The Cracks in the Kingdom Read online

  Darshana was talking fast. “Hans Christian Orsted,” she said, “was a Danish physicist. He was giving a lecture in Copenhagen and about to demonstrate a form of battery, when he noticed that the needle of a nearby compass moved every time he started or stopped the electric current. The compass, of course, was magnetic. Electricity had created magnetism.”

  Madeleine straightened up.

  “Michael Faraday,” Darshana said next, “was a poor little uneducated English bookbinder. And he thought, If electricity creates magnetism, maybe magnetism creates electricity?

  “Do you see what I am saying?!” Darshana continued. Jack and Belle were both lost in thought. They shook themselves a little and turned politely towards Darshana, who crouched down, leaned into their faces, and spoke in a low, ominous voice: “They are intimately connected. Electricity and magnetism are closely interrelated. If Chakiki is an electrical field and Rhani is a magnetic field, then Chakiki and Rhani are sisters!”

  “We are sisters,” the little girls pointed out in unison.

  “Exactly!” shouted their mother, standing up again, and reaching for the girls. “An electrical field moves” — she pushed Chakiki forward — “and it creates a magnetic field!” — she pushed Rhani — “which creates an electrical field … which creates a magnetic field … which creates an electrical field …” And she grabbed and shoved at her giggling girls, looping them around in figure eights, across the living room, down the hall, and back again.

  Madeleine turned sideways. Belle’s eyes had glazed again she saw, but Jack was watching all this with raised, skeptical eyebrows.

  The pieces of strangeness intensified.

  She and Elliot had played games with magnets one night and games with electricity the next. Who knew their games had been connected in this way, intertwined like this?

  “Take a magnet and coil a wire around it,” Darshana was saying. “Spin the magnet. Keep it spinning! Use coal or water or the best mother in the world to spin it!” She reached out to the girls’ shoulders. “Spin! That’s it! Spin! Generate electricity!”

  The girls spun until they tipped sideways, fell, stood up and spun again. Rhani bumped her head and howled, but her mother told her not to be a crybaby.

  “Maybe the girls should have a break?” Jack suggested.

  “What?” cried Darshana, gleeful. “You are accusing me of child abuse again! Please, by all means, report me! I will say to the authorities, You think this is bad? You know there was a scientist who placed magnets in his little boy’s hand, and then electrified him? So that colourful streams of light came from the boy’s hand! I will say that to the authorities, and they will say, Ah, then. Please. Forgive us! Get back to spinning your girls! But please do not electrify them.”

  “Yes!” cried Rhani and Chakiki. “Make colours stream from our hands!”

  “Please, Mummy, electrify me!”

  “No, me first!”

  Darshana was laughing wickedly.

  The sun was picking up the dust on the TV screen. Madeleine noticed an old teabag on the floor. A coil of tangled leads and a double adaptor. The girls’ pajamas scattered on the floor from that morning, along with shreds of breakfast cereal, soggy with milk.

  The pieces of other people’s lives.

  She looked at her own palms, and imagined they were holding the pieces of her life here in Cambridge. History with Federico above the porter’s lodge. Science here with Darshana. French in Belle’s crowded living room. English with Madeleine’s own mother. The sewing machine. Beans in a pot. Her mother’s mood swings. Belle and Jack, laughing or fierce. Chats with Denny wheezing downstairs. Midnight conversations with Elliot.

  Now she lifted her hands. She imagined she was letting the Elliot piece fall to the carpet. In her mind she heard a loud thud.

  There was no question. He was a big piece of her life.

  “Nobody is going to be electrocuted!” said Darshana, suddenly stern. “Keep spinning! Spin! Faster! Faster! Whoa! Watch where you spin! You could blacken your eye doing that!” She was laughing again. “Come, get up. You eye is all right.” She beckoned her three students, speaking over the high-pitched giggles and squeals of her daughters: “Come, we will have cake. Leave them to their spinning,” and she walked towards the kitchen, tall and proud. “It was a good lesson, was it not? And next week we will talk about James Clerk Maxwell!”

