Septimania Read online

  which a sixteenth-century mathematician decided to baptize with an italic i, perhaps to keep it from infecting the real numbers, the ones you could see and touch and chew.

  “I was eight,” Louiza said, “when I asked my father what was the square root of negative 1. He thought the question was nonsense. Negative numbers he could understand, as years on a timeline, as negative befores in contrast to positive afters. But the square root of negative 1? I might as well have asked him what was the square root of the Magna Carta or a sugar beet. It was my mother who couldn’t be bothered with her own ignorance and asked the maths teacher at school.

  ‘Louiza, meet i,’ he said to me. ‘i, Louiza.’ And after i, the brothers of i, the distant cousins, the family tree of imaginary numbers built around i. Suddenly i became my escape. I found a home in a world peopled with histories and futures and pets dead and alive, a nook in the universe where reading and writing made sense.”

  “And that’s what you’re studying for your BA?” Malory asked.

  “PhD actually,” Louiza looked down. “Studied. I passed my viva this morning.”

  “This morning?” Malory steadied himself with a hand on the rough boards of the roof.

  “Would you like to hear my thesis?” Louiza reached up to Malory’s belt and pulled him down into a conspiratorial squat, her cotton hem riding up above a pair of knees that Malory thought might just fit in his mouth.

  “Of course,” Malory said, still dizzy at the thought that this young woman—could she even be twenty?—was about to graduate with a PhD and had just happened to climb up the steeple of St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey, and find him, Malory, who had spent the past ten years avoiding his own doctorate on Sir Isaac Newton with an alternating diet of organs and scones.

  “i = u”

  “I equals you?”

  “i = u.” Louiza took Malory’s Book of Organs and wrote the formula on a blank page in a sharp, decisive hand. “i = u,” she repeated, slowly tracing the letters on Malory’s receptive chest. “In italics.”

  “Italics,” Malory repeated in idiotic rapture at the touch of Louiza’s finger on the flannel of his shirt.

  “I,” Louiza said, “Louiza. You?”

  Malory told her. He told her about his rooms in Great Court next to the chapel; as Organ Scholar of Trinity College—on call from matins to vespers, from baptisms to funerals—proximity to the chapel was essential. He told her about his sitting room, which looked out onto Trinity Street and the apple tree planted in 1966 in honor of the three-hundredth anniversary of Newton’s annus mirabilis, the year the great man ran from the Plague back to his mother’s garden in Lincolnshire and discovered the law of gravity, the nature of light, calculus, and half a dozen other Promethean treasures. He told her about the summer mornings when he would awaken to the desperate cramming of field mice in his rubbish bin and winter mornings when a prism of thawing ice rode the bobsled of gravity from the windowpane to his head. As a graduate student writing a doctoral thesis on the great Sir Isaac, it was foregone and fitting that Newton’s rooms, if not his genius, should come to Malory.

  “But you,” Louiza said. “Who are you?”

  Malory told her that his own Christian name was Hercule (his mother Sara being French-born) and that the last name on his birth certificate was Emery (being his mother’s alone). “But everyone calls me Malory, with one l,” Malory said to Louiza, whose eyes widened in what Malory could only believe was the usual astonishment. “I know what you’re thinking,” he rushed on. “Malory as in Thomas Malory who wrote about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. You know, Lancelot and Guinevere, Galahad the Pure?”

  “No,” Louiza whispered, “it’s not that.” But Malory didn’t hear her message, eager as he was to confess something he’d never told anyone else. That Malory was the name of a father who had never seen his son. That Malory, like the great Sir Isaac, was posthumous at birth, his fisherman of a father having died after failing to judge the proper speed of the Irish ferry on which his mother was arriving to marry him. That was as much as he knew of the old man—the surname, the fatal eagerness with which he’d loved young Sara—and that much he had gleaned from his mother only after it was clear, shortly before his tenth birthday, that she too would be leaving him, and without much more than this one story.

