Time and Time Again Page 3

  Stanton smiled. That wasn’t the sort of sentiment you heard a lot these days. Even in the army old-fashioned notions such as courage and honour were viewed with deep suspicion. Not ‘inclusive’ enough.

  There was a knock at the door. Breakfast had arrived.

  ‘There you go, Sally,’ one of the caterers said as the professor signed for the food. ‘Enjoy, Sal.’

  Stanton had never heard McCluskey addressed by her first name before, let alone heard it reduced from Sally to Sal.

  ‘Ah yes,’ McCluskey remarked once the caterers had left. ‘I’m Sal all right. There are no exceptions in the new cultural egalitarianism. But the funny thing is that no matter how many times everybody uses each other’s first name, the rich still get richer and the poor still get poorer and nobody actually gives a damn about anyone. Ain’t life grand?’

  ‘Look, professor,’ Stanton said, accepting a plate of fried breakfast, ‘are you going to tell me why you asked me here or aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m going to try, Hugh, but when you’ve heard me out I think you’ll concede that it’s not a simple thing to explain.’

  ‘Have a crack at it.’

  McCluskey helped herself to some bacon and eggs, on top of which, to Stanton’s disgust, she drizzled honey. ‘I knew getting into this was going to be difficult,’ she said through a mouth full of food. ‘Let’s start with this. If you could change one thing in history, if you had the opportunity to go back into the past, to one place and one time and change one thing, where would you go? What would you do?’

  ‘Professor, you know bloody well I’d—’

  ‘Hugh, not you personally. You can’t go back to the street in Camden and stop your wife and children from stepping into the road. I want an objective not a subjective answer. This isn’t about you and your private tragedy. It’s about us and our global tragedy. About humanity.’

  ‘Screw humanity. I don’t give the whole stinking bunch of us more than a couple of generations and good riddance. The universe is better off without us.’

  ‘But surely we’re not irredeemable?’ McCluskey suggested.

  ‘Aren’t we?’

  ‘Of course not. No race that could produce Shakespeare and Mozart is irredeemable. We’ve just lost our way, that’s all. But what if you could give us a chance to do better? Just one chance. One single move in the great game of history. What’s your best shot? What would you consider to be the greatest mistake in world history and, more to the point, what single thing would you do to prevent it?’

  ‘All human history has been a disaster,’ Stanton insisted. ‘If you want to fix it, go back a couple of hundred thousand years and shoot the first ape that tries to get up and walk on two feet.’

  ‘Not good enough. I won’t accept lazy apocalyptic cop-outs. I want a proper answer, argued from the facts.’

  ‘Missing your students, prof?’ Stanton asked. ‘Can’t survive the holiday without one of your “What ifs”?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘I don’t much. I’m not really in the mood for games.’

  ‘You’re not in the mood for anything. You told me you were just passing the time till you die so clearly you don’t have anything better to do. What’s more, it’s Christmas and it’s minus ten outside. Why not indulge me? Eat your brekkie. Have another cognac and do a favour to a lonely old bitch who fancied a bit of company and knew you’d be free because you’re even more lonely than she is.’

  Stanton looked out of the window once more. There was a big storm brewing and even to a man who didn’t care if he lived or died, Christmas Eve in a Travelodge was an unpleasant prospect. McCluskey’s sitting room was warm and filled with lots of comforting-looking things, things that dated to a time before he or Cassie or the children had ever existed. Books, pictures, antiques. He closed his eyes and sipped his tea and cognac. It occurred to him that he was already slightly drunk. But it was a nice mellow sort of high, the first booze buzz he’d enjoyed since …

  He shut the thought from his mind and focused on McCluskey.

  ‘All right, professor,’ he said, ‘since it’s Christmas.’

  ‘Then game on!’ McCluskey said, clapping her yellow, nicotinestained hands together. ‘Come on. Best shot. What is humanity’s biggest mistake? Its worst disaster?’

  As if on cue, there was an alarming rattle at the window and a squall of heavy hail crashed against the glass, threatening to smash it in. The two of them turned to watch as icy stones the size of marbles began bouncing off the pane, which fortunately had been reinforced against what was becoming a common occurrence.

