Two
I wasn’t good with people. How could I have been?
My foster-parents had adopted me because Mary could not have children of her own. That was what she told me, although I have since wondered whether my foster-father had been too busy reading about the politics of Germany and the Hapsburg Empire in the mid-nineteenth century to find time to take her to bed. Mary often told me what a beautiful baby I had been. She used to speak wistfully about how enchanting I had been, looking past me as she recalled the first time she saw me, the one moment in the entire process of my adoption she seemed able to recall with pleasure.
She treated me well, though. I cannot remember ever having been beaten, or even any really hard words. It was simply that she found, quite soon after taking me in, that she did not really love me: indeed she did not seem even to like me.
My foster-father was quite straightforward in his attitude towards me. I had been brought into the house as an indulgence for Mary. After that, it was best if I kept out of his way. That was easy enough. He spent most of his time when he was not at the university locked up in a small room he called sometimes his ‘library’ and at other times his ‘office’.
We led a quiet life together. My foster-father’s social life was limited to the Senior Common Room at the university, or wherever else political-history lecturers gather together to graze in the fields of learning. People rarely came to our house for any form of entertainment and, when they did, it did not tempt them to stay long.
I grew up a solitary child. I did not have much opportunity to meet other children outside school, but perhaps that was just as well: I found it difficult enough to talk to them in school. I kept my thoughts to myself. I was a very neat and tidy child. No one could ever complain about that. Sometimes I looked up to the sky and saw stars, even in the daylight. No one else ever seemed to see the stars that I saw, so I did not mention them to anyone else. I think I was about sixteen when I discovered I had an aptitude for numbers. I was not particularly good at any subject until, suddenly, I began to excel at mathematics. My foster-father thought this was a waste of time.
‘What is the use of knowing how to add up,’ he asked me, ‘unless you are planning on working as a shop assistant. Are you planning on working as a shop assistant, Frankie?’
‘Not particularly,’ I mumbled.
‘I hope you are planning on doing something,’ he said. ‘Bringing you up has been a considerable financial burden. I wish you could appreciate the sacrifices we have made. I hope you do not expect this largesse to last for ever.’
I did not know then what ‘largesse’ meant. My foster-father enjoyed using words like that.
I said, ‘I’m interested in computers, though.’
‘Oh, computers,’ said my foster-father.
When I was awarded a scholarship at a local university to read Computer Sciences, I went and knocked on the door of my foster-father’s office. It was unheard of for anyone to interrupt him while he was working on his book. The projected Life of Bismarck occupied a great deal of his time. A publisher in Augsburg in Germany was said to be keenly interested in the German rights.
‘Who is it?’ he called.
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘It’s Frankie.’
‘What do you want? I’m very busy.’
‘I just wanted to tell you something.’
He called me in. The weariness in his voice made me feel tired. I opened the door. He looked up from his desk. His hands were covered in printing ink from the ribbon of his Remington typewriter.
‘What is it, Frankie? You can see how busy I am.’
‘Let me help,’ I said, and quickly untangled the ribbon for him and clicked the spool back into place. Then I said, ‘I’ve been given a scholarship, to read Computer Sciences at Durham University.’
My foster-father said, ‘Oh. Well, I don’t see why you couldn’t have waited until dinner to tell me that. And I suppose you expect me to pay for your maintenance, do you?’
My father was right: my news could have waited until dinner.
I never finished the university course. I absorbed knowledge so fast that I soon knew more than most of the lecturers, at least about the things that interested me. After eighteen months I left, and with some help from one of the lecturers, who gave me some contraband ‘obsolete’ equipment from one of the computer labs, I started my own business.
Of course, since setting up my own company I had learned the necessity of meeting people and getting on with them. Customers in particular needed careful handling. I had learned that you had to talk to them, before you could ask them for money. Until Andy joined the business I found the selling side rather painful and, if it had not been that the software I had developed was really rather good, I would never have made a sale. When Andy joined, even though he was employed as finance director, his natural social skills meant that he took over a lot of the customer work, until we grew big enough to employ full-time salesmen. Even then he kept up the relationships with our bigger customers. He was a natural. He laughed, he made jokes, and he teased them about their football teams. Everyone liked Andy.