  “Malory,” Louiza whispered again and looked at him, Malory thought, as if she were really, really interested in him, his name, his history. And he also thought, hoped, dreaded that Louiza would kiss him—his first kiss, he was ashamed to even think, his first girl. Twenty-six years old and he would finally kiss a girl. Not that he’d been a man’s man. There had always been something too homuncular about him to make him a target of the older boys at King’s College Choir School or later. There had been dozens, millions of times, actually, from childhood through to the present, when he would have gladly cuddled up to anything human: male, female, or child. But there had never been occasion. He had to content himself with pencils, small rocks, horse chestnuts, the edges of worn sweaters that, with their smells and their textures, kindled enough of an image of affection to stave off his hunger. But now, this girl, this Louiza, of imaginary numbers and cats—

  “Is this it?” Louiza reached around Malory.

  Malory sat for a moment, still waiting for the kiss, still trying to make sense of the brief equation Louiza had traced on his chest and his equally brief confession. And then he focused, with an attempt at equilibrium, on the lightly dusted hand holding an apple pip in front of his face in the slanted light of the steeple. An apple pip. Between two perfect, if nail-bitten, fingers, Louiza was holding an apple pip that she had pried loose from between two slats of the shutters. And although Malory needed ten minutes of chromatic variations on Bach’s “Come Now, O Savior of the Gentiles” to prove that this singular Pip was the demon that had asphyxiated the organ, the demon he had chased from one key to the next, he knew, beyond a doubt, that Louiza—in any of her many possible worlds—could solve all problems without looking.

  The kiss, the undressing of flannel shirt and cotton dress, the exploration and all the rest followed with calm, with passion and a sense of musical inevitability. Yet there was so much that was unpredictable in Louiza’s movements, such a matrix of unsuspected jumping-aways and lunging-togethers that it wasn’t until afterwards, with the afternoon sun casting a final five-line shadow on the eastern wall of the steeple, that Malory stopped to wonder why. Why him? Why now? Why here in the steeple of St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey?

  “Your name,” Louiza said. “Malory, your name equals negative 78.” Louiza traced the unitalicized equation on Malory’s unshirted chest. “So does my name, Louiza. Negative 78. I equals you.”

  He did the maths. Of course she was correct—m plus a plus l and so on equaled l plus o plus all the gorgeous things that had just happened, that had just happened to him. But being Malory, being a student of Isaac Newton and a tuner of organs with an ear that wouldn’t be satisfied, he had to ask.

  “What does it mean, my equation?” Louiza’s cheek was resting on his thigh. Her voice was soft, but it resonated through his body as if she were whispering in his ear. “How can my equation, how can i = u change the world?”

  “Yes,” Malory said. “Something like that.”

  “The applications,” Louiza began. “The applications are extraordinary. And quite possibly dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” Malory sat up.

  “I’ll explain next time,” Louiza said, springing to her feet and stepping to the ladder.

  “Next time?” Malory said, in some desperation that this time seemed to be drawing to a close. “Where? When?”

  “Wherever you find that cat,” Louiza said. “Whenever.” She handed him the Pip with those slender, teeth-bitten fingers. “Remember: i = u.” And disappeared.

  1/2

  HY DID MALORY LET LOUIZA DISAPPEAR? WHY DIDN’T HE JUMP up? Why didn’t he play Galahad and leap, or at least slide
down the ladder from the steeple and out to wherever the breath of late afternoon had borne her?

  The sun was in his eyes. Or rather, there was a vision, a curtain between the floor where Malory sat and the trap door down which Louiza had disappeared. A curtain, or better still, a gentle waterfall of light flowed down from the beveled slats of the roof to the wooden planking of the steeple floor. A dusty host of angels climbed up and down that mid-afternoon sunbeam, flapping their wings to the backbeat of a Hosanna over Malory’s Kit Bag, his Book of Organs, his Universal Tuner.

