Calvin studied the picture. ‘I like him,’ he announced judiciously. ‘Looks kind of like Charles Wallace, doesn’t he?’
Meg laughed again. ‘When Charles was a baby he looked exactly like father. It was really funny.’
Calvin continued to look at the picture. ‘He’s not handsome or anything. But I like him.’
Meg was indignant. ‘He is too handsome.’
Calvin shook his head. ‘Nah. He’s tall and skinny like me.’
‘Well, I think you’re handsome,’ Meg said. ‘Father’s eyes are kind of like yours, too. You know. Really blue. Only you don’t notice his as much because of the glasses.’
‘Where is he now?’
Meg stiffened. But she didn’t have to answer because the door from lab to kitchen slammed, and Mrs Murry came in, carrying a dish of stew. ‘Now,’ she called, ‘I’ll finish this up properly on the stove. Have you done your homework, Meg?’
‘Not quite,’ Meg said, going back into the kitchen.
‘Then I’m sure Calvin won’t mind if you finish before dinner.’
‘Sure, go ahead.’ Calvin fished in his pocket and pulled out a wad of folded paper. ‘As a matter of fact I have some junk of mine to finish up. Math. That’s the one thing I have a hard time keeping up in. I’m okay on anything to do with words, but I don’t do as well with numbers.’
Mrs Murry smiled. ‘Why don’t you get Meg to help you?’
‘But, see, I’m several grades above Meg.’
‘Try asking her to help you with your math, anyhow,’ Mrs Murry suggested.
‘Well, sure,’ Calvin said. ‘Here. But it’s pretty complicated.’
Meg smoothed out the paper and studied it. ‘Do they care how you do it?’ she asked. ‘I mean, can you work it out your own way?’
‘Well, sure, as long as I understand and get the answers right.’
‘Well, we have to do it their way. Now look, Calvin, don’t you see how much easier it would be if you did it this way?’ Her pencil flew over the paper.
‘Hey!’ Calvin said. ‘Hey! I think I get it. Show me once more on another one.’
Again Meg’s pencil was busy. ‘All you have to remember is that every ordinary fraction can be converted into an infinite periodic decimal fraction. See? So 3/7 is 0·428571.’
‘This is the craziest family.’ Calvin grinned at her. ‘I suppose I should stop being surprised by now, but you’re supposed to be dumb in school, always being called up on the carpet.’
‘Oh, I am.’
‘The trouble with Meg and math,’ Mrs Murry said briskly, ‘is that Meg and her father used to play with numbers and Meg learned far too many short cuts. So when they want her to do problems the long way round at school she gets sullen and stubborn and sets up a fine mental block for herself.’
‘Are there any more morons like Meg and Charles around?’ Calvin asked. ‘If so, I should meet more of them.’
‘It might also help if Meg’s handwriting were legible,’ Mrs Murry said. ‘With a good deal of difficulty I can usually decipher it, but I doubt very much if her teachers can, or are willing to take the time. I’m planning on giving her a typewriter for Christmas. That may be a help.’
‘If I get anything right nobody’ll believe it’s me,’ Meg said.
‘What’s a megaparsec?’ Calvin asked.
‘One of father’s nicknames for me,’ Meg said. ‘It’s also 3·26 million light years.’
‘What’s E = mc2?’
‘Einstein’s equation.’
‘What’s E stand for?’
‘Energy.’
‘m?’
‘Mass.’
‘c2?’
‘The square of the velocity of light in centimetres per second.’
‘By what countries is Peru bounded?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. I think it’s in South America somewhere.’
‘Who wrote Boswell’s Life of Johnson?’
‘Oh, Calvin, I’m not any good at English.’
Calvin groaned and turned to Mrs Murry. ‘I see what you mean. Her I wouldn’t want to teach.’
‘She’s a little one-sided, I grant you,’ Mrs Murry said, ‘though I blame her father and myself for that. She still enjoys playing with her doll’s house, though.’
