The Old Wine Shades (7 page)

‘Then does this description of Lark Cottage, at least of her reaction to it, strike you as like her?’

‘Since you put it that way, no, it doesn’t sound like Glynn.’ He picked up the wine bottle, turned to Jury. ‘Are you saying maybe some other woman actually made the call?’ Harry saw the bottle was empty.

‘The telephone call? No, I don’t think someone else made the call, although it’s always a possibility.’ Jury paused. ‘Do you know of anyone who wished her harm?’

‘Absolutely not. Glynn wasn’t a woman to make enemies.’ Harry set the wine bottle down. ‘Look, I’m famished. Care to have dinner?’

Mungo came out from under the two stools as if the invitation were extended to him.

‘Yes. Where?’

‘I know a place.’ Harry rose, unhooked his coat from the back of the bar chair. ‘Then I can tell you about my cat.’

‘Cat?’

‘Her name is Schrödinger.’

‘Good name for a cat.’

‘I think you’ll like her.’

SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT

9

‘Schrödinger’s equation–’ Harry began.

‘I thought that was your cat’s name.’

‘It is. My cat’s named after the physicist Schrödinger.’

‘If I were your cat, I’d object.’ Jury felt Mungo twisting around on his feet as if he’d object, too.

‘The Schrödinger equation is famous; it might be the greatest contribution to quantum mechanics besides Niels Bohr’s.’ Jury sipped a very good single malt. They had forgone the wine list in favor of whiskey. The Docklands restaurant was crowded with up-and-comers, you could tell, along with the chattering classes.

‘Am I going to like this?’

‘You’ll love it. There’s a thought experiment in quantum physics–no, a hypothesis–and it’s very interesting: you put a cat in a box along with a vial containing cyanide, together with a radioactive nucleus and a mechanism to trace the decay. Now, the nucleus has to decay; it’s when the nucleus will decay that we don’t know. But when the nucleus decays, it nudges the mechanism that releases the poison. The poison leaks out and kills the cat.’

‘I’m notifying PETA.’

Harry winced. ‘You don’t do it, for God’s sake; you don’t kill the cat. The point is this: you have only probability to go on that the nucleus will decay by a certain time. Nuclear decay is unpredictable. As I said, it will decay, you just don’t know when; and, of course, you might open the box before the nucleus decays. But you don’t know when or if the cat will die. Now, we know that the nucleus hasn’t decayed, and the cat is alive only when we close the lid of the box. You could say that’s our final measurement until we open it again. All we have to go on is wave function–the wave function of the nucleus–’

‘What in hell’s that?’ Jury was feeling both relatively drunk and relatively stupid.

‘It’s hard to describe exactly. Say this: in classical physics–’

‘Einstein,’ put in Jury, feeling better.

Harry smiled. ‘Good. In classical physics, an electron can be said to have a certain position. But in quantum mechanics, no. The wave function defines an area, say, of probability. An analogy might be that if a highly contagious disease turns up in a segment of the population, the disease control center gets right on it and tries to work out the probability of its recurrence in certain areas. The wave function isn’t an entity, it’s nothing in itself, it describes probability.’ Harry leaned closer as if he were divulging a sexy secret and went on: ‘So what we’ve got, then, is the probability of an electron’s being in a certain place at a certain moment. Only when we’re measuring it can we know not only where it is but if it is. So the cat–’ Jury waved his hands in front of his face as if clearing a space to breathe in. ‘Are you going to tell me the cat’s both alive and dead at the same time?’

Harry smiled. ‘That’s right.’

Jury made a blubbery sound with his lips. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘No, it isn’t. You just don’t understand. The decayed/undecayed nucleus is entangled with the live/dead cat–’

Mungo stuck his head out and looked, Jury could have sworn, balefully up at him. The dog pulled his head back under the tablecloth.

Jury laughed.

‘What?’

‘Mungo seems to be entangled with your zombie cat! The undead.’

‘He can’t stand the cat; he never could.’

