The Ghost of Matter Read online

  ‘He’s still going out there,’ Martha had confided to him when he’d come in with a pile of wood for stocking the box by the fire, come with the grim and constant expectation of comfort, of being the comforter and being inadequate to the task. Her piano was polished; it gleamed in the afternoon sun. She never played it. That was her punishment, as James found his on the empty shores and river banks. ‘He’s still looking for them.’ For Charles and Herbert, missing for near a year now and drowned, everyone thought, as they boated on the Sounds. She clutched his arm. ‘Ernest.’ As if he could reach out, put back together what had broken so cleanly and so finally into fractures. And he was the clever one, the clever son, and he knew about pulling things apart and building them back up again, didn’t he?

  She didn’t say anything else. It wasn’t his mother’s way to talk about it anymore, and Ern didn’t know if it ever would be again. She communicated silently now; the waves about her were quiet and lacked the salt of early grief. She didn’t say, ‘I want him to give it up,’ because that would have been betrayal. She didn’t say, ‘We need him here, me and the kids,’ – the ones that were still young, still at home. That would have been guilt, and Martha knew enough of guilt now to not wish more of it on the only person who could truly understand her loss.

  She didn’t say, ‘I hope he never finds them,’ for it had been close to a year now. A year, and what remained of her little boys would be bloated and ragged, gnawed on by rats and sharks and just recognisable enough to give their father screaming dreams for the rest of his life. Worse still if he found one and not the other, because that would give a bitter hope and would also be the death of the one thin comfort they had: that their boys had been together at the end, that they hadn’t died and drowned alone.

  Better to never find them than that. Better to give them over to the ocean for good, to believe that they lay at rest in a place that they loved, in the sea where they’d splashed and swum and fished, ten and twelve years old forever.

  ‘I’ll find him,’ said Ern. ‘I could do with a walk anyway.’ There were things that he didn’t say as well. Like how his promises were hollow ones, sometimes, because he had once promised his mother that he’d find that which he never did, though she never reminded him of it. Never told him that he failed her, not just by breaking the promise but by making it in the first place. He didn’t say anything about the guilt either – that he longed to escape the grief-pull of Havelock, that he wanted to leave the suffering behind him, to try in his own way to forget. To find problems that he could solve, and have pleasure in the solving.

  He wondered what it would be like, to have a child with a woman. Whether he would ever have to see in that woman’s face what he saw in his mother’s. Whether he would ever have to face in mirrors what he saw in his father’s. And there was a certain savage pleasure in it too, the thought of breaking out of that thin veneer of misery, in finding a way to shatter and split until a new reality could rise to the surface.

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’ said James, out far along the shoreline, his big hands empty and fisting at nothing. Ern almost would have preferred if his father hit him, if he had thrown a punch or lost his rag and tried to beat what he couldn’t bear instead of staring out to see, to sea. ‘It’s the first thing I think when I get up in the morning. There’s not a moment goes past I can’t feel it crouching on top of me. The weight of it, Ernest. The weight.

  ‘You can’t know how it feels,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Ernest. ‘I can’t. But if you keep this up you’ll go mad, Dad. Think of Mum. Think of the rest of us. Think of Charles and Herbert. They’d never want this for you.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re asking,’ said his father.

  CAMBRIDGE, 1896

  ERN HAD DECIDED TO give up radio work. It had been good to him: got him the Exhibition scholarship, brought him to the Cavendish and he’d made a good impression there with the detector he’d brought all the way from New Zealand, with the improvements he’d made since then.

  There’d been another demonstration, even – the kind he had dreamed of in Canterbury’s half-cellar. ‘One day I’ll be demonstrating from the finest lab in the world,’ he said, and he’d done it too, more than once, though there’d been hurdles and hiccups. He’d even delivered a paper to the Royal Society – quite the coup for the boy from Brightwater. Clearly, there was room for him in radio; room to make a name for himself, to research and present and publish. Room to invent, but though Ern imagined for himself a lifetime of laboratory work he could not imagine that work being radio. Any possible commercial application was beyond his reach. Lord Kelvin, approached by J.J. Thomson, Ern’s supervisor and support, had told him it would cost as much as a hundred thousand pounds to make Ern’s radio work commercially profitable. Ern, subsisting on a student lifestyle of several hundred pounds per year, found such sums barely conceivable. ‘We need money to get married on,’ he wrote to Mary, back in New Zealand. ‘I’m not sure that I can cover both.’

  Besides, there were far more exciting fields open to him: radioactivity, and atoms.

  ‘If you think that the work will get any easier then think again,’ said J.J. ‘This is a whole new field for you. You’ll have to start nearly from scratch.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Ern. He wasn’t interested in radio or profit; he was interested in atoms and silence. Building a radio wave detector was a very fine thing, and it had been admired tremendously and that was good for his ego, coming as he was from the colonies and dismissed, initially, as only provincially intellectual.

