The Green papers (continued)

When they began the interview in the low, late afternoon light, I took the opportunity to sleep. Christine’s cameras, after all, were running, so for the following couple of hours there would be multiple copies of their activity. When I woke, I checked that both of them were asleep and then reviewed the interview in detail. I realised again that Cartwright was telling us nothing new. We had already monitored the activity of his systems and knew that many thousands of interactions took place between the different modules every day. But the jigsaw of relationships they presented had defied analysis. We could list all the individual transactions, and had been doing so for several months. We could analyse the trends in his dealings. But what we could not do was detect any consistent pattern, any formulaic system. The trades and even the overall strategy often seemed contradictory, even potentially self-defeating. That they eventually coalesced into repeated success was beyond debate, but after the interview the scenario was no easier to assemble than the day before. As he claimed, there seemed to be some underlying, unifying idea that was known only by him.

What did surprise me was that they had not completed the interview. Over the years I have come to know my wife’s professional approach in some detail, and it struck me as highly unlike her to have left a job half done. They had in fact descended into argument, almost animosity during the discussion. It had started during the point about stealing computer time. Cartwright had objected to the use of the term ‘stealing’, but Christine refused to refer to it any other way. He backed down and continued, but there was a second tiff at the mention of ancient history. They had a serious breakdown again after references to milliseconds and then the process broke down completely when Christine mentioned his previous unwillingness to be interviewed. He stormed off to his study and did not reappear. Christine stayed up for an hour or so, time she spent reviewing her recordings.

She then slept, but only fitfully, waking up several times before dawn and even taking a couple of strolls around the house’s balcony in the dark. She managed to kick the butane bottle under the stove at the back of the house, her false leg giving a hard tap that gave out a loud, sonorous clang. The noise seemed to cut through the near complete silence, ringing for some time, but Cartwright did not stir.

He was not asleep, incidentally. I knew that, but Christine clearly did not. I checked several times and on each occasion he was awake, but he was neither working nor reading, just sitting quietly in the dark. Just before dawn he took up his notebook, switched on his light and wrote a page or so of notes. And then, apparently without re-reading or checking his work, he extinguished the light, closed his notebook and replaced it on his shelf. Dawn had broken by the time he left his room, so perhaps for him the day had well and truly begun. He certainly did not hesitate in waking Christine to demand they finish the interview. She, of course, was barely awake, and still tired, but she agreed immediately.

When viewing that first encounter you will notice several anomalies. Despite the fact that the only backdrop visible is the lashed bamboo of the house behind them, you will notice that the quality of the light changes abruptly about three quarters of the way through the sequence. This was the overnight pause. It is rendered less noticeable by the use of several short continuity sequences, but the point where they re-started is quite clear. I mention this because not only did Cartwright’s manner at the end appear to be different from the start, but also because Christine did seem to break off the encounter just as he seemed ready to open up, which I found immediately surprising. Perhaps she was conscious of already having exceeded the projected length of the first episode, but she may also have felt that she had lost control of the material and, rather than allow Cartwright to take control, she decided to cut her losses.

Immediately after they stopped recording, Cartwright announced he was going to swim and did so. He was away for just a few minutes, returning before Christine had finished packing away her cameras and putting their batteries on charge. It was while she was doing this that I realised the constant low drone I had previously ascribed to the engines of passing boats was in fact the rhythm of Cartwright’s windmill generator as it rotated out of my sight above the house. He had little use for electricity, it seemed, and this makeshift arrangement appeared to provide for all his needs. We never did locate the bank of car batteries he mentioned several times, the system that ensured a stable supply.

By the time Christine had tidied her cameras and cables away, Cartwright had already cooked and served fried rice. As he presented Christine with a plate and spoon she asked, “Is this all you ever eat - rice and sambal?”

“Pretty much... plus fresh fish and crabs, of course. I’ll catch something later so we can have a change. It won’t be much - just a little bream or two.”

Christine accepted the plate and started to eat. She had by now laid claim to a particular chair on the front balcony. Seated, she ate in silence, apparently studying the sea between the house and the distant Borneo coast.

“I still haven’t really got my bearings,” she said.

Cartwright appeared from inside to stand at the end of the balcony. He spoke between mouthfuls of his breakfast. “That’s where you got on the ferry,” he said pointing to the east. “That’s where you got off.” He indicated the port on the island to their left, its few tall buildings visible above the trees and then continued, “...and that’s where I picked you up.” He concluded by pointing at the northern tip of the island. The hotel was, of course, out of sight, around the other side of the mangrove-fringed headland that was in view.

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t meet me in the main harbour, where the ferry left me.”

“The answer to that would have been fairly clear, if you had taken a moment to inspect the only area where a boat like mine would have been allowed to pick you up, being the jetty used by the open water taxis, boats like mine, in other words. There’s a wide ladder that the passengers have to clamber down to get into the boats, and there’s a good foot and a half between some of the rungs. You would never have managed it. I thought you might slip...” He paused for a few seconds, his tone having registered that he would continue. “And so I decided on the hotel jetty... and you slipped.”

