CHAPTER 19

The same morning found Michael Wenton-Weakes in something of anodd mood.

You would need to know him fairly well to know that it was anespecially odd mood, because most people regarded him as being a littleodd to start with. Few people knew him that well. His mother, perhaps,but there existed between them a state of cold war and neither had spoken to the other now in weeks.

He also had an elder brother, Peter, who was now tremendouslysenior in the Marines. Apart from at their father’s funeral, Michaelhad not seen Peter since he came back from the Falklands, covered inglory, promotion, and contempt for his younger brother.

Peter had been delighted that their mother had taken over Magna,and had sent Michael a regimental Christmas card to that effect. Hisown greatest satisfaction still remained that of throwing himself intoa muddy ditch and firing a machine gun for at least a minute, and hedidn’t think that the British newspaper and publishing industry, evenin its current state of unrest, was likely to afford him that pleasure,at least until some more Australians moved into it.

Michael had risen very late after a night of cold savagery andthen of troubled dreams which still disturbed him now in the late morning daylight.

His dreams had been filled with the familiar sensations of loss,isolation, guilt and so forth, but had also been inexplicably involvedwith large quantities of mud. By the telescopic power of the night, thenightmare of mud and loneliness had seemed to stretch on forterrifying, unimaginable lengths of time, and had only concluded withthe appearance of slimy things with legs that had crawled on the slimysea. This had been altogether too much and he had woken with a start ina cold sweat.

Though all the business with the mud had seemed strange to him,the sense of loss, of isolation, and above all the aggrievement, theneed to undo what had been done, these had all found an easy home inhis spirit.

Even the slimy things with legs seemed oddly familiar and tickedaway irritably at the back of his mind while he made himself a latebreakfast, a piece of grapefruit and some China tea, allowed his eyesto rest lightly on the arts pages of the Daily Telegraph for a while,and then rather clumsily changed the dressing on the cuts on his hand.

These small tasks accomplished, he was then in two minds as towhat to do next.

He was able to view the events of the previous night with a cooldetachment that he would not have expected. It had been right, it hadbeen proper, it had been correctly done. But it resolved nothing. Allthat mattered was yet to be done.

All what? He frowned at the odd way his thoughts ebbed andflowed.

Normally he would pop along to his club at about this time. Itused to be that he would do this with a luxurious sense of the fact that there were many other things that he should be doing. Now therewas nothing else to do, which made time spent there, as anywhere else,hang somewhat heavy on his hands.

When he went he would do as he always did — indulge in a gin andtonic and a little light conversation, and then allow his eyes to restgently on the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, Opera, The NewYorker or whatever else fell easily to hand, but there was no doubtthat he did it these days with less verve and relish than previously.

Then there would be lunch. Today, he had no lunch date planned -?again — and would probably therefore have stayed at his club, andeaten a lightly grilled Dover sole, with potatoes garnished withparsley and boiled to bits, followed by a large heap of trifle. A glassor two of Sancerre. And coffee. And then the afternoon, with whateverthat might bring.

But today he felt oddly impelled not to do that. He flexed themuscles in his cut hand, poured himself another cup of tea, looked withcurious dispassion at the large kitchen knife that still lay by thefine bone china teapot, and waited for a moment to see what he would donext. What he did next, in fact, was to walk upstairs.

His house was rather chill in its formal perfection, and lookedmuch as people who buy reproduction furniture would like their housesto look. Except of course that everything here was genuine — crystal,mahogany and Wilton — and only looked as if it might be fake becausethere was no life to any of it.

He walked up into his workroom, which was the only room in thehouse that was not sterile with order, but here the disorder of booksand papers was instead sterile with neglect. A thin film of dust hadsettled over everything. Michael had not been into it in weeks, and thecleaner was under strict instructions to leave it well alone. He had not worked here since he edited the last edition of Fathom. Not, ofcourse, the actual last edition, but the last proper edition. The lastedition as far as he was concerned.