  It just hadn’t fixed his interest. Ern was used to concentration, to thinking through and hunting down. He’d never been the type of scatterbrain to jump from one thought to the next, undisciplined, chaotic. He’d seen men like that, heard of them through gossip at the labs and while it worked for some it was not Ern’s way. His mind, he knew, was heavy. It relied upon inertia, and once set on a path forward it would go slowly, a glacier – but glaciers drove down all before them, given time. Ern could feel the glacial weight, the monumental movement, when he was faced with radioactivity, with its prospects and potential and the giant undiscovered landscapes before him.

  He didn’t feel that way about radio waves. They made him flippant, somehow, unfocused in his science. That was the only explanation. There was no other reason why late in his lab at night he’d work on his receiver and hear things that weren’t there. It just wasn’t possible. His vibrating detector could work through walls and distances, find the waves and advertise the finding, but it didn’t transmit what Ern heard. A voice, very distant, and the sound of waves he thought, although it could have been some sort of static, like a badly playing phonograph.

  At first he’d thought it contamination. That he was hearing things from another source – a conversation through an open window, a tap left running. Ern closed up his space as best he could, worked to eliminate any outside influence, and still he heard it. There was no failure of the equipment – he took it all apart and rebuilt it many times, and it was only occasionally after rebuilding that he’d hear the sounds again. They seemed to come and go, although the voice became sharper occasionally, as if coming into focus. It was quick and light and feminine, but past that Ern could make nothing out.

  He even worked with friends, with other students in the lab, but when they couldn’t hear what he did Ern stopped asking. He didn’t think it was a practical joke. He knew that some people heard ringing in their ears sometimes, but he’d never had that problem and it never happened to him at all outside of his work on radio waves.

  ‘You don’t seem as interested anymore,’ said J.J.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Ern, and perhaps that was it. Perhaps his mind was wandering because there was something else out there for him, the new science of radioactivity that drew him as a magnet. He didn’t like to give up on a puzzle but this seemed such a solution – his own brain distracting him, when without distraction he might have stayed
on the same path, remained with radio waves when radioactivity was where his potential lay.

  ‘Trust your gut,’ his father had told him.

  Ernest trusted.

  CAMBRIDGE, 1933

  ‘OVER MY DEAD BODY,’ said Ernest. It wasn’t his way to publicise disputes, to drag the disagreements of science into the public sphere and hold others up for ridicule – but he wouldn’t support everything either, at least not blindly, and this was safe. He was alone with J.J., a private conversation over tea with the man who had been his mentor. There was nothing he could say here that would leave the room, nothing that would embarrass another person or himself.

  ‘You worked in the war as well,’ J.J. said to him mildly, and Ernest snorted so that tea slopped into his saucer.

  ‘That was different,’ he said, who had worked on submarines and sonar and the detection of both. He didn’t bother to explain. J.J. had heard his rants before: on how terrible organisation had limited even that, on how the Navy had looked down on science and made it less of a priority than they could have done. His war work had come in fits and starts, when he was able to do it at all, when it didn’t take second place to his own. And it wasn’t vicious, any of it. He remembered being out on the Firth of Forth, on the HMS Vernon, holding on to Paget’s legs while the other man had his head underwater, trying to detect different frequencies through the cold sea. ‘If that’s the price of having perfect pitch, rather you than me,’ he’d said to Paget, after hauling him up half-frozen and with his eyes screwed shut from salt.

  ‘It was different,’ he said again. ‘I didn’t go making poison gas to throw into the trenches!’

  That’s what Haber had done, and Ernest had never forgiven him. It was such a betrayal – of humanity, of science. Of his wife.

  ‘Chlorine gas,’ said Ernest, and he could feel his face getting redder, feel his voice rising. ‘He made chlorine gas for one conflict, and now he’s on the losing side of another he wants help! Well he’s not getting it from me, he isn’t.’ The situation in Germany was becoming dire. Jewish scientists were being fired from their positions, fired from universities and research centres, and Ernest had been asked to involve himself. He was a busy man – too busy for it, in truth – but he’d done his best to get his displaced fellow scientists to jobs in Europe, in America, in the colonies. Places where they could teach and think and experiment without fear of repercussion. But Haber... Haber with his poison patriotism no longer enough to counter his ancestry was a step too far. It was violent prejudice, deep-seated – and perhaps he should be a better man, Ernest thought. Perhaps he should take the higher ground, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

  ‘Haber knew what he created,’ said Ernest. Knew the results, knew what it would be like to breathe and burn and choke and did it anyway. Did it because he thought it would shorten a war, perhaps, but Ernest couldn’t get past the price of shortening. His revulsion had been immediate and long-lasting. He was entrenched with it.

  ‘Do we?’ said J.J.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Ernest. He wasn’t H.G. Wells, or the authors of that awful play where some halfwit excuse for an atomic scientist threatened to blow up as much as he could. Wings Over Europe, that was it. Talk about a nightmare. He hated to think of the impression it was leaving. It was Haber all over again, Haber working with atoms instead of gas.

  ‘Sometimes I dream,’ said J.J. ‘And then the next day, the next week, I find myself at my bench or my desk, or talking to a friend, and I think – I’ve done this before. It all seems so familiar. Déjà vu, you understand?’

