“Simon? Simon, is that you?”
For a second Simon emerged from an aisle, scooped the leaflets off a table covered in local-authority publications, then bounced back into obscurity along a row starting with Beyond Leaf Raking.
“Simon! Psst!”
His head is like a gray feather duster, at the other end of which is a little housekeeper, cross and impatient to get home.
Across the car park, two muscular spruces spread along a lawn.
I glimpsed a head bob above Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Personal View.
“Simon!”
The fluffiness disappeared behind Drying Flowers with Your Microwave.
“Simon! Was that you?”
It reappeared three aisles to the left in audiobooks, and began to peck up and down, up and down. He was emptying an entire information-display carousel of its contents.
Abruptly Simon was beside me. His bag was covered in fresh bumps; it was bloated with new leaflets; his trouser pockets bulged with handbills and flyers about zorbing (rolling down hills inside a large bouncy ball). Wedges of brochures were squeezed behind his ears and sticking out of his socks. A small dribbling of leaflets fell from the rips in his puffa jacket and started a pile next to his shoe.
“Ahhhh, um, Alex,” he said irritably, breaking off for a second from his delighted chewing of his tongue, “why are you still here?”
A mild, angular-faced gentleman, pink tie poking over the top of his V-neck sweater like a noose hastily stuffed out of sight, he patted the table and cleared his throat: “Ladies and gentlemen, good eve…”
“At school, we washed clothes every week,” mused Simon in a noisy attempt at a whisper. “I sometimes leave it a bit longer now.”
We’d arrived back at the church for the 123rd protest meeting of the Sudbury–Haverhill Railway Action Committee. The gathering space was half filled with chairs. It was not a hall. It was a widened portion of corridor that concluded somewhere better and more important, farther down. Dotted around the chairs were eight men and two surprisingly young women, both with an air of having been unexpectedly turfed out of their homes.
Reverend Hill, leading light of the Sudbury–Haverhill Railway Action Committee, held up the minutes and gave them another revolutionary shake.
“Ladies and gentlemen! Good evening! Tonight we are going to…”
Simon began rustling in his bulging duffel. After a moment of loud plastic rips and the sound of punched shopping bags, he re-emerged with a thick fold of paper, opened it out, heaved a sigh, and settled back in his chair.
Reverend Hill, paper still in the air, looked across and nodded, but not with irritation. Simon has been coming down on the Number 44 and making peculiar noises at these meetings for the last ten years.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the purpose of our mee—”
Again Simon dived inside the bag, rumbled around this time with the crackle of thunder, and returned to his seat with a bigger prize: a carton of Tesco UHT orange juice. He squeezed the top to open it. The liquid spurted on his nose.
Reverend Hill gave an ecumenical laugh. “Ha, ha, terrible, isn’t it, modern packaging? Would you care for a tissue? No? Quite settled now? Well, as I was saying, gentlemen—and ladies—this, being our AGM, we have a considerable quantity of material to cover, so let us move quic—”
But Simon was still not quite settled. A vision of his position in the world had passed in front of his eyes—and it contained a gap. This time, the explosion of plastic resulted in a pickled cucumber. Now he was ready. His mouth widened for the opening scrunch, and the Reverend Hill began a third time.
Simon has attended a good many gatherings like this—meetings with an air of studied legality and respectful advancement, and all eyes turning upward at the stupidity of politicians. I find them intensely frustrating. If you are going to act, then act—smash a window, undermine reputations, slash your enemy’s tires. If all you want is to whisper and reasonabilize, then do it at home with the lights off. But Simon basks in this sort of thing, and comes away with a sense of exploiting the democratic process and helping people.
The first item on Reverend Hill’s agenda was about a letter “expressing concern” that the committee had sent to the local Member of Parliament.
Lo! Surprise! It had not been answered.
Careful discussion, reasoned debate, seventy-six committee resolutions signed in quintuplicate had gone into the composition of this object, since (who was to say?) some day it might become Central Exhibit A in Haverhill’s Bumper Book of Public Transport Thrills—and the MP had ditched the pages in the bin along with his egg scraps.
