The Body of a Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

former positions. From one flank a group of riders approached centre front, jingling and jogging, with standards flying, dark uniforms bobbing under rather more merciful hats - busbies, weren’t they? She imagined they were Hussars but, viewed from so far away, they remained faceless toy soldiers.

    By any standard the horses were magnificent. They performed some elaborate wheeling motion and presented a new pattern. Except for when the standards passed, the Queen had remained seated. In earlier times she would have saluted them from on horseback, gracefully seated side-saddle. This year she was dressed as a civilian but the Press had announced that as a Colonel-in-Chief, Princess Anne would be mounted astride.
    Meaningless to Leila, the troops’ geometric combinations and permutations would continue for half an hour yet. While sections circled and wove, the sun bore down on serried, unmoving lines where only fear of their RSM’s blistering threats kept the sweltering ranks from dropping with heatstroke.
    â€˜I suppose,’ she suggested to the maths-man beside her, ‘that you admire all this geometric precision.’
    â€˜Not really,’ he admitted, sipping slowly at his Bollinger. ‘My principal interest is in the chaos theory. I get high on cause and effect.’
    She looked again at Waites. Perhaps he was more interesting than she’d assumed. He had been talking Oceanology with a stout woman to Leila’s left and without actually eavesdropping she’d picked up an intriguing term foreign to her.
    â€˜What is an algorithm?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Logarithms I’ve a vague memory of from school. So is algorithm just a mathematician’s joke anagram of the same?’
    Waites came suddenly alive. ‘It might well be. You’d have to ask the Ancient Greeks.’ He considered for a moment. ‘To give you the broad definition, it’s a procedure to solve a well-defined problem in a routine manner. We use it to deal with equations; perform calculations and construct geometrical figures; sort our data.’
    He was becoming quite pink with enthusiasm, waving his empty champagne flute perilously close to her hat brim. ‘To take a simple example: when a computer arranges a list - of,
say, your party guests - into alphabetical order, that is performed by an algorithmic procedure of moving upwards initial letters according to pre-imposed pattern; then the second letters in the same way; and so on through each word until the required order is achieved.
    â€˜Euclid himself contrived a mathematical algorithm to find the highest common factor, or divisor. Take for instance the numbers 35 and 150. Divide the greater by the smaller and the remainder is 10. Now divide the original 35 by that remainder and the new remainder is 5. Next divide your 10 by that 5 and the remainder is nought. Arriving at zero remainder proves that both original numbers are divisible by the last number you have reached. And that, being the first to obtain zero, is the greatest.’
    â€˜Which was 5,’ she said faintly, accepting but still not seeing why. She had always imagined a parallel between mathematics and religion: that reasoning in either was beyond her. Which left only a choice of blind faith or disbelief.
    He was beaming at her delightedly through thick lenses which made his eyes into huge, dark beetles, his wire-rimmed spectacles askew on the beaky nose.
    Well, she had brought that on herself. To escape sinking further out of her depth, she glanced past him, seemed to recognise an acquaintance and gave a little social wave. ‘It was lovely meeting you again,’ she lied, smiled and moved on.
    â€˜Gorgeous hat,’ intervened an old goat breathing brandy fumes over her. She kept her gaze ahead, content in the knowledge that a wide brim ensured a certain degree of privacy. Few dared plunge under to kiss since the exercise required some co-operation from the