Christine laughed. “I was never very agile. I always had a tendency to trip up over my own feet.”

“Your own foot...” Cartwright offered a smile, but Christine did not respond. “I can remember how you used to fall over every time you bowled a ball during that summer when we went to the park every day.”

Christine laughed. “Tom, that was forty years ago. You hadn’t thought, of course, that in the intervening years I might have become more used to the reality of wearing a false leg!”

Cartwright stood up from the chair beside Christine, set down his plate on the small table beside his chair and jokingly mimicked a person taking careful but unsteady aim in a game of bowls. He then theatrically leaned forward, swung his arm to indicate the delivery action and then fell forward onto his face. He turned onto his back, laughing, “...and that’s how you used to do it. Mind you,” he continued, pivoting so he could lie on his side, supporting his head on a bent arm, “I used to enjoy helping you to your feet. I could get my arms around you.”

Christine ignored his reminiscence. “You made a comment yesterday... a comment about not being able to judge which way a bowling ball would go...”

Cartwright got up with the help of the balcony balustrade and associated grunts of exertion. He retrieved his plate of rice and then spoke as he slumped back into the chair next to her. “Did you ever play bowls again?”

There was an initial pause, but then Christine laughed again in that whole-hearted guffaw she had let loose when she fell into the boat. “No. I never did... You know, I had almost completely forgotten about...”

“I did,” he said, proudly. “In fact I became quite good at it. The game became my first real project, my first proper attempt at analysing the real world.”

“I have not really considered crown green bowls as being part of the real world.”

“It’s not unreal. Try kicking one of the balls.” He paused. “And you became a Green...” He glanced at her momentarily, theatrically frowning and grimacing as he feigned an attempt to inspect the top of her head. “...but I see no crown... only the halo.” His gulp of water was almost punctuation.

Christine smiled broadly, but histrionically ignored his clearly pointed comment and continued to make notes on her pad.

For the first time since Christine’s arrival, Cartwright appeared to be relaxed. “I knew there had to be a critical point somewhere. You remember, of course, how usually we tried to counteract the slope by bowling with the bias towards the crown, thinking that the ball would travel in a straight line?” He turned towards Christine, as if to confirm she was smiling. “And of course generally it did, until the momentum reduced and then it tended to fall away on the slope and then curve...” Christine nodded, feigning only partial interest, but with an expression that displayed a distance both in space and time.

“...before settling onto the bias...”

“So you do remember.”

“How could I possibly forget?” The reply was immediate, its tone ironic.

Now Cartwright laughed. “But what interested me was how you bowled those difficult ones that went across the crown. Sometimes it would finish so far from the jack I just couldn’t believe it. There was clearly a critical point, a combination of speed, slope and bias. Get the right side of the variables and the ball behaved as desired, but get even slightly on the wrong side and you missed by a mile.”

“At which point you would storm off after the ball in a temper so you could try the shot again.”

“I’ve never been one to accept failure, especially my own.”

“And then that big chap with the waistcoat and watch chain would come out and shout, ‘F-off home you hooligans. Stop destroying our green!’”

“Christine, people in those days did not say ‘fuck off’. If I might quote him accurately, I think the words he chose were, ‘Hey you two, sling your hook!’”

“Which would have been politically incorrect if we had lost arms rather than legs.”

Cartwright’s chuckle to himself was barely a pause. “After all these years I can see his point. No matter how careful we were, the feet on those prostheses did dig into the turf.”

“Especially when you set off after a bad one at top speed... I remember yours almost used to screw itself into the ground, especially when it was wet.”

“It wasn’t damage to the turf that irked him. What really made him angry was the fact that I repeated a shot. He thought it was bad manners... against the spirit of fair play. One day he even took me aside and whispered the word ‘etiquette’”.

“He was a fat old boor.”

“He merely offended your middle class sensibilities.”

The conversation stalled here for several minutes. It was Christine who resumed.

“So you solved the problem and became an expert at bowls?”

“No, far from it. There were far too many variables, and all the greens are different... except this one of course,” he said turning towards Christine with a knowing smile. “This one seems to be very much the same as it used to be.” He paused again to check if Christine might react, but she did not. “I was young and naïve...”

“No! Never!” said Christine, mocking.

“... and thought I could model the process. The slopes are all different, the grass types have different friction characteristics. Then there’s humidity and dew, as well as gravity and the dynamics, not to mention the unevenly distributed weight of the ball, its rotation and wobbling moment of inertia. And even after the attention of old Joe Baxter, the groundsman, even the green we used was uneven both in surface and slope.”

“It certainly was uneven after you had screwed your rubber foot into it a few times.”

Cartwright turned to give her a light playful slap on the forearm with the spoon in his right hand. “It wasn’t that bad..:”

“So rule of thumb gives better results?”

