The Last Samurai

If anyone else had written it, I would have written back to point out that the whole article talked as if selection at the level of genes, individuals and species were the same thing and that he needed to clear up this confusion even if he was arguing against Dawkins as the article claimed to, and I would have pointed out that he hadn’t answered any of my arguments. I still didn’t want to annoy, however, so I let it pass. The crucial thing was that he had put his address at the top of the page. I looked the street up in the A-Z, and it was not far from the Circle Line.

5

For David, with best wishes

I took the Circle Line and I went to my father’s house and stood outside.

I knew I had two half-brothers and a half-sister, but I was pretty sure they lived with their mother. At about 10:30 a woman came out of the house. She got in a car and drove off.

I wasn’t sure whether to go up to the door. I didn’t know what I’d say—I thought I’d blurt out something stupid. I crossed the street and looked at the windows. I couldn’t see any movement. At about 11:00 I saw a face.

At 11:30 the door opened again and a man came out and down the steps. He looked older than I’d imagined him; the pictures I’d seen must have been taken years ago. He was less handsome than I’d imagined, even after the pictures; I’d forgotten that she had been rather drunk by the time she kissed him.

He reached the street and turned right. At the corner he turned right again.

I went back again the next day. I had in my backpack the introduction to aerodynamics, a book on calculus for engineers, the Penguin translation of Njal’s Saga, Brennunjalssaga, Gordon’s Introduction to Old Norse and The Count of Monte Cristo in case I got bored, plus four peanut butter and jam sandwiches and a tangerine. There was a bus stop with a low wall beside it across the street from his house. I sat watching the house, reading Njal’s Saga and flipping back and forth between the Icelandic and the Penguin.

Njal and his sons were at a court called the Althing. Skarp-Hedin, one of Njal’s sons, had killed a priest. I did not really understand how the court worked. Njal’s son-in-law Asgrim and the Njalssons went from booth to booth looking for support. First they went to Gizurr’s booth and then they went to the Olfus booth to see Skapti Thoroddson.

‘Lát heyra at,’ segir Skapti.

‘Let us hear your errand,’ said Skapti.

‘Ek vil biðja ik liðsinnis,’ segir Ásgrímr, ‘at ú veitir mér lið ok mágum mínum.’

‘I need your help,’ said Asgrim, ‘for myself and my kinsmen.’

I had been working on Icelandic for three weeks so it wasn’t too bad. There were some things I couldn’t do without a dictionary. Nothing happened in the house.

‘Hitt hafða ek ætlat,’ segir Skapti, ‘at ekki skyldi koma vandræði yður í híbýli mín.’

‘I have no intention,’ said Skapti, ‘of letting your troubles into my house.’

Ásgrímr segir: ‘Illa er slíkt mælt, at verða mnnum á sízt at liði, er mest liggr við.’

Asgrim said, ‘These are mean words; you are of least use when the need is greatest.’

The postman came to the house with the second post. The woman came to the door to take it; there seemed to be a lot of letters. I ate a peanut butter sandwich.

‘Hverr er sá maðr,’ segir Skapti, ‘er fjórir menn ganga fyrir, mikill maðr ok flleitr, ógæfusamligr, harðligr ok trllsligr?’

‘Who is that man,’ said Skapti, ‘the fifth in the line, that tall, fierce-looking, troll-like man with the pale, ill-starred look?’

Nothing happened in the house.

Hann segir: ‘Skarpheðinn heiti ek, ok hefir ú sét mik jafnan á ingi, en vera mun ek ví vitrari en ú, at ek arf eigi at spyrja, hvat ú heitir. ú heitir Skapti óroddsson, en fyrr kallaðir ú ik Burstakoll, á er ú hafðir drepit Ketil ór Eldu; gerðir ú ér á koll ok bart tjru í hfuð ér. Siðan keyptir ú at prælum, at rísta upp jarðarmen, ok skreitt ú ar undir um nóttina. Síðan fórt ú til órólfs Loptssonar á Eyrum, ok tók hann við ér ok bar ik út í mjlsekkum sínum.’

‘Skarp-Hedin is my name,’ he replied, ‘and you have often seen me here at the Althing. But I must he sharper than you, for I have no need to ask you your name. You are called Skapti Thoroddsson, but once you called yourself Bristle-Head, when you had just killed Ketil of Elda; that was the time you shaved your head and smeared it with tar, and bribed some slaves to cut you a strip of turf to cower under for the night. Later you fled to Thorolf Loptsson of Eyrar, who took you in and then smuggled you abroad in his flour sacks.’

Eptir at gengu eir Ásgrímr út.

With that they all left the booth.

Nothing happened in the house.

Skarpheðinn mælti: ‘Hvert skulu vér nú ganga?’

‘Where shall we go now?’ asked Skarp-Hedin.

‘Til búðar Snorra goða,’ segir Ásgrímr.

‘To Snorri the Priest’s booth,’ said Asgrim.

Njal’s Saga was a bit hard in places but not too hard. The aerodynamics was a real killer. I read a couple of pages but I wasn’t in the mood. Nothing happened in the house.

I went back to Njal’s Saga. Snorri said that their own lawsuits were going badly, but he promised not to take sides against the Njalssons or support their enemies. He said:

‘Hverr er sá maðr, er fjórir ganga fyrir, flleitr ok skarpleitr ok glottir við tnn ok hefir øxi reidda um xl?’

‘Who is that man, fifth in the line, the pale, sharp-featured man with a grin on his face and an axe on his shoulder?’

‘Heðinn heiti ek,’ segir hann, ‘en sumir kalla mik Skarpheðinn llu nafni, eða hvat vilt ú fleira til mín tala?’

‘My name is Hedin,’ he replied, ‘but some call me Skarp-Hedin in full. Have you anything else to say to me?’

Snorri maelti: ‘at at mér, ykki maðr harðligr ok mikilfengligr, en ó get ek, at rotin sé nú ín en mesta gæfa, ok skamt get ek eptir innar æfi.’

‘I think you look very ruthless and formidable,’ said Snorri, ‘but my guess is that you have exhausted your store of good luck, and that you have not long to live.’

The Asgrimssons went from booth to booth with mixed success and each time someone said there is just one thing I’d like to know, who is that ill-starred looking man the fifth in line and each time Skarp-Hedin said something insulting with predictable results. It was quite different from Homer or from Malory because it was very plain but I still rather liked it. There was a glossary in Gordon and some grammatical tips so it was not too bad on the whole.

I read a few more pages and then I read The Count of Monte Cristo for a couple of hours and went home.

I went back the next day and I read three pages of aerodynamics but I wasn’t in the mood. Then I read some more of Njal’s Saga.

At about 12:30 he passed by a window on the ground floor eating a sandwich. I had four peanut butter and jam sandwiches and two banana and Marmite sandwiches and a bag of crisps in my backpack. I ate one of the sandwiches and then read The Count of Monte Cristo. Nothing else happened in the house.

I let two days go by. It was raining hard and cold. Then the weather cleared. I went back to sit on the wall. I had three peanut butter and jam sandwiches, one peanut butter and honey sandwich and a bottle of Ribena.

It started to rain again, so I walked back to the Circle Line and spent the rest of the day reading The Count of Monte Cristo. I could have worked on aerodynamics but I wasn’t in the mood.

Third week of May, typical English cold snap. 283 degrees above absolute zero. I went to the house just to look at it. I saw him talking to the woman in an upstairs room but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I made myself sit reading on the wall just in case I ever had to go to the North Pole.

My teeth started chattering. Magnusson seemed to have used a different text from the one Sibylla had given me; I thought I could work out the extra bits. Then I remembered I wasn’t going to be going to the North Pole. There was nothing going on in the house. I went back to the Circle Line and ate my sandwiches.

I let four days go by and then I had to go back. I sat on the wall and made myself read a whole chapter on aerodynamics just to prove I could still do it. I ate a peanut butter sandwich. I was still reading Njal’s Saga. I hadn’t worked on it very much. It was stupid to stand here. I couldn’t really work, either I should do something or I should go somewhere else where I could work. It would be stupid to go away after standing outside at a bus stop for a week.

Then I knew what I would do.

I would ask my father for an autograph.

I came back the next day, and I took with me a paperback copy of Stout Cortez (the book with the Balinese woman), which I had bought at an Oxfam shop for 50p. I also had Brennu-njalssaga, Magnusson, Gordon, the book on Laplace transforms and a book on edible insects which the library was selling off for 10p. I could spend the rest of the day on the Circle Line. I wasn’t expecting this to take long; it was just something I had to do.

I reached the house at 10:00. A window was open on the ground floor; people were talking quietly. I stood by the wall listening.

Are you sure you don’t want to come? You hardly ever get to see them.

It’s not really my kind of thing. It won’t help if I’m bored out of my skull, and if we do something else they’ll hate me. The only question is, are you sure you don’t mind?

It’s not that I mind, I just thought you’d like to spend some time with them.

I would, obviously, but they’ve got school all week. They’ve got their own ideas about how they spend the weekend. It’s not the end of the world.

A car drew up outside the house and three children got out.

The car drove off.

The children looked up at the house.

Well, come on, said one.

They headed up the walk. The door opened. There was some sort of discussion just inside it. The children came back down the steps with the woman I’d seen before. The man stood in the doorway.

We’ll go to Planet Hollywood when you get back, he said.

They got into a car and drove off. He closed the door.

I was tired of walking up and down the street and watching that door. I didn’t want to walk away again. I was tired of wondering whether it was a bad time. I was tired of wondering whether it would be better to interrupt him before he’d had a chance to start work.

I went to the door and rang the bell. I waited a minute. Then I counted a minute, and then I counted two minutes. I knocked on the door and counted another minute. If he didn’t come I would go away. I thought I’d annoy him if I kept knocking and ringing the bell. Two minutes went by. I turned and went down the steps.

A window shot up on the second floor.

Hang on, I’ll be down in a minute, he shouted.

I went back to the door.

A couple of minutes went by, and the door opened.

What can I do for you? he asked.

His hair was medium brown, with some grey; his forehead was quite deeply lined; there were grey hairs in the eyebrows, and the eyes under them were large and light, a little like a night animal’s. His voice was rather light and soft.

Can I help you? he asked.

I’ve come for the Christian Aid envelope, I found myself saying.

I don’t see it anywhere, he said, not looking. Anyway, we’re not Christians.

That’s OK, I said. I’m a Jewish atheist myself.

All right, I’ll ask, he said smiling now. If you’re a Jewish atheist what are you doing collecting for Christian Aid?

My mother makes me, I said.

But if you’re Jewish, doesn’t your mother have to be Jewish too? he asked.

She is, I said. That’s why she won’t let me steal from Jewish charities.

It worked like a charm. He laughed helplessly. He said: Shouldn’t you save this for Comic Relief?

I said: A red nose is funny? I know, I know, they only laugh when it hurts.

He said: Why do I get the feeling you’re not here for Christian Aid?

I said: I wanted an autograph, but you have to break these things gradually.

He said: You want an autograph? Really? How old are you?

I said: Why, is your signature 15-certificate?

He said: Well, there may be a few people who think my name is a dirty word, but no. You seem a little young, though. Or is this another scam? Are you going to flog it?

I said: Could I get a lot of money for it?

And he said quite confidently: I think you’ll have to wait a while.

I said: Well, I don’t mind. I’ve got a book with me.

I took off my backpack.

He said: Is it a first edition?

I said: I don’t think so. It’s a paperback.

He said: Then it won’t be worth a lot of money.

I said: Well, I guess I’ll just have to keep it.

He said: I guess you will. Come inside and I’ll sign it for you.

I followed him down a corridor to a kitchen at the back of the house. He asked whether I would like anything. I said an orange juice.

He poured two and handed me one. I handed him the book.

He said:

It’s always strange when they come back to you. It’s like sending children out into the world with no idea where they’ll end up. Look at this. Third printing, 1986. 1986! It could have been around the world. Some clapped-out hippy in Kathmandu could have carried it on a trek; passed it to a mate on his way to Australia; a tourist might have picked it up in an airport before meeting one of those cruise ships that go to the Antarctic. What shall I put?

