Turbulence Read online

  Once the holidays finally came, along with other colonial children I would join a ship of the Union Castle line to Cape Town. I would then take the mail steamer up the coast to Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika, where my father would pick me up. It will be strange to see that place again.

  The drive across to Nyasaland across a highland escarpment which marked the edge of the Rift Valley was always very exciting; though being somewhat long and arduous the journey was of great concern to my mother as she waited at home on the farm. With the image in my head of her greeting us, one time or another – wearing a dress printed with flowers as the mud-spattered Land Rover pulled up outside the verandah, Vickers jumping manically up beside – I fell asleep, secure once again in those happy times, before the event. Before the kizunguzungu, which was the Swahili word for the spinning dizziness to come.

  I don’t know what the Chichewa word was. We spoke kitchen Swahili to the servants because that’s what my father had picked up in Kenya. I ought to apologise for it now, and I will happily do so, but at the time such an apology would have been inconceivable.

  That was just how it was in those days. Whites didn’t give politics a second thought. I myself certainly had no conception, as a boy, that it might be better not to talk to Cecilia and Gideon and the others in a lingua franca of command which was as foreign to them as to us. Everyone in the house spoke English well enough but, ridiculously, it was used only when pidgin Swahili failed either them or us. Now, looking back, remembering Cecilia’s mothering of me and Gideon’s fond scolding of Vickers, I wish I had learned Chichewa. Some boys did, but they lived on farms even further off the map than ours.

  We were all in the Great Rift, that long strip of African country which, mostly let down through faults and slips and sudden fallings away, stretches from the lower Zambezi in the south to Ethiopia in the north. Related rifts continue across the Red Sea into the Jordan Valley. But beginning with Lake Nyasa and bifurcating at its top end into Lakes Tanganyika, Kivu, Edward and Albert on the western side, and a vast series of mountainous gulfs and plunges up through towards Lake Rudolf and beyond in the east – my rift, the Great Rift, was formed when rigid basement rocks buckled during the last continental shift, lowering and raising great blocks of land as if they were nursery bricks. In between these two arms sat Uganda and the vast basin of Lake Victoria, and volcanic extrusions such as the Ruwenzori.

  Ugandans, Kenyans, Tanganyikans, Nyasalanders, the white settler on his farm, the Indian merchant selling soap and sugar at his duka – we were all turning in the lava that runs in the splits between cultures, all spinning and tumbling as we fell like scraps of paper into those running streams. Some individuals were burned in an instant. Many whole tribes were choked and scorched and incinerated. Some were bloodied by floating boulders. Others there were who were overwhelmed simply by the smoke of distant battle.

  But of the white tribe we can say one thing with certainty. We were the most stupid. Some of us had no idea whatsoever it would ever end, no conception at all that at imperial sunset another formation might appear, rising like a sea monster out of the molten depths.

  Out of the fault.

  The Rift.

  The Great Rift.

  There is every cause to believe that there is more extraordinary geological activity to come in the Great Lakes region. A man named Bullard who had been a research student in Rutherford’s laboratory, and was still at Cambridge when I turned up there, did some fascinating work on this subject. He showed that gravity is lower than it ought to be in some of these Rift lakes. This negative gravity means there is material down there that’s lighter than its surroundings, material that’s longing to rise – and would do so in an instant were it not for side-pressing rocks holding it down like a pair of pliers. Bullard’s anomalies mean some of the Rift is not just foundered valleys, the consequence of a fall.

  Some of it must have been pushed down. If there is a shift of plate tectonics, that material will come flying up.

  15

  A week after my lunch with the Rymans I was working over some charts in the cot-house when there was a knock on the door. It was Gill. She was carrying a round wooden tray on which stood tall tumblers full of ice and a jug of straw-coloured liquid. She was dressed in a skirt and blouse: some kind of heavy, yellowish, iridescent silk for the skirt and another material, the colour of limestone, for the blouse. Her figure seemed fuller, somehow, as if it were a fold one might enter. I felt a shiver of desire.

