Turbulence Read online

  Working inside on the breadboard was unusual. Most of the time I spent in Ryman’s company we were outside, messing about with smoke plumes and seeds and the parachutes of dandelions and such things, seeing how the wind affected them and what we could infer from that. On one occasion he told me to go into town and buy sixty ping-pong balls, but I couldn’t find even one in Dunoon. ‘All right,’ he said when I came back. ‘We’ll use parsnips instead.’

  We dug them from the garden then took them down to the pier at Blairmore, where my steamer had come in when I first arrived. We chucked them into the water, two by two, measuring the distance between them, the relative motion …

  It was a calm day, specially chosen. What we were testing was eddy diffusion in water, so we didn’t want the wind to disturb the process. We confirmed another law Ryman had discovered. The general law, stating that diffusion of objects in a turbulent stream rises in proportion to the original separation – i.e. how far apart you throw them in. But it wasn’t the Ryman number, it wasn’t the real secret revealed in all its nakedness.

  Ryman adjusted the depth at which different-sized parsnips floated by pushing nails into them, like weights on a fishing float. He knelt on the wooden planks of the pier with a bucket of seawater beside him as he tested each of our thirty pairs for relative weight. He noted everything in a little black book, even the percentage of rotten parsnips.

  The man was a one-off. I had never met anyone who tried to apply so rigorously, so widely, the strictures of quantification and measurement. Not just in the obvious areas, but in everything. He even wrote a paper on fashion, explaining how to predict the likelihood of one colour succeeding another as the shade of the moment.

  He was always seeing things in relative terms, seeing in base 17 or 60 what we’d see in base 10, seeing in hogs what we’d see in corn, seeing shillings in dollars, methuselahs in measuring spoons – seeing, indeed, ‘we’ where ‘we’ would see ‘them’. That was the source of his peace work. The idea of any interval or gap in humanity was anathema to him.

  I felt he would have extended the same courtesy to all living species so far as he could; even to matter, both organic and inorganic; even to the atmosphere itself.

  ‘For what is the air,’ he used to say, ‘but something we make part of ourselves every day? The atmosphere is where all of us live – it lives inside us with every breath.’

  2

  I am perhaps giving the impression that I was always by Ryman’s side. That would be mistaken. Whenever I got on with my own weather-observing duties he would for the most part keep away, mindful, no doubt, of my military connections. Mostly I worked alone, sending up balloons for Whybrow. Fairly frequently this involved stepping into cowpats as I ran clutching the launching string of the balloon, with the copper wire of the aerial trailing behind.

  But Ryman did seem to have mellowed, and when he was undertaking his own experiments would often call me to join him. In one, we tested the wind’s velocity – that complex issue he had referred to during lunch that first Sunday – by shooting into the air with a special meteorological gun metal spheres of different sizes: three spheres the size of an apple, five the size of a plum, fifteen the size of a cherry.

  It was my job to pace out the distance to the landing site of each shot, if it could be found. I remember standing under a tree – wet knees, wet shoes – thinking, ‘What the bloody hell am I doing here? Why don’t I just give up?’ Then Ryman bellowed through a megaphone from the other end of the field, telling me to hurry up. I ran back to him across the grass, nearly falling over in my haste.

  ‘Good analogue of the effect of friction on human affairs,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Running through tussocky grass.’

  It was then that the Junkers converted for meteorological and photographic operations appeared in the sky again, coming down low over the field. I could have sworn the pilot was looking at us as he swooped by, but Ryman dismissed the idea. Perhaps it brought the war too close for comfort.

  He was equally dismissive as, ducking down, I told him I had seen the same plane twice before. The only action he took was to throw down his meteorological gun on the grass, I presume so it would not be thought an offensive weapon.

  ‘Do not mistake randomness for intention,’ he shouted over the engine noise as the plane made another pass. ‘Conventional sapience has it that because we have an enemy, he has turned up in this particular spot of air to fight us; it is just as likely he happened to be flying overhead.’

