"Ye have business wi' the Prophet?" asked Mackellar.

"You mean Professor Ryman?"

"We ken him as the Prophet."

"Oh."

"He gies us advice," said my nut-brown chauffeur. "When tae plant oor crops. When the moon'll mak a cow drap her calf. When the salmon run'll start. How tae mak your ain weedkiller and whit'll keep the midges aff ye. That sort a thing."

"But surely country people know all that anyway?"

"Auld wives' tales," he said dismissively, upturning the prejudice I had formed of him. "Folklore and the like. G.o.d knows, my wife has faith in it. She thinks milk boiling o'er means somebody is going to fall ill, that snails an' smoking are unlucky, an' maist of a' that if the burds skirl before a flaw, a stronger blaw's on its way, sic as could tip ye heelstergowdie."

After asking him what 'heelstergowdie' meant, I deciphered all this as meaning something like 'if the birds whirl around before a squall, a stronger wind is on its way, such as might tip you head over heels'. He invariably spoke the Scots more quickly than the English.

"But I prefer the Prophet's predictions," he continued. "He goes about with a gun. Ye'll see for yourself soon enough."

The earlier sun had gone. The Holy Loch looked cold and grey now, its surface flecked by a raking pattern of white cat's paws, every rippling line and distortion derived from physics and chemistry, even the clouds reflected in its waters.

"That's where the Prophet lives," said Mackellar, pointing with his whip as we approached a solid, square magnolia-painted house set among gardens and situated a little way back from the road behind a stone wall. "My ain farm's just beyond."

On a hillside above Ryman's home (which was Georgian, I suppose, with two bay windows), I saw another wall and beyond that a farmhouse and outbuildings. There were also stables and a cowshed and a barn stacked with hay, together with some gla.s.shouses. In the field between the farm and Ryman's house stood a much older stone building, beside a trough at which two Highland cattle were drinking. Higher up ran a stripe of beech trees. Mackellar told me there was a stream in the middle of the beech wood, with a small bridge across it.

Further still up the hill was the forestry: line after line of forbidding spruce, broken only where logging had taken place-and also by a long steel chute. It looked like a child's slide. "The foresters use tha' for getting the wood out," explained Mackellar, seeing me looking.

We had stopped at the wrought-iron gate of the Ryman house, which was decorated with a solar design surrounded by signs of the zodiac. I wondered for a second if I had strayed into a location with laws other than those of Newton, a place of signs and wonders, a glen of omens. But then I saw a sundial in the garden and also a large telescope on a pedestal, and somehow with those instruments rationality rea.s.serted itself.

"That building next to the tree, the auld cot-house, that's where they put your kit," said Mackellar, pointing up the hillside. "There's a bed, but I cannae say it looks very comfortable. I'll take you there."

"No, no thank you," I said. "I may as well pay the professor a visit now I'm here. But if you could take up my suitcase, I'd be most grateful."

"That I'll dae," said Mackellar gruffly.

I climbed down from the trap.

"Now the Prophet," he said, raising his whip for emphasis, "he disnae like folk to bang at the door." He paused. "So you must go in sleekit-like. He'll like you mair, if you make it so," he added.

The farmer followed this statement with a thrusting movement of the other hand that needed no interpretation. I searched in my pocket for the fare and gave it him. As the trap made its way up to my new home I walked up to the front door of Ryman's house.

I was about to knock when I remembered Mackellar's warning. I pushed against the heavy black door. It was locked.

Behind me, from somewhere across the loch or deep up the Firth, I heard a ship's foghorn sound. It was like the groan of a dying mammoth or mastodon, as if some early drama of evolution was being played out across the archipelagic waters of the Cowal. I stood and waited, feeling uneasy again. This really did, after all, seem an odd, obscure place for the logical transparencies of science to have triumphed, as far from the mechanistic projections of the Ryman number as could be imagined.

Six.

Hearing a sound, I turned to see a tall woman emerge from an outhouse behind me. Her blonde hair was sc.r.a.ped under a scarf and she wore a woollen jumper, corduroy trousers and Wellington boots. She was carrying an empty hand seed sower, an instrument that allowed one to control the flow of seeds through different outlets. There was something about her that was immediately rea.s.suring.

She gave a start when she saw me, then smiled. "I'm supposed to be propagating cabbages," she said, lifting up the sower's funnel-shaped spout and peering at me mischievously through it. She held out a hand. "But I've lost the packet that the seeds are in. Gill Ryman. And you must be...?"

"Henry Meadows. I'm from the Met Office. I'm staffing the radio equipment in Mr Mackellar's field."