  It made me nervous to see her. Although taking any opportunity to see Ryman himself, I’d been keeping a low profile so far as his wife was concerned, for obvious reasons.

  ‘I thought you might like some lemonade,’ she said.

  ‘Lemons? At this time of year? In Scotland?’

  Her high heels ticked across the tiled floor. I had never seen her in anything but flat shoes before.

  ‘We use lemon essence, actually. And citric acid. Wallace makes it.’ She came over and put the tray down on the desk where I was working, peering over my chart as she poured a glass. ‘What are you working on?’

  ‘Some rather intricate upper-air conditions.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That.’ She went to the bed and sat down, smoothing her skirt. ‘You know, Wallace once had a plan to chequer the globe with reporters who’d send in upper-air data to computers in his forecast factory, all calculating away.’

  In those days the word computer was used to refer to human beings with slide-rules. Effectively, back then, it meant mathematicians. It was another term she used which seemed strange to me at the time. ‘Forecast factory?’ I queried.

  ‘Yes, a large hall like a theatre in which all the computers, men as well as women, would sit doing their calculations, keeping pace with the weather as it was reported – by telegrams.’

  ‘That would mean a lot of telegrams.’

  ‘Or by radio. Or telephone, though that would be expensive. Every three hours each of the sixty-four thousand computers would receive a message from his or her area of the world.’

  ‘Sixty-four thousand people? In one room?’

  ‘Yes, working in parallel as the weather moved across the globe.’

  I humoured her. ‘It would have to be an awfully big theatre. More like a football stadium.’

  ‘He has in mind something like the Albert Hall, overseen by a conductor.’

  She stood up and swept her hands across the room. ‘A map of the world is painted on the walls of the chamber: the Arctic on the ceiling, England in the gallery. In the upper circle, the tropics. Dress circle? Australia. Antarctic in the pit. Desk by desk, each computer attends to the mathematical quantities, broken down by type – pressure, temperature, humidity – for his or her region. Then works them through the appropriate equations. Do you see?’

  ‘Sort of.’ I took a hesitant sip of the lemonade. I was right to be doubtful. It was frightfully bitter and chemical. ‘Each computer passes the solution to his equation to his neighbour, and so on.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s much better than that. On each desk is a visual display showing the values for that equation once it is worked out. These are read by one’s neighbours and by a higher official who co-ordinates the work of each region and maintains communication throughout the system, reporting to the central conductor.’ She paused. ‘All the basic-level computers wear a uniform to encourage discipline – though I don’t suppose Wallace would want it to be anything like a military one. Perhaps something like the police, with the higher officials displaying special chevrons to distinguish them from the ordinaries. No one speaks, it’s all done by writing on slips.’

  It took me more than a few seconds to absorb all this. As I was doing so, with ever more animated gestures, Gill explained how the ‘conductor’ would co-ordinate information about the future weather as it flowed north and south, east and west, each flow mirrored by what was happening on the floor of the forecast factory.

  It was a pretty bizarre scenario, effectively treating m
en as machines working in parallel, but it was the issue of representation that puzzled me most.

  I put it to her. ‘How does he think they mirror the variability of the real world? The fuzziness of a cloud, the rate of evaporation from foliage, the vorticity of one eddy as compared with that of its neighbour? Not to mention all the other myriad things which affect weather.’

  ‘Wallace has quantities, symbols in the equations, for all those things. Each one. Even one for fuzziness. I think he calls it “turbulivity”. Or “scatterivity”. Anyway, that’s by the by. All those numbers, resolved down to quantities more familiar to the public – wind, rain, temperature – will eventually be broadcast to the nation, but the whole thing has to be properly organised before that is possible.’

  She moved to the centre of the cabin. Again I was struck by the fullness of her figure. ‘From the pit, the Antarctic region, a pillar rises. In a pulpit at the top stands the conductor. His instruments are the human computers in their adjacent geographical zones. Time is of the essence. Or rather, it’s the medium that they’re working in. Chasing real weather almost in real time as it races round the globe.’

