King of the World Read online

  For Christopher wouldn’t come down. Twice he was called, first by one parent and then by the other, until finally Norah went upstairs herself to hurry him up.

  It wasn’t homework he was doing, she could see that at a glance. He was sitting, head bent, at the sturdy oak table which had been placed under the window specially for his studies, and he was so absorbed in his task that he seemed not to notice his mother’s arrival, even when she came close up behind him. His back was towards her, and his fair hair, touched to pale gold by the last of the sunshine, hung over a forehead furrowed with indescribable urgency as he wrote and wrote, as if under threat of some approaching deadline. So small and cramped was the handwriting that at first she could make nothing of it, except that it consisted not of words but of lists of figures.

  “What are you doing, Chris?” she asked, and this time he did seem to have heard her. He responded by hastily covering the page with his left arm and peering sideways up at her. She had never seen that furtive sideways slewing of his eyes before, and it was frightening. Someone else, someone she didn’t know, was looking out of her child’s eyes.

  “Chris,” she said again, and this time there was a note of fear in her voice. “What are you doing?” She added, as if to reassure herself that everything was normal, “It’s suppertime, you know. You must come on down. You can finish that afterwards.”

  “What do you mean, finish it?” he demanded. “Can’t you see it’s the seventeen-times table? ‘two seventeens are thirty-four, three seventeens are fifty-one, four seventeens are sixty-eight …”’ Abruptly the sing-song recitation came to a halt, and once more he turned upon her that strange, sideways look. “Everyone will tell you that the seventeen times table can’t be finished, that it will go on to infinity. But it won’t. It will stop somewhere, and I have discovered a way to find out where. I am about to discover where numbers stop. I am the only mathematician in the world who can do this.”

  Completely baffled, and with a sickening kind of fear rising in her throat, Norah tried to bring the child down to earth.

  “Come along,” she urged him, and laying her hands on his thin, childish shoulders, she yanked him out of his chair and marched him to the door. “Everything’ll be getting cold, so come on down and stop talking nonsense.”

  He came downstairs meekly enough, and he also stopped talking nonsense. In fact he didn’t talk at all throughout the meal or for some time afterwards.

  At that time – nearly five years ago now – Norah had still been in the habit of consulting her husband about any problems concerning Christopher. Well, why not? Mervyn was not only a concerned and caring father, but a psychiatrist into the bargain. And so, that evening, after Christopher had gone to bed, she told Mervyn of her anxieties, describing to him what she had seen.

  “The seventeen-times table – on and on right up into the hundreds of thousands – I mean, what can be the point of it? It worries me. It looks, – I mean, don’t you think? – it looks a a bit – well – obsessional? Oughtn’t we to take him to see someone?”

  It seemed to Norah that her husband’s face had grown pale as he turned to face her from his desk, but his expression did not change. The light from his angle-poise lamp lit to full advantage his handsome, strong features; they shone out bland and unruffled as they always did when he was dealing with patients. This was his professional look, his stock-in-trade for dealing with other people’s problems. A necessary one – so one was given to understand – in order to avoid involvement. Never, according to established psychiatric wisdom, should the therapist allow himself to become emotionally involved with his patient’s problems, no matter how urgent or traumatic these might be. He must dispense succour from outside like an international aid organisation, getting supplies through to a beleaguered population neutrally, without taking sides or making judgements.

  Well, fair enough; professionalism was no doubt essential; but this was his son who was under discussion. Couldn’t he allow even a flicker of concern to cross his face?

  Yes? No? For some seconds he remained silent, watching Norah closely. Then, still without any change of expression, he spoke:

  “My dear Norah, you really must try to control these maternal anxieties. The boy is growing up, he’s not a baby any more. This mothering instinct of yours is beginning to get out of hand. It’s going to do him real harm if you aren’t careful. He’s thirteen years old – and an exceptionally brilliant thirteen-year-old at that. He doesn’t need your guidance any more – and particularly he doesn’t need it about mathematics.”