  There was nothing unusual about any of the three. They were as worn and discolored as any of the million keepsakes that other solitary adolescents have adapted to adult use over their own histories. The Universal Tuner was a foot-long piece of twisted metal the ten-year-old Malory had found lying on a cairn in the hills outside Narbonne, that last summer he had spent with his mother. He had never been curious enough to ask about its composition, although it was clearly harder than the lead that made up the better organ pipes. He was thankful for the Universal Tuner’s angular eccentricities, its ability to scratch and bang and pry and cajole thousands upon thousands of pipes into harmonic precision, and its singular economy, as compact as a Swiss Army knife and as ingenious as a Geiger counter for diagnosing and curing the many ailments of the pipe organ, in their multitudinous variety. The Book of Organs was as near a diary as Malory had ever possessed—listing the name, the location, the birth date, baptism, and every subsequent tuning and idiosyncrasy of every organ he had played, tuned, cleaned, or vacuumed free of dust and mouse droppings, going back to the organ of the cathedral of Narbonne.

  Both Universal Tuner and Book of Organs had special pockets in Malory’s Kit Bag, which was not lacking in the pocket department. It could hold half-eaten sandwiches, cake wrapped in waxed paper, music folios, and shoe polish. The Kit Bag was the only souvenir Malory possessed of his dead fisherman of a father, although why his father had the bag was a mystery. As far as Malory knew, his father had never been a soldier. In any case the bag was too small to be useful either as a duffel bag or a serious daypack. Green canvas was hardly the kind of waterproof material for a fisherman carrying bait and tackle and a fish or three, no matter how many pockets it had. But the Kit Bag, the one true link to his paternity, was stenciled on the flap in broken capitals:

  MALORY

  Tenuous and puerile as Malory realized such attachments were, there were moments in the drafty organ lofts of East Anglia when tracing the letters with his fingertips brought a certain warmth. All three—Universal Tuner, Book of Organs, and Kit Bag—were Malory’s constant companions. Yet something had happened to Malory in the steeple of the church of St. George’s, Whistler Abbey. And in case Malory was too dim to understand the significance, the seraphim of Nature were mobilizing to focus his eyes on the obvious.

  The obvious sat in its own pool of atomized afternoon, atop the pebbled and abused cover of the Book of Organs. The Pip, the Pip that Louiza had pried from between the shutters of the steeple, the Pip that had brought Malory’s life into tune. The brown-husked mini-ovum of a Pip that drew the afternoon light into its brownness at the new center of Malory’s expanding universe. The Pip was the obvious cause of Malory’s change—or at least obvious to Malory, who could interpret the beating of his heart, the coursing in his veins, the dizziness of what others simply call love, only through the light and the gravity of his Newton. The Pip brought Louiza and Malory together, the Pip witnessed all that had gone between them. The Pip was the Sun that drew the Moon to the Earth and spun them around one another. The Pip would bring them back together for all time. The Pip would keep company with the Universal Tuner and the Book of Organs in his Kit Bag. The Pip would be his guide.

  Malory packed the Pip into a plastic 35-millimeter film canister that he normally used for resin, wedged it safely into a pocket of the Kit Bag, added the Universal Tuner and the Book of Organs, and let gravity pull him back down the ladder to the nave. He was twice as tall when his feet touched the paving stones of the nave as when he had ascended that morning. He was certain that Louiza would be waiting for him outside St. George’s, or in the Orchard, or if not there, then not far away.

  “Good afternoon.”

  Not Louiza. In the cooler light of the second pew sat the Old Lady.

  “Good afternoon, Hercule,” the Old Lady said again.

  “Good afternoon—”

  “Please,” the Old Lady said. “Come sit for a moment.”

  Malory had no desire to sit, had no desire to talk to any old lady—this one, perhaps, in particular.

  “Please,” the Old Lady said again. “I will not bite.” The crumbs of French at the edges of the Old Lady’s accent gave the invitation a certain force that Malory—being Malory and therefore incapable of giving offense—could not ignore. Malory sat. “You know who I am, I suppose.”

  She was covered in a dusty blue and gray, although the dust, to Malory’s eye, was neither the dust of the angels nor the dust of neglect but more of a powder that softened the threads of her woolen suit, molded the silk at her neck into the ancient pockets of her skin and blended the powdered white of her hair into a hat that Malory would only remember as expensive in the way that history must be. But the sensation that struck Malory with the sharpest power—a power that he was soon forced to recall on many occasions—was the scent of pine and sun, the scent of the four-thousand-year-old yew in the churchyard, one he hadn’t smelled on a human being since the death of his mother nearly twenty years before.

