Invisible Things (6 page)

“I can only hope,” Arne added, looking painfully worried, “that Professor Bohr will have the sense to keep a lid on what’s going on here. It’s pretty much hopeless, though—he has been rhapsodizing about these new discoveries to everyone he meets!”

“Yes,” said Mikael, impatiently and with considerable sarcasm, “there’s no doubt that this very idealistic notion about science being international and free to all comers in the spirit of intellectual inquiry makes it very difficult to keep things secret!”

“It is very strange,” Arne said, his tone of perplexity making Sophie slightly want to laugh despite the gravity of the situation. “It will be a disaster for all of us—a disaster for the
planet
—if the Europeans are placed in a position to design and manufacture such a weapon. And yet he’s not willing to keep these matters to himself! A noble internationalism, but distinctly dangerous.”

*  *  *

14 September 1938

Dear Sophie:

I spent the weekend at my parents’ place—the countryside is glorious at this time of year!—and had a very good visit from Jean and Priscilla. They’re about to start at IRYLNS; they told me a most perplexing story about Miss Chatterjee having telephoned Priscilla and arranged to take the two of them out for tea, only for her to try to persuade them not to enroll in the program after all! I am pleased to report that they were not swayed by her blandishments. Good for them! You know neither of them would be much use in the army, but I feel certain they will excel at IRYLNS—can’t you imagine Priscilla all beautifully dolled up in a gorgeous suit and awfully high-heeled shoes, and taking dictation like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth?

Sophie, I can’t really tell from your letter, but it was very short—are you sure that you are quite happy in København? I notice that you do not say anything about
that boy
, as Priscilla calls him—I suppose you must know him much better by now. I can hear you protesting, “But I do not at all think of him in that way!”—and, Sophie, I promise I will not pester you—but I hope you will introduce me to him one of these days so that I can see with my own eyes whether or not he is worthy of you! With love and all best wishes from your most grateful friend,

Nan

Sophie winced at the word
grateful
. The basis of whatever ill-founded gratitude Nan might feel toward her was the séance in which Sophie had so memorably and horribly contacted Nan’s brother, who had died some days earlier in a skirmish on the eastern front. Ever since Sophie had been in København, she had mercifully heard nothing from anyone dead—no voices, no knocks or raps, no nudges of any kind— and it could be described only as an enormous relief. She supposed that some tiny, greedy part of her had felt special to have been singled out with such an unusual and striking gift, but her larger rational self was horrified by the whole grotesque business and immensely relieved that this chapter of her life seemed to be over.

As she refolded the letter and tucked it back into the envelope, the cat Trismegistus leaped up onto the little writing desk and padded over to twine himself into Sophie’s arms, pressing his muzzle against her face and purring like a windup toy. He seemed to know she needed comfort, and she rested her forehead on his fur and sighed.

Of all Sophie’s wishes and regrets, perhaps the most heartfelt concerned her failure to persuade her school friends Jean and Priscilla not to enter the Institution for the Recruitment of Young Ladies for National Security. Sophie had been taken there for a visit by her great-aunt, a patroness and founder of the society, as a kind of warning, and further investigation had revealed a horror show behind the scenes: girls medicated and shocked and all-around brainwashed into subordinating their own wills and desires and personalities to the needs of Scotland’s most influential men.

Sophie had believed that a change in government might allow Great-aunt Tabitha to put a stop to the depredations of IRYLNS, but in fact it had proved quite otherwise—political flip-flopping at the ministry seemed to have left IRYLNS even more deeply entrenched in the landscape. It was to Miss Chatterjee’s credit that she had broken the seal of secrecy to the extent of trying to warn the girls away from the place, but of course they would not have listened to her.

Without realizing it, Sophie had been stripping little bits of paper off the edge of the envelope, and she found herself with a pile of confetti in front of her where Nan’s letter had once been, with Trismegistus forgetting his dignity enough to bat at a few pieces and watch them propeller their floaty way down to the floor.

A knock came at the door, and Sophie called out, “Come in!”