  Norah cringed and hung her head at the jibe, but did not answer; and Mervyn continued:

  “For God’s sake, Norah, what do you think you can teach him about mathematics? He’s already at university level – the headmaster told me so himself. He’s going to be the most brilliant mathematician since Isaac Newton. How can you imagine that you are in a position to criticise whatever mathematical theory he may be working on – something far, far beyond your intellectual scope – and mine too, of course, but at least I have the sense to recognise my limitations.”

  At this Norah – braver in those early days than she could possibly dare to be now – stood her ground.

  “It isn’t a mathematical theory he’s working on,” she insisted. “I told you – it’s the seventeen-times table, going on and on and on. There can’t be any sense in it – especially since he’s got that super-expensive calculator you bought him. If he wants to know what seventeen-times-something is, all he has to do is …

  Expression had come over Mervyn’s features at last. She was aware of a mounting tension in him, overlaid with a veneer of withering scorn.

  “A typical Norah-ism!” he sneered – and she could tell that he was struggling to convince himself as well as her. “You haven’t the faintest idea of what a calculator can and can’t do, and yet you have the nerve to make these judgements! Calculators don’t extend to infinity, you know; Christopher’s onto something important there, because actually there’s no such thing as infinity, it’s just a mathematical abstraction.”

  She realised clearly enough that, deep down, he was as scared as she was by Christopher’s aberration; but now, suddenly, his face cleared. He had thought of something.

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you,” he exclaimed, “That seventeen is a prime number? Research into the nature of prime numbers is something that has engaged the minds of top mathematicians for centuries. Obviously, that’s what Christopher is working on. It may be – I’m sure it will be – that our son is destined to be the genius who will finally solve the problem.”

  Mervyn turned back to his work with an air of overwhelming relief, and the uneasy exchange was over. The problem of prime numbers – whatever it might consist of – was serving as a comfortable substitute preoccupation for the problem of Christopher’s mental state.

  And thus it remained for the following weeks, during which Norah’s anxieties slowly and steadily deepened.

  Chapter 8

  By the time Norah had finished her phone call, relieved rather than dismayed by what she had heard – centipedes which tapped out Morse signals with their hundred legs were a soft option compared with the thing she had feared – it was quite dark. She drew the heavy, floor-length curtains against the misty darkness outside, and then sat for a while, considering her next move. They didn’t seem to be thinking of throwing her out – not just yet, anyway; though it was awkward that they weren’t letting her pay any rent. It made things embarrassing which would otherwise have been easy and straight-forward. For instance, right now she was wondering if she was entitled to switch on the imitation coal fire in this apparently communal living-room. Must have a talk with Diana when she comes in, she mused; and even as the thought passed through her mind, it was borne in upon her that Diana was already in, was, at this very moment, coming into the room.

  But how strangely she was behaving! Pushing the door a little way open, and peering cautiously round it, as if fearing that
something might be about to leap out on her.

  “Hullo!” Norah said in what she felt to be a perfectly normal voice, and was about to continue with some sort of apology for having used the phone, and a promise to pay for the call, when Diana silently withdrew her head and retreated without a word, closing the door softly behind her.

  It was a couple of uneasy hours later when the two met up in the kitchen, brewing respectively a mug of coffee and a half-pint packet of instant soup. With the to-ing and fro-ing in the restricted space around the cooker, unbroken silence was impossible to maintain; especially for Diana, whose curiosity had by now overcome her initial panic at finding herself locked up (well, sort of) with a raving lunatic, and who longed to hear more about the centipedes. Insane or not, it had to be a good story, and Diana was partial to good stories, both professionally and in her ordinary social life.

  And so it came about that, within a very few minutes, the two of them were cosily seated one on each side of the imitation coal fire, sipping their hot drinks and embarking on that sort of late-night conversation which is bound to end in an exchange of life-stories.

