PopCo (56 page)

I open the chest, using the combination my grandfather taught me.

Inside are manuscripts from his Mind Mangle collections, and flat proofs corrected in his large, almost unreadable handwriting. There are bundles of letters and old photos, some going back to the thirties in Cambridge. Then there are the papers that I always vowed I would put aside a weekend to sort out: reams and reams of handwritten notes, mostly unreadable due either to my grandfather’s handwriting or, more often, to the fact that they were written in code. I know that part of the answer is here, and part of it is on my necklace. But I don’t know how any of it fits together.

I sit back on the floor, cross-legged, with a bundle of papers. I start going through them, but an hour later I haven’t found anything that looks like it will help. There are a couple of essays, handwritten in English, on the subjects ‘Exploitation in the Workplace’ and ‘SOE: Remembering’. But most of the papers are lists of numbers, a Beale-type code: a Stevenson-type code. It’s unclear how I would go about
sorting and arranging them. Shall I take them downstairs and make a cup of tea? Shall I leave this until another time? No. The fire is now going and it’s starting to get warm in here. Maybe I will make a cup of tea and bring it up. I will bring my tea upstairs and actually go through these documents properly – however long it takes. That decided, I grab a handful of photographs – something to look at while I wait for the kettle to boil – and go downstairs.

Atari is asleep on top of the Aga, and I don’t blame him: it’s a cold evening. I put the kettle on and lean against the Aga myself, warming my back, and start flicking through the photographs. There are quite a lot that I haven’t seen before. Photos of my father, with his beard and jeans, and, every so often, my mother: sitting in the sun in my grandparents’ old city garden, or reading. There’s one of my grandfather in his old study, sitting posed at his desk, with a little twinkle in his eyes suggesting that somewhere behind the photo is a serious occasion that he is not taking entirely seriously. I remember the layout of that little study only vaguely, although I do remember that it always smelled of earth and pencil shavings. In the photo my grandfather sits slightly back from his desk with his legs crossed, right loosely dangling over left. The picture is well composed and has been taken side-on, with my grandfather in the right-hand side of the frame and the desk in the left. It’s a mess, as his desk always was.

I wonder who was behind the camera. It can’t have been my grandmother, as she is in the next photo, sitting on his lap, laughing and – bizarrely, because I never saw my grandmother in anything other than full dress – wearing a yellow bathing costume. Was it my mother? Did she take these? The next photo is of my grandfather reaching to pin or unpin something on the notice board that hung above his desk. I look at the series again. They seem like a text that has fallen out of order: a non linear narrative. But the actual story is clear. My grandfather was busy working in his study, getting a document off his notice board, when someone, perhaps my mother, disturbed him with a camera. ‘Come on, Dad, we’re all having fun outside,’ she’d probably have said. And then she would have made him pose at his desk for his own inside-while-everyone-else-is-out-in-the-sun photo. Then my grandmother would have come in and teased him and joined in, sitting on his lap for another photo.

Except that this isn’t what happened, because my mother was already dead. ‘Long, hot summer, 1982,’ it says on the back of the photos. 1982. The year before I went to live with them. The year before my father disappeared. I didn’t see my grandparents much during that year, especially after that big argument that my father had with my grandfather.

The kettle is whistling, so I put down the photos, pick it up and pour water into my mug. Then I add a pinch of green tea from the caddy on the shelf.
Especially after that big argument that my father
had with my grandfather
. Of course … That argument was about the solution to the Stevenson/Heath puzzle. My father was asking my grandfather to tell him the answer so he could sail off and get the treasure. Shit. When was that? Autumn 1982? Winter? I don’t think it was in the summer. What did we do that summer? I certainly didn’t see my grandparents. What did I do in the long hot summer of 1982?
Come on, Alice, your last summer with your father
. It’s too difficult to remember. I remember one summer when we went to Margate with Nana Bailey, but I don’t think it was that one. Except … Oh, God. Of course. 1982 was the summer that we went to Wales and stayed in a caravan with a horrible woman called Sandy, and her son Jake. My father wanted us to all become ‘a family’: him, me, Sandy and Jake. But on the last day of the holiday, a cold, rainy bank holiday Monday, a big man with tattoos came and asked Sandy to ‘come home’. She did. And now I remember something else: it was the night we got home from that holiday that my grandfather came over with my necklace. It was still raining. So much for the long hot summer. And of course my father and grandfather argued then as well. ‘Why do you keep spying on me?’ my father shouted at my grandfather, before leaving the flat wearing his long, black raincoat. It was while he was out – at the phone box telephoning Sandy – that my grandfather gave me the necklace and told me never to take it off.

