Coincidence: A Novel (22 page)

Thomas nods.

‘Do me some sums,' she tells him.

‘OK.' He is at least on familiar ground here. ‘We should assume that the first death – the death of Abraham Yves – was a random day of the year. So we don't need to calculate the odds for him.'

‘Very well. And for the record, we should note that Samuel Yves died on an altogether different date.'

‘March 6th 1949,' Thomas says.

‘Exactly. So we start with Marion. What are the chances that she would die on exactly the same day of the decade as her father?'

‘Say there are three thousand six hundred and fifty days in a decade,' says Thomas, ‘plus a couple of leap years – then those are the odds. One in three thousand six hundred and fifty-two.'

‘Excellent. Long odds, but not astronomical. Like having the winning ticket in the village raffle. So now we add Rebecca.'

‘Multiply three and a half thousand by three and a half thousand.'

‘Which makes . . .' Clementine rummages on her desk and finds a calculator.

Thomas punches in the numbers. ‘Thirteen point three million.'

‘About the same odds as winning the lottery. Now what if we add Gideon Robertson?'

‘Forty-eight billion.'

‘And now . . .' she pauses to catch his eye, ‘ . . . we add Azalea.'

Thomas exhales deeply. ‘So the chances of that are . . . one in one hundred and seventy trillion. Give or take.' He drops the calculator back on the desk.

‘And you're still worried about this?'

‘Well it doesn't look very random, does it? If you throw five heads, it's chance. If you throw fifty, then someone is messing with the coin.'

‘Maybe, Dr Post, you just proved the existence of God.'

Thomas grimaces. ‘But what kind of God? One who kills people off at regular intervals just to taunt us?'

‘What if there's another explanation?'

It's getting late. They walk out of the university and stroll up towards Euston Road.

‘Do you take the tube?' Thomas asks.

‘My dear boy.' She gives him an indulgent look. ‘With this leg?'

‘We could share a taxi.'

‘I thought you lived in Hackney.'

‘I do. But I'm not in a hurry. Let me travel with you.'

They climb into the back of the cab. ‘Primrose Hill,' Thomas tells the driver. ‘Elsworthy Road.'

The taxi pulls off into the evening traffic.

‘What you said,' Thomas says, ‘reminded me of something.' He reaches into his bag for a newspaper. ‘Look. It's the
Telegraph
. I try to do it every day,' he says. He turns the paper over for Clementine to see.

‘The crossword?'

‘I'm a cruciverbalist.' He smiles. ‘Do you know the famous coincidence associated with the
Daily Telegraph
crossword?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘There was once a crossword compiler for the
Telegraph
called Leonard Dawe,' he says.

‘When was this?'

‘During the Second World War.'

‘Ah,' she says. ‘Then I think perhaps I do know the story. Didn't he spook MI5 by putting all the code-words for the D-Day landings in a crossword?'

‘Almost. In the crossword on 16 August 1942, Dawe included the clue “French Port”, six letters. Innocuous enough, you might think. Then the next day the paper published the solution.'

‘Which was?'

‘Dieppe.'

‘And the relevance was?'

‘The very next day, the Allies mounted a raid on Dieppe. It was a disaster. Three and a half thousand men were killed or captured. They lost over a hundred planes.'

She is tapping her walking stick again. ‘And they thought the crossword may have been responsible for giving away the location of the raid?'

‘Not right away. The War Office did notice the coincidence. They looked into it, and decided it was just a fluke. But then two years later, more unlikely words started to appear. First Juno, then Gold, then Sword.'

She nods in recognition. ‘Code names for the D-day beaches.'

‘Exactly. Then came Utah, and then, on 22 May the clue was “Indian on the Missouri”, and the solution was . . .'

‘Omaha?'

Thomas grins. ‘Five days later one of the answers was “Overlord”, which was the code name for the whole operation. Then three more days and there was a clue, which was “The bush in the centre of nursery revolutions”. Eight letters.'

‘English is not my first language, dear boy,' she rebukes him.

