by Helen Dewitt
He said: You’ve got to understand. If it didn’t go up the chances were nothing like that ever would go up ever. I don’t just mean in 10 or 20 years but in the whole lifetime of the species. The resources would be gone and there would never be another chance to find these things out for the next 10,000 or 20,000 or however many hundreds of thousands of years there are people around to want to know.
He walked up and down. He said: It’s not something I did lightly but I could see she thought I should—Anyway I’m glad she found some way around it.
He put a hand on my shoulder and smiled.
He said: If she doesn’t know you’re here that makes things easier. I’m sure she had her reasons but you can’t go on this way, you really must mix with people your own age. I’ll get you an application form for Winchester; send it in and give me as a reference; you don’t have to tell her you’ve seen me, just wait till you’ve got the scholarship and present it as a fait accompli.
I said: How do you know I’ll get a scholarship?
He said: Why on earth shouldn’t you get a scholarship? Well if there’s a problem I expect I can drum up some sort of sponsorship but why should there be a problem?
I said: But isn’t there a waiting list or something?
He said: I daresay there may be but it’s completely beside the point. The fact that you think it could apply to you is, if I may say so, the best proof you could give that you don’t understand the first thing about the system. Look at it from the point of view of the school. A boy comes to them with a reference from a Nobel Laureate who says this could be the next Newton, and that of all the schools in the country theirs is the one he thinks could best foster these extraordinary talents. Not only do they have before them the long-term prospect of a guaranteed genius as a future alumnus of the school; in the short term they can count on someone who has not only won the Nobel Prize but has also appeared on TV to add lustre to really big school events. I could get you into any school in the country; if there’s one you think you’d like better by all means let me know, I don’t want to ride over you roughshod—I’ve simply picked one I think it wouldn’t drive you insane.
I tried to get excited about going to a school at the age of 12, but compared to going to Cambridge it did not seem a very interesting thing to do. I said: But what if I’ve already done everything?
He said: You’ll probably find you haven’t and anyway it won’t hurt to consolidate. Besides, it won’t hurt you to branch out. People expect scientists to be well-rounded; it won’t hurt you to put in some time on the humanities. You can pick up a language or two—that should stand you in good stead.
I tried to imagine explaining to Sibylla that I had won a scholarship to Winchester. I tried to imagine Sib not asking who had provided a reference. I tried to imagine Sib believing that Winchester had been impressed by a reference from my teacher at Bermondsey Boys Junior Judo.
He must have thought I didn’t like the idea of studying languages, because he said: I know how you feel, when you start out there’s just so much to know you can’t stand wasting time. But it can’t hurt to keep your options open at this stage. You can get some experience on the practical side—have you ever even been in a lab? No, I thought not.
I tried to imagine explaining to Sorabji that I was not his son in the genetic sense of the word.
Sorabji kept pacing up and down talking about the school. His eyes were flashing; he waved his hands; gradually he made it sound more and more attractive. It was not as exciting as going to the North Pole or galloping across the Mongolian steppe, but it seemed to be something that could definitely happen. He talked about the teachers at the school; he talked about boys at the school who would be friends for life. He seemed so happy and excited now that there was something he could do. I was beginning to think if we fought with real swords I would kill him; I couldn’t tell him I wasn’t his son because it was true.
Besides, why shouldn’t I go to the school?
I thought: What if there was some way to do it?
If he was right then I really could do it. I could get a scholarship and go to the school and if he ever found out about the trick it would be too late. They would not take the scholarship away just because he said to; they wouldn’t take it away if he said he only gave me the reference because he thought I was his son, and anyway how could he say that was why he gave me the reference? Sibylla would have more disposable income if I went; she could buy Schürer’s History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, the brilliant four-volume update by Vermes and Millar which no home should be without. If I could persuade a Nobel Laureate that I was his longlost son surely I could persuade my own mother that I had got a scholarship to Winchester.
I thought: Why can’t I do that?
If it didn’t work out I could always go to Cambridge at 13 instead. It might work out. At least it would be better than another winter on the Circle Line.
He was looking at me sympathetically.
I said: I don’t know.
I thought: Why wouldn’t it be right not to tell him? Sibylla would be happy. He’d be happy. He’s obviously been going around for years feeling guilty because there was nothing he could do, and now there’s something he can do. What’s wrong with letting him think there’s something he can do?
The phone rang.
He gave me a sort of rueful is-there-no-end-to-it smile. He said: I won’t be a moment.
He went to the desk and picked up the phone. He said: Sorabji!
He said: Yes, what seems to be the problem?
There was a long pause.
He said: I couldn’t agree with you more, Roy, but what do you imagine I can do about it? I’m not even on the committee—
There was another pause.
He said: I’d be only too delighted to help if there were anything I could usefully do, but I really don’t see any way round it—
There was another pause.
He said: That’s a very interesting suggestion.