  “Mrs. Emery,” Malory said. “Good evening.” He knew she was Mrs. Emery. Old Mrs. Emery who lived alone, it was said, in the gothic pile of Whistler Abbey, a manor that overlooked the yew. Old Mrs. Emery, who for as long as Malory could remember had said nothing to him, but had placed a shilling in his palm following every service. Given the choice, Malory would have sooner spent a night in the churchyard than in Whistler Abbey with Old Mrs. Emery.

  “Mrs. Emery,” she repeated. He saw another church, in the Cathar South of France when his mother was still alive, a land as hilly as the fens were smooth, the church where a younger Malory ran for the warmth and all-consuming vibrations of the organ, where he danced on the pedals because his feet could not reach from the bench, while his fist relaxed into a Bach prelude or a Saint-Saëns fantasy. “Hercule,” Mrs. Emery repeated. “I know that we have complex relations.”

  Malory had survived by avoiding complexity, by seeking simplicity, in Newton, in Bach. But complexity was clearly the motif of the day—first Louiza with her i = u, her complex nature bound up in a web of numbers built from the square root of –1, and now Mrs. Emery, whose every breath reminded Malory that he had never known his father and had lost his mother at an age when the world was beginning to seem unbearably complex. Both Louiza and Mrs. Emery had found him at St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey. Malory needed tea. Badly.

  “Hercule,” Mrs. Emery said. “You are in a rush, I can see.”

  “Yes,” Malory said. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t let me keep you.” Mrs. Emery didn’t move, and it was clear that she did not mean what she was saying. “But perhaps you can spare a moment for your grandmother.”

  His grandmother. Mrs. Emery. Ahh. Malory’s mind began again. Mrs. Emery was his grandmother. There was the word. The Old Lady in the second pew was his grandmother. Like the discovery that goosed Archimedes out of his ancient Sicilian bathtub, the realization that Old Mrs. Emery was his grandmother had a touch of Eureka to it. But the surprise was tempered by a recognition that this was something he had always known. His mother had never spoken of her family. Malory had assumed a chorus of disapproval. Disapproval of his mother, disapproval primed by Sara’s choice of Irish lover, Malory père, a man whose judgment was in inverse proportion to his love.

  Was it malice that Old Mrs. Emery felt towards her daughter Sara, towards the Irish lover, Malory’s father? Was it malice on Sara’s part that denied her own mother the knowledge
of her grandson? For the first ten years of his life, Malory was only too willing to worship the decisions of his mother. And nothing he learned after her death induced him to develop the faculty of inquiry. Someone arranged for him to study and room at King’s College Choir School. He never asked who. He was at an age where he accepted everything, accepted the academics, the music, the bullying, although his posture was so naïvely open that the worst of the thugs felt it beneath their dignity to bloody a boy who didn’t know how to cower. And he never wondered why he was there.

  Was it to this Mrs. Emery, this grandmother, that Malory owed—as unthinkingly, perhaps, as he owed God—his four A levels and subsequent Organ Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge? Was it to her he owed the request of the Master of Trinity that, for a small additional stipend, he play the ten o’clock service at the tiny Norman church of St. George, Whistler Abbey, every other Sunday morning (in such a depleted parish, the church had to share a preacher with Lesser St. Arnulf’s in Cambridge)? It was from the organ loft of St. George’s that Malory saw the gray-haired lady in the second pew every other Sunday. When later he had learned that, like his mother, her name too was Emery and that his stipend was directly transferred from her weekly donation to his pocket, he began to guess at her identity, or rather at his own. With the weight of that possibility, at the height of the organ loft, he felt his abandonment most keenly.

  Instead of acknowledging the word grandmother, he made up a fiction to justify his abandonment. He had inherited his love of the organ from Mrs. Emery. Her piety, like his, was merely a stop that she could push in or pull out to create the desired effect, an unspoken linkage of two notes. It was part of a secret they shared. He’d always known and refused to think it odd that the old lady who smiled up at him from her seat on the aisle in the second pew never spoke to him and never approached him save to place a shilling in his palm at the close of service.