‘Mother!’ Meg shrieked in agony.
‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry’ Mrs Murry said swiftly. ‘But I’m sure Calvin understands what I mean.’
With a sudden enthusiastic gesture Calvin flung his arms out wide, as though he were embracing Meg and her mother, the whole house. ‘How did all this happen? Isn’t it wonderful? I feel as though I were just being born! I’m not alone any more! Do you realize what that means to me?’
‘But you’re good at basketball and things,’ Meg protested. ‘You’re good in school. Everybody likes you.’
‘For all the most unimportant reasons,’ Calvin said. ‘There hasn’t been anybody, anybody in the world I could talk to. Sure, I can function on the same level as everybody else, I can hold myself down, but it isn’t me.’
Meg took a batch of forks from the drawer and turned them over and over, looking at them. ‘I’m all confused again.’
‘Oh, so ’m I,’ Calvin said gaily. ‘But now at least I know we’re going somewhere.’
Meg was pleased and a little surprised when the twins were excited at having Calvin for supper. They knew more about his athletic record and were far more impressed by it than she. Calvin ate five bowls of stew, three saucers of strawberry jelly and a dozen cookies, and then Charles Wallace insisted that Calvin should take him up to bed and read to him. The twins, who had finished their homework, were allowed to watch half an hour of TV. Meg helped her mother with the dishes and then sat at the table and struggled with her homework. But she could not concentrate.
‘Mother, are you upset?’ she asked suddenly.
Mrs Murry looked up from a copy of an English scientific magazine through which she was leafing. For a moment she did not speak. Then,‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Again Mrs Murry paused. She held her hands out and looked at them. They were long and strong and beautiful. She touched with the fingers of her right hand the broad gold band on the third finger of her left hand. ‘I’m still quite a young woman, you know,’ she said finally, ‘though I realize that that’s difficult for you children to conceive. And I’m still very much in love with your father. I miss him quite dreadfully’
‘And you think all this has something to do with father?’
‘I think it must have.’
‘But what?’
‘That I don’t know. But it seems the only explanation.’
‘Do you think things always have an explanation?’
‘Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we’re not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.’
‘I like to understand things,’ Meg said.
‘We all do. But it isn’t always possible.’
‘Charles Wallace understands more than the rest of us, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I suppose because he’s — well, because he’s different, Meg.’
‘Different how?’
‘I’m not quite sure. You know yourself he’s not like anybody else.’
‘No. And I wouldn’t want him to be,’ Meg said defensively.
‘Wanting doesn’t have anything to do with it. Charles Wallace is what he is. Different. New.’
‘New?’
‘Yes. That’s what your father and I feel.’
Meg twisted her pencil so hard that it broke. She laughed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really not being destructive. I’m just trying to get things straight.’
‘I know.’
‘But Charles Wallace doesn’t look different from anybody else.’
‘No, Meg, but people are more th
an just the way they look. Charles Wallace’s difference isn’t physical. It’s in essence.’
Meg sighed heavily, took off her glasses and twirled them, put them back on again. ‘Well, I know Charles Wallace is different, and I know he’s something more. I guess I’ll just have to accept it without understanding it.’
Mrs Murry smiled at her. ‘Maybe that’s really the point I was trying to put across.’
‘Yah,’ Meg said dubiously.
Her mother smiled again. ‘Maybe that’s why our visitor last night didn’t surprise me. Maybe that’s why I’m able to have a — a willing suspension of disbelief. Because of Charles Wallace.’
‘Are you like Charles?’ Meg asked.
‘I? Heavens no. I’m blessed with more brains and opportunities than many people, but there’s nothing about me that breaks out of the ordinary mould.’
‘Your looks do,’ Meg said.
Mrs Murry laughed. ‘You just haven’t had enough basis for comparison, Meg. I’m very ordinary, really.’
Calvin O’Keefe, coming in then, said, ‘Ha ha.’