He said: It would certainly be unorthodox, but that’s not to say—
He said: Look, Roy, could I call you tomorrow? I’m in the middle of something right now. I don’t want to raise false hopes, but let’s not rule out any possibilities.
He said: Good. Yes. Thanks for calling.
I kept looking at him. I couldn’t work out what was going on. I couldn’t work out what had been going on with Dr. Miller, and I couldn’t work out what had been going on with the Australian astronomer; I couldn’t even really work out what was going on with his three children and the pages of problems. All the relevant evidence did not seem to be available; I could not see any way of getting all the relevant evidence. Based on the evidence available, the last person I would ask for further relevant evidence was Sorabji.
I thought that if I let him do something I would have to be his son. I wouldn’t have guessed, from the TV show, that if you went to him in a crisis he’d start interrogating you on petroleum by-products—but was that the end of the world? I could avoid him in a crisis. The rest of the time he would probably take me up in a helicopter and teach me to climb a rope ladder, or take me flying across the Channel, or explain things that were so hard it helped to have them explained. There was obviously more to him than met the eye, but how much more? How much did it matter?
It seemed to me that things were easier in the days when I just had Val Peters to worry about. He had his faults. Mixing up DNA and RNA. Dabbling in sexual tourism. One could go on. But no one would ever blame me for having a father like that—he just came that way. Whereas—
I said: What was that about?
Sorabji looked astonished. He said: Curiosity killed the cat.
Then he smiled and shrugged. He said: Just some administrative kerfuffle. Somebody’s nose out of joint.
I knew I couldn’t do it. I thought: But why do I have to tell him?
I wanted to say I would send the application and then just not send it. It would be easy because once I lef
t he would never find me. If he talked to the woman he would find out that she had not had a child. If he didn’t talk to her then he would never know.
I knew I was going to have to tell him. I thought I’d better do it before I lost my nerve.
I said: You might not want to write me a reference
He said: What, because someone might suspect something? They won’t think anything of it. A brilliant, self-taught boy comes to my attention; I do what I can to put him in contact with the right sort of people—what could be more natural? There’s the resemblance, of course, but a lot of boys have their hair shorter than that—if you get yours cut before you go I don’t think anyone will notice.
I said: You might not want to write me a reference because I’m not really your son.
He said: What?
I said: I’m really not your son.
He frowned as if to say What?
I said: I made it up.
He said: You— He said: Don’t be absurd. I can understand your resentment but you can’t go around with a chip on your shoulder. You look exactly like me.
I said: My mother says you look like Robert Donat. Are you related?
He stared at me. He said: So you— He said: Might I ask why?
I explained about Seven Samurai.
I don’t know what he was expecting. He said: That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense.
I said I thought it made sense.
He looked down at the pages of Fourier analysis and spread them slightly on the table with his hand. Then he crumpled them up suddenly and dropped them in the bin. He said: So I have no son.
He said: Of course it would have been quite impossible for her, I should have seen that at once.
He looked at me.
I said: I’m sorry.
He said: Come here.
I stayed where I was. I said: I tried to tell you.
He said: It’s stupid, if you were going to make it up what was the point of telling me?
I said: Is it still natural to put me in contact with the right sort of people?
He looked at me. He didn’t say anything. His face was quite cold and expressionless, as if something was calculating behind it.
He said at last in an expressionless voice: You have a piece of information which you shouldn’t have. You may think that piece of information is dangerous to me.
He said: I would advise you to be careful what you say. I think you will find if you try to use it that it will prove extremely dangerous to you.
I said I wasn’t planning to use it and that I had tried to stop him. I thought that there had to be something I could say. He had been so excited about the Fourier analysis before; I couldn’t see why it made such a difference if the person who had done it did not happen to share 50% of his genes. I sensed that this was not the moment to make this point. I said I just wanted— I said my own father tended to get the special and general theories of relativity confused.
Sorabji just looked at me.
I said I didn’t really know him, it was more of a genetic relationship, and I just thought—
He just looked at me. I thought he was probably not really listening to me; he was probably just thinking that there was nothing he could do.
I said: You don’t know what would have happened. Maybe it was the right thing to do. She could have gone insane. Maybe you saved her life. Just because you said the wrong thing doesn’t mean you were wrong about—
I didn’t even see his arm move. He got me on the side of the head with his open hand, knocking me across the room to the floor. I rolled out of the fall back onto my feet but he was already there. He hit me on the other side of my head and knocked me to the floor again. He was there before I could get up this time, but I tripped him and he fell heavily. Mainly on me.
I couldn’t move because he was lying on top of me. A clock which I hadn’t noticed was ticking in the room. It kept ticking. Nothing happened. He was panting as if he’d been in a worse fight; his eyes were glittering in his head. I didn’t know what he would do.
There was a knock at the door, and his wife said: George?
He said: I’ll just be two seconds, darling.
I could hear her footsteps retreating down the hall. I realised I could have shouted something. His eyes were still glittering—
The clock was still ticking.
