A woman of about his age was eating by herself at a table in front of him. She was not facing him directly, but at a shallow angle: she would be aware of him from peripheral vision. It seemed a good opportunity to practise the non-verbal aspects of the routine that Rhianna had taught him, so he synchronized his respiration with hers, and in various ways altered his body language, forming a resonance between them.
Her eyelids fluttered and closed. Her head tilted forward, chin down.
Oh, shit.
Was this stuff really so powerful? Were the words not even necessary?
‘Great food,’ he called to a human waiter across the room. ‘It’s made me come awake. Fully alert.’
The woman jerked up, blinked twice, and continued to eat.
That’s just so cool.
He grinned, leaned back in his chair, and wondered what other mischief he could get up to.
FIFTY
EARTH, 1942 AD
This was what Gavriela wrote in her diary: Today I gave birth.
It was a small collection of words for oceanic waves of pain, for eighteen century-like hours of waiting and effort, of things tearing inside her, her own core come to frightening, would-be-independent life and rearing to burst free, to rend its way into the world amid the stink of piss and blood, of amniotic fluid, shit and disinfectant. And then, the living form itself: shrunken, with blood-red monkey features, a tiny shock of black, spiky hair, the rubbery limbs, and the raucous wailing as the midwife said: ‘He’s a boy.’
In her arms then, the most beautiful creation in the universe, her son, and the pain inside her lost the edge of its fullness, beginning its backward ebb into the past, into the has-been. Into forgetfulness.
Today I gave birth.
Dividing her life into two: before and after the Moment.
Over the coming days, neither Brian nor Rupert called on her, but they sent separate congratulatory notes – no sense of ownership or responsibility in Brian’s, no emotional intimacy in either – along with baskets of fruit and even chocolate: black-market goods that no one, in a maternity ward, would pay attention to.
She was in the Radcliffe Infirmary, and once released she would be living with Mrs Wilson, in her temporary digs from those first few nights in Oxford. The arrangements were Rupert’s doing, and would suffice – he had said in writing – until she returned to work.
‘What’s our handsome boy going to be called?’ asked one of the night nurses.
Gavriela, in the midst of suckling, looked up.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
Perhaps it was the aftermath of birth, of that massive effort, but she was finding it hard to be creative in her second language. All the names that occurred to her were German, therefore anathema.
‘I like Tyrone,’ called out an Irish nurse.
‘Or Clark,’ said the first nurse. ‘Like Clark Gable, you know?’
‘How about Winston?’ That was the Irish nurse again. ‘Or Eamon.’
After Churchill or de Valera, presumably.
‘Maybe.’ Gavriela smiled at them. ‘Maybe.’
When they finally released her from hospital, a friend of Mrs Wilson’s drove Gavriela and her blanket-wrapped treasure to the house, where Mrs Wilson fell in love with the baby on sight. It was a feeling that would only strengthen, for within days he was sleeping through the night and crying only when necessary, never for long.
‘If only my Peter had been like that,’ Mrs Wilson would say.
Her son, friend to Rupert during their schooldays, was serving in North Africa. Occasionally he would send a photograph of a camel or people in Bedouin dress, trying for lightheartedness, his letters unmarked by the censors because he steered away from military details.
‘Have you decided yet?’ Mrs Wilson would ask each morning at the end of breakfast.
‘Sorry.’ Gavriela would smile.
The question of the baby’s name was beginning to vex her visitors: two of the Radcliffe nurses, who sometimes popped in as they came off duty; once, Rosie, who came by train all the way from Bletchley; and a nervous young Balliol man called Stafford, who on his first visit brought a letter that served obliquely as an introduction, straightforwardly as an explanation of the books and papers he had lugged from college for Gavriela to read.
Perhaps you might like to keep your mind exercised. I know I would, in your circumstances.
Best,
AMT
For a codes-and-ciphers expert, it took a too-long second to realize it was from Turing.
‘He’s from the other place,’ said Stafford, ‘but we’ve met at conferences and so on, becoming … friends.’
The other place meaning Cambridge. Learning English had been one thing, but Oxford had a culture all of its own, one that intrigued Gavriela but did not entirely attract her.
‘Thank you,’ she told him. ‘My brain seems to have melted. These will help me mend it.’
Stafford blushed, as though even this indirect mention of childbirth was unseemly.
‘Let’s look at what we’ve got,’ she added. ‘Does Alan realize I’m no mathematician?’
It was a logician’s treasure-trove: papers on symbolic logic, lambda calculus, abstract groups, and quantum mechanics; while among the books were the Russell and Whitehead Principia, commentaries of Gödel’s work, and Karl Popper’s Logik der Forschung. Only in Oxford could someone carry a German book without raising suspicion. Slightly less challenging were Russell’s Why I Don’t Believe, H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World, something by Dorothy Sayers, and a first edition of The History of Mr Polly, a Wells novel she had never read.
‘The Gödel material,’ said Stafford, ‘is not entirely irrelevant to Alan’s disposal of the deep Entscheidungsproblem.’
Gavriela felt a wide grin spread across her face.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Whatever for?’
‘For assuming I have a brain capable of more than baby talk.’
Stafford blushed again.
‘One takes it for granted,’ he said.
His Entscheidungsproblem remark pointed out the relationship between Gödel’s proof that some truths cannot be proven and Turing’s proof that the computability of some problems cannot be decided in advance of working the problem through. Neither those proofs nor any of the material here was classified, but no matter. This was challenging enough: her brain could cope with more than baby talk, but not much more, not yet.
With a grin, Stafford added: ‘In the other place, they still don’t allow women to graduate, did you know that?’
‘I presume they consider themselves the last bastion of civilization.’
‘Last bastion of a broken empire,’ he said, ‘along with ourselves. And that’s assuming we survive the war. An empire that fails to defend itself without assistance is doomed. Continuing to groom young men to rule such an empire is going to become, well, irrelevant.’
‘An empire spanning the globe, and containing a quarter of it,’ said Gavriela. ‘Surely rebuilding is possible.’
‘That’s what everyone seems to think. Personally, I believe Hitler’s done what Communism and economic depression failed to achieve: begun the dismantling of our rotten class system.’
‘But …’ Gavriela wanted to point out his patrician accent and manner, but in some way that would not offend.
‘Oh, I’m as rotten as the rest of them.’ Stafford’s laugh was both girlish and self-deprecating. ‘Believe me, I’m aware of it.’
He rose then, and promised he would come again next week. Gavriela said she would look forward to it, and meant it.
When Stafford was gone, Mrs Wilson took the baby for a walk around the house, meaning she carried and rocked him as she perambulated, humming and talking softly, then came back, and said: ‘He’s told me he wants to be called Algernon.’