Septimania Read online

  There was no way, clearly, that Louiza could know the effect of this prohibition on her mother. The problems that MacPhearson asked Louiza to solve the next morning—or rather the problems that appeared on the kitchen table every morning at breakfast, delivered by one or another of her Cottagemates—were fascinating enough to distract Louiza from memories of home and even that funny little Malory in the organ loft. Her life consisted of descending for meals and problems and ascending to the desk under the eaves for solutions. As the weather grew into summer, a lighter duvet appeared on her bed. Fresh clothing arrived, the washing up was done. Her curiosity about the ripening foliage, the music of the river, was satisfied by an open window. All other questions were satisfied by the mathematics of negativity.

  And the growth.

  The first morning at the cottage, Louiza knew she was pregnant. It had been the first time for her, and obviously the first time for Malory. Her basic knowledge of biology had prepared her for the possibility. Her belief in mathematics had acquainted her with certainty. Malory = Louiza. i = u. From identity came multiplication, and now exponential growth.

  Louiza could have checked with a doctor. Her Cottagemates could have alerted MacPhearson, who could have alerted Malory, who could have—it was easier to avoid the dark woods of human behavior and retreat into the world of negative numbers. Young and thin as she was, the channel of her shoulders let the straps of her summer shifts hang loose enough that no one would have noticed a change, and in any case, no one was looking. Morning sickness never struck. Her nipples, although they darkened, never called attention to themselves.

  Louiza knew there was something alive inside her by the gradual swell and the occasional rumble. But whatever the something was, it shared its mother’s ability to lose itself in concentrated activity and generate few ripples. Summer turned to autumn. A heavier duvet appeared on Louiza’s bed along with a set of jacket-length knit cardigans that easily camouflaged her metamorphosis.

  Until the morning of the kick.

  Louiza had finished her egg and had just ascended the stairs to her room with fresh problems and a second cup of tea, when she felt the kick. More than a kick, it was a full-fledged riot that pulled her stomach towards the window, leaving a wake of spilled tea and damp papers. She had felt the baby’s presence before, but more as friendly companionship. Now it was announcing itself as an independent life, urging her closer to the window, forcing her to put down her tea cup and take a look outside towards the river.

  “Malory!” she said. There he was, the little man from the organ loft. He was on the towpath by the river, wearing the same brown corduroy jacket, with the same military bag slung across his shoulder, atop a bicycle. Or, rather, under. Malory had fallen off.

  IT WAS ONLY A FEW HOURS EARLIER THAT MALORY HEARD HIS OWN KNOCKING. Waking from a rare, dreamless sleep, he thought that the knock belonged to Louiza, who had found him, who had observed his quest and finally deemed him worthy of rescue.

  “Mr. Malory?” No, the fruity baritone was not Louiza. “Rix, sir. I’ve brought your breakfast.”

  “What time is it?” Malory opened the door to the porter. The electric light was still on in the stairwell, and the small window that opened onto the Great Court of Trinity was too full of the greasy residue of some ambitious fresher’s late-night grill to give much of a clue.

  “Just gone seven, Mr. Malory,” Rix said, the tray of tea and scone balanced on his left hand. “A telephone call in the Porters’ lodge, just now,” Rix continued.

  “Breakfast?” Malory said.

  “Rather urgent, sir. The vicar, St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey. Very sorry to bother, but he wondered whether you might play a service this morning.”

  “This morning?” Malory’s left eye was just beginning to open.

  “In one hour, eight o’clock.”

  “Ring him back and say you couldn’t find me. Please.” Malory turned to close the door.

  “He was quite insistent.” The tray was inside his rooms. Malory was forced to retreat as Rix set it down and poured him a cup. Malory wasn’t particularly fond of the vicar at the best of times and was still shrouded in the disappointment of finding Rix rather than Louiza outside his door. But his inability to offend gave him the energy to pull on yesterday’s clothing as Rix buttered his scone—there was no need for fancy dress; he’d be up in the loft, hidden by the balustrade and a robe—brush his teeth and do his best with his hair, grab his corduroy jacket and Kit Bag, and stumble to the door.

