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The reason he’d prefer a boy was that his brothers and his sister all had boys already that would carry on the name. His older little sister Lou, six years his senior and nearly a foot his junior, had got two girls as well, but her and her chap Albert had produced a youngest boy, it must be getting on twelve year ago. Their Walt, Tom’s younger brother and the pride of the black market, he’d got married not long after the war’s end and had two lads already. Even young Frank, he’d beat Tommy to the altar and had had a son only the year before. If Tommy, who was after all the eldest brother, hadn’t had a kid of some kind by the age of forty, then he’d never hear the last of it from May, his mam. May Minnie Warren, leathery old so-and-so who’d got a voice like a dockworker’s fist, with which she’d no doubt pummel Tom to death if him and Doreen didn’t get a shift on and extend the Warren line. Tommy was frightened of his mam, but so was everyone.
He could remember, on Walt’s wedding night in 1947 or round then, the way their mam had cornered him and Frank out in the corridor at the reception, which was at the dance hall up in Gold Street. She’d stood there by the swing door, with people going in and out so that she’d had to shout over the music that kept blasting forth – it was the band May’s youngest brother managed, Tommy’s uncle Johnny – and his mam had read the riot act to him and Frank. She’d got half a pork pie held in one hand what she’d had off the buffet table and the other half of it was in her mouth part-chewed while she was talking, flakes of lardy pastry, ground pink pig-bits and yellowy jelly mashed together by her few remaining teeth or in a meat spume, spraying over Tom and his young brother as they stood there quaking in their boots before this strychnine Christmas pudding of a woman.
“Right, that’s Walter and our Lou both married off and out from underneath me feet, so you two better buck your ideas up and find yourselves a gal who’ll have yer, toot sweet. I’ll not have everybody thinking I’ve brought up a pair of idiots who need their mother to take care of ’em. You’re thirty, Tommy, and you, Frank, you’re nearly twenty-five. People are going to ask what’s up with you.”
That had been getting on six years ago. Tommy was thirty-six now, and until he’d met Doreen two or three years back, he’d been starting to ask what was up with him himself. It wasn’t like he’d never had a girlfriend, there’d been one or two, but there’d been nothing that had come to much. Part of it was that Tom was shy. He wasn’t impish or adventurous like Lou, his sis. He couldn’t charm the birds down out the trees then sell them shares in cloud-apartments like their Walter did, nor could he manage all the easy, near-the-knuckle sauciness that Frank would dish out to the girls. Tom was, in his own private estimation, the most knowledgeable of his siblings. He weren’t wise like Lou, ingenious like Walt or even crafty like their Frank, but Tommy knew a lot. About the only thing he didn’t know was how to set that learning to his own advantage, and when it had come to women he’d been lost and couldn’t put a foot right for the life of him.
Another car swam from the fogbank, possibly a snub-nosed Morris Minor, this one headed west and travelling in the opposite direction from the previous vehicle. Its watery headlights splashed across the rough, dark limestone of St. Edmund’s bounding wall when it went spluttering past him, and then there were only the bright rat-eyes of its rear reflectors as it seemed to back away from Tom into the shrouded corner represented by Northampton’s centre. Mad Marie struck up a bold rendition of “O Little Town of Burlington”, or possibly “Bethlehem Bertie”, as if welcoming the new arrival.
Tommy was still thinking of his previous luck with girls, or lack of it. When Tom had been a lad back in the ’Thirties, not that long before his dad died, he’d been briefly smitten by the daughter of Ron Bayliss, who was at the time Tom’s captain in the Boy’s Brigade. It was the 18th Company, who’d met up for drill practice once a week in the big upstairs hall of the old church in College Street. Since Tom had always been not just the shyest but the most quietly religious member of his family, the regular attendance at the church and the band marches once a month suited him fine, and when he’d first clapped eyes upon Liz Bayliss it was just one more incentive. She’d been very pretty and a cut above Tom socially, but he knew he was a good-looking chap himself, and round where he came from in Green Street he’d been thought of as a snappy dresser, too. So he’d worked up the nerve and, after church one Sunday morning, asked her if she’d come to the theatre with him.