  ‘Well, there’s your answer, I reckon,’ Stanton said. ‘Climate change. Got to be the big one, hasn’t it? Earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, floods, tornadoes, mini bloody ice ages. The Gulf Stream gets turned off and suddenly East Sussex is Northern Canada. A couple more years of failed harvests and the whole world will almost certainly starve.’

  ‘Climate change is a consequence, Hugh,’ McCluskey replied sternly. ‘A consequence of global warming, which is also a consequence. A consequence of burning carbon, which among other things powers our cars. Would you uninvent cars?’

  ‘Not me, prof, I’m a petrolhead, you know that. I reckon a perfectly tuned V8 engine’s worth a couple of icebergs any time.’

  ‘Central heating then? Refrigerated food? Incubators for the premature? Stair lifts for the infirm? We don’t normally think of those things as disasters, do we? But they all contribute to global warming. Shall we uninvent them?’

  Stanton felt a familiar sensation, one he hadn’t felt since he was twenty-one, the sense of McCluskey running rings around him.

  ‘Well, it’s a matter of scale, isn’t it?’ he said, struggling to hold his own. ‘Of course, there are lots of benefits, but the fact is that ever since the industrial revolution—’

  ‘Would you call that a disaster?’ McCluskey interrupted, pouncing gleefully. ‘Would you prevent it? That thing that brought health and plenty to untold billions? Cheap food, cheap clothes, cheap power. Levels of comfort delivered to entire populations that previously not even kings had enjoyed? Besides which, you couldn’t prevent it even if you wanted to. The industrial revolution wasn’t a single event, it was the result of any number of scientific and technological breakthroughs. No one thing began it, not even the Spinning Jenny, despite what was once taught in schools, and I’m only allowing you to change one thing. So, sorry, Hugh, no good, you’ll have to try again.’

  Stanton actually laughed. He hadn’t laughed in over six months. It felt strange. But also liberating.

  ‘Come on then, professor, out with it.’

  ‘Out with what?’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious you’ve decided on your own answer. You’re just waiting to shoot me down in flames a few times before you tell me what it is. Just like you did to us when we were students. I could say anything. The invention of gun powder. Splitting the atom. Taking small pox to the New World and bringing back syphilis. The Romans coming up with decent plumbing then ruining it by using lead pipes. And you’d tell me they were all wrong because you know where this is heading.’

  McCluskey drained her teacup and splashed another shot of cognac into it.

  ‘Well, you’re right and you’re wrong, Hugh,’ she admitted. ‘I do have the answer, but I certainly don’t know where this is heading, no one on earth could know that. But I know where it began. In this very room, as a matter of fact. Possibly in these very chairs. Two hundred and ninety-seven years ago.’

  Stanton did the mental arithmetic.

  ‘1727?’

  ‘1727 indeed.’

  McCluskey pushed away her half-finished plate and put her Nike-clad feet up on a little padded footstool. Then, with stubby brown-stained fingers she filled an ancient tar-coated pipe with tobacco, which she appeared to keep loose in the pocket of her greatcoat.

  ‘Don’t mind if I smoke while you’re still eating, do you? Illegal, of course, within fifty metres of a person or a building, but what’s the point being Master of Trinity if you can’t be master of your own sitting room?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Stanton replied. ‘I did two tours in the Mid East; everybody smoked, including me.’

  ‘Well, I do think you need a pipe to tell a good story.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me a story?’

  ‘I’m going to tell you the first half of one, Hugh. The second half hasn’t been written yet.’

  4

  TWO HUNDRED AND ninety-seven years before Stanton returned to his old university to visit the Master of Trinity, another exstudent, and one rather more eminent, had stood at the lodge door with the same intention.

  The Master’s Lodge had been quite new then, a relatively recent addition to the College, scarcely a century old. Not much older in fact than the ex-student himself, who was eighty-four, an immense age for the time. The old man had gout and a suspected kidney stone but he had nonetheless come all the way from the comfort of his niece’s home in London, where he was spending his final years, in order to deliver a package of papers and a letter.

  A letter to Professor McCluskey.

