Chapter 14
Pen was sitting on one of the stone walls on the far side of the cemetery when she heard footsteps behind her. “Budge over, will you? I brought libations.”
Aunt Agnes was on her Easter holidays, and thus around.
She’d come home Friday evening. Of course, Saturday and Sunday had been the usual flurry of parish obligations for Easter.
Or cleaning and preparing, and then dealing with people.
Now, on Easter Monday, there was a bit of relaxation, and no need to hurry about anything.
Pen slid over a bit, leaving space on the smooth top of the wall before the bit that had been buckled by a tree some years ago.
“Did Mrs Willoughby actually finish her story?” She was known for them. The woman had moved to town a few years ago. As far as Pen and her family could tell, she had a near endless procession of cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces, all of whom came with tales.
“She did. I would not abandon your mother to that alone.” Aunt Agnes snorted. “She knows where I sleep. It should be quiet for a bit. And I wanted to catch up with you.”
Pen nodded. She was not, however, sure what to say.
Instead, she sat on the wall, looking off across the fields beyond the cemetery.
It was a lovely view, a bit of perfect British pastoral glory.
Even if there wasn’t much specific beauty to see yet, this early in the spring.
In a few months, the fields would have much more going on.
There’d be the wildflowers in full bloom and the buzzing of bees and the various sounds of the birds. “Thinking, mostly.”
“Anything in particular?” Aunt Agnes considered. “Papa mentioned you were going off on a reading party in a fortnight?” She then handed over a flask of tea, satisfyingly warm.
Pen nodded. “A couple of other women. All reading maths or something close enough.” It would be fine.
Probably better than fine, she got on well enough with all of them, though none of the others were magical.
They all had similar enough interests not to find each other’s particular passions too tedious.
“Two weeks in the Lake Country, one of them has a family house. It’s not really the best season for it, but the long vac is a different sort of problem. ”
“It is.” Aunt Agnes had been at Somerville in her own time. She understood that. “No new luck with tutoring?”
Pen shook her head. “No. My tutor’s fine, it’s just...” She cut off there.
“Have you given any thought to what you want to do after? I was wondering if you were considering teaching, I could keep my ear open for any positions. We get to hear about them, people in the field. Or I gather your Professor Acharya is thinking of retiring in a year or two. Martha saw the note in the Trellech Moon that they’re particularly encouraging fellows in maths next year or the one after.
” People who might reasonably be considered as replacements, then.
Being a fellow at Schola was a good way both to learn a great deal and to see what teaching was like.
That was a change of an era at Schola. Professor Acharya had been teaching maths there since well before Pen had been born.
And she’d been deputy head for decades, too.
That had some temptation to it. Being back at Schola would be wonderful, nestled in a space with magic, with time to work on her own research.
Not that Pen had any illusions about how much time and energy teaching took.
She’d heard more than enough from Aunt Agnes.
But there would be some time for herself.
She looked up. “Maybe. I won’t rule it out. But to be honest, Aunt Agnes, my heart’s not in teaching. And probably it should be, to be a good teacher.”
“The heart certainly helps.” Aunt Agnes considered, giving the topic space.
That was one thing Pen appreciated about her aunt.
Things weren’t rushed. They might move quickly, when needs must, but when there wasn’t that pressure, Aunt Agnes took her time.
Finally, without looking directly at Pen, she asked, “Where do you find your heart is?”
“I want to solve complicated problems. Puzzles that do things.” Pen gestured a little helplessly with her left hand. “There’s a lot of drudgery in that, I know that. I’ve learned that already. But something that matters in the end.”
Aunt Agnes nodded once. Pen could see it out of the corner of her eye. “I suppose you’re named for the patient resolution of problems, in one sense.”
“Penelope?” Pen tilted her head. “Mum and Dad have never explained the name.”
“Oh, that was Mama.” Pen’s grandmother had delighted in the name of Iphigenia.
Despite it, she’d had a long and glorious life as matriarch of her family, certainly not sacrificed in her youth.
“She was most insistent on it. And Papa grumbled— it’s not at all biblical, of course.
But you know how he was with Mama. He could never deny her anything she wanted.
Your parents thought it was a fine name, if a trifle long for ordinary use.
” Pen had been Pen, just the one syllable, for short, for as long as she could remember.
Vastly preferable to Penny. “Certainly better than any of the martyrs.”
“Many of whom were also very patient,” Pen agreed. “Though some names aren’t bad. And it goes well enough, magical or not.” Which was more than could be entirely said of Iphigenia.
“And that’s turned out to be handy, yes. More than we’d realised at the time.” When Pen had been born in the aftermath of the Great War, everyone had assumed there would be no such thing. Certainly no war that took Pen away to do secret work for years.
Seeing as her aunt was in an unusually confessional sort of mood, Pen ventured another question.
She was unlikely to get a better chance for months, and she’d become increasingly curious about it.
“Aunt Agnes, there’s something I’ve been wondering about.
Did you have something to do with my war work? To start out?”
“Yes, and no.” Now Aunt Agnes was definitely staring off into the distance. “Let me think about how to put it. Why do you ask now?”
Pen shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about it. Some of it’s the, what’s the word. Impact. The filter that experience puts on the world.” Not that she could explain that any better without mentioning what she’d been doing. Since she couldn’t do that, most of it was a conversational dead end.
“I suppose that would particularly be a thing given the timing, wouldn’t it? As going up to Oxford was for me.”
“Oh, Oxford is too. Some of it fascinating, some of it irritating.” Pen shrugged, not wanting to get into that right now, especially if Aunt Agnes might be informative.
