Slipping the ticket into the top pocket of his blazer, Jack finally decided to make the coldest calculation of his life. He had plenty of time before Ralph would arrive.
The oak bench had wide arms, just enough room for his matches and ashtray and he was enjoying the perfumed warmth of the sunny patio at the end of the path. Behind the busyness of the bumble bees Jack could hear the numbers being called for Sunday morning bingo. God then gambling. He smiled as he once more contemplated his prime numbers, that over the years had multiplied, divided and then subtracted themselves to total one life.
He reached for his tobacco pouch, gently cradling the familiar round of the briar he filled, lit and inhaled. Apparently smoking wasn’t politically correct any more; a notion he found curious while political conflict scorched so many of the innocent around the world. To Jack it had always seemed a paradox to kill a man in order to persuade him what’s right.
Throughout his life the rhythm of numbers had been a steady heartbeat. When the Nazis had cast their shadow, Jack’s mathematical brilliance at Cambridge took him straight to Station X, MI6’s National Codes Centre at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. For five years he relentlessly stretched his genius to fight against the staggering odds of cracking the secret Enigma codes of the German armed forces, providing the Allied war effort with a wealth of intelligence and saving countless lives. Bletchley Park, where Jack had met Honey, found love and his reason to live, was the cradle of the communications revolution and in many ways became the community that changed the future.
He closed his eyes and willingly withstood the familiar bittersweet pain, as he breathed once more the redolent scent of lavender. Again he could hear Honey’s laugh, taste her warmth and recall her urgency for him when she burgled his sleep to steal his dreams.
At the height of the war Jack and Honey had worked alongside over 10,000 people who had been recruited to the Park, they were a deliciously intellectual, multi national casserole of linguists, mathematicians, technologists, logisticians, chess players and crossword experts. A few were famous, but all were brilliant, pioneering and radical innovators, desperately working against time and around the clock. Conditions were cramped and Spartan and the work often arduous, but at Bletchley Jack had helped midwife the birth of ‘Colossus’, the world’s first programmable computer. Without ‘Colossus’ the elite Lorenz cipher used by Hitler and his High Command would not have been broken and the awesome gallantry of D-Day could so easily have been tragically wasted.
Now the next generation of computers serves the nation’s desperation to win the Lottery, rather than their desperation to win the War. Either way, Jack had always been able to find his answers to most of life’s questions in the power of accurate calculation.
He refilled his pipe and the rich sweet maleness of his Clan tobacco danced in the sun with the bees’ lavender, the signature of Honey’s soul. A Massachusetts girl of nineteen, racing her bicycle up the long drive at Bletchley to get out of the summer rain. She always loathed getting wet, teasing him in her Boston twang that water was only good for ice cubes and hot baths. And tea parties, of course. They had only ever argued once. After the war and a simple wedding, summer in Monte Carlo had been one of Honey’s dreams and Jack had used his formidable talents at the famous casino’s roulette wheel. Honey had laughed, cried, shouted at him, then made him promise never to use his genius for gambling with numbers in such a way again. But his small fortune of forbidden francs had paid for the holiday and another of Honey’s dreams, their cottage on the River Cam, that she had named ‘Jackpot’. After the birth of the twins, the laughter vanished from her hazel eyes, but up to her death and beyond, their love had been indivisible.
A cloud eclipsed the warmth of the sun and Jack closed his eyes as his memory curled back to his son. Arrogance, anger and aniseed drops had been the constants from a malevolent childhood. Ralph had been ten when his twin sisters were born. In spite of his parents loving encouragement, he had intensely ignored his mother’s pregnancy, constantly abhorred the prospect of siblings and had twice defaced the sugar almond colours of the pretty new nursery.
Being underweight, which was quite usual in twins, little Lucy and Kate came home some six weeks after their birth. Early the following morning as the house slept, Jack peeped into the quiet nursery to gently kiss the little ones before going off to work. But something was wrong. As his mind started to ricochet with the quick fire questions and crazed answers of rising panic, he moved swiftly from one cradle to the other, unaware of the pounding of his own heartbeat. The only heartbeat in the room. The silence of the two cribs was the worst noise of his life. In spite of his desperate efforts, Jack was unable to wake either of his baby girls. Somewhere, in the depths of the profound horror of the moment, his denying mind had registered the unmistakable smell of aniseed.
The constant grief and heartbreak at the death of the twins was incalculable. And solely for the sake of Honey, Jack chose to never fully contemplate the sad and painful equation of wicked jealousy and murderous hatred that he alone knew was in the heart of their son. But at last the time had come to apply the correct answer and for the dreadful results of that vile equation to be fully squared.
Over the years since Bletchley, Jack had not totally resisted the benign brainteasers that the latest technology periodically presented. In 1957 it hadn’t taken him long to calculate the right Premium Bond Number and crack ERNIE, the National Saving’s new and controversial Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment. It was the same in both 1973 and 1988, as each time they built a new machine, he felt obliged to buy another Premium Bond. But as all three ERNIES worked to the same system, it got tedious. Whatever he won, he always kept his promise to Honey. It amused him that the National Savings were still looking for the winner of the largest unclaimed prize of £25,000, who apparently, they believed, emigrated to Canada.
Thirty years after his mother’s death, Ralph had reasoned that there might be an inheritance in the old man. So Sunday outings were arranged, during which Ralph made pathetic, covert attempts to discover his father’s worth. But he never got close to cracking an enigmatic Jack, who had precisely calculated his finances to get him through to the ‘end of hostilities’.
Dr James Berenson, Consultant Oncologist, had been very kind and had understood when Jack declined the prescribed chemotherapy. They both knew that it would not increase his survival against the fatal formula of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia. Seven months was Berenson’s guess, but Jack had always dealt in definites, not guesses. What Jim Berenson didn’t know was that Jack would quietly decide when his number was up and one peaceful November evening would simply break the cancer’s crippling cipher for himself.
And when the time came, an angry Ralph would find that his father’s estate was all out of ‘aniseed drops’. Besides, there was still one huge debt outstanding on Ralph’s account as far as Jack was concerned, the reasons for which were carefully noted in the handwritten codicil, held by his solicitor and addressed to his son.
But before that, Jack had wanted to take on the challenge of one more machine. The ‘Alpha’, the ultimate number cruncher. In the distance, the sound of tyres could be heard on the gravel driveway and a few moments later a car door slammed behind the visitor. As the French Windows opened, without turning, Jack felt in his top pocket and pulled out the small pink and white square of paper.
There they were, the six Prime Numbers of his life, ‘in ascending order’: three children, his five years at Bletchley, Berenson’s seven months, Honey was 19 and he had been 23 when they married, followed by 31 years together.
03 05 07 19 23 31
Exactly the same as the winning rollover National Lottery numbers on his television screen last night. He had done it. Jack had cracked ‘Alpha’, Camelot’s latest mainframe system. He laughed at the melodramatic tones of the over-excited commentator’s announcement,
‘Early indications show that there is one lucky Jackpot winner, receiving a total of approximately £17 million’.
Actually, £17,999,953 he calculated. Another prime number. But Jack knew that he had had his jackpot many years ago. There was nothing that could possibly be added, his years with Honey and breaking Enigma had been the prime numbers of his life. Now he had to make one final division for the sake of the twins Lucy and Kate and this last massive subtraction from Ralph would close the balance sheet on all their lives.
Carefully tearing the Lottery Ticket down the centre into two little pieces, he watched as each one briefly flared into brilliant life in the bowl of his pipe, only to be snuffed out. One last pull on the briar, he tipped it over the ashtray and knocked out the embers.
There was the sound of footsteps on the path behind him, and Jack turned to face his son.