Gill Ryman. Eyes the colour of the sea and just as changeable, but brighter. Lines of care on her brow and, yes, she looked tired, but she was intriguing as well as rea.s.suring-most of all those eyes, which were filled with the fierce energy of true believers. I didn't know, then, quite how unquenchable was the faith of this bright-eyed huntress of seed, whom I would so terribly harm. It was her faith that saved me, not my own. And it was her intelligence which cracked the number. But on first meeting her, I got no sense of either of these things; she was, instead, the object of misdirected melancholic longings, feelings that I only half understood myself.

Her hand was cold and slightly calloused as I shook it. I noticed there was scrollwork on the front of her jersey. She was attractive, quite a big woman overall, but also, in an odd way, angular. The mixture gave a sense of strength and frailty in balance, as if she were both fern and flower; it made you wonder what lay beneath.

"Oh, that's you, is it?" She took off the scarf, shook out her locks, then looked me up and down, like a farmer inspecting a bullock at market. "We noticed the men from the ministry had been busy. My husband once worked for the Met Office."

"Well, that's why I'm here," I said. "I mean, at your door. I'm a follower of his weather work."

"Really? But he gave all that up ages ago. He concentrates on his peace studies now."

Peace studies. How strange that sounded in wartime. A blasphemy. For a moment I was lost for anything to say. I didn't want to arouse suspicion.

"All the same," I said eventually, "I am very interested in his mathematics."

"I can't promise he will see you, but do come in."

I stepped towards the front door again.

"Oh, we don't use that one," she said. "This way."

I followed her round to the back. I found myself gazing at her well-covered form. She had a roundness across the hips; otherwise she was bony, all knees and elbows and shoulders. Behind the house, stretching up a hillside towards the low stone building and Mackellar's, were vegetable gardens in which I noticed a tall labourer digging.

"That's the cot-house up there," she said, gesturing at the old stone building as she opened the back door. Cot-house. Mackellar had used the same odd term, which I later learned was just an old word for a dwelling on agricultural land. The little black Highland cattle I'd seen earlier had moved closer to the stone structure. Now they were gathering round it, angling down their malevolent-looking horns as if they might lift it from its ancient foundations.

"Those are our gardens in between." My gaze drew back down nearer, to the old man, digging.

"Parsnips," added Mrs Ryman by way of explanation as I followed her into the hall. Directly, something hit me on the head.

"Sorry. Should have warned you. That's my husband's special heating system. It hangs from cables. Don't ask me how it works."

A series of pipes, supported by wires, ran down the centre of the hallway. The whole place smelt strongly of steam and chemicals. I followed her through into a large country kitchen.

"Cup of tea?"

"Yes, please." The kitchen was rather spartan. "Excuse me, but-is your husband here?"

"He's always here," she said. "That was him, digging in the garden."

"That was Professor Ryman?" I was amazed.

"Yes. He does most of the heavy digging. Though we get Mackellar to scythe the gra.s.s. I hope he was pleasant to you on the way up from Blairmore. It's a pain, our own pier being out of action; usually you would have been able to walk."

"Mackellar? Pleasant enough."

"He can be a little surly. And as for his wife..." I was surprised she was so candid.

The kettle whistled loudly. She turned her attention to making the tea-not a pot, just a mug with a steel diffuser in it-then vanished into an adjoining room.

She returned with a bowl of broad beans. "Hungry? Go on, try them. They're delicious."

I took a couple of beans. They had been boiled and sprinkled with salt and were surprisingly good.

"We don't keep sugar in the house, I'm afraid. Or biscuits. Wallace says there is as much glucose in a broad bean as in a spoonful of sugar."

I wondered if that was true. It sounded as if it might be, though with so little sugar available at this stage of the war it would have been hard to verify the issue.

"There now," she added, handing me the mug of tea. "You drink that up and I'll ask if he will see you." She went out into the garden.

I sipped my tea, which was a bit too strong, then peeped into the drawing room. The walls were whitewashed, and it was plainly furnished with antique black-oak furniture. Sideboards and dressers and the like: the sort of thing people inherit-though I had received nothing like that. It all stayed in Africa.

There were also two threadbare armchairs in the Rymans' drawing room, and a chaise-longue upholstered in pink satin-a rare hint of luxury. The overwhelming impression was one of self-denial, although in one corner of the room there stood a large rocking horse. There were indentations in the wall opposite its head and ears, clearly made by too-enthusiastic usage.

