Plays 5

by Tom Stoppard

  Thomasina I hope you die!

  She nearly bumps into Brice who is entering. She runs out of sight. Brice enters.

  Brice Good God, man, what have you told her?

  Septimus Told her? Told her what?

  Brice Hodge!

  Septimus looks outside the door, slightly contrite about Thomasina, and sees that Chater is skulking out of view.

  Septimus Chater! My dear fellow! Don’t hang back – come in, sir!

  Chater allows himself to be drawn sheepishly into the room, where Brice stands on his dignity.

  Chater Captain Brice does me the honour – I mean to say, sir, whatever you have to say to me, sir, address yourself to Captain Brice.

  Septimus How unusual. (to Brice) Your wife did not appear yesterday, sir. I trust she is not sick?

  Brice My wife? I have no wife. What the devil do you mean, sir?

  Septimus makes to reply, but hesitates, puzzled. He turns back to Chater.

  Septimus I do not understand the scheme, Chater. Whom do I address when I want to speak to Captain Brice?

  Brice Oh, slippery, Hodge – slippery!

  Septimus (to Chater) By the way, Chater – (He interrupts himself and turns back to Brice, and continues as before.) – by the way, Chater, I have amazing news to tell you. Someone has taken to writing wild and whirling letters in your name. I received one not half an hour ago.

  Brice (angrily) Mr Hodge! Look to your honour, sir! If you cannot attend to me without this foolery, nominate your second who might settle the business as between gentlemen. No doubt your friend Byron would do you the service.

  Septimus gives up the game.

  Septimus Oh yes, he would do me the service. (His mood changes, he turns to Chater.) Sir – I repent your injury. You are an honest fellow with no more malice in you than poetry.

  Chater (happily) Ah well! – that is more like the thing! (overtaken by doubt) Is he apologizing?

  Brice There is still the injury to his conjugal property, Mrs Chater’s –

  Chater Tush, sir!

  Brice As you will – her tush. Nevertheless –

  But they are interrupted by Lady Croom, also entering from the garden.

  Lady Croom Oh – excellently found! Mr Chater, this will please you very much. Lord Byron begs a copy of your new book. He dies to read it and intends to include your name in the second edition of his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

  Chater English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, your ladyship, is a doggerel aimed at Lord Byron’s seniors and betters. If he intends to include me, he intends to insult me.

  Lady Croom Well, of course he does, Mr Chater. Would you rather be thought not worth insulting? You should be proud to be in the company of Rogers and Moore and Wordsworth – ah! ‘The Couch of Eros!’ (For she has spotted Septimus’s copy of the book on the table.)

  Septimus That is my copy, madam.

  Lady Croom So much the better – what are a friend’s books for if not to be borrowed?

  Note: ‘The Couch of Eros’ now contains the three letters, and it must do so without advertising the fact. This is why the volume has been described as a substantial quarto.

  Mr Hodge, you must speak to your friend and put him out of his affectation of pretending to quit us. I will not have it. He says he is determined on the Malta packet sailing out of Falmouth! His head is full of Lisbon and Lesbos, and his portmanteau of pistols, and I have told him it is not to be thought of. The whole of Europe is in a Napoleonic fit, all the best ruins will be closed, the roads entirely occupied with the movement of armies, the lodgings turned to billets and the fashion for godless republicanism not yet arrived at its natural reversion. He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps. I charge you to take command of his pistols, Mr Hodge! He is not safe with them. His lameness, he confessed to me, is entirely the result of his habit from boyhood of shooting himself in the foot. What is that noise?

  The noise is a badly played piano in the next room. It has been going on for some time since Thomasina left.

  Septimus The new Broadwood pianoforte, madam. Our music lessons are at an early stage.

  Lady Croom Well, restrict your lessons to the piano side of the instrument and let her loose on the forte when she has learned something. (Holding the book, she sails out back into the garden.)

  Brice Now! If that was not God speaking through Lady Croom, he never spoke through anyone!

  Chater (awed) Take command of Lord Byron’s pistols!

  Brice You hear Mr Chater, sir – how will you answer him?

  Septimus has been watching Lady Croom’s progress up the garden. He turns back.

  Septimus By killing him. I am tired of him.

  Chater (startled) Eh?

  Brice (pleased) Ah!

  Septimus Oh, damn your soul, Chater! Ovid would have stayed a lawyer and Virgil a farmer if they had known the bathos to which love would descend in your sportive satyrs and noodle nymphs! I am at your service with a half-ounce ball in your brain. May it satisfy you – behind the boat-house at daybreak – shall we say five o’clock? My compliments to Mrs Chater – have no fear for her, she will not want for protection while Captain Brice has a guinea in his pocket, he told her so himself.

  Brice You lie, sir!

  Septimus No, sir. Mrs Chater, perhaps.