I felt cold. I could say To Ludo, with love from Dad. In ten seconds there would not be an object in the room that was not there now, and yet everything would be different.

He had a pen in his hand and had been through this all before.

The hand that had been now here now there held the pen. His mouth was slightly pursed. He was wearing a blue shirt and brown corduroys.

He said: What’s your name?

David.

Is To David with best wishes all right? he asked.

I nodded.

He scrawled something in the book and handed it back.

I wondered whether I would throw up.

He asked me something about school.

I said I didn’t go to school.

He asked me about that.

I said something about that.

He said something else. He was being pleasant. There seemed to be a lot of grey in his hair; that wouldn’t have been there at the time of the Medley.

I said: Can I see where you work?

He said: Sure. He sounded surprised and pleased.

I followed him up to the top of the house. This was not the same house, but they had gone to his study for the Medley, so some of the books and things would probably be here. I don’t know why I had to see this but I had to see it.

He had the whole top of the house for a study. He showed me his computer. He said he used to have a lot of games on it but he had to take them off because he wasted too much time playing games. He gave me an engaging boyish grin. He showed me his database on different countries. He showed me boxes of record cards for different books.

On a bookshelf I saw 10 books by the author of the magazine article Sibylla had shown me. I walked over and took one off the shelf. It was signed. I said:

Are they all signed?

He said:

I’m a big fan.

He said:

I think he is one of the greatest writers in English this century.

I did not laugh hysterically. I said:

My mother says I will be able to appreciate him when I am older.

He said:

What other books do you like?

I was about to say Other?

I said:

Do you mean in English?

He said:

In anything.

I said:

I like Kon Tiki.

He said:

Fair enough.

I said I liked Amundsen and Scott and I liked King Solomon’s Mines and I liked everything by Dumas and I liked The Bad Seed and The Hound of the Baskervilles and I liked The Name of the Rose but the Italian was rather difficult.

I said:

I like Malory a lot. I like the Odyssey. I read the Iliad a long time ago but I was too young to appreciate it. I’m reading Njal’s Saga right now. My favourite part is where they go around the booths asking for help and Skarp-Hedin insults everybody.

He had been making a thing of being wide-eyed and open mouthed. He said humorously: I don’t think I’ve come across it.

I said: Do you want to see my Penguin translation? I’ve got it with me.

He said: Sure.

I opened my backpack and took out the Penguin translation by Magnus Magnusson. The Icelandic dictionary is about £140 & I had told Sibylla we could not afford it.

I opened it to the page. I said: It’s only a couple of pages, and I handed it to him.

He turned the pages, chuckling as he read. At last he handed it back to me.

You’re right, it’s a scream, he said. I’ll have to get a copy. Thanks.

I said: The translation isn’t very much like the Icelandic though. You can’t really imagine a Viking warrior saying don’t interfere in the conversation. The Icelandic is vil ek nú biðja ik, Skarpheðinn! at pú létir ekki til pín taka um mál várt. Though of course the Icelandic words don’t really have the same register as English words of Anglo-Saxon derivation because they’re not in opposition to a register of Latinate vocabulary.

He said: You know Icelandic?

I said: No, I’ve only just started. That’s why I need the Penguin.

He said: Isn’t that cheating?

I said: It’s harder than using a dictionary.

He said: Then why don’t you use a dictionary?

I said: It costs £140.

He said: £140!

I said: Well it stands to reason there’s not much of a market for it. People only study it at university if at all; the only way you can get anything in Icelandic is to order it specially from Iceland; who’s going to buy the dictionary? If there was a groundswell of interest in the population at large maybe the price would come down, or at least maybe libraries would get a copy, but obviously people aren’t going to develop an interest in something they’ve never heard of.

He said: Well how did you develop an interest in it?

I said: I read some of the Penguin translations when I was younger. I said: The interesting thing is that according to Hainsworth’s classic article on Homer & the epic cycle the mark of Homer’s superiority to the cycle is supposed to be richness and expansiveness, & yet it seems as though bareness is the thing that is good in the Icelandic saga. You could say Well, Schoenberg is obviously wrong to dismiss the Japanese print as primitive and superficial, why is he wrong?

He was giving me another humorous wide-eyed look. He said:

Now I believe you read my book.

I did not know what to say.

I said:

I’ve read all your books.

And he said: Thanks.

He said: I mean that. That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

I thought: I can’t stand this.

I thought of the three Prisoners of Fate. I could walk out any time. I wanted to walk out and I wanted to drop hints. I wanted to mention the Rosetta Stone and watch realisation dawn. I don’t know what I was going to say.

I was just about to say something when I saw Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria on a shelf. I exclaimed artlessly:

Oh, you’ve got Ptolemaic Alexandria!

He said:

I shouldn’t really have bought it but I couldn’t resist.

I didn’t ask where he’d heard of it. Somebody had obviously told him it was a superb work of scholarship which no home should be without.

I said:

Well, it’s a brilliant book.

He said:

Not that it’s much use to me. Did you know there was a Greek tragedy about God and Moses? It’s got it at the back but it’s all in Greek.

I said:

Would you like me to read some for you?

He said:

Oh—

and he said

Well, why not?

I got Volume II off the shelf and I started reading where God is saying Stretch out thy rod in iambic trimeters and I translated as I went along and after about three lines I could see he was looking bored and amazed.

I said:

Well, you get the drift.

He said:

How old are you?

I said I was 11. I said there was nothing very difficult about the passage and anyone who had studied the language for a few months would be able to read it and I had known it for years.

He said: Christ.

I said it was not such a big deal and that J. S. Mill had started Greek at the age of 3.

He said: How old were you when you started?

I said: 4.

He said: Christ.

Then he said:

Sorry, I don’t mean to make you self-conscious, it’s just that I’ve got kids of my own.

I was looking down at Ptolemaic Alexandria thinking I’ve got to say something. I said What did he try to teach them and he said nothing in a formal way but the point was they had watched Sesame Street and it was about the right level. There was a piece of paper at the front of the book. I said: What’s this?

He said: Don’t you recognise it?

and I thought: So he knows

and I thought: How did he know?

I said: Recognise it?

He said: It’s from the Iliad. I thought you’d recognise it. Somebody gave it to me.

I said: Oh, of course.

I said: Have you read it then?

He said: I keep meaning to get around to it.

He said: I think subconsciously it reminds me of Latin.

I said: Of Latin?

He said: I took a year at school and I spent most of it smoking behind the bike shed.

I said I had heard the things worth reading in Latin were things you couldn’t appreciate until you were 15 so maybe it was just the texts.

He said: I don’t think we made it as far as texts, I just remember on the first day the teacher writing some noun on the board with nominative genitive bla bla bla. It all seemed so fucking pointless. I mean, look at the Romance languages. As far as I know every single one got rid of the case endings because the people actually speaking the language thought they were a complete waste of time. I kept thinking why do I have to sit here learning this evolutionary failure of a language?

He was grinning broadly as he said it and he said he thought whatever it was that had made him get out of the class and smoke behind the bike shed instead of sitting in the class learning case endings was probably the thing that had helped most to make him successful if you could call it success.

I was looking at a piece of paper that ended hope you like it Must dash S[illegible scrawl].

I thought: My father is Val Peters.

He said: But I really should read it one of these days, she obviously went to a lot of trouble.

He said: I’m kind of glad mine weren’t put under any pressure to start early, they grow up so fast and they spend so much time in school anyway, but I think it’s amazing what you’ve done I really do and it really does mean a lot that you like my books, I wasn’t just saying that, because at the end of the day it’s not just how many people buy them.

I thought I should say something.

He said: Look, let me give you something else, something that’ll be worth something some day. I mean I don’t know what you think, but maybe you’d like one of these, it’s not as if I’m ever going to read them, they get translated into about 17 languages and you don’t necessarily do signings every time so if I signed one it would be unique,

and he went to another bookcase that was full of books and he said why didn’t I take one of his books in Czech or Finnish or something and he would sign it and it would be unique.

I said You don’t have to do that and he said No I insist, and he asked me which language I would like and I said Well how about Finnish?

He said Don’t tell me you know Finnish and I said Do you want me to lie about something like that and he said Gordon Bennett.

He said Just out of curiosity is there any language here you don’t know? I looked at the books and I said No but there are a lot I don’t know very well and he said Sorry I asked and gave me another humorous look.

He said:

Why don’t I make this one more personal, is there something you’d like me to say?

I thought: I’ve got to say something. I thought: Am I just going to go away without saying anything? I said: What did you have in mind?

He said: How about, for David, I promise never to decrease the market value of this book by signing another Finnish edition, your friend in Mammon Val Peters? He was grinning at me and holding a pen.

I said: Say whatever you want.

He said: I’d like to say something more personal but everything you think of saying always sounds so wet.

I said I probably wouldn’t sell it anyway so it didn’t have to be unique.

He said: Well in that case why don’t I just put For David with best wishes Val but you’ll know it came from the heart. He did not really say this with another humorous smile because he was smiling humorously throughout. I said Fine, thanks, and he scrawled something in the book and handed it over.

It was not hard to imagine a world where my body stood in this room with something else inside it. If I said something he would see that other world. I thought: Well am I going to go away?

I said:

Do you ever bury your books?

He said: What?

I said: You could bury your books in a plastic bag a few metres down, one on each continent. Then if there was a cataclysm they’d be preserved for posterity. They could dig them up again.

He said he hadn’t tried it.

I said: What they should really do is bury a book in the foundation of each house. Sealed in plastic. It would help archaeologists in a millennium or so.

He smiled. He said: I hate to throw you out, but I’m gonna have to throw you out. I’ve got work to do.

I thought again that I could say something and everything would be different, and seeing his casual slightly complimented look I wanted to say it.

Then I thought:

If we fought with real swords I would kill him.

I thought:

I can’t say I’m his son, because it’s true.

v

He obviously thinks he’s a samurai

1

A good samurai will parry the blow

The night I met him I went outside to sleep on the ground. It was stupid, I wasn’t going anywhere. I rolled up my sleeping bag and brought it inside. I went upstairs and slept on the mattress, covered in blankets.

I could sleep outside if I had to.

I finished Njal’s Saga. I had planned to go back to Inuit when I had finished but now there did not seem to be any immediate point so I decided to go on with aerodynamics.

I put the book on aerodynamics in my backpack as well as the two Schaum Outlines in case I needed Laplace transforms or Fourier analysis. I went to the National Gallery and sat on a bench in front of The Virgin & Child Enthroned between a Soldier Saint and St. John the Baptist.

4.9 Bound Vortex

It was shown in the last section that the force on a body is determined entirely by the circulation around it and by the free stream velocity.

Now I believe you read my book, said my father.

In an identical manner, it can be shown that the force on a vortex that is stationary relative to a uniform flow is given by the Kutta-Joukowski law.

Thanks, said my father. I mean that. That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

The vortex that represents the circulation around the body

Thanks, said my father. I mean that.

departs in its characteristics from that of a vortex in the external flow

Thanks, said my father.

in that it does not remain attached to the same fluid particles

I mean that, said my father. That’s the nicest thing

I got up and went to the main wing and sat in front of A Young Man Holding a Skull by Frans Hals. My father didn’t say anything. I opened Kuethe & Chow on Foundations of Aerodynamics to page 85.

4.10 Kutta Condition

The Kutta-Joukowski theorem states that the force experienced by a body in a uniform stream is equal to the product of the fluid density, stream velocity, and circulation and has a direction perpendicular to the stream velocity.

I think you’re going to have to wait a while, said my father.

The Kutta-Joukowski theorem states that the force experienced by a body in a uniform stream is equal to the product of the fluid density, stream velocity, and circulation and has a direction perpendicular to the stream velocity.

I think he’s one of the greatest writers this century, said my father.

The Kutta-Joukowski theorem states that the force experienced by a body in a uniform stream

Thanks, said my father.