She expected it would be Fru Petersen with a stack of neatly folded and sweet-smelling clothes, but in fact it was Mikael. She swept the remaining scraps of letter over the edge of the desk and into the palm of her hand, then disposed of them in the wastepaper basket. She felt extremely self-conscious around Mikael inside the flat, never more so than when he crossed the invisible barrier at the sill of her bedroom door.

Mikael looked around as though he did not quite know where to sit, then perched awkwardly on the trunk at the foot of the narrow bed. It was the trunk in which Sophie had escaped from Scotland, hidden inside the secret compartment that a magician friend of Miss Chatterjee’s had used in his stage show. She had no way of returning it to him, not unless Miss Chatterjee sent a forwarding address—but hurtfully Sophie had heard nothing from her former history teacher since the day of that terrifying cross-country drive.

“Sophie,” Mikael announced solemnly, “when Arne sends for you to come and visit Mr. Nobel, you have to let me come with you!”

Sophie looked at him with surprise.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “At least, I assumed I would ask you to come and that you would say yes, but why make such a pronouncement of it? Do you think Arne would prefer you not to come?”

“No, not exactly,” Mikael said, “but I am afraid he thinks you might be more biddable if he gets you on your own.”

“Biddable?”

“Well, you are not always the best at standing up for yourself,” Mikael pointed out.

Sophie couldn’t explain why these words upset her so much—was it because they were true?—but she felt the tears well up in her eyes. She contemplated some savage retort, but swallowed her angry words, feeling a little sick to her stomach. Sometimes she felt almost as though Mikael wanted to cocoon her in protective silk wadding; as much as one might like the idea of being cared for by someone else, it was a surprisingly unpleasant sensation.

She sprang up out of her seat.

“Come on,” she said, “let’s go and see if there is anything good to eat in the lunchroom.”

“Not a bad idea,” Mikael said appraisingly. “This is the time of day when people sometimes bring cake, and there will certainly be biscuits, at the very least.”

They let themselves out the front door of the flat and wandered down the hall to the lunchroom. Sophie’s thought had indeed been happily timed, for the table held a huge box from Grandjean’s Patisserie, and inside was still left at least a third of a delicious-looking and absolutely
huge
chocolate cake covered with heaps of whipped cream and cherries and lightly dusted with shaved curls of chocolate.

Sitting around the table were Bohr and Hevesy and the English theorist and refugee Paul Dirac and a rotund Austrian named Wolfgang Pauli, whom Sophie suspected of having bought the cake; he was known for his excessive love of all sorts of good things, including what Bohr euphemistically referred to as “wine, women, and song.” They welcomed the young people and urged them to help themselves to cake and join the conversation, which hinged on a question Sophie had spent a great deal of time contemplating during the summer: whether there was really any such thing as a parapsychological sense.

“The very existence of wireless telegraphy and of radio,” Bohr was saying, “must surely invalidate any notion that the human brain is capable of performing feats of telepathy. If I were wired for such things, why would I need to build an apparatus? I would simply tune my attention in to the sea of waves transmitted by other minds, as one might opt in or out of the conversation others are carrying on in another part of the room, and be able to hear their thoughts—or indeed to receive the same programs I might obtain on a radiogram. . . .”

“The evidence for telepathic communication is very strong,” said Dirac, who was eating his cake in neat, appreciative forkfuls, each one containing a balanced proportion of cake and filling. “We have every reason to believe that a significant percentage of those who claim to have communicated with the dead are neither deluded nor fraudulent. I myself was once present at a séance in Cambridge at which the ethereal manifestations of James Clerk Maxwell and Isaac Newton were both present, and I detected nothing in either spirit’s communications that would have led me to discredit his authenticity.”

Bohr’s thought train was shunted by this remark into another direction.

Sophie was meanwhile skulking very low down in her seat and hoping Mikael wouldn’t look in her direction: she hoped to have put speaking with the dead resolutely behind her, along with much else of life in Scotland.

“Have you ever thought of what it is that makes a ghost sinister?” Bohr asked, leaning forward with his eyes intent upon his interlocutor. “What is sinister, with a ghost, is precisely that one does
not
believe in it. If we believed in the ghost in some straightforward way, as we believe in the real physical existence of a burglar or a wild animal, it would be only
dangerous
. The fact that we do
not
believe in it—that is what changes it from dangerous to sinister. Thus the highly real phenomenon of eeriness. . . .”