  Brice You lie, or you will answer to me!

  Septimus (wearily) Oh, very well – I can fit you in at five minutes after five. And then it’s off to the Malta packet out of Falmouth. You two will be dead, my penurious schoolfriend will remain to tutor Lady Thomasina, and I trust everybody including Lady Croom will be satisfied! (He slams the door behind him.)

  Brice He is all bluster and bladder. Rest assured, Chater, I will let the air out of him.

  Brice leaves by the other door. Chater’s assurance lasts only a moment. When he spots the flaw …

  Chater Oh! But … (He hurries out after Brice.)

  SCENE FOUR

  Hannah and Valentine. She is reading aloud. He is listening. Lightning, the tortoise, is on the table and is not readily distinguishable from Plautus. In front of Valentine is Septimus’s portfolio, recognizably so but naturally somewhat jaded. It is open. Principally associated with the portfolio (although it may contain sheets of blank paper also) are three items: a slim maths primer; a sheet of drawing paper on which there is a scrawled diagram and some mathematical notations, arrow marks, etc.; and Thomasina’s mathematics lesson book, i.e. the one she writes in, which Valentine is leafing through as he listens to Hannah reading from the primer.

  Hannah ‘I, Thomasina Coverly, have found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone. This margin being too mean for my purpose, the reader must look elsewhere for the New Geometry of Irregular Forms discovered by Thomasina Coverly.’

  Pause. She hands Valentine the text book. Valentine looks at what she has been reading. From the next room, a piano is heard, beginning to play quietly, unintrusively, improvisationally.

  Does it mean anything?

  Valentine I don’t know. I don’t know what it means, except mathematically.

  Hannah I meant mathematically.

  Valentine (now with the lesson book again) It’s an iterated algorithm.

  Hannah What’s that?

  Valentine Well, it’s … Jesus … it’s an algorithm that’s been … iterated. How’m I supposed to …? (He makes an effort.) The left-hand pages are graphs of what the numbers are doing on the right-hand pages. But all on different scales. Each graph is a small section of the previous one, blown up. Like you’d blow up a detail of a photograph, and then a detail of the detail, and so on, forever. Or in her case, till she ran out of pages.

  Hannah Is it difficult?

  Valentine The maths isn’t difficult. It’s what you did at school. You have some x-and-y equation. Any value for x gives you a value for y. So you put a dot where it’s right
for both x and y. Then you take the next value for x which gives you another value for y, and when you’ve done that a few times you join up the dots and that’s your graph of whatever the equation is.

  Hannah And is that what she’s doing?

  Valentine No. Not exactly. Not at all. What she’s doing is, every time she works out a value for y, she’s using that as her next value for x. And so on. Like a feedback. She’s feeding the solution back into the equation, and then solving it again. Iteration, you see.

  Hannah And that’s surprising, is it?

  Valentine Well, it is a bit. It’s the technique I’m using on my grouse numbers, and it hasn’t been around for much longer than, well, call it twenty years.

  Pause.

  Hannah Why would she be doing it?

  Valentine I have no idea. (Pause.) I thought you were doing the hermit.

  Hannah I am. I still am. But Bernard, damn him … Thomasina’s tutor turns out to have interesting connections. Bernard is going through the library like a bloodhound. The portfolio was in a cupboard.

  Valentine There’s a lot of stuff around. Gus loves going through it. No old masters or anything …

  Hannah The maths primer she was using belonged to him – the tutor; he wrote his name in it.

  Valentine (reading) ‘Septimus Hodge.’

  Hannah Why were these things saved, do you think?

  Valentine Why should there be a reason?

  Hannah And the diagram, what’s it of?

  Valentine How would I know?

  Hannah Why are you cross?

  Valentine I’m not cross. (Pause.) When your Thomasina was doing maths it had been the same maths for a couple of thousand years. Classical. And for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world.

  Hannah This feedback thing?

  Valentine For example.

  Hannah Well, could Thomasina have –

  Valentine (snaps) No, of course she bloody couldn’t!

  Hannah All right, you’re not cross. What did you mean you were doing the same thing she was doing? (Pause.) What are you doing?

  Valentine Actually I’m doing it from the other end. She started with an equation and turned it into a graph. I’ve got a graph – real data – and I’m trying to find the equation which would give you the graph if you used it the way she’s used hers. Iterated it.

  Hannah What for?

  Valentine It’s how you look at population changes in biology. Goldfish in a pond, say. This year there are x goldfish. Next year there’ll be y goldfish. Some get born, some get eaten by herons, whatever. Nature manipulates the x and turns it into y. Then y goldfish is your starting population for the following year. Just like Thomasina. Your value for y becomes your next value for x. The question is: what is being done to x? What is the manipulation? Whatever it is, it can be written down as mathematics. It’s called an algorithm.

