Fascination: Stories Page 6

  ‘What happened to your hand?’

  ‘I tried to beat up my oldest friend.’

  ‘Christ. We’d better get to work.’ She pursed her lips, rattled her fingertips on the desk top. ‘Would you mind if I spoke to someone about your case? Just a hunch.’

  ‘August 14th. The Rankin Hotel, Bloomsbury. I have moved out of the house and Stella has asked for a divorce. Crazily, stupidly, I took a girl home, a waitress called Katerina, Russian, I think, or Ukrainian. I said she could stay, be our lodger, as we had plenty of spare rooms. Stella came back as she was inspecting the guest bedroom in the basement. I never laid a finger on her (I was planning to, of course). In the fight that followed it transpired that John-Jo had told Stella about finding me with Encarnacion. Stella was convinced I was mired in some miserable, middle-aged fit of satyriasis – she had been prepared to suffer it for a while, but not any more. I disgusted her, she bawled at me, how could I bring a girl into our house? What was she meant to do? She had some dignity left. She ordered me out of the house and I meekly went. Tomorrow I go to Edinburgh, perhaps it’s best I try to sort this out on my own.’

  Part III. Edinburgh

  Edinburgh in high summer was buffeted by gales and driving rain out of the north, interspersed with baffling periods of brilliant breezy sunshine, the wet streets drying before your eyes, umbrellas stowed, raincoats shrugged off, the terraced gardens beneath the dark, looming castle suddenly busy with half-naked sunbathers, before – inevitably – the slate-blue clouds gathered over Fife and the North Sea and bore down on the city again and the unrelenting drenching downpour resumed with all its former energy.

  I had not been here for years and I had forgotten how the city in August surrendered itself to its annual invasion of Festival-goers, Princes Street and the Royal Mile loud with polyglot chatter, railings and billboards a patchwork collage of posters and advertisements. Yet beneath all this bright tat and cultural tourism, this cosmopolitan artfest, and the fizz and crackle in the atmosphere – almost palpable – of people set on indulging themselves, the old, dour, sooty reserve of the place appeared merely to be biding its time. These frivolous laughing folk will be gone in a week or so, seemed to be the message one read in the grim, impassive faces of the locals, and then we can get on with the serious business of living.

  I was strongly conscious of this, of the old city and its implacable mores, as I walked along one of the gaunt, dark grey Georgian crescents of the New Town – the rain slanting down again, stinging my cheeks and brow – towards number 37 and noted the brass plaque (teared with icy drops) beside the bell-push which declared: ‘The Royal Scottish Institute of Hydrodynamic Engineering’, and, below that, the terse instruction, ‘Tradesmen report to the rear of the building’.

  A tiny grey-haired woman with supernaturally bright eyes opened the door and directed me to a seat in the wide, penumbrous hall, where I was surveyed by numerous varnished portraits of engineering worthies from the nineteenth century. ‘Mr Auchinleck will be with you presently,’ she said and scurried back to her office from where I could shortly hear – a rarer and rarer sound this – the noise of a manual typewriter tapping rapidly away.

  It had been Petra Fairbrother who had unwittingly sent me north from my mean hotel in Bloomsbury. She tracked me down there and informed me by telephone, excitement colouring her voice, that she thought she had a ‘lead’ – though she had no idea what exactly it would portend.

  She had shown my pages of ‘automatic writing’, as she termed it, to a friend of hers, a mathematics don at Cambridge University. He thought the signs – the elongated x’s – were vaguely familiar and had promised to investigate. I fancifully imagined my pages being passed round the senior common rooms of various Cambridge colleges, grey heads nodding sagely at my hieroglyphs, learned speculation ensuing… But, whatever happened, he called back some few days later to say that the sign had been recognized by someone in the engineering department. There was every possibility, Petra Fairbrother related to me, that the sign I had written, 35,000 feet above the Atlantic, represented a concept evolved in hydrodynamic engineering known as a ‘Saltire Wave’.

