I had been trying to provoke her. I won’t even bother to pretend otherwise. I had been trying to … I don’t know … to get under her skin. Out of pique. Out of pure spite. Out of a feeling of immense … frustration – irritation – powerlessness. And I’m not remotely ashamed to admit this (in fact I’m happy to admit it – too happy, perhaps).
But when she picked up that child’s coat and cradled it in her arms, and her face …
It crumpled. Like a paper bag. It just crumpled. As if I’d … like I’d crushed the very … destroyed the very … scooped out her very soul with my two bare hands. And then her entire body was racked by these gigantic sobs. The most awful, desperate, heart-wrenching sobs.
Ah! Such terrible distress! Such unspeakable anguish! Like a wounded beast, trapped, fatally injured, insensible with pain (and its young, meanwhile, all back at the den – just waiting, patiently waiting – still expecting to be fed).
Even the imaginary Miss Hahn – generally difficult to knock off her perch – was reduced to silence by this most distressing of spectacles.
What have I done? I asked, tentatively. Very tentatively. In my head. Looking for reassurance.
You’ve gone too far, Mr Huff, the imaginary Miss Hahn whispered, that’s what you’ve done!
But … but she hid the dead shark under my bed, Miss Hahn! I wheedled.
‘How could you, Mr Huff?!’ The actual Miss Hahn lifted her face from the coat with an agonizing groan. ‘Orla’s little coat. Her coat. How could you, Mr Huff?’
Oh dear. And how might I adequately respond? What could I conceivably come up with to try and right such a dreadful ‘perceived’ wrong?
I think I … I probably just cobbled together some pathetic excuse straight off the cuff. Said Mrs Barrow had made a silly mistake. Tried to palm it off on her as best I could.
Miss Hahn shoved her distraught face back into the dense folds of the coat again.
She’s furious! Miss Hahn cautioned me. Incandescent! Listen to that!
I didn’t want to listen. It was unbearable! Miss Hahn was muttering and groaning and clenching her fists. She was in an ecstasy of rage. An ecstasy. And then – just as suddenly – it stopped. She stopped. Her fists unclenched. Her shoulders relaxed. Her breathing regulated. And she was … she was embracing and kissing and consoling the damn thing, muttering sweetly into it, nuzzling it, reassuring it.
It was very strange. I (meanwhile) was busy telling Miss Hahn (the actual Miss Hahn) – who I knew wasn’t listening – of my frustrations over suddenly, mysteriously, being designated the Clearys’ chief representative on earth. I mean I had taken on this role semi-voluntarily at first, although my motivations, at root, weren’t entirely honourable (I can’t – or won’t – be a hypocrite about it). But I hadn’t intended to become … I hadn’t wanted to become caught up … hog-tied … because I simply … I simply wasn’t equipped emotionally to … to cope.
Same as Miss Hahn herself, I suppose. And if I think back I recall Miss Hahn confessing as much in the sauna that day. Drawing a comparison between us both. But at the time I hadn’t … I was just too caught up in … in I’m not sure what. In proving myself to be above it all. Maintaining a measure of professional distance.
It was at this point, anyhow, that Miss Hahn lifted her face from the coat and demanded to know who it was that had entrusted the damn thing to me. Her tone was disparaging, almost aggressive. I was slightly taken aback. I’d been happily spilling out my guts to this incorrigible female – this veritable banshee – and now here I was being cross-examined on every conceivable detail pertaining to its bizarre acquisition. Either way, shoving aside my (considerable, and utterly valid) misgivings, I set about trying to explain (in plain English, although this language didn’t entirely seem to suit my explanations) how it had all come about. And as I explained it I became – perhaps it was her combative style of questioning that injured my feelings, or the cynical mutterings of the imaginary Miss Hahn in my head – but as I explained it I became increasingly infuriated. Just the look of contempt in her eyes. And of betrayal (I didn’t ask Miss Hahn to have any confidence in me, did I? Quite the opposite, in fact!). But it was mainly the hurt – the crushing sense of disappointment. They rankled with me. They stung.
So I headed into the house. I fled. Well, I staggered. With Miss Hahn still in hot pursuit, haranguing me about the coat, explaining its history and its significance and its endless virtues in considerable (nay, interminable) detail.
By the time I’d reached the living room I was spent (physically, emotionally). I turned to face her again, panting, exhausted, perfectly willing to concede defeat.