Apart from the chaise-longue and the rocking horse, the only other softening touch was a piece of embroidery in a wooden frame behind gla.s.s. It was the kind of fancy lacework you might see displayed in Madeira or Nantes, or even in Nottingham long ago. I realised it was a child's christening gown.

"I'm afraid my husband cannot see you now," said Mrs Ryman from behind me. She had returned from the garden without my noticing. There was a little chill in her voice. We both looked at the gown for a moment and she gave a blink. "He has some calculations to do once he has finished digging. He doesn't like unexpected visitors." She expelled air from between her lips. "Unexpected anything, really."

In light of this reb.u.t.tal I recalculated my own options, trying at the same time to cover my annoyance. "Oh. What a shame. Another time, perhaps?"

"Sunday lunch," she said. "Do come. The minister will be there."

I shook her hand, and then she said, with a curious smile, "I look forward to it."

Seven.

The Met Office had been busy in Mackellar's cot-house. As I approached the building I noticed a green motorcycle leaning against the wall by the door, its handle pressing against lichen on the stone. Inside I found my suitcase, a desk, and about five torpedo-like hydrogen cylinders. There were also a large number of labelled wooden crates, some drums of caustic soda and several new cable points. Electricity had been run up from the road on wooden poles. A stove and sink stood in one corner; in another a door opened to a small bathroom with a red-tiled floor.

On the desk was a letter from Gordon Whybrow, my immediate notional superior at the main station in Dunoon. Typewritten in a distinctive font, it listed the materials that had been delivered. The note also detailed the charting and plotting that would be required of me. It added that the motorcycle outside was for my own use as I had a balloon schedule involving releases in some quite remote locations.

Having read it, I felt a bit glum. It was all very well Sir Peter giving me a cover under which to spy on Ryman, but the cover itself would mean quite hard work. How was I going to manage it all? Still, there were compensations. I had never been on a motorcycle before.

So the first thing I did was I tuck my trousers into my socks and go back outside to try it. I fell off a few times, skidding about the field and frightening the cattle, but it was tremendous fun. I'd more or less got the hang of it after an hour.

Spattered with mud, I went back in to inspect the crates.

I read some of the labels: EDDYSTONE RADIOSONDE, ROTATABLE ADc.o.c.k AERIAL SYSTEM, RADIO TRANSCEIVER EDDYSTONE RADIOSONDE, ROTATABLE ADc.o.c.k AERIAL SYSTEM, RADIO TRANSCEIVER...There was also a teleprinter for contacting the main station at Dunoon, plus an AO, an oscillator device for comparing the radiosonde transmissions against a known frequency.

I picked up a hydrogen cylinder and shook it. It was empty, which explained the drums of caustic soda. From these and other ingredients, I was to make my own hydrogen. I had never made it before, but I knew this was common practice on substations, unlike at Kew. It would have been impracticable to deliver pressurised ready-filled cylinders to observers in rural locations.

Realising the unpacking was going to be a big job, I walked down to the village shop to buy some bread, cheese and pickle and other provisions, then set to work on my return. It would take me the rest of the day to sort it all. I began splitting open the crates with a crowbar-labelled CROWBAR, in inimitable Met Office style-and I finished around midnight. The floor was covered with splinters of wood; they looked like arrows and spears left over from some terrible colonial ma.s.sacre.

That night, as I lay in the darkness, with the cattle coughing around me in the field and bits of slate dust falling on my face from the roof when the wind blew, I actually found myself looking forward to plotting some charts. Brain work rather than brawn work. But, having unpacked the equipment, I still had to prepare it.

The next morning, after doing my ablutions, I went up to Mackellar's farm to scrounge some milk. The gruff old farmer-pipe sticking out of his mouth even at that early hour-gave of it freely, taking me to the dairy and dipping a steel jug into a bucket.

"You keep that jug and come here in the mornings, do the same thing yersel'. Never you mind if my wife comes bawling. Tell her you have the permission."

"Righto," I said cheerfully, and made my way back down the gra.s.sy hill, carefully holding the milk-slopping jug in front of me with both hands.

I had some breakfast, then began testing the audio oscillator. The regular sounds it produced were compared with the altering transmissions from the radiosondes that hung beneath each balloon, which I could pick up on the high-frequency radio set. The signals varied in pitch according to the height of the balloon, thus enabling me to get a fix on its position as it recorded meteorological phenomena.

The oscillator was quite loud-it made a series of pips-and could be heard outside, even though it was standing on the desk in the cot-house. It soon attracted the attention of the cows in the field. They gathered round the building in a circle, which made me vaguely uneasy. The sight of them provoked a memory.

