CHAPTER 3
Eldred was learning. One of the things he learned was that not everything can be learned from books. He began to study people very carefully. He learned then that people don't like being studied. And that taught him to be subtler in his research.
He learned too that people don't like success, except within certain limits. And that taught Eldred to be secretive.
He learned that when someone asked him, 'How did you know that?’ it was acceptable to say, ‘I read it in a book’ or, ‘I saw a programme on TV,’ because second-hand knowledge was not suspect. What people could not accept was that some of Eldred's knowledge arose from Eldred himself.
‘Where do you get all your ideas from?’ Edgar's aunts would ask the child.
In the early days, soon after his homecoming from the hospital, Eldred would reply, ‘Ideas arise from inspiration working through information acquired and selected for retention by the individual mind.’
Now, at the age of six and a half, he was becoming worldly-wise. He knew people wanted to believe that ideas were something acquired, like facts from an encyclopaedia or tins of tuna-fish from Sainsbury's - commodities which had been prepared by other people and only needed to be taken off the shelf and claimed as their own.
‘I could have been a scientist,’ Eldred's father occasionally sighed, ‘only I never had the education.’
‘I could have been a writer of children's books,’ Mildred would chime in. ‘I was always writing stories when I was a little girl. Eldred gets all his scribbling from me. I could still do it now, if only I had the ideas.’
Little Eldred took his parents seriously. On one of his frequent visits to the local library he spent some time in the reference section and returned with a sheet of carefully copied information on adult education science courses for his father.
He also, for the first time, used his ticket to take out eight storybooks from the children's section. ‘You need to study the market,’ he told Mildred. ‘I only selected books with recent publication dates. The senior librarian told me that trends in children's publishing change very rapidly.’
Mildred, to Eldred's surprise, became angry. ‘If you think I've got time for all that stuff, you can think again,’ she said. ‘I've got a house to run and a family to look after. By the time I've turned round in the morning, it's time to fetch you from school at quarter past three.’
Eldred was concerned. ‘Shall we make alternative arrangements for fetching me?’ he enquired. ‘With another parent perhaps? I wouldn't like to be the cause of your failing to fulfil your ambition to write.’
‘I didn't say it was an ambition,’ Mildred said, growing flustered. ‘I said it was something I could have done at one time. I'm too old to learn new tricks now.’
‘From the neurological and psychological reports I have read,’ said Eldred helpfully, ‘I gather that brain cells do die, or at least become inoperative, in old age, but they can be regenerated in cases where people have the motivation to extend their mental horizons. So the willingness to learn can in itself re-stimulate the capacity for learning.’
Mildred sent him to do his homework. It didn't take him very long but instinct warned Eldred to stay out of his mother's way for a while; she seemed angry about something. So he sat at his little desk and pondered her reaction to his helpfulness. The conclusion of his pondering made him sad.
When Edgar came home from work, Eldred hid the information about science courses under his bed and went to talk to his father in the kitchen first. Something told him that this seemingly innocent subject of his parents’ unfulfilled ambitions hid a minefield.
‘How was work today, Dad?’ Eldred asked, when Edgar was installed at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in front of him. ‘Did you sell much insurance?’
‘Quite a few enquiries,’ Edgar said. ‘I doubt they'll come to much, in the present recession.’
Eldred was interested. ‘Won't the effective value of the policies when they reach maturity repay the sacrifice in income invested in them now? Or could it be that the rate of environmental damage to the planet makes people dubious about the validity of a future to insure against or provide for at all?’
Edgar frowned at him. ‘What do you mean? People are always going to need insurance.’
‘Don't bother your father now, Eldred,’ said Mildred automatically. ‘He's been working hard all day. He doesn't want a lot of questions.’
Eldred refrained from telling his mother that medical research provided evidence that a change of mental activity actually rested the brain. Tact was a lesson he was trying to learn. Instead he said, ‘Do you ever wish you had taken up some other kind of job, Dad? Like, say, writing books? Or science?’
Edgar pulled himself to his feet. ‘My job's as good as anybody's,’ he said. 'Books and science are no good when someone's house burns down, are they?’
‘So,’ said Eldred cautiously, ‘you feel more needed as an insurance salesman than you would as a scientist?’
‘Feelings have got nothing to do with it,’ said Edgar irritably. ‘It's facts I'm talking about. You stick to facts, son.’
‘You've gone and upset your father now,’ said Mildred, as Edgar took his tea into the lounge-diner.
‘Yes, I can see that,’ said Eldred. He went back to his room, tore up the pages of carefully copied information about adult education courses and wrapped the pieces in an old newspaper before putting them into the bin. He stayed in his room until called to join his parents in front of The Paul Daniels Magic Show. He was learning.
Genius Page 3