  A few hours in a local library unearthed the key facts about the Saltire Wave. It was a phenomenon discovered by the Scottish engineer Findlay Smith Quarrie in 1834. One afternoon, riding his horse along the banks of the Union Canal near Edinburgh, he noticed that when a barge was suddenly halted, the body of water around it, after an initial violent agitation, calmed itself and then moved ahead independently in an even wave, as if the barge were still there and the displacement of the water caused by the barge’s forward motion was still occurring. On this particular day, Quarrie had spurred his horse forward and had followed this wave along the canalside for several miles. The wave was miraculously real, but its cause seemed spectral. It was as if, Quarrie remarked in the paper he submitted to the Institute of Hydrodynamic Engineering – with due apologies for the anthropomorphic nature of his observation – ‘the water was still remembering the effect of the barge’.

  In the paper he proposed a mathematical symbol to represent this phenomenon: two parallel lines forced to cross as a result of an energy twist in the middle. He called it the Saltire Wave because the shape that ensued resembled an elongated version of the white ‘x’ on the blue ground of the Scottish flag – known familiarly as the ‘Saltire Cross’.

  I sat in the shadowy hall of the Institute, waiting for Mr Auchinleck, with an empty but open mind. I was not sure why I felt I had to come to Edinburgh, or of what I might achieve or discover, but at least I felt I was acting, doing something positive. Some strange enlightenment might arrive as a result of this visit and I had a sixth sense that it would be found in the long-defunct persona of Findlay Smith Quarrie.

  There was the sound of squeaking rubber on the polished parquet of the Institute before Mr Auchinleck appeared. He was a young man in his thirties with a frizzy mass of wavy brown hair. He was wearing a grey suit and a plaid shirt with no tie. The squeaks had been produced by the crude sandals he was wearing, the soles apparently cut from auto tyres. I could not help looking down and was vaguely distressed to see his unduly long toenails extending through the sandal thongs like curved yellow talons.

  Auchinleck – ‘Call me Gilles,’ he immediately invited – was a genial fellow and intrigued to learn I was on the trail of Findlay Smith Quarrie and his Saltire Wave.

  ‘A fascinating man,’ Auchinleck said. ‘Sort of ahead of his time. I don’t think, to be honest, he really knew what he had found with his Wave.’ He grinned. ‘Now we say everything’s a wave, don’t we? Atoms are both wave and particle,’ he recited in a sing-song voice. ‘Don’t they claim that even thought is basically a wave phenomenon?’

  ‘Is it?’ I asked, intrigued.

  ‘Well, so they say. Waves, waves everywhere. Do you want to see what he looked like?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Quarrie.’

  Gilles Auchinleck led me upstairs to the Institute’s original lecture room, purpose built, a semicircular bank of wooden pews facing a wooden dais that backed on to an enormous, crowded oil painting.

  ‘1834,’ he said. ‘The founding members. There’s Quarrie standing by his famous pump.’

  I stepped forward, following the direction of his pointing finger to stare at the well-executed portrait of a plump rosy-faced figure, more like a country squire than one’s idea of a Victorian engineer, his stomach straining at the buttons of his silk waistcoat.

  ‘Quarrie made a fortune from that pump,’ Auchinleck said. ‘By the middle of the century it was in every coal mine in the world.’

  He went on, but I wasn’t listening, as my eye had been caught by a saturnine figure in the background – a man in a dark suit with a odd white silk stock at his neck. In one hand he held a burning cigar and his eyes seemed to stare directly out of the canvas. His face was slumped – his features haggard, through illness or debauchery one would have guessed – but what was most striking
about him was his wide moustache, dark across his sallow face, its wings extending beyond the edge of his lips and curving upwards in a cropped, swooping handlebar shape on to the cheeks themselves.

  ‘Who’s that man?’ I asked, pointing, ‘the one at the back.’

  ‘Good question,’ Auchinleck said. ‘If we go down to the library I’ll be able to tell you exactly.’

