Being necessary made her powerful. More than that: it made her feel alive.
‘Beth?’
Charlie’s voice was quiet as he clasped her hand.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you think it’s my fault?’
Beth looked at the fading bruises on his face and the clenched line of his jaw. He was only twenty-five, but he’d been an adult for so long: the person who was always responsible, the one who made things right. And now, faced with a cruel loss and a world he couldn’t control, he was trying to seek out some sense, some version in which he could have prevented the bomb that killed his sister and his friend. Beth looked at him, the golden centre of her eyes gleaming in the lamplight and shook her head. ‘Charlie, it’s not your fault.’
He leaned against the softness of her breasts, her hair falling onto his face and pressed his mouth to hers. Nothing made sense except this.
15 October 1977
A blue bulb of vein stood out in John’s father’s neck, his hands thrust firmly in the pockets of his trousers as John’s mother cried and stared at the tiny swell of Stella’s belly. Picking at the skin around her fingers, a slight tremor in her hands, she didn’t look at her son as she spoke.
‘But, John … what about your research? The post-doc position?’
Stella felt a wave of hot hatred for this weak woman, with her tailored clothes and her pearls and her nervous birdlike hands. Do you not understand, Stella wanted to scream, that this is the 1970s and my studies are important too? She gripped John’s hand, feeling her cheeks burn as they sat down to a roast dinner in the front room. John’s mother talked without pause as she handed around the vegetables, while his father sat in silence, grimly slicing chicken.
Stella had never believed in love at first sight. Deep down she knew it for what it really was: a rush of blood to the genitals. But when she’d spilled John’s drink in that wood-panelled pub, even in her deepest embarrassment she’d felt something happen to her; it was as if a hidden door had opened. Thoughts came rushing in unbidden; thoughts that to her horror corresponded in no way to the passionate feminist politics she had argued over pints of cheap lager. Like a dark and dirty secret, Stella had become entranced by whisperings of tablecloths and fresh flowers, roast dinners on a Sunday, a warm body in her bed.
They had met again, by chance, in the library. His lopsided smile revealed wonky teeth, his hands were not quite sure of where to put themselves.
‘It is you!’
Stella had been relieved when she saw that he was pleased to see her. ‘Good job there are no liquids nearby,’ she’d said, trying to disguise the symphony swelling inside. They’d ended up at the same pub as before and John grinned with delight as she’d paid for two pints before he’d opened his wallet. It was still light when they left and they headed north across the park, walking hand in hand towards the small wooded part in the middle, where they’d sat down and kissed, tipsy in the long grass. He had walked her home later, said he hoped to see her soon.
A few days later she had seen him in the student union. There was a party the following weekend, he’d said. Some friends – here he had gestured around the group of young post-docs with whom he sat – a get-together in his flat, with guitars and a few drinks. ‘You could bring your fiddle,’ he’d said, pointing at the violin she was carrying. Looking around the gangly, T-shirted group (scientists, all of them, she’d thought with a certain distain), Stella had found herself surprised that John was a musician as well as a theoretical physicist. He spent his days translating the mysteries of the world into the tidy language of mathematics; how then, she wondered, did he suspend this orderly thought and feel his way within the music? For her, music was of the body; it was the world explained as feeling, sound and sense. She’d tried to imagine what that abandonment was like for him. Sounds fun, she’d said, feigning nonchalance, and John had watched her walk away, perplexed by the disorder of his thoughts whenever she was near.
The following Saturday, Stella had walked through an early evening Kilburn still thick with people. When she reached John’s flat, someone had buzzed her in and she’d climbed the stairs right to the top of the old Victorian house. Through the half-open door, the music came, invisible waves that smoothed the faint chaos of the city-sound outside. She walked into a room full of people and saw John and his guitar in a circle of girls and Stella felt her breath catch short. She was suddenly conscious of her homemade skirt and how the strap of her battered violin case was making her chest lopsided. From the way those girls were leaning towards him, their hair falling loose around their faces, the flushed fullness of their breasts held before them like weaponry, it was clear that they knew about sex in a way that she did not. Nauseous with the need to leave, she had thought that she would walk away, but something fixed her to the spot. Guitar sounds rang around her as she lifted the violin from its case, breathing in its scent of wood and resin and tucking it tight beneath her angled chin.
Across the landscape of her brain, small cities came alight. A trail of neuron fire was taking hold, its electric pulses compelling her hands to move, touch, change, strike. All around her as she played, the air leapt up and danced. Invisible waves moved within mathematical space, their liquid peaks melting into one another like ghosts, the confluence of violin-song and guitar jostling and weaving into harmony. And in all this, as unseen as sound itself, something else collided, rising between them with a force both ancient and new-born: the purest of forms, the most primitive of impulses.
From then on they had spent most of their free time together. After a day spent working in the library, Stella would meet John at the physics lab and they would walk together through the park. As the autumn days had shortened, their walks changed course, skirting the edge of that wide, dark space. Along the dim-lit bridleway they shared stories of their research: Stella talking fast and tripping over her words to tell him of the literary works she’d discovered in the London Library; women writers who’d been all but lost to history. She was going to put them on the map, make people hear them, she’d said one night, clasping John’s hand tight in her excitement. More steadily, with deep pauses as he sought the right words to use, John had spoken about his work. Quantum entanglement was not something that slipped easily from mathematics into general conversation. But in those early days when every thought was fascinating, Stella had wanted desperately to understand just what it was that filled John’s mind when she was not with him. And he, in turn, had felt the tug of two loves and the scalding urge to swallow them both whole.
How did two particles become entangled, and why did they behave in the way they did? What was this spooky action at a distance; and how could it be explained? He’d told her about Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen and Schrödinger – of the bafflement of the first three of those eminent men at what came to be known as the EPR paradox. Quantum entanglement must be an impossible phenomenon, they’d claimed. Because by affecting immediate change in each other, no matter the distance that separated them, the entangled particles broke one of the fundamental rules of relativity: that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. But, he explained as Stella linked her arm through his, over and again experiments had shown that this is how it works. That despite not knowing why, these entangled particles do exist in a state and as part of a system that appears to break the laws of physics. And despite her miserable grade 5 at O level, Stella had understood the fascination of what he was doing: how he was finding the gaps in established knowledge and shaping a new language for what was missing.
John was known to be brilliant, but among his peers he had always been considered a