“Indeed it does, except that in bowls it’s as often rule of finger.”

Christine laughed and then skilfully switched the conversation to her concerns. “So do rules of finger and thumb underpin what you do now?”

Cartwright turned to face her as he spooned the last of his rice into his mouth. After a concentrated chew and a swallow he said, “No comment,” and they were silent for several minutes. As the microphones adjusted to the lack of nearby sound, the lapping waves beneath the house grew gradually louder. Words, when they came, then seemed like a shout, causing the newly readjusted level to miss some of what followed near silently in reply.

“Do you think we’d have lived if we’d not had each other?”

“We did live, didn’t we...” Cartwright continued to mumble unintelligibly for several seconds. “ ...had each other...”

Had I not been well prepared, the direction of their conversation would have confused me and its significance would have been lost. But it was only after I had viewed the action and read my comment several times that I was persuaded to insert a short commentary of my own at this point, a commentary that might assist readers to interpret what was being said, so that they might understand it as I did implicitly at the time, but only in detail after subsequent consideration.

The period that Christine and Tom Cartwright had referred to was a particular summer, specifically the two months from early June to early August 1970, when they were both eighteen. A couple of months before Christine undertook this One-On-One assignment, I had no knowledge whatsoever of this short, but apparently momentous period in her life. She had never referred to these regular encounters with her fellow amputee during our thirty-five years of married life, and she had made not even a reference to the period in her autobiography, except a passing mention that taking walks in the park had helped her come to terms with her new false leg. Even the autobiographical mini-series she made for national television that focused on her home village, featuring the contrast between the contemporary and the remembered, had included no mention of what proved to be a crucial and intense period for both herself and Cartwright. The topic arose almost by chance during sessions when we jointly examined the current mission brief from all possible angles. That they had known one another during their school years was already well known. It was, indeed, the prime reason why we chose Christine for this assignment. That they had become lovers during their final months at school was perhaps known only to the two of them. That their relationship came to fruition playing bowls on a municipal crown green had remained their shared, but private knowledge.

Christine and Tom Cartwright spent at least four days of each of those eight weeks playing bowls in the local park. They were brought up in West Yorkshire when it was still called a Riding. The game of bowls in that area, unlike elsewhere in the country, is more usually played on green with a crown, so it involves the anticipation of an effect of slope as well as the draw of the balls. Unlike the flat green game, the players can also send the jack in any direction they want, and to any length. Ends can be played across the crown, along the edges, into the centre, long or short. At busy times, of course, when there might be several simultaneous games on one green, there is always a danger of one game’s bowls hitting players involved in another end. There is an etiquette whereby the bowler, anticipating such a problem, shouts “Feet!” in the same way that a golfer might shout “Fore!”. Given their circumstances, it seems that Cartwright developed a personal take on this practice, insisting on shouting “Foot!” in a determined singular on the rare occasions when there were other players on the green during the day. Christine, I realised just two weeks before the current mission, had internalised this call, and continued to use it. Over the years, I had become used to her issuing it whenever something got in the way of her false leg, thus preventing her from moving easily. I had thus learned to respond to any call of “Foot!”, knowing I was urgently needed to help her out of some situation where her false leg had become caught or jammed. I had never before been able to interpret the little giggle she always gave when she said it, however, until I learned of her bowling summer of 1970.

They played during the day, never in the evenings. On every occasion, they were supposed to be in school, so they were playing truant as well as bowls, but then their teachers knew what was happening and turned a blind eye. There was considerable sympathy for both of them in their respective schools, since it was generally assumed they would both die. They played all morning, usually starting soon after nine and then for a couple of hours each afternoon. There were a few days when they did not play, because they had to attend hospital appointments - together, as it happens. They would pause for an early lunch at the municipal café by the duck pond around twelve, a lunch whose form and content quickly became institutionalised, since the only things on offer were commercial confectionaries, which they despised, and, courtesy of the café’s manageress, as a means of earning a few extra bob for herself, some home-made pasties. They would have finished their pasty and tea by one, the time that the groundsman, a Mr Baxter, took his own lunch habitually in the pub. His brief, of course, was that he should close the green, lock the equipment in the shed and re-open at two. But because these two monopedal waifs appeared each day at one o’clock from the café, having already spent all morning on the green, Baxter soon took pity on them and left the shed open while he went to the pub, especially when it rained, so the two of them might shelter. But whatever the motivation of their facilitator, there may have been an element of social class pressure here, with Baxter being essentially unwilling to lord it over a couple of school-uniformed elite, despite their youth, and despite his annoyed authority. There might also, of course, have been an element of sympathy for their predicament, or even fear of their disability, their recently-acquired deformity, in his decision.