He set his china cup down in the fine dust and went to inspecthis elderly record player. On it he found an elderly recording of someVivaldi wind concertos, set it to play and sat down.

He waited again to see what he would do next and suddenly foundto his surprise that he was already doing it, and it was this: he waslistening to the music.

A bewildered look crept slowly across his face as he realisedthat he had never done this before. He had heard it many, many timesand thought that it made a very pleasant noise. Indeed, he found thatit made a pleasant background against which to discuss the concertseason, but it had never before occurred to him that there was anythingactually to listen to.

He sat thunderstruck by the interplay of melody and counterpointwhich suddenly stood revealed to him with a clarity that owed nothingto the dust-ridden surface of the record or the fourteen-year-oldstylus.

But with this revelation came an almost immediate sense of disappointment, which confused him all the more. The music suddenlyrevealed to him was oddly unfulfilling. It was as if his capacity tounderstand the music had suddenly increased up to and far beyond themusic’s ability to satisfy it, all in one dramatic moment.

He strained to listen for what was missing, and felt that themusic was like a flightless bird that didn’t even know what capacity ithad lost. It walked very well, but it walked where it should soar, itwalked where it should swoop, it walked where it should climb and bankand dive, it walked where it should thrill with the giddiness offlight. It never even looked up.

He looked up.

After a while he became aware that all he was doing was simplystaring stupidly at the ceiling. He shook his head, and discovered thatthe perception had faded, leaving him feeling slightly sick and dizzy.It had not vanished entirely, but had dropped deep inside him, deeperthan he could reach.

The music continued. It was an agreeable enough assortment ofpleasant sounds in the background, but it no longer stirred him.

He needed some clues as to what it was he had just experienced,and a thought flicked momentarily at the back of his mind as to wherehe might find them. He let go of the thought in anger, but it flickedat him again, and kept on flicking at him until at last he acted uponit.

From under his desk he pulled out the large tin wastepaper bin.Since he had barred his cleaning lady from even coming in here for themoment, the bin had remained unemptied and he found in it the tatteredshreds of what he was looking for with the contents of an ashtrayemptied over them.

He overcame his distaste with grim determination and slowlyjiggled around the bits of the hated object on his desk, clumsilysticking them together with bits of sticky tape that curled around andstuck the wrong bit to the wrong bit and stuck the right bit to hispudgy fingers and then to the desk, until at last there lay before him,crudely reassembled, a copy of Fathom. As edited by the execrablecreature A. K. Ross.

Appalling.

He turned the sticky lumpish pages as if he was picking overchicken giblets. Not a single line drawing of Joan Sutherland orMarilyn Horne anywhere. No profiles of any of the major Cork Street artdealers, not a one.

His series on the Rossettis: discontinued. “Green Room Gossip’: discontinued.He shook his head in incredulity and then he found the article he

was after. “Music and Fractal Landscapes’ by Richard MacDuff.He skipped over the first couple of paragraphs of introduction

and picked it up further on:

Mathematical analysis and computer modelling are revealingto us that the shapes and processes we encounter in nature -?the way that plants grow, the way that mountains erode orrivers flow, the way that snowflakes or islands achieve theirshapes, the way that light plays on a surface, the way themilk folds and spins into your coffee as you stir it, the waythat laughter sweeps through a crowd of people — all thesethings in their seemingly magical complexity can be describedby the interaction of mathematical processes that are, ifanything, even more magical in their simplicity.Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the productsof complex shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. Thevery word “natural” that we have often taken to mean”unstructured” in fact describes shapes and processes thatappear so unfathomably complex that we cannot consciouslyperceive the simple natural laws at work.They can all be described by numbers.

Oddly, this idea seemed less revolting now to Michael than it haddone on his first, scant reading.

He read on with increasing concentration.