‘Charles all settled?’ Mrs Murry asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What did you read to him?’
‘Genesis. His choice. By the way, what kind of an experiment were you working on this afternoon, Mrs Murry?’
‘Oh, something my husband and I were cooking up together. I don’t want to be too far behind him when he gets back.’
‘Mother,’ Meg pursued. ‘Charles says I’m not one thing or the other, nor flesh nor fowl nor good red herring.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Calvin said, ‘you’re Meg, aren’t you? Come on and let’s go for a walk.’
But Meg was still not satisfied. ‘And what do you make of Calvin?’ she demanded of her mother.
Mrs Murry laughed. ‘I don’t want to make anything of Calvin. I like him very much, and I’m delighted he’s found his way here.’
‘Mother, you were going to tell me about a tesseract.’
‘Yes.’ A troubled look came into Mrs Murry’s eyes. ‘But not now, Meg. Not now. Go on out for that walk with Calvin. I’m going up to kiss Charles and then I have to see that the twins get to bed.’
Out of doors the grass was wet with dew. The moon was half-way up and dimmed the stars for a great arc. Calvin reached out and took Meg’s hand with a gesture as simple and friendly as Charles Wallace’s. ‘Were you upsetting your mother?’ he asked gently.
‘I don’t think I was. But she’s upset.’
‘What about?’
‘Father.’
Calvin led Meg across the lawn. The shadows of the trees were long and twisted and there was a heavy, sweet, autumnal smell to the air. Meg stumbled as the land sloped suddenly downhill, but Calvin’s strong hand steadied her. They walked carefully across the vegetable garden, picking their way through rows of cabbages, beets, broccoli, pumpkins. Looming on their left were the tall stalks of maize. Ahead of them was a small apple orchard bounded by a stone wall, and beyond this the woods through which they had walked that afternoon. Calvin led the way to the wall, and then sat there, his red hair shining silver in the moonlight, his body dappled with patterns from the tangle of branches. He reached up, pulled an apple off a gnarled limb, handed it to Meg, then picked one for himself. ‘Tell me about your father.’
‘He’s a physicist.’
‘Sure, we all know that. And he’s supposed to have left your mother and gone off with some dame.’
Meg jerked up from the stone on which she was perched, but Calvin grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back down. ‘Hold it, kid. I didn’t say anything you hadn’t heard already, did I?’
‘No,’ Meg said, but continued to pull away. ‘Let me go.’
‘Come on, calm down. You know it isn’t true, I know it isn’t true. And how anybody after one look at your mother could believe any man would leave her for another woman just shows how far jealousy will make people go. Right?’
‘I guess so,’ Meg said, but her happiness had fled and she was back in a morass of anger and resentment.
‘Look, dope,’ Calvin shook her gently. ‘I just want to get things straight, sort of sort out the fact from fiction. Your father’s a physicist. That’s a fact, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a Ph.D. several times over.’
‘Yes.’
‘Most of the time he works alone but some of the time he was at the Institute for Higher Learning in Princeton and in England, at Cambridge. Correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then he did some work for the government, didn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘You take it from there. That’s all I know.’
‘That’s about all I know, too,’ Meg said. ‘Maybe mother knows more. I don’t know. What he did was — well, it was what they call Classified.’
‘Top Secret, you mean?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you don’t even have any idea what it was about?’
Meg shook her head. ‘No. Not really. Just an idea because of where he was.’
‘Well, where?’
‘Out in New Mexico for a while; we were with him there; and then he was in Florida at Cape Canaveral, and we were with him there, too. And then he was going to be travelling a lot, so we came here.’
‘You’d always had this house?’
‘Yes. But we used to live in it just in the summer.’
‘And you don’t know where your father was sent?’
‘No. At first we got lots of letters. Mother and father always wrote to each other every day. I think mother still writes to him every night. Every once in a while the postmistress makes some kind of crack about all her letters.’
