Murmur. Will Eaves
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new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately. . . . The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.
– Alan M. Turing, unpublished note
The Field of Endeavour
Dear June,
No, the loneliness itself does not distress me, as I do not understand what most people mean by it. There is my home life, itself solitary, and then there is work. I cannot be cut off by the treatment, because I am already cut off by inclination. It is a matter of choice. I am not one for poetry (‘Count me out on this one’!! Am I permitted to quote myself?), but I did admire M. Baudelaire’s poem about a man and his inner life: ‘Qui ne sait pas peupler sa solitude, ne sait pas non plus être seul dans une foule affairée.’ Well, that is me – populously on my tod!
Work, too, is separate, a separation from the world almost, and the more I do what principally defines me, the more I realise I’m not meant to have ordinary relationships, which seem to me, when I look at all the men and women in the department, so often unsuccessful precisely because the contracted sharing of time and space undefines couples, as individuals I mean. No more relaxed chat in the pub, curfew at seven, the inlaws coming for the day. And though I’d never say it aloud (but can to you, who understand), I can’t help feeling that marriage by and large has the most deplorably erosive effect on one’s ability to think.
The work suffers, and the person who needs his work becomes almost negligent of his suffering in that regard. (And then of course the community of science suffers, and that is the sort of community I do believe in.)
I asked Trentham (nostrils, galoshes, very tall) the other day if he wanted to talk about his ‘field awareness’ paper after hours and he flinched almost with embarrassment. ‘The little man’, he said, ‘has got the measles.’
It wasn’t that, of course, or not just that. And I don’t believe he thought I had any ulterior motive. He’s quite the unsuspicious sort (and indeed not for me). His whole vitality just seemed to ebb away, the shoulders sagged and he loped off, red-eyed, head thrust forward in a parody of concentrated endeavour, as much as to say, ‘I’ve made this pact and now I’m stuck with it.’
I’ve met his wife. She’s very nice. They’re both charming, of course they are. I do feel, though, that shared existence entails a loss of privacy, and privacy, mental solitude at any rate, is absolutely essential, as you know.
The ones that work, the marriages, are based on such tolerance, such frank distance, that one is bound to ask the point of them in the first place. The world’s opinion, I suppose, and maybe that’s a good enough reason.
I’ve made myself another tidy paradox, haven’t I? I’m all but saying, with my love of the solitary virtue, that I’m the perfect candidate for some discreet entanglement – but that would never do. Because although I do yearn for friends, for companionship, and in my own way for you, my dear June, very much, I do also feel that the business of yearning, for me, is a sort of proof of liberty – the imagining of what I want mustn’t be interrupted, or the fancy fleeth.
It’s peculiar. It’s something, like the working out of a particular problem, I can do only on my own – like dreaming. Speaking of which, yes, I am still beset by the man in the mirror. He is with me nightly, daily. My doctor is fascinated, naturally, and wants to know everything. But there is very little I can tell him, and less he would understand. The impression is vivid while I am waking – he is a man, I think, and a man in distress, a prisoner of some description? – and lasts about as long as it takes for me to get to the desk, where I begin to write, and then . . .
Love to you,
A.
*
Before it’s light, the first planes make their last approach, a noise like children blowing across milk bottles. The sound dips with the wind. Passengers, freight, the half-awake break through the clouds and settle on the ground. An open-eyed man hears these bottle-blowers from his bed, where he has passed the night wondering, recovering, steeling himself to wait out various embassies of doubt: you may struggle to speak, you may not know that you can speak or have spoken. It will be difficult in different ways, when you are with others, when you’re alone. Try to conserve your energy.
Which he has done, letting the dark merely be dark, the curtain rail merely a row of hooks and not a file of iron imps hauling up canvases. Sometimes it seems as if the night has been one long held breath, until the planes arrive, the heating starts, and water flares and prickles in the pipes.
The reassuring forms emerge, the shelves of books, the desk, the built-in cupboard and the bed, his hands holding a grey herringbone blanket holed by moths. A small white label in one corner of the blanket reads ‘Alec’. (The surname is obscured.) He gets up, wanders over to the desk and scribbles with the shivery sense that being up so early ought to give him an advantage – clarity. Except the world is up at the same time. Its silent armies stand revealed. His pen hovers. He wants to work, and working is at first invigorating and then too tiring. He hasn’t yet remembered how to use the computer. It isn’t him holding the pen. He sees the page moving beneath his nib in strokes and curves that form letters. The trail of ink is indecipherable. He feels so sick and out of breath; he nods his head.
Sleep comes as, miles away, the passengers step off the plane. They leave behind such quantities of rubbish – peanuts scattered over Ararat, coffee poured down the Rhine. What are they for, these airport trolleys with the orange beacons, nuzzling the belly of the plane? Inside the airport building, everyone shuffles. A man clears immigration with a yawn. The next couple are moved from queue to booth to closed office, where after several hours they learn that they will be deported and accept the bad news with surprising grace. The office windows frame a view of wet ground that’s unreachable, less true than a recalled image of bare toes, sun and a warm puddle, foothills, goats. The city and the London life that might have been are meaningless as torchbeams aimed skywards, flicked star to star, faster than light. Sleep comes and isn’t sleep. He goes back to his bed, lies down again, touches his lips and stares.
I am that roving beam flashed by the wide-awake sleeper across the room, a figment of his thought, apart. I’m what he thinks. I make a sign in his night-sky, a projection the source of which is close to hand, the unreal image far. Gauzy visions crowd in so fast I’ve no time to distinguish between his and mine: am I a memory? More like a pulse, the stirring of the drapes, the bottle-breath guiding the planes and harrowing the blocked chimney. This is his room.
A burst of time. An all-at-once imagining. This was a lump of molten rock facing the new-born sun. This was an underwater world of gastropods and lingula. This was the root-ball of a carboniferous tree becoming nothingness and dust. This was the chalky eyeless face that looked down on the eastern mudflats as a forager looked up, his hand and mouth opening before the great wave hit and Britain’s land bridge disappeared. This was the lime extracted from that buried cliff to make plaster.
I’m in his wall, or on it, maybe, like a red stag’s head. This is his room. This is the likeness of his room, where he lay as a boy and kept his spirits up by staring through the curtains at the comforting streetlight. That artificial star burns in his mind’s eye now. I see it, too. Around the yellow glare, a winter’s bare twigs form circles.
There is a glass of water by his bed. He raises it to drink, his face looms close. Features distort. I see the eyes, the glass reflected in the eyes, the nostrils with a few hairs cleaving to the black insides, the skin yellow from surgery or care, the good but chattering teeth bumping the rim, the white pill on his tongue. He must be drinking but I’m almost blind, caught in a surf of elongated images and fingerprints. His face is monstered by the swell, massive, falling away, an altogether spy-hole face.
The swell passes, the glass set down. I’m on the wall again, watching him rise. Slowly he strokes his head, on which the hair is growing back, the fingers tracing one red groove from ear to ear and other