A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas
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in a different colour sequence. She smiled uncertainly, pleased and oddly soothed by the sound of the rolling balls and by the neat way they had plopped into their resting places, although she had no idea what was supposed to have been achieved.
‘How is your mathematics?’ Simon demanded.
‘Quite good.’ It was true. Harriet enjoyed figures.
‘Then tell me how many different ways the counters could be arranged in those slots.’
Harriet frowned.
‘Four to the power of four,’ he prompted her.
‘Two hundred and fifty six.’
‘Exactly.’ Simon was delighted. Some of the iron lines faded from his face. ‘Do you understand?’
‘I think so,’ Harriet said, who was only beginning to.
‘Go on, then. Your counters are your markers. Make your coloured balls drop into the same slots in the same order.’
‘I think I can do that.’
‘Would you like to make a little bet?’
Harriet grinned, fired by the challenge. She had forgotten to be afraid of Simon’s strange expression. ‘A fiver,’ she offered.
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me. You haven’t won it yet.’
The key to the game, Harriet saw now, was the little gates in the sloping struts. She touched one, and then saw that it would lift out, leaving a hole in the strut, big enough for a ball to drop through. The gate was made in the shape of a Y, and when she examined it she saw that it was made from matchsticks, painstakingly glued together. She studied it for a long moment, wondering, and then slipped it back into its place. It fitted, but at a different angle. She tried it one way and then another, and discovered that there were three possible positions for it. The gate could be locked open or locked shut, that was simple enough. But in the third position, the gate stood open to let a ball through. Only then, as it passed, the weight of the ball closed and locked the gate behind it.
Harriet took a deep, determined breath, sensing Simon watching her. Her head was still fuddled with food and wine, and the day’s jumbled impressions.
She saw that the green ball would roll first, but that she must coax it into the next-to-last slot. The red ball would drop last but must occupy the first slot. Without giving herself too much time to think and change her mind, she flipped the gates, trying to visualise the path the balls would take as they rolled and dropped.
After two minutes she was satisfied.
She brushed Simon’s hand away, flicked the spring-loaded tongue, and the balls merrily rattled. She held her breath as they trickled and dropped, making the same musical sound. As if drawn by magnets, they completed their course and fell, colour by colour and slot by slot, on top of the right, bright counters.
Harriet shouted in triumph.
Simon only nodded. ‘Good for a first try.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look.’
He pointed to the little gates. A number was pencilled on the strut beside each one, high numbers at the top, lower all down the length of the zigzag path. Harriet’s gates stood open, breaking the smoothness of the route. Counting aloud, Simon added the numbers to make a total. ‘Seventy-nine,’ he said. ‘Now, watch again.’ With a flick, he obliterated Harriet’s solution and substituted his own. She saw that fewer gates stood open, all lower down the board. Then he scooped out the balls and rolled them again. They dropped inexorably to the same resting places, but Simon’s score was only twenty-seven.
‘You see? The same conclusion, but achieved by a more or less circuitous route.’
‘I see, like life,’ Harriet murmured.
Simon unfolded a piece of paper. In neat, spidery writing he had plotted the lowest scores for each of the two hundred and fifty-six possible permutations. Harriet glanced at it, then rearranged the counters at random. She drew her lower lip between her teeth, frowning in concentration as her fingers danced over the gates. But now, when the balls were released, the yellow and the green fell into the wrong slots.
Simon moved to show her, but she stopped him. ‘No. Let me try again.’
This time she was right, but there was no triumphant shout. She was staring at the board, hypnotised by it. The power of the game, she saw, lay in its simplicity. It was made from a packing case and spent matches, but its brilliance shone out of it. It drew her fingers, tempting another try.
‘It’s very clever,’ she said. She felt the fine hairs at the nape of her neck, down the length of her spine, stir and prickle. She shivered, but not from cold now. ‘Very, very clever.’
Harriet felt a moment of pure, clear excitement. It was like her waking dream back in her childhood bed. It possessed her completely, making everything she contemplated seem fine, and simple, and infinitely inviting. And then, just as quickly, it was gone again, leaving her wondering just what had happened to her. She touched the splintered wood and the faded markings, puzzled by them.
‘So when did you make it? Where, and why?’
‘So many questions,’ Simon said.
Ever since he had let her in, her history and her questions had probed his defences. Kath would never have asked such questions. Kath had been absorbed in herself. Not unhealthily, but with the normal, sharp appetite of youth. Even thirty years ago she had made him feel old, because she was so fresh and full of juice. He had loved that. With Kath’s different, surprising daughter – who had come too close, in so short a time – beside him, he wondered whether he had loved the real Kath, or even known her. He felt angry with this girl because she threatened to distort a happy memory, a cherished one because so many other memories were not happy.
Simon didn’t want to look at the game now because it reawakened those other memories. He didn’t know what impulse had made him bring it out. He studied Kath’s daughter instead, as her fingers explored the old wood from Shamshuipo camp.
She didn’t look like her mother, even. Kath had been all curls and satiny curves. She had full, soft lips and a ready smile. This girl was lean and flat, and her close-cut hair made her look even more like a boy. As well as asking questions, she listened to the answers as if trying to memorise them. And her eyes moved quickly, taking in everything. Unlike her mother, she didn’t smile very often. She did laugh, in startling bursts, but it was a fierce kind of laughter, more like a man’s.
Simon didn’t think Harriet Trott was happy, but he did not attribute much significance to that. Happiness was not an expectation of his own, either.
‘Is this lettering? Chinese lettering?’
Questions.
‘It’s Japanese,’ Simon told her.
The dam burst with the words. Sights and sounds, smells that choked him, all flooded up. The stinking tide swept him away from his workbench, from his redoubt, to another place. He became another man.
Lieutenant Archer, Royal Artillery. Shamshuipo Prisoner of War Camp, Hong Kong, in the spring of 1942.
Simon stared into the gloom of his kitchen, not seeing the girl, blind to everything but the horror of the camp. He was back there in an instant, and he knew as always that nothing he had done or ever could do would obliterate what he had known in that place.
The smells were the worst.
Forty years later Simon Archer could try to close his eyes and muffle his ears, but the smells still crept inside his head to rot the bones of his skull.
There were dying men all around him. The dysentery buckets overflowed on to the concrete floors of the prison, and the sick men lay in their mess too weak to move.
The scents of putrefaction and death were part