Cartwright and Christine had the place to themselves for that lunch hour. Since Baxter’s lunchtime pint could almost time the half hour, his two pints, plus the five minutes each way it took to walk to the park gates and across the road, was how long the two eighteen-year-olds had on each occasion, and they quickly learned to use it well. Given their circumstances, their encounters clearly gave new meaning to the cliché “I’ll show you mine if...”

Christine Gardiner and Thomas Cartwright were brought up in the same village, though they never attended the same school and, until their illness, had never met. The Gardiners were a middle class family. Richard, Christine’s father, was an optician with his own established practice in the local town. Jennifer, his wife, was a colour chemist, employed by a chemical company in another nearby town that specialised in the manufacture of dyes for the textile industry. Both parents pursued professional careers and were already comfortably off when Christine, a late child, was born. They had already designed and built the extensive bungalow on a corner plot in an exclusive, almost hidden, enclave on the edge of the village and had been in residence there for almost ten years when Jennifer’s mother moved in with them, following the death of her second husband. It was two years later, when Jennifer Gardiner was almost forty that Christine was born in 1952. Jennifer went straight back to work, of course, and Christine was brought up mainly by her live-in grandmother, with whom she developed a close relationship.

The Cartwrights lived at the other end of the village, close to the coal mine. Trevor Cartwright was a coal merchant and by the mid-nineteen-fifties was already running his own business with the help of the family lorry and the two assistants he employed on a casual basis. His own father had run such a business, starting with a horse and cart before graduating to a truck as his trade increased. Trevor’s father joined up and served in the army during the war, and was killed in action in Burma just as Trevor himself was approaching school leaving age. A premature exit from school allowed him to devote himself full time to the business, which needed considerable attention, since neglect during the later war years meant that everything had to be rebuilt virtually from scratch. As an only child, he took full possession of the family home and business when his mother died in 1947.

Trevor Cartwright married Stella Ramsden at eighteen and they eventually had five children. Thomas Cartwright was born in 1952, and was the middle child. Two older brothers grew up to strapping lads in their father’s mould. They joined the family business on leaving school and soon refocused it away from the by then ailing coal deliveries towards removals. Tom’s two younger sisters both lived what can only be described as conventional village lives, leaving school at fifteen and sixteen respectively, and getting both married and pregnant before the age of twenty. Both made their homes in the village.

Tom Cartwright’s four siblings thus conformed to their father’s somewhat limited expectations and canalised assumptions of what constituted a life, something the middle child never seemed to want. He was different, from an early age, and his desires and needs were always a bone of contention between Trevor and Stella. The child may even have forced the parents apart. Whatever the reason, the family had a reputation in the village for domestic violence, with, in later years, Stella Cartwright often seen out about sporting a shiner. I must stress that my willingness to be definitive about the domestic violence indicates that reference has been made to it during our research on the background of the subject by several independent contacts. This is no mere gossip.

The relationship between husband and wife started to deteriorate when Tom Cartwright fell ill as a toddler. He contracted meningitis and took several months to recover. It was said by those who remembered him as a child that he was still in his pram long after he ought to have been walking, that he used to sit with his head lolling to one side, wore a rather vacant unchanging expression and developed speech very slowly. But he was well enough to start school as a rising five and, by the age of seven, his experience there had become far from the norm, since he was identified as a gifted child, whose intellectual abilities deserved special treatment. He was duly accelerated through primary school and entered Grammar school at the age of ten. This meant, of course, that by the time he came to be playing bowls in 1970, he had already completed his A-levels and won a university place. He had used his third year in the sixth form to seek entry to Oxbridge, an ambition that was thwarted by his cancer treatment.

Christine Gardiner, meanwhile, attended a private prep school and then the private Girl’s High School, which was in the same town as Thomas Cartwright’s Grammar, but separated by the half mile or so of the town park. They did not know one another - in fact they had never met, Christine assured me - before their first shared encounter in hospital in their mid-teens. Christine did her A-levels at eighteen, having already been prepared for Oxbridge entrance by her school, which had more experience of the process than Tom’s Grammar. She was offered a place to read ancient history at a well known ladies’ college, as she herself used to refer to it, but still needed to achieve reasonable grades in her exams. Of course she lost a lot of school time during the latter part of 1969 and into 1970 as a result of her own treatment regime, but she sat her exams at the appointed time, just six weeks after her amputation. Her grades proved to be lower than required, but the college took circumstances into account and upheld her offer.

