Me: Looking back, if you could change one thing about your life, what would it be?
Simon: I would have been more sensible. I would have taken more care over the routes I took.
Me: You mean you’d have taken more care in the type of work you did for your mathematical career?
Simon: No. I mean I would have taken more care planning my bus routes.
Aside from a recent mugging on Jesus Green in Cambridge, when three men forced him onto his knees and made him beg for mercy because he looked like a homeless person, Simon’s life has not been troubled by excitement during these last months.
He doesn’t look on time as most of the rest of us do, moving from incident to incident; he dwells either in satisfaction, or out of it. You can bob along the west coast of Norway with Simon, staring for hours at surging mountains and fantastical contortions of rock face, without feeling that a single thought has passed through his head.
His sole phrase for everything – from the vertiginous cliffs and crash of mountains to the langoustine, crevettes and lumpfish caviar that cruise boats lay out on platters like pearled swatches every lunchtime, is ‘It’s alright.’
‘On your right, you see the town of Standa!’ shouted the polite ferry guide on our excursion down Geirangerfjord, after our day in the Bergen woods. ‘Standa has the only pizza-making factory in Norway, thank you.’
Palisades of cliffs thundered against the sky; waterfalls – braided, crashing, bounced out from precipices, exploding diamond speckles high across our heads – plunged into a muffle of trees a thousand feet above, and re-emerged as bathtub bubbles next to the hull of our boat. Simon’s response? ‘It’s alright.’
‘And please don’t spell it “alright”. I have always insisted strongly on spelling it as two words, so please do the same.’
He feels certain spellings are wrong in a ‘visceral’ sort of way.
‘Ja,’ continues Polite Ferry Guide, ‘and on those farms on the cliffs, livestock and children must be kept tethered to stop them falling over the edge – thank you.’ Toppling crags and looming escarpments blocked out and released the heat of the sun. A sea eagle soared in predatory arcs among wisps of cloud. ‘Und the only way to get a cow there is to carry it up as a calf. Ja, in the nineteenth century, when the taxman is visiting, the farmers hide all the ladders which stop you falling off the mountain.’
The water in the middle of the fjord, still as ice, reflected clouds. It seemed as though the mountains were flinging the sky itself back and forth between their peaks.
‘It’s all right,’ asserted Simon.
‘Can’t you think of anything to say but “all right”?’ I cried.
‘My mother used to complain of the same thing,’ agreed Simon contentedly.
As a matter of fact, I’m not unsympathetic. How do you describe the west coast of Norway? What words could possibly take on the job? At the end of this fjord is a tourist centre, where another cruise ship was berthed next to the knitted-goods shop, its house-sized propellers murmuring; hundreds of tourists were on the dock, each carrying a shopping bag containing a squash-featured, pot-bellied, turnip-limbed doll with floor-length pink nylon hair.
Mathematicians, in order to make progress with the notion of infinity, often talk about it in terms of division by zero: zero will go into seven (for example) a limitless (i.e. infinite) number of times. To rephrase infinity like this brings the idea closer to us, and a little further from mysticism. It hems the subject in a little. Everybody can relate to zero. Norwegians do the same thing with beauty: faced with the inexpressible splendour of their mountains and the glacial stillness of their fjords, they have invented trolls.
The journey up the coast of Norway into twenty-four-hour daylight takes five days and is accomplished by the eleven liveried ships of the Hurtigruten line, which are in constant rotation, bringing supplies and vast parcels on pallets to the coastal villages. They greet each other among the islands with a clangour of sirens. Our ship was the 11,000-tonne Richard With, named after the man who set up the company around the turn of the last century.
Each evening I pushed Simon’s unbending socks off the side table, set up my digital voice recorder and mic, and tried to conduct an interview. But it was hard to fix his attention. Every time a mountain passed by Simon’s nose rose furtively, drawing his head and body up after it – as if he really thought I might not notice – so that he could get his eyes over the porthole ledge and see what interesting coastal landmarks he had missed.
Or he was afflicted by a sudden starvation, and had to lunge around his holdall looking for Bombay mix, then re-emerge, sucking grease and beige bits off his fingers.
As I clipped the microphone to his T-shirt, he fidgeted and bounced and flicked through his Thomas Cook European Railway Timetable, wondering: ‘Where is Chernobyl? Is there a train going there that stops to pick up radioactive passengers?’
‘Simon, please! Concentrate.’
‘Sorry.’
Sometimes I tried a long run-up. I retreated back half a century to the horizon of his existence – the most basic questions; the necessary conditions of life. Take a deep breath, clench fists and … ‘Right, ready? Good, right, go!’ … zing forward:
‘When were you born?’
