Maxwell's Demon. Steven Hall

       1

       Roses

      When I was little, my father was famous. Dr Stanley Quinn was a man of letters, a man of words, a man who’d built himself from clattering keys and spooling ribbon – and a firm yank on his own bootstraps – to become the greatest poet, journalist and war correspondent of his generation.

      In real terms, this meant that I grew up without my father around, although as I remember it, he always seemed strangely present. Throughout his many absences, my father endured as an active part of my life – his picture in the press, his thoughts in broadsheet black ink that rubbed off on my fingers, his disembodied voice from inside our kitchen radio.

      To a child of perhaps three or four, it seemed as if my father only ever left home by degrees. His name, his voice, his picture were always there for me, always around to watch over us. Even now, almost thirty years later, my father returns, although far less frequently. His voice comes back in television documentaries about the old conflicts. Beirut, Suez, Muscat.

      Live sound recording, original tape says the caption, and then he’s in the room, reporting through hiss and static, my father still.

      And it’s no small thing, you see, the way a child sees a parent. The world comes in through our mothers and our fathers like light through a stained-glass window, and our infant selves can’t help but be coloured by it, then and for ever. To me, Dr Stanley Quinn was always a man dismantled, and Alexandra Quinn – well, she was always a woman fading away.

      As a child, it never occurred to me as strange that my mother spent all of her days in bed. Not until years later. At the time, I simply assumed that it was how things should be and, to tell you the truth, I liked it. The mornings and evenings of my very early life would be spent upstairs with her in our home in the country, talking and listening to her read from one of the many books that filled every corner of our house.

      My mother was a beautiful woman, pale and delicate, with the kind of hair that lights up like a halo in the sun. Even as an adult, I’ve never been able to equate the knowledge of what was happening to her, that her illness was growing ever more severe, with how I remember the changes she underwent. She simply became softer, paler, lighter. More other somehow, more somewhere else. As far as I can remember, there were no bad days, no coughing fits, no unpleasant deterioration, simply the impression of her becoming less of one thing, and more of another. She spoke quietly, and read to me every day in that gentle voice; we soon exhausted all the children’s books we had in the house, and moved on to the heaped shelves of my parents’ collection. Before long, I was a child of Greek tragedies, Darwinian struggles and of bright, burning tygers. She read aloud the words of great thinkers, writers and artists from all across history and, as she did, she read them into me.

      Oh, don’t misunderstand me when I say this – I know I’m nothing special. What I am, I’ve often thought, is a little garden shed, a rickety box of old, reclaimed planks lifted from the great houses of Dickens and Darwin, topped off with cracked and fallen slates from Herman Melville’s home. My latch doesn’t work, my window doesn’t open, and if it rains, everything inside me gets wet in less than half an hour. And, well – that’s okay, you know? That’s just how it is, and I mind it a lot less than I could. Because here’s the thing – learning and growing were never what kept me climbing up those creaky old stairs with the next heavy hardback clutched tight to my chest all that time ago. All that mattered were the quiet hours with my mother, sitting on the bed, listening to her gentle words as they came. It was only years later that I understood how the stories that she read had become a part of me, worked into my skin and my blood by the quality of her voice, and the uncomplicated love that illuminated and defined those times.

      o

      I remember two seasons from this very early part of my life, a summer and a winter, although, of course, there must have been an autumn in between. That summer was an extraordinary one, because Dr Stanley Quinn made one of his rare extended visits home.

      I remember how the physicality of my father seemed magical to me. I’d become used to him as a picture, a voice, as the smell of clothes in a wardrobe, and as a hundred other single-sensory avatars. But now, it was as if some force had pulled all of him together, as if, for the shortest of times, these fragmented elements had condensed to make a man, and that man could suddenly exert his physical will upon the world. The simplest of things – that my father could respond to spoken words, could move from one part of the house to another, could cut back the roses, could be touched and felt and had a real hand that could hold mine – these things were miracles, magic, amazing events that left me full of wonder.

      I have a clear memory of one specific conversation with my father from this time.

      The memory starts with roses in a basket.

      ‘Why are you doing that?’

      My father glanced down at me, a freshly cut rose stem in one hand, a pair of bright silver secateurs in the other.

      ‘So we can take them inside to your mother. She loves the roses.’

      ‘She likes the red ones best.’

      ‘That’s right.’ My father clipped another stem. ‘She does.’

      ‘But they’ll die now they’ve been chopped off.’

      I must have sounded very serious as I said this because Dr Stanley Quinn stopped what he was doing and knelt down in front of me.

      ‘But if they weren’t chopped off, how would your mother see them?’

      I thought.

      ‘We could take her a picture,’ I said.

      ‘And would that be the same?’

      I thought again.

      ‘No.’

      ‘No,’ he said. ‘The roses are bright; they’re beautiful, but they don’t last very long. And that’s all right; it’s an important part of what they are.’

      We took the roses inside.

      o

      My next memory is of the following winter, of being led into my parents’ bedroom to see my mother’s body, to say my last goodbyes.

      I remember snow piled up against the windowpane and the blizzard blowing outside, but the room itself was still and quiet. Dust particles hung like stars, fixed points in unchanging space. My mother’s head looked so light on her pillow; she seemed to be barely there at all.

      I walked across to her bedside, unafraid.

      I felt no sudden pain of separation. Like my father, though in a different sense, my mother had always been leaving home by degrees.

      I remember feeling that it was not as if her life had ended, but more that she’d arrived at the natural conclusion of some motherly process. Since the beginning of time, her voice had been growing steadily quieter and her movements more slow. In the last few weeks she’d read to me in a barely audible whisper, and in the last few days she had read in silence, her mouth forming words I’d been unable to hear. She moved less and less until her movements became imperceptible, until, finally, there were no movements at all. One thing becoming another – this was how it had always been, and in the end, it was no more complicated than that.

      I stood quietly beside the bed, my hand on my mother’s, watching the snowflakes swirl and pile against the windowpane. I could