The fact that two adolescents of roughly the same age and from the same village both developed bone cancer in the knee is one of those coincidences that becomes only harder to accept. I have spoken personally to the epidemiologist who two decades later conducted research on several identified disease hotspots and she shared with me both the papers she published and the primary data she collected. She investigated the West Yorkshire cancers of the late 1960s and found nothing to suggest they should be attributed to anything other than chance. And yet these two sixteen-year-olds, as they were when they first developed symptoms, lived in the same village and both developed virulent and similar tumours on the knee, albeit in different legs, albeit on the tibia in Christine’s case and the femur in Cartwright’s. They found themselves visiting the same treatment centre, often with adjacent appointments with the same specialist. Of course, it did not take long for the two patients to become friends and compare notes on their progress, but their parents never seemed to exchange more than a cursory greeting and hardly interacted. Tom was always accompanied by his mother, since his father by then wanted little or nothing to do with him, whereas Christine’s parents shared the responsibility of taking her to the hospital in an attempt to disrupt their professional lives as little as possible. As a result, Stella Cartwright sometimes greeted Jennifer Gardiner and on other occasions it would be Richard, and it was perhaps this lack of habit in their practice that precluded more intimate engagement. At the time, of course, Stella Cartwright was also suffering domestic abuse, so there would probably have been occasions when her main personal goal was to hide.

Their tumours, of course, were similar, but not clinically the same, and were thus treated quite differently. Both patients had chemotherapy and radiotherapy at different times, but Tom’s cancer was soon deemed to be highly aggressive and his amputation took place soon after his seventeenth birthday, giving him some months to recover before his exams. In any case, that summer he was scheduled to take only scholarship exams, and special papers, since he had completed his A-levels the previous year.

In Christine’s case, whether because of the different nature of her disease or as a result of some desire to prevent her cosmetic disfigurement if at all possible, she underwent prolonged radiotherapy in an attempt to avoid amputation. This proved debilitating at the time, but allowed her sufficiently long periods of stability to enable her to complete her Oxbridge selection process. When she eventually was forced to resort to amputation, it was close to her exams and affected her performance, but because she was already in the system, her application prevailed. Tom, over at the Grammar, had never been able to enter the Oxbridge selection process so, despite getting excellent A-level grades, he made do with a place in Manchester, since he had spent most of the previous year’s scholarship period in hospital. By April 1970 they had both had their operations and were attending regular sessions to dress the wounds and receive counselling and advice on what might happen next. They attended fitting sessions for their false limbs on the same day, and the doctor still remembers their jokes about sharing a pair, since his was a right and hers a left. Tom’s wound had taken several months to heal, whereas Christine’s progressed at speed, which is why they were both being kitted out at roughly the same time.

Their false limbs were not as sophisticated as those in use nowadays, but were near state of the art for the time. Initially neither of them was fitted with a foot. Instead, there was a rounded heel of compressed rubber, which was treaded with a thick replaceable sole. The body of the limb was a simple frame of tubular metal and plastic, with a sprung joint to mimic a knee, but was only designed to be bent when seated. When walking, the limb was held rigid, and there was no pivot at the ankle, so progress was very much dependent on their learning to swing the contraption forward through a rotation at the hip, and then using the solid support almost as a crutch to assist a step. The structure was secured around the waist by a couple of wide belts that were at least adjustable. At the time, neither Christine nor Tom could take either weight or friction on their scar tissue, so most of the body weight was supported via straps near the groin. I am assured by Christine that these would soon start to rub and chafe if they tried to do too much. Strangely enough, this usually did not hinder them on the bowling green, since they both developed a technique of playing which involved standing on one leg.

It was only during these recent interviews with Christine that I appreciated how vivid an impression the period had left in her memory. It’s not every day that you lose a leg and gain another, and perhaps none of us knows how we would react in such circumstance. Cartwright, for instance, had always been a rather distant character, with family and friends alike describing him as a remarkably quiet, self-contained, even withdrawn individual. And yet, with Christine he was different enough for her to describe him as a bundle of fun, full of energy, free-flowing conversation and jokes. Christine assesses herself as having been something of a snob in her youth, and was generally unwilling to mix with anyone her parents - and particularly her grandmother - deemed beneath the Gardiners’ class. But with Tom Cartwright, an accomplished academic, but a mathematician from a working class background and sporting a thick West Riding accent, she ignored any desire or advice to reject, and so entered his world. The two of them needed one another, given their strangely shared predicament, and both of them knew it implicitly and immediately. After that period, of course, it could be said that both reverted to type. Christine became a Young Tory and later an arch Thatcherite, right-wing journalist and champion of the individual, whereas Cartwright espoused socialism, became almost professionally working class and for a time took to selling Socialist Worker outside factory gates.

But for that short period in the summer of 1970, after exams and before college, they had one another. Christine is still reticent about what they did with themselves, at least in part because she still suffers pangs of guilt about lying to the school about fictitious hospital visits. In fact, I have subsequently learned from her former form teacher, who is still alive and compos mentis, that they knew she was making it up. They took pity on her and considered that, under the circumstances, she should be granted the small freedom of going off to see her friend. And, of course, Cartwright’s school also knew he was going off to meet Christine, since both schools had been cooperating for at least a year to assist in coordinating the two victims’ appointment times. Apparently, no-one on the staff of either school expected either of them to live. As to what happened in the bowling green shed at lunchtime, we can only speculate, but, despite Christine’s continued reticence on the subject, we can speculate with some certainty and without need of imagination.