Back upstairs, I switch on the lamp and settle down in my grandfather’s chair with the photographs. The one that most intrigues me is the one where he is sitting at his desk, before my grandmother comes in with her bathing suit. You can see everything on his desk, including the piece of paper he was reaching to take down from his notice board. I recognise the piece of paper anyway: it’s in the trunk – I saw it as I was rifling through before – but it’s
something that my grandfather has always had pinned up around his various desks. It’s a copy of Fletcher Pratt’s ‘Frequency of Occurrence of Letters in English’. There are other interesting things in the photograph as well, items scattered on my grandfather’s desk: a World Atlas, a red pamphlet, a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales and stories, and a book I remember well, the one about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem that I read when I was doing all those prime factorisations the first year I lived with my grandparents (and the one that inspired me to try to write ‘I love you’ in Gödel’s code). There are other bits and pieces, mainly sheets and sheets of paper. His fountain pen is there, lid off, resting on the frequency table document.

I sit and look at the photograph for about twenty minutes. It is extraordinary really, and I am sure that no one else would see what I can see in it, but it is clear now that this photograph is a perfect snapshot of my grandfather’s desk just after he cracked the Stevenson/Heath puzzle. The red pamphlet is, of course, the one containing the Stevenson/Heath manuscript. My brain feels creaky, but it is still registering the significance of all this. My grandfather gave me my necklace at the end of August 1982, which means he must have arrived at the answer earlier that summer. The World Atlas on his desk implies that, at the moment this photograph was taken, he had reached the stage where he had coordinates to plot. So what do the other things mean? Why would he be taking down the frequency table? What would he have been doing with it?

I go over to the trunk and find the frequency table, the same faded photocopy my grandfather used for all those years. Of course, it is different from the cleaner, newer version of itself captured in the photograph. It now has about five holes in the top, from the drawing pins with which it has been secured to various notice boards over the years. There is a doodle in the top right-hand corner – a few cubes and a triangle – and somewhere in the middle of the right-hand margin is that kind of faded-but-becoming-clearer blue squiggle you get when you try to get ink to flow out of a new biro. In the bottom left-hand corner there is a phone number beginning 01, the old London code. For a moment I consider ringing this number (would it now be
020 7
or
020 8
, I wonder) until I notice another way in which the piece of paper differs from the photograph from 1982. This one has tiny blue dots by several of the
letters on the table: E, T, A, R, I, S, L, C.

For a few moments I look from the frequency table in my hand to the photograph. Then I get up and take my grandfather’s magnifying glass out of the drawer. I study the photograph again and, now it’s magnified, I can see something peculiar in it. In the frequency table in the photograph, just by the lid of my grandfather’s pen, it is now possible to pick out the letter E, at the top of the table. It has a blue dot by it. But none of the other letters have blue dots. Could it be that this was what he was doing when he was disturbed by the photographer: marking off this set of letters? But why? It doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s 1982, and he’s just finished cracking the Stevenson/Heath code, which uses numbers, anyway, not letters. He’s got his Atlas on his desk. So why would he be needing to use a frequency table at that point? And why mark off letters on it? I know my grandfather well. He hadn’t started on something else, not with his desk still cluttered with Stevenson/Heath-related stuff. Whatever he had on his desk – his most precious working space – would have been there for a reason.

And of course there’s the other thing: although he had that frequency table pinned up by every desk he ever had, I never saw him use it. He knew those frequencies by heart.