I stood up and left the room. I went this time to Room 34, and I took the corner seat by Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. Still no sign of Polyphemus. I couldn’t really remember the Kutta-Joukowski theorem but I wasn’t going back to it again. I opened the book to page 86 and I started reading down the page very fast

The above discussion applies to an inviscid flow, but in a viscous fluid (however small the viscosity), the circulation is fixed by the imposition of an empirical observation. Experiments show that when a body with a sharp trailing edge is set in motion, the action of the fluid viscosity causes the flow over the upper and lower surfaces to merge smoothly at the trailing edge; this circumstance, which fixes the magnitude of the circulation around the body, is termed the Kutta condition, which may be stated as follows: A body with a sharp trailing edge in motion through a fluid creates about itself a circulation of sufficient strength to hold the rear stagnation point at the trailing edge.

The flow around an airfoil at an angle of attack in an inviscid flow develops no circulation and the rear stagnation point occurs Thanks Sure Now I believe you read my book. Isn’t that cheating? Why don’t you use a dictionary?

It wasn’t all that easy to understand the book anyway, and with my father interrupting all the time it was practically impossible; what if he never stopped? What was it going to be like hearing it for 80 years? I thought of giving up and going home. Then I thought of Sibylla, jumping up and sitting down, jumping up to walk here and there, jumping up to read this book and that book a paragraph a sentence a word at a time.

I got up again, and I started walking quickly through the gallery, past the Fragonards, past the Caravaggios, past a room of Rembrandts and a room of followers of Rembrandt, looking for one of the boring little rooms people never visit to hide from him there. What about this? Still Life with Drinking Horn of the Saint Sebastian Archer’s Guild, Lobster and Glasses, not to mention a half-peeled lemon—but beside it was a Vanitas by Jan Jansz Tech, a picture of a skull, an hourglass, a silk scarf, a drawing & other precious things, meant according to the caption to remind the viewer of the absurdity of human ambition. This was exactly the type of thing my father liked to comment on in philosophical moments, generally in the presence of a crumbling temple or tomb, what about the next room? Here was Cuyp’s large painting, A Distant View of Dordrecht with a Milkmaid and Four Cows, and his small painting, A Distant View of Dordrecht with a Sleeping Herdsman and Five Cows—no one would look for me here.

I made myself read to the end of the chapter. I had to read every paragraph about eight times but at last I had finished it. I reread the Kutta-Joukowski Theorem five or six times. I thought of reading another chapter, but he kept saying Thanks, & instead I started flipping through the book, stopping at one page or another, looking for something so fascinating I wouldn’t hear him any more. Mach Waves — incompressible flows—Tollmien-Schlichting instability— Flight of small insects—Control and Maneuvering in Bird Flight—

‘My observation of the flight of buzzards leads me to believe that they regain their lateral balance, when partly overturned by a gust of wind, by a torsion of the tips of the wings …’ This passage is from Wilbur Wright’s first letter to Octave Chanute, dated 13 May 1900. It describes the crucial observation that led the Wright brothers to the invention of the aileron and thus to the achievement of lateral control and in turn to man’s first powered flight.

Now I believe you read my book, said my father. I really mean that I’m not just saying that said my father. It means a lot said my father. At the end of the day it’s not just how many buy them said my father. I’ve got kids of my own said my father Sesame Street was about the right level said my father Now I believe you read my book said my father Now I believe you read my book.

There was no point in staying so I left. There is a painting over the main stairs by Lord Leighton of Cimabue’s Celebrated Image of the Virgin Borne in Procession; for years I had looked at this painting every time I left, wondering what was wrong with it.

When I got home Sibylla was watching Seven Samurai. She couldn’t have been watching long; the farmers had only just left the village. Tough-looking samurai were striding through the streets of a large town; you’d have to have a lot of nerve to ask one to fight for three meals a day.

I sat on the sofa beside her. Fair enough, said my father.

Kambei was handing a razor to the priest with a bow. He sat by the river and splashed water on his head; the priest began to shave off his hair.

Fair enough, said my father.

Kambei put on the clothes which the priest had brought. He met the eyes of the shiftless Mifune with a face of stone. I think you’re going to have to wait a while, said my father.

Kambei took the two rice cakes and walked to the barn. The thief shrieked inside. I am only a priest, said Kambei. I won’t arrest you. I won’t come in. I’ve brought food for the child. Thanks, said my father. I mean that. That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

I stood up and began walking around the room, looking for something I could do for an hour or even ten minutes without hearing his voice. I picked up my book on judo but after two lines I saw his face, and I started reading Ibn Khaldun and he said Now I believe you read my books.

Have you seen him yet? asked Sibylla. This was her idea of delicacy, to bring the thing out in the open rather than leave me to wonder what she knew & whether I should say anything.

I saw him, I said. I don’t know what you saw in him.

You know as much as I know, said Sib, delicately indicating that she knew for a fact that I’d also read through her papers.

I didn’t tell him, I said.

Selbstverständlich, said Sib. I never could. I kept thinking I should, but I just couldn’t. I’d read something he’d written, thinking he might have changed, and he did change, but only in the way that someone from the Tyrone Power school of acting would show maturity: mouth set, furrowed brow, this is someone thinking tough thoughts. He woke up a boy and went to bed—a man. I’m sorry to speak ill of your sperm donor, though. I’d better stop.

It’s all right, I said.

No, it’s not all right, said Sib. She turned off the video. It is shocking to stop in the middle, she said, still at least Kurosawa will never know.

It doesn’t matter, I said.

All right, said Sib. Just remember that you are perfect, whatever your father may be. It may be that other people need a sensible father more.

We’re not talking about an exhaustible resource, I said.

We’re talking about luck, said Sib. Why should you have all of it?

Was I complaining? I said.

Look at it from his point of view, said Sib. It’s hard for a man to be upstaged by his son.

I wasn’t complaining, I said.

Of course you weren’t, said Sib.

He said he had kids of his own, I said. He said they watched Sesame Street and it was about the right level.

At what age? said Sib.

He didn’t say.

Hmmm, said Sib.

She stood up and turned on the computer and picked up the Independent and sat down to read it.

Did I tell you I was reading Die Zeit? said Sib. I was reading Die Zeit and I came across this lovely line, Es regnete ununterbrochen. It rained uninterruptedly. It sounded so lovely in the German. Es regnete ununterbrochen. Es regnete ununterbrochen. I shall think of it whenever it rains.

Did you ever think of having an abortion? I said.

I did, said Sib, but it was very late and I had to have counselling, they counselled adoption & I said Yes but how could I be sure your adoptive parents would teach you how to leave life if you did not care for it & they said What and I said—well you know I said what any rational person would say and we had an unprofitable discussion & she said

Oh look! Hugh Carey is back in England.

I said: Who?

Sibylla said: He was the best friend of Raymond Decker.

I said: Who?

Sibylla: You’ve never heard of Raymond Decker!

And then: But then who has?

She said that Carey was an explorer and Decker, she did not know what Decker was doing these days but in the early 60s they had been legendary classicists at Oxford. A pirate copy of Carey’s translation of Wee sleekit cow’rin’ tim’rous beastie into Greek for the verse paper in the Ireland was passed from hand to hand, & Decker had won the Chancellor’s Latin with an amazing translation of Johnson on Pope, not said Sibylla the bit where he says It is a very pretty poem Mr. Pope but it is not Homer which was actually Bentley anyway now I think of it but the bit that goes

… the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker’s mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities.

Sib explained that this though Latinate was a diabolical piece to put into Latin because all the abstract nouns would have to be turned into clauses, she digressed to explain that Lytton Strachey on Johnson on the Poets, on the other hand, was the type of thing that was very easy to turn into Latin, Strachey she said for example said

Johnson’s aesthetic judgements are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them—except one: they are never right. That is an unfortunate deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up for it, and that his wit has saved all

the Latin she said practically wrote itself she seemed on the point of digressing to some other point of similar interest so before she could discuss somebody else on Strachey on Johnson and how they might easily be translated into Phoenician or Linear B or Hittite I said quickly

But who ARE these people?

Hugh Carey and Raymond Decker met when HC was 15 and RD was 19. HC was from Edinburgh. He had told his teacher he wanted to apply to Oxford and the teacher had told him to wait, & HC thought—but that’s stupid, if I get in at 15 people will always say He got into Oxford when he was 15. So he wrote independently to Merton to apply to take the exam, & he went down to take the exam.

RD was largely self-taught.

RD had read Plato’s Gorgias even before he came up, and being the type to take things to heart he had taken it to heart. In the Phaedrus the rhetorician Gorgias is said to boast that he can give a long or a short answer to any question, and in the Gorgias he says that when it comes to giving short answers he is unsurpassed. Socrates, on the other hand, knows only one way to answer a question, some questions can be answered with one word and others may take five thousand, and the philosopher, unlike the rhetorician or the politician, will take as long as he needs. This placed RD in a terrible dilemma. He had bought copies of past papers from the University Press & now he paced up and down declaiming to HC: All the interesting questions require a minimum of three hours apiece to answer and the rest are so stupid it is impossible to say anything intelligent about them, how can you make an intelligent reply to a stupid question? And he would tear his hair and say What am I to do?

HC was surprised. He had done 13 O-levels because he had heard the most anyone had ever done before was 12, and he had done them at the age of 12 because he had heard when he was 9 that the youngest anyone had ever done more than 5 was 13 & he had instantly decided to beat the record.

He said: Well what did you do for A-level?

RD: I don’t want to talk about it.

HC: Well what about O-level?

RD: I don’t want to talk about it.

HC: Well surely you must have taken some exam.

RD: Of course I’ve taken an exam. It was horrible. Full of questions about long division. I don’t want to talk about it.

Long division? said HC.

RD: I don’t want to TALK about it. And he paced up and down the common room making further anguished references to the Gorgias crying What am I to do?

HC said: Do you play chess?

What? said RD.

And HC said: Do you play chess?

And RD said: Of course.

And HC said Let’s play a game. He took out from one pocket a pocket chess set, and from his other pocket he took out a chess clock which he took with him wherever he went. It was the night before the first exam, and he had been planning to go over the chorus to Zeus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. He set out the board. RD was white.

HC set the timer & he said: 20 minute game.

And RD said: I don’t play that way.

HC: 10 minutes each.

And RD said: But that’s stupid.

HC: I don’t have time to play longer. I need to look at the chorus to Zeus.

RD: P-K4.

HC: P-QB4.

RD knew many responses to the Sicilian Defence but the question was what could be developed in the time available, still pondering this question he had not even moved his knight to KB3 when the timer went off, he moved his knight now to KB3 and HC said:

Sorry. Game’s over.

RD was furious & he started to argue but in the meantime HC had moved all the pieces back and turned the clock back & this time HC was white.

HC: P-K4.

RD liked the Sicilian Defence himself but debating inwardly the merits in the time allowed of the Najdorf Variation, the Scheveningen (which he generally preferred), the Nimzowitsch & others too numerous to mention he nearly made the same mistake, suddenly pulling himself together (P-QB4) he managed to make 10 moves before falling again into deep thought interrupted only by the timer.

He reached his 10th move & the timer went off before he had moved a piece & HC said game’s over and moved the pieces back again and started the clock.

By now RD was really furious. HC was only 15 and looked young for his age. RD made his first move and HC made his and this time RD made a move the instant it was his turn and HC won in 25 moves.

RD put the pieces back. HC said he had to read the Agamemnon. RD said This won’t take long. He was black. This time he played the defence he knew the best, and he played a version of a middle game he had read in Keres & Kotov, and the end played itself.

He said: Checkmate. And he said: I know what you think you’re doing, but it’s stupid. It’s not the same.

And HC said: It’s a game. It’s a stupid game. Opening, middle game, endgame, opening, middle game, endgame, opening middle game endgame. Let’s set the clock to 5 minutes.

RD said: It’s not the same.

HC said: 10 minute game.

HC set out the pieces and he started the clock. They played 5 games and RD won 4.

RD said: It’s not the same.