As a young man I once helped round up cattle on a farm somewhere on the earth road between Blantyre and Zomba, where one of my father's friends had tried his hand at dairy. Those animals, feeding on yellow gra.s.s amid cl.u.s.ters of native huts, were a cross between Friesians and African zebu and they were pretty lively. These Scottish beasts, spikily horned, impishly black, seemed far less tractable. They regarded me moodily, with a certainty of interspecies difference that reminded me of the way baboons would face up to lions. Where was Vickers when I needed him, to give them a nip?

By the end of my first full day in the cot-house I had got the HF set playing big-band music from the Home Service and the teleprinter, switched into receive mode, churning out observations and forecasts. Combined with other readings from the local area, my own information would be telexed from Dunoon to Met Office operational headquarters and fed into the general weather picture. This, in turn, would be the basis of briefings to the Allied forces all over the world.

The teleprinter made a chuh-chuh chuh-chuh noise as its keys. .h.i.t the paper, which jerked out off the roll and snaked to the floor. It was heartening to think of all those Met observers and Waafs and Wrens punching in their messages. The meteorological realm presided over by Sir Peter Vaward was very well organised. It had to be. Consider just for a moment how the constant changeability of the weather had to be gauged, now and in the future, against a background of the chaos and upheaval of war. noise as its keys. .h.i.t the paper, which jerked out off the roll and snaked to the floor. It was heartening to think of all those Met observers and Waafs and Wrens punching in their messages. The meteorological realm presided over by Sir Peter Vaward was very well organised. It had to be. Consider just for a moment how the constant changeability of the weather had to be gauged, now and in the future, against a background of the chaos and upheaval of war.

But having global weather information is one thing; using it is quite another. If your measurement is even slightly wrong-as we now know it always will be-there's a danger of the data degrading very rapidly. There's also a more basic problem of measurements (which are mental artefacts) being taken on certain sizes of eddies (which are physical artefacts) and not others. There are always scales and dimensions that are being ignored. And this is dangerous because the whole point is that all these sizes of turbulence are interconnected; they are both separate and continuous, feeding energy from large to small then back again.

Each scale must be viewed as information that contributes to understanding the likely pattern of the whole; and they don't last long anyway, these eddies, even when you do spot them. New information, yes, but now it's changing, now it's gone-and what have you understood?

Ryman's method did not solve the missing dimensions problem but it went closer to doing so than anything done before. But the Ryman number was clearly not something one could tick off on one's fingers. So although it was frustrating to have to wait a week before I could see him, I was grateful for an interval in which to marshal my thoughts and try out his techniques as best I could, using Channel weather as a proving ground.

I spent the second night in the cot-house, as I would many over the forthcoming four months, doing calculations-sometimes in my head, sometimes with a wooden slide-rule, notched and ink-stained, which I still possess. Squeezing precision out of continuous domains in a mustering tumult of differential calculus-such was my life in that strange time.

Lying on the bed doing calculus. Sitting on the c.r.a.pper doing calculus. Shaving doing calculus. Doing calculus while listening to the radio, hearing what was going on in the war or, for preference, some cla.s.sical music. Doing calculus while eating. Doing calculus while squeezing the toothpaste tube.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. I am sure I even did it while I was sleeping. Sometimes that can happen. You can go to bed with a problem in your head and wake up with it solved.

But not this problem: how to supply, on the strategic scale and with enough lead time, a safe weather forecast that would allow thousands of men to land by sea and air on a stretch of the French coast on a single day at the optimum time.

Eight.

Early on my third day I set off on the motorcycle to Dunoon, in order to report to Whybrow, my notional superior there. I had left it rather late, telling myself the important thing was to ready myself for the encounter with Ryman. Presumably Sir Peter had given Whybrow some indication that I was also doing work other than local observations.

Feeling the wind-chill on my face and hands, I rode alongside the water, past the row of large loch-front houses which const.i.tuted Kilmun itself, pa.s.sing an old church with a tower in its graveyard. I then turned left under b.u.mpy green hills, travelling for several miles (and at one point falling off) until I reached Dunoon.

It was a busy place. As well as local residents there were an awful lot of people in one sort or uniform or another. Colonial troops and Americans as well as British servicemen. On asking where I might find HMS Osprey Osprey, where Sir Peter had said Whybrow was based, I found it to be one of the sh.o.r.e-based establishments-in this case a former convalescent home-which the navy insists on calling a ship. The floor is referred to as the deck, right starboard and left port. Even to leave by the front door is to take a liberty boat.