We know, however, that the mind is capable of understandingthese matters in all their complexity and in all theirsimplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to theforce and direction with which it was thrown, the action ofgravity, the friction of the air which it must expend itsenergy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around itssurface, and the rate and direction of the ball’s spin.And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciouslytrying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have notrouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host ofrelated calculations so astoundingly fast that they canactually catch a flying ball.People who call this “instinct” are merely giving thephenomenon a name, not explaining anything.I think that the closest that human beings come toexpressing our understanding of these natural complexities isin music. It is the most abstract of the arts — it has no meaning or purpose other than to be itself.Every single aspect of a piece of music can be representedby numbers. From the organisation of movements in a wholesymphony, down through the patterns of pitch and rhythm thatmake up the melodies and harmonies, the dynamics that shapethe performance, all the way down to the timbres of the notesthemselves, their harmonics, the way they change over time, inshort, all the elements of a noise that distinguish betweenthe sound of one person piping on a piccolo and another onethumping a drum — all of these things can be expressed bypatterns and hierarchies of numbers.And in my experience the more internal relationships thereare between the patterns of numbers at different levels of thehierarchy, however complex and subtle those relationships maybe, the more satisfying and, well, whole, the music will seemto be. In fact the more subtle and complex those relationships,and the further they are beyond the grasp of the consciousmind, the more the instinctive part of your mind — by which Imean that part of your mind that can do differential calculusso astoundingly fast that it will put your hand in the rightplace to catch a flying ball — the more that part of yourbrain revels in it. Music of any complexity (and even “Three Blind Mice” iscomplex in its way by the time someone has actually performedit on an instrument with its own individual timbre and articulation) passes beyond your conscious mind into the armsof your own private mathematical genius who dwells in yourunconscious responding to all the inner complexities andrelationships and proportions that we think we know nothingabout. Some people object to such a view of music, saying that ifyou reduce music to mathematics, where does the emotion comeinto it? I would say that it’s never been out of it.The things by which our emotions can be moved — the shapeof a flower or a Grecian urn, the way a baby grows, the waythe wind brushes across your face, the way clouds move, their shapes, the way light dances on the water, or daffodilsflutter in the breeze, the way in which the person you lovemoves their head, the way their hair follows that movement,the curve described by the dying fall of the last chord of apiece of music — all these things can be described by thecomplex flow of numbers.That’s not a reduction of it, that’s the beauty of it.Ask Newton. Ask Einstein. Ask the poet (Keats) who said that what the imaginationseizes as beauty must be truth.He might also have said that what the hand seizes as a ballmust be truth, but he didn’t, because he was a poet andpreferred loafing about under trees with a bottle of laudanumand a notebook to playing cricket, but it would have beenequally true.

This jogged a thought at the back of Michael’s memory, but hecouldn’t immediately place it.

Because that is at the heart of the relationship between onthe one hand our “instinctive” understanding of shape, form,movement, light, and on the other hand our emotional responsesto them. And that is why I believe that there must be a form ofmusic inherent in nature, in natural objects, in the patternsof natural processes. A music that would be as deeplysatisfying as any naturally occurring beauty — and our owndeepest emotions are, after all, a form of naturally occurringbeauty…

Michael stopped reading and let his gaze gradually drift from thepage.

He wondered if he knew what such a music would be and tried to grope in the dark recesses of his mind for it. Each part of his mindthat he visited seemed as if that music had been playing there onlyseconds before and all that was left was the last dying echo ofsomething he was unable to catch at and hear. He laid the magazinelimply aside.

Then he remembered what it was that the mention of Keats had

jogged in his memory.The slimy things with legs from his dream.A cold calm came over him as he felt himself coming very close to

something.Coleridge. That man.

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legsUpon the slimy sea.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Dazed, Michael walked over to the bookshelf and pulled down hisColeridge anthology. He took it back to his seat and with a certainapprehension he riffled through the pages until he found the openinglines.

It is an ancient Mariner,And he stoppeth one of three.

The words were very familiar to him, and yet as he read onthrough them they awoke in him strange sensations and fearful memoriesthat he knew were not his. There reared up inside him a sense of lossand desolation of terrifying intensity which, while he knew it was nothis own, resonated so perfectly now with his own aggrievements that hecould not but surrender to it absolutely.

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I.