  Her heels might have been on the wooden boards of the cot-house, but her head was in conceptual clouds. Pointing here and there with one arm, then the other, she was lost like a child in the game of the thing. ‘The conductor shines a beam of rosy light on those who are running ahead of the rest, a beam of blue light on those who are behind.’

  As she moved through the room, I found myself watching the contours of her legs and back and shoulders, most of all (and strangely) her abdomen, until she inclined her head towards me with a smile – ‘Well, what do you think?’

  What I thought, uncomfortable suddenly, was that a husband’s scientific scheme was being offered me by his wife as a kind of seduction. But there was something even stranger than that. In the distance, from high on the hill, I heard the sound of one of the foresters’ chain saws. Looking at her body I was struck by her beauty again, but also something else, it suddenly occurred to me that she might be pregnant. What a fence post I was, I think now. But then most men are in these matters.

  ‘Well, it’s certainly a system,’ I said, puzzled. ‘It would work for world domination if it doesn’t work for weather prediction. How are people told about this factory’s forecasts?’

  ‘The conductor has a senior clerk, lieutenant … come, you be him.’ She held out her hand, and I rose to take it, as if for a dance. ‘The clerk dispatches the future weather by pneumatic carrier to a room where it is transmitted to the public. Obviously there is a lot of information. Wallace is quite anxious about the amount of data. Messengers carry piles of used computing forms from the lieutenant down to a cellar, a storehouse for data …’

  Mimicking the action of the lieutenant handing the messenger a pile of forms, she suddenly fell hard against my chest. I fell back onto the tray and the jug of juice crashed on the floor. The next moment Gill and I were hunched down among the broken glass and fake lemonade.

  There was a strange theatricality about it all, as if she had always meant to push me. Then she leaned over as I was about to pick up a shard and pressed her hand hard down on top of mine. Again it seemed entirely deliberate, though surely it must have been an accident, I thought.

  ‘Oh God, I am sorry.’

  She had almost made this apology before the event happened. Certainly before I let out a howl, lifting up my hand to look at the shard embedded in it.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said, whipping out a white handkerchief – it was a man’s handkerchief, one of Ryman’s, I suppose – to mop up the blood running down my wrist. She grabbed my wounded hand to remove the shard, which she dropped into her own empty glass. She continued to mop at the wound till the handkerchief was fairly soaked. Then, without a word, she rushed for the door, leaving me bleeding, blood dripping on my charts.

  Flabbergasted, I found an old towel to staunch the remaining flow. As I was doing so, I heard a vehicle start up. I went to the door just in time to see Ryman’s car disappear down the hill.

  With the towel still wrapped round my wrist, I wandered down the field, at a loss to understand what had happened. There was a smell of burning. As I got closer, Ryman emerged from the smoke of a bonfire he was tending. He was a little way from me, across some roughish ground that divided the bottom of Mackellar’s field from the Rymans’ garden. He was carrying a fork and wearing an old straw hat.

  ‘Your wife!’ I shouted, walking towards him.

  Dressed in wellingtons and an old trilby hat, he stared at me through his glasses. ‘Yes?’

  ‘She’s gone. She brought me a drink. Citric acid. It dropped and I cut myself. Then she fled.’

  ‘I think she has gone in the car. What had you been discussing?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What were you talking about?’

  The smoke of the bonfire began to envelop us. Plumes of it were curling over the brim of Ryman’s hat, giving him an obscure, spectral aspect.

  ‘Your scheme,’ I said. ‘The Albert Hall. Your complicated scheme.’

  He gave an odd, bitter smile. ‘The scheme is complicated because the atmosphere is complicated.’ And then, like an enchanter or stage illusionist, he folded himself back into the smoke.