‘28th of February 1952.’
‘What was your mother’s name?’
‘Helene.’
‘What was your father’s name?’
‘Richard.’
‘What was he like?’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand such philosophical questions.’
Simon’s mind can’t keep off public-transport campaigning. He insists that I take this ‘opportunity’ to include ‘a mention of his conversation with fellow passengers who have been inconvenienced because the link between Lerwick [Shetland] and Bergen has been axed, so they cannot enjoy this trip of a lifetime with the same ease that we do. Links from Scrabster and Newcastle have also gone.’
‘It is important for readers to learn at least some useful information in your book,’ he remarks tartly. ‘You can also add that I was not looking up services for radioactive passengers, I was working out the bare bones of how a Hurtigruten-like service could usefully be introduced in the Western and Northern Isles of Scotland, stimulating our sustainabletourism industry. Now that I have worked it out I am wondering how to promote the idea, and suggest anyone who is interested get in touch with me via the publishers or the author’s website.’
‘Right, good, returning to the biography …’ I clicked on the Record button. ‘Why do you think your genius vanished?’
‘Aaaaah, hhnn … Can we stop now? I think I’d like a banana.’
As you go further north, the houses become increasingly blockish and made with corrugated iron. The requirements of survival are evident: oil-storage tanks, fish-processing plants, mobile-phone masts, shipyards – instead of being set aside from the town, these sorts of municipal landmarks start to gather round the high street with the houses, as if cringeing against the cold. By the time we reach the North Cape the battle to jolly things up is lost.
On Meagre Island, 120 kilometres above the geographical treeline, the wind blasts away any vegetation above toe-height. ‘Here they have two supermarkets,’ announced the tour guide with a proud puff, ‘and, ja, a retirement home, thank you!’
There is more life in the air and much more underwater than on the land of Meagre Island. In winter even the reindeer vamoose. The 7,000-strong herd that grazes this island, gnawing the specks of lichen from the rocks, belongs to six Sami families. Every spring they ship the reindeer over on military landing vessels, and at the end of every summer, before the weather turns absurd with nastiness, they herd them up again, goad them to the edge of the water, and make them swim across the strait to the mainland. After that, it’s a three-week trek through Norway, over Sweden, back to the Finnish–Russian border where the Sami have their farms. On the few days of the year when the water reaches above 10°C the locals themselves nip out to a dire fifty-foot stretch of grey sand to have a swim. They call it Copacabana.
‘Simon, your brother told me about David Elton, who you used to play with as a child in the summer holidays, when your family went to the coast, where you went swimming. Did you know that he became a murderer?’
But Simon has a knack of treating queries as if they are the end of a conversation. His brain simply substitutes a full stop in place of the question mark, and his face goes on smiling with no adjustment.
He sat back on the tour-boat bench with a sigh of happiness.
‘With a champagne bottle?’ I pestered. ‘His wife: he bludgeoned her over the head, then drowned himself. Simon!’
Simon’s nose was above the porthole again. A small village rippled past, barely more than a tarnish of houses among the waterside rocks. Against one of the corrugated-iron walls, a baked moose skull, stuck on spikes.
‘What does it feel like,’ I continued eagerly, ‘to have gone swimming with a murderer?’
‘Aaaaah … I didn’t like swimming.’
Puffin Island is a motorway diner for birds. The sea serves up huge fish suppers all summer long to thirty-five different types of seabird that react by screaming and fighting and killing each other as they jostle for table space and turn the rocks white with excrement. The puffins are so tubby that they land on water by bumping into little waves, bouncing their plump breasts from crest to crest until they stop, and sink.
On the way back from Puffin Island, an awful, high-pitched noise came from behind my left ear. I turned to see Simon, bleating foully – ‘humming’, he pronounced it.
‘Beethoven’s Sonata No. 19. A prime number!’ he declared joyously.
The ecstasy of the birds had driven him to music.
Night above the Arctic Circle is not like ordinary daylight. It is autumnal light, a bit egg-yolk-coloured, but also grey. Warm, cushioned, soft, it makes you feel slightly sick as you move north up the coast; but each night I tried to stay up on the boat, to make sure the sun truly didn’t ever pop off for a snooze, I fell asleep before the miracle happened: somehow, between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., the day is replenished with freshness. Strawberries and cherries grow in north Norway, dense with the sort of sweetness you normally only read about in children’s books, force-fed by twenty-four hours of sun. In winter, said a banker from Tromsø, the day isn’t really quite black either, but blue as if just drowned.