One thing Christine did describe at length and with much mirth was what used to happen on the days when they had hospital appointments and therefore did not go to the park. By then they were both being called at roughly the same time to see the same specialist and so always met in the waiting room. Cartwright used to play a joke with an inane double meaning with the help of his false leg. The sprung joint at the knee could be brought to its fixed position at the flick of a catch that could be pressed through the fabric of his trousers. Thus, if he was sitting, he could bring the limb to its rigid position before he tried to get up, so that it would be ready to take whatever weight was put on it. He took to using the facility differently, however, to mimic an erection, suggesting that his leg had come up as a result of a new rigidity poking down his trouser leg. And he would do this whenever an attractive nurse or fellow patient walked past him in the hospital waiting room, leaving it sticking into mid air and commenting on it until it made Christine laugh. The joke remained private, but I recall that the laugh she gave when recalling the story was considerably greater than a giggle, and I can now state with certainty that it was that same laugh she repeated when she fell into Cartwright’s boat on the first morning of their encounter.

The school terms finished in late July that year, but their encounters in the park continued, with the two of them meeting in the village to take the bus into town. Both sets of parents were happy to see them keen to take the exercise needed to familiarise them with the demands of their new limbs. This continued until the Gardiners took off in mid August for a month in southern France, where they owned a rural property. In the last week of September, when Christine returned from her holiday, they saw one another just once before Tom left for university. At the time the Cartwright household was in turmoil and Stella had temporarily fled, taking Tom with her, to her sister’s house, also in the village. The source of the domestic dispute had been Trevor Cartwright’s expressed unwillingness to make up his son’s university grant with the expected parental contribution. He insisted on comparing Tom to his elder brothers, both of whom were by then earning salaries from the family business and living independently. Christine had tried to telephone Tom several times, but her father and sisters, who were still at home, put the phone down on her. Why Tom did not try to contact her remains something of a mystery, but Christine’s opinion is that he was completely preoccupied with his mother’s difficulties. At least that is what he told her when he cut their eventual encounter short. A week later saw Tom’s departure to Manchester to start his degree course and they did not see one another again until Cartwright’s boat approached the hotel jetty over forty years later.

“...had each other...”

Cartwright’s repetition of the phrase gradually raised Christine’s smile. “We argued like two rabid dogs, didn’t we?”

“Of course we did. I blame you.”

She laughed.

“We’d spent a week dividing our time between the not so fine points of crown green bowls and political posturing on the impending British General Election. If my memory serves me well, that happened on June 18, so we spent a week or so analysing how we would vote and then over a month castigating one another over what we had done.”

“You remember it that well?”

“How could I forget?” He was almost shouting, but through laughter. “I lost.” He turned towards Christine and pointed an accusing but wholly playful finger. “·And you, you silver-spoon privileged Tory, argued the toss like your life depended on it, and then chose not to vote at all ... and still won! Story of my life...”

“Says the world’s richest man...”

“But you have to admit, Chris, that your claim of ideological integrity, let alone the added angle that implied racial superiority, on the bases of rightness, democracy, morality and even religion on the Wednesday were a bit thick, when on the Thursday you didn’t even bother to turn out and vote. It was specious in the extreme!”

“I had a limb fitting appointment.”

“So did I! I was with you at the hospital. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course I do. I remember you saying you were off to vote.”

“And who went shopping with her mother?”

Christine laughed. “I did intend to vote later...”

“...excuses ...excuses... I just could not believe my ears that Friday morning when we got to the park. There was I, suffering from a political hangover and a victim’s pathos, having stayed up all night to watch the results come in and thus getting more and more depressed, and still breaking my arse to get down to the park in time to meet you. And I was as sick as a dog, because I had just been ideologically robbed... feeling about three inches tall because I knew a triumphalist Tory was going to take glee in rubbing it in... and then you said you hadn’t even bothered to vote! What a put down!”

“It wasn’t a put down, I just went shopping and stayed out with my mother.”

“And probably ate out in a restaurant, had a glass of wine, discussed Oxbridge...”

Christine thought for a moment. “You know, I think we did...”

“Bloody hell woman, were you born a sadist?”

“Are you sure I claimed superiority on racial and religious grounds? How can you possibly remember what we said forty years ago?”

“I just told you. I lost. It still hurts. I can remember every sodding word!” He laughed again and, for thirty seconds or so, the two of them seemed to concentrate, as if their shared past had come immediately and jointly alive behind their open eyes. “And to have argued the case for democracy - speciously, I might add - and then not to have exercised your bleeding franchise the first time in British history that an eighteen year old had the opportunity of doing so really did take the biscuit!”

“...which at the time would have been a Wagon Wheel...”

Cartwright laughed long and hard. Christine joined in.

“They were good, but not as good as Mrs Thingy’s home-made pasties.”

Christine’s smiles continued as she skilfully changed the subject. “I thought we might include a discussion of your background - family, education, college and the like - in the second interview.”