  ‘Edinburgh. August 17th. They say that on occasions the force of a person’s gaze can be felt physically (maybe the “look” is a form of wave?) and if intent enough can make the object of that gaze turn round, yet the girl behind the bar – at whom I have been staring for the last five minutes – smokes on unconcernedly, looking everywhere except at me. She is dark, of course, young, with a small shading of acne at the corners of her wide mouth. When she poured me my fourth large scotch and water I noticed that her nails were bitten to the quick. She has a tall, boyish figure and her hair is spiky with gel. I sit here in the corner scribbling, and I feel the need I have for her like an ache in my gut. Like a dagger in my gut. I will drink on here until closing time and then ask her to come home with me to my hotel. There is a difference now: I seem to be able to step back from the seizure, the fit, the madness, or whatever it is – I seem to be able to acknowledge that it is underway. Is this a sign of its hold on me diminishing? Or merely that I am learning to live with it, as the invalid does with his chronic incontinence? But it is as if some corner of my brain remains my own… And yet I will not rise to my feet and leave this place.’

  Wallace Kilmaron. Wallace Kilmaron. His name was Wallace Kilmaron – the man in the painting with the cigar and the moustache. Auchinleck had been able to identify him with the aid of a key to the painting’s multitude of portraits (some thirty-three in all) and gave me a little information. Kilmaron had been an expert in drainage and irrigation systems and had done much of his work in Holland, where he was acknowledged as a nonpareil when it came to constructing floodwalls, canals and all the complex business of water displacement involved in land reclamation. His dates were 1796–1840. Auchinleck had no idea how he had died but it was clear that he had not reached any great age, even by the standards of the nineteenth century. More interestingly, he had resigned from the Institute in 1835 – hence the paucity of information they held. ‘Most of the fellows lodged their archives with us,’ Auchinleck explained, ‘which was half the purpose of establishing the Institute in the first place. Something must have gone wrong there – we’ve nothing on Kilmaron, I’m afraid, apart from these few basic facts.’ As if he were in some way responsible for this omission, Auchinleck obligingly put in a call to a friend at the National Library of Scotland and an appointment was arranged for me the next day, where everything the library had on Kilmaron would be made available.

  I was early and went to a café to wait for the main doors to be opened. I felt a tension in me, born of a bizarre confidence that the answer to my problems lay within that solid grey sandstone building. I was hungover also, my night’s drinking having only provoked a thin, mean headache, and I felt soured further by the residual sense of shame at my vain importuning of the girl behind the bar. She had barely been able to sum up the energy to dismiss me, as if this were an event that happened nightly – drunk, middle-aged men leeringly asking her home for a nightcap. But as I sat in the café, trying to forget the look of contempt in her eyes, trying to concentrate on the crossword in the Scotsman and idly watching the morning drizzle fill the gutters outside, I felt my right side growing cold as if from a draught and suddenly my hand began to move across the checkerboard squares of the crossword puzzle drawing a series of Saltire Wave symbols. I must have done a dozen or so elongated x’s when suddenly I regained the power in my arm.

  I looked at the page with no fear or panic this time – I saw it more as a form of communication from the – from the what? – from the shade of Wallace Kilmaron, I suppose, as if he were whispering ‘congratulations’ to me down through the decades. And across the street I saw the porter swing the heavy wooden doors of the library open.

  Wallace Kilmaron died a bitter and frustrated man, aged forty-four, from an ‘infection of the lung and belly’ – in other words from causes unknown to contemporary medicine. In his life he had published a dozen or so scientific papers, mostly in learned journals, to do with his field of expertise. One small book, however, was lodged in the Library’s archives, privately printed by a printer and bookseller in Leith, entitled: ‘On a Phenomenon of Turbulent Water’. Its publication date was 1835 and a reading of it, combined with the three obituaries that had appeared on his death and an exchange of letters in the Annals of Civil Engineering, were enough to piece Wallace Kilmaron’s story together.

  In 1833 Wallace Kilmaron had been involved in a major project of land reclamation between the Waal river and the Lower Rhine in Holland, to which end a complex pattern of drainage channels had been dug over an area of some dozens of square miles. One day a narrow, flat-bottomed square-ended skiff (used for the transportation of dredged mud and sand) had sunk tight in one of the channels. During the efforts to refloat the boat (teams of horses and winches being employed) the confines of the narrow waterway, combined with the heaving and lowering of the stern and bow of the skiff, had set up a series of turbulent waves. Kilmaron, standing supervising on the bank, had noticed how these waves ‘like the travelling hump of a whiplash’ would speed down the water channel ‘without change of form or diminution of velocity’. Intrigued, Kilmaron decided to follow one of these waves on its progress and recorded walking hundreds of yards alongside one of these ‘surges’, as he called them, likening them to a form of tidal bore, ‘a rounded, distinct elevation of water’. He noted further that when the channel changed course the wave would seemingly diminish into wavelets and then, as the channel straightened, the wavelets would magically reform into the original surge as if ‘somehow contained in the turbulence of the water was a memory of the surge’s original identity’.

