The Weight of Numbers Read online

  THE GIFT

  1

  Summer 1939.

  The British government believes that an air war will destroy civilization.

  It has forecast the number of casualties likely to be sustained following a Luftwaffe attack on London. The numbers are apocalyptic. Bleaker still is Whitehall’s estimate of the city’s psychological resilience. Analysts believe the experience of bombardment will send the survivors mad.

  Hospitals surrounding the capital have sent home their non-urgent cases. They are making up beds ready for tens of thousands of ‘nervous cases’.

  The government believes that following an air attack, survivors who make it into the city’s tunnels will refuse to emerge; that they will turn their backs on the devastated Overground, preferring to live and breed beneath the earth, a Morlock terror to the Eloi above. In London, the Underground is locked at night against those who would seek shelter, come the raids.

  Nineteen-year-old former abattoir clerk Kathleen Hosken knows better. She has inside information. With halting fingers, Kathleen has typed up data which even the government has yet to read. She has worked with the government’s own specialist on a project to assess the physiological effects of ground shock waves and blast, a man of such luminous intelligence and charm his associates have nicknamed him ‘Sage’.

  From Sage, she has learned that if you look into the eye of the thing you most fear, and replace your passion with a rational curiosity, then the horror – he calls it ‘funk’ – goes away. So Kathleen Hosken has left the rain-swept border country of Darlington, and has boarded a train for London, the soon-to-be-devastated metropolis. This journey to the epicentre of the coming war is not just a journey of necessity – a search for employment and a place to live. It is also a test she has set herself. She believes that if she approaches her life there rationally, carefully interrogating her every assumption, then she can protect herself, even from bombs and fire storms.

  The men sharing her train carriage – the crooked teeth their smiles reveal, the Players and Capstan cigarettes they offer her – are objects for observation. From Sage, she has learned something about the scientific method. This novel way of thinking requires her to suppress her emotions and to put herself at a distance from things. Besides, she does not smoke.

  Some of the men on the train are in uniform. Most are not: volunteers, they have yet to be received into the service. There is a camaraderie between the two groups which marks them out from the handful of young, scrape-faced commercial travellers who also share the carriage.

  ‘The air’s sweeter over here, love.’

  ‘There’s room to stretch your feet by me.’

  ‘I’m a Darlington man meself, dearie, come and have a chat.’

  They are teasing her. She is being offish with them and she isn’t pretty enough, and not nearly well dressed enough, to get away with it.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  ‘He joined up already then, love?’

  ‘Tore himself away, he did, from the sparkling ray-pah-tee.’

  They laugh.

  Kathleen takes a steadying breath. She thinks up an experiment – and smiles softly, knowingly, to appease them.

  A lad with infected acne lets out a cheer. The company of friendly elders has made him boisterous. ‘Knew you could do it, love!’

  She notes, for future reference, the success of her strategy. She has identified, confronted and resolved a problem in her human relations. For the first time in her life, the boys have not made her cry.

  She remains – for all their barracking – in the seat she has chosen for herself, riding backwards, facing west. She is looking her last at the moorland of her childhood. More than that: she is looking out, past barren scarps and low stony ridges, over long-abandoned dry-stone walls and between hawthorns stunted by the wind, for the remains of a series of sheds. Given the lie of the land, it is only by facing backwards to the direction of travel that she will be able to spot them.

  That these sheds have been visible from passing trains at all is an error Sage made early on in the project, when he misread the contour lines on his Ordnance Survey map. He spotted the error while studying the map for other sites, and before the sheds were ever erected – a feat of magic which amazed Kathleen at the time. The error was tiny, however, and Solly Zuckerman, Sage’s colleague and keeper of the project’s top-secret experimental menagerie, persuaded him to let it go.

  Kathleen remembers her first train ride with Sage. Since going to work for him, she had persisted in calling him Mr Arven, and he was teasing her, telling her that, since he was a professor, she should call him ‘Professor Arven’; that he had letters after his name and, since she was so fond of honorifics, she ‘ought to recite them, an’ all’. Abruptly, he had broken off his jesting and took out his watch. He paused a moment – he appeared to be counting – then he glanced at the window. He took her hand and pulled her with him onto the seat opposite, facing backwards.