  “And Mr. Malory.” Rix handed him the scone with one hand and slid an envelope into the outer breast pocket of his jacket. “This came for you. From the Master.” Another dinner. Malory chewed and stumbled towards the bicycle shed. More Americans at High Table.

  Malory pushed his bicycle through the arch of the college, beneath the gaze of Henry VIII holding a leg of mutton or a scepter in his stony hand. The light was graying towards eight o’clock by the time he reached the towpath by the river. It was that hopeful hour of dawn that encouraged him to rise each morning and resume his search for Louiza, as he had every morning for the past seven months. Louiza’s disappearance had coincided with the Easter Holiday, which emptied Cambridge of any student or fellow with even half a family and a lamb chop. Malory stayed if not happily then with determination in the depopulated cave of Trinity College, intent on pushing the rock of his stupidity up the cobbled slope of his loss. But his search for clues in the shadows and echoes of the new spring turned up only a lost Iranian student or a freshly widowed fellow, caught in the perplexed limbo of embarrassment and grief. As Easter Term led through the May Balls of June into the empty twilights of summer, Malory paid regular visits to the Maths Faculty and Antonella’s teakettle. Although every time he did, it seemed that Antonella’s beloved Rome had suffered another disaster.

  At the beginning of May, Aldo Moro was discovered lying on his back in the boot of a cherry Renault 4 behind the Caetani Palace—dead, shot ten times. Pope Paul VI’s death in early August didn’t release an equal flow of tears but still provoked in Antonella the terror of a fast-approaching Day of Judgment. And when the newly crowned Smiling Pope John Paul I failed to awake on September 28 after only thirty-three mornings on the throne of St. Peter, Malory had to spring for a pair of kebabs and half a carafe of retsina at the Eros for the poor, distracted Italian girl.

  Of course, there were quieter, less dramatic times with Antonella, when she would pull a shoebox of photos and postcards from a Heffers carrier bag and give Malory a guided tour of her Rome, from the mosaics in Santa Prassede to the oak-paneled door of the Basilica of Santa Sabina, where Antonella had spent much of her girlhood in battle with the Dominican nuns. Malory’s favorites were the frescoes in the Carafa Chapel of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

  “There was an ugly cardinal,” Antonella told Malory, opening up her biscuit tin. “I mean really ugly. Bruttissimo, as ugly as a mathematician. Sorry,” she said immediately, but Malory the Historian of Science couldn’t imagine why she would apologize, since calling Louiza something as simple as a mathematician had never occurred to him. “Cardinal Carafa hired a poor Tuscan bastard named Lippi to decorate the family chapel.” Antonella propped three postcards up against the tin. St. Thomas Aquinas seemed—as best as Malory could tell—to be the subject of each one: a pale man in a dun-colored cloak, who was overly familiar with the insides of the biscuit tin. “My favorite,” she said, picking up one card between two magenta nails, “is the Annunciazione.”

  Antonella was correct. The cardinal was ugly. The patron behind every Annunciation always got pride of place, kneeling before the Virgin. But the patron kneeling in the scarlet robes, with little hair and an unfortunate nose, must have been truly hideous if this was how Lippi had idealized him. Aquinas stood behind Carafa, introducing him to the Virgin Mary, while a Florentine angel frantically tried to point out to the young lady that the Holy Spirit was on the cusp of bringing her some very good news.

  “But se
e how the Virgin tells the angel to wait,” Antonella said to Malory, “like that news lady you like so much on the BBC—”

  “Anna Ford?” Malory looked at Lippi’s virgin and thought, in fact, how much more she reminded him of Louiza than of the Italian with the biscuit tin or the British rose of the TV screen. The pale skin, the wheaten hair, the eyes turned down below nearly invisible eyebrows, as Louiza turned down hers when she announced the formula that won her the PhD and the everlasting devotion of Malory.

  Malory accepted Antonella’s hand across a biscuit tin, her arm in the Arts Cinema as a fair trade for her help in his quest for Louiza. And as it was, Antonella uncovered quite a bit, even if Malory was uncertain how to interpret the discoveries. Malory hadn’t disclosed any of the more tender portions of his afternoon with Louiza. But he had shared with Antonella the academic characteristics of Louiza’s work, chief among them, of course, the equation i = u. Familiar as she was with the form if not the substance of the work of her mathematical charges, Antonella immediately recognized the complexity condensed within that simple equation.

