Chapter 30 #2
He’s explaining a Mobius strip.
‘Take a strip of paper. Long one, give it a half-twist. Glue the ends.’
Paper, scissors. The kettle is clicking off.
‘Now run your finger along the surface. Don’t lift. See where you end up.’
A silence that is Mr Patterson’s finger, presumably, travelling.
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Yes.’
‘Same side.’
‘Same side. One edge. The inside and the outside are the same thing. Topologically, the object has one surface.’
‘That’s not.’
‘It’s not what you’d think from looking at it. I know. The shape should have two sides because everything in ordinary experience has two sides. But topology cares about connections, not appearances. If you can get there without lifting your finger, it’s the same place.’
A long pause.
‘Dr Haldrey,’ says Mr Patterson, he uses the title even though he’s old enough to be Laurence’s father, ‘if I’d been taught this in 1965 I’d have a different life.’
‘It wasn’t on the A-Level syllabus in 1965.’
‘That’s exactly my point.’
I look up from my proof—the window. Rain is starting on the glass—the voice in the kitchen. Strip the mask, and the thing underneath is the thing itself.
I file the observation as furniture.
At half past twelve, Laurence sticks his head round the door.
‘Patterson’s staying for lunch. I said yes before asking you, sorry.’
‘All good.’
The three of us are at the kitchen table. Soup from a tin. Heinz tomato, the orange one, the one Laurence keeps in the cupboard because he says it tastes like being eleven. Toast. Mr Patterson talks. He’s a filler of silences. Automatic. No check on whether anyone wanted the refill.
He tells us about a bridge in Stockport that he helped build in 1982.
About his wife Margaret, who died four years ago, cancer, quick in the end, which he calls a mercy, while his voice says the opposite.
About his son in Auckland, who rings on Sundays and whose vowels have gone a bit New Zealand after thirty years.
Then, over the toast, he looks between us.
‘How’d you two meet, then?’
Laurence goes very still. The stillness that comes before either a retreat or a truth, and which of the two depends on whose company he’s in.
‘He was my lecturer,’ I say. Even, no edges on it. ‘First-year algebra. I sat in the back row.’
Mr Patterson nods, chews his toast.
‘I married my typist,’ he says, eventually.
‘In 1971. The polytechnic, engineering department. She was twenty-four and I was twenty-nine and the head of department called me into his office and said it wasn’t done.
I said it was already done. He said there’d be consequences.
There were, small ones. We had forty-three years. ’
He puts his spoon in the empty bowl.
‘My advice, if you want it, is that the consequences matter less than you think and the forty-three years matter more. Thanks for the soup.’
He stands. Puts his plate in the sink without being told. Pulls his coat on. At the door, he turns.
‘Same time next Saturday, Dr Haldrey?’
‘Same time.’
‘I’ll bring better custard creams. Those ones you had in the tin were stale.’
Door closes.
Laurence sits back down. He reaches across the table and finds my hand without looking. His eyes are on the closed door.
‘Forty-three years.’
‘Yes.’
The Heinz tomato is cooling in the bowls.
The rain is harder on the window now. Laurence’s thumb against my knuckle.
Left hand. The one that holds chalk. The one that held my waist on Wednesday night and refused the instruction, the hand I finally understood, for the first time, as the thing love looks like when it has to say wait.
Afternoon. He watches tv, I read Hardy. The sofa holds both of us, and my feet are in his lap, and his free hand rests on my ankle like a man resting a book he intends to pick up again.
Three paragraphs in, Hardy writes about mathematics and beauty, and I read the sentence twice because the first time I was watching Laurence’s hand.
Then the sentence goes in.
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
I say it out loud.
Laurence hums. Doesn’t look up from the telly.
‘Go on.’
‘I’m a pattern-maker. That’s what Hardy says we are.’
‘And?’
‘I used to think I was a pattern-finder. Passive. The patterns were there and I noticed them. Hardy’s saying we make them. Active.’
He puts the red pen down.
‘What do you think?’
I pause because the thought is arriving in real time, and Laurence has always been the first person I’ve been willing to think in front of.
‘You don’t find a Mobius strip. You twist the paper.
The twist is the pattern. Without the twist, the paper is just paper.
The maths is what happens when someone decides to twist it. ’
‘Write that down.’
‘It’s not a proof.’
‘Write it down anyway. It’s a sentence that makes a proof worth writing.’