  Hannah It can’t be the same every year.

  Valentine The details change, you can’t keep tabs on everything, it’s not nature in a box. But it isn’t necessary to know the details. When they are all put together, it turns out the population is obeying a mathematical rule.

  Hannah The goldfish are?

  Valentine Yes. No. The numbers. It’s not about the behaviour of fish. It’s about the behaviour of numbers. This thing works for any phenomenon which eats its own numbers – measles epidemics, rainfall averages, cotton prices, it’s a natural phenomenon in itself. Spooky.

  Hannah Does it work for grouse?

  Valentine I don’t know yet. I mean, it does undoubtedly, but it’s hard to show. There’s more noise with grouse.

  Hannah Noise?

  Valentine Distortions. Interference. Real data is messy. There’s a thousand acres of moorland that had grouse on it, always did till about 1930. But nobody counted the grouse. They shot them. So you count the grouse they shot. But burning the heather interferes, it improves the food supply. A good year for foxes interferes the other way, they eat the chicks. And then there’s the weather. It’s all very, very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it’s playing your song, but unfortunately it’s out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk – I mean, the noise! Impossible!

  Hannah What do you do?

  Valentine You start guessing what the tune might be. You try to pick it out of the noise. You try this, you try that, you start to get something – it’s half-baked but you start putting in notes which are missing or not quite the right notes … and bit by bit … (He starts to dumdi-da to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’.) Dumdi-dum-dum, dear Val-en-tine, dumdidum-dum to you – the lost algorithm!

  Hannah (soberly) Yes, I see. And then what?

  Valentine I publish.

  Hannah Of course. Sorry. Jolly good.

  Valentine That’s the theory. Grouse are bastards compared to goldfish.

  Hannah Why did you choose them?

  Valentine The game books. My true inheritance. Two hundred years of real data on a plate.

  Hannah Somebody wrote down everything that’s shot?

  Valentine Well, that’s what a game book is. I’m only using from 1870, when butts and beaters came in.

  Hannah You mean the game books go back to Thomasina’s time?

  Valentine Oh yes. Further, (and then getting ahead of her thought) No – really. I promise you. I promise you. Not a schoolgirl living in a country house in Derbyshire in eighteen-something!

  Hannah Well, what was she doing?

  Valentine She was just playing with the numbers. The truth is, she wasn’t doing anything.

  Hannah She must have been doing something.

  Valentine Doodling. Nothing she understood.

  Hannah A monkey at a typewriter?

  Valentine Yes. Well, a piano.

  Hannah picks up the algebra book and reads from it.

  Hannah ‘… a method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone.’ This feedback, is it a way of making pictures of forms in nature? Just tell me if it is or it isn’t.

  Valentine (irritated) To me it is. Pictures of turbulence – growth – change – creation – it’s not a way of drawing an elephant, for God’s sake!

  Hannah I’m sorry. (She picks up an apple leaf from the table. She is timid about pushing the point.) So you couldn’t make a picture of this leaf by iterating a whatsit?

  Valentine (off-hand) Oh yes, you could do that.

  Hannah (furiously) Well, tell me! Honestly, I could kill you!

  Valentine If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there’d be a dot somewhere on the screen. You’d never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you’d start to see this shape, because every dot will be inside the shape of this leaf. It wouldn’t be a leaf, it would be a mathematical object. But yes. The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It’s how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can’
t even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

  Pause.

  Hannah The weather is fairly predictable in the Sahara.

  Valentine The scale is different but the graph goes up and down the same way. Six thousand years in the Sahara looks like six months in Manchester, I bet you.

  Hannah How much?

  Valentine Everything you have to lose.

  Hannah (pause) No.

  Valentine Quite right. That’s why there was corn in Egypt.

  Hiatus. The piano is heard again.

  Hannah What is he playing?

  Valentine I don’t know. He makes it up.

  Hannah Chloë called him ‘genius’.

  Valentine It’s what my mother calls him – only she means it. Last year some expert had her digging in the wrong place for months to find something or other – the foundations of Capability Brown’s boat-house – and Gus put her right first go.

  Hannah Did he ever speak?

  Valentine Oh yes. Until he was five. You’ve never asked about him. You get high marks here for good breeding.

  Hannah Yes, I know. I’ve always been given credit for my unconcern.

  Bernard enters in high excitement and triumph.

  Bernard English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. A pencilled superscription. Listen and kiss my cycle-clips! (He is carrying the book. He reads from it.)

  ‘O harbinger of Sleep, who missed the press

  And hoped his drone might thus escape redress!

  The wretched Chater, bard of Eros’ Couch,

  For his narcotic let my pencil vouch!’

  You see, you have to turn over every page.

  Hannah Is it his handwriting?

  Bernard Oh, come on.

  Hannah Obviously not.