“Include whatever you want,” he said without hesitation. He was still laughing as he delivered the phrase, which was also strained with increasing volume as he rose from his seat. He began to mount the balustrade, and then, using the adjacent roof pillar as his support, he rose to stand on the rail. As his muscles strained and his breathing wheezed his exertion, he spoke again, “...but I reserve my right not to answer, just like you didn’t vote, you democrat!”

The final word was shouted as he dived into the sea and disappeared from view. Christine peered past the angle of the balcony to the water’s surface, but he did not reappear. She stood in her now usual way, backwards, forcing herself up onto her limb using the arms of the chair, and then turned to look down at the water, but by the time she reached her vantage point at the balcony rail, Cartwright had swum away underwater to disappear under the surface’s reflected glare.

She picked up her own and Cartwright’s plate and spoon, stacked them so she could carry them in one hand and then set off round the veranda to the sink at the back. It took her some minutes to walk the few paces, since she was still unsure of her footing on the lashed bamboo poles. When she turned the second corner, she was momentarily startled.

“Thanks for bringing the plates,” said Cartwright as he advanced to relieve her of her burden.

“You know, there’s another fellow just like you in this house. He just jumped off the front balcony and went off in that direction...” She waved generally towards the mainland.

“I needed to start the washing up.”

“And you washed up yourself first.”

“Correct.” He rinsed the plates and then dried them with a cloth before replacing them in the cupboard under the sink. The plastic bowl he emptied with the flick of one arm over the balcony. There was a slap as its scant helping of water hit a rock. For a couple of minutes he busied himself with a cloth, wiping out his wok and cleaning the surfaces next to the sink and cooker. Christine watched in silence, no doubt thinking, as I was, that this was a man whose routine of existence was quite set, honed to eliminate any waste of energy or effort, and, in its idiosyncratic way, calculatedly efficient and thus highly successful. “When?” he asked, standing to face her.

She said nothing, but still managed to ask a question.

“When do you want to do the next interview?”

“How about tomorrow morning? How about early, very early, before the sun gets high?”

“Fine.”

“I’ll have to work on my script this afternoon and evening.”

“Fine. I have some work of my own.”

And with that he went inside, closed the door of his cubby-hole office and all sound seemed to cease.

Christine remained standing on the veranda for some time. “How on earth can you can sit in that room without air conditioning or a fan defeats me.” His office door may have been closed, but the walls did not go to the ceiling, so he would have heard the words even if whispered.

He did not answer, so Christine returned to the front balcony, to the chair she had left, the chair that had already, it seemed, become her private property, her own space in Cartwright’s little empire. She reached down to her bag, took out her file, found a pen and began to read through her papers.

“And someone who invokes democracy and then doesn’t vote deserves a biscuit!” he shouted.

“Wagon Wheel,” she mumbled without looking up.

Thus we entered another period where only I had the privilege of being able to see what both of them were doing. I sat and watched Cartwright work with what appeared to be complete concentration for the more than four unbroken hours that he devoted to his task. He eventually filled one page of his notebook. And again I printed off a still of his efforts and asked a specialist to read it. As before it was unintelligible, the reply this time implying that I might even be wasting departmental time.

In fact I rested during Cartwright’s hours of study and reviewed them later on fast forward, just to make sure that what was almost deliberately angled forward towards my camera at the end of his labours actually did represent the focus of his attention for the previous four hours or more. I now cannot decide whether Cartwright’s ‘work’ actually represents his serious endeavour or, alternatively, whether it might represent some practical joke on his part, a deliberate ploy to present meaningless mumbo-jumbo that will divert us and occupy our energies. Are those unintelligible notes and symbols really the true language of a mathematics only he understands, or are they, like his false leg erections of those years ago, merely a practical joke, a brainless diversion?

I decided later to review these work sessions and I did notice a pattern. First, he never once brought his own personal computer alive in any session. I assume this must have been wholly out of character, since all of his business has been transacted via the internet. To have never bothered even to check his accounts or read his emails suggests he was deliberately avoiding the display of any personal information and that there was something on that computer that he desperately wanted to hide.

I accept, however, that his system has proved so reliable over the last two years or so for him not to worry about the short-term direction of travel in his accounts. For him, being worth a billion more or less each day is neither here nor there, so why bother yourself with detail?

A second point of interest lies in the fact that thus far he had never opened a file of old material. This meant he never seemed to refer to previous work, but each time merely continued from the point where he had previously abandoned his notebook. Given the presumed complexity of his system, this seemed to be improbable behaviour. Thirdly, and even more inexplicable, he really did seem to angle his work towards my camera, as if he wanted to provide an easily reproducible image of what he had been doing. If he remained convinced of its originality and uniqueness, however, there was no inherent danger in his doing this, and there may just have been a strand of arrogance in his motive. But if this really was gibberish, then it was also possible he was consciously trying to mislead us.