  Her voice disappeared into the kitchen, and Belle, Jack, and Madeleine wandered after her, looking back at the spinning, falling, spinning, falling girls.

  “James Clerk Maxwell,” said Belle. “I know that name.” She frowned. “He’s that famous actor, yeah? The one with the deep voice?”

  “James Earl Jones,” said Jack.

  “Oh, right.” Belle drifted a moment, then brightened abruptly. “Stupid! It’s the Prime Minster!”

  She sauntered down the hall.

  Madeleine was distracted by a falling lamp. By throwing herself across the room, she managed to catch it before it hit the floor.

  Jack watched her, and when she turned back, he said, “It’s the name from the hat, isn’t it? James Clerk Maxwell. Your extra name from the hat.”

  Madeleine nodded.

  He looked at her. She shook her hair out of her eyes and looked back. Their eyes held, and she didn’t understand what Jack was trying to say, but she felt fragments slide towards her: We’ll go no more a-roving. Unexpected pieces of paper. The light of the moon.

  Jack was right.

  She’d given up on Elliot, on magic, on unexpected papers, on moonlight — and that was a mistake.

  But then, as Jack started heading down the hall, something else came to Madeleine.

  That night when she had been trapped in the juddering, shaking darkness, she had spoken.

  She remembered now what she had said.

  Can somebody help me? she’d said.

  There’d been nothing but silence.

  7.

  Madeleine sat on her couch-bed, papers and books scattered around her. Her mother was at the sewing table, and there was the flick, flick of Madeleine’s pages, and the bzzzz of the sewing machine; sofa springs, slow thoughtful breathing or quick impatient breathing, clicking tongues, and the silences between.

  James Clerk Maxwell.

  There were pieces of James Clerk Maxwell on the couch with her.

  His name in a hat; his name in Darshana’s voice.

  The universe must want her to read about him. She would fill up the empty space left by Elliot with pieces of James Clerk Maxwell: his three-tiered, pointy name.

  She was flicking pages randomly, taking fragments at a time.

  James Clerk Maxwell grew up in a manor house. He liked hot-air balloons. His mother died of cancer when he was eight.

  That stopped her.

  She’d only just met him, he was still only eight, and already his mother was dead.

  At the sewing table, Madeleine’s own mother was clearing her throat — once, twice, three times — each time more vigorously than the last, and Madeleine said, sharply: “Drink some water.”

  She felt as if a person was standing in her path, elbows spread, casting the shadow of an unspoken everything: Your mother almost died from a brain tumour, you know.

  Well, I know, she thought back. Don’t you think I know that?

  If she almost died once, the shadow persisted, it could happen again. Listen to her clearing her throat. What is it this time? Lung cancer?

  Now Holly was threading a needle for hand sewing: She was holding the needle in the air, aiming the thread, and Madeleine thought how fine the thread was, how fine the needle, how fine the space between her mother’s life and death.

  If Elliot had not sent the healing beads from Cello. If Madeleine had not run from the hospital to the parking meter to get them. If she hadn’t got back in —

  James Clerk Maxwell.

  He had a broad accent and a stutter.

  He showed how colours merged on a spinning top. He too
k the first ever colour photograph: a picture of a tartan ribbon.

  Madeleine looked up from the notes again. She was thinking of the Colours of Cello, and realising that she no longer had even a fine thread of doubt about the Kingdom. She believed in it completely.

  Only, she thought next, she no longer believed in Elliot.

  Or not his essence anyway. He was empty, a phantasm. The qualities she’d ascribed to him had all come from her imagination.

  It was the same with her father, actually. She’d believed in him all her life, but now he was nothing but a puppet made of cloth. You put the strings down and it folds itself up, face down. A strong wind and the puppet blows away.

  She looked across the room at her mother, who was concentrating, leaning forward. Her mother was stronger than a cloth puppet, but there are always winds that are bigger than people; always the chance of a hurricane.

