The New Confessions (7 page)

“Sir,” Fraser said, looking surprised. I shared his reaction as Minto himself was bearded. No one made any comment.

I do not know why it should have been so but Minto’s genial threat worked. He flogged only half a dozen boys in the years I was at school. By and large we behaved ourselves, and when we transgressed so arranged it that Minto remained in complete ignorance. In this we had the connivance of the senior boys. For all its strangeness it was a happy school.

Minto Academy had once been a moderately large private house. It stood in its own grounds on a rise overlooking the Tweed. From the main door terraced gardens—now grassed over—descended to a rugby pitch. The house itself was of a purplish brown sandstone that turned a dull murky mauve when wet with rain. There was a classical pedimented porch at the front with four fluted pillars, in the center of an elongated but elegant two-story facade. The top floor consisted of Mr. Minto’s apartments and those of the three masters the school employed. On the ground floor was an assembly room, a dining room, kitchens, locker and wash rooms and three large dormitories where the boys slept. It was a small school with never more than sixty pupils. Behind the house was a square stable block with a courtyard and clocktower. Two sides of the square had been converted to classrooms; the other two were still occupied with horses. To this day I associate school with the smell of horseshit. Above the classrooms and loose stalls lived the school maids and Minto’s handyman and factotum, Angus.

The school had been founded by Minto’s father in 1865, specifically established to “cater for children gifted in mathematics and music.” After the Scottish Education Act of 1892, Mr. Minto, Sr., refused to relinquish control to the Galashiels Burgh Council and struggled thereafter to remain independent. In 1898 Archibald Minto returned from the University of Göttingen—where he had been studying mathematics under Hilbert—to take over the running of the school after his father had suffered a severe stroke. Under him the school prospered modestly. He sold off some land and advertised its special facilities further afield, implying that it welcomed not only mathematical and musical talents, but also anyone, so the brochure hinted, who could not fit into orthodox scholastic environments.

Minto was a passionate rugby football enthusiast and he determined that the Minto Academy first fifteen should excel in this also. Accordingly, he granted “scholarships” to any strapping lad or nippy sprinter he fancied for his team. The school regularly triumphed in the local leagues, held up and down the Tweed Valley. This obsession explained
the presence of the bearded Fraser—he was required for the second row of the scrum.

We were a curious student body. There were genuine mathematical and musical talents, but, while I was there, there was only one prodigy. Then there were people like me whose vague gifts seemed to lie only in one or the other of these directions and whose parents were despairing of getting them educated. Then there were the misfits, encouraged by Minto’s all-embracing manifesto. Boys who could draw well, boys who “were good with their hands,” boys who could run fast. Some of these types verged on the freakish. There was a brilliant juggler; there was one boy with exceptional eyesight who could read a printed page at eight feet. There was another, a thin long-armed fellow, who could hurl a cricket ball well over a hundred yards. There was a prodigious high-jumper. And so on. This category was the smallest in the school, seldom more than a dozen all told at any one time. They made up a sullen edgy population (we called them black buns for some reason) who often lasted no more than a term or two. Outside the orthodox curriculum they were encouraged to develop their specialty under Minto’s eye. He believed passionately in excellence, and if that happened in an individual case to confine itself to cricket ball throwing, then so be it. And then there was the rugby team: local lads plucked from farm or mill (rumor had it Minto actually paid their parents), provided with board and lodging, offered the notional gloss of secondary education and throughout winter and spring as much rugby football as they could take.

Most of us were averagely good mathematicians or musicians. Minto took us for maths; Mr. Leadbetter taught the musicians. The school orchestra was quite proficient and played regular concerts in council chambers and corn exchanges in the Tweed Valley, incidentally providing the Academy with another source of income. Two other teachers, forlorn-looking bachelors, a Mr. Fry and a Mr. Handasyde, made a stab at the other subjects necessary to have the Academy accredited by the regional school board. These two glum, wistful men seemed more fearful of Minto than we boys and we wondered what duress kept them at the school.