  ‘I feel sick this way,’ she protested. He did not reply. She wondered when he would let go of her hand. Instead, he squeezed it, painfully hard, and pointed out the window: ‘Watch… watch now… There!’

  Far in the distance, Kathleen glimpsed the frameworks of their oh-so-secret sheds.

  Mr Zuckerman – Professor Zuckerman – was quite right: even as they registered on the eye, they were gone. There was no real risk of discovery.

  ‘Feckit!’ Sage exclaimed.

  She smiles to think of it. The boy with the infected face comes and sits beside her. Her smile has been misinterpreted as a reply to something he has said, which she has not heard. He flicks a cigarette jauntily into his mouth but fumbles the catch, so for a moment the cigarette hangs precariously between prehensile lips. His erupted face boils over in a blush. He thrusts the cigarette pack under her nose.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Kathleen says. She turns back to the window. Watch… Watch…

  It seems the sheds have been dismantled.

  Thick clouds of tobacco smoke press white hands against the window.

  School ended for Kathleen when she was fourteen. Working in her uncle’s office at the abattoir was undemanding. There were clerks employed to tally the animals brought to slaughter, to calculate the number of different cuts, to calculate wastage, the company’s profits, the workers’ wages. There was a secretary, a long-nosed woman, no longer middle-aged, who saw to her uncle’s business correspondence. For Kathleen, there were files to keep in order; ‘to do’ lists to type for her uncle; wages to hand to the boys who worked on the cutting floor; errands to run in town. Now she has left, Kathleen understands that her uncle employed her, above all, so that he might see her from time to time. He had played no real role in her childhood – the consequence of some nebulous rift between him and his brother, Kathleen’s father.

  Shortly after her father walked out for good, her uncle visited her and her mother at home. She has a vague memory of being sent upstairs by her mother; of lying on her bedroom floor and pressing her ear to a crack between the boards. If she heard what her uncle said, she has no memory of it.

  She understands, now that she is leaving, that her uncle enjoyed her company, that many of the errands and tasks he set for her were made up so that the two of them might spend time together when by rights they should both have been working.

  She remembers making blood puddings with him. ‘We waste hundreds of gallons of blood a year, Kathleen. Well, what can we do about this? How can we turn this wastage into profit?’ Whatever they were up to – visiting a neighbour’s farm, experimenting in the firm’s huge galley kitchen, taking drives through the country – he had a way of describing the activity so that it seemed important to his business.

  ‘The blood’ll splash my dress,’ she protested.

  ‘Nonsense.’ Her uncle’s dark, friendly features wobbled uncertainly towards what he thought was a ‘business-like’ expression. He looked as though he were sucking a boiled sweet.

  He brought her
an apron – a long one, it reached almost to her feet – and helped her lift the bucket. Together they strained the pig’s blood through a muslin cloth into a pan, and added spices, oatmeal, fat in tiny dice. He showed her how to fill the casing, how to tie it off. Everything had to be a bravura performance with him, even the making of puddings. ‘Here, you try!’ She was afraid that she might mark her clothes, her shoes. What would her mother say? He could not persuade her. He shook his head, and did the job himself. She watched him, and though it was a trivial thing, she felt that she had let him down.

  When the puddings were done, he lifted one from the boiling water by its string, laid it on a board, and cut it through with a knife. It was light like a soufflé. Delighted, he told her to fry some up for them. She did not know how. He showed her, dripping a knob of lard off a butter knife into a hot pan: ‘You cook this at home, surely?’

  Tongue-tied, she shook her head. He set places for them. He sat her down, adjusting the chair beneath her, as though she were in a hotel. She blushed.

  ‘Eat up!’

  She speared a mouthful with her fork. The black blood melted on her tongue.

  *

  On the bus home, and as usual, the Bridgeman boys – George and Robert, brothers, apprentice slaughtermen, who lived at the end of her street – came and sat behind her. They sniggered at her, and one of them said something disgusting about her and her uncle. She knew nothing she could say would heal their resentment of her: their boss’s favourite, his poor relation.

