Two days before I left for America, meaning never to return, my friends from the Reading Room insisted on giving me a farewell lunch I knew they couldn’t afford. Their cardigans were shabbier than ever, their teeth more stained, but their jokes were as erudite as always, their eyes bright and hot, hungry for fun. Except now I couldn’t deal with it. They were forcing me to pretend, for a full two hours, that life was a droll and merry affair; if they were only pretending too, that no longer struck me as touching gallantry. I would have preferred for us to sit there exchanging harsh truths.
They toasted my new life with glasses of Australian wine; they presented me with a Victorian copy of the Biographia Literaria as a parting gift, in pretty silver wrapping, with a white bow. Guilt-stricken, unworthy, I went round the table, kissing each of them in turn. I rolled my eyes as I told them about Hiawatha and the world’s largest shopping mall and the average annual snowfall in the Twin Cities.
But all the time I was thinking of the inquest, remembering the stuffy smell in the room, sweat overlaid with Dettol, and the hard, worn benches and the clearing of throats. The judge had offered his solemn condolences to Isabel’s mother, who bowed her head majestically, in silent acknowledgment. When I called Alexei afterward he told me he couldn’t talk just then and hung up.
On the face of it, Isabel and Alexei were the most unlikely pair imaginable, you could hardly even picture them in the same room. But maybe nobody since Stavros had breached her defenses with such blithe disregard. Or been on such a mission to save the world.
It was through Mr. Cassini, whose passion for lost causes was seemingly inexhaustible, that I’d hooked up with him. On one of his pub crawls Mr. Cassini had met a man from the Royal Society who told him about Alexei: an intellectual shaman, he called him, obsessed with some Russian mathematicians he claimed had broken the logjam in set theory back in the days of the czars; some of them had been monks, and their theory of functions was actually based on an ancient mystical tradition, condemned by first the Orthodox Church and then the Communists. Through heroic effort, this wild man had managed to track down their papers and private journals, smuggled out of Russia during the Stalinist era. At the very least, the guy in the pub said, it was a great story.
Mr. Cassini tracked Alexei down at his shabby office over a kebab shop in Oxford; he had a small grant from the university’s mathematics faculty to oversee the publication of the papers, but his deadline had come and gone, the money was running out, and nobody was willing to provide more funding. It was shameful, he said on the phone, a disgrace, inimical to mankind’s best interests: the ramifications of the Name Worshippers’ work went far beyond mathematics; it constituted nothing less than an alternative to Western materialism.
Mr. Cassini sent him a check for a thousand pounds, but could do no more, his resources having been stretched to the limit. The profits from his Buffalo investments had nose-dived in his absence. He suspected Mr. Barreca of skimming off the profits, and was about to fly back to take control of his empire himself. But before he left he formulated a strategy to address Alexei’s plight: get him “fabulous” publicity in America, generate excitement; then the Rockefeller or Ford Foundation could be persuaded to fund his project. I, being an American, was his chosen instrument for this plan; I was supposed to publish an article in an American magazine, explaining the dramatic implications of Alexei’s work for the regeneration of society.
I pointed out that I knew less than nothing about math, and anyway Art & Antiques wasn’t likely to run a story on set theory. “But this guy wants to save humanity. You know that, right? And what if he could, just a little bit? What if he could make this messed-up old world just a teeny bit better, bring it half an inch closer to what God wants for us? Don’t we have to help him? Come on. You’re saying you won’t even go hear what he’s got to say? And write a few crummy letters to some magazines? I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
So I caved in and took a train to Oxford, where Alexei, peering at me over little gold glasses, running his hands excitably through his mane of white hair—he looked a bit like Einstein, which made it easier to suspend disbelief—delivered himself of an impassioned speech about Cantor’s beautiful spirit and the different types of infinity. He kept rummaging through the battered metal shelves to find yet another notebook or yellowed sheet of paper that he insisted I look at, never mind that, when they didn’t consist wholly of numbers, they were in Russian, which I had to keep reminding him I didn’t understand. “I will translate for you,” he said, although when he did, my comprehension didn’t extend much further.
“But this is absurd, to try to write all I say in a notebook, this is not the proper way to interview someone,” he said, clutching his head in distress, and dug out a tape recorder from the debris beneath his desk. We agreed that I would return it to him when I had finished transcribing the tapes, and meet again then to discuss the article further, in London this time. It was then I had the idea of bringing Isabel. I remembered her saying how she’d fallen in love with maths as an adolescent, only Sasha was so much better that she realized she didn’t have a real gift. Still, she’d done maths at A-level, which put her way ahead of me. She’d know the right questions to ask, she could tell me if his fixation on those monks was warranted or just plain nuts. If I thought at all about how she’d see him, I assumed it would be how I did: as an exotic throwback, a figure from a nineteenth-century Russian novel.
It was two years since our first meeting in the Reading Room. A few months before, I’d met a man at a TLS party, a thirty-six-year-old lecturer in history at Birkbeck, and embarked on a relationship that felt so uncomplicatedly easy I sometimes forgot his existence for hours at a time. I never once retreated to the ladies’ room of a restaurant where we were eating to gaze at myself anxiously in the mirror, hoping I hadn’t veered into hideousness during the course of the entrée. “Would you call this a love affair?” I asked him one night, as we lay in bed in his flat in Tufnell Park, his hand resting on my thigh, and he said, “Let’s just say we have a taste for each other’s company.”