I pick up my notebook. The pen. I write it down. Underneath, in smaller letters, I write for L, and then I scribble it out, because naming the dedication is the nineteen-year-old move, and I want to at least try to be older than that.
He sees the scribble. He doesn’t comment.
Evening. He hasn’t mentioned tomorrow.
Tomorrow is Sunday. Sunday is the lasagna, and my parents are coming to see where I live.
And to meet my partner.
His nerves about all of it are the size of a small house and growing since about three on Friday afternoon, when my mum texted me the time and signed it Mum xx, which is the first xx I’ve had from her since I went there.
Laurence is doing the washing-up. Back to me, spine rigid. A man carrying the weight of an event he can’t plan for.
I press in close behind him. He leans back fractionally, letting me take some of the weight without either of us saying it.
‘We didn’t have to.’
‘Yes we did.’
‘I know. Small white lie.’
He laughs, the dry one, the one that sits behind a sigh.
‘Thanks.’
‘Whatever they say, whatever he says, it won’t change anything between us. You’re stuck with me.’
He turns the tap off. Dries his palms on the tea towel.
‘Stuck,’ he says. Testing the word, trying it on. Lancashire surfacing in the vowels, faint, the tired tell.
‘Positively stuck.’
He turns around. His left hand finds its usual spot without looking.
‘Bed?’ he says—the question is shaped like permanence disguised as ordinary.
‘Bed.’
Bedroom door open. Same sheets as this morning, still clean. He’s left the lamp on his side, low.
We undress. Same fluency we’ve built up over a year, except his hands have a small tremor that wasn’t there at breakfast. I notice. Don’t comment.
I push him back onto the bed.
He goes.
I kiss him slow. His mouth opens. Toothpaste, coffee from earlier. I work down. Throat. Sternum. The freckle, the hair, the soft place under his navel.
His cock is half-soft when I get there.
I take him into my mouth before he can negotiate it.
He breathes out, sharp. Hand in my hair.
I take my time. Taste of him, the way he gets harder under attention, slow rise of him against my tongue.
His hand grips, releases, grips. His head tips back.
Grey-blue eyes shut, then open. The bad-machinery laugh from this morning is nowhere in this.
The body remembers what it’s for when no one’s asking it to perform.
When he’s fully hard I pull off. Wet sound, his exhale, relief on his face that has more in it than the obvious relief.
‘OK?’
‘Yes.’
Drawer. Condom. Lube. He hands me the bottle before I’ve finished asking, way he always does when this is the direction we’re going. Hands of someone who knows the sequence and is choosing it.
First finger. Slow. His body opens for me the way it’s opened a hundred times. I’m careful tonight because of where we’re standing, not because the body needs it. He doesn’t need patience. He needs me to know I’m being patient. There’s a difference.
Second. He swears under his breath, Lancashire, fond.
Third. He’s pulling at my forearm. ‘Get on with it.’
‘Demanding.’
‘Always.’
I push his thighs up. He helps. Condom on, fast. The slick. I push in slow, the give, the heat, the whole familiar thing nothing else has ever been able to replicate, no matter how many bodies I tried it on first.
His hand on my face.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
I move. He moves with me. Angle we found in October, rhythm that took us a week of getting wrong before we got it right. He swears at it because it still gets him, the way the same trick still gets him.
‘There—’
‘I know.’
I get my hand on his cock. Stroke him in rhythm. He comes first—easier than he has any right to, his hand on my face the whole time. I follow a few strokes later. The same private spot. The one it’s always been.
I drop. Forehead against his shoulder. His arm comes around my back.
‘Thank you,’ he says into my hair.
‘For?’
‘For making the day end like this.’
I don’t answer. There’s nothing to answer.
I pull out. Bin the condom. Bathroom, the flannel. He lets me clean him because we’re past arguing about it.
Back in bed. Duvet up. He pulls me in. His arm across my chest, heavy, way it goes when he’s already half gone.
‘Tomorrow,’ he mumbles. ‘I owe you.’
‘Noted.’
His breathing slows.
Flat quiet. Radiator clicks. Outside, the tram, the last one. Manchester does Manchester. Tomorrow is the lasagna and my parents and the doorbell at one o’clock, and tonight is this, and tonight is most nights, and that’s the point.
Key in my wallet on the bedside table. Brass. Worn. Home.