Lord knows why he’d said “theatre”. Tom had never been to a theatre in his life, had simply thought it sounded cultured and impressive. Anyway, he’d not expected her to say she’d be delighted, and had only stuttered, “Oh, good. Then I’ll see you there on Thursday”, without any idea what was on the bill that night. As it turned out, it had been Maxie Miller, and it hadn’t been his white book the comedian had been performing from on that particular occasion.
Bloody hell. It had been both the funniest and most embarrassing half-hour of Tommy’s life. As soon as he’d seen Miller’s name up on the posters, Tommy had been horrified, had known that this was the last place on earth that he should take a fervent Baptist like Liz Bayliss, but by then he’d bought the tickets and there wasn’t any way he could back out. Besides, he’d heard Max Miller did a clean night now and then, so thought there was a chance he’d get away with it. At least, he’d thought that until Max had come out on the stage in his white suit with big red roses in brocade all over it, his wicked cherub face grinning up at the audience from underneath the brim of his white bowler hat.
“D’you like the seaside, ladies? Yes, I’ll bet you do. I love it, me. I was down Kent the other week, ladies and gents, lovely down there it was. I took a stroll, I took a stroll along the cliff-tops it were such a smashing day. Walking along this narrow little path, I was, with a sheer drop down to one side of me and ooh, it was a height, ladies and gents, the waves all crashing round the rocks hundreds of feet below. This path, well, it weren’t very broad, just wide enough to have one person on it but without the room for two people to pass, so just imagine, gents and ladies, just imagine my alarm when who should I see coming down the path the other way but a young lady in her summer frock and what a lovely thing she was, ladies and gents, I don’t mind telling you. Well, now, you can see my dilemma. I stopped in me tracks, I looked at her, I looked down at the rocks below and didn’t know what I should do. I’ll tell you, I weren’t sure if I should block her passage or just toss meself off and be done with it.”
In her seat next to Tom, Liz Bayliss had turned white as Miller’s hat. As the theatre all around them had erupted into laughter, Tom had struggled to compose his face into a look as mortified as that of his companion while preventing himself rattling like a boiler with suppressed hilarity. After a further twenty minutes, when the tears were running down Tom’s cheeks into the corners of his desperate rictus grimace, Liz had asked him in a voice like graveyard marble if he would escort her out and take her home. That had been more or less the last he’d seen of her, since he’d felt far too awkward to keep up his Boy’s Brigade or church appearances much after that.
The Wellingborough Road stretched out to either side of him, its weak electric lamps suspended in the churning dark at lengthy intervals, like lanterns hung from masts on quayside fishing boats. They weren’t much use for lighting up a stretch of road like this, not on a foggy
night, but they were better than the gas lamps that were still in use in some parts of the Boroughs, such as Green Street where his mam lived on her own with no electric. Tommy pictured her, a scowling boulder in her groaning armchair by the fireside shelling peas, with her cat Jim down at her still-small but carbuncled feet, the hissing gaslight dyeing the room’s shadows to a deep dead-nettle-green. Next time he saw his mother, Tom was hoping he’d be able to hold up a grandson like a shield in front of him to stave off her attack. Or a granddaughter, obviously, although a son would probably be bigger and thus slow Tom’s mother down for longer.
From across an empty main road the St. Edmund’s bell chimed once, although if it were for one or half past he wasn’t sure. He squinted at the church tower through the intervening billows and reflected how he wasn’t sorry that he hadn’t been to church so much since the Liz Bayliss incident. Tom still believed in God and in the afterlife and all of that, but in the war he’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t the same God and afterlife they talked about in church. That sounded too stuck up and fancy in the way that everybody dressed, behaved and talked. What Tom had first liked, as a kid, about the Bible was how Jesus was a carpenter, who would have had big callused hands and smelled of sawdust and said “bugger” just like anybody if the hammer caught his thumb. If Jesus was God’s son, it made you think his dad had very likely acted much the same when he was knocking up the planets and the stars. A working bloke; the hardest working bloke of all, who favoured working men and paupers throughout all the best loved stories in the Bible. The same rough and ready God that Philip Doddridge used to preach about on Castle Hill all of them years back. Tommy didn’t hear that cheery gruffness in the pious tones of vicars, didn’t feel that coarse warmth striking from the polished pews. These days, though Tom’s faith hadn’t budged an inch in its conviction, he preferred to worship privately and at a ruder altarpiece, alone inside his thoughts. He didn’t go to church except for funerals, weddings, and, if this went well tonight, for christenings. He didn’t let his lips move when he prayed.