Dirac was not ready to let the former matter drop.

“That is muddled thinking,” he said. “You are twisting the meaning of the word
belief
beyond what it will bear. I believe in the atom, even though I will never see it with my own eyes. The atom is not sinister, but it is certainly dangerous. . . .”

“If it is possible to receive the thoughts of the dead,” Bohr said irritably, “then it should also be possible to detect the thoughts of the living! Why, then, does someone not retain the services of a medium to read the thoughts of the European emperor, or perhaps the czar of Russia? It would be far more useful to know whether Europe is contemplating invading Denmark than whether Great-aunt Bertha, as it were, continues to enjoy the celestial bridge games in the ely-sian fields. . . .”

“For all we know,” said Dirac, his manner as dry as ever (to Sophie he seemed enviably free of emotion, she still not having weaned herself altogether from the notion that the true perfection of human nature would be a calm, impassive rationality of the kind associated with the disembodied brain in a science-fiction novel), “there are a dozen mediums doing precisely that. You must allow, Bohr, that the causes of certain things are hidden from us, and may remain so.”

“That, I do not dispute,” said Bohr. “But as soon as we allow there to be such a thing as, say, a sixth sense, we beg the question of what constitutes that sense! I believe that the salmon, for instance, has a wonderful and deeply mysterious ability to trace a path back to the place where it was spawned. The fish is born in a mountain lake. It swims down brooks and rivers”—he took the sugar bowl and used it to weave a path around the obstacles on the table—“to the ocean. But when the time comes for the fish to reproduce, it finds its way home to the exact same pool it was born in. Does this fill me with a deep wonder as to the amazing ways of nature? Yes. Need I invoke a sixth sense? What would be the physical basis for the function of such a sense? Where is it located, and how does it work?”

Hevesy had been following the exchange with his usual look of detached, slightly ironic interest. At this juncture he leaned forward.

“The fish finds its way home,” he said softly, “because the fish does not know enough to ask questions. Future investigations will likely reveal the physiological mechanism underlying the salmon’s path-finding ability—but the salmon cannot apply that ability to finding, say, the best over-land route—or even a route by water!—from København to Elsinore. The fish has only one task to perform—he does not choose among alternatives; he exists under the weight of a single imperative. We human beings, on the other hand, have divided the world up into choices.”

Later that afternoon, Sophie lay on her bed reading a book and pleasantly digesting a large portion of cake when Fru Petersen leaned her head around the door.

“Sophie,” she said in considerable agitation; Sophie had never seen her so ruffled. “Oh, Sophie! I don’t suppose you especially heard the bell ringing just now—but it was the boy from the telegraph company. He has brought something truly terrible!”

“What is it?” Sophie asked stupidly, though as she looked at the yellow envelope in Fru Petersen’s hand she suddenly guessed what it might be.

Fru Petersen simply gave Sophie the telegram, which was from Sophie’s great-aunt Tabitha’s solicitor.

Regret announce sudden death Miss Tabitha Hunter. Details to follow—condolences to Miss Sophie Hunter—burial arrangements do not— repeat DO NOT—require younger Miss Hunter’s return to Scotland, as per deceased’s instructions.

Fru Petersen laid a hand on Sophie’s shoulder, but Sophie shrugged it off. The older woman sat beside her for some minutes, but Sophie wouldn’t even look at her. She lay facing in the other direction, stiff and unresponsive, until Fru Petersen finally brushed her hand lightly over Sophie’s hair and stood up and went away.

The sound of the door closing was Sophie’s cue to throw herself on the bed and begin crying. After a bout of hard, gulping sobs, she felt Trismegistus install himself along her side. She grasped him with both hands and pressed him to her chest. For once, he made no demur, resting quietly beside her as she wept, then sitting up and beginning the process (surprisingly dainty for such a thuggish-looking cat) of paw cleaning and grooming as Sophie far less elegantly blew her nose and drank a long swallow of water from the nighttime tumbler on her bedside table.