‘I sympathize.’ Jury lifted the cloth, said this, let it fall.

‘To continue: Niels Bohr made it clear that, of course, the cat wasn’t
literally
dead and alive at the same time, but
in the absence of measurement, there’s no reality
, which is crucial. There’s no reality without measurement, and to measure, one has to look. So that we can’t speak of the cat as having any reality until we open the box and look.’

‘Kick the damn box; that’ll tell you.’

Harry shrugged. ‘Why do I feel my lecture is falling upon deaf ears?’

Jury smiled. ‘Well, drunk ears, anyway.’

The waiter was there now, launching into his list of specials, a litany from which Jury could make out only two or three words that sounded familiar. ‘Salmon’ was one. He ordered it, despite its sauce, its seasonings and other complications. ‘Fillet’ was another.

Harry ordered that. They both ordered the house salad.

They returned (all of them, if Jury correctly assessed Mungo’s temperament) to the undead cat in the box. Jury said, ‘You know, you said something back in the pub about an objects’ changing depending upon how we observed it. This Niels Bohr theory: it sounds like that. That we can’t know if a thing exists until we see it. That’s a lot like the tree in the forest falling.’

‘Something like it, yes. We can’t comment on the cat’s separate reality until we open the box. No, it’s more that the cat
has
no separate reality until we see it; that is, can measure it.’

Harry paused and drank some more whiskey. ‘Going back to Gödel: he was at Princeton with Einstein, who greatly admired him. Einstein couldn’t have admired that many in his field. And he distrusted quantum theory. Anyway, Gödel proved the existence of unprovable arithmetical truths. Propositions both true and unprovable. When the physics community finally worked out what he was saying–and he said it in one well-turned sentence, as I recall-they couldn’t believe it. When he said it, they didn’t really hear it.

Gödel was a young mathematician. But when they realized, well, as I said, they couldn’t believe it. How could something be both true and unprovable? Truth posits ‘provability,’ doesn’t it?’

Jury just looked at him, feeling thick as two planks.

‘Of course it does. It’s one of the most revolutionary theories in mathematics. The theory of incompleteness is what he called it. The incompleteness proof. A proof that, within a formal system, proves something unprovable.’

Jury looked up from his salad. ‘That’s paradoxical, isn’t it?’

‘You’re absolutely right. Remember what’s called the liar’s paradox?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Take the sentence ‘I am a liar.’ That sentence is true only if it’s false. If you say you’re lying, then you’re not, from which it follows that you are, and so on and so on. Of course Gödel is talking about arithmetical proofs. But that an arithmetical proof which should automatically be true–no. Gödel was talking about proving the unprovable. Proving that there were arithmetical truths that were unprovable.’

Jury wondered how this was possible.

For a few moments they ate in silence.

‘Hugh seems to think she–Glynnis–could be anywhere. It’s like predicting the position of an electron. Until you measure it, it’s nowhere. It doesn’t have a definite position.’

‘In the world of Schrödinger’s cat, maybe. But Hugh’s wife isn’t a particle.’

‘But that’s the implication, isn’t it?’

Jury thought about this. ‘This disappearance doesn’t seem real, does it?’

‘Perhaps not, but it happened,’ Harry said drily.

Jury said nothing.

‘Hugh wondered a lot about that, I remember. I remember he shook his head and said, ‘It never happened.’’

‘What did he mean?’

‘I don’t really know.’

‘Perhaps with Hugh it was simply denial.’

‘Maybe.’ Harry seemed to be studying something not on his plate but in his mind. ‘Upstairs there were four bedrooms, empty like the rest of the house. There were no outbuildings, no pasture or paddock, just the woods and the grass going down to them. Of course, we paid no attention to our Mr. Jessup’s warning.’ Harry laughed- ‘It’s just too much, isn’t it? Anyway, the wood was quite pleasant with the light falling through the branches.’ Harry looked down at his plate. ‘I don’t know why I noticed.’

