Newton’s Fire

the Temple of Solomon is built once more upon Moriah. All Israel united as one again on Rosh Chodesh Sivan.’ He came to a finish, half expecting to be greeted with acclaim and cheers, but all he got was a few grudging nods.

‘Very well,’ said Shlomo, interpreting the mood of his small company. ‘Just as long as there aren’t any women.’

Avram didn’t let his expression so much as flicker. ‘Of course not,’ he said.

II

Luke woke to the harsh shriek of the coach’s reversing alarm to discover his head resting on Rachel’s. He must have dozed off too. He sat up as gently as he could, partly to allow her a few more moments rest, but mostly because he didn’t want her knowing he’d fallen asleep. He didn’t quite know why it should matter to him that she should think of him as having stayed vigilant; but it did.

She opened her eyes a second or two later, rubbed them tiredly. ‘Are we here?’

‘Yes, Victoria,’ he said.

She closed her eyes again, leaned against his shoulder, snuggled up for a few extra seconds. Then the doors opened and the lights came on and she shook herself awake. He grabbed the laptop from beneath the seat.

‘What now?’ she asked, as they climbed down onto the concourse. ‘Taxi?’

‘Let’s save our cash. He’s only just across the bridge.’

She nodded at some payphones. ‘Shall we warn him we’re on our way?’

‘Let him sleep,’ said Luke. ‘I can’t remember his number anyway.’

The new day hadn’t yet dawned exactly, but the sky was growing light. They walked briskly to the Chelsea Bridge Road and the Thames ran fat and grey beneath them. An impressively dedicated rowing eight heaved and grunted out of view beneath the bridge. ‘A word to the wise,’ said Luke. ‘Jay isn’t always the easiest person in the world.’

‘How do you mean?’

Luke hesitated. It felt disloyal discussing his friend behind his back. ‘He has a mild to moderate case of Asperger’s syndrome. It’s a high-functioning autistic spectrum disorder, the one that can sometimes make people exceptional at music and maths and-’

‘I know Asperger’s.’

‘Jay’s brilliant at pattern recognition. That’s what makes him so good at codes. But he also has difficulty in reading people. He doesn’t empathize easily and he tends not to spot irony or jokes unless they’re heavily signalled. He doesn’t do small talk, so he can come across as quite curt, and when he gets onto a favourite topic, or gets overexcited, he can be hard to stop. Occasionally he’ll say something hurtful by mistake. And if he ever realizes afterwards, he’ll beat himself up for days about it. So he’s had to deal with a lot of self-hatred over the years. You can still see the hatching on his arms from when he used to cut himself. And I’m pretty sure he tried suicide at least once.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Don’t get alarmed. Asperger’s gets better with age. He’s grown much more confident since I first met him, on that documentary I did. But he still gets edgy around new people. Particularly women. Even more particularly young and beautiful women.’

‘Sure,’ laughed Rachel. ‘Because I’m a knock-out in borrowed clothes after a night on the bus.’ But she adopted a more serious look. ‘Would it be better if I waited outside?’

‘God, no. I need you in there. And it’ll be fine, truly. I just want you aware, so that you won’t overreact if he says or does something odd.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Consider me aware. But how did he cope with your documentary? It can’t have been easy for him, having a TV crew around.’

‘It wasn’t like that. He just checked our scripts and helped track down some interesting alchemical experiments for Pelham. This was before the bulk of Newton’s papers were digitized, so he was invaluable. He knows them backwards — he can recite vast sections of Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended. But for god’s sake don’t mention that to him, or there’s every chance he will.’

‘Must be a riot at dinner parties.’ Her jaw trembled as she fought a yawn. ‘Why’s he so interested in Newton?’

‘I think he sees him as a role model. Because of the Asperger’s.’

Rachel squinted at him. ‘Newton had Asperger’s?’

‘We think maybe. Diagnosis is impossible after three hundred years, but he certainly showed some signs. He pretty much taught himself mathematics from first principles, for one thing. Then he took it far beyond anything anyone had ever done before. You don’t do that without a seriously unusual mind.’

‘So all great mathematicians have Asperger’s by definition, do they?’

‘Of course not. But Asperger’s is a syndrome. You diagnose it by looking for certain attributes and behaviours. One of those can be an extraordinary facility with numbers. Newton had that. So that box gets a tick.’

‘And what’s the next box?’

‘Asperger’s sufferers often have extraordinary visualisation skills. Remember that movie Rain Man? How the character played by Dustin Hoffman told at a glance how many toothpicks or whatever got spilled on the floor? According to a Cambridge roommate, Newton could do something similar. He kept a thousand guineas worth of coins in a huge bowl by his window just to see if anyone was stealing from him.’

‘Wow,’ teased Rachel. ‘So he could be a suspicious room-mate. Lock the bastard up.’

‘Okay,’ said Luke. ‘Asperger’s shows itself very early. Infants with it have difficulty bonding with their parents. Newton’s father died before he was born and his mother remarried when he was three years old. But the thing is, even though her new husband had plenty of room in his home, she didn’t take Isaac with her when she moved in.’

‘Maybe her new man didn’t like children.’

‘Then why marry her?’

‘Ever heard of love?’

Luke shook his head. ‘They hadn’t even met when he proposed. He’d just heard good reports.’

Rachel looked startled. ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘They were both recently widowed,’ said Luke. ‘It made good sense. But it certainly wasn’t a marriage of necessity. So why not take Isaac?’

‘What did she do with him?’

‘Left him with her parents. They had a lovely farmhouse in Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, home of the famous apple tree. But he didn’t get on with them either. He had a very strained relationship with his grandmother — and his grandfather actually cut him out of his will. As for the servants and farmhands, they popped corks when he finally left home: Fit for nothing but the ’Versity, as one of them put it. He didn’t have many childhood friends, partly because he picked a lot of quarrels and held a pretty good grudge. Same thing at Cambridge. Later on, one of his disciples decided to track down Newton’s contemporaries there, ask them what the great man had been like as an undergraduate. None of them could even remember having met him. It was only in his thirties that he started making any real friends; but then people typically learn to manage their Asperger’s better as they get older, like Jay’s doing. And Newton never became comfortable with intimacy. In fact, he probably died a virgin. Anyway, I’m not saying Newton had Asperger’s; I’m just explaining why Jay looks up to him.’

They’d reached Jay’s street. Luke pointed across the road to a front door painted racing green. ‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘Let’s go wake the bugger up.’