Robert Wilson - The Company of Strangers

She went to sit on the window ledge, her room at the top, old servants’ quarters. She looked over the back garden through the lime trees to Macaulay Road, four houses along, direct hit from a doodlebug, not much left, blackened beams, piled rubble but nobody home at the time. She caught sight of herself, only her head in the bottom corner of the mirror on the dressing table across the room. Long black hair, dark, nearly olive skin, twenty-year-old brown eyes wanting to be older.

She opened a packet of Woodbines, rested the filterless cigarette on her lower lip, let it stick. She struck a match on the outside wall, warm brick. Her hand came into the frame, she turned her face and accepted the light. She flicked her head back, unstuck the cigarette, let out a long stream of smoke and came back to herself in the mirror with her tongue on her top lip – being sophisticated. She shook her head at herself, looked out of the window – still a silly girl playing romantic games in the mirror. Not a spy.

She’d spent most of her life at the Sacred Heart Convent in Devizes where she’d been sent at seven years old when her great aunt had died and there’d been no one to look after her while her mother worked. That was why the piano teacher and his wife, who’d been bombed in their home during the Blitz, had been so important to her, they’d become family, looking after her through school holidays. The piano teacher was her father. She’d never known her own, the one who’d died of cholera before she was born.

They knew about discipline and religion at the Sacred Heart and not much else, but it hadn’t prevented her from getting a place at St Anne’s, Oxford to read maths. She’d done nearly two years of her degree when her tutor invited her to a party at St John’s. At the party a large quantity of drink was served and consumed by dons, undergraduates and other people not directly associated with the university. These people floated around the room and occasionally moored themselves to some young person or other and engaged them in short intense conversations about politics and history. She went to more parties like this and met a man who took a particular interest in her, who was called simply – Rawlinson.

Rawlinson was very tall. He wore a three-piece suit, charcoal grey, a starched collar attached with studs to his shirt and a school tie which, if she’d known more, would have said Wellington and the military. He was in his fifties with all his hair, which was black on top, grey at the sides and combed through with tonic. He had only one leg and his prosthesis was stiff so that when he walked that leg swung in a semi-circle and he had to support himself with a duckhead-topped cane. She felt lucky because, while his conversation was the usual penetrative stuff, he participated with the charm of an uncle who shouldn’t really take a fancy to his niece but couldn’t help it.

‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Mathematics. Has anybody ever asked you why mathematics? Interesting.’

Andrea, a little drunk, shrugged. Unprepared for the question, her brain ticked. She spoke with her mind elsewhere.

‘You can get things to work out, I suppose,’ she said, feeling instantly stupid, embarrassed.

‘Not always, I shouldn’t think,’ said Rawlinson, surprising her, taking it seriously, taking her seriously even.

‘No, not always, but when you do it’s…well…there’s a beauty to it, an inconceivable simplicity. As Godfrey Hardy said, “Beauty is the test. There’s no place in this world for ugly mathematics.’”

‘Beauty?’ said Rawlinson, baffled. ‘Not something I remember from maths class. Fiendish is more the word. Show me beauty…beauty that I can understand.’

‘The number six,’ she said, ‘has three divisors – one, two and three – which if added together come to…six. Isn’t that perfect? And, seen in that same light, isn’t Pythagoras’s theorem beautiful too? So simple. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the other two sides squared. True for all right-angled triangles ever created. What seems terribly complicated can be resolved into equations…formulae which go towards completing the…well, at least part of the puzzle.’

He tapped his cheek with a long finger.

‘The puzzle?’

‘How things work,’ she said, hysteria mounting as the banality took root.

‘And people,’ he said; question or agreement, she wasn’t sure.

‘People?’

‘How do people fit into the equation?’

‘There are infinite possibilities in maths. Every number is a complex number. It can be real or imaginary, and real numbers can be rational or irrational. Rational like integers or fractions, irrational like algebra or transcendental numbers.’

‘Transcendental?’

‘Real, but non-algebraic.’

‘I see.’

‘Like π.’

‘What are you saying, Miss Aspinall?’

‘I’m talking to you in the simplest way possible, at the most basic end of mathematics, and already there are things you don’t fully understand. It’s a secret language. Only very few people know it and can speak it.’

‘That still doesn’t explain how people fit into your world.’

‘I was just showing you that numbers can be complicated in the same way that people can be. And something else…I’m a person, too, with all the normal human needs. I don’t always speak in algorithms.’

‘Numbers are more stable than people, I’d have thought. More predictable.’

‘I haven’t come across an emotional number…yet,’ she said, her hands feeling huge at her sides, flapping like albatross’s wings, ‘which is why, I suppose, it’s possible to get things to work out…every so often.’

‘Are solutions important to you?’

Andrea studied him for a moment, the question carrying interview weight. His eyes didn’t flinch from hers. She lost the match.

‘I do like to solve problems. That’s the reward. But it’s not always possible and working towards something can be just as satisfying,’ she said, not believing it, but thinking it might please him.

After this string of parties her tutor sent her over to Oriel to talk to someone about ‘matters pertaining to the war effort’. He sent her to a doctor who gave her a half-hour medical examination. She didn’t hear anything for a week until she was called back to Oriel and found herself signing the Official Secrets Act, so, it seemed, that they could give her a course in typing and shorthand. She thought she was headed for a code-cracking centre, where she’d heard lots of other maths graduates had been sent, but they gave her some additional training instead. Dead-letter drops, invisible ink, using miniature cameras, following people, talking to people while pretending to be someone else to find out what they knew – role-playing, they called it. The minuscule arts of deception. They also taught her how to fire a gun, ride a motorbike and drive a car.

They sent her home at the beginning of July to wait for an assignment. A week later she was contacted by Rawlinson, who told her he was going to come to tea to meet her mother. It was important to establish normality at home, her mother had to be given something official about what her daughter would be doing but not, of course, the reality.

‘Andrea!’

Her mother shouted up the stairs from the hall. She dabbed the coal of the cigarette out on the wall, put the butt back in the packet.

‘Andrea!’

‘Coming, Mother,’ she said, ripping open the door.

She looked down the stairs to her mother’s moon-white, but not so luminous, face at the curve of the bannisters.

‘Mr Rawlinson’s here,’ she said in a stage whisper.

‘I didn’t hear him arrive.’

‘Well, he’s here,’ she said. ‘Shoes.’