Once, 2 a.m., the ship hit a storm. The prow tossed-up and belly-flopped into the waves. The rain slashed in under the overhanging lifeboats, then appeared suddenly to be defeated, leaving a narrow sheltered section beneath their keels, under one of which I stood on deck, feet spread against the pitching of the sea, and drank my first can of beer of the morning in a state of pleasant gloominess.
‘Opening only by authorised personnel!’ read a sign on a gate in the deck railing. ‘Danger of life!’ It unbolted onto the Beowulf waves.
Three years ago, the cook on one of these ships sneaked out, dropped a small blow-up lifeboat into the sea, clambered over this sign and vanished off to the islands with one of the waitresses. I understood his sentiments. It took the police fifteen weeks to find them, radiant among the moss and puffins.
The next morning – or perhaps it was evening – it might even have been the middle of the night – there was an important bridge coming: a famous wonder of the North, soaring like a ghostly arc of paint high above the water. But Simon (standing on the deck) had lost his place on the map: he had to find where the bridge was on it before he could do anything else. For a while I watched him desperately trying to outwit the wind that rushed frigidly down the walkways of the boat and buffeted the page.
‘Oh dear, oh dear!’
‘Quick, Simon, quick!’ I goaded. ‘You’re going to miss it!’
A gust again snapped the map from his grip; he bounced comically about the deck grabbing at the air to retrieve it, even as the shadow of this gloriously precise creation of bridge engineering – a mathematical astonishment – clutched on to the prow and started relentlessly to slide down the sides of the hull.
High above, on the top of the arc, I could see a small crowd gathered. We didn’t wave to each other. We were just humans, protected by roughly equal masses of steel and concrete in the silly vastness of the North – one set of us suspended in the air, the other, on water – neither where humans were supposed to be.
A quarter of a mile further on, Simon at last got his paper under control, pinpointed the spot, ‘Stawr … sigh … sun-det Bridge,’ breathed a sigh of relief and looked back.
‘It’s … really good!’ he barked, and tittered with merriment.
Simon has two explanations for why his genius collapsed.
The first is that everyone is mistaken – he never was a great brain, just a very quick one. He reached the peak of his ability, lickety-split, in ten years. At five, he could do the mathematics of a twelve-year-old; at twelve, he was reading university textbooks on complex numbers; at fifteen, he was better than many university research students; by twenty, the equal of a professor, only his reading was not as broad. Then Simon’s brain stopped developing. The alchemical process fizzled out. Other people began to catch up. They wouldn’t reach him for a further five years, but what they call his ‘loss of genius’ is actually their arrival. So used to thinking of Simon as miles ahead, a speck dancing on the distant mathematical horizon, they didn’t know how to appreciate him when they were finally alongside, celebrating the subject as equals. They mistook equality for Simon’s decline, and declared that he’d suffered a catastrophic intellectual failure.
What else, argues Simon, could explain the fact that despite his infamous ‘collapse’ he is doing maths today that is as good as, if not better than, he has ever done before? Witness his performance in Montreal. Witness his great discovery of ‘the appearance of Conway Group in the projective plane presentation of the Monster’ (Simon: ‘I don’t think I can make it any more comprehensible to your readers than that’), done two years after Conway had left for America, long after Simon’s supposed ‘first mistake’ in the Atlantis office. Witness his paper on socks.
Simon’s second explanation of his loss of mathematical direction is heartbreaking. Now that Conway has fled to America, there is no one in the mathematical world who will work with him. They say he is too peculiar, too shabby, too old. His interests are fixed in mathematics that has had its day. His brilliance is frigid. His talent, perfectly suited to an extraordinary moment in algebraic history (the symmetry work at Cambridge during the 1970s and 1980s) is out of fashion.
‘I sometimes think that I would not have been capable of doing outstanding work in any field other than what I worked in. In due course I had worked out the field which I was expert in, and the cast of my mind was not amenable to diversifying.’
He is, somehow, both too meticulous and too playful for modern theoreticians.
Too meticulous, because he is like a man at the airport check-in desk, madly searching through his luggage for his ticket long after everyone else has boarded the plane: Simon continues to be obsessed with exposing errors and patterns in the Group Table of the Monster, believing that the secret of the universe is hidden there, even though everyone else has taken the hunt elsewhere.
Too playful, because … well … because he is equally likely to write a paper about socks.
At 3 a.m. I left Simon on deck, in a state of vertical trance: joyous, windswept and in possession of all he saw.
Simon is not heartbroken.
At least, not about anything to do with his life in mathematics.
About the state of our public-transport services, it is a different matter:
I’d say that you ought to treat me as if I was currently watching the great love of my life being slowly murdered, torn between my desire to save her and expose her murderers and my wish to spend as much time as I can with her while she’s still alive.