FIVE
Christlow serves me a breakfast of scrambled eggs, black pudding, Oxford Dainties, fried bread, grilled tomato and bacon (“Looks like you need perking up, sir…”) which I scoff greedily from their lake of fat. Then I take a long soak in one of the white-tiled bathrooms at the end of the corridor. Finally, dressed, fortified with tablets, I walk along Broad in bright morning sunshine towards my meeting with this Bracken person.
The new science blocks along South Parks Road are still surrounded by the rutted clay of a building site. For once, I can only agree with Cumbernald. They are ugly; all squat towers, thick walls, defensive-looking windows, like fairy castles that have been sat on by a giant. I find Bracken by enquiring at the first major entrance I come to. Gawking at the sculpted knights and maidens as I wait for him to respond to a telephoned summons, I see that at last my time has come; the carved ribbons of inscription around the skylight roof—Dickens, Ruskin, Morris, John Arthur, lots of Shakespeare—are no longer in Latin.
Bracken arrives wearing a tattered jacket and a name badge. “They’ve got this thing about security here,” he mutters as he leads me along brightly-lit parquet-patterned corridors. With his broad body, straw-like hair, eyes that don’t really look at you, his faint smell of sulphur, he’s nothing like the dons I’m used to.
In his office, as we fence around the subject of what exactly we’re supposed to be doing together, I look for signs of his political loyalties. Not that anyone isn’t Modernist now, but still there are degrees. Little things that would have meant nothing a few years ago have acquired an almost magical significance. Too many volumes of Ruskin or Shakespeare in the bookcase (especially if they look new and little-read). The collected works of Sir Walter Scott (invariably pristine). Cups and medals, odd-looking diplomas, a breezy over-emphasis on outdoor pursuits, large group photographs of grinning adults. All signify the need for caution.
But the evidence here is harder to decipher. Bracken’s office is awash with heaped and be-ribboned exam sheets, piled textbooks with eye-stinging titles, unwashed crockery. And beneath that hair, Bracken is younger than he looks. He smells, I decide, simply of matches and grass; neutral out-of-doorsy smells. In another age, he’d have made a fine shepherd.
After we’ve acknowledged that we know little and care even less about each other’s subjects, we drink coffee in the deserted canteen, talking easily in that careless way that strangers sometimes have. As a fig-leaf to cover Cumbernald’s demands, we agree to say we’re working on something based on Pope Urban VIII’s dispute with Galileo. And I comment on how quiet it seems here: all these new buildings, all these rooms and floors, so few dons or students…
“Everything’s under-subscribed,” Bracken sighs. “If you get good School Highers in physics, you’d do a lot better going straight into the Army, or even the KSG. All that happens after you pass your degree here is that you’re conscripted. Then you’re stuck in the same secret institutions, and up against people who’ve been there all along.”
“That didn’t happen to you?”
“I served my two years. After that, I simply wanted out…” His voice trails off. “Anyway, as you’re here, I may as well show you some of what my work’s about.”
I’m treated to swirling displays of prettily coloured gases, the mad dancing of broken-looking pendulums, photographs of rain clouds, rolling trays of balls, as Bracken demonstrates a phenomenon called sensitive dependence on initial conditions. “You see…” he says, standing back as a tap splutters. “This is called turbulent behaviour. The actions of the individual water molecules are no longer predictable, no longer smooth and controlled. The slightest change—the slightest disturbance…” He tweaks a valve and the flow smoothes. “It becomes what we call laminar again. Turbulent, not turbulent—a vast difference, mathematically and physically. Yet all it takes is the minutest change.”
Bracken’s slow voice, his big hands, his deliberate manner, are impossibly soothing. I can’t help but warm to him, and his work on randomness and unpredictability seems like almost the opposite of science; something I can understand from my own study of the increasing wildness of history. Perhaps, the thought creeps in just as always it does when I meet someone male and less than repulsive, he, too, might be…? When he suggests that we go back to his house for lunch, I accept.
We take a green Oxford City bus from New Street to Marston—the older village rather than the newer suburb that’s going up nearby amid clouds of cement dust. Walking past St Nicholas’s church and quiet Cotswold stone, we reach Bracken’s pretty low-roofed cottage. The garden is filled with poppies, sweet peas, soaring red hot pokers and lupins.
“I’m home!” he surprises me by calling out when he opens the front door on its latch. A feminine murmur of reply rises from the kitchen.
“This is my sister Ursula,” Bracken says to my slight and shameful relief as a young woman, dark haired and pony-tailed, smoothes her pinafore and smiles in greeting.
“I’m sure there’s enough mince in the oven,” Ursula says as she shakes my hand with her own, which is cool, firm, freckled. “I just wish Walter would tell me…”
Over plates of what would once have been called Irish stew, Bracken remains silent as his big, scientific hands dissect the somewhat gristly meat whilst his sister tells me about her opposition to the proposed new Oxford Bypass.
“They’re so lethargic here,” she says. “If nobody does anything, nothing will ever happen. The whole countryside’s being ruined…”
“You must be very determined,” I say, “to think that you can change things.”
“Oh, I’m sure I won’t. There’ll be the public enquiry, then they’ll start building it this autumn. The word is that they’ve already let the contract. But you have to make the effort,” she says gravely, fixing me with her steady brown eyes. “You have to do that, don’t you? I mean, that’s what I’m always telling Walter…”
Our lunch digested, Walter Bracken guides me through the bean poles and cabbages in the back garden to show me the long building that runs across the cottage’s rear. It’s vine-encrusted, made of rusted corrugated iron, is about the width of a car garage, but much longer.