That was the war, of course, a lot of that. Four brothers setting out, three coming home. It still upset him when he thought of Jack, and at the time he hadn’t seen quite how the Warren family would get over it, although you did, of course. You had to. It was like the war itself. It had been inconceivable to everybody while they were still getting through it that there’d ever be another way of living, that they could recover from it, all the bombs, all the dead relatives. Nobody could imagine much beyond more of what they were suffering already, only worse. The future, back then, it had been something that Tommy couldn’t think about, a place he’d never honestly expected he should see.
Yet eight years later here he was, a married man stood waiting for the birth of his first child. As for the future, Tommy thought of nothing but. Things weren’t the way they’d been before the war. Nothing meant quite the same as what you’d thought it did, and England was a different country now. They’d got a pretty young queen that the papers likened to the previous Good Queen Bess, and even ordinary working people had got televisions so as they could watch the coronation. It was all like something out of Journey into Space, how quick the onslaught of this modern world had been, as though the war’s end had removed a great impediment and finally let the twentieth century catch up with itself. Tom and Doreen’s first child – and they’d talked already of another one – would be one of these New Elizabethans everyone was going on about. They might grow up to live a life that Tom could never dream of, all the things that scientists would have discovered and found out about by then. They might have all the chances that Tom hadn’t had, or else had been compelled by circumstances to forgo.
Off in the curdling greyness, Mad Marie still serenaded him with “My Old Man Said Onward Christian Soldiers”, her piano sounding small and far away, a broken music-box that had been set off accidentally in another room. Tom thought of his maths scholarship again, the one that he’d passed up to take the brewery job instead. While it was true he’d not resented missing out on education if it meant that he could help his family, he still missed all the fun he used to have with sums and numbers, when it was all new to him.
It was his granddad, Snowy, who he’d got the skill with figures from. Although the old boy had passed on in 1926 when Tom was nine (gone mad and eating flowers out of a vase according to Tom’s mam), the pair had got on well and in those last two years of his grandfather’s life Tom had spent most Saturday afternoons at his grandparents’ house in the grim, narrow crack of Fort Street. While Tom’s granny Lou had fussed around in the dark kitchen, Snowy and young Tom had chanted their way through all the multiplication tables, sitting in the living room. Geometry, that was another thing that Tommy’s granddad had instructed him upon: rough circles drawn around milk-bottle bases with a titchy stub of pencil, sheets of butcher’s paper covering the tea-table until you couldn’t see the wine-red tablecloth. Snowy had told his grandson that most of the know-how came from his own father, Tom’s great-granddad Ernest Vernall, who had once worked touching up the frescoes of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Victorian times. Snowy said him and his sister, Tommy’s great-aunt Thursa, had been given lessons by their dad while he was at a rest home. Only some years later, after badgering his mam, had Tommy found out that the rest home had been Bedlam, the original asylum what they’d had in Lambeth.
He recalled the afternoon, fumbling now in his mac pocket for the pack of Kensitas, when they’d been working on the eight- and nine-times-tables. His granddad had pointed out how all the multiples of nine, if you just totalled up their digits, always added up to nine: one plus eight, two plus seven, three plus six and so on, for as high as you could go. The memory smelled of fruitcake, from which Tom assumed his gran had been out in the kitchen baking, that particular occasion. It had tickled him, the thing about the number nine, and for a lark he’d added up the digits in the answers to his eight-times-table, too. The first was just eight, obviously, while the next, sixteen, was one plus six and therefore added up to seven. The next, twenty-four, was two plus four and added up to six, while thirty-two reduced in the same way to five. Tommy had realised with a growing sense of intrigue that his column of additions counted down from eight to one (eight eights were sixty-four, in which the six and four thus added up to ten, the one and nought of which totalled just one), and then began the countdown all again commencing with the number nine this time (nine eights, seventy-two, the seven and the two of which made nine). This run of numbers, nine to one, was then repeated, on and on, presumably unto infinity. That had been when Tom’s grandfather had pointed out that this was the same sequence as the one-times-table, only in reverse, and that had set both of them thinking.