Jury smiled. ‘Because the world keeps turning. We’re made to notice, Harry.’

‘There was nothing sinister, nothing menacing there.’

‘Why did he say that, then?’

Harry shook his head a little, as if clearing it. ‘Who?’

‘Your visitor, Mr. Jessup.’

‘I don’t know, couldn’t even hazard a guess. I assumed he was just a screwball, a character with few social skills; instead of engaging in small talk, he handed out warnings. Thinking on it, though, we thought we would stop to see him and realized we didn’t know where he lived. What he said was, ‘It’s been too many things happened there; the last was a woman and boy disappeared.’ He put his palms together and shot one hand upward, and said, ‘Like smoke, they did.’’

‘And he said nothing at all except to warn you you shouldn’t go tramping around in the woods?’

Harry shook his head, drank the last of his whiskey, left beside his wineglass.

Jury thought for a moment. ‘Where would Robbie have been when Glynnis was inspecting the house?’

Harry shrugged and pushed his plate back. ‘I thought about that. He was probably just tagging along with his mum.’

‘But perhaps not. You know how kids like to explore a new place. I wonder–’ Jury sat back, let out a breath.

‘Yes?’

‘–if he saw something.’

‘Or if Glynnis did.’

‘If she did.’ Jury paused. ‘The agent must have shown the house to a number of people if it had been vacant long.’

‘Yes, but you know how estate agents operate in the country: hand you a key and let you get on with it. A peculiar practice, it seems to me.’

‘What did Hugh do’ then? I mean in the weeks and months that followed.’

•
‘As I said, he engaged a private detective when the police came up with nothing. Then he started coming apart. This puzzle-obsessed him.’

‘It would anyone, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, but it consumed Hugh. It was as if he stood in a burning building and couldn’t move, as if he were waiting for the flames. It got so that he wouldn’t leave the house, he was so afraid he’d miss the telephone call or the knock at the door. He told me he could swear he heard Mungo bark.’

Weight beneath the table, Mungo rearranging himself.

‘He’d only gotten worse; he didn’t eat or sleep until his body knocked him out. I found him once by the fireplace and thought he was dead.’

‘No suicide attempts?’

‘No, not Hugh. The cook and the maid stayed on even though he forgot to pay them. I paid them when I found out. They were devoted to the family. Gone now, of course.’

Jury nodded, twisting his wineglass. No, he didn’t want any more. He was whiskey and wine logged.

Harry leaned back, then forward and sighed. ‘And then he could no longer live by himself. I told him that. He gave me a blank look and said, ‘But what can I do? What if Glynn and Robbie come back, what would they do if they came home and I wasn’t here?’ He seemed to regard his not being here as some sort of final, ruinous act–if he wasn’t there, they would never see one another again.’

‘And it was ‘when’ they come home, not ‘if?’

‘Yes. Hugh always thought they would.’

‘But he didn’t believe it completely or he wouldn’t have gone to pieces, would he?’

‘You know it’s strange, well not strange, exactly, but biblical or Greek, some act of God or the gods that is utterly unassailable and therefore unanswerable. Job. Oedipus Rex. Or something out of Shakespeare. I can’t explain it, but, then, perhaps one isn’t supposed to.’

‘That was Job’s problem, as you said.’

‘Strange. Hugh had always been the coolest man I ever knew. I mean that not just figuratively but literally. He was self-reliant and self-contained and gracious–not in a superficial way, but gracious down to the bone. Even his anger was self-contained; he knew just how far he could take it before a relationship was irrevocably damaged. He always held the reins, had control of himself.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Stoddard Clinic. In Fulham. Actually, it is a pleasant place, very handsome, well cared for, expensive, obviously. There are few patients; it’s geared to handle only a few. He’s been there for about eight months now.’

‘Is he better?’

Harry shook his head. ‘He really couldn’t be. Hugh’s not psychotic, not mad; it’s more like obsession. Like Othello, perhaps. Or Iago.’