‘Of course. Well the answer was “Mulberry”, as in, “Here we go round the mulberry bush”. Nursery revolutions, you see. Anyway, Mulberry was the code name given to the floating harbours they used on the landings.'

‘I see.'

‘And finally, on 30 May, the crossword included the answer “Neptune”, which was the code-word for the whole naval assault.'

‘Quite a set of coincidences,' she observes. ‘And did the authorities look into it?'

‘Oh yes. And they concluded it was just a huge coincidence. They questioned Leonard Dawe and he seemed convincing. “Why shouldn't I use these words?” he said.'

‘I see.'

‘What would you have made of it?'

She shrugs. ‘I don't know. I'm not the coincidentologist.'

Thomas laughs. The taxi turns into Regent's Park Road, and he leans towards her. ‘The War Office believed Dawe when he told them it was all an embarrassing coincidence.' His eyes are twinkling.

‘But you don't?'

‘If I had been around at the time, and if they'd sought my advice . . .' he pauses for dramatic effect, ‘ . . . I'd have hanged him.'

‘Good gracious! So it wasn't a coincidence at all?'

‘Consider the likelihood of the eight most significant code names all turning up within six months of each other,' he says. ‘Each crossword had thirty to forty answers, so we're looking at around four thousand words. What are the chances that all five Normandy beaches would appear in those four thousand clues?'

She shakes her head again. ‘I'm guessing you've already done the maths.'

‘I have,' he says. ‘The sums aren't easy. We need to go back through thousands of crosswords to see, for example, how often the word “Juno” naturally crops up, or how often “Gold” appears. But let's make some generous assumptions; let's say the chance of “Juno” appearing in those four thousand clues is about one in twenty.'

‘OK.'

‘So the chances of both Juno and Gold appearing is about one in four hundred.'

‘If you say so.'

‘And the chances of all five beaches is around one in three million.'

‘Still,' she says, ‘would you hang a man on those statistics?'

‘Maybe not. But let's add Overlord, Mulberry and Neptune,' Thomas says. ‘The chances of all eight words randomly showing up in the months before the invasion would be less than one in twenty-five thousand million. Or, to put it another way, if they'd been publishing the
Telegraph
crossword every weekday since the earth was first formed, it would probably never have happened. But it did happen. And it happened in the months before D-Day.'

She narrows her eyes at him. ‘Are you telling me the man
was
a spy?'

‘Some coincidences are so outrageously unlikely that there
has
to be another explanation,' Thomas says.

‘So you would have hanged him?'

Thomas mimes the tightening of a noose around his neck, and laughs. ‘I would,' he says. ‘I would have hanged him. So it's just as well they didn't consult me, because I would have been wrong.'

‘Wrong? Are you saying it
was
a coincidence then?'

‘No. But there
was
another explanation, although it didn't come out until quite a few years after the war had ended. Leonard Dawe wasn't just a crossword compiler; he was also the headmaster of a school in south London. He sometimes let the boys fill in some of the crossword grids for him, while he composed the clues. And it just happened that some of the boys had overheard the code-words from American soldiers billeted at the school. So they sneaked the words into the crosswords as a prank.'

‘Some prank!'

‘Indeed.' Thomas looks pleased with Clementine's reaction. ‘I often tell this story to students who come to me with coincidences that are astronomically unlikely,' he says. ‘And I tell them to look for another explanation. There's always another explanation.'

The taxi pulls up outside a large Georgian building. Clementine is reaching for her purse.

‘Let me pay for this,' Thomas says.

‘My dear boy, I wouldn't hear of it.' Dr Bielszowska thrusts some coins into his hand. ‘Are you aware what date it is?'

‘What
date
it is?'

‘It is the eighteenth of June. You have three days to work this out.'

Thomas looks gloomy once more. ‘I know.'

‘I want you to come and see me tomorrow,' she says. ‘Come here to my house. Five o'clock. I will make you tea.'

‘Thank you,' he says.

‘We will sort this out,' she says, and she clambers awkwardly from the taxi. ‘Hackney,' she tells the driver. She swings the door shut.