Taking one short untipped cigarette out of the pack, with its sleek, smarmy butler mascot in red, black and white, Tom lit it with a Captain Webb’s and threw the spent match in the vague direction of an unseen gutter, lost somewhere in the cold smoulder down around his feet. The fag-pack with its butler and the matchbox with its bold, moustachioed channel swimmer both went back into his raincoat pocket. He’d a Fry’s Five Boys bar in there, too, with a quintet of lads at various emotional extremes upon its wrapper. All this advertising and this packaging that you got nowadays, it meant that he was carrying seven tiny people in his pocket, just so he could have a smoke and possibly a square of chocolate if he should feel peckish later on.
Upon that memorable afternoon getting on thirty years before, Tom and his grandfather had swiftly reckoned up the digits in the answers to the rest of the multiplication tables. He remembered the excitement that he’d felt, the giddy, sheer thrill of discovery now come back to him in a fruitcake rush of allspice, candied peel and Snowy Vernall’s rubbing liniment. The two-times-table, if you added up the figures of the products, it transpired, resulted in a number-pattern that first ran through all the even numbers, two, four, six, eight, then all of the odd ones, one (one plus nought), three (one plus two), five, and so on up to
nine (eighteen, or one plus eight). Remembering the way the one- and eight-times-tables had both yielded up numerical progressions that were backwards mirror-versions of each other, Snowy and young Tom had looked at the seven-times-table, where they’d learned that first the added answers counted down through the odd numbers, seven, five (one plus four), three (two plus one), one (two plus eight, which made the ten, the digits of which added up to one), and then went on to run down through the even numbers. Eight (three plus five), six (four plus two) and so on until the countdown of odd numbers started up again. The number seven seemed to work exactly like the number two, but with the sequence running back to front.
The number three, which just went three, six, nine, three, six, nine, unendingly if you made sums out of its multiples, appeared to be twinned with the number six, which went six, three, nine, six, three, nine, if you did the same thing. The number four produced a pattern that seemed complicated at first sight, in that it counted down from two numbers in parallel, and alternated in between the two. Thus, what you got was four, then eight, then three (or one plus two), then seven (one plus six), then two (two plus nought), six (two plus four), one (two plus eight, adding up to ten, or one plus nought), five (thirty-two, or three plus two), et cetera, et cetera. The five-times-table, unsurprisingly by now, did just the same thing in reverse. It alternated in the same way between two progressions, this time counting up instead of down, so that the sequence in this case was five, one, six, two, seven (two plus five), three (three plus nought), eight (three plus five) and so forth. Tommy and his grandfather had looked at one another and just burst out laughing so that Tom’s grandma Louisa had come out the kitchen to see what was up.
What had been up was that there seemed to be a hidden pattern in the sums that could be generated by the answers of the one- to eight-times-tables. They were all symmetrical, one mirrored eight, two mirrored seven, three worked just the same as six, four was like five. Only the number that had sparked off their investigations, nine, remained alone out of the single figures in that it did not possess a twin, a number that no matter how much it was multiplied would yield the same unvarying result.
Tom, eight years old, had been attempting to explain all this to his uncomprehending gran, when out of nowhere his granddad had yelped with glee, snatched up the midget pencil and, in faint lines on the thin and shiny butcher’s paper littering the table, had inscribed two circles, one inside the other. With one Capstan-yellowed index finger, Snowy had jabbed meaningfully at the drawing, looking up at Tommy from beneath the winter hedgerow of his brow to ascertain whether his grandson understood or not. The old man’s eyes were shining in a way that had reminded Tommy, there amidst the fruited oven-fug and camaraderie of the maths game which they’d been working out together, that his grandfather was said by many to be mad, including Tommy’s mam. And everybody else, now that he’d thought of it. His granddad had just grinned and once again poked at his mystifying scribble with an urgent finger. All that there had been to Snowy’s drawing was just two concentric circles, like a car tyre, or an angel’s halo standing on its side. Tommy had squinted at the simple shape for what seemed minutes before he’d become aware that he was looking at the figure nought.