The letter out of the way, the treasurer read the committee accounts: £12 in subscriptions, £22 in donations, £6.50 from the sale of postcards, minus £54 to pay for the hire of the meeting room, minus another £14 for heating. Yet somehow these pathetic sums had added up. They had £1,307 in the bank.
“That’s a significant number,” said Simon with a grin.
Reverend Hill turned to make some remark, then abruptly stopped and took up tapping his cheekbone instead. There were many simple retorts he could have made to Simon’s maddening interruptions—“Oh, is it? And what’s that, what’s this latest absurdity got to do with anything, my dotty friend?” Or, “No, Simon, not now, do for once try to keep your mind in this world, and shut up.” Silence flopped into the room.
The treasurer, unwilling to be shaken from the single, brilliant object of his figures, started to bend the edges of his balance sheets awkwardly.
There is a famous anecdote about the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy visiting the genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan, aged thirty-two, was in hospital in Putney, recovering from a suicide attempt.
“I have just come in a taxi that had a rather uninteresting number,” complained Hardy. “I hope it is not a bad omen.” The number was 1729.
“No,” replied Ramanujan. “It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
1729 = 1 × 1 × 1 + 12 × 12 × 12
1729 = 9 × 9 × 9 + 10 × 10 × 10
Such numbers—numbers that can be expressed as sums of cubes in a variety of different ways—are now called Ramanujan-Hardy numbers, or taxicab numbers.
There is no known fundamental importance to these things—yet. For the moment, they simply possess the sort of balance and surprisingness that please the artistic sensibilities of mathematicians, and they come with that nice anecdote attached. At the same time, that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth profound study. They appear in books on Number Theory and are the subject of earnest articles in computing journals, because the amount of calculation required to find them requires huge quantities of computing power. You can never be certain with mathematics. It is possible that one day they might explain how whales migrate, or galaxies implode.
So, when Simon said to the baffled militants of the Sudbury–Haverhill Railway Action Committee that 1307 was a “significant number,” I couldn’t help recollecting this story about Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy and the taxicab with the “dull” number.
Instantly I pressed the record button of my tape recorder, specially brought along to capture just such a moment, which but for me, Simon’s Boswell, would be lost to mathematical history; a moment that will lead to a new branch of study in Number Theory, the Norton-Masters numbers.
“The A1307,” pronounced Simon, rustling in his plastic bags again and plucking out this time a pale-blue pamphlet of timetables. “Hnnn, it’s the road from Haverhill to Cambridge.”
* * *
1 His favorite route in the South is the 4 or 47 bus: Newbury–Lambourn– Swindon.
29 Great Silence
Dr. Parker: To prove something “in the sense of Simon” is to do a proof without doing it at all. You just know the answer will come out right without having to do any calculation.
Me: Can you give me an example of this that I could understand?
/> Dr. Parker: Wooooooo!…no…no, nothing so simple as that.
Dr. Richard Parker, Simon’s former colleague,
in conversation with the author
Simon has dismissed himself from his Cambridge history. He hurried about the city during these student years with such a platter-faced lack of awareness that (from the point of view of his biographer) it’s possible he wasn’t there at all.
“But your own history! How can you eliminate that?” I say. “Are you a person or a fog?”
“Ahhh, have you seen this?” says Simon, putting down his latest garbage bag. (There is now a clear view of carpet stretching from the kitchen to the main door.) It’s a till receipt for a book called The Messianic Legacy. The purchase entry reads: “Messy Legs…£8.00.”