  I was astonished he could talk such nonsense, at such a time. ‘Don’t you think we had better find cover?’ I shouted back, cowering under the sonorous clatter of the plane.

  But Ryman stood stock still, his silhouette a perfect target. Not wishing to appear cowardly, though that is what I felt, I straightened up and followed suit. We waited for the plane to bank again at the end of its box of sky. But it didn’t, instead continuing into the middle distance.

  ‘No need,’ said Ryman, watching the cross of the wings and tail. ‘It’s going now.’

  He was right. Its growl diminishing, the aircraft progressed in the same direction until it merged into the horizon.

  Only when the noise of the engine had gone did I speak again. ‘Common things are common. Rare things are rare. As I’ve said, I’ve seen this plane twice before. It’s rare to see a German plane over Kilmun. That suggests it is here for a reason, not by chance.’

  Ryman shook his head and bent down to pick up the gun. He began reloading it with metal spheres. ‘You are exhibiting a very human tendency – to underestimate randomness.’

  ‘But it’s not random!’ I said in frustration. ‘This is the third time he has been here. The Home Guard has already been alerted. We should get someone to come and shoot him down.’

  ‘Not under my auspices.’

  I could not believe that someone could continue to hold such ideas when Allied troops were dying. ‘Don’t you feel it’s your duty to fight for your country?’

  ‘On the contrary. It’s my duty to stop the fighting. Or at least, to minimise the harm done by fighting. But that doesn’t mean I’m a coward. I joined the Quaker ambulance corps in the first lot, you know. Nobody in the Friends Ambulance Unit was a coward.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were a coward,’ I mumbled, suddenly unsure of my ground.

  He ceased counting ball bearings for a moment. ‘But I can tell you I was frightened. It was the most terrifying experience of my life.’

  ‘What did it involve, being in that unit?’

  ‘Our job was to bring the seriously wounded from the poste de secours, in the forward trenches, back to the nearest hospitals. I will never forget the stench of charred flesh and the poor men in the back crying out every time you went over a pothole. The traffic was pretty chaotic in the roads behind the trenches. Staff cars, lorries, ambulances like ours, tanks, horses and carts, too, and the wounded tramping through the mud. Once, during a bombardment, I ran over a man with an amputated leg. He had a crutch and this … stump. The bandage unwound from it, trailing into the puddles …’

  Clearly distraught, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘I rather hoped to get a leg knocked off myself. Then I could go home with a clear conscience. I was so sick of seeing things smashed and burned. That cursed war! After a while nothing happened in it but casualties. It seemed to go on largely because of inertia; the original causes, though not forgotten, faded into the background. There could have been peace much earlier if the leaders had agreed to have it, rather than carrying on so that they could say they won …’

  He paused and looked at the ground as if to recover a distant scene, not from memory but from hell.

  ‘Sometimes, going down Dead Man’s Alley, as we called it, I had to drive round the bodies of sentries and horses that I’d seen alive on the way up. I was a bad driver, anyway, because I saw my dream instead of the traffic.’

  ‘Your dream?’

  ‘The syste
m. My theory of numerical weather prediction. I wrote the first draft during the battle of Champagne. Lost it for a while after that, then found it in my living quarters under a heap of coal.’

  ‘I’d love to read through some of your equations,’ I said, sensing an opportunity. ‘Is that when you came upon the Ryman number?’

  He took off his glasses again and looked at me searchingly. ‘I told you – I don’t call it that …’

  ‘I have to confess that I don’t exactly understand how to connect up a range of its values,’ I said, pressing on.

  I could see him studying me, looking me in the face. Did he suspect something? ‘It’s just a measure,’ he said evenly. ‘A measure of changing conditions. Surely you know that?’