  She thought of herself blown around in that darkness — the splintering light — Can somebody help me —

  James Clerk Maxwell.

  When he was eighteen, he wrote a paper On the Theory of Rolling Curves. He analysed the rings around Saturn.

  Madeleine yawned.

  “Why don’t you go to sleep?” said her mother, without looking up.

  “You should go to sleep yourself.”

  Neither of them moved, then Holly smiled at Madeleine — and it hit her.

  All this time she’d been focusing on her mother’s state of mind, pretending that her own terror didn’t count. But there it was. A giant shadow blocking her path. A haze of electrons. The shape of the darkness in the space between worlds.

  Fears do come true. Tumours return. She looked at Holly again and imagined her mother not there, an empty chair —

  James Clerk Maxwell.

  Ah. Here he was studying the interplay between electrical fields and magnetic fields. This must be why Darshana had mentioned him.

  Only, James Clerk Maxwell was saying something more. Electricity and magnetism were not just closely related, he was saying. They were the same thing. Two sides of the same thing. Spinning together at the speed of —

  They were light.

  James Clerk Maxwell had put two pieces of a puzzle together and come up with light: Electrical waves and magnetic waves make light.

  Why had she never heard of this guy before? He’d seen light, translated it, gathered it, and turned it into messages on paper.

  Across the room, Madeleine’s mother was packing up, scraping her chair back, yawning noisily.

  “I’m going to have a cocoa. Want one?”

  She was moving around the flat, opening cupboards, closing drawers, changing into her pajamas, disappearing into the bathroom. The water was running. She was humming in there as she brushed her teeth.

  Madeleine felt sleepy herself. She picked up a random piece of paper. Incandescence, she read. Luminescence. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, her mother was standing in the open bathroom door, drying her face with a towel. Incandescent. Luminous.

  Madeleine picked up a book, scanned a few paragraphs, then sat back, thinking.

  Maybe she was half asleep, but it seemed to her that the story of light took three giant steps — from Isaac Newton to James Clerk Maxwell to Albert Einstein.

  Holly was pouring milk into a saucepan and setting it onto the stove. She was taking mugs and cocoa from the cupboard. She was yawning again.

  “Stop yawning,” Madeleine said. “You’re making me sleepy.”

  “It’s nighttime,” Holly replied. “The ideal time for sleepiness. Put your work away.”

  Madeleine picked up another set of papers.

  Newton thought that light was made of tiny pieces. James Clerk Maxwell said: No, it’s waves, and it rides the ether. But people used mirrors and lights to prove that the ether did not exist. Someone else found a piece of light. Einstein flew the universe with it.

  “So which is it?” Madeleine said. “A particle or wave?”

  “What? Which is what?” said her mother, handing her a mug of cocoa.

  Light, she read, has a dual nature, as both particles and waves.

  “So it’s both,” she said, and her mother repeated promptly: “What?”

  “Nothing,” murmured Madeleine, stirring the cocoa, but: Everything, she thought.

  It’s all dualities. She closed her eyes again. She thought of Darshana’s two girls spinning. North and south. Positive and negative. Electricity and magnetism. Belle and Jack.

  Herself and her mother.

  There was a creak as her mother climbed into the bed, and a click as she turned off the bedside lamp.

  She thought of her mother standing by the window, staring at nothing, twisting the ring around her finger. Her mother asking Denny if she could borrow his computer to sign up for online dating. Her mother arguing with strangers in her sleep.

  She and her mother were a broken pair, a mismatched pair, but a pair.

  The World and the Kingdom of Cello, she thought next.

  She took a sip of cocoa.

  “Listen,” said her mother, from the darkness of the bed. “There’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.”

  The room cracked like a power cut.

  Madeleine stared.

  “What did you just say?”

  Her mother shifted in the bed, turned the pillow, stilled again.