Simon’s life during the period in which he was a student and a world-leading young research fellow is like a film in which a minor character has been removed from the celluloid with a Stanley knife. Other figures start back from his hollowness, tiptoe away from his vacuity, whisper behind a back that isn’t there. There was none of that noisy, gawky scrabble to establish a character for himself that makes other young men such memorable bores. Simon aged twenty was in extremis what Simon is being today, at fifty-eight: a gathering of emptiness. His old classmates were thrilled to know this famous genius was in their year; delighted to be counted among his admirers and conversationalists; overjoyed to point him out to their baffled parents when they spotted him scraping along the wall toward the Mathematics Faculty with a sequence of plastic bags on his arm (this was before he discovered the existence of duffels)—but as a man they barely remember him.
“He had this hermetic life,” says Professor Bernard Silverman, now a Fellow of the Royal Society and former Master of St. Peter’s College, Oxford. “At an angle to the rest of the world.”
“Recently, I looked him up in Who’s Who, and when I didn’t find him, I assumed he’d finally got run over,” recollects Raymond Keene, who became England’s second-ever chess grandmaster. “Our main concern was making sure he got to chess matches without getting knocked down, because he was always looking at his feet as he was about to cross the road.”
Lee Hsien Loong, now Prime Minister of Singapore, and the second-best student mathematician at Trinity after Simon, “feels he did not know Dr. Simon Norton sufficiently well, and it would not be appropriate for him to do this [i.e., comment].”
“But what sort of person was he? Did people like him? Who were his friends?”
“Of course people liked him,” soothes Nick Wedd, who went up to Cambridge the same year as Simon, to study natural sciences. “Why would you not like Simon? What was there not to like?” For a giggle, he and Professor Silverman broke into Simon’s rooms in Trinity once. “But we didn’t find anything there either.”
Grandmaster Keene rings up with a new recollection. If I bring him a ten-shilling note next time I’m in Clapham— a used note, not a fresh one—he will re-create it for me.
“As Simon walked around,” explains Keene when I arrive with the money, “he used to pester the note, like this:”
Keene also contributes the astonishing information that Simon wore a suit during these years.
“Don’t make me laugh!” I reply, outraged. “He wouldn’t know how to get into a suit. He’d put his feet in the armholes. His head would appear out of a trouser leg.”
“And a tie,” insists Keene.
Simon too looks dubious about this piece of information.
His brother Michael remembers that as a child Simon invented an idea called Vortex Theory. According to Vortex Theory, one step in the wrong sartorial direction—e.g., buying a new pair of trousers when there are still two days left in the old ones before the police file indecency charges—and the Vortex will get you. A second later you’ll be swirling down Saville Row in a frenzy of designer suits and Gucci tiepins.
(Simon: “‘Savile’, not ‘Saville’. I may despise the products of Savile Row, but not so much as to want to misspell the name.”)
However, Keene’s evidence does explain a mystery of the Excavation: why there is a clothes cupboard in the front room (wedged against a groyne halfway along the south wall) containing, sodden with mold, three jackets and a dressing gown. The thin filaments growing along the fibers of the gown are different from the fried-egg splatters sucking on the jackets.
At the base of this cupboard, a swell of floor clutter has washed in and left a puddle: three shoes and an Asda bag of Norwegian swimming brochures featuring young ladies.
“As I say,” continues Simon, inspired by this flurry of my historical investigation, “I do remember one other fact pertaining to my habits of the period…” He stretches his back as though limbering up for a shocking revelation: “I was always a great Twiglet eater.”
Then he returns to sorting through a pylon of colorful leaflets by the cupboard. “I think this pressure you are putting on me may be creating a domino effect. One memory seems to be coming quickly after another now.”
While at Cambridge as a student, Simon also developed a dislike of cows “when of the female sex.”
His habit of scraping along walls as he walked was not because he was trying to keep in contact with it; he was avoiding the middle of the pavement, although he can’t explain why he should have wanted to do this.
He adopted a new word: “ooze.”
“What did it mean?”
“Agggh, hunnnh, I don’t know.”
“Ooze”: it was between an interjection and a sigh.
“Where did you make it up from? The River Ouse in Yorkshire? ‘Ooze’ as in what mud does?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Well, how did you spell it?”
“I never spell it.”