  As the bus rolled over the bridge into the village, the bigger of the boys dug about in the pocket of his trousers and produced a twist of bloody paper. He unwrapped it, leaned over and dropped a pig’s eye into Kathleen’s lap. Kathleen leapt out of her seat, speechless, pale with disgust. The smaller boy practically fell off his seat for laughing. ‘Oh George,’ he cried, and patted his brother on the arm, ‘th’art a proper one!’

  Her mother scolded her. ‘I’ll never get it out,’ she snapped, scrubbing at the bloody mark on Kathleen’s dress. ‘I never shall. It’s quite ruined.’

  Kathleen mentioned the puddings and lied about how the stain was made: a splash, she said, an accident. While she talked she wrapped her arms around her body. She was cold without her dress.

  ‘Put your hands by your sides,’ her mother said.

  Kathleen did as she was told.

  ‘Stand up straight.’

  The dress was a good one. The sun had set by the time the surface of the material gave way under her mother’s scrubbing brush. Kathleen’s mother sat at the kitchen table and cried a while, absently tearing threads from the dress she had ruined.

  Kathleen stood with her hands by her sides. She did not move. She did not make a sound.

  When she was done destroying the dress, Kathleen’s mother began her nightly clean of the kitchen. She boiled water in a pan. She added soap flakes. She scrubbed the stove. She scrubbed the table. She swept the floor and scrubbed it. She boiled up more water in a pan. She scrubbed the pan. Knowing her daughter had handled blood, she scrubbed at Kathleen’s hands till they were raw.

  Kathleen’s mother kept the kitchen clean. The pans and plates shone, then she put them away in deep drawers, and the drawers, too, she kept them clean. Each knife was sharp, unblemished: ‘Don’t touch.’

  That evening, because of the dress, and the time taken to clean it, and the time taken to establish that it was altogether ruined – the time spent mourning it, in fact – there was no supper. Normally, supper consisted of tea, bread and butter.

  By morning, however, her mother’s mood had improved. Night-time had wrought its necessary revisions upon the events of yesterday. It was the shoddy dress at fault, that would not clean up. It was her uncle’s fault, that he was careless: ‘Why, you might have been scalded!’

  Her mother’s mood was so solicitous, Kathleen dared to ask her for a second slice of bread. Mother laughed. ‘Little piglet,’ she said. ‘Greedy little piglet ears.’ It was true: Kathleen was always hungry.

  Rather than give her a second slice, Mother poured her a glass of milk. ‘Drink up,’ she said, ‘it’s good for you.’ There was a tap in the kitchen. She ran the jug under the tap, thinning the milk out for another day. The milk was never actually bad, but the jug lent it a certain sourness.

  ‘Drink up, love, you’ll be late.’

  Sometimes there would be jam. Never anything hot.

  During the weeks of the experiment, John Arven – the man his friends called ‘Sage’ – took lunch at an isolated pub, about a mile away from the sheds. He drank weak ale and ate sandwiches: huge doorsteps of white bread crammed with thick strips of baked ham. A piece of ham, ointment pink, fell out the bottom of his sandwich onto the table. ‘Pitch in, lovey,’ said Arven, handing her a sandwich.

  Her blush was deep and prickly like a fever.

  Arven was curious-looking. His nose hung down as a continuation of his forehead, like the guard on a helmet. This arrangement gave a certain power to his eyes, which were forever laughing and always focused on you. He had dreadful bouffant hair in which he took great pride; she could smell the dressing he used from where she sat. His clothes were unpressed and he hardly ever wore a tie. He talked incessantly, his voice rising to accommodate the broad Lancashire vowels he had picked up at school.

  Kathleen swallowed down slivers of crumbly, juicy ham. She forced herself to eat slowly: first her uncle’s pudding, now this ham – her shrunken stomach did not know how to handle it all.

  ‘Mr Hosken says you’re good with figures.’