I don’t know how much any of them liked me, except for Andy himself. They knew, though, that the business wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for me. I was the person who had developed the original software on which the business had been built, and I still knew more about it than anyone else. When the staff or the customers needed more than jokes, they came to me for the explanations and the answers.
I knew how to talk to people, but I had never got to the point of doing it for fun.
The day that I left Hartlepool Hall, after having had lunch there, I believed that I would never see Ed or Eck again. Why would I? All that had happened was that there had been a transaction: one hour of IT support, provided by Wilberforce, value say £100; one lamb chop, and a cup of coffee, provided by Ed Simmonds, value say £10. On the face of it Ed Simmonds still owed me something, but then he had given me, if only for a couple of hours, the countenance of his friendship, value probably rather more than £90.
Andy used to tell me he was my friend, usually in the context of a discussion about salaries or share options, and in many ways he was my friend. We used to have supper together in a little Indian restaurant sometimes after work; we shared moments of triumph and crisis in the business; and we plotted and schemed together. All of those things I thought amounted to friendship. I supposed that that was what friendship was. But after my visit to Hartlepool Hall I began to speculate that there might be other modes of life, where people passed time together and did not talk about their work but about other things: about each other; about forms of activity of which I knew nothing, such as racing or hunting; even about wine. I imagined the world inhabited by these people to be like a garden surrounded by a high wall: inside the garden, the few inhabitants allowed to enter it enjoyed a life of leisure, in surroundings that were pleasant to the eye; outside, the world trudged about its weary business. I had been allowed a glimpse of the garden through the railings, had even stepped inside for a moment, and it had unsettled me. In the garden there were fewer transactions than on the outside: instead relationships flourished, which the word ‘transaction’ was not always adequate to describe. I had thought that relationships with other people, if you had to have them, were based on mutual need: I have something you want; you have something I want. The possibility that people could spend time together with no other object in mind than enjoyment of one another’s company was a new idea to me.
My life, which before had seemed full, now seemed empty.
My routine went on as before. I worked until seven or seven thirty, then drove to the food mall at the shopping centre, bought a takeaway and took it home. I would sit at the kitchen table in my flat, eating the food without really knowing what it was I was eating, and sipping the giant Diet Coke I usually bought to wash down the food. Sometimes I had the television on when I did this; sometimes I did not. I never took much notice of what the programmes were about, anyway. While the television was on, the picture and the sound gave an illusion of activity to the flat which I liked, for some reason.
After I had finished eating I used to tidy up. A cleaning lady who did the other flats in the building came in three times a week, and did the laundry as well, so there was never very much to do. I liked rearranging things: I used to rearrange the books in the bookcase, a mixture of a few novels bought at the supermarket checkout and manuals for software developers. I would sometimes arrange them by size and at other times by colour. I used to wash and dry the foil cartons in which my takeaways came and keep them in neat piles, in case they could be of use some day. I rearranged the piles of cartons now and then. I found it soothing. At other times I would empty everything from the fridge and clean the fridge out, a job the cleaning lady often neglected to do. There was never much in it: a block of processed Cheddar, a tub of instantly spreadable butter, a carton of orange juice or two, and a few eggs.
If there was nothing to tidy up, I would sit and do large sums in my head. It was an ability I had been born with: numbers were to me like words to other people. Thinking up algorithms was a form of passing the time that I found particularly satisfactory. When I had completed these recreations, it would be time to turn on the computer, call up the office file server, and do a couple of hours work on whatever project was engaging me at the time. Some time before midnight I would go to bed and sleep for a few hours before driving to the office at five or six in the morning.
For more than ten years this routine had satisfied me, and I had needed no other distraction in my life. I loved doing what I did. I was good at it - better than most people. My work was everything to me: Andy used to say I was obsessive about it, but then he earned a salary of seventy thousand a year on the back of my obsessions, so he really couldn’t complain.
