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.