  The old man had hoped to be discreet about his arrival at College but a hundred eyes had stared from leaded windows as he made his slow progress across the Great Court. Word, he knew, would be spreading like wildfire. After all, he was a very famous man and that fame had been established here in Cambridge, at Trinity. He was, without doubt, the College’s most celebrated son, and in all probability would ever remain so.

  It was he who had brought order to the universe.

  The laws of motion. The movement of planets. The nature and substance of light. Optics, calculus, telescopics and, above all, gravity were all areas of understanding that the searchlight
of the old man’s mind had revealed to an astonished world. Small wonder then that crowds of young men in black gowns had thrown down their books and come scuttling from their various rooms and chambers anxious to catch a glimpse of a legend, to be for a moment close to the very epicentre of modern practical philosophy, long gowns flapping like wings as they scurried across the quad. A swarm of intellectual moths drawn to the blinding light of true genius.

  But that light was fading now. Sir Isaac Newton’s eyes were dimming. Pain racked his body and torment troubled his extraordinary mind. It was this torment that had led him to make the taxing journey back to Trinity. To deliver the letter and the package of notes into the care of Richard Bentley, the Master of the College.

  Having entered the lodge, leaving the crowd of chattering students outside, Newton paused in the hallway while a servant took his coat. He glanced ruefully up at the long sweeping stairway he knew he still had to climb.

  The Master appeared at the top of the stairs, his arms thrown wide in salutation.

  ‘Welcome, Sir Isaac! You do your alma mater and my house a great honour.’

  Newton grunted and patted the ornate banister. ‘It’s every bit as ridiculous as word has it,’ he said.

  Richard Bentley winced. His decision to install a spectacular new staircase in the Trinity Master’s Lodge had been a matter of considerable controversy.

  ‘The cost has been much exaggerated,’ Bentley replied primly.

  ‘One can only hope so,’ Newton muttered, putting an unsteady foot on the first step, ‘or I doubt Trinity will be buying any actual books for a while.’

  ‘Ha! There speaks His Majesty’s Master of the Mint,’ Bentley said, but rather too loudly and pretending to laugh. ‘I hope you haven’t come here in your official capacity, Sir Isaac. Am I to be audited?’

  ‘I do not audit, Mr Bentley. I am not a clerk.’

  ‘I was being merry, Sir Isaac.’

  ‘Then I envy you that ability,’ Newton said, puffing as he laboured up the last of the stairs. ‘I am come not in any official capacity, Mr Bentley, but on an entirely personal matter. A matter, in fact, of the utmost privacy.’

  ‘You intrigue me, sir.’

  ‘So private that it will require the swearing of a solemn and binding oath of secrecy.’

  ‘My goodness, how exciting.’

  ‘It is. But not for us.’

  Bentley helped the great man into his drawing room where wine was served, after which Newton instructed Bentley to dismiss all the servants and lock the doors.

  ‘Now draw the curtains if you will, sir, and light a candle,’ Newton said. ‘For this thing which must remain in darkness should begin in darkness.’

  Bentley couldn’t help smiling at the old man’s sense of drama. Newton was well over eighty, after all, and perhaps approaching the doddering senility of Shakespeare’s seventh age.

  When the room had been rendered suitably dark and mysterious, Newton produced a cross and made Bentley swear an oath upon it.

  ‘Do you, Richard Bentley, on your honour as Master of Trinity College and before God as a Christian gentleman, swear that all that passes between us in this room will remain in this room and no word or hint of it shall ever be divulged to another soul, save to one person and that be in a letter to your successor?’

  Bentley agreed.

  ‘Kiss the cross and repeat your promise,’ Newton demanded.

  Again Bentley did as he was told, but this time the indulgent smile was replaced with just a hint of impatience. Newton might be universally acknowledged as the greatest mind in England and probably all the world but he, Bentley, had written the celebrated Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, which was no small thing either.

  ‘There, Mr Bentley,’ Newton said. ‘You are become a Companion of the Order of Chronos. The first of their number! Unless you count me, which I suppose we should. So let us say the second of their number.’

  Bentley gave a spacious wave as if to indicate that he was content to be number two. ‘Chronos. God of Time?’