They played until 2:00 in the morning. RD kept saying It’s not the same, but he was laughing now because he was winning most of the time. You are probably thinking that HC was letting him win but he wasn’t. HC had none of the Socratic scruples that plagued RD, but he carried sportsmanship to so fanatical an extreme that it had a very similar effect; he knew he would have no real competition if RD was not there, & left to his own devices & composing Socratic answers to Gorgianic questions RD was certainly not going to be there. So even though he could hardly keep his eyes open he said to RD: Don’t think of arguments. Look at a question and say: Queen’s Indian. Sicilian Defence.

RD thought this was ridiculous but no sooner had he dismissed it as ridiculous than it suddenly seemed to him, as a matter of fact, that you actually could start a discussion of the influence of Homer on Virgil using the Sicilian Defence.

Ruy Lopez, said HC, pursuing his advantage.

RD: Ruy LOPEZ! How can I POSSIBLY use the Ruy LOPEZ?

HC hesitated—

RD: If they set the question they are OBVIOUSLY, ALWAYS white.

& he was again briefly plunged into despair.

HC: Black to win in 4 moves. Two knights & a rook, checkmate in 6.

No, said RD, and he stood up and wrapped his arms around his head in a pretzel formation. He paced up and down & at last he said: Yes. NOW I see. He said: You don’t actually ARGUE all the way THROUGH you decide the endgame you want to play you incorporate an opening which might lead to it by REFERENCE as it might be Black played an unusual version of the Queen’s Indian you incorporate the middle game largely by REFERENCE—

Whether this really is what you do or not RD did get in under the impression that you did and get a scholarship on the strength of [opening] [middle game] endgame, and he and HC were friends & rivals. HC made him go in for prizes because if he won a prize RD had not gone in for it would not really count, & every time he had to play chess with RD to counterbalance the hold Socrates had regained on his mind in the meantime. He had to play chess to counteract the influence of Fraenkel.

Fraenkel was a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, and on coming to England he had been made Professor of Latin at Corpus Christi College and gave seminars on Greek. Very few undergraduates went to these, and the few that went went with the approval of their tutor because Fraenkel was very formidable. Somehow or other HC heard of these seminars and instantly decided to go. He asked his tutor and his tutor said he thought it would be better to wait, and HC thought: But that’s stupid, if I go now people will always say He went to Fraenkel’s seminar in his first term when he was only 15. His birthday was in mid-October, and if he waited even a term it would be too late.

Now if HC went RD had to go too, because otherwise HC would have felt he was getting an unfair advantage. RD was naturally diffident and said he thought he should wait till his second or even third year; a chessboard was no use in a situation like this, but HC with the genius of desperation said That’s ridiculous, and stealing shamelessly from Socrates he said there was no shame in ignorance but in the refusal to learn. He said he had heard that Fraenkel had deplored the lack of rigour in English scholarship; he said surely it was of the ESSENCE that they should not pick up slipshod methods at the very OUTSET of their scholarly careers. RD said Yes but he probably won’t let us in the class and HC said Leave everything to me.

HC was 15 and looked 12. He went over to Corpus before breakfast and waited outside Fraenkel’s room, and when the great man appeared he brought out the phrases ‘slipshod methods’ and ‘outset of scholarly career’. He was taken into the room and shown some Greek he had never seen before and made to comment on it, and when he did not absolutely disgrace himself he was told that he and his friend could come to the class on probation.

Now Fraenkel once said in a class that a scholar should be able to look at any word in a passage and instantly think of another passage where it occurred; HC was unperturbed by this remark, but RD took it to heart, and the longer he worked the more any text was like a pack of icebergs each word a snowy peak with a huge frozen mass of cross-references beneath the surface. So that now in addition to Socratic reservations on answering any question was added a conviction that in any linguistic analysis a real scholar would haul up the whole iceberg. Meanwhile HC was horribly bored by the class, he found the business of loading a line with comment excruciatingly boring; he was only able to cheer himself up by remembering that he had only just turned 16.

Five terms passed and it was time for Mods.

The night before the first exam other candidates went over the arguments for and against a single author of the Iliad and Odyssey while HC and RD sat over a chessboard with HC saying Opening middle game end game and RD saying it’s not the same and HC saying 5 minutes.

HC and RD had now come to the part of the course which concentrated on history and philosophy. HC wanted to change courses & study Arabic & dazzle the Oriental Institute, but not only had RD taken to heart the words of Fraenkel and Socrates, he had also taken to heart the words of Wilamowitz, and he said in anguish that Wilamowitz had said that the study of history and philosophy was an essential part of Altertumswissenschaft and what was he to do? HC said they should study Arabic and dazzle the Oriental Institute, but RD said the core of the subject was the exploration of valid modes of reasoning about the subject. Whether this carried weight with HC is not known. He was not one to take things to heart, but he was a sportsman, and he could not bring himself to go into a course where he would have no competition.

Seven terms went by and it was time for Greats, the last exams of the course. RD came to HC’s room. RD felt that having spent two and a half years learning valid methods of argument it was contemptible to cast them aside just as though he were a 19-year-old entrance candidate with no real training in philosophy, and on the other hand he thought he must be missing something since philosophers and historians did after all set the exams and appeared to expect the candidates to take them. He walked up and down talking about Socrates & Wilamowitz & Mommsen waiting for HC to get out the chessboard, & sure enough HC brought out his chessboard.

They began to play without a word. The timer went before RD had made his fifth move. HC set the clock back & began putting the pieces back. RD put his head on his hand.

He said: It’s not the same.

He said: Is there no END to this?

HC said: You’ll never have to take an exam again.

HC said: Well maybe just one.

What? said RD.

All Souls! said HC, who hoped to be the youngest fellow in a hundred years.

RD said: I can’t do this any more. I can’t do this to PHILOSOPHY. I can’t write some piece of rubbish in half an hour and say they MADE me do it.

HC said: Opening middle game endgame.

RD said: I can’t do this anymore. He said in anguish: What am I to do?

HC set out the game. He set the clock. RD raised his head. He stopped saying what am I to do. He played rapidly and confidently. He won in 23 moves and he said

But it’s not the same.

They played, and RD won 10 games out of 10.

He said: But it’s not the same.

5 minutes, said HC.

RD won 10 games out of 10. He did not say But it’s not the same. He did not say What am I to do?

The first exam was the Plato and Aristotle paper.

RD put on a black suit and white tie. He put on his scholar’s gown. The icebergs bore down on him. Socrates stood silent at his shoulder. He looked silently down at the paper.

Looking up he saw that the invigilator was JH, a man who had been working for the last 20 years on a book on Republic X. In those days it was possible for a man to be the finest Platonist of his generation and not publish for 20 years. There was a question on Republic X. Now RD saw what he must do.

He wrote: I am not so presumptuous as to attempt in 40 minutes what Mr. JH has not achieved in 20 years. That took a minute. The implication of the sentence, however, was that Mr. JH had been wrong to set the paper, & it took him 2 hours and 57 minutes to decide that it would be more insulting to spare a philosopher what he believed to be the truth than to hand in the notebook with this sentence on the page.

He spent the rest of the week punting on the Cherwell.

HC got the top first that year, and RD got no degree of any kind.

Now as soon as HC saw the list of vivas he knew that he had got a very good first and RD had not, because RD’s name was not on the list. There were three days of vivas after HC’s: he had three days in which to enjoy his victory.

Then the class list went up and he discovered that RD’s name was not on it. He had TRICKED HC into going on with the course with all his talk of Wilamowitz, and then he had cheated. Now the congratulations of the examiners seemed empty and stupid. HC stalked up and down shouting, he said no one would give RD a job, no one would give him teaching, he would end up working on a dictionary or an Oxford Companion, he’d get kicked off for missed deadlines, he’d end up marking A-levels and getting kicked off the board, he’d end up teaching English as a foreign language. RD was rather tired. Everyone can imagine a life’s regret for a moment of cowardice, but you could just as easily regret a moment’s courage; RD thought that everything HC said might well be true (as in fact it was), and the years after this moment of courage might make him capable of regretting it. Still, it was done.

HC stalked out of the room. He got a Fellowship at All Souls at the age of 19 but all the fun had gone out of it.

RD got a job at a crammer’s.

I said I thought a crammer was a place that helped people to pass exams.

Sibylla said Yes.

I: Wasn’t that a problem?

Sib: Well, it wasn’t a problem in one sense in that RD thought it was perfectly acceptable to take an exam to get INTO a place where you might improve your logical faculties, he just thought once your faculties were improved you shouldn’t trample underfoot what you had learned and accept an accolade for doing so, but it was kind of a problem in that the students found the chess rather hard to follow. RD would start talking about Lucretian elements in the Aeneid & go to the board & talk about developing the argument on the queenside under the impression that he was helping the students with their exam technique, or he would say Now let’s look at some basic mating positions & have trouble with discipline. So he lost the job and got another job.

HC & RD still went to Fraenkel’s classes. Afterwards they would come out into the front quadrangle at Corpus, there is a statue of a pelican on a pillar in the centre of the quad and RD would pace in anguish around the pelican. HC was getting more and more depressed. Each day he went into the Bodleian at 9:00. At 1:00 he went back to college for lunch, and at 2:15 he was back in the Bodleian. At 6:15 he went back to his college unless of course it was the day of the seminar. Sometimes he worked in the Lower Reading Room, and sometimes he called up a manuscript and worked in Duke Humfrey. There would never be anyone to compete with ever again.

He was weary of philology, weary of tracing the corruption of sounds in their written relics. He wanted to go where a language was not written. He wanted to go where all utterances died with breath.

Then he heard that there was a strange silent tribe in the desert of Kyzylkum. They refused to let anyone who was not of the tribe know its language and any member of the tribe who repeated a word in the presence of a foreigner was punished by death.

HC did some research and he eventually came to the exciting conclusion that the references to a lost silent tribe in four or five separate historical traditions might be to the same tribe which being nomadic had ranged over thousands of miles for thousands of years. He decided to find it.

He spent seven years learning Chinese and Uralic and Altaic and Slavic and Semitic languages, and at the end of his Fellowship he set off for the desert.

It was not easy to get to Kyzylkum. He tried to fly to Moscow but he could not get a visa. He tried to get over the border into Turkmenistan from Iran & was turned back. He went to Afghanistan & tried to cross the border into Uzbekistan & was turned back. Then he thought perhaps he could go to Pakistan and cross the Pamirs to Tajikistan and so trek on to Kyzylkum but he was turned back again.

Then he decided to start his quest at the other end. His theory was that the tribe ranged all the way from the Mongolian plateau to the desert of Kyzylkum and he now decided to make for Mongolia instead.

He travelled to China, pretending to be a simple tourist.

HC joined a package tour to avoid suspicion. The tour included a visit to Xinjiang, a province in the far northwest of the country; his plan was to leave the group at Ürümqi and make his way to the Mongolian border. On the second day of the tour it was announced that the Xinjiang leg of the tour had been cancelled to allow more time for celebrated landscapes of art and poetry.

The group took a train to a town in the south. The buildings had posters of Chairman Mao on their sides. No one in the town had a copy of the Dream of the Red Chamber. There were no books in the town or if there were no one would tell HC. There was no jade, there were no pictures. It was an odd place he said for the children all seemed to be boys. The people there seemed to work very hard, but on a field outside the town the parents and the little boys would gather to fly kites, and these were the most beautiful kites he had ever seen. They were a brilliant red, and each had a picture of Chairman Mao on the body of the kite, or two or three characters representing one of the sayings of the Chairman. A steady wind always seemed to flow across the field, and the fiery dragons shot up into the air as soon as they were released.

He did not think he would find the silent tribe, but if he did not go forward where else was there to go? As long as he felt that he had turned his back on England he was all right, but if he turned his face to it he thought that he would turn to stone.

He pretended to be sick, and when the group went on he stayed behind.

One day he stood watching as the kites flew far overhead, the Chinese characters tossing this way and that in the air. The written language was constructed of ideograms compatible with many spoken realisations of the words & he felt that people spoke here any way they liked, while the written language flew on kites overhead. He felt at last free of philology. He thought Why should I inspect the lost silent tribe are they not just as silent if I am not there? But what was he to do if he had no quest?