  “Old news,” she told him. “No one in the Faculty is interested in complex numbers. They put their noses in the air and walk around talking about K-theory and Z-algebra. They snort and say only Americans and Russians are obsessed with imaginary numbers.”

  “Americans and Russians?” Malory asked, diving without invitation into Antonella’s bottomless biscuit tin.

  “It has something to do with silly secrets,” Antonella said. “Secrets the Americans want to keep, secrets the Russians want to keep.”

  “Secrets?” Malory asked. “Secret codes? Encryption?” Louiza had suggested that the ramifications of her simple equation were astonishing, perhaps even dangerous.

  “Forse sì,” Antonella said. “None of my old men are interested in the Americans. C’era una volta, once upon a time my Mama, back in Garbatella. She too was interested. After the War, she had the voglia to wash and cook for Americans, twenty-four hours a day. Now—”

  “Yes,” Malory said, wondering more about the Americans than Antonella’s mother. He had met Americans, of course, during colloquia at the Physics Faculty or when the Master insisted he sit next to one at High Table—most recently an animal behaviorist from Harvard talking of Africa and pygmies and spare parts for his Land Rover. “But which Americans in particular disinterest your old men?”

  “I don’t know their names,” Antonella said. “They come in so full of smiles and laughing and cologne, and I am embarrassed to ask why they are here.”

  “But they never have a young girl with them?” Malory asked. “A young, British girl?”

  “Yes, yes,” Antonella said, making Malory blush at her annoyance. “A young, fair-haired British girl, who picks the skin from around her finger nails and has skinny, little shoulders and likes fuzzy organ tuners in corduroy jackets. I think,” she said, flicking a piece of lint from the lapel of Malory’s own corduroy, “that you have described Louiza well enough that I would recognize her in a crowd of a thousand fair-haired girls—even Americans.”

  Malory had enlisted Rix as well, whose familiarity with the comings and goings of the students and fellows of Trinity—not to mention the porters and the porters’ families of the other twenty-odd colleges that made up the University of Cambridge—gave him unparalleled access to the secrets and practices of virtually the entire academic community. Malory attended colloquia and seminars and conferences with an eye out for wisps. He dined at High Table with the Master who, although an economist, dabbled enough in numbers and money that Malory could drop the phrase i = u into casual conversation and watch for a reaction. But after seven months of searching and questioning, he was no closer, no surer that he was even searching in the right corner of the right steeple.

  Of course Malory haunted the environs of St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey, the Pip in a plastic 35-millimeter container in his pocket, the sole companion and proof that something remarkable had happened, that the search for the lost Louiza that occupied the greater part of his waking thoughts and all of his nocturnal dreams was not complete lunacy. So, early and unexpected as the call from the vicar had been, Malory was not entirely displeased to be riding his bicycle along the towpath to Whistler Abbey to the rhythm of i (down with the left pedal) equals u (down with the right).

  He was halfway along the towpath—whether on i or u he couldn’t remember—when suddenly something knocked over his bicycle. Malory fell to the ground, more confused than hurt. He hadn’t felt a gust of wind. There was no large dog or early morning jogger who might have plowed him over. But as he lay under his bicycle, he felt a vibration from inside his Kit Bag. He unstrapped the flap and looked inside. The Book of Organs, the Universal Tuner were in place. But from the secret pocket where he had squirreled away the 35-millimeter canister and the Pip came the unmistakable hum of a low C, the vibration, he was sure, of the Pip, the Pip Louiza had found in the steeple. Had he been knocked over a second time by the Pip? Could such a small thing have such a force?

  BY THE TIME LOUIZA PULLED ON A PAIR OF WELLIES AND RAN OUT THE back door of the cottage, Malory had righted his bicycle and was disappearing around the curve of the towpath. It was the first time Louiza had been out of the cottage in, well, perhaps since MacPhearson had brought her there that March afternoon after lunch at the Orchard. She didn’t look back to see whether the Cottagemates were following her. She merely began to walk to the rhythm of the kicks in her cardigan-beshrouded belly.