The hunter, hunted! The imaginary Miss Hahn chuckled. And she was right. The imaginary Miss Hahn had put her imaginary finger on it. Yet again.
‘What do you want from me, Miss Hahn?’ I asked the real Miss Hahn. It was a kind of … a kind of … a tortured appeal. Because I didn’t know what I could conceivably give. And if Miss Hahn would only … just tell me, then we might be able to negotiate some basic parameters. We might even be able to … to bring about some kind of … of a rapprochement between us.
‘What do you want from me, Miss Hahn?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered.
But I wasn’t sure if I entirely believed her. I think she did know. I think there was something. Something she wanted. But she wouldn’t allow herself to confess to it. And then she just … she just started talking about the damn coat again and pointing out all these tiny ‘messages’ embedded into the skin of it.
‘This is a four and a nought and a … this is a leaf … this is a rabbit …’ etc. etc.
At which point my natural … shall I call it arrogance? No. Curiosity? Yes. I think I’ll call it curiosity. My natural curiosity got the better of me. I’m not sure if that’s grammatical (even logical). But anyway. I began looking at the coat somewhat more attentively, and I won’t pretend that I wasn’t quite … quite fascinated by the little narrative that quickly unfolded on the surface of those old skins.
It was certainly very ancient. Older than I had originally conceived of. I suppose you might call me something of an expert in the curing and preservation of skins. Miss Hahn had chided me (slightly earlier) about my having ‘an interest in native antiquities’. And she was right. I did/do have one. Quite an active interest, in fact. And this coat was immensely old and exquisitely ornate. I really was quite taken with it. I started setting Miss Hahn straight on a few of the details … the ancient story, the watering holes, the stream, the journey, the great star …
As I talked I could feel – perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself here – I could feel Miss Hahn leaning in. She was leaning in. And her eyes – once affixed to the coat – were now … not affixed to the coat any longer. But to me. She tucked her hair behind her ear. It’s a nervous gesture. A tic, of sorts. She tucked her hair behind her ear. And I felt the movement and I looked up and I stared into her grey-green eyes and I said, ‘You keep tucking your hair behind your ear, Miss Hahn.’
This wasn’t an especially interesting or profound thing for me to have said (I accept this). It was simply an observation. An intimate observation. Then I lifted my … I raised my hand to … to … In fact I’m not entirely sure (on deeper reflection) what I planned to do with that hand. Did I plan to touch her cheek? Or the hair itself? I don’t know. Either way, I lifted my hand and Miss Hahn (in her turn) just … she automatically jerked back. In sheer horror! As if I was intending to … to strike her. Then my crutch clattered to the floor. And I was … I was … I felt … Just to be … to be so repeatedly, instinctively rejected by Miss Hahn. Or if not … I don’t know. So I lashed out. Which is typical of me, when I find myself in a corner. I lashed out and said something cutting about Miss Hahn’s ridiculous hair-clip. And then Miss Hahn said something sharp back. As well she might. But the funny thing was that as she said it, as she said it – and I don’t remember her precise words right now – as she said it the imaginary Miss Hahn uttered the exact same sentence! Then she (the real Miss Hahn) said something else, and the imaginary Miss Hahn also … etc. … and then I realized that the two Miss Hahns were now miraculously conjoined and that … well, that both were rejecting me! Together! In unison! And I felt very hurt. And bereft. And angry. And I made some ill-considered comment about a sea cow, or a giraffe. Then I had a sudden change of heart and began trying to apologize, but the damage was done. The damage was well and truly done.
At which point … I’m sorry to just clumsily regurgitate the whole thing like this without any … without any particular style or finesse, but I’m actually re-telling this sorry tale to … to myself if you must know. To try and make some kind of sense out of it. Because – like so many other stories in my life thus far – it doesn’t really add up. Which I suppose is the story of my life – my destiny (if you want to get all deep and meaningful about it) – it simply doesn’t add up. My life is an incorrect sum. A bad piece of algebra. And that is who I am. My story will always have a big, red cross stuck in the margin at the side of it. Mr Huff, you are wrong, it proclaims. Mr Huff, you are simply wrong.
But anyhow … I was just trying to … to backtrack, to apologize to Miss Hahn for my terrible blunder when who should turn up but Mrs Sage Meadows – a Florence Nightingale in heels! – bearing a bloody cake. And Miss Hahn closed down. She shut down. Whatever there was between us – before – was gone. In an instant.