  ‘The very same, Mr Bentley.’

  Newton settled himself into the beautiful new Queen Anne winged chair on which he was sitting and took a sip of claret. ‘You will recall,’ he began, ‘that many years ago, at the time when first we corresponded on theological matters, I had some disturbance of the mind?’

  Bentley nodded uneasily. He was indeed aware. There could have been few members of Britain’s intellectual establishment who hadn’t known about the nervous breakdown Newton had suffered thirty years earlier at the height of his fame. Or the deranged and paranoiac letters he had written at the time to both friends and rivals, letters filled with wild accusations of conspiracy and betrayal. Or the dark talk of alchemy and the search for hidden messages in the Bible, which had led many to conclude that Newton’s mind was gone for ever.

  ‘The world believes I had a fit,’ the old man went on. ‘That my mind was crazed with madness.’

  ‘You were over-worked, Sir Isaac,’ Bentley said soothingly.

  ‘They thought me mad, Bentley,’ Newton snapped, ‘and well I might have been, for what I’d discovered should have driven anyone to lunacy.’

  ‘Discovered, Sir Isaac? But all the world knows what you discovered and you are rightly lionized for it.’

  ‘The world knows only what I published, Mr Bentley.’

  For the first time Bentley’s supercilious manner deserted him.

  ‘You mean,’ he asked, ‘there’s more?’

  The great philosopher was silent for a moment. The creases on his thin, lined face deepened a little and the heels of his shoes tapped on the parquet floor. He scratched absent-mindedly at that famous long, lean nose, then passed the hand beneath his wig to scratch his head.

  ‘You remember how it was a year before my madness,’ Newton began, ‘when you delivered your little lecture … what was it called?’

  ‘A Confutation of Atheism,’ Bentley said. ‘Though I venture “little” is too small a word. It was after all considered the most—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Newton interrupted. ‘Whatever its size, in it you sought to show that my work proved the existence of God. That my great theory of planetary movement self-evidently required the hand of an intelligent designer, the architect of all things.’

  ‘Yes I did, Sir Isaac. I treasure the letters of approval you sent to me at the time.’

  ‘Well, I was grateful for your intervention. Some called me a heretic then. Many still do.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t put it as strongly as—’

  ‘Don’t mollycoddle me, Mr Bentley. A heretic is what they call me. But just because I question the theology of the Trinity doesn’t mean I’m not a Christian man.’

  ‘Sir Isaac, is this really the place to …’ Bentley could see that Newton was about to go off on his infamous and downright dangerous hobbyhorse.

  ‘The trinity is a mathematical impossibility!’ Newton barked, slapping the little table on which his glass was standing and upsetting his wine. ‘Three separate entities cannot also be the same thing. Three peas cannot also be one pea! Any more than can a father, a son and a holy ghost. Such a thing defies logic. Besides which, it is idolatry, because if the Father and the Son are the same thing, then those images of a dying man we put upon our crucifixes are also images of his father, hence images of God. Hence idolatry, sir! And they call me blasphemous.’

  Bentley was shifting uncomfortably in his seat. This wasn’t the sort of conversation anybody wanted to have, even in private. Particularly a person like him, who owed his position to the monarch’s patronage. It hadn’t been many years since people had been burned in England for things like denying the Trinity.

  ‘Uhm … is the question of the Trinity relevant to what you came here to discuss, Sir Isaac?’ Bentley enquired gently.

  ‘Since you ask, no, actually it isn’t,’ Newton admitted grumpily.

  ‘Hmm. Well, perhaps we should return to this business of Chronos, of which you spoke. You mentioned unpublished discoveries, Sir Isaac? That would indeed be an extraordinary and exciting thing.’

  Newton accepted another glass of wine to replace the one he’d spilled. It seemed to calm him, for when he spoke again he had regained his composure.

  ‘You know that I’ve had more time for thinking than most men, Mr Bentley,’ he said. ‘I am a bachelor. I’ve been little in the company of women save for my nieces and I’m no hand at social intercourse. All of the effort people commonly expend in the cultivation of love and friendship I have been able to devote to my observing the workings of God’s universe.’