His name was Jack; a miner’s son from Durham, he was now a member of what he called the North London chattering classes, mostly consisting of academics and journalists and a few therapists—a profession Jack regarded as a load of bollocks. Nobody in Durham, apparently, had ever paid good money to have someone listen to him whine about his problems. Another thing he was derisive about, with many cheerful snorts, was my romance with his “fucked-up, feudal” country. He claimed to prefer Americans for their openness, their bracing directness, though one of the most endearing things he ever told me was that the first time he’d gone to Manhattan, flying Laker’s Skytrain when he was just out of university, he really believed that if he offended a New Yorker—jostled a man in the subway, ordered a jelly doughnut in a coffee shop that had run out of jelly doughnuts—whoever it was might take out a gun and shoot him. Of course he laughed as he said it, but when we flew together to New York during his spring break I noticed he was wholly unlike his usual combative self. Even when my brother, who had come from Pittsburgh to see us, was telling him about the revolutionary potential of thrash metal music, even when Joannie’s husband described spending the night on the gym floor with his students, with only newspapers for blankets, to give them insight into the experience of homelessness, he only nodded at intervals and made murmurous hmmmm noises vaguely indicative of assent. It made me wonder if the thought of that gun was still lurking somewhere.
I’d been scared that the whole city would seem haunted, I’d be flooded with guilt or nostalgia or both, but only very rarely—turning the corner onto Second Avenue, the wind blowing bits of paper and grit into my face, or catching sight of a sign for Long Island City—did it feel as though Eliot was somewhere still, for a snatch of a minute the reality of him became so vivid that it knocked me off balance. Which happened sometimes in England too, when I was just on the brink of sleep. But mostly I had a slightly skittish sense of disconnection the whole time we were in New York, as though I weren’t quite present; my body had been transported from England but I hadn’t arrived yet.
Only in Gurneyville, my mother in her familiar green armchair, in her familiar green housecoat, did I feel wholly real to myself, back in touch with my past—all the old guilt and pity and anger and resentment, the waters closing over my head.
As far as the conversation went, I might have been visiting from Poughkeepsie, or Chittenango. The first thing she did when I arrived was to tell me that the TV was on the blink. “That’s not my fault,” I snapped, though she hadn’t said it was—it was only that all her complaints were uttered in a tone of reproach, so that even when she told me, via long distance, that Mrs. Zincke had fallen and broken her hip, she wouldn’t be coming by with hot meals for a while, I felt as though somehow this too was my fault, or at least I should fill in for her, I should be providing those hot meals.
“I don’t suppose you could take a look at it,” she said mournfully. And because she clearly had no real hope that I’d fix it, I was determined to. I fiddled with the knobs, I checked all the wires at the back to make sure they weren’t loose, and then removed them and blew into the holes, in case dust was the problem. When none of that worked, I thumped it on its side. “Stop that,” my mother said sharply, “you’re hurting it”—as though the television were the sentient object, not me. “Go on, get away from there.” Those little eruptions, when she awakened from her habitual daze, were always startling; in those years after my father left my brother and I would ignore her for hours or days, fix our own meals, shovel the path, squabble with each other over whose turn it was to do the dishes, and then suddenly, without warning, she’d rouse herself, she might attack with a dish towel, or her nails, or just stand up and shriek that she wished we’d never been born. Though she’d slump back into her chair a minute later, as though nothing had happened, we were always a little leery of her for a while afterward.
She hardly looked at the presents I had brought her, all those guilt offerings from London: a Royal Doulton cup and saucer, Yardley talcum powder, a paisley scarf. “Why don’t you wear it now?” I said brightly, but she shook her head. “Those new pills for my heart aren’t doing a darn bit of good.” After that we sat in silence for a minute, until, hysteria mounting, I leapt to my feet. “You know what? I think we should rearrange the furniture. Wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t you be glad of a change?” And when she didn’t outright refuse, I started jerking the couch across the room, pushing first one side and then another, huffing and puffing, till it stood in the opposite corner. I dragged the coffee table across the carpet, picked up the side table with the lamp and stuck it next to the couch, moved everything but the chair she was sitting on, exclaiming in false delight as I stood back and examined my work. “There! Isn’t that better? It makes the room seem more spacious, don’t you think?”
She looked me in the face then, pityingly, as though sensing my desperation; she gave a little sigh and leaned toward me, her lips parted. It flashed into my head that she was going to say I couldn’t change her life by changing the furniture around. I knew there was no answer to that, I dreaded hearing her say it, but I almost wanted her to, at least there’d be some kind of truth between us. Instead she fell back again. “If you say so.” After that there was more about Mrs. Zincke, and the pills, and the new social worker, a big fat lady, not half as pretty as the girl that used to come. The very last thing she said, as I was leaving to catch the bus back to the city, was about the TV: “I bet Eliot could have fixed it,” she said. “Eliot was so good at fixing things.”