It was difficult. Mrs Meadows – for some reason – seemed confused and irritated that Miss Hahn was … and I was confused and irritated that Mrs Meadows was …
Either way, Mrs Meadows put the cake down on to the kitchen counter and then started making a big fuss about … This was odd. Mrs Meadows was just trying to pass off a difficult social situation as best she could, and then suddenly (that part is a bit of a blur, if I’m honest) she was looking at the coat – at the child’s coat – which Miss Hahn had just hung over the back of a chair before preparing to dash off (she had that look – that look Miss Hahn always gets when she longs to escape. Which is a look I am all too familiar with, alas). Anyway, Mrs Meadows started cooing over it (as Mrs Meadows is wont to do – coo over things) and then out of the blue she started inspecting it with a real intensity … her eyes lit up.
‘How extraordinary!’ she exclaimed, reaching into her handbag, removing a rather large and ungainly pair of heavy, tortoiseshell glasses and applying them to her nose. ‘What exactly is this thing?’
‘It’s Orla’s coat,’ Miss Hahn informed her (moving from foot to foot, eye on the door), ‘Orla’s possum-skin coat. It was a family heirloom, passed down through several generations on the Aboriginal side of the family. The first time Orla saw the Virgin Mary, in a vision, after an attack of heatstroke, Mary was wearing a possum-skin coat just like this one. It’s actually very old.’
Mrs Sage Meadows scratched her head. ‘But how … how odd,’ she said.
‘Odd?’ Miss Hahn echoed.
‘Yes. Odd … Strange.’
Mrs Meadows drew in closer to the coat and pointed. ‘That’s Ludwig Boltzmann’s famous diagram of a molecule showing atomic “sensitive region” overlap … and’ – she moved her finger – ‘that’s a Boltzmann Machine … look, the three hidden units and the four visible units.’ She slowly shook her head, bemused. ‘And over here … that’s a Hopfield network … see the four nodes? And that’s … that’s the Crab Nebula, surely …?’
Of course I was utterly confounded by all this. Sensitive region overlap?! Boltzmann Machine?!
Miss Hahn (with typical acuity) observed my befuddlement. ‘Mrs Meadows has a half-completed Ph.D. in Pure Maths and Engineering,’ she explained.
‘Oh!’ I said.
Mrs Meadows had a … a what …?
‘That’s a diagram of Heinrich Hurtz’s photoelectric effect,’ she gushed. ‘And surely this is Niels Bohr’s quantum model of the atom? See the three circles and the two dots in the middle and the squiggly line over on the right-hand side?’
‘I believe in Aboriginal parlance,’ I quickly interrupted, ‘that would “read” as an old woman’s nipple next to a sun with a …’
‘The Feynman diagram of gluon radiation!’ Mrs Meadows all but shouted, jumping up and down, clapping her hands together. ‘I’ve got to … I really must photograph this! Or at least … at least jot some things down. Because there’s an entire … it’s like an entire …’
‘Map,’ Miss Hahn helpfully filled in.
‘Yes. Exactly. It’s like a kind of … of Rosetta Stone of modern physics; a key. A key to … Or if not, then … I mean there are things here I haven’t ever seen before. But there are people … there are definitely people who could interpret it way better than I can. Remember that friend in San Francisco, Miss Hahn? In Silicon Valley? Her husband? It’s just a matter of … a question of getting him to …’
She paused for a second.
‘Is this a dream?’ she demanded, glancing around her. ‘Have I gone utterly mad?’
‘Did you see the bee?’ Miss Hahn asked, pointing.
‘Good heavens, yes! A bee! And the swarm is … Oh my God! That’s a stable Dyson’s swarm! A swarm! Next to the bee!’
She turned to Miss Hahn, astonished. ‘After we were talking this morning, Miss Hahn, and I was thinking about the hive, and I was … something was coming together in my mind but I couldn’t quite … a kind of … of inspiration. But there was something missing. Something … undecidable. It was this. Good heavens! I have this extraordinary feeling! In my stomach! A fluttering. A sense of … of rightness! Do you understand me, Miss Hahn? Mr … Mr Huff?’