Minto himself was a smallish man in his late forties. He had dark-ginger hair—close cropped on cheeks and chin, dry and wispy on his head. He wore round horn spectacles and had a friendly light voice with a trace of rhotacismus: “Weally vey good,” he used to say in approbation.

Ostensibly there was nothing threatening about him. Any member of the rugby team could have knocked him flat, for example, but his discipline was unquestioned and would have done credit to an army barracks.

After one of his rare vicious floggings I asked the victim (a twenty-year-old wheelwright from Kelso) why he had not retaliated. His crime had been to give cheek to Mrs. Leadbetter. He looked at me as if I were an idiot.

“D’ye no ken aboot that Angus?”

Angus was a big stupid man with pronounced pigeon-toes. It was his job to control the beefier pupils. He had killed a man with his bare hands in a public house brawl, so local legend had it. After his prison sentence (manslaughter) Minto had taken him on. From time to time, I was told, Angus had administered savage beatings to any member of the rugby team who questioned Minto’s authority.

In spite of these deterrents—perhaps because of them—the school was a tolerant, tolerable place. Only once did I suffer at the hands of other boys, but it was an initiation rite that everyone underwent.

This was a bonding ritual known as the “wax-bogey plate.” On his first night in the dormitory a newboy was obliged to consume a symbolic meal consisting of small balls—the size of shot—made up of earwax and phlegm. The other boys mined their orifices for the raw material, which they then diligently rolled into little balls. Collected on a plate, these were then presented to the initiate. They looked like a loose beige caviar. You had the choice of eating them individually or all at once. I selected the latter course. It was not so unpleasant. A swallow, a quick swill round the mouth with your tongue. Only the sour taste of earwax lingered for an hour or two.

Hamish Malahide was the school’s only bona fide prodigy. He was a year older than I and had been at the Academy for two years. He was so good at maths that Minto gave him private tuition. I encountered him shortly after I arrived.

One dark Sunday evening before chapel, a senior boy sent me over to the classroom block to fetch something or other. On my way back I saw a group of boys—six or seven—gathered round the railings at the rear of the house. Here there was a small basement well that led to the coal cellars and the boiler house—Angus’s responsibility and strictly out of bounds. As I approached I recognized the boys were all black buns. They were laughing with enjoyment and pleasure, holding their kilt
fronts up and urinating into the basement well. I looked down and saw a figure trying to dodge the spraying streams with little success. Then he tripped and the arcs of piss zeroed in, pattering loudly on his clothes until he scrambled up again. The ordeal lasted only as long as the tormentors’ bladders held out. Soon the urinators gave up and wandered away. In the well the figure tugged fitfully at his damp clothes. I was struck by the fact that he had made no sound of complaint. He looked up at me.

“I suppose you want to have a shot now.”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Give us a hand,” he said as he climbed the steps.

I grabbed his moist hand and helped him over the high railings. The gate was padlocked.

“Thanks.” He explained how he had been caught by the black buns and had been hustled into the well.

“Why did they do it?”

“Who knows.”

We walked in the back door. A maid came out of the kitchen and glanced at us curiously before walking away. In the light from the gas mantle in the corridor I took a closer look at the victim. At that stage I did not know his name, but I knew his face. Hamish Malahide had the worst acne I had ever seen, or have ever seen since. He had spots everywhere, from his forehead to his chin. They clustered thickly round his nose and below his bottom lip. His neck and jawbone were rashed with them. He even seemed to have spots in his hair. His face looked so angry and sore, not to say repellent, that one wanted to flinch. I saw later the boils on his back, the large red buttons, the hard pink wens of incipient pustules.

I did not flinch, in fact, but he would not have noticed anyway, preoccupied as he was with the state of his clothes.

“I’ll have to change,” he said. “Bastards.”

“Why don’t you tell Minto? He said we should report bullying.”

He looked at me. “New rat?”

“Yes.”

“Minto would flog them, I suppose, but he always flogs the fellow who clypes as well.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not worth it. You’ll understand when you see how Minto flogs.”

“Why does he flog the victim?”

“Makes sense. He has a quieter life. He knows that when someone does complain it’s really serious.”