When he emerged from his office, he behaved true to the type I had by now learned to anticipate. He cast a cursory greeting towards Christine and then let himself down off the front balcony into the sea, where he pottered around diving and surfacing for just a few minutes. He then clambered back up to the balcony, unhitched the mooring ropes to release his boat and then announced that he was going to check the lines and pots he had set early that morning. I was surprised, since I thought I had monitored all activity around the house. When I checked back I realised I had missed his exit just before dawn. Strangely, he had taken the boat away on its oars, presumably to keep down the noise while Christine was still asleep, but of course it may have been a ploy to avoid attracting my attention. And it worked. I had completely missed it. What I did not miss, on re-examining the footage, was that he had taken a bag with him when he left early that morning, a bag the right size and shape to contain a notebook computer. Through the gloom, via the camera facing directly off the balcony, I could see that he parked the boat about fifty metres from the house, but I could not see what he was doing. On seeing this material, I immediately placed a request to check the content of the internet traffic through his router at the time, since this may well have been powerful enough to allow him remote access from his boat. At time of writing, I await the result of that request.

When Cartwright returned, he did so with something of a catch. In the distance I could clearly see him inspect a line attached to floats and then retrieve four nearby pots. Thus he returned with a few small fish, mainly bream, and half a dozen blue crabs. He had the whole lot in a mesh bag slung over his shoulder and across his body as he clambered up his pole ladder. The crabs were very much alive and trying to nip his flesh through the bag string, so he moved quickly. And, as he ascended, he had light strings attached to both guy ropes from the boat tied around his ankle. Once back on the balcony, he was thus able to drop the crab bag and moor the boat as before in just a few seconds. Christine had watched this obviously practised and accurate manoeuvre from her balcony chair.

“We’re in luck,” said Cartwright. “Crabs for dinner.”

The sun was sinking fast by the time sounds of cooking peppered the microphones. His technique was simple: he had a heavy iron wok that he placed, dry, on the gas. When it was very hot, he dropped the live crabs, which were quite small, straight onto its surface. He had a lid ready in his right hand which he slammed on top of the pan as they tried to jump out. There was a commotion of scratching for a few seconds, but it soon died away and, just a couple of minutes later, Cartwright removed the lid and slopped a glug or two of red sauce from a large bottle that seemed to live next to the stove. A few seconds later, he turned out the completed dish onto a plate. A quick wipe of the pan with a cane brush and a drop of water that was cast over the balcony into the sea left its surfaces clean, ready to take the oil he added and then, just a minute later, he tossed in his small fish, each of which he had gutted over the balcony rail through the gills with his fingers while the pan was heating. He cooked the fish three times to crisp them and these, along with the crabs and a few broken salad leaves he took from a bag hanging on a pole nearby, was then a complete meal. A moment extra was all he needed to make a salad of sliced green mango and tomato, both of which also came from a hanging bag, as did the kalamansi he squeezed over it as dressing. The entire process, from live crabs to meal took ten minutes at the outside, and Christine was not at all ready to join him when he shouted, “Food!” round the corner of the house.

“Foot!” shouted Christine with a laugh.

It took Christine over two minutes to lay down her papers, negotiate a rise to her feet and then shuffle to the corner. She looked immediately at the large metal platter of chilli crabs, crispy fried fish, salad leaves and green mango and, surprised, asked, “Do you eat them just like that?”

“No, you have to put them in your mouth,” he answered, crunching and sucking on a claw.

Christine ignored the comment. “What about the shells?”

“They aren’t strong. You can crack them with your fingers, but if you insist...” He placed two of the whole crabs on the table and gave them a sharp but controlled tap with the flat of his cleaver, which was to hand next to the stove. “There, those can be yours.”

“Can we wait a while?”

“You can wait as long as you like. But the flies will get extra helpings.” As he spoke he also unhitched a black, red and white food cover from a nail on the wall and covered the whole serving dish, and then weighted it down with an upturned pan over its apex. Christine had already started back to her seat on the front balcony and Cartwright now rose to follow. He had not yet reached his own seat when Christine spoke.

“Now about this interview...”

It seemed that little of interest would happen for a while. Christine was running through the points she wanted to raise and a pensive Cartwright was making mental notes of each area, but wrote nothing. I will include none of what transpired here, since the text of the interview covers everything and more to the same depth and in the same terms. And the light was already beginning to fade when they finally decided to eat. By then Christine had suggested several alternative approaches, none of which, frankly, was substantively different from any of the others and throughout Cartwright offered little more than near-silent assent. They continued to talk about the interview as they ate, slowly, and then continued for a further half an hour in the same vein as before. I gloss over the entire period, since the content of the interview itself covers everything of relevance. They shared no more small talk except cursory good nights and an aside from Christine. “The green mango alongside the crab meat is absolutely superb.” Despite her regular and extensive professional travel, she hardly ever ate anything other than hotel food.