I nodded, amazed. Miss Hahn nodded. She covered her mouth with her hand and blinked several times. She was very pale. Then, ‘This is what it was all for,’ she whispered, ‘what it was all about – the suffering. Twelve, thirteen years of confusion. So that you would come here, be here, at this moment, and you would see this, with me, with …’ – she pointed to me – ‘with us. I feel it too! The fluttering! This is what Orla always wanted, Mrs Meadows. This – you – are to take her message forward, take her … her story … her … her legacy … her …’
Mrs Meadows looked slightly taken aback by this sudden, emotional outpouring from Miss Hahn, but she nodded at her, gamely, and smiled, somewhat condescendingly. I quickly stepped in (Damage limitation! Miss Hahn didn’t want to scare the poor woman off, now, did she?).
‘I have a couple of good friends in Silicon Valley,’ I said. ‘A man called Dr Clark Kipps. I don’t know if you’ve ever …?’
‘Dr Kipps did an amazing lecture at my university when I was a second-year student!’ Mrs Meadows exclaimed. ‘We occasionally correspond. He’s working between California and CERN in Switzerland alongside a man called Tim Berners-Lee who invented ENQUIRE. Are you aware of the sorts of things he’s been dabbling in at all?’
‘Information sharing.’ I nodded.
Mrs Meadows then went off on a long tangent about Dr Kipps and how her former husband, Dr Meadows, had diagnosed a particular kind of neurological disorder in him called – I think – ‘Dystonia’ simply from reading Dr Kipps’s occasional letter (apparently the handwriting becomes very scruffy after approximately three lines, due to a cramping sensation in the hand. Dr Kipps also blinked excessively which was very typical of the condition, I’m told. Both of these characteristics were familiar to me as a long-term – although somewhat distant – acquaintance of said gentleman).
It transpired that Dr Kipps had contracted this rare disorder after suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning as a child. Dr Meadows – who I must admit was starting to sound like some kind of inspired medical genius – had always encouraged Mrs Meadows in her interest in the sciences. They’d met at a small ‘Science Club’ in Rye which Dr Meadows had established in the mid-1960s. Mrs Meadows’s parents (late of Dublin; Mrs Meadows was a lapsed Catholic and had attended convent school) had been living in Rye at that time and she had fled there following a rather messy break-up with … I can’t recall. It might have been an airline pilot.
After Dr Meadows’s sudden death, Mrs Meadows had abandoned all her former interest in science and engineering. The deep passion he’d reignited suddenly dwindled … It was simply too painful for her. It reminded her of Dr Meadows and the ‘great enthusiasms’ they’d shared …
But … but then what an extraordinary coincidence – she gasped – that it was my coming to see her, my searching her out over Orla and Dr Meadows’s diaries that had led to … this sudden, strange discovery. This revelation! How very extraordinary!
Yes! And after she’d been standing in the garden this morning, watching the bees, thinking about … about … and then to make this … this connection … with the stable Dyson’s swarm … she pointed … And what on earth is this? she added, her eyes shining, here, right next to it? I … I honestly don’t know what that means! she panted. ‘What on earth does that …? How perplexing! I need to go home and get a camera or if I could just …if I could just get a piece of paper and copy this all down … Is that a Hopf Bundle? There? Is that …?’
I turned to say something to Miss Hahn at this point. I think I had been intending to ask her if she might help me search for a jotter in the bedroom; my suitcase was pushed under the bed and I couldn’t bend over to … and if Mrs Meadows could put on the kettle and cut into that delicious-seeming … this was all complete hokum. I just wanted to get Miss Hahn on her own so that I might apologize for my former – my previous – but Miss Hahn was gone. Miss Hahn had vanished. Miss Hahn had left the room – the cottage. Without my even …
And I … this feeling of complete devastation! This shattered feeling. As if I had been blown into a thousand, tiny pieces and those pieces were floating about the room and getting lost under heavy furniture and … and only Miss Hahn had the adhesive. Only Miss Hahn had the glue.
I simply couldn’t leave things as they were. I grabbed Mrs Meadows by the hand and said, ‘Miss Hahn has gone! But you must run after her with … with …’ I quickly improvised: ‘with some cake! Miss Hahn adores cake … Or … or …’ My eyes looked frantically around the room … some kind of … some kind of gesture … some kind of … of keepsake … just by way of an … to apologize. To apologize. As a small sign. Of my great … my esteem. My great, my enduring esteem. For her. For the woman who had single-handedly borne … For Miss Hahn. Who had … who had brought us all together and then had quietly slipped away again. Without so much as a … without seemingly even … without …