  I wondered if I’d said too much, for he looked me in the face again and fell silent then, which I took to mean we should resume our experiment. After about another half an hour we packed up and I followed him back towards his house, neither of us speaking. Mrs Ryman was watching us from the drawing-room window. With a ray of sunlight falling on her, her pregnant profile was clear now. The light, which gave her hair an auburn, reddish tone, seemed to form an envelope around her.

  Glancing at me, Ryman said goodbye and, carrying the meteorological rifle over his shoulder like a soldier, hurried inside.

  As I walked back up the hill I turned and saw, framed in that same window, bathed both in that self-same light, him and Gill embracing.

  3

  I didn’t see much of Ryman during the next week. Whenever I tried to manoeuvre myself into a position in which I could ask him more about the number, he began making excuses again. I was sure he was now deliberately avoiding me.

  After a few uncomfortable days of this, I simply accepted the stalemate. Maybe if I sat tight, things would change. But they didn’t.

  I continued with my cover job as a meteorological observer, now and then dropping down to Dunoon to buy food, pick up my wages or collect more supplies for making hydrogen. I was more careful about that now. On these occasions I always sought out Joan and Gwen, and they invariably welcomed me with a cup of tea and a chat and showed me their latest painting. I suppose I was still hoping I would end up in bed with one or other of them.

  It still seemed there might be a chance of that, despite the fiasco of the dance. One Sunday they came for a walk with me in the plantation above the cot-house. I had not yet been into the forest, despite being constantly reminded of its presence by the logs sliding down. The idea was that we would find the foresters’ camp on their day of rest. I’d imagined they would greet us in their silent way, and perhaps brew up some coffee.

  Well, it was supposed to happen that way but I hadn’t quite realised how thickly the trees were planted. The forest was impossible to walk through, because the old stumps of cut trees still stood between the rows, and it was gloomy anyway. The girls had soon had enough. So we came back and stuck to the beech tree walk, going along by the stream and over the bridge, chatting as we strolled. Entering the glade that was there, I again felt it was somewhere special. A place of mysterious peace. I think they felt it too.

  Gwen was particularly friendly to me and it was she who suggested we try sliding down the chute for a lark. I got in first but there was too much friction and I couldn’t get down. Then Gwen got in front of me, between my legs, me holding her shoulders. Still we didn’t move. Even though I knew that the foresters didn’t work on Sundays I began to worry that a log might come down and hit us. Only when Joan joined us did we start to move, slowly at first and then quicker and quicker – ‘Hold on tight!’ Gwen cried – until we came out of the forest and into the sunlit field, speeding past Mackellar’s farm and the cot-house and finally Ryman’s. Laughing wildly, we tumbled out by the wood stack next to the road.

  The jolly mood continued later that evening when I returned to Dunoon with them, and after getting something to eat in a dining room in the town we all went up to their little den in the hydrogen shed. They made Martinis and talked to me about art, now and then getting out crayons and paper and sketching something – a horseman, a fragment of statuary, the torso of a woman with flowing hair – as an explanation of what they were trying to tell me. Or they would refer to the beach picture of the dogs in the breakers, which was still up on the easel.

  That picture exerted a powerful influence on me and at the time I could not tell why. Now I realise it was because of Vickers.

  Most of their arty talk went over my head. But we continued chatting away until suddenly there was a loud boom in the distance. At first I thought it was another U-boat in the Clyde but it was too far away. We opened up the trapdoors and raised the tower to have a look.

  Across the water the searchlights above Glasgow were crisscrossing to and fro, like the limbs of a preyed-upon creature frantically trying to stave off the all-devouring dark. Nearer was a large mass of light, something burning with a terrible blue colour. Hearing the sound of planes above, and then Dunoon’s siren wailing, we climbed down.

  ‘You better stay here,’ Gwen said. ‘It will be too dangerous to ride back and you’ve probably had too much to drink anyway. You do rather overdo it.’

  I saw them exchange a glance. I thought for a moment that my dreams had come true, but what they meant was that I should sleep in the hydrogen shed and they would go back to their quarters, which is what happened, me bedding down on their biscuit mattresses, driven wild with frustration by Gwen’s and Joan’s residual perfume in the rug and cushion they gave me to sleep on.