Suddenly he let go of me and leapt lightly to his feet. I scrambled away across the room but he didn’t come after me. He was standing by the desk with his hands in his pockets. He smiled at me and said pleasantly and conversationally:
I’m sorry, that was completely out of line. I’m sorry I got carried away. My temper flares up and then it’s over, I never hold a grudge.
My head was still ringing.
His hair had fallen into his face; his eyes were sparkling. He looked like Robert Donat in The 39 Steps; he looked the way he’d looked earlier, when he’d talked about the atom and Fourier analysis.
He said: Of course you should be put in touch with the right people.
I said: So I could still go into astronomy?
He laughed. He said: I’d hate to think I’d put you off!
He raised an eyebrow in a sort of quizzical, self-mocking way. His eyes were sparkling with amusement, as if there was nothing calculating behind them.
I just hoped I wasn’t going to have a black eye.
I said: Should I still apply to Winchester? Do you still want to give me a reference?
He was still smiling. He said: Yes, you should certainly apply.
He smiled and said: Be sure to mention my name.
3
A good samurai will parry the blow
Robert Donat was on again Thursday at 9:00. Sib watched enthralled. I was reading Scientific American.
There was an article about a man who had done research in Antarctica and was about to go back. There was an article by a man who had done pioneering work on the solar neutrino problem. I would read a paragraph or two and then turn to another page.
Sometimes I thought about the girls who were not my sisters, and sometimes I thought about Dr. Miller, but most of the time I thought of the Nobel Prize-winning Robert Donat lookalike turning through the pages of Fourier analysis, looking at me with flashing eyes, telling me I was brilliant and I was exactly the way he was at that age. I couldn’t tell from the articles in Scientific American whether their authors thought Sesame Street was not the right level; I couldn’t tell whether they had an ill-timed obsession with petroleum by-products; but I didn’t have to read even a paragraph to know I’d never find another one like Sorabji.
I put down Scientific American and picked up my book on aerodynamics. Sometimes I thought I understood it and sometimes it was hard to follow, and when it was hard to follow it wasn’t easy to tell what would help; the thing that would really help would be to be able to ask someone who didn’t sum up the mathematics required as 18th 19th century stuff. Any idiot can learn a language, all you have to do is keep going and sooner or later it all makes sense, but with mathematics you have to understand one thing to understand another, and you can’t always tell what the first thing is that you have to understand. And even then either you see it or you don’t. You can waste a lot of time trying to work out what you need to know, and a lot more time just trying to see it.
If I hadn’t said anything to Sorabji I wouldn’t ever have had to waste time that way ever again. In the first place I would have gone to Winchester at the age of 12, and in the second place whenever I had a question I could have asked someone who not only knew the answer but couldn’t do enough for his longlost son. And if I’d just seen Sorabji on another night—if I’d just spent one more day on the periodic table—I wouldn’t have seen Dr. Miller, and I wouldn’t have heard any phone calls, and I wouldn’t have known there was anything to see or hear. I could have stopped wasting time and been the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. Instead I was going to have to do everything myself.
I had anot
her look at the Kutta-Joukowski theorem. It wasn’t so much that I knew for a fact that I wanted to win a Nobel Prize. It’s just that if you’re not going to win a Nobel Prize you might as well do something else worth doing with the time, such as going up the Amazon or down the Andes. If you can’t go down the Andes you might as well do something else worth doing, such as having a shot at a Nobel Prize. Whereas this was just stupid.
I put down my book on aerodynamics.
Sorabji looked out from the screen with flashing eyes.
I thought suddenly that it was stupid to be so sentimental.
What we needed was not a hero to worship but money.
If we had money we could go anywhere. Give us the money and we would be the heroes.
In the morning I decided to go the library. A day one way or the other was not going to have a significant effect on my chances of either winning a Nobel Prize or going down the Amazon. My chances of earning a lot of money soon were slim to non-existent. I thought I would read one of my old favourites just for fun.
Journey into Danger! was out so I got Half Mile Down instead.
I took the book to read on the Circle Line, and I turned to the first descent in the bathysphere before starting the whole book again.
It was of an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world, and it excited our optic nerves in a most confusing manner. We kept thinking and calling it brilliant, and again and again I picked up a book to read the type, only to find that I could not tell the difference between a blank page and a coloured plate. I brought all my logic to bear, I put out of mind the excitement of our position in watery space and tried to think sanely of comparative colour, and I failed utterly. I flashed on the search-light, which seemed the yellowest thing I have ever seen, and let it soak into my eyes, yet the moment it was switched off, it was like the long vanished sunlight—it was as though it had never been—and the blueness of the blue, both outside and inside our sphere, seemed to pass materially through the eye into our very beings. This is all very unscientific; quite worthy of being jeered at by optician or physicist; but there it was … I think we both experienced a wholly new kind of mental reception of colour impression.