Now, like dawn creeping through the drawn curtains of a darkened room, a pale light was beginning to grow, and as it grew it illuminated the austere and lonely nature of my world. It hadn’t just been the visit to Hartlepool Hall that had unsettled me. One morning I woke up with a haunting sense of loss. I awoke from a dream, and as I awoke, its shreds and tatters of memory drifted away and evaporated into nothingness even as my conscious mind reached out to grasp them. I awoke from a dream in which someone very close to me had died, and yet in the dream he or she was still able to reproach me, to call out to me for help. It had been a she, I felt sure. As my mind struggled with the remains of sleep, for a moment the image in my dream came back to me. I saw a dim figure on the far shore of a pale lake, with her arms reaching out to me. It seemed to me that if I could have reached out and touched her outstretched fingers, and grasped her hands, I might have brought her back; but the pale lake stood between us and I knew I could never cross it. Then the figure receded into darkness, and as it disappeared, its silent cry of anguish and despair reached inside me and twisted itself around my heart. Then I was truly awake, and tears stood in the corners of my eyes.
A dream is a dream, and most of the few dreams I had ever had involved the development of a new bit of software. Once I dreamed I had found a new prime number. I had never had a dream like this before. Its memory stayed with me for days, like a wound deep within my brain that would not heal.
The existence that I had led, sitting in front of a computer for fourteen hours out of every twenty-four, once seemed to have sufficient rigour and clarity to be the complete answer to any question that I might ask myself about the point of my existence. Now, I began to appreciate that life and software development could not be balanced in the same scales. I began to imagine that my life was itself like an insoluble equation, and there was an ‘x’ in the middle of the equation that I had to understand and could not quantify.
Ed Simmonds didn’t ring me back. Once I would have been grateful not to have the problem of knowing how to refuse further invitations. Now I regretted that he had ever allowed me to think that he would be in touch again. I had written my telephone number down for him because he had asked me to, and I had left it by the telephone in his sitting room. It would not have required a moment of his time to pick up the phone and call me, and he appeared to have no shortage of time available to him. He did not ring, and I knew exactly what he must think about it all, as if I could hear him in the next room speaking to Eck about me: ‘Such an odd chap, that Wilberforce; he’s awfully clever with computers. He must live and breathe them. He doesn’t tell many jokes, though, does he?’ and Eck would reply, ‘True. Still, it’s probably better to keep his number in case your machine breaks down or something?’
Ed Simmonds didn’t ring. I did go back to see Francis Black now and then. He did not seem to mind me dropping in and he did not expect me to buy anything. We sat and talked and I was surprised how easy it was to talk to Francis; or to listen, for Francis was quite apt to suddenly recall some piece of family history, or some incident from his own past, which he would decide it would suit me to hear about. I began to form a disconnected picture of Francis’s past. He had been wild in his youth - almost to the point of self-destruction. The death of his parents and the inheritance of what remained of his family estate had steadied him up. Now wine was his one reason for living. It was almost an obsession with him.
I did not visit Francis very often. I was afraid of imposing myself on him. From time to time I bought a bottle of his wine, because I thought it might be expected of me, in order to give him the pleasure of telling me all about the grower, the vintage or the appellation. Francis’s shop had been where I had met Ed and Eck, and whenever I went up to Caerlyon I half-expected and half-hoped I would see another car parked in the courtyard. I never did.
After each visit, if I had bought some wine, I would put the bottle away somewhere. There were quite a few of them after a while, lining my shelves. Very occasionally I opened a bottle and drank a glass. I had to admit that I could see why people sometimes drank wine. The taste was strangely interesting, certainly more interesting than Diet Coke. If I ever drank a second glass I felt, for a moment, disinclined to do any tidying up or count up to very large numbers in my head. Oddly enough, the most readily identifiable feeling I had after drinking the second glass was that it might be nice to drink a third. I never did; I poured the rest of the bottle down the sink, as Francis had told me I should, so that the wine should not die.
It was odd to think that wine could die so quickly. What had Francis’s words been? A lifetime of experience to create, ten years in the bottle to become ready to drink, and a few hours of drinkable life before the wine was drunk or extinguished.
One’s own life, too, was finite. I had once read in a science magazine that we start to die as soon as our cells stop dividing and growing, in our late teens or early twenties. The same article said that we lost most of our ability to learn at around the age of five, when our ability to absorb new information reduced by at least three-quarters. On that basis I was on the way out. I was well over thirty, my brain was vanishing in an exponential decay of brain cells, my body had stopped growing and started ageing, and all I had ever done was write some clever software.
I expressed this view to Andy one night in Al Diwan, the Indian restaurant we used to eat in.