  16

  For some time after this strange incident, I kept my distance from the Rymans. I didn’t know what to do. In any case, I was busy. The flow of work from Whybrow had increased enormously. A barrage of messages emanated from Dunoon, and Whybrow took quite an obnoxious tone if you didn’t jump to it. As well as my usual observations, barometer readings and so on, I had to provide Met plans for flights from a local airfield. I was also occasionally asked to do prospective calculations relating to smoke screens for defence artillery units.

  I found it frustrating to spend so long doing all this extra work, but I couldn’t exactly refuse to do it outright. There was an element of Whybrow trying to impress the authority of his little fiefdom on me, but that was only part of it. The nature of war – and weather – meant that the work’s very existence was an indication of its importance, even if it was not as important as my authentic reason for being in Kilmun. Still, I did cut some corners here and there and this caused Whybrow to flap a touch.

  So I did not have much time to visit Ryman, even though Sir Peter’s instructions remained uppermost in my mind. At least I think they did … Another part of me was in a kind of reverie, unable to think on any scale except the one I was within, there in the backwater of Kilmun. Despite all the soldiers and ships, it seemed a very long way from any invasion of mainland Europe.

  It crossed my mind that I should simply again ask Ryman – outright – to explain exactly how to use his wretched ratio. My psychology wasn’t suited to all this subterfuge. I was almost grateful for the heavy workload I was under, since it at least gave me reason not to consider my failure to get what Sir Peter was after. By now I had sent the director a bromidey sort of letter, saying I was beginning to make progress.

  The whole situation was peculiar. I had come to the conclusion that Gill’s attempt to maim me was definitely deliberate – but I could not for the life of me understand the reason. Or why, if she really was pregnant, she had come on like the temptress older woman? And what, in the house of a pacifist, were those shell cases for? In the face of all these mysteries I was grateful for the bluff simplicity of Mackellar.

  It became my habit, once the day’s work was over, to meet him for a smoke and sometimes a nip of whisky on the drystone wall that ran along the edge of the field in which the cot-house stood. I smoked cigarettes. Mackellar had his pipe, an authentic cherry-wood briar, such as I myself have now taken up, eschewing cigarettes in my old age.

  Sometimes one or two of the foresters joined us on their way down from the hill. Bearded, bony-faced taciturn men in green overalls flecked with woodchips, they spoke, if they spoke at all, in a Scottish accent different from Mackellar’s. He said m
ost of them came from the Highland estates, from families that had done this sort of work for generations.

  Long-limbed and slightly forbidding – as if they might cut a man’s throat without a thought – the foresters made up for what they lacked in conversation by bringing along square tin flasks of some sort of hooch they distilled themselves up in the camps. There was a comforting lack of excitability to these gatherings and nothing was said in them worth recording. We all just sat there making staccato observations, often unacknowledged – about weather and wood, animals and landscape and tools – until the tobacco and the alcohol did their job of unfolding the knots of physical (or, in my case, largely mental) activity that had made up the day.

  One night, I remember – hard to get a precise sense of time after all these years, there are difficulties for the mind there – it was too cold to sit on the wall so Mackellar invited me inside the kitchen of his farmhouse. It had a splendid wooden fireplace. I noticed that carved into the black wood of the frame was an X with three horizontal bars below it.

  ‘It’s an auld thing,’ said Mackellar, when I pointed it out. ‘Supposed to stop witches coming doon the chimney. I canna say it’s worked.’ He let out a harsh laugh.

  Mackellar had got the fire going and we were drinking when his wife walked in. I’d seen her from a distance but not yet properly made her acquaintance. She was some years older than her husband and wore a stained and ragged coat. It was bright red.

  ‘Filling the hoose wi’ fumes, again, Mackellar,’ she said, ‘you and your freen.’

  Meg Mackellar wore a tight blue woollen cap on her head, from the sides of which shot forth curly strands of white hair down to her shoulders. But the most remarkable thing about her was that red coat, which was of the most lurid colour imaginable.