Just as I was finishing he said, ‘Never be disappointed.’
‘What was that?’
‘I was saying that those who believe in the afterlife will never be disappointed.’
‘You mean, if they’re wrong they’ll never know about it.’
‘Yes.’
I looked at him closely. Was he different now? He had an expectant look. ‘Logical enough. But Adam. I hope you don’t think that’s profound.’
He didn’t reply. I took my empty bowl to the sink and made myself tea. I sat at the table, across from him, and after taking a couple of sips, I said, ‘Why did you say that I shouldn’t trust Miranda?’
‘Oh that…’
‘Come on.’
‘I spoke out of turn and I’m truly sorry.’
‘Answer the question.’
His voice had changed. It was firmer, more expressive in its varied pitch. But the attitude – I needed more time. My immediate, unreliable impression was of an intact presence.
‘I was thinking only of your best interests.’
‘You just said you were sorry.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘I need to hear why you said what you did.’
‘There’s a small but significant possibility that she might harm you.’
I disguised my irritation and said, ‘How significant?’
‘In the terms set by Thomas Bayes, the eighteenth-century clergyman, I’d say one in five, assuming you accept my values for the priors.’
My father, adept at the harmonic progressions of bebop, was a sincere technophobe. He used to say that any faulty electrical device needed no more than a good thump. I drank my tea and considered. In the colossal array of tree-branching networks that governed Adam’s decision-making, there would be a strong weighting in favour of reasonableness.
I said, ‘I happen to know that the possibility is insignificant, close to zero.’
‘I see. I’m so sorry.’
‘We all make mistakes.’
‘We certainly do.’
‘How many mistakes have you made in your life, Adam?’
‘Only this one.’
‘Then it’s important.’
‘Yes.’
‘And important not to repeat it.’
‘Of course.’
‘So we need to analyse how you came to make it, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I agree.’
‘So, in this regrettable process what was your first move?’
He spoke confidently now, seeming to take pleasure in describing his methods. ‘I have privileged access to all court records, criminal as well as the Family Division, even when in camera. Miranda’s name was anonymised, but I matched the case against other circumstantial factors that are also not generally available.’
‘Clever.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Tell me about the case. And the date and place.’
‘The young man, you see, knew very well that the first time he had intimate relations with her…’
He broke off and stared at me, bug-eyed in astonishment, as though he was taking in my presence for the first time. I guessed my short run of discovery was coming to a close. He appeared now to know about the value of reticence.
‘Go on.’
‘Uh, she brought along a half-bottle of vodka.’
‘Give me a date and place and the man’s name. Quick!’
‘October the… Salisbury. But look—’
Then he began to giggle, a silly, hissing sound. It was embarrassing to witness, but I couldn’t look away. On his face was a complicated look – of confusion, of anxiety, or mirthless hilarity. The user’s handbook claimed that he had forty facial expressions. The Eves had fifty. As far as I knew, the average among people was fewer than twenty-five.
‘Get a grip, Adam. We agreed. We need to understand your mistake.’
It took him more than a minute to get himself under control. I drank the last of my tea and watched what I knew to be a complex process. I understood that personality was not like a shell, encasing and constraining his capacity for coherent thought; that his deviousness, if that was what motivated him, did not live downstream of reason. Nor did mine. His rational impulse to collaborate with me may have pulsed through his neural networks at half the speed of light, but it would not have been suddenly barred at the logic gate of a freshly devised persona. Instead, these two elements were entwined at their origins, like the snakes of Mercury’s caduceus. Adam saw the world and understood it through the prism of his personality; his personality was at the service of his objectifying reason and its constant updates. From the beginning of our conversation, it had been simultaneously in his interests to avoid a repetition of an error and to withhold information from me. When the two became incompatible, he became incapacitated and giggled like a child in church. Whatever we had chosen for him lay far upstream of the branching intricacy of his decision-making. In a different dispensation of character he might simply have fallen silent; in another, he might have been compelled to tell me everything. A case could be made for both.
I now knew a little more than nothing, enough to worry about, not enough to follow up, even if I’d had access to the closed sessions of the courts: Miranda as witness, victim or accused, sex with a young man, vodka, a courtroom, one October in Salisbury.
Adam had fallen silent. His expression, the special material of his face, indistinguishable from skin, relaxed into watchful neutrality. I could have gone upstairs and woken Miranda to confront her with the obvious questions and get everything clear between us. Or I could wait and reflect, holding back what I knew in order to grant myself the illusion of control. A case could be made for both.
But I didn’t hesitate. I went into my bedroom, undressed, leaving my clothes in a heap on my desk, and lay down naked under the summer duvet. It was already light. I would have liked to be soothed and hear, above the dawn chorus, the sound of the milkman going from door to door, clinking his bottles on the steps. But the last of the electric-powered milk floats had vanished from our streets. A shame. Still, I was tired and suddenly comfortable. There’s a special dispensation in the sensuousness of an unshared bed, at least for a while, until sleeping alone begins to assume its own quiet sadness.
THREE
In the waiting room of the local doctor’s practice, a dozen junk-shop dining-room chairs were arranged round the walls of what had once been a Victorian front parlour. In the centre was a low plywood table with spindly metal legs and a few magazines, greasy to the touch. I had picked one up and immediately put it back. In one corner, some colourful broken toys, a headless giraffe, a car with a missing wheel, gnawed plastic bricks, kindly donated. There were no infants in our group of nine. I was keen to avoid the gaze of the others, their small talk or ailment-swapping. I kept my breathing shallow in case the air around me swarmed with pathogens. I didn’t belong here. I wasn’t ill, my problem was not systemic but peripheral, a toenail. I was the youngest in the room, surely the fittest, a god among mortals, with an appointment not with the doctor but the nurse. I remained beyond mortality’s reach. Decay and death were for others. I expected my name to be called first. It turned out to be a long wait. I was second to last.
On the wall opposite me was a cork noticeboard with fliers promoting early detection of this or that, healthy living, dire warnings. I had time to read them all. A photograph showed an elderly man in cardigan and slippers standing by a window. Without raising a hand to his mouth, he was lustily sneezing in the direction of a laughing little girl. Backlighting illuminated tens of thousands of particles flying towards her – minute droplets of fluid teeming with germs shared by an old fool.
I reflected on the long strange history that lay behind this tableau. The idea that germs were responsible for the spread of disease didn’t gain general acceptance until the 1880s and the work of Louis Pasteur and others, only a hundred years before this poster was devised. Until then, against a few dissenters, the miasma theory prevailed – disease originated in bad air, bad smells, decomposition, or even in night air, against which windows were properly closed. But the device that could have spoken truth to medicine was available 200 years before Pasteur. The amateur scientist of the seventeenth century who knew best how to make and use the device, was known to the scientific elite of London.