He piled a spoonful or two of chopped onion on to a flake of poppadum, added a good-sized amount of hot lime pickle and said, ‘Yes, well, in your case, Wilberforce, it is very likely that you are either already dead, or else in a state of suspended animation.’
‘That’s not particularly funny,’ I said. Andy enjoyed winding me up, I knew, and he indulged himself quite often enough for me.
‘No, but seriously, you don’t allow yourself much of a life. Why don’t you ever go on holiday?’
‘Where to?’
‘Majorca? Florida? The Maldives? You could afford to go anywhere in the world, but you never bother.’
Andy went on holiday a lot. He worked hard, but he went to France or Spain with his girlfriend at least three times a year, and dreamed of owning his own villa next door to a golf course.
‘What would I do on holiday?’ I asked him.
‘Nothing - that’s the whole point,’ explained Andy. He drank from his glass of lager. ‘And then there’s the question of your social life.’
‘What social life?’
‘Exactly,’ said Andy. ‘What social life? Other people have friends. They even have girlfriends. They go to bed with their girlfriends sometimes and have sex with them. Did you do sex at school, or did you leave before they got to that bit?’
I didn’t like Andy teasing me, but then again I did like him talking about me. No one else had ever spent any time on the subject, apart from the teachers who wrote my school reports. He had an attractive girlfriend called Clare whom he had once told me he might marry when he had the time.
‘I got a GSCE in Biology,’ I said, ‘I got a C. I got an A-star in Mathematics and—’
‘We’re not writing your CV,’ said Andy. ‘I’m just saying that most people, when they get to your age, probably have a few friends. They might belong to the rugby club, or the tennis club, or the golf club. They might not even belong to a club at all, but just might get out and meet people. They might be going out with someone, or they might even be married. Wilberforce, did you know quite a lot of people got married before they were thirty? You and I are still single and at our ages we are the exception rather than the rule. But at least I can say I have a girl in my life.’
‘A very nice one too,’ I said, thinking of Clare.
‘She is, isn’t she?’ agreed Andy, with a complacent smile. ‘I don’t mean to lecture you - ah, mine is the lamb vindaloo; my friend is having the chicken madras,’ he said to the waiter as the food began to arrive. ‘But it was you that brought up the subject of a social life.’
There was a pause while we helped ourselves to curry.
‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about having a social life myself,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure how to go about it, or what I would do with it if I got one.’
‘A social life’, explained Andy, ‘isn’t like a takeaway. You can’t buy it. Well, some people can, but I don’t think that you are one of them. You have to work at it. You have to meet people, you have to like them, and they have to like you. That’s how it works.’
‘I met some people the other day,’ I said, as casually as I could.
‘People? What people?’ he asked. He seemed slightly put out by my initiative.
‘Oh, some people at the top of the hill.’ Then I had to explain that my remark was not about their social status, but more to do with geography.
He said, ‘Well, there you are. It just shows how these things can happen. Will you be seeing them again?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘It depends.’
Then he became bored with teasing me and we spent the rest of the evening, as usual, talking about the business. Andy wanted me to float it on the stock market one day and I said, ‘That’s more or less the same as selling it, isn’t it? I don’t think I could ever sell it. What would I do with the money? What would be the point?’
It depends, I had said, when Andy had asked me if I would see my new friends again. It depends on what? I wondered, as I drove home that evening. On what would it depend that Ed Simmonds, whom I hardly knew, or Eck, or Francis, or anyone whom I would ever meet, would want, having once met me, to repeat the experience? I couldn’t think of a single reason. What could he gain from seeing me a second time, if his computer still worked?
Once again the image of a secret garden came into my mind. Everybody else in the world was in on the secret and had a key to its iron door. Only I, a child of no known mother, a person of no accomplishments except being able to add up large numbers in his head, prowled around on the outside and was never to be admitted.
I did not sleep much that night. It takes someone to tell you about what you might be missing before you realise you are missing it. That was what Andy had just done. I lay awake staring at the invisible ceiling in the darkness, and thought about prime numbers and counted in my head up to some impossibly large number. At four in the morning, I fell into a sleep like drowning. I awoke with a start at half past seven, feeling dreadful, and rushed into the office without stopping to shave.
Andy was already there. ‘Morning, Wilberforce,’ he said. ‘You look ghastly. I told you the chicken madras would be too hot for you.’