  Well, why not? Norah had realised, by now, that she was a very poor liar. Already she had forgotten exactly what she’d told her friends on that first evening. It certainly hadn’t been a success; she’d already put her foot in it about that imaginary Women’s Refuge – Diana had caught her out almost at once in some sort of factual slip. Even less did she remember what she’d told Alistair during that unexpected meal that she’d rather disconcertingly shared with him. They had had a pizza, and he’d ordered a bottle of red wine to go with it, it had been so long since she’d enjoyed the sort of social life that involved sharing bottles of red wine, that her two – or was it three? – glasses had gone straight to her head, and her answers to his increasingly tactless questions had probably been wildly incoherent. Oh, she’d lied about herself all right, of that she felt sure: but even lies can be discreet or indiscreet. And anyway, he hadn’t believed her, you could see he hadn’t. He’d been amused, though, and she’d been hazily flattered to feel that she was still capable of amusing a new man, even after all these black years.

  “I told you a lie!” she blurted out now, in response to Diana’s cautious feelers. “I told you I hadn’t got any children, but I have. I have a son. I didn’t want to tell you about him, but I think I must. He’s eighteen and he’s a schizophrenic. I can’t bear it any more and so I’ve run away, which was an awful thing to do. There, now you know. I’m bad news. Throw me out if you like, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  She wouldn’t, of course, be thrown out: no way. All unwittingly, she was employing the time-honoured Scheherazade technique: dangle a fascinating unfinished tale in front of someone, and rather than miss the dénouement they will refrain from murder, let alone from evicting you from their flat.

  “It all began five years ago”, she told Diana. “It was one evening early in April. He was thirteen at the time …”

  But was that when it began? Hadn’t there been earlier occasions – much, much earlier, when it could be seen, with hindsight, that something was wrong? Norah recalled her small son’s perennial reluctance to spend time with children of his own age. It had been a nuisance, she remembered thinking, because it meant she couldn’t join easily in the casual child-swapping arrangements by which the young mothers of the neighbourhood secured stretches of child-free leisure for themselves, turn and turn about; but it hadn’t occurred to her, at the time, to worry about it. Nor did she rate as anything more than an inconvenience Christopher’s tiresome tendency to ignore any child who had been invited in to play with him. After a few minutes of eyeing the newcomer in sullen silence, he would turn away and get on with his own solitary amusements, while his mother was landed with the task of entertaining the small visitor. Again, a nuisance, but not, so far as she could remember, a cause for worry. And, of course, with Mervyn assuring her that it was all because their child was so brilliant, and Louise next door assuring her that kids were all a pain in the neck one way or another (if it wasn’t that, it would be something else) well, between the two of them, they quashed any qualms she might have had almost before they were born. And, on top of all this, Christopher was a very easy child in all sorts of ways; quiet, reasonable and well-behaved. She was lucky, really.

  Or thought she was.

  In the process of talking to Diana, it was all coming back to her with painful vividness; all the more painful because the events were now seen in the lurid light of hindsight; of knowing how it would all end.

  “How awful for you,” Diana was saying. “And so what happened after that?”

  After the episode of the seventeen-times tables, she meant; and Norah tried to think. What exactly had happened next?”

  Certainly, during the following summer, Christopher had become increasingly silent and moody – but wasn’t that typical of adolescents everywhere? But there had been frightening episodes now and then. Norah recalled one that had happened in the summer holidays that year – August it must have been, late August. Christopher had spent the whole morning and afternoon buried in his studies; and Norah, having tried in vain to get him at least to bring his books out into the garden and get some fresh air, had finally given up and settled herself in a garden chair on the patio, from where she could see the late-blooming roses and hear the bees humming in and out of the michaelmas daisies. She was reading, deeply immersed in her book, and so wasn’t sure quite when it was when the sound of hammering began, nor how soon it was when she began to realise that it wasn’t one of the neighbours engaged on some piece of “Do-it-yourself,” or “Do-it-your-selfishness,” as Louise used to call it when it was her husband strewing sawdust all over the carpet. No, it wasn’t a neighbour this time; the noise was coming from her house. Norah was at once pricked with unease, though she couldn’t quite have said why. Surely it would be a good thing, not a sinister one, if for once Christopher had abandoned his books in favour of something practical?