  Kathleen folded her hands on her lap and nodded. She expected a test. She was ready.

  ‘Do you see ’em?’

  He met her blank look. ‘Figures, I mean. Only when a chap is good with figures, quite often – this is my experience – he sees them. As colours, as shapes. It’s not a question of thinking. It’s a question of looking. The inner eye. You know?’

  She shook her head, abashed. Amazing, that he should have guessed, that he should have seen so far inside her, to where her private colours lay. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a bloody business,’ Arven warned her, walking up the dirt track to where the sheds were now nearly complete. The sound of hammers rose on the air in weird syncopation. ‘You’ll be used to that, I expect.’

  A van rocked past them. Arven took Kathleen’s arm and drew her up onto the verge bordering the track. The van had a horse-box on tow, and the box slid and teetered in the ruts of the track.

  The sheds were wooden but for one wall, made of different stuff: brick, corrugated tin, sandbags; even a patch of dry-stone wall. Some of the sheds had windows. Others did not. The windows were either left open or fitted with a test material: wire mesh, or a coarsely woven material; glass of various sorts. Some of the panes were taped with a white criss-cross. Windows fitted with ordinary window glass were shielded by curtains of different materials.

  The sheds had birdcages fixed at different heights on one interior wall, and a larger, waist-high wire enclosure bolted to the floor.

  Arven showed Kathleen what to do; how the sheds were numbered, and the walls too, and the cages on the walls; how to use the record sheets he had prepared.

  From inside the van, Arven drew out cage after cage of pigeons. Inside cramped mesh containers, the rat-grey birds broiled over and around each other. Arven carried pigeons into the first shed and released them, one at a time, into cages mounted at different heights on the wall facing the window.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, mystified.

  A truck in army livery rolled up, drowning out his answer.

  The driver and his mate lifted green metal boxes from the back of the truck and carried them towards the sheds. Kathleen, under Arven’s instruction, noted down the distances between the boxes and the sheds. She found it hard to concentrate. She had heard strange sounds coming from the horse-box. Professor Arven had disabused her: ‘Not horses. Apes.’

  She wanted to see
the apes. She had never seen an ape except once in a zoo in York, and then it was sleeping, just a big deflated ball of grey-black fur.

  She wondered what their eyes were like; their hands. She imagined a troop of gorillas – huge, taller than a man – scampering out of the horse-box, rolling about, playing rough-and-tumble games. But the horse-box was opened only at the last minute, and the apes were in cages, and the cages were much smaller than she had expected, and draped in coarse cream cloths.

  At about four in the afternoon, they gathered behind the army lorry: the two soldiers, Arven, Kathleen and the driver of the van – a happy, snub-nosed man about Arven’s age who turned out to be his colleague, Solly Zuckerman.

  One of the soldiers was fiddling with a box held close to his chest. Wires trailed from the box. When she stepped out to see where the wires led, Arven pulled her back and took her hand.

  The explosion tore the roof right off the shed and blew the inner wall away. The silence which followed was punctuated, first by the clatter of shattered timber, then, from inside the broken shed, by screams. They were like the cries of a child. The driver’s mate strode over to the site of the explosion, to where the air had coagulated into wisps of smoke and steam. He turned and waved a flag: all clear.

  Arven and Zuckerman slogged over to him. Feeling numb, Kathleen made to follow. Arven gestured her to stay where she was. She found a flattish rock to sit on and listened, with an educated ear, to the screaming. There was more humanity to it than even a pig’s cry, or a lamb’s. When she saw no one was watching her, she covered her ears.

  Arven and Zuckerman picked morosely over the wreckage of the shed, peered inside, then beckoned the driver’s mate over.

  The flat slap of a pistol shot.

  A grey feather fell, smouldering, onto Kathleen’s dress. She leapt up and shook it away.

  Arven and Zuckerman’s eventual findings were to run quite counter to the impressions left on them by that first, calamitous experiment. Back at the abattoir, in a room given over by Mr Hosken to the government scientists, the zoologist Zuckerman would spend far more time studying live, undamaged animals than dead or injured ones.