23

June 2011–February 2012

A
zalea Lewis and Thomas Post started dating in June 2011, a month after the Isle of Man trip. Thomas appeared unannounced at the office in Birkbeck College that Azalea shared with a colleague. The colleague, a moon-faced woman with dreadlocked hair, sat respectfully at her desk and tried not to giggle when Thomas produced flowers from a carrier bag. The stems had been damaged somewhat, and so had several of the flowers themselves. ‘I'm sorry,' Thomas said. ‘I didn't want to carry them too openly.'

‘You were
embarrassed
to carry them too openly,' Azalea said accusingly while her colleague pretended to look out of the window. ‘I don't have a vase,' she said.

The colleague slid a jug along her desk, still feigning unawareness of the conversation. Azalea swept it up, thrust the flowers inside and put the whole arrangement on her desk. ‘There.' She gave a wide grin. ‘Lovely.'

They went to see
Hamlet
at a West End theatre, and later they went to a French restaurant in Soho where they discussed the play. Thomas talked about predetermination. ‘
Hamlet
explores free will,' he said, while struggling with a Coquilles Saint Jacques. ‘But his destiny defies him. He wants to commit suicide but he can't. He wants to kill his uncle but he can't. He has to play out his father's instructions, but he can't seem to do it.'

‘But that isn't free will,' said Azalea. ‘That's dithering. That's prevarication. Hamlet can't do the deeds because he's weak.'

‘So the moral is . . . ?'

‘The burden of Hamlet's responsibility becomes the reason for his inaction. You have to act in order to be. Don't you think that's what the play is telling us? We may not be born free, but what we do defines us.'

But Thomas Post was made of weaker stuff even than Hamlet. He didn't consummate a relationship with Azalea that night, nor did he after sitting through one of her evening lectures on Futurism in Poetry; afterwards, they ate a simple pizza on Tottenham Court Road and walked together all the way to Marble Arch. They didn't go home together after an afternoon at a Thames regatta, where Thomas wore a borrowed blazer with arms too short and a boater that perched on the top of his head. In the end, Azalea offered to cook a meal at home. Thomas came to her flat near Highgate with another bouquet; this time the flowers were unbroken. She made an African stew and he told her that he loved it. In truth, he loved her. In truth he wanted her so badly that his body no longer knew how to behave. He had become drunk on thoughts of Azalea. He sat and watched her through sheepish eyes.

She served up a trifle from Marks and Spencer's. ‘I don't have much time to cook,' she explained.

It was the finest trifle ever.

‘Shall we watch a DVD?' she asked him.

He nodded, wholly mute.

They squeezed together onto her small settee and tried to watch
Winter's Bone
, but he couldn't concentrate on the film. He let his arm creep around her like a teenager, and she snuggled her head into his shoulder. And finally, after hours in each other's company, five months after they had sat together in much the same configuration on the floor of a tube station, finally their human reserve ran out and human nature flooded in to replace it.

‘Can I ask you something?' Thomas said, as they lay in bed in the early hours of a London morning listening to traffic noises through her open window.

‘Ask away.'

‘Why don't you do relationships?'

She lay silent for a long time. Far too long. ‘I don't know.' It was a whisper.

‘Is
this
a relationship?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Would you like it to be?'

You could measure time in heartbeats, Thomas thought. Some heartbeats came and went so fast, while others could last a lifetime. Once, for each of us, there must have been a first heartbeat, a quickening in the womb, a tiny electrical spark and a twitch of muscle and the engine has started that must now flex and pump without rest like the click of a metronome, one beat, two beats, a million beats, a billion beats, until one day the spark never comes and the muscle discovers that it was nothing but frail meat all along.

‘I don't know,' whispered Azalea. And then, a thousand heartbeats later, ‘Perhaps.'

 

The sun that rose over Highgate was a different sun to the one that rose every day over Thomas Post's apartment in Hackney. It was a bigger sun, a yellower sun. The sky was bluer, the clouds were lighter, the air was a different mixture of elements, the wind blew with a different purpose. The world even smelt different. It smelt new. It smelt of lilac and lime and toast and honey. Thomas made breakfast and carried it through to the bedroom and he kissed Azalea all the way up from her navel, and when he reached her mouth she was waiting.