Thumping down medieval wooden stairs from his college rooms at every opportunity, past the students lounging about on the lawn with Cava and strawberries, Simon hauled his plastic bags through streams of cyclists on King’s Parade—and dropped himself into the first bus at the Drummer Street terminus that would fling him into distant Britain: the glens of Scotland, the tin fields of Cornwall, the glittering lakes of Cumbria.
After his first term Simon rushed back to London and calmed his jitters with a twelve-mile Ramblers Association walk around Meopham. He still has the leaflet stored in a box file, on the oddly tidy shelves in the back room of the Excavation. “On behalf of British Rail,” it announces, “we apologise to the participants on the last trip who had to leap out of the train next to the Live Rail and remove a fallen tree.”
Simon joined an excursion group: the Merry Makers, a British Rail club run by an energetic fellow who claimed at the top of the letter that he was the Area Manager of Watford Junction train station—but signed himself off at the bottom, in a mumble, as the Commercial Assistant. Saturday Sprees! Holiday Previews! Spring Tours! Pied Piper Seaside Specials! Simon leapt on them all.
“The two things,” he says, “that I would recommend to anyone who is lonely: politics and public transport.”
Suntan Tours! Autumn Tours! Mystery Tours (Mini, Midi or Maxi)! “Hello, you may already be a ‘Merry Maker’ and I am sure you will not be able to resist becoming a ‘Happy Wanderer’ too!”
It was during this period that he developed his distinctive technique for introducing himself to strangers.
He locates a bunch of people he likes the look of, looms at the fringe of their conversation until his quick mind spots a link between a passing topic and a place he’s visited recently, then he whips out his wallet, extracts the relevant ticket and jumps aboard. Lo! He’s with you, rattling along on the conversation.
“Haaa, hnnnn, have you seen this? [Hands round a travel docket from, say, Pershore.] I thought you might be interested because you were talking about Anthony Powell and earlier mentioned the village of Wyre Piddle…”
Simon looks semi-idiotic at these moments. But he’s the opposite—while you’re presuming that he’s lost his marbles, he’s
waiting for you to spot the three or four links connecting Piddle and Powell. Piddle is next to Pershore railway station, Worcestershire; last week Simon made the journey from Piddle via Pershore to Frome; Frome is where Anthony Powell had his house “The Chantry” and wrote A Dance to the Music of Time.
It’s quite possible that Simon has read a novel by Powell (despite Simon’s insistence that he dislikes all serious literature), and could have joined in with a sharp comment about one of the characters, but if he can get to the topic this roundabout way, on public transport, he feels vastly happy.
When I have a party in my rooms, Simon stomps upstairs bringing a very thick train timetable—the thickest possible: one for the whole of Europe or America. Most people think this is because he can’t bear to tear himself away from his closed-off world of public-transport obsessiveness. In fact, it’s to give him more ways to escape his closed-off world: it’s in case his ticket collection isn’t enough. He wants to be able to use all the information in the book, as well as all that in his wallet, as possible links. As he walks around the room, lurking at the edges of the groups, listening out for conversations that interest him, he keeps one finger stuck among the pages, halfway through, so that the moment he hears a cue word he can snap the book open, spin through the sections, and have the relevant timetable up and pushing aside everyone’s wineglass before the topic has moved on.
“Aaah, uugh…have you seen this? [Shows a timetable to Heathrow, interrupting a conversation about glass eyes.] As I say, that reminded me that I once gave £10,000 to the man who Super-Glued himself to Gordon Brown.”
“Thank you, Simon.”
“AAAhnnh, as I say, his name was Dan Glass. He is a founder of the activist organization Plane Stupid, which protests against the expansion of Heathrow.”1
The winter term of Simon’s second year at Cambridge arrived: the Garden House riots. A thousand students drummed on the windows of this local fancy hotel and invaded the kleftiko course during a visit by a delegation of fascist Greek generals. Nine arrested, lecturers reprimanded—the most famous student political event of the decade. Where was Simon? On a bus.