He watched the kiteflyers and he saw that there was a child with no kite. The child would run now to this group now to another and be pushed away. Once the child ran by HC. It was snivelling and covered with sores and it looked different from the other children in the village. He said something and the child said something he could not understand, he thought that it must be the dialect. He said something else and the child said something else and suddenly he thought that he understood a word here and there, but if he understood them they were Turkic words made strange by the Chinese intonation. He said something in Turkish and he tried it in Karakalpak and Kyrgyz and Uighur and the child looked at him as though it understood. He asked someone if he could meet its parents and he was told it had no family. He thought that the child might come from some Turkic tribe in Xinjiang or perhaps it came from the lost silent tribe itself, but what difference did it make.

At last one day in despair he walked out of town, and he came to a cliff overlooking a valley. The floor of the valley was absolutely flat, a deep bright green. Through it curved a river, flat as a ribbon, a dull silver twisting back and forth. And from that plain thrust the sheer bare rock cliffs of mountains, each a boulder thousands of feet high breaking through the flat green.

The sky when he came there was grey, and shreds of mist snagged on the rock and floated motionless above the ground. It was the strangest and most beautiful place he had ever seen. England seemed far away, it contracted until dead Fraenkel and the pelican in the quad were tiny, the Bodleian and the lives buried there were no bigger than a postage stamp. Although there was no wind he saw that the rags of mist had moved, they hung now a yard or two from where they had been. He wanted to say something—he felt so far away. The opening of the Odyssey came to his mind. Odysseus could not rescue his companions.

They perished by their own recklessness, the fools. They ate the cattle of the Sun God who took from them their day of return, νóστιμον μαρ he thought, nostimon emar—What must I do so that I need never return? Shall I eat the cattle of the Sun?

He felt it would destroy him if he were to put himself back in the matchbox.

What must I do? he said.

The valley floor could not be seen. It was covered with a mist as thick and white as cloud. Out of the cloud rose the barren rocks. The sky had cleared above, as if a solution of air and fine rain had separated until the heavier of the two had silted the valley in thick white mist leaving the clear pure air above. The backs of the rocks were in black shadow, and at the edge of the black ran a glittering line of gold, as though each was a moon just past the new. On the summit of each was a little cluster of trees, black against the setting sun, and liquid flame welled through.

I can’t go back, he said. What shall I do?

As he sat there a great wind suddenly blew up, so that high above he could see the branches of the trees streaming in the ferocious air. From behind him in the distance he heard a great noise, as of many people shouting—and when he looked back & then up he saw a huge dragon shooting up into the darkening sky: the best kitemakers in the village had been working on it for weeks, & now it had escaped. The field where they launched the kites was far away, but in the slanting afternoon light all the figures stood out clearly: five or six were staring up at the kite which had escaped, and further back another group was struggling to haul a kite in. One person had caught the body of the kite, and another was reeling in the line.

Suddenly the wind snatched at the kite; the lineman tripped, tearing the kite from the other man’s hands; and as the kite began to lift a child ran forward and flung itself onto the frame. The kite dragged along the ground for a few feet, the tiny figure still clinging—and then the wind snatched it high into the air while the line went flying far out of reach.

Now the kiteflyers looked up in silence, while the brilliant red kite bore the child away. It sailed above HC, and when it reached the cliff a current of air tossed it high above.

The villagers stopped at the edge of the cliff. The kite began to descend. The wind snatched it this way and that, and at last hurled it at the top of one of the mountains HC had been looking at just before. The wind was blowing away from them, but in a sudden sharp twist it tossed at them a snatch of sound, the howling of a child, before wheeling away again.

The villagers looked at the mountain & HC, feeling they might now be more communicative, asked sympathetically: What is to be done?

But though he found the dialect very difficult what they seemed to be saying was that nothing could be done.

HC was sure he had not understood, but later someone explained that though of course they could request assistance it would not come and the request would count against them.

HC said: But couldn’t someone climb up and get it?

And everyone said at once that this was impossible because no one had ever climbed the mountain and anyone who tried it would die.

That settled it.

HC said at once:

I will rescue the child.

He looked up at the flaming trees and laughed, and he said:

I will eat the cattle of the Sun.

Night had fallen. The moon was the colour of a pumpkin, low on the horizon, sullen brother of the Sun. Under its baleful light the white mist glimmered, and the black of the mountains was more solid than rock.

He went back to town and he said that he needed a lot of silk. He was told that this could not be had but he kept insisting. He explained what he wanted to do and now the local people took an interest. In all the terrible times they had been through they had kept their interest in kites, and almost everyone in the town took an interest in aerodynamics and in what could be done with the silk. He gave hard currency to the right people and he was given 100 or so square metres of brilliant yellow silk, and a woman sat up all night sewing it for him on an old black Singer with a foot pedal.

In the morning the mist had cleared. The green fields ran straight to the base of each rock, unbroken by any path, and so he walked straight across a field to the wall of rock. The air was still & the occasional cries of the child could be heard.

HC had done some climbing as a boy. The fact that he had climbed before meant that he had some idea of what he was taking on; sometimes he thought he could do it, and sometimes he knew that he knew the form his death would take.

He found a handhold and a foothold, and he began to climb.

After an hour his hands were scraped and there was a shooting pain in his shoulder. His face was scraped on one side where it was against the rock, and a trickle of blood and sweat ran by the corner of one eye and could not be wiped away.

Perhaps no one would back down who’d started such a thing. HC would never back down. He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men. He had been through the Iliad and Odyssey and each time he had come to a word he did not know he had looked it up in Liddell & Scott and written it down, and if there were five words in a line he had looked up five words and written them down before going on to a line in which there were four words he did not know, and at the age of 14 he had worked through Tacitus in this way and at the age of 20 he had read the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun and at 22 the Dream of the Red Chamber. Now he moved one finger a centimetre and then another, and then he moved the toe of his boot a centimetre and the toe of his other boot a centimetre.

For ten hours he moved up the face of the rock centimetre by centimetre. He looked neither up nor down. But in the tenth hour he put a boot up a centimetre and as his head rose a centimetre the green leaf of a vine dangled by his nose. He looked up and the fringe of the top was a few feet above him. Still obstinately, though his hands were bloody and his face was bloody he climbed centimetre by centimetre.

When he got to the top he could hardly get over the edge. His arms had been stretched up for ten hours and the muscles had set. When he bent one wrist over the edge a terrible cramp seized the whole arm, so that for a second he hung by one hand and the tips of two boots; blackness covered his eyes and he might have fallen back through thousands of feet of empty air. Something saved him. He saw a root by his left hand and grasped it, and though he groaned with pain he pulled himself up over the edge, and he lay on the grass and looked at the sky.

After a while he heard a little sound & still looking up he found he was looking into the face of the child. It was the child he had spoken to the day before. Previously he had thought that the child had been carried away by accident. Now he thought: But perhaps he meant to do it. He saw the dragon shooting up into the air; perhaps the child had imagined being carried into the air away from its tormentors. Now its face was scratched and there was a cut on one arm. HC said something in Uzbek and then in Chinese, but the child did not seem to understand.

After a while he sat up, & the child flinched away. HC was in excruciating pain, but he said to himself Well it’s not for long, and he looked out over the edge.

The valley floor was now concealed again by the thick white mist which must have gathered while he climbed. Above the cloud the mountains rose like islands, and on the nearer ones he could see the different things that grew there. On one there was only bamboo—there is nothing like bamboo for spreading—and the grove was bent almost parallel to the ground from the strong steady wind. The fronds of it were ruffled like feathers, they streamed out in the wind. On another were tortured trees, their hard trunks must have fought harder against the wind before they bent, they consisted of the bare tormented trunks and a few leaves. The light was clear and golden—everything had the clarity and beauty of things seen underwater, so that he could see the individual leaves of the bamboo, the tiny birds, the diaphanous wings of an insect. On the far horizon was a big golden cloud, and a series of smaller clouds were being carried even as he watched steadily out of sight.

I said: So what had happened? Was he rescued? Did he climb back down again?

Of course he didn’t climb back down again, Sibylla said impatiently. It was bad enough going up alone; how could he possibly go back down with the child? It would have been ridiculous to go to all that trouble and go back WITHOUT the child.

Well he must have got down somehow, I said.

Of course he GOT down, said Sibylla.

Well he can’t have flown himself away on a kite, I said.

Of course he didn’t fly himself on a kite, said Sibylla. I wish you would think about this logically, Ludo.

He looked out to the west. The setting sun gleamed on yellow sand. The snowy peaks of a distant mountain range were as pale as the moon by day. The whole of Tibet lay between him and Xinjiang.

Now among the many O-levels HC had taken at 12 was one in physics. The result was that he knew something about aerodynamics. His first idea had been to make a parachute—but he had heard terrible stories from his father, who had been in the RAF, about parachutes failing to deploy. Then he had thought of taking dismantled kites to reassemble as a glider—but if he’d brought anything with him that could be used for stiff wings the wind would have blown him off the rock.

Then he had had an idea. Anything will have lift if its front edge is higher than its back, and it will have more if the top surface area is greater than the bottom. His idea was that if you made a pair of silk wings open at the front and cut the bottom shorter than the top the air rushing in would inflate them and the resultant taut surface would produce lift. He had had the woman sew in ribs like those on the wings of a plane, and attach ropes for a sort of harness, and this was what he had brought in his backpack.

He had thought only that he could bring the child down. Now he thought: If no one saw us leave no one would know we had not come down.

He thought: If they would not rescue the child why should they come for me?

He thought that if they flew over the mist it would be a long time before anyone knew they had gone.

Now he unpacked the wings and assembled the harness. The child stood watching him warily; it was backing toward a thicket of bamboo on top of the rock. He stepped into the harness and beckoned but the child refused to come. He was not entirely sure himself that the contraption would work, but he could not test it first—he knew he would not be able to climb up again.

Meanwhile the wind was pulling at the wings, and one gust almost pulled him off his feet; he had to grab a tree to keep from being blown away. Another gust of wind tore at him and nearly swept him off the rock. When it died down he made a sudden rush for the child; it turned and ran, and tripped, and he seized it by the foot. And now a third gust of wind snatched at him, sharper than the first two, and he had only one hand free. He was pulled loose from the tree; he could feel himself being pulled toward the cliff. Quickly he seized the child’s other foot; ignoring its howls he pulled it toward him and gripped it tightly in his arms—and no sooner had he done so than the wind filled the wings and they were carried off into the air.

At once they were carried high, high above even those pinnacles of rocks which he had seen flaming the day before. A fierce wind bore them along so impetuously he was afraid it would tear the wings; up it swooped and down it dropped, and it swept them at last out of that valley and miles and miles to the west until at last it did drop him in a bare rocky plain. There was no sand, but this was what had gleamed yellow on the horizon.

There was light in the upper air, but as soon as he reached the ground the light was gone. The sun was a bloody ball on the horizon. While he was still unfastening the harness it dropped out of sight.

HC was now in a much worse position than he had been at the top of the cliff. There was no water here; before the light had gone he had seen only the endless rocky plain stretching in all directions, with no sign of human habitation. It was bitterly cold, and there was nothing to burn. But now he had no way to a quick death—both might well die slowly of cold or thirst.

But even though he might now die a painful death he could not stop laughing. The silk wings lay crumpled at his feet, and the child was whimpering on his back, and he kept laughing and exclaiming: It worked! It bloody worked! Christ Almighty, it bloody worked!

He realised that he could not lie down to sleep or he would freeze to death. So he put the child on his back and he set out to walk through the night.

HC was 6′4″ and when he walked fast he covered ground. By morning he reckoned he must have walked a good 60 miles. And when the sun came up he saw a railroad track. Even though he was cold and hungry he was still laughing. When he turned to look back the way he had come he could not even see the valley, and he said again It bloody worked!