 

They fitted as a couple. Azalea could rest her head on Thomas's broad shoulder. They could walk hand in hand down Regent Street, window-shopping for things that they could never afford. They could sit together in little coffee shops so that Azalea could breathe in the rich aroma of roasting beans. They could lie close together on Azalea's little sofa and tackle the cryptic crossword in the
Telegraph
. ‘Five across,' she might chant, ‘company in police before Conservative leader is taken in by directions, is synchronicity. Eleven letters.' And Thomas could look over her shoulder and say, ‘coincidence', and then laugh and ruffle her hair. ‘Synchronicity is coincidence. “Co” is company, “in CID” is “in police”, and Conservative leader is C buried in east-north-east.'

It seemed not to matter that Azalea read poetry while Thomas read crime. Or that Thomas listened to indie rock while Azalea liked folk. Or that he rose early while she rose late. Or that he liked to stretch out with a beer and watch the test match on TV while she, well . . . didn't. They were, in a sense, two solitary people who had become used to their own company, relaxed in their own company, but who longed nonetheless for another heart to beat alongside their own.

‘Do you do relationships yet?' Thomas would ask.

‘I don't know,' she would whisper. But she would wind her arm around his waist and whisper the words into his ear so that he could feel her breath.

So why did Azalea leave?

They gave it their best shot. One weekend they flew to Glasgow and they took a bus from the airport down the Clyde to a little town called Gourock, and they caught a ferry from Gourock to Dunoon, and there they met with two doctors who ran a general practice in a village north of Ballochyle, and the doctors were Ritchie and Lauren Lewis. Azalea called them ‘Ritchie' and ‘Lauren'; they were not her mum and dad. They were more like her elder siblings, eminently sensible, delightfully settled, with two teenage sons of their own.

‘How long have you been here?' Thomas asked them.

‘Just two years,' they said. But they loved it.

Would they ever go back to Africa?

Ritchie shook his head, and he glanced across at Lauren. ‘Azalea told you about Africa, then?' he said. He still had his quiff of blond hair and his raffish manner. ‘We shall never go back.' The month they had spent in East Africa had provided enough fireside stories for a lifetime, and the three weeks they had practised medicine as if they had been qualified doctors at the mission in Kakuma had given them a confidence and a grounding they could hardly have earned elsewhere.

When they stayed with Ritchie and Lauren, Azalea and Thomas slept together on a horsehair mattress in a spare bedroom looking out over Loch Eck. And in the morning they walked out like a family with the old family dog, taking the forest tracks up the hillside until high above the loch they could marvel at the views. And they sat together like a family in the snug bar of the village pub, while Ritchie showed off his knowledge of single malt whiskies and Lauren and Azalea shared a hundred stories. And they strolled back along the seafront at Dunoon watching the ferries haul out across the sound.

‘It's a little like West Nile,' Azalea told Thomas, and he raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘No, you're right,' she said, ‘it's nothing like West Nile. Except that it's a part of the mainland, but you need the ferry to get here. Once, in Langadi, when the Laropi ferry broke down for a month the only way to Gulu without crossing a border was a two-hundred-mile detour via the only bridge at Pakwach. And the roads were terrible. If there had been heavy rain, you wouldn't even think about trying to drive it. Here when the ferries stop running at night, the only way to Gourock just across the bay is the long drive up through Argyll Forest Park and all the way down the coast to Helensburgh and back over the Clyde at Erskine, and that's around ninety miles, just to cross a two-mile strait.'

They spent a day in Edinburgh, climbing up to see the castle, strolling like an old married couple down Princes Street. Alongside the Scott Monument Thomas balanced on a low canvas stool while an artist sketched his likeness in charcoal. Azalea, Ritchie and Lauren stood and watched the drawing take shape, laughing at the licence shown by the artist. In the evening, Ritchie and Lauren drove them out from Dunoon to a ceilidh where all three Lewises knew all the steps, and Thomas lurched in his uncoordinated way unable to remember a move from one round to the next. And at night they lay on the horsehair bed with the view out over Loch Eck, and Azalea flung open the windows as she always did and they listened to the tangible silence of the glen.