  She had no idea, really, where her cottage was in relation to the Orchard or Cambridge or for that matter the rest of the world. But in an animal way, she knew that Malory was cycling to St. George’s Church. The identity i = u, Louiza = Malory, included the world in which they had first met and conceived this new life that, in the mysterious way that numbers propagate numbers, was becoming an integral part of this equation.

  MALORY PARKED HIS BICYCLE BY THE SOUTHERN WALL ON THE YEW SIDE of the church and entered through the chancel. He was pulling on a robe in the shadows of the narthex when the vicar approached.

  “Much obliged, Malory. Sad occasion, what?”

  Malory looked up towards the altar and noticed the blond pine of the coffin lying on a pair of sawhorses.

  “Yes,” Malory said. Rix had said “service,” hadn’t he, not “funeral,” but no matter. Music wasn’t the problem. Malory only wondered why the rush? There were only half a dozen people in the church. Not a state occasion. Had another organist canceled? “Bach?” he asked the vicar. “Albinoni?”

  “The deceased requested simply that you play what you wish,” the vicar said. “I’m certain you’ll do what is right. And Malory—”

  “Yes?”

  “Do stay for the graveside. I need to speak with you after.”

  Malory flipped one switch, and the light over his keyboard illuminated the fine moondust of the windless organ loft. He flipped another, and the electric motor twenty feet away behind the pipes began to pump air into the lungs of the instrument. The hum of mechanical power vibrated confidence through the organ bench, up Malory’s body, and into his fingers. He knew this organ, knew its tranquility, its quirks. His Book of Organs memorialized the tunings of all the organs he had tended, all the services he had played, the weddings, the funerals, the christenings and communions, the hymns and psalms and Indian ragas and Procol Harums from the more esoteric ceremonies that the charismatic members and observant hippies had introduced in recent years. The record of the organ of St. George’s, Whistler Abbey, was no different from the rest—except for the Pip, the demon that bedeviled that sconeless March morning and continued to confuse and exhaust and rattle a lost harmony in the sleepless hearing of Malory’s ear. The Pip was mentioned briefly in the Book of Organs: “16 March 1978. 8 a.m.–2 p.m. tuning. Pip in steeple.” But encoded in the ink was the full meaning and direction of Malory’s life, a description and a story as full of promise and potential danger as Louiza’s equation.

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nbsp; Malory glanced in the rearview mirror that gave him a view of the coffin at the altar and the vicar at the pulpit. The vicar gave a nod. It was time for music. The deceased had left it up to him. It was time to play. It was time to play what he had played every time he had cycled out to St. George’s in the past seven months in the hope that Louiza would be waiting for him in the organ loft.

  It was time to play i = u.

  Louiza = Malory. As set to music, of course.

  Bach and Schubert and plenty of less-inspired composers, after all, had turned letters into numbers and numbers into music, into points on the twelve-note scale. Louiza’s own peculiar calculus of names gave Malory a system of composition, an initial theme to rise off the launching pad and into the stratosphere of improvisation. Setting middle C at –1, as Malory did, then –2 equals B-natural. –3 equals B-flat, 4 equals A-natural, and so on.

  He believed that if he played his melody, their melody, the melody of unity and identification, Louiza = Malory, Malory = Louiza, the girl of the golden head and the pale chin would reappear from around the Orchard and lift her eyes to the sound of Malory and his organ.

  The melody began with Louiza’s name, the drama of a diminished triad in first inversion—B-flat, D-flat (since D-flat equals C-sharp as surely as i = u), G—resolving with a perfect fourth to the key of C, before dropping a half step, with ominous portent, to a cliffhanger of a B-natural. It was a phantom-of-the-operatic bit of drama that promised tears, sweat, more tears, but eventually the full-throttle, stops-out consummation of an entire life of smiles and kisses with his beloved, if Malory only followed Louiza’s name with his own:

  Amazing, if he thought of it—as he had, of course, every morning when he awoke and every evening in the tentative hour of dusk—that his name, Malory, was connected to Louiza’s by a perfect octave. And he could even reverse the notes, since identity is reversible.