“Well. Right at the start of the war, there was a request for anyone who’d read maths— especially those of us who were teaching— to suggest people we knew who might have the right sort of minds.
It was easiest to ask people who were still engaged with the subject, and they were especially looking for people who had just finished at university, or who would in the near future. That wasn’t you, of course.”
“No.” Pen had begun her fourth year at Schola when the war started.
She’d been old enough to know she loved maths and wanted to do more, but not actually much good at anything remotely complex yet.
Just getting into the interesting bits, as Professor Acharya had put it.
“Did they ask again?” It would make sense, or at least it was one line of logic that did.
“They did. Right around the time you were finishing school. And that time, the inquiry came partly from our Ministry. Yours wasn’t the only name I mentioned.
I sent them maybe ten.” Pen could tell her aunt knew exactly how many, and wasn’t saying.
That was fine. Everyone in this conversation had secrets.
“That time, they were looking for people who could learn a technical process, dealing with maths, and do it reliably.”
The timing there made sense. Pen had left school in 1941, when they were gearing up for even more bombes at Bletchley, the great deciphering machines with the arguably confusing name.
Even if those weren’t where she’d ended up, Pen had certainly fit the profile of the girls there.
Women, for all they were so often referred to communally as girls.
She considered what she could say, then finally settled on, “I felt like I was doing something meaningful there. And something not everyone could do. Not like some tasks, right?”
“Everyone can serve. That’s been a family motto since long before Papa.
” Aunt Agnes said it fondly, even though that sort of motto had consequences.
Pen’s family had never had a holiday— religious or otherwise— without taking several dozen people’s preferences into account about the timing, or how far they could go, or when.
Then there were the expectations about behaviour.
Whatever Pen did behind closed doors, in public she had to behave impeccably.
Anywhere the gossip might follow. Schola had been largely a safe haven from that.
Bletchley Park had been, because no one talked outside of it.
Oxford was anything but. Pen couldn’t go a week without running into someone who knew her parents, or especially Grandfather.
Aunt Agnes had given her a moment, but now she asked, “Frustrations at university? Besides the tutoring, I mean. I assume you’d have told us at some length if you’d had a new option.”
“Some.” Now Pen had to try to figure out how to put things.
“I look at a lot of the people there, and they seem so, what’s the word?
Juvenile is part of it, but that’s the wrong word.
About half the people who are up are my age.
The men served; the women served. We’re not fresh out of whatever school, no idea how to handle being an adult. ”
“Superficial, perhaps?” Aunt Agnes said.
“That’s— well. After the Great War, there was a lot of that.
People who’d done and been through awful things, clinging hard to whatever joy they could find, wherever they found it.
I don’t think we’ve solved that problem at all, though it’s coming out a bit differently now.
” Her shoulder twitched. “The rationing is rather a damper on certain kinds of gatherings. All alcohol, no food.”
“Certainly not the best combination up at Oxford, ugh. I could cheerfully live the rest of my life without drunken staggering just before the gates close. At least Somerville doesn’t have quite the same problem.
” She’d overheard far too many stories of awful messes from someone staggering home drunk, mistaking which was their room, and so on.
She entirely pitied any man with a ground-floor room and an accessible window.
“Surely there’s some variation. Is the Academy any better? One thing I will say about Schola is that they seem to get better manners into most of you than many schools.”
“Plenty of people have nice manners when it’s teachers watching,” Pen pointed out.
“Though I’ve heard your stories, and the things you see people don’t expect.
” She considered. “I think it is the superficiality that gets to me. People going along like the most important thing in the world is some bit of translation, when there’s something meaningful that needs doing.
I keep thinking about Professor Born and the Waynflete lectures this year, how he was talking at some level about the moral obligations of maths and the sciences. ”
Aunt Agnes nodded. “Mind, some people think about those things because of history or Greek or Latin or what have you. That’s why we as humans keep coming back to those stories.
They have power. Even if the power they have isn’t entirely visible.
” She hesitated. “I’ve an ongoing wrangle with Janet. You remember, she teaches Latin.”
“I do. You talk about her quite a bit in your letters.” Pen had met her, too, more than once.
Janet was a trim, tidy woman about the same age as Aunt Agnes.
She came from the Scottish borders and looked like she’d take on any Greek or Roman warrior, grab him by the ear, and lecture him into submission.
“She was rereading the Iliad, and she was talking— this is over a month or so, at suppers, you know how it is— about the experience of war there, and the experience of war of young men. Both twenty years ago and now, and how that’s changed.
We asked people— mostly men— to go off and do horrible things, in ways that I don’t think any of us were made to do without breaking.
Some people hide the cracks better than others.
And we don’t know what someone else’s experience was. Unless we ask.”
“If we can ask and get an answer.” Pen let out a huff of breath.
“I suppose. But I can’t talk about what I was doing.
It’s rude to ask someone else. Even if there were someone I might ask where it wouldn’t be rude.
Most of the annoying ones, I can’t imagine being in a conversation where asking would make sense. ”
“Mmm.” Aunt Agnes considered. “You might think about whether there’s some group you could lend a hand to. An hour or two a week. It might open up some conversation. If you want.”
“Not this year. Maybe next,” Pen said immediately, instinctively. “Trinity Term’s sports, all over the place. That’s enough to be dodging around.”
Aunt Agnes laughed. “You've got a point. Shall we go have a walk, at least? I wanted to do a sketch from the top of the hill. I want to try a painting later, and I can’t remember where the oak came down over the winter properly.”
“Sure.” Pen pushed herself off the wall. “I like being out in the open.”