How good might it have been if every day was like that? Azalea in her cotton frock and sandals, her skin glowing from the summer sunshine; no deadlines, no alarm clocks, no emails, no phone calls.

Yet how like Hamlet was Thomas Post? He procrastinated. He should have acted, should have leaped in like Laertes, but something deep within his psyche forbade him; or maybe he was just a fool. Back in London, the mismatch of their working hours was winning its battle with their regime. Azalea would work evenings and take the tube back home to Highgate. Thomas would work days and then kick around the evenings in his lonely flat in Hackney, occasionally venturing out to take on the squash ladder, or drinking late in the Hawley Arms. Azalea would often work at weekends, and Thomas would be left to watch sport on the television, catching up with his ironing and his laundry in front of the Grand Prix or the golf.

Oh Thomas, Thomas. He would sit at his desk for hours running statistics on the trends from
The Coincidence Authority
website. He would plot his projections and his forecasts on graphs, and then he would collapse them, for they were not ready; not yet.

Some nights Thomas would spend at Azalea's flat in Highgate, squeezed up against her in her three-quarter bed with his long legs reaching out over the end. Once she made the journey out to Hackney and climbed the four flights of stairs to his flat, but she was uncomfortable in his unfamiliar bedroom without her wardrobe of clothes and her armoury of cosmetics close to hand. It should have been easy and casual, but somehow the arrangements were awkward and faltering. His day finished so much earlier than her day – should he travel alone up to Highgate and sit for hours in her feminine flat, waiting for her to arrive home? He did this sometimes, but it made him uneasy, tiptoeing up her stairway, sitting alone on her sofa. So how should it work? Should she move in with him? Or should he move in with her? Or should they find a new flat together? And if they did, then what would this say about the permanence of their relationship, and were they ready for this yet? Hackney and Highgate. So close in the alphabet, so near on the page, yet the gulf between these two London boroughs was threatening to tear them apart. Thomas owned a car, but he kept it parked in a lock-up in Clapton. So he could as an option walk to the lock-up, drive for half an hour, find somewhere to park in Highgate and all should be well; and this he did, too, on occasion, trying to time his arrival at Azalea's apartment just as she would emerge from Highgate tube. But it seemed a very deliberate and mechanical set of arrangements. And then it gave him a problem for the morning after, because parking in central London was too expensive to contemplate, so he would have to drive back to the lock-up, walk to his flat, climb the four flights, change and then set off on the bus journey into Bloomsbury arriving into work after two hours of travel. The wonderful benefits of London living, the multifarious travel options of Underground, Overground, bus, cycle, car and taxi all transformed into burdens when faced with the reality of disparate work shifts and six miles of separation.

And then there was another thing. This thing was a mystery to them both. This thing belonged more in Clementine Bielszowska's domain – the domain of human psychology – than in the curious philosophy of Thomas or the cryptic poetry of Azalea. This thing was a barrier that was growing between them based not on their natural human chemistry, or even upon their obvious desire one for another. There may not be a lexicon to explain this drifting apart of Thomas and Azalea – two individuals who seemed in so many respects to have been divinely created for each other – but there was an inevitability about it. Perhaps, Thomas might have concluded, the luckless collisions of Laplace's Demon were to blame. Maybe free will was not enough to defeat a providence that was destined to separate them. They were two travellers, each on a different trajectory. Like satellites in different orbits, they had come together almost miraculously, but now their revolutions were drawing them apart. Partly it was temperament. ‘Everything that happens,' Azalea would say, ‘happens for a reason.' Thomas, with his outsized feet rooted in unwavering rationalism would gently mock this world view, and when the subject came up – as so often it did – they would end up with a glass pane of silence between them.

‘You're too arrogant,' Azalea would accuse him. ‘You can't simply dismiss my views just because they make no sense to you.'