My head hurts. Perhaps there’s nothing here for me to see.

I finish my tea, which is now cold. The fire is almost dead. I was right about all the memories in here. It’s not just my grandfather I remember, though, but myself as a child – even though I was never a child here. I remember the crazy recipes I used to concoct, thinking I would chance upon something that would make me invisible, or give me amazing superpowers. I would have been about nine or ten, and I would spend whole afternoons in the kitchen, mumbling to myself as I tipped things into a mixing bowl. ‘Hmmm,’ I’d say to myself. ‘The merest pinch of plain flour combined with a small teaspoon of jam. And then all you need is a pint of water, a few grains of baking powder and an eggcupful of hundreds and thousands …’ At that age I believed that all inventions were accidents. Of course, I’d been brought up on stories of serendipitous scientific discoveries: Alexander Fleming, I knew, had accidentally grown life-saving mould on some unwashed plates; but so many other things had been discovered by accident. Ice lollies were invented by a kid who left a beaker of soft drink outside with a stirring stick
in it all night, and Velcro was conceived when George de Mestral got covered in cockleburs while out on a walk. I knew that if I kept fiddling around in the kitchen, doing random things, eventually I would have my own moment of serendipity. But it never came. And, since then, I think I can honestly say that I have never had a ‘happy accident’. Every achievement I have made has been through logic and deduction. And although I always take shortcuts, these are shortcuts through a definite system.

This is why I can’t believe that what I have found now is significant. I have not used any system here. But that doesn’t stop me writing those letters – E, T, A, R, I, S, L, C – down on a piece of paper and seeing what anagrams can be made from them. Of course, I do this methodically, trying to begin words with E, then T, than A. And although you can make other things from this jumble of letters, including ‘recitals’, it is the word ARTICLES that I find first. And then it all starts to fall into place.

And is
this
a happy accident? No. Because my grandfather taught me the following two important lessons: if you see a big number, prime factorise it, and if you see a jumble of letters, start making anagrams. Perhaps seeing the photo was a happy accident. Perhaps that was it.

Of course, it takes me the rest of the weekend to really work it out. ‘Articles’, of course, is the answer, up to a point. It refers to the Articles of the pirate ship, a document that John Christian would certainly have had in his possession, and the text that Francis Stevenson used to create his number-code. And now that I know this was the text used I feel like it was so obvious all along. All those clues my grandfather gave me … He never said it was a book, ever, and he said that the ‘text’ didn’t exist any more and that he’d had to put it together himself, backwards. If only I had sat down and made a list of all books and texts mentioned in the story. Perhaps I would have got it then.

So how does this relate to my necklace? Why did my grandfather make me wear it for all those years? Could I ever have worked back from that ridiculous number and got ‘Articles’ as a solution? No. But, gradually, over the weekend, I work out what it does mean, and why it was so clever.

I remember when I tried to write ‘I love you’ in Gödel’s code
and how frustrated I got with the big numbers I was generating. Of course, ‘I love you’ does contain various letters that are way down in the alphabet, and that will generate very big numbers, like 13
²⁵
and 19
²¹
. But even a simple word can lead to huge numbers if you try to encode it this way, and I gave up on Gödel’s code pretty quickly. The alphabet was just too complicated for it, with 26 letters all needing to be assigned a numerical value. And it didn’t help that T, at number 2 in any English frequency table (which meant you were going to see it a lot), was always going to be number 20 in the alphabet.

But my grandfather had always been very fascinated with Gödel’s code and its potential use in cryptography, so it’s not surprising that he did actually use it this one time, when he simply had an eight-letter word to encipher. But even the word ‘Articles’ is problematic when you try to put it into Gödel’s code. It contains the letters T and S – and S is the eighth letter, which would imply having to calculate 19
¹⁹
right at the end of the process. And this is why my grandfather used Fletcher Pratt’s ‘Frequency of Occurrence of Letters in English’ to assign numbers to letters, rather than posi tion in the alphabet.