Inside, as Bracken hefts open the padlock and clicks on the bare lights, I discover a long windowless space, caged off along one side. It smells more strongly of the scent I’ve already noticed on him. Salty, hayey; bitter and sharp. It’s hot in here. I brush the cobwebs off a stool to sit down as, after throwing switches that cause the place to buzz like a faintly aching tooth, Bracken opens a tall cream-enamelled cabinet at the far end that looks like a butcher’s fridge and does, in fact, contain several halves of pig carcass. He lifts one out and hooks it inside the cage. Painted blue to signify it’s been condemned by the Health Inspector, it gives off a sour, rubbery smell.
He then unlocks a big metal-banded chest containing a large armoury of pistols and rifles. I’m half expecting him to toss one out to me in the manner of Randolph Scott when the farmstead is surrounded—“You can handle a shooter, can’t you? Don’t matter now who’s Marshall”—but instead he places a large pistol into a vice within the cage pointing down at the blue pig.
Fiddling with screwdrivers as he loads the gun and sets the sights, Bracken recounts how the project he’s working on here was started by a don who nursed his son to a slow death after being wounded at the Somme. The experience made him decide to develop something called Humane Bullet—which is the projectile most certain to kill its target instantly. To me, it all sounds like another apocryphal Oxford story.
“The Government took it over in the twenties,” Bracken says. “They’ve been giving a grant ever since… Here,” he dangles me a grubby pair of ear mufflers, then steps back and pulls a wire.
Blam. The gun explodes, and the blue pig quivers through the smoke as various teletype machines begin to chatter to themselves like the crowd at Wimbledon after a rally. There’s small hole in the flesh beneath the ribs: the far side of this new orifice, as Bracken wanders down the cage and twists the carcass around to measure and inspect it, is a gouged-out mess of flesh, bone, gristle.
The Humane Bullet, he explains in this oddly intimate moment as the strangely appetising waft of half-cooked spoiled pork reaches me, is the meeting of a vast number of variables: there’s the size of the bullet itself, and the weapon from which it is to be fired, then the distance it will cross, the level of accuracy required, velocity, the alloy from which it is made, the type of jacket, aerodynamics, the chemistry of the charge, the clothing and body-mass of the target…The basic trick, though, is to make a hole in the tip of the bullet so that it spreads out on impact with flesh, transferring more of the energy. The Humane Bullet, put simply, is a sophisticated version of the dum-dum.
“The man from the knacker’s yard comes round Thursday evenings,” he adds as he works with a mop and bucket to clear up the scattered bits of meat. “Most of the carcass ends up as candles and glue…”
“Don’t you worry?” I ask.
Walter Bracken pauses, hands clasped on the top of his mop, head bowed, as if he hasn’t quite heard the question.
“I mean, about the use this will be put to.”
“If I wasn’t doing this,” he says, beginning to push the mop again, “it would be something else. There’s a project in Australia the War Office is pestering me to go to. Some part of the Western Desert that doesn’t even have a name. Very hush hush, and I’ve been using the Humane Bullet, I suppose, as a way of keeping them off my back. Unfortunately, though, the work out there is somewhat related to this…”
I gaze around the shed. “Australia seems a long way from here.”
“But it also has to do with the behaviour of materials under extreme compression,” he murmurs. “And turbulence, shock waves, even bullets, strangely enough…” Some time after that, the phrases lost in an internal train of thought and the clank and swish of his mop and bucket, Bracken’s voice dies. Then blam a while later as another dead pig bites the dust. He seems to have forgotten about me by then, and I’m feeling sleepy in the shed’s strange foggy warmth with the patter of sparrow’s feet on the roof interrupted now and then by the sour hammer of destruction.
When I finally drag my chin from my chest, I hear tinkling, and see that Bracken’s busy sweeping up the cartridge cases with a dustpan and broom. I’m forced out into the air as I begin to cough.
“I don’t know how many hours Walter spends down there,” Ursula says as we stand outside the kitchen window, gazing down the gravel path. “I’m surprised the neighbours don’t complain. But of course they’re used to it.” She folds her arms and gives a little shiver. “That’s why I came down here, really. To keep an eye on him.”
“Where do you live?”
“I suppose you can say here at the moment.” She shrugs. “Walter’s doing me the favour by letting me stay in this house. But since our father died, I’m not sure that I can fit in anywhere.”
“Oxford’s as good a place as any to not fit in,” I say. “At least, that’s what I’ve found.”
“Hmmm…” She nods, jutting her chin out nervously. “Anyway Geoffrey—can I call you Geoffrey?—Geoffrey, this work you and Walter are busy on—”
“—I’d hardly call it work—”
“—Whatever it is. I think he’s quite lonely down at the college. And here, with me. I’m not sure if I know how to say this, but will you keep an eye on him? Try to be—oh, I know this sounds silly—his friend?”
I meet her gaze. “I’ll do my best.”
She smiles up at me. “Anyway, I expect you’ll want to be getting back…”
So I say goodbye to them both, fiddling with the latch as we stand cramped in the little hall and Bracken runs his bitten fingernails around the edges of a letter that’s arrived, marked Recorded Delivery, with the afternoon’s post. The envelope’s brown, but plush. Crested. Perfectly typed. OHMS.
They watch me from the doorway, brother and sister, as I head off down the path. I give them a cheery wave. It’s a late afternoon in this suddenly perfect English summer, far too beautiful to waste standing waiting for a bus. As I set off down warm country lanes sleepy with birdsong and the drone of insects, and as the towers of Oxford drift closer over the haze of the parklands and the river, I’m sure I can still hear a gun firing repeatedly in the distance.