Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

It got closer. It was big – not a building but more a pool of light – huge, by the side of the road, with darkness and the empty land all around it. It was a car dealership, out in the middle of nowhere. There was nobody there. The windows of the building itself were black. It rose up from the car park like the bridge of a container ship. All around it were cars, hundreds of cars, parked hull to hull, with halogen lights burning bone white above them.

It made him think of an elephants’ graveyard. Not white bones tanning in the sun, but empty windscreens, roof props, the scratchproof paint shining under the cold arc lights.

Alex rode on, until it vanished behind him, an island of light, unpopulated, in the enormous desert night.

Isla spends the week with Nicolas. At first, he doesn’t say much at all, though he behaves as if he was somehow expecting her – an affectation of serene foreknowledge that she doesn’t know whether or not to trust.

He ushers her into the shack. She ducks her head under the lintel as she enters. He, behind her, nodding courteously. The shack has a smell of wood and something sweet and dusty, like a church. He follows her in, gestures at a wooden chair that’s pushed in against a desk. On either side of the chair are tall stacks of yellow paper. The stacks of paper are everywhere. He sees her looking at them, waves dismissively as if brushing them away, shuffles to the chair and pulls it out, turns it round for her, busily nods and points her at it.

‘There, there – please… sit.’

The old man smiles encouragingly, nodding again faster as she advances.

She sits, nervously. She still has her backpack on so she teeters on the front couple of inches of the seat, smiling back at him, hands on her knees. She keeps suppressing an instinct, like someone meeting a nervous dog, to extend a low palm, gently.

He turns round, fumbles behind one of the piles of paper and fishes out an ancient kettle on the end of a snaking orange extension lead, then fills it from a large earthenware jug. He mumbles to himself in a sing-song voice under his breath as he does so.

As the kettle starts to rattle and cough, he moves over to an arrangement of shallow wire baskets hanging one above the other from chains. She can see a couple of leeks just going dry at the ends, a red net of cashew nuts. The whole assemblage wobbles as he rummages in it, and two handsomely sized eggs, smeared with a dab of dried brown, loll against each other in the bottom basket.

He pulls something out and returns, his tall body hunched over a little as if half out of shyness, half to save himself the effort of standing up only to bend again. On the floor he puts a dark green mug. It is the colour of old copper, she can see, on the inside. He produces a cloudy tumbler from somewhere else, puts it down too, and as the kettle passes its crisis of excitement, drops a pinch of some sort of herb into each and tops it with boiling water.

‘I don’t get many visitors,’ he says, stirring each with a spoon before handing her the mug, punctiliously, handle first. The infusion smells very strongly of sage. He sits down cross-legged with a great crack of the knees and looks at her, then downwards into his beard, whose ends he worries at absently between finger and thumb.

He begins with a cough, and a shrug. ‘I’ve been gone a long time,’ he says. ‘I know… I know… I’m very – touched – that you have come to see me. My last letters – I must apologise for… well, let’s…’

He pauses and shakes his head quickly from side to side.

‘We’ll talk about that later, perhaps. Yes. I’m glad you came.’

Isla simply sits there with her face glowing. She tells him how much he is admired, how much she has longed to meet him. After several minutes of this he starts to respond more than monosyllabically.

‘Oh, it’s a long time since I did mathematics, really. A child’s game. A means to an end. My work now is very different.’ She can see the flattery working on him. ‘But you know that, don’t you?’

He is still reluctant to meet her eyes for more than a moment. But she keeps talking, tries to keep him talking. She picks up on points in their correspondence, passes on faculty gossip – to which he listens with what she suspects is feigned interest, apart from the odd light of recognition, sometimes hostile, when the name of a mathematician of his own generation is mentioned.

At one point during their conversation – this is when Isla thinks she has made a breakthrough – he sees her eyes drifting over to a netting bag of some green vegetables by the pallet where he sleeps.

‘Ah, yes,’ he says, and the twist of his mouth seems almost self-mocking. ‘Artichokes.’

Occasionally she feels something spiky in his mind pushing back at her. He’ll ask a question about a point of mathematics, as if testing her, checking she’s understood. Sometimes the look when he raises his eye is minutely sharper, more appraising – then the sentences will again trail off and the combing of the fingers through the beard will increase. He continues to sit cross-legged, without apparent discomfort.

As they talk, he hauls over a pottery container filled with pea pods, takes a handful and pushes the container over towards Isla. They shell and eat the peas, which taste woody, but less horrible than the sage tea – and to Isla, who is both hungry and nervous, they are a welcome opportunity to do something with her hands.

That first night, she keeps talking to him till the sun sinks. He lights the hurricane lamp and moths loop in crazy eights around the table. They pass a point where impoliteness has become moot. Only when he notices her start to shiver a little, and tries to give her his blanket, does she make a move. The blanket, she guesses, is the origin of the dusty smell.

‘I’m sorry. You are too kind. I must leave you…’ She dares his first name: ‘Nicolas. I have to go and pitch my tent.’ She asks if she can set up her tent down the slope from his house. ‘Perhaps we can talk some more in the morning; if I’m not intruding?’

‘No,’ he said, wanly. ‘You are intruding, but you are not an intruder. Perhaps a helper. A sharer.’

That night she sets up her tent, laboriously, in the pitch dark. She dreams of goats bleating, and the following morning she is woken by the sound of chickens pecking about at the entrance to her tent. It hasn’t rained. Shivering from the dawn, she pokes her head out and sees Banacharski, bent over in his corduroy trousers, scrubbing at something in the dirt up by the front of the shack.

That is how Isla Holderness’s week with Banacharski starts. She quietly slots into his life, and he lets her. That first morning, she offers to make him breakfast and he, affecting to be startled by the emergence of this woman from the dew-steaming tent at the foot of his garden, nods. ‘Come.’ She uses the eggs she saw – they are fresh enough, and finds a couple more in a dirt bath under the house, one still warm.

The gas canisters she saw outside heat a little tank of hot water Banacharski uses to wash. But he also has a single-ring burner on a bottle of gas and she finds a skillet.

‘I don’t usually cook,’ he says.

She makes omelettes, seasoned with chervil she finds growing at a short distance from the house, and they eat them. He, again, insists she take the chair while he sits on the floor.

For most of that morning she helps him potter around the garden, pulling weeds. He does this more than she, but he points, occasionally, and grunts. She doesn’t know anything about gardening; she has always lived in big cities. As it goes on, prompted gently, the older man starts to talk a little more – about himself, about the disappearance. He won’t say much about it, but when she says something about being overcome by ‘pressure’ he turns to her sharply.