‘I suppose they think she’s pursuing him or something,’ Calvin said, rather bitterly. ‘They can’t understand plain, ordinary love when they see it. Well, go on. What happened next?’
‘Nothing happened,’ Meg said. ‘That’s the trouble.’
‘Well, what about your father’s letters?’
‘They just stopped coming.’
‘You haven’t heard anything at all?’
‘No,’ Meg said. ‘Nothing.’ Her voice was heavy with misery.
Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.
At last Calvin spoke in a dry, unemotional voice, not looking at Meg. ‘Do you think he could be dead?’
Again Meg leapt up, and again Calvin pulled her down. ‘No! They’d have told us if he were dead! There’s always a telegram or something. They always tell you!’
‘What do they tell you?’
Meg choked down a sob, managed to speak over it. ‘Oh, Calvin, mother’s tried and tried to find out. She’s been down to Washington and everything. And all they’ll say is that he’s on a secret and dangerous mission, and she can be very proud of him, but he won’t be able to — to communicate with us for a while. And they’ll give us news as soon as they have it.’
‘Meg, don’t get mad, but do you think maybe they don’t know?’
A slow tear trickled down Meg’s cheek. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
‘Why don’t you cry?’ Calvin asked gently. ‘You’re just crazy about your father, aren’t you? Go ahead and cry. It’ll do you good.’
Meg’s voice came out trembling over tears. ‘I cry much too much. I should be like mother. I should be able to control myself.’
‘Your mother’s a completely different person and she’s a lot older than you are.’
‘I wish I were a different person,’ Meg said shakily. ‘I hate myself.’
Calvin reached over and took off her glasses. Then he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped her tears. This gesture of tenderness undid her completely, and she put her head down on her knees and sobbed. Calvin sat quietly beside her, every once in a while patting he
r head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed finally. ‘I’m terribly sorry. Now you’ll hate me.’
‘Oh, Meg, you are a moron,’ Calvin said. ‘Don’t you know you’re the nicest thing that’s happened to me in a long time?’
Meg raised her head, and moonlight shone on her tear-stained face; without the glasses her eyes were unexpectedly beautiful. ‘If Charles Wallace is a sport, I think I’m a biological mistake.’
Now she was waiting to be contradicted. But Calvin said, ‘Do you know that this is the first time I’ve seen you without your glasses?’
‘I’m blind as a bat without them. I’m near-sighted, like father.’
‘Well, you know what, you’ve got dream-boat eyes,’ Calvin said. ‘Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don’t think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.’
Meg smiled with pleasure. She could feel herself blushing and she wondered if the blush would be visible in the moonlight.
‘Okay, hold it, you two,’ came a voice out of the shadows. Charles Wallace stepped into the moonlight. ‘I wasn’t spying on you,’ he said quickly, ‘and I hate to break things up, but this is it, kids, this is it!’ His voice quivered with excitement.
‘This is what?’ Calvin asked.
‘We’re going.’
‘Going? Where?’ Meg reached out and instinctively grabbed for Calvin’s hand.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ Charles Wallace said. ‘But I think it’s to find father.’
Suddenly two eyes seemed to spring at them out of the darkness; it was the moonlight striking on Mrs Who’s glasses. She was standing next to Charles Wallace, and how she had managed to appear where a moment ago there had been nothing but flickering shadows in the moonlight Meg had no idea. She heard a sound behind her and turned round. There was Mrs Whatsit scrambling over the wall.
‘My, but I wish there were no wind,’ Mrs Whatsit said plaintively. ‘It’s so difficult with all these clothes.’ She wore her outfit of the night before, rubber boots and all, with the addition of one of Mrs Buncombe’s sheets which she had draped over her. As she slid off the wall the sheet caught in a low branch and came off. The felt hat slipped over both eyes, and another branch plucked at the pink stole. ‘Oh, dear,’ she sighed. ‘I shall never learn to manage.’
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