  She hurried indoors.

  At first, she couldn’t quite make out what he was doing. With hammer and nails he seemed to be fixing a huge wooden board, about two feet wide and five feet high, to his bedroom wall, while all around lay scattered chunks of plaster.

  “Christopher!” she cried from the doorway “What are you doing? Where did you get that great piece of …”

  And then she realised where he had got it. It was simply the reverse side of the full-length mirror which had been a fixture on his bedroom wall ever since they’d moved here. With chisel and claw-hammer, he had wrenched it from its moorings, regardless of the damage to the wall, and was now savagely nailing it up again, with the glass facing inwards, against the wall.

  “Christopher!” she shrieked, forgetting that she was a psychiatrist’s wife, and giving way to blind fury, “How dare you! Just look what you’ve done!” – gesturing at the mess of scattered plaser.

  And when he said nothing, paid no attention to her whatever, but just went on hammering, Norah plunged across the room, snatched the hammer from his hand, and demanded an explanation.

  All this was entirely the wrong thing to do, as Mervyn was to point out in no uncertain terms when he arrived home that evening; but at the time it had seemed to be what anyone would have done.

  And indeed, more or less, it had worked. It at least got the boy talking, giving a careful and considered explanation that, unless you had been listening closely, might have made his bizarre action seem almost sane.

  “I don’t like that mirror,” he said, eyes narrowed. “I’ve never liked it. I don’t like that boy who lives in it. I don’t like the way he looks at me, sometimes he seems quite mad. He has mad eyes. He’s always there, getting in the way, when I want to look at myself, and so I’ve decided to give him a lesson. He’ll just be looking out at a blank wall now. That’ll teach him!”

  Diana was listening, rapt and spellbound, as indeed anyone might be.

  “Whatever happened then?
” she asked. “I mean, when your husband came home? Surely he realised then that the boy was mentally ill?”

  “But he didn’t, Diana. You won’t believe it, but he still didn’t. When he saw what had happened, the mess of plaster and everything, he was furious, of course, as anyone would be. But not with Christopher. No, with me! “Look what you’ve driven him to!” he said later that evening. “It’s this crazy possessiveness of yours! I knew, I knew things were coming to a crisis! He’s at this vulnerable age when he needs above all a supportive and understanding background – and what happens? You, his mother, have mishandled the situation so grossly as to exacerbate his normal adolescent identity problems to a point where some violent resolution is his only option. In order to save himself he has to destroy himself symbolically; destroy, that is, his mirror image. And I’m afraid, Norah, that you bear a lot of the responsibility.”

  “And then he listed all the awful things I’d done to him, ever since he was a baby. How I used to hold him up in front of the mirror when he was only a few months old, so that he could play a game of smiling, laughing, waving his arms about and watching the baby in the mirror doing the same. All right, it was a game; all right, the baby appeared to enjoy it; but did I not realise how dangerous a game it was? Deliberately inculcating the illusion of being two individuals, not one? What sort of a mother is it, he asked me, who goes out of her way to force a split personality on her child when he is barely a year old?”

  “But how unfair!” Diana expostulated. “I’m sure all mothers and babies play this game with mirrors at one time or another, and the babies love it. Why should Christopher be the only one who …”

  “Yes, well, that’s what I said, more or less, but of course Mervyn wouldn’t listen. And he accused me of damaging the child by reading him Alice through the Looking Glass as a bedtime story. Didn’t I realise that it isn’t a children’s story at all, but a farrago of obscene symbolism aimed at perverted adults? By reading him such a book, I’d been building into his psyche a deeply-entrenched phobia about mirrors, which was now distorting what would otherwise have been the normal identity-crisis of early adolescence.