He walked by the track all day, and in late afternoon a train came. It did not stop when he waved, but it was going so slowly that he was able to jump on the last car, and it did not stop to throw him off.

The train did not stop at the next village, but he jumped off again to buy food. They ate, and then he put the child on his back again and followed the track. The next train was going too fast, but he jumped on the one after that. He kept expecting to be stopped but he thought that he would just keep going until he was stopped.

He rode trains for five days, and on the morning of the sixth day he saw the Flaming Mountains of Gaochang.

HC was now in the heart of Xinjiang, Mongolia to the east Kazakhstan & Kyrgyzstan to the west, but he did not know which way to go.

He left the train close to the end of the line and set off on foot. He walked north, keeping his options open, and now he had another piece of luck. He came to a village, and it seemed to him that the people there looked a little like the child he had rescued.

At first he thought he might find a home for the child, but people looked at the child and shook their heads, & though he could barely understand the local dialect he thought he was being told that it came from the west.

There were no maps to be had. He did not have enough to buy a pack animal. So they set out on foot.

They crossed the border without being stopped, and together they went through increasingly harsh terrain.

They went very slowly for the child could not travel fast.

After many months they came out onto a plain where horses were grazing. In the distance some kind of encampment could be seen. On they went, both half-dead.

They came to the encampment but the men were gone. The women were preparing meals or repairing clothes. The man and the boy came to a halt in the centre of the tents and gradually all fell silent.

Then at the far end a woman looked up. Her black hair was as rough as a pony’s; she had the broad features of a true Mongolian. She gazed intently at the boy and at last came forward. The boy walked into her arms and began to cry and she too cried. Then she stood back and hit the boy on the side of the head and shouted and cried again. The boy lay in the dirt. HC made some gesture. The woman looked at him dumbly.

HC gestured at the boy’s torn feet and the woman looked at him dumbly. He gestured from himself to a pot of food and she spat at his feet.

At last one of the other women offered HC some food. None spoke while he ate and through the long afternoon there was complete silence in the encampment.

The men returned from hunting and still no one spoke, and HC at last slept in some straw by the horses and no one spoke either to protest or to offer him hospitality, and the boy slept with him.

He stayed for eight years. For five years no one spoke to him, and if they spoke to each other and he approached they fell silent, but in his fifth year he had a terrible disappointment.

HC had been thinking for some reason of RD, who had based his method of Greek pronunciation on the authoritative work on the subject, W. S. Allen’s Vox Graeca. RD, being largely self-taught, had always made a point of pronouncing Greek with the pitch accents, with the result that no one could ever understand a word he said. Thinking of RD, HC realised suddenly after five years with the tribe that their language was in fact Indo-European, but Indo-European filtered through a Chinese system of pitch accents to the point where it sounded like nothing he knew. He was now able to recognise a few words. It was a terrible anticlimax after all the languages he had learned, but he stayed another three years and was befriended at last and mastered it.

But then he was forced to leave.

The tribe moved around as nomads do, and it had moved to an area which was disputed between the Soviet Union and China. They were close to a village which had been punished severely by both sides for not implementing government policy and thus showing where its allegiance lay. One day a plane crashed in the desert near the encampment; the survivors were arrested as spies to forestall reprisals from above. The spies were thrown into jail and beaten to give a good impression.

HC knew he had to do something. He suspected the prisoners knew no Chinese, so he went to the jail to reason with the authorities. When he got into town he was told to come back the next day. When he got back to the encampment he found that the tribe had disappeared.

The jail was badly built and badly guarded. HC broke into it and freed the prisoners. He decided that the best plan was to march south and make their way into India. It had been ten years since he had heard a European language spoken, and he found it almost unbearable to articulate the old words with his tongue, but it had to be done.

Sibylla put her head on her hand. She seemed tired of the words in her own mouth. At last she went on.

The march south was very arduous, and three of the captives died en route. The survivors walked at last into the British consulate in Peshawar and demanded repatriation. HC was almost turned away: he had no passport, of course, and no proof of identification, and as he had been missing for more than seven years he was officially dead. Luckily for HC, however, it turned out that a man he had beaten in various prize examinations was now the British consul in Bombay. A trunk call was put through, and HC was able to recite from memory his translation into Greek verse of Wee sleekit cow’rin’ tim’rous beastie, and the man at the other end said there was only one man in the world who could do that. This was not strictly true, since RD could probably have done it, but HC was not about to argue.

He returned to a civilisation which in the interim had known John Travolta and the Bee Gees and he published a book in which he spoke of the silence of the lost tribe. Then people demonstrated that he could not have been where he said he had been and people who had travelled in China said that it was not like that at all and people who had climbed those strange mountains said they were in some completely different part of the country and anyway he could not have climbed one in ten hours the way he had said. Others argued that a tiny peasant village would not have had the quantities of silk he claimed to have requisitioned, and would not have had the battered old Singer sewing machine he had claimed was used, & would have had no use for hard currency even if it had. Others said kiteflying had been banned as a bourgeois practice by the Red Guard. Then HC laughed scornfully and said he certainly did not propose the lost tribe to be a subject of a documentary but if he should ever decide this was a suitable fate for it he would at once publish an accurate itinerary of his travels to facilitate location of that wandering people. Then of course there was a great hue and cry and people tried to investigate where he had really been for the public had a right to know, but no one was able to discover anything apart from the fact that he had walked into the consulate in Peshawar.

That book said Sibylla had come out in 1982 and HC had done this and that for a while. She said that she had met him at an Oxford party in the Fraenkel Room in Corpus Christi College. Skarp-Hedin had been talking to Robin Nisbet and so Sibylla had talked for a time to HC. I said Skarp-Hedin? and Sib said One of my boyfriends his real name did not do justice to his pale ill-starred look. She said that HC had spent years with the tribe though they had offered no encouragement to stay and even after his first breakthrough he could understand little or nothing.

Then one day everything had changed. They had he said a barbarous initiation ceremony which he would not describe. Afterwards many of the boys required prolonged nursing. One day as he lurked behind a tent he heard one of the initiates say something to his nurse, and then when she laughed correct himself. He had understood everything in a flash. It was the most wonderful thing he’d ever come across. There was an elaborate system of case-endings he said which was used only by women—the thing was quite extraordinary, as if you had at once for example a group of people speaking Arabic as it is written and another group speaking it as it is spoken. Amazing! And it was the same for moods and tenses. There was an indicative, past present and future, and an imperative, and these were used only by men—and then there were what he would call by analogy the subjunctive and the optative, and these were used only by women. It was very confusing, he said, for when presently they began to speak to him at last he would find that if he asked a question of a man, no matter how slim or even non-existent the knowledge might be on which an answer might be given, it would always be given as a statement of fact—whereas you might ask a woman whether it was raining outside and she would commit herself only to saying that it might be so. He said that when he worked it out he lay flat on his back in the grass and laughed till he cried.

Now the Fraenkel Room at this time said Sib had a long table covered with a mauve corded cloth like a cheap Sears bedspread, and a black and white photo of Fraenkel on the wall.

HC took one look at the picture and another at the people there and he said Oh my God and walked out.

That is, said Sib, he said Oh my God let’s get out of here, and though she knew Skarp-Hedin would complain that she did not love him she had said Yes let’s get out and they had both walked out.

HC had gone off again she said and now he was back. Sibylla said of HC that he could go for months without human contact, and if he made contact the first thing he wanted to know was how his interlocutor handled sequence of tenses, and the second was whether he used a subjunctive.

I said: What happened to RD?

Sibylla said: Oh he got a job on one of the dictionaries. You can see him around the Bodleian.

I said: Was he at the seminar?

She said: Oh he goes to all the seminars.

I said: Did they say anything?

She said: Well, RD asked the speaker a question about Phrynichus.

I said: Did they say anything to each OTHER?

She said: Of course they didn’t say anything to each other. As soon as HC saw who was there he said Oh my God let’s get out of here.

I said: Did you play chess?

She said: No, we didn’t play chess.

I thought about this for a while and I said: What’s the youngest anyone has ever gone to Oxford? Sibylla said she didn’t know, in the Middle Ages it was more like a boarding school & she thought a lot of boys would be sent there at 12 or so. She thought a girl had gone to read mathematics at the age of 10 a few years ago.

I said: 10!

She said: I think she’d been taught by her father, who was a mathematician.

If I had had a mathematician for a father I could probably have beaten the record.

I said: Well what’s the youngest anyone ever did classics?

Sib said she didn’t know.

I said: Younger than 11?

It seems unlikely, said Sib, but we can only surmise.

I said: Do you think I could go?

Sib said: Well you probably could but how would you ever learn quantum mechanics?

I said: But if I got in at 11 people would say all my life that I got in at 11!

Sib said: They certainly would. She said: Or I could give you a piece of paper certifying that you read Sugata Sanshiro in the original Japanese at the age of 6 and all your life people would say you read Sugata Sanshiro in Japanese at the age of 6.

I said: What do I have to do to get in? Do I have to read a lot about chess endings?

Sib said: Well, it worked for RD.

Sib seemed to have no interest at all in helping me set a record. I argued with her for a long time until at last she said: Why are you saying all this to me? Do whatever you want. If you pay £35 you can go to as many lectures as you want; the RATIONAL thing to do would be to pay £35 or whatever it is, get the lecture lists, go to whatever looks interesting, collect reading lists, go through the reading lists, decide on the basis of evidence which lecturers are moderately competent teachers, decide on the basis of evidence which fields you are interested in & who is doing interesting work in those fields; collect further evidence at OTHER universities (assuming THEY let in paying guests) by going to lectures given by the interesting people to see whether they are reasonably competent teachers & then decide where to go when you are about 16.

SIXTEEN! I said.

Sib began to talk about boring people she knew who had got jobs at Oxford & someone brilliant who had just gone to Warwick.

I did not say WARWICK! but Sib said drily that I would have of course to weigh very carefully the benefit of studying with someone brilliant against the undoubted drawback that people would merely say all my life (if they bothered to mention so uninteresting a fact) that I had gone to Warwick at the age of 16.

I could see that at any moment she was going to start talking about Sugata Sanshiro so I said quickly that we could talk about it some other time.

I said: Aren’t you supposed to be typing The Modern Knitter?

Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation, said Sib. I’m up to 1965.

I said: I thought you were going to finish it by the end of the week.

Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance, said Sib, was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker’s mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities.

Sib went to the computer and typed for five minutes or so and then she stood up and sat on the sofa and turned on the video.

Kambei raised the bowl of rice. I understand, he said. No more shouting. I’m not going to waste this rice. Fair enough, said my father.

Tough-looking samurai strode up and down the street. In a doorway stood the farmers, impressed, Katsushiro, impressed, Kambei, arms crossed, unimpressed. Thanks, said my father. I mean that.

Kambei sat inside facing the door. He handed Katsushiro a heavy stick. Hide behind the door, he said. Get in position. Take the overhead-sword stance. Hit the samurai when he comes in, hard. No holding back! As hard as you can. Fair e

I stared at the screen. Katsushiro stood behind the door. I stood up and began walking up and down while a samurai came through the door and parried the blow.

Now I did not hear my father’s voice or see his face; though the film had moved on I saw in my mind a street full of tough-looking samurai, and Kambei in a doorway watching the street.

In my mind I saw Katsushiro standing behind the door with a stick. I saw Kyuzo slicing through a blustering second-rater. But a good samurai will parry the blow.

I thought: I could have James Hatton after all! Or Red Devlin. Or both!

I thought: I could have anyone I wanted!

I thought: Opening middle game endgame.

I thought: A good samurai will parry the blow.

I thought: A good samurai will parry the blow.

I looked at Sib’s paper & it said that HC was about to walk across the former Soviet Union, and that he was planning to go alone.

I thought, HE could fight with swords. Here I thought was a man to challenge, a man who knew 50 languages, a man who had faced death a hundred times, a man impervious to praise and ridicule alike. Here was a man who on meeting his son for the first time would SURELY encourage him to go to Oxford at the age of 11, or at least take him on an expedition instead.