  So fascinated was he by the discovery of this phenomenon that Kilmaron constructed a large wooden platform floating on the surface of the water which, by a clever distribution of weights, could be made to oscillate about a fixed axle, thereby creating regular surges – or Coherent Waves, as he now called them – to order. Weeks of experimentation allowed him to arrive at some understanding of the phenomenon, which he described in the scientific paper that he wrote as a form of resonance, rather than turbulence, representing order rather than chaos, and which was dependent on precise relationships of depth and width of water channel and degree of agitation if it was to occur. He proposed a mathematical symbol to designate these conditions which took the form of two whiplash humps superimposed, and which, when further simplified, resembled a curiously flattened and rounded ‘x’ shape. He submitted that this condition should be known henceforward as the Kilmaron Wave, and he journeyed back from Holland to Edinburgh to read his paper – ‘On a Phenomenon of Turbulent Water’ – and present his findings to the recently formed Institute of Hydrodynamic Engineering – only to discover that Findlay Smith Quarrie had beaten him to it by a matter of weeks and the small world of hydrodynamic engineering was loud with discussion about Quarrie’s amazing ‘Saltire Wave’ and all that it implied.

  ‘August 18th. Edinburgh. I am fully conscious of the dangerous illogic of what I am about to write, fully aware of what danger it places me in, of how it will alter the way I am perceived, but I know, I know for sure in my heart and head that everything that has happened to me since that day in May, when my hand began to scribble symbols on my notebook – that everything is to do with Wallace Kilmaron and his death in 1840.’

  As I read and deduced what had occurred since his discovery of the Kilmaron Wave I knew that somehow – somehow – the events of over 150 years ago were systematically destroying my life. The final evidence came when I read at the end of one of his obituaries that six months before his death Wallace Kilmaron had married a parlourmaid in his household, one Sarah McBride, and le
ft his estate to her. It was a union that was never recognized by Kilmaron’s family, who later contested in court that the marriage and the rewriting of the will had occurred while Kilmaron was in a state of ‘drunkenness and dementia’.

  Part IV: Biarritz

  Didier Visconti smiled, and placed his big, tanned hand briefly on my shoulder.

  ‘Don’t mention it, Alex,’ he said. ‘You paid for everything. Everybody’s going to talk about it. I’ll be famous. I should be grateful to you.’

  For some reason I felt like weeping with gratitude, felt like hugging this cheery, burly Frenchman, felt like telling him he had saved my life. Instead, I said: ‘I can’t tell you why – or I could tell you why, but it would make no sense – you’d think I was crazy. Let’s say it was something I had to do.’

  Didier looked down at the sign, cast in metal and embedded in the turf at the edge of the fourteenth tee. I had had it rendered in six languages – French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish. It read: ‘The water hazard on this hole is unique in golf. It is based on a phenomenon of turbulent water first discovered in 1834 by the Scottish engineer Wallace Kilmaron, a phenomenon known as the Kilmaron Wave.’

  We followed a meandering foursome of middle-aged Swedish ladies down the fairway towards the fourteenth green. ‘Les Cerisiers’ was a new golf course owned and constructed by Didier Visconti, a wealthy builder, some few miles north of Biarritz, landscaped by Harrigan-Rief Associates some six years ago. In the course of the landscaping I had redirected a small stream into a narrow, deep-banked channel some hundreds of metres long that ran down the side of the fourteenth fairway and crossed in front of the fourteenth green – to act as a fiendish water hazard (any balls lost in it were irretrievable) – before vanishing underground to feed the artificial lake in front of the clubhouse (architect: John-Joseph Harrigan).