He smiled. He had large uneven teeth. He had fair hair and a pale skin that somehow made his acne seem worse. He was an ugly boy.

“What’s your name?”

“Todd.”

“I’m Malahide. Thanks for not slashing on me, Todd.” He paused. “I won’t forget it. Ever.”

It was a strange thing to say. He smiled again and walked off. So began the most important friendship of my life.

Mathematics. Why was I good at it and indifferent to poor in my other subjects? I believe that sort of skill or talent is something to do with the cast of the individual mind, innate,
a priori
. How could I, whose imagination was first stimulated by unknown stories in an incomprehensible tongue, have a talent for mathematics? The only answer I can supply is precisely
because
my imagination was stimulated in that way. I went to school clear-eyed, unformed. I remember my first arithmetic class. The rear wall was covered with charts of the multiplication tables.

“Right, Todd. Six-times table.”

“What table, sir?”

Uproar in the class. I was put at a separate desk to learn my tables. The numbers crowded before my eyes. I looked at the nine-times table. I saw at once, with the clarity of instinct, that the integers in the answer to each calculation themselves added up to 9: 9 × 2 = 18, 1 + 8 = 9, 9 × 3 = 27, 2 + 7 = 9. And so on up to 10. I drew my teacher’s attention to this and received my first words of praise.

What made me notice this? What made me see the pattern? And what kind of conjuring trick in that most abstract of worlds is being played here? I am not saying that I felt in some way blessed, but I do consider that some sort of inkling was being offered to me here. Since that first day at school and since that discovery the realm of mathematics was, for me, teeming with promise. What other secrets would I find? What other insights?

It is said that there are two types of mathematicians. Ninety percent see in figures. Ten percent see in pictures. The most brilliant, the most profound, come from that 10 percent. In my own case I think that for a few early years I saw the world of numbers in pictures, that I had the gift up to the age of ten and then, for some reason, it faded into mere
proficient numeracy. But the great mathematicians never lose that facility. Perhaps that is why infant prodigies occur only in the worlds of maths, music and chess. These regions can be surveyed pictorially; patterns and shapes can be perceived there. Order can be discerned among randomness, sense separated from contingency. Or at least that is what I used to think. I have abandoned explanations now. Mathematics and physics have led me to greater, more disturbing truths than these, as I shall reveal to you. Sense, order, pattern, meaning … they are all illusions.

Hamish Malahide, of course, was one of those 10 percent. I like to think we all are at birth, but the
tabula rasa
is quickly scored with confusing hieroglyphics that we never manage to erase again. I was lucky. I had that guileless vision for a few extra years. Hamish never lost it. He was extraordinary. Mathematicians, like artists, tend to have their peak periods. Hamish did also, and as a young man produced the celebrated Malahide Paradoxes I and II. There was a brief refulgence in the 1940s with the discovery of the Malahide Number, but after his twenties the creative power waned, almost like a form of aging. But his perception remained ever vigorous and acute, right to the end of his desperately unhappy life.

At Minto Academy it took me some time to realize his qualities. At school he was a reviled and unpopular figure because of his appalling acne. Even Mrs. Leadbetter, the matron, gave up any pretense of medical impassivity in her vain attempts to keep it under control. She wore cotton gloves when she dabbed the goo and patent lotions on his face, her nostrils tight with disgust. Some of the school wits called him Job and the name stuck. In summer we often went to the Tweed to bathe and Hamish had to swim downstream from the rest of us. Even I, his only friend, had to admit that unclothed he did look repulsive. Consequently I often found myself divided in that role. There were things about him that I found potently intriguing, but if I looked too closely at those vivid encrusted spots my scalp literally began to crawl and my eyes water. But Hamish, with his typical sensitivity, sensed my dilemma. One day he showed me a small pot of ointment.

“What’s that?”

“My mother sent it to me: ‘Dr. Keith Harvey’s Emulsion. Cures Warts, Acne, Lupus, Locomotor—Ataxy and St. Vitus’s Dance.’ She sends me these things once a month.” He smiled. “For my rotten plooks.”