The paper did not say where he was staying.

I called his publisher and asked whether there would be any book signings. I counted on the charm of my childish voice to elicit the information I required, and in fact after a short time I was given a list of places where books would be signed.

He was signing books the next day at the Waterstone’s in Notting Hill Gate.

I took the Circle Line and ascended to the street.

I went to the book signing, and as I expected HC left on foot. He was as tall as she had said and covered ground fast, but I had expected that too and had brought my skateboard.

The house was large and white, with white pillars. In front was a little square of grass and roses around a paved stone circle, with a birdbath in the middle of the flagstones. There was nowhere to leave my skateboard. I walked ten houses down to a For Sale sign and hid my skateboard in the long grass and then walked back.

I rang the doorbell, and a woman with shining hair and jewellery and makeup and a pink dress came to the door.

I stared at her in surprise. I hadn’t known he was married. Or it could be his sister.

I said I had come to see Hugh Carey.

She said: I’m awfully sorry, he isn’t seeing anybody.

I said I was sorry and I went away and retreated up the street. Later the woman in pink came out and went to a car and got in it and drove away. I went back to the house and rang the bell.

He came to the door and said What do you want.

His face was creased and brown and there was a badly healed scar down one cheek. His eyes blazed blue. His eyebrows were shaggy, he had a straggling moustache. His hair was bleached very light, and there were white hairs in it.

What do you want? he said again.

I have to talk to you, I said. I knew that if I walked away I would despise myself for the rest of my life.

He said he could spare a few minutes and I followed him inside. I don’t know what I expected but I was surprised by the shining wooden floors and thick rugs and stuffed sofas. An interesting form of the subjunctive is not something you can bring back as a trophy but still this was not what I had expected.

We went into a room with a black and white marble floor and a pale yellow sofa and he gestured to the sofa and said again What do you want.

I looked into that face of stone and knew I was about to die. He would see instantly through the lie and be filled with contempt. I thought of him walking across China with the boy, and walking across Kazakhstan with a tiny band of men; it was cheap and contemptible to play a trick on someone like that. I should make some excuse and leave.

Kambei tells Rikichi to call a samurai to a fight. He sits inside waiting. He tells Katsushiro to stand just inside the door with a stick. A good samurai will parry the blow.

I thought that if I were a coward I really would be my father’s son.

I said: I wanted to see you because I’m your son.

You’re my—

I was dead.

Eyes like the burnished blade of a sword blazed in his hard face. I was dead.

His mouth tightened. I was dead.

At last he spoke.

How the hell did that happen? he said irritably. She told me she had everything taken care of.

She forgot that she’d taken the pill a day late the day before, I said truthfully. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

Women! he said contemptuously. You must be older than you look, it can’t have been later than 83 which would make you—

13 and 10 months, I said. I look young for my age.

Well, and so tell me about yourself, he said heartily. Where do you go to school? What are your interests?

I don’t go to school, I said. I study at home.

I was about to explain that I already knew Greek, French, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, Russian and some Latin (in no particular order), plus a smattering of 17 or 18 others, when he exploded.

Oh my GOD! he exclaimed in horror. What is the stupid woman thinking of? Do you know ANYTHING? What’s 6 × 7?

What do you mean? I asked cautiously. I hadn’t done much on philosophy of number yet.

Oh—my—God.

He began pacing up and down the room, with a heavy-footed, slightly lame step—I remembered that he had covered thousands of miles on foot. He said: We’ve got to get you into a school pronto, my young friend. He said: Don’t get any ideas. I couldn’t possibly stump up school fees. He said: I hear some of the state schools aren’t bad. He said: My God, I knew the whole times table up to 12 by the time I was 6.

I’d known the times table up to 20 by the time I was 4, but I was too disgusted to say so. I said: Oh, you mean you wanted to know the product of 6 and 7.

What did you think I meant? he asked.

I don’t know, that’s why I asked what you meant, I said.

You’ll soon get that sort of nonsense knocked out of you at school, he said.

I said I had always heard that logical thought was discouraged in schools. I could not believe someone so stupid had been to find the lost silent tribe; no wonder they hadn’t wanted to talk to him.

He kept shooting me fierce glances out of narrowed eyes as he stumped up and down. What’s the capital of Peru? he said abruptly.

Oh, does it have a capital? I said.

Oh—my—God.

Madrid? I said. Barcelona? Kiev?

What is the country coming to?

Buenos Aires! I said. Santiago! Cartagena—no that’s Brazil isn’t it don’t tell me I’ll have it in a minute it isn’t, it wouldn’t be Acapulco would it no forget I said that it’s on the tip of my tongue don’t tell me it’s coming ancient holy city of the Zincas Casablanca.

He said: Lima.

I said: I thought Casablanca didn’t sound quite right, ask me another one.

He said I must give him my mother’s phone number and he would have a word with her.

I said I would rather not.

He said: What you want is neither here nor there.

I wanted to get this over. I hadn’t come for money but I had to say something so I said: Look, I really didn’t come here to discuss my education. I know the product of 7 and 6 is 42, and 13 × 17 is 221 and 18 × 19 is 342 and I know the binomial theorem and I know

is the Bernoulli equation for inviscid incompressible irrotational flow. I plan to learn to work as a member of a team when the other members of the team are out of their teens. My mother doesn’t know I came here, she didn’t want you to be bothered. But she’s going insane at her work. I want to buy a mule and go down the Andes. I thought you might help.

The last thing I wanted was to be alone in the Transural with this lunatic. I also couldn’t see myself confiding my ambition to go to Oxford at the age of 11. But I had to say something.

Go down the Andes on a mule? That doesn’t sound very in character, he said. Are you sure this isn’t something you want?

Yes it’s something I want, I said.

Well, the best piece of advice I can give you is never rely on anyone but yourself for anything you want out of life, he said. Everything I’ve got I’ve got by my own efforts. You don’t grow up by having people hand you things on a platter.

By the time I grow up it may be too late, I said.

You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, he said, and he stopped pacing to stand beside me. One hand gripped the back of the sofa; I saw that a finger was missing. He’d probably offered a piece of advice to a member of the Lost Silent Tribe.

That’s what worries me, I said.

Well there’s nothing I can do, he said. Nobody ever did anything for me and it never did me any harm. It made me what I am today.

I was glad we weren’t fighting with real swords. If we had been this might have killed me. I said I would bear that in mind.

He said: I’ve got a son already. He’d be older than you are if he’s still alive. Not by much, but he’s already a man—they grow up fast.

He said: When a boy reaches 12 he goes through an initiation ceremony. He’s stripped to the waist and flogged—not a lot, just five or six welts to make the back bleed. Then he’s tied up. There’s a beastly stinging fly that’s attracted by blood—of course they gather. If the boy cries out he gets another lash. It’s over when he’s been silent for a day. You’ll see them stretched out, backs solid with the feeding flies—sometimes they’re unconscious for the last 12 hours or so, sometimes the father will slap a boy awake to make sure they don’t get off lightly. It’s hard to be a man there.

I said: Yeah, I hear they don’t even use case endings.

He said: Who told you that?

It’s in the book, I said.

No it’s not in the book, he said.

I heard it somewhere, I said.

She must have told you. I don’t suppose she told you how I found out.

He grinned at me; his teeth were yellow and brown beneath the moustache.

She said you hid behind a tent, I said.

I tried that, he said. I got nowhere. Then one day the mother of the boy came to me. She’d sold him again to some traders—they don’t like impure blood in the tribe. But she was curious all the same—that’s what had got her in trouble the first time. She couldn’t stay away. I got her to teach me a few words and one thing led to another. The women spat at her and pulled her hair when they found out. Anyway we’d lie about in the grass and I’d copy something she’d said and she’d slap me or laugh at me for copying her. Then I overheard a couple of men talking to each other and realised what was going on. I laughed till I cried. Then she got pregnant. She made me leave. Probably sold the little bastard to the Chinese. If so he won’t have been initiated, he said, and he grinned, and he said, If these things happen to anyone why shouldn’t they happen to my son?

I said: In that case why should you care whether I know the multiplication table and why should you care whether I go to school?

He said: There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t take her with me, and they’d have killed me if I’d stayed. This is different. Your mother has been completely irresponsible.

I began to laugh.

Steps approached the front door, which opened. The door to the room opened while I was still laughing, and the woman in pink came in.

What’s going on? she asked.

This is my son, he said.

No I’m not, I said.

What do you mean? he said.

Have you seen Seven Samurai?

No.

I have, said the woman.

It was a test, I said. I couldn’t tell my real father because it was true.

I don’t begin to understand, said the woman, and the man said

In some parts of the world you’d be flogged for this.

I said it was not necessary to leave England to find people who did stupid things.

Who are you? he said angrily. What’s your name?

David, I said without thinking.

I don’t understand, he said angrily. Did you want money? You made it up to get money?

Of course I want money, I said, though there were other things I wanted more. How am I supposed to buy a mule without money?

But why in God’s name—

I did not know what to say. Because you were a linguist, I said. I heard the story about the case endings and I thought you’d understand. Of course you don’t understand. I’ve got to go.

But it’s got to be true, he said. How could you know about the case endings? She must have told you. It must be true. Where is she?

I’ve got to go, I said.

He said: No, don’t go.

I said: Do you still play chess?

He said: She told you about the chess?

I said: What?

The woman said: Hugh—

He said: What does it take to get a cup of tea in this house?

She said: I was just going, but she looked at me as she went.

He said: What did she tell you about the chess?

I said: Do you mean you let him win?

He said: Didn’t she tell you?

I said: She said you didn’t let him win.

He said: Of course I didn’t let him win, and he stumped up and down the rug.

He said: He won 10 games out of 10. He stopped saying What am I going to do; he sat smiling at the board. He said I do what you do better than you can yourself, and you can’t do what I do at all. I thought Where would you be if it weren’t for me, you stupid bastard?

I said You talk a good game.

He said Meaning?

I said Is it a game because I say it’s a game? And I said that if I treated it as a game because I thought it was a game and he treated it as a game not because he thought it was a game but because I said it was —

And he said Yes

— which of us was doing the thing he thought he did

And he said Yes

and that was the last thing I said to him

Before the exam, I said.

Yes, he said.

What was the last thing he said to you? I asked.

None of your business.

What did my mother say? I said.

I can’t remember. Some daft thing.

What? I said hoping it would be something Sibylla couldn’t possibly have said.

I can’t remember. Something sympathetic.

I wanted to ask whether the woman had looked bored, but I thought he probably wouldn’t have noticed.

He said: Tell me where she is. I’ve got to see her again

I said: I’ve got to go

He said: You’ve got to tell me

I opened the door and went down the front hall. I could hear him behind me. I broke into a run and slipped on a silky rug that slid on the polished wood and got my balance and caught at the first Chubb lock and I could hear him behind me coming fast. I snapped open the first lock and I opened the second Chubb lock and the third Chubb lock with both hands and I got the door open just as his hand gripped my shoulder.

I twisted away and pulled myself free. I crossed the walk in three strides and vaulted over the gate and when I looked back he was just standing at the door. He looked at me across the birdbath and the rosebushes and then he turned.

The door shut. It was just a boring house on a boring street of houses with their closed white doors.

I stumbled down the street. He had not killed to learn those moodless verbs and uninflected nouns, but he had brought a slave into existence for their sake.

I walked back to Notting Hill Gate and I took the Circle Line.

2

A good samurai will parry the blow

I decided not to apply to Oxford to read classics at the age of 11.

Sibylla asked what had happened to my skateboard. I thought of the long line of closed doors, the house for sale, the long grass. I knew I couldn’t go back. I said it had got stolen. I said it didn’t matter. I kept thinking of the boy who wasn’t my brother.

I thought of the prisoners of fate who couldn’t hope for better luck.

I thought: Why would I even WANT a father. At least I was free to come and go. Sometimes I’d pass a council bus with a message on the back: SOUTHWARK: WHERE TRUANCY IS TAKEN SERIOUSLY, and I’d walk north across Tower Bridge to the City, where truancy was not taken seriously. What kind of father would put up with that? I should quit while I was ahead.