  When I emerged the next morning there was another smell on the wind. Something like scorched malt. Whybrow spotted me as I crossed the courtyard. He asked what I had been doing in the hydrogen shed. I explained about the raid.

  He nodded grimly. ‘Yes, they bombed the sugar factory in Greenock. People have been rowing across the river all night to escape the flames. Most of the town has been down at the pier helping them. And you have been doing what?’

  Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heel, leaving me wondering exactly what he was accusing me of.

  The answer came about a week later, when I returned to Dunoon, ostensibly to collect supplies for making hydrogen but also hoping to see Gwen and Joan again. Not finding them in the main office I entered the hydrogen shed and called up to the little boudoir. There was no reply. I began collecting my hydrogen supplies.

  As I was doing so, I heard a voice behind me. ‘Actually, they’ve gone out. Your girlfriends have gone away for the day.’

  I turned to see Whybrow’s face, regarding me with malicious glee.

  ‘Hoping to see them, were you?’ he jeered. ‘Up there.’ He gestured up at the mezzanine as if he were trying to swat a fly. ‘Well, you can’t. They’ve gone to Glasgow – to meet some other man, no doubt. I’ve half a mind to have them transferred. Or better still, kicked out.’ His eyes popping, and both hands gesticulating now, he looked as though he were about to have some kind of seizure. ‘They are disgusting, in my view. And you …’ He interrupted his ejaculation to poke a finger towards me. ‘You are no better. Chasing after them. Going about like a slavering puppy. You’re days behind with your charts. Let me tell you, young man, that you are running out of time. If you don’t buck your ideas up I shall put you on a charge to Sir Peter. He might think you’re a genius, fit to mix with the likes of Ryman, but I think you’re just workshy. And lecherous.’

  He began to splutter, raising both hands now, as if he were a ghoulish puppet-master directing invisible marionettes. The poor man worked himself into such a frenzy that he had to pause for breath. Not knowing how to respond, I took the opportunity to gather up my supplies and leave the shed.

  ‘You’re running out of time, Meadows,’ he shouted again as the metal door banged behind me. ‘Out of time, let me tell you!’

  4

  Driving back to Kilmun on the motorcycle, I considered the quantity on which Whybrow had so eloquently discoursed. Time was not something so easily reducible to defin
ition as the old fool seemed to think. It has been described as a river which carries us along. Or – and this was my present state on the pillion, amused but also unnerved by my superior’s outburst – a road on which one travels. Neither of these explanations is adequate, especially for those highly absorbent events which return unbidden to mind years later, like my parents’ death. And, I remember thinking, it’s not just the most important events that return like that …

  My philosophical divagation was interrupted by the sight of Pyke, kneeling by the roadside, changing a tyre on his Humber motor car.

  ‘Can I give you a hand?’ I said.

  He was glad of the help, but said very little as we replaced the tyre.

  ‘Anything the matter?’ I asked eventually.

  He straightened up. ‘Leviathan, my sea lion, is dead. Blown up by a mine. My mine. Bits all over the bay.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘As I am. It was my own fault. A failure of science.’

  ‘What will you do now?’

  ‘I’m driving down to London. Mountbatten has got the go-ahead from Churchill and Roosevelt for my project.’

  ‘That thing you called Habbakuk?’

  He nodded. ‘Can’t say anything else just yet, but I may be in touch.’

  ‘And your friend?’

  ‘Julius is back in Cambridge. That reminds me. We had a strange visit from the wife of your man Ryman. She brought us a blood sample. Some of it in a test-tube in a solution of citric acid. More on a handkerchief. She wanted Julius to test them.’

  ‘For what?’ I asked, alarmed.

  ‘Rhesus compatibility. Blood groups. Julius recently made some new discoveries about blood structure, though I don’t know she knew that. Rather odd. He took it all in his stride, of course.’