Howard wants to ask him why he still comes here, he of all people; but instead he says, ‘It’s good to see you, Ruprecht. I’ve been meaning to have a word with you.’
Ruprecht says nothing, watches his eyes. Howard finds his mouth has gone dry, slurps from his Sprite. ‘On the phone you said there was something important you needed to talk about.’
Ruprecht nods. ‘I just wanted to know something for this project I’m doing,’ he says, keeping his voice carefully neutral.
‘What kind of project?’
‘Sort of a communications project.’
He catches Ruprecht’s eye just as something surfaces to peek out at him; then it bolts back into the impenetrable recesses of the boy’s mind. ‘Well, that’s good,’ he says. ‘That you’re doing a project. Because it seems like you’ve been a bit under the weather lately. You know, you haven’t been taking as much interest in class as you used to.’
Ruprecht does not respond to this, traces invisible ideograms with the end of his straw on the tabletop.
‘Since what, ah, what happened to Daniel,’ Howard expands. ‘I mean, it seems like it affected you a great deal.’
The boy continues to devote his full attention to his straw pictures, but his cheeks crimson and his face assumes an expression of misery.
Howard looks over his shoulder. The only other customers are a foreign couple, pored over a map; behind the till, a bored-looking Asian is emptying coins from plastic baggies.
‘Sometimes in these matters,’ he says, ‘what you really need is closure. To understand what’s happened, tie up any loose ends that might exist. Often that, tying up the loose ends, that’s what will help you to move on.’ He clears his throat. ‘And if tying those loose ends seems difficult, or even dangerous, you should know that there are people who are ready to help you. Who will coach you through it. Do you understand me?’
Ruprecht’s eyes flash up-from-under at him, seeking to puzzle him out.
Howard waits, on tenterhooks. Then at last, ‘Is that, is tying the loose ends, what you wanted to talk to me about?’
The boy takes a deep breath. ‘You mentioned a scientist,’ he says hoarsely. ‘When we were in the park, you mentioned a scientist, a pioneer in electromagnetic waves.’
For a moment Howard is at sea. What is he talking about? Is this some sort of code?
‘You said he had worked out how to communicate –’ Ruprecht brings his voice down to a whisper ‘– with the dead.’ His eyes glimmer with desperation; and finally Howard understands. Ruprecht has no clue about Coach or any kind of wrongdoing; he has no plan to bring anyone to justice; all that remains locked up in Howard’s own head. The disappointment is crushing – so much so that for an instant he teeters on the verge of telling the boy himself, telling him everything. But does he really want to be the one who visits the repulsion and cynicism of that world on Ruprecht’s? Instead, to sweeten the bitterness, he picks up a doughnut and takes a bite. It is surprisingly good.
‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘His name was Oliver Lodge. At the time he was one of the most famous scientists in the world. He’d made all sorts of groundbreaking discoveries involving magnetism, electricity, radio waves, and in his later years he attempted to use these, as you say, to communicate with the spirit world. There was a lot of that going on at the end of the Victorian era – seances, fairies, psychic photography, and so on. Maybe it was a reaction to the society of the day, which was very materialistic and technology-obsessed – quite like ours, actually. It made the scientists of the period very angry, especially because the spiritualists were claiming to use science, specifically new inventions like cameras, gramophones and radios, to contact the spirit world. So a group of scientists, including Lodge, got together to study supernatural phenomena with the aim of exposing the whole thing as the fraud it was.
‘But then war broke out, and Lodge’s son Raymond was killed in battle. The next thing, Lodge was caught up in the very stuff he was supposed to be disproving. He claimed he had communicated with his dead son – in fact, he wrote a book, part of which was supposedly dictated to him by the boy, from beyond the grave. According to this book, which became a huge bestseller, the other world, the afterlife – Summerland was the name his son gave it – was only a hair’s breadth away from the world familiar to you and me. But it existed in a different dimension, so you couldn’t see it.’
‘But he could see it?’
‘Well, no. He had a housemaid who was a medium. Everything came through her. But from his own work in physics, and Raymond’s descriptions of the other world, Lodge believed he was on the point of proving conclusively that there was life after death. The key was this fourth dimension, this extra dimension right next to ours but separated from us by an invisible veil. Lodge thought that the new electromagnetic waves he’d discovered could pass through this veil.’
‘How?’ Ruprecht’s eyes pinned on him in as lynx-like a fashion as is possible for a chronically overweight fourteen-year-old.
‘Well, there was an idea at the time that space was filled by an invisible material called ether. Scientists didn’t understand how these waves they’d discovered, light waves, radio waves and so forth, could travel through a vacuum. There must be something that carried them. So they came up with ether. Ether was what allowed light to travel from the sun to the earth. Ether connected everything to everything else. The spiritualists proposed that it didn’t stop at matter either. It joined our souls to our bodies, it linked the worlds of the living and the dead.’
‘Ether.’ Ruprecht nods to himself.
‘Right. Lodge thought that if electromagnetic waves could traverse this ether, then communication with the dead was not only scientifically plausible but within the grasp of the technology of the time. In Raymond’s accounts of Summerland, the dead soldiers reported being able to hear very faint emanations from the world of the living – music, especially, certain pieces of music came through the veil. So in his book Lodge outlines the first principles of how this communication would work.’
‘And what happened?’ Ruprecht has leaned so far across the table that he appears to be floating above his seat; Howard, beginning to feel uncomfortable, attempts to inch his chair back only to find it welded to the floor. ‘Nothing happened,’ he says.
‘Nothing?’ Ruprecht doesn’t understand.
‘Well, it failed, obviously, I mean it was wrong, it was all wrong. Because there was no ether. There was no mysterious substance joining everything to everything else. Lodge became a laughing stock, his reputation was ruined.’
‘But…’ Ruprecht is scanning the table in disbelief, like an investor being told his entire portfolio has gone south. ‘But how could it not work?’
Howard does not quite understand what is going on here, why Ruprecht should be taking this so personally. ‘I think it’s important to remember the context in which Lodge was working,’ he says carefully. ‘Yes, he was a great scientist. But he was also a man who had just lost his son. Other champions of spiritualism were in the same position – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, had also lost a son in the war. The people who bought Lodge’s book, the ones who conducted seances themselves, the soldiers in the trenches who saw the ghosts of their friends – these were all people in mourning. This was a world that had literally gone crazy with grief. At the same time, it was an age when science and technology promised they could deliver all the answers. Suddenly you could talk to somebody on the other side of the world – why shouldn’t you be able to talk to the dead?’
Ruprecht is hanging on his words, glassy-eyed, with bated breath. ‘But the point was, you couldn’t,’ Howard says, and repeats it, ‘you couldn’t,’ to bolster himself against the hostility with which this information is received – a stare that is pitched somewhere between crestfallen and mutinous.