  “It’s a line from a poem. It’s e. e. cummings. I’ll get it for you — just a moment — nope. Can’t. Too tired. I’m amazed my mouth is forming words. A hell of a — well, my mouth won’t finish — but just let me — Nice. Night. Gnight — Swee. Dre — You —”

  Madeleine continued to stare into the shadows where her mother now quietly snored.

  There’d been a moment, and inside that moment, her mother had known Cello. A hell of a good universe next door. Also in that moment, her mother had known how to get to Cello: let’s go.

  A door inside Madeleine had revolved, opening onto a new place — where Cello was accessible — and onto an old, where her mother was in charge.

  But the door had spun again and here she was.

  In this attic flat and uncertainty. Frightened mother. Absent father. Lost friends, lost life. New friends fading into mystery — like Belle and Jack — or into flimsiness — like Elliot.

  But for just one moment —

  She set the cocoa on the floor, and closed her eyes against the shock and disappointment.

  Behind her eyes, at once, she saw Elliot.

  She saw his face turning towards her in the dark schoolyard, towards her, then away again, lost. Now she saw herself walking beside Elliot, scuffing through autumn leaves. She saw her boots, his boots. So we’ll go no more a-roving. But they’d never roved anywhere. She’d never scuffed through leaves with him, but here were the details of a memory: fine threads of cracks in his worn boots; damp-edged, wood-smoked leaves.

  False memories from an invented past, or an imagined future?

  Night after night, she had leaned against a parking meter in a dark Cambridge street while Elliot tossed a deftball in the darkness of a schoolyard. Opposite each other, alone but together, waiting on each other’s thoughts.

  The silence while she waited for his replies: wondering how he’d reflect her words, rotate them, smooth their edges. Or fling them back, turn to his own stories — that silence while she waited for his words. It was a silence, she thought now, that had both purity and sharpness. It was the colour of a candle. The flavour of pecans, or mango, or nutmeg. It had spin and dimension, particles and waves.

  She saw herself with Elliot again. Both of them placing their hands on the hood of a car and flinching at the heat.

  She felt Elliot pressing his thumb onto her shoulder blade: “Is this where it hurts?”

  Herself calling to him on a crowded street, “If you don’t get a move on, we’ll miss the start,” while he smiled, distracted by the display behind a plate-glass window.

  These imagined glimpses —
they were neither invented past, nor imagined future, she saw that now.

  They were translations of the silences. The space between their words; the space between their worlds.

  Elliot was not an empty cloth puppet. He was himself. He could be silent and lost; she could call for his help and he might be busy or he might need help himself. They didn’t have to fit or meld or blend to be a pair: They could be mismatched, broken, displaced; a pair that had to shift and twist to see each other, a pair that could be separate, together and apart.

  He was a face turning towards her, a hand reaching —

  She was slipping towards sleep. Papers rustled, a book spilled to the floor with a thud.

  She sat up, confused. Who was she, where was she, what was she?

  Ah, it was night and she was Madeleine.

  She should change into pajamas, make up her bed, wash out the cocoa mug, switch off the lights —

  She leaned down to pick up the fallen books and fanned papers.

  James Clerk Maxwell on her floorboards.

  Phrases caught her eyes.

  Here he was inviting a friend to come and stay: If you are particular about your lantern, he wrote, bring it yourself like Guy Fawkes or the Man in the Moon.

  Here he was using mirror-writing: Why have you forgotten to send Alice. We remain in Wonderland until she appears.

  Again, having a bad day: I am desolated, he wrote, … a mere man in a mirror.

  Madeleine liked him.

  She reached to close a book and saw that it was open at a quote from Edith Wharton:

  There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

  Lights, she thought, and mirrors.

  Now she picked up the teaspoon from the floor beside the mug. Her own sleepy face looked back at her: elongated, mournful, her forehead rising up like a hill.

  She thought of Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope: mirrors catching light.

  Lights. Mirrors.

  Mirrors. Lights.

  Elliot’s face again.