It had been just as if the lights had been switched on. Nought was the only number, other than the number nine, that didn’t change if it were multiplied. All of the single digit figures between nought and nine made sequences by adding up their multiples that had a perfect symmetry. As if to underline this, Tom’s granddad had once more taken up his pencil, and had written those ten numbers in, all in a ring between the zero’s innermost and outer circles, like the numbers round the edges of a clock. The number nought was roughly where the one would be upon a normal timepiece, with the numerals proceeding clockwise round the dial and leaving spaces where the six and twelve were usually positioned. The effect of this was that each number was now set at the same horizontal level as its mirror-twin, the nine up at the top left face now lined up with the nought at the top right. The eight and one were opposite each other at both ten-to and ten-past, the seven and the two were diametrically opposed, each at the quarter-hour mark, with the six and three below that, and the five and four facing each other down the bottom, one at five-and-twenty-to, the other one at five-and-twenty after. It was lovely. In one simple flash a hidden pattern that had been there all the time, concealed beneath the surface, was revealed.
Neither Tom nor his grandfather had had the first idea what their discovery might mean, or could conceive of any useful application for it. Indeed, it was so blindingly obvious once you’d first seen it that they’d both assumed that someone, or more likely a great many people, had stumbled across the notion previously. It didn’t matter. In that moment Tom had felt a sense of triumph and sultana-scented revelation that he’d never known before or since. His grandfather had smiled a cracked smile that looked rueful rather than elated, and had stabbed once more with one black fingernail at the blank space enclosed by the big number nought’s interior ring.
“The nought’s a torus. That means, like, a lifebelt shape what’s got a hole in. Or it’s like a chimneypot, looked down on from above. And at the middle of the nought here, down the barrel of the chimney, that’s where all the nothing’s kept. You’ve got to keep your eye on nothing, lad, or else it gets all over everything. Then there’s no chimneypot, there’s just the hole. Then there’s no lifebelt, there’s no torus. There’s no nothing.”
With this, Snowy Vernall had seemed to get angry or unhappy, just like that. He’d screwed the piece of paper with the altered clock face drawn upon it up into a ball and thrown it on the fire. Tom hadn’t comprehended any of what his granddad had just been going on about, and must have looked scared by the old boy’s sudden change of disposition. Tommy’s gran Louisa, who looked like she’d seen these swings of mood before, had said “Right, that’s enough sums for today. Young Tommy, you run off back home before your mam gets worried. You can see your granddad Snowy on another Sat’day afternoon.” She hadn’t even shown Tom out, perhaps because she’d known that there was an explosion imminent. Tommy had barely shut the worn front door behind him and stepped outside into Fort Street when he heard the furious bellowing and, shortly after, breaking glass. Most probably it would have been a window or a mirror, mirrors being something that Tom’s grandfather was known to have become suspicious of. Tommy had scarpered off down Fort Street which, although it had been barely the mid-afternoon, Tom pictured now as having then been ominously dark. However, he recalled that this had happened in the ’Twenties, long before the Borough Waste Destructor had been pulled down to make way for flats in Bath Street, so that was one mystery solved.
Tom pulled upon his Kensitas and blew an unintended smoke-ring, almost instantly made indistinguishable from the chilly, writhing fumes surrounding him there in the Wellingborough Road. He wished he could blow one like that when somebody was watching. When Doreen was watching.
Drifting up from the town centre, to the west and on Tom’s right, the jingling and meandering performance of the marathon concert recitalist was still continuing, notes hung on the infrequent threads of breeze like the glass lozenges that dripped from chandeliers. It still reminded him of something, of some other night like this, perhaps, some other music drifting from some other fog? The memory, much like fog, was elusive, and he let it go and instead wondered how Doreen was getting on. She probably would have been in no mood to have appreciated Tommy’s smoke-ring, even if she’d seen it. She’d most likely other things upon her mind right now.