  ‘I do,’ said Ernest. ‘I think most people know what that feels like, but I don’t believe it’s anything more than coincidence. I don’t think people really can see the future. There’s no basis in science for it.’ He knew what the older man was getting at, regardless. There were some men, and women too, who seemed to see further ahead than others. Who seemed to be able to tease out future paths of research, to predict things that weren’t there. He’d done it himself, with the neutron. He’d felt it was there, felt it for years, but it wasn’t until Chadwick proved its existence via experimentation that Ernest had been shown correct.

  ‘Just because a man’s done it once doesn’t mean he can always do it,’ he said. ‘Or that he knows he’s done it at all.’ There’d been a number of ideas he’d had over the years that had come to nothing. Some that had, of course, and some he’d thought nothing of had been made successful by others. In all cases there had been something he’d been all but certain of – but there was always a gap. Ideas that hung about, created from past experience and Ernest never knowing if they were true or not, if there were any validity to them.

  He’d always thought it took a really imaginative man to see the future, to be able to pick out patterns, to look ahead.

  ‘You’re an imaginative man, Ernest,’ said J.J.

  ‘I know,’ said Ernest, but he never knew if he were imaginative enough. He’d never have Haber’s culpability, which was something to be grateful for, but did he have any of his own? What could there be that he had missed? What consequences might be laid upon his head?

  ‘I’ve done the best I can,’ he said.

  IT MAY BE POSSIBLE for an electron to combine much more closely with the hydrogen nucleus, forming a kind of neutral doublet. Such an atom would have very novel properties. Its external field would be practically zero, except very close to the nucleus, and in consequence it should be able to move very freely through matter. Its presence would probably be difficult to detect by spectroscope, and it may be impossible to contain it in a sealed vessel. (Ernest Rutherford, Bakerian lecture, 1920.)

  CAMBRDIGE, 1930

  IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN the most awful Christmas that Ernest had ever had. He couldn’t think of a worse. There was nothing of celebration in it, even with the new baby. ‘A Christmas baby,’ Eileen had said, not two months before, round and waddling with her fourth child while the other three played about her. ‘My little winter baby.’ She herself had been born into spring – or autumn, depending on the hemisphere, but she had been born in the north, so there were no kōwhai about her.

  She had been born into spring, and had died in winter. Died giving birth to her winter baby, two days before Christmas and Ernest couldn’t believe it still, couldn’t understand the world in which his only child died in the season of gifts and gratitude.

  He and Ralph had taken the children outside, while Mary stayed with the baby. The kids had looked so stunned, so uncomprehending and the way that they sat around the tree, listless, had forced Ernest up out of his chair.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Grab your jackets. Hats, scarves, mittens. Mush! You too, Ralph.’ His daughter’s husband, a physicist as well, a close companion at Cavendish even though he was a theoretician at heart, and even more stupefied than Ernest. ‘You can’t sit here all day.’ Watching the children pretend to play with their gifts, trying to answer questions that had no answer. ‘You’ll feel better with some fresh air, some exercise.’ And didn’t that just sound hollow. Ernest didn’t want fresh air and exercise himself. He wanted to go to his lab, to forget his grief in experiments, to break glass and rage and have a reason for the raging. Failing that, he wanted to go to bed. To try and dream, to try and forget.

  Almost the very last thing he wanted was to tramp through a frozen garden on a bum leg. But someone needed to try to warm his grandchildren out of apathy, the ones that couldn’t be soothed with milk and rocking, and the house had become oppressive. Too many visitors, too much sympathy. Too much food, too, spread over every surface – brought by friends and colleagues and it was all Christmas food because that was all anyone had in their larders.

  Ernest could quite happily have thrown all the mince pies into the Cam before he ate another. Fruit and citrus and pastry ... there was nothing about any of them that tasted of separation. He would have been happier if all that had been brought tasted like ashes in his mouth – at least that would have been fitt
ing. It would have been suitably funereal. Instead, the tastes were so vivid – it was a cruelty, to eat and feel so alive. Even the children felt it. He’d put tangerines in their stockings, as he always did, but they hadn’t been eaten. He’d have to peel one when they got back, share it around, and smile at the kids so that they ate it. He’d have to eat some segments himself, to show it was all right. He’d have to swallow that bright, sweet taste and not vomit.

  At last they were ready. Mary was helping with boots and scarves, and the poor little things were as round as they were high, she’d wrapped them up so well. If all else failed, Ernest thought, he could roll them round the garden – but once he got them out in the snow, helped them to pack balls together in preparation for fights and snowmen, their cheeks pinked up and the lethargy fell back a little.

  ‘I know it’s hard, my boy,’ he said to Ralph, quiet in a corner and watching, his breath steaming out in clouds. ‘But you’ve got to find a way to carry on.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re asking,’ said Ralph, and Ernest nearly laughed it was that terrible.

  ‘I know,’ he said. His father’s face had been in the mirror that morning.