between? What about all the unrecorded moments that are ciphered away, never making it into history? Pile up all those, disappear all those in every human life across time-not to mention other types of life-and you build a ma.s.sive head of pressure against the future, millions of Pascal units just waiting to come down on us in the form of the unexpected, just waiting to displace us, subject us, unseat us.

LOG.

DATE: 1 February 1980 1 February 1980 POSITION @ 0600 LOCAL (GMT +2): POSITION @ 0600 LOCAL (GMT +2): Lat.i.tude 33 54' South, Longitude 18 25' East Lat.i.tude 33 54' South, Longitude 18 25' East Cape Town, Duncan Dock, E-Berth Cape Town, Duncan Dock, E-Berth DEPARTED BOUVET ISLAND: DEPARTED BOUVET ISLAND: 23 January 23 January NEXT DESTINATION: NEXT DESTINATION: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Dar es Salaam, Tanzania ETA: ETA: 15 February 15 February DISTANCE TO GO: DISTANCE TO GO: 2248 nm 2248 nm CURRENT WEATHER: CURRENT WEATHER: Sunny and warm Sunny and warm SEA STATE: SEA STATE: Calm Calm WIND: WIND: 5 kt SouthEasterly 5 kt SouthEasterly BAROMETRIC PRESSURE: BAROMETRIC PRESSURE: 1012. mb 1012. mb AIR TEMPERATURE: AIR TEMPERATURE: 23C 23C SEA TEMPERATURE: SEA TEMPERATURE: 19C 19C

MAY.

One.

I feel I could still help. If, despite everything that has happened, you can still see your way, Sir Peter, to attaching me to Stagg's team after all, I should be extremely grateful.

The failure of Habbakuk hit me like a hammer blow. It seemed to confirm that I was in a narrative of decline, rather than being subjected to a disconnected series of mishaps. I had begun to wonder if success and happiness were now impregnably concealed from me for ever.

Now I had to go back to Sir Peter on my knees, writing him another letter. I was embarra.s.sed, frankly. It was not the most fluent piece of self-advocacy, but it was the best I could do in the circ.u.mstances.

As I walked back down Amwell Street to post it, I thought again about James Stagg-my former mentor at Kew and the man who had been chosen to lead the weather forecast for the invasion. It would be an honour to join him, but I didn't think much of my chances now.

In some ways he was quite a surprising choice for Sir Peter to have made to lead the D-Day team. Dr Stagg had been science master at George Heriot's School in Edinburgh before entering the Met Office in 1924. Like Ryman, he had worked at Eskdalemuir Observatory in Dumfriess.h.i.+re for a while, but there his field had been terrestrial magnetism, auroral activity, not meteorology. He was earth sciences really, not actually a forecaster at all, though I believe he had done a little of that in Iraq at some time. He had also served on a polar expedition to Arctic Canada before becoming superintendent at Kew.

Was it there that the cold entered his heart, I wonder, or did that chill, remote air he sometimes had, that seemed to whirl about him, emanate from Covenanter traditions? For he was certainly an awkward character-rather like Ryman, in fact, but without the playfulness.

After posting the letter to Sir Peter I went into the Three Kings again. Into my own shame, feeling as if I were a hamster circling a wheel, but grateful for the all-conquering, uncertainty-dispelling booze all the same. What the alcohol did for me, I now see, was appear to suspend time; the awful sense of endlessly waiting or, equally, of being endlessly too late, became something of myself, absorbed into the ebb and flow of my own body, rather than something imposed from outside. I remember in later years-over one of the cups of strong, aromatic coffee that he favoured at a certain Cambridge cafe-Brecher telling me that the human idea of time was bound up with the fervid rhythms of the blood.

Some hours later-it was dusk by now-I woke up in my rooms feeling hot and thirsty and headachy, on account of the drink, no doubt. I went downstairs to make a cup of tea. I would have preferred it with plenty of sugar, which usually does the trick with hangovers, but we were having to do without that then.

Claremont Square was on a hill. If I stood on a bench I could see down into King's Cross, where a cupola of pink light-the acc.u.mulated pollution of trains and factories-was adding further colour to an already colourful horizon. How strange it is that some of the sky's most beautiful spectacles are produced by pollutant particles of smoke and chemicals. The moon was pale yellow, with a halo of fattening blue, which gradually attenuated through puffy clouds into yellow again.

Pink, yellow, blue: it was like a picture show, so pretty I could almost have forgotten that we were at war. One was always on the lookout for planes, of course, or the flash of anti-aircraft fire, but the impression I had that night was of calm, of a deadly normality. It was as if my fate were being painted up there on the canvas of the sky-and I had an uneasy feeling the painter was disguising the true perspective.

Light, colour: illuminating and entertaining as they are, these quant.i.ties can distract from the facts of a matter as they funnel into the eye-glistening, swirling, a steady stream of stimulation-filling the observer with misguided perceptions, dubious a.s.sumptions, delirious upliftments. Chief among these is the belief that everything is going to be all right in the morning.

Two.

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