‘My sweet Gorgon, I am so very sorry,’ Mr West told Peter’s mother.
‘Please don’t call me that,’ she said in a small voice.
‘A thousand pardons. Also for not attending the funeral. You know how it is, right now. But I wanted to come and pay my respects.’
‘It’s fine, HB, it really is.’
‘I hoped he would have taken a Ticket.’
‘That was never an option, you know that.’
‘I suppose so. Still.’
‘HB,’ Mrs Bloom said, ‘I loved him, in the end. He worked so hard. I tried to help, but it wasn’t enough. He was trying to be you.’ She let out a sob. ‘In a way, we killed him, you and I.’
‘Don’t say that. He was a good man, but he chose his fate. I respected that. We have to respect that now.’
‘Oh, I do, more than you know. I have decided to run for his seat.’
‘I see. I did think there was something familiar in his essays. It was you all along, wasn’t it? Well, I could not wish for a worthier opponent.’
‘I know you would rather have sent him to your Summerland,’ Peter’s mother said. ‘But this way, his life means something. He will not be gone, as long as I remember him. As long as Peter does.’
‘And how is the boy?’
‘Oh, HB.’ Mrs Bloom’s voice broke. ‘He will not speak to me. I broke his crystal set, a few months before Charles passed. He thought he could have spoken to Charles, before he Faded.’
Mr West said nothing.
‘Now he sits in his room and won’t go outside. I don’t know what to do.’
‘He is young. Time heals. Let me talk to him.’
‘Do you think that is wise?’
‘Why not? I am nothing but an old friend of yours, here to pay my respects. And Charles and I were friends, too, once. What’s the harm? Besides, I brought him a gift.’
‘It’s one of your games, isn’t it?’
‘I am telling you, my dear, my games are what they will remember me for, a century hence.’
Mrs Bloom laughed. ‘I will let him decide that. Peter!’
Peter sprang up, bumped his head on the billiard table’s bottom and ran back towards his room. He made it to the top of the stairs just as Mr West and his mother appeared in the hallway.
‘There is someone I want you to meet,’ Mrs Bloom said.
Mr West’s hands were plump and soft but his handshake was firm. He smelled faintly of honey.
Peter sat upright in his chair. Nanny brought them tea, but he was too nervous to touch it. Mrs Bloom wished them a good evening and retired to her study.
‘I read your book,’ Peter said.
‘Oh? Which one?’
‘The Science of Death. I liked it.’
‘Ah. Thank you. That is not the one most younger readers mention,’ Mr West said. ‘Perhaps we will not discuss it tonight, for your mother’s sake. But tell me, Peter—have you ever played at war?’
Peter shook his head. ‘I don’t feel like playing much. And that sort of thing is for little boys.’
‘Oh, I beg to differ!’
Mr West held up the brown paper bag he had brought with him and took out a large cardboard box. The cover showed a khaki-uniformed army on a battlefield, and the words SMALL WARS in large, elaborate letters.
‘If I am not too old, you are not too old. Let me show you.’
The little man opened the box. It contained painted tin soldiers and spring-loaded cannons, cardboard terrain that folded out into hills and trees, dice and sheets of paper with tables. Mr West got down on all fours and crawled around, arraying his little armies against each other on the drawing room floor. Peter watched, a tangled knot in his chest.
Mr West’s enthusiasm was infectious, and the game was sort of interesting. You rolled dice to determine the outcomes of cannon shots and encounters between units. Mr West had created it based on the Prussian Kriegspielen used to train officers in the old days.
‘It should not be random,’ Peter said, after one of his cavalry units had been annihilated by a lucky cannon shot.
‘How so?’
‘Like in your book, you say that if you have a solution to the Maxwell–Kelvin equations, you know what the aether is going to do, for all time. There is nothing random. Why should a battle be any different?’
‘Well, in theory it is the same—if we knew all the variables and the equations governing them, and their initial values. Unfortunately, we are not intelligent enough to construct such equations, and thus nothing in war—or love, for that matter—is ever certain.’
‘So you can never be certain about anything?’
‘Well, you can in pure mathematics, I suppose. You start with axioms, and you prove that certain things follow logically. In number theory, you can prove that there are an infinite number of primes, for example. Sadly, most of these true things have little practical use. It’s better to live with uncertainty and roll the dice, even if we don’t always like the outcome.’
Peter looked at the battlefield and his fallen cavalry unit.
Nanny Schmidt had found Mr Bloom in the morning after his last rally. He had stumbled home late, fallen, hit his head and then suffocated in his own vomit. The doctor explained it all cheerfully, until he learned that Mr Bloom did not have a Ticket.
Peter knew that only the strongest Ticketless spirits, one in a thousand, survived more than a day after passing over—the others got lost in their own thoughts, pursuing dreams or nightmares in the infinite aether until they Faded. His mother refused to get an ectophone to even try, adamant that it was what Mr Bloom would have wanted.
‘Peter,’ Mr West said quietly, ‘you mustn’t blame your mother for not being able to calculate the future. She did what she believed to be right. She loves you, and right now she needs you.’
‘I am not angry with Mother.’
‘Well, she certainly seems to think you are.’
‘I wished he were dead,’ Peter said. The words came out like the ball from a spring-loaded cannon. ‘I wished Father were dead and I never meant it and I never got to tell him I’m sorry.’
‘Peter,’ Mr West said in a throaty voice, ‘he knew. Of course he knew. And if I ever knew my friend Charles Bloom at all, he forgave you.’
Clumsily, he stretched out a hand and squeezed Peter’s shoulder.
‘Let me tell you a secret, Peter. Charles and I had this one big disagreement. In the end, I think he was right and I was wrong, but I just could not bring myself to admit it. And now I’ll never get to tell him. But that’s the thing about those we love. Sometimes they don’t have to be told the important things.’ Mr West’s silver eyes shimmered. ‘Now, shall we continue playing a bit? I do believe you were winning.’
Peter wiped his eyes. They finished the game, which ended in Mr West’s defeat. Peter helped him put the soldiers away.
‘Could you come and visit us again?’ he asked.
Mr West looked down and stroked his moustache.
‘I’m afraid that will not be possible, Peter.’
‘Why not?’
‘It is difficult to explain. You will understand when you are older. It is not a very good answer, I know. But I will be thinking of you, and your mother. You can keep the game.’
There was another world, Peter suddenly knew, where things were very different. Not Summerland, but a land that lay sideways in time. As Mr West put on his coat and hat and said goodbye to his mother, Peter very much wished he could travel there, no matter how far away it was.
* * *
Once, George asked Peter if he hated Herbert West. It had been Peter’s turn to laugh. Whatever West’s faults, he was there for Peter on that evening. After that, Peter had been able to speak to his mother again. And West’s words had convinced him to read mathematics in Cambridge.