I had stopped sleeping on the floor. I had stopped eating grasshoppers au gratin with a sauce of sautéed woodlice. Sibylla kept asking if something was wrong. I said nothing was wrong. The thing that was wrong was that nothing was ever going to change.

I decided to do something Hugh Carey would not have done at age 11. I thought if I worked through the Schaum Outline series on Fourier analysis that would be safe enough because according to Sib it is not taught in schools. HC had probably never studied it at all. I thought maybe I would do Lagrangians just to be on the safe side. Maybe I would do some Laplace transforms too.

Sibylla was typing Tropical Fish Hobbyist. No one was going to take me galloping across the Mongolian steppe. No one was going to take me to the North Pole any time soon.

One day I went with Sibylla to Tesco’s.

A brilliant white light beat pitilessly down, like the fierce desert sun at midday on the French Foreign Legion; the glittering floor dazzled the eye with the cruel desert glare.

We walked slowly through the cereals.

Vast boxes of cornflakes and bran flakes rose on either side; as we reached the muesli a cart turned the corner and turned into the aisle, propelled by a fat woman and followed by three fat children. One was crying into a fat fist, and two were arguing about Frosties and Breakfast Boulders, and the woman was smiling.

She came down the aisle and Sibylla stopped and stood by the cart, motionless as the boxes of cornflakes on their shelves. Her eyes were like black coals, and her skin like pale dirty thick clay. From her absolute silence, from her black staring eyes, I knew that this mild fat woman was someone she had hoped never to see again.

The cart, and the woman, and the children came forward, and suddenly the woman’s eyes shifted from the boxes of cereal, and across the mildness spread a look of pleased surprise.

Sybil! she exclaimed. Is it really you?

This was obviously someone who knew Sib about as well as she knew her name. No one who knew Sibylla well would have opened a conversation with a remark of such unparalleled fatuity.

Sib stared at her dumbly.

It’s me! said the woman. I suppose I’ve changed a lot, she added grimacing comically. Kids! she added.

The little wet fist fell, and small eyes gazed at a box on which brightly coloured cartoon characters consumed representations of the product.

I want the Honey Monster, howled the child.

You picked last time, said one of the others, with unmistakable Schadenfreude, and an argument broke out concerning the respective claims of the remaining two to choose this week.

Now two of the children wept into pudgy fingers, one screaming.

The woman tried, with small success, to restore order.

And is this your little boy? she asked brightly.

Sibylla was still silent, and now her lips were pressed tightly together.

If the woman opposite was capable of thought, something for which we had as yet no evidence, her thoughts were certainly opaque to her companions. I could see Sibylla’s thoughts circling her mind like goldfish in a bowl. At last she spoke.

To be or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—

No more and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation

The woman glanced aghast at the small fat crew and was at once relieved, for it was clear enough that they had not understood a word of this.

Well, of course we all have our cross to bear, she said cheerily.

Sibylla gazed down, eyes blazing, at a tin of baked beans.

What is your little boy’s name? asked the woman.

His name is Stephen, said Sib, after a moment’s hesitation.

He looks very bright, said the woman. No, Felicity, no! Micky, what did I say?

He is capable of logical thought, said Sib. It makes him appear exceptionally intelligent. The fact is that most people are illogical out of habit rather than stupidity; they could probably be rational quite easily if they were properly taught.

So it has all worked out for the best! said the woman. You know, however bad things look, something good may be just around the corner.

Or vice versa, said Sib.

We must always look on the bright side.

Again Sibylla was silent.

The children burst into quarrel again. The woman urged them mildly to stop. They paid no attention.

She looked at them mildly, her mouth crumpling a little.

Sib looked at her with terrible pity, as if wondering what death could be worse than the life which had led her to this cardboard canyon of cornflakes. She said to me in a low voice:

Ludo, take the Little Prince away.

And do what? I said.

Buy him some chocolate, said Sib, digging into her bag and giving me a pound. Buy them all some chocolate. Take them all away.

I led them away down the aisle. As we turned the corner I saw Sib put an arm around one fat shaking shoulder; now it was the fat woman who wept on a wet fist.

One of the children was about my age. He asked where I went to school. I said I didn’t go to a school. He said everybody had to go to school. I said my mother thought I should identify a field of particular interest and just go straight to university, though I would probably find the students rather immature.

The conversation flagged. My companions absorbed chocolate; this gone, they turned again to combat.

Presently Sibylla and the woman came through the checkout lanes.

Sib was saying All I’m saying is if we imagine setting up a society with no knowledge of the place we are to occupy, we are highly UNLIKELY to sentence ourselves to 16 odd years’ absolute economic dependence upon persons of whose rationality there can be no guarantee, and highly LIKELY to stipulate a society in which

The woman was laughing softly.

Sibylla looked with ill-concealed horror at the bechocolated crew which now converged whining on the other trolley.

The woman smiled mildly.

No, Micky, no! Felicity, what did I say? she began—

and then she stopped. She was staring at the Schaum Outline on Fourier analysis which I had brought in case I got bored.

She said What school does he go to?

Sibylla said I was studying at home.

Now the woman stared at me, and now she stared at Sibylla like a prisoner of fate who sees hope of reprieve. She said You mean you’re teaching him yourself! But that’s amazing!

and she said I wonder—it would be the most enormous favour—would you consider helping Micky? I’m sure he’s very bright, but he’s had a few problems, and the school just doesn’t want to know.

The most enormous favour did not sound good, and sure enough she went on to say Nothing formal.

Sibylla was stammering But surely you

The woman said What with the other two

Sibylla said Well

We walked home with rations for the week.

I said: Who was that?

Sibylla said she was someone

She said: She once saved my life.

She said: Had our positions been reversed, of course, she would have been preserved thanks to me for what we now know lay in store.

She laughed and said: This reminds me of that line in Renan!

She frowned and I thought she was not going to be able to remember the line from Renan. She said: The Aryan language had a great superiority in the conjugation of verbs, that marvellous instrument, the conjugation of verbs, that marvellous instrument, that marvellous instrument of metaphysics … The Arab race handicapped for fifteen hundred years by the inferiority of their moods and tenses—

and she said ce merveilleux instrument, ce merveilleux instrument

and suddenly she laughed and said I wonder if I can do it in Arabic!

I said: Do what in Arabic?

Sib said: Had our positions been reversed, of course, she would have been preserved thanks to me for what we now know lay in store.

She said: Let’s do it in Hebrew and Arabic and see if he’s right! You do Hebrew, I’ll do Arabic—

and she said lau …

I said: How did she save your life?

Sib said she did not know much about it because she had been unconscious at the time but apparently the woman had called an ambulance in the nick of time.

I said: How do you know about the case endings?

Sib said: What case endings?

I said: Of the lost silent tribe, they’re not in the book

Sib said: lau …

I said: And the chess isn’t in the book

Sib said: Isn’t Robert Donat on TV tonight?

I said: Did HC tell you after the seminar?

Sib said: This thing by Renan is mysterious. It seems to me that philosophical Greek would be more troublesome to translate into Latin than Arabic. What we should do is compare a Latin translation of, say, Plato with one in Arabic and maybe some passage of Maimonides on a related subject and see which is more awkward.

I said: The chess

Sib said: Look Ludo, an Illinois Fried Chicken!

I said: isn’t in the book

Sib said: You can go to SOAS and work on it

I said: SOAS won’t let me in

Sib said: You simply explain that you are working on a project for school

She said: & if I type Tropical Fish Hobbyist for four hours we can catch Robert Donat at 9:00. You can work on Plato to get ready for this project at SOAS.

I said: Are you really going to teach the Little Prince?

She said: The Little Pauper, wits gone a-begging. It will kill me to do it but it must be done.

The actor Robert Donat never made many films. There was The 39 Steps, in which he escaped across moors and jumped on and off moving trains; there was The Winslow Boy, in which he played a charismatic, controversial and highly paid barrister. In The Count of Monte Cristo he escaped from the Chateau d’If. In The Citadel he played a charismatic doctor who abandoned his ideals. In The Young Mr. Pitt he played a charismatic politician. There was also Goodbye Mr. Chips, in which he played a shy schoolmaster who always told the same jokes. Sib thought there were some others but she could never remember what they were. None of the films was scheduled to be on that night. The astronomer, Nobel Prize winner and Donat lookalike George Sorabji was on TV every Thursday at 9:00. Sometimes he liked to jump onto a rope ladder dropped from a helicopter, and sometimes he liked to stride up and down, eyes flashing, and explain the Pauli Exclusion Principle or the importance of the Chandrasekhar constant. He was never much like Mr. Chips.

Sorabji liked to say when asked (if not asked he would volunteer the information) that he was the descendant of a drugs baron. His great-grandfather had been a Parsi businessman in Bombay, and he had built up a fortune mainly in the opium trade. Far from being a social outcast he was a pillar of society and noted philanthropist, a man who had littered Bombay with schools and hospitals and repulsive pieces of statuary. Sorabji argued that similar benefits, only on a larger scale, would be the inevitable result of legalisation of drugs, which could be heavily taxed to pay for schools, hospitals and obscenely expensive telescopes.

The letters pages of the papers were full of heated exchanges between Sorabji and members of the public on the legalisation of drugs, astrology the pseudo-science, the absolute insignificance of our national heritage in comparison with the universe & consequent need for instant reallocation of funds to pay for obscenely expensive telescopes, and an impressive range of other subjects on which Sorabji held strong views. You could also hear Robert Donat in Winslow Boy mode on the radio or see him on TV. Last but not least he had won a Nobel Prize.

Sorabji had shared the prize with three other people; he had won it for physics because there isn’t a Nobel Prize for astronomy, and people who knew said that though he was a brilliant astronomer he hadn’t really won it for the thing he was brilliant at.

The thing he had been brilliant at was creating mathematical models of black holes, but the thing he had won the prize for was Colossus, a satellite for multi-wavelength astronomy which would never have got off the drawing board, let alone the ground, had it not been for Sorabji. Sorabji had extracted commitments for obscene amounts of money from the US, the EU, Australia, Japan and lots of other places that had never before thought of sponsoring a satellite, and he had helped to design ground-breaking telescopes for the satellite, which had caused the obscenely expensive project to go a heartstopping five times over budget. Then it went into orbit, and within three years information from the satellite had revolutionised understanding of quasars, pulsars and black holes.

Sorabji was interested in things that bored 90% of the country, and he had strong views with which 99% of the country strongly disagreed, but nobody held it against him. Some people said that say what you like he had the courage of his convictions, and some people said say what you like his heart is in the right place. They said he would lay down his life for his friends. Sorabji had once saved the life of a friend when, visiting the observatory at Mauna Koa, they had taken a helicopter up over a live volcano and crashed inside it, and he had rescued a member of his team, a Ugandan from the Lango tribe placed under house arrest by Idi Amin, by smuggling him out over the Kenyan border under a hail of bullets.

Sorabji had originally come to the attention of the British public through a programme called Mathematics the Universal Language. 99.99% of the British public were not interested in mathematics, but they were interested in the fact that Sorabji had succeeded in teaching mathematics to a boy from an Amazonian tribe when neither spoke a word of the other’s language, and in the fact that he had nearly laid down his life for his friend.

Sorabji had been en route to a conference on pulsars in Santiago when the plane made an unscheduled stop in Belem because of mechanical difficulties. Sorabji had taken a small local plane instead; it had crashed deep in the Amazonian rainforest, the pilot dead on impact, Sorabji rescued by a local tribe but stranded for six months.

At night he would look up at the brilliant Southern sky which could be seen from the clearing, thinking about how far away everything was and how long it took the light to reach him and how little time a man did have to observe the light as it came.

He would spread soft dirt on the ground outside his hut and work on mathematical problems, because there was nothing else to do.

One day a boy from the tribe stood by him and seemed interested.

Sorabji thought: But how terrible! Suppose he is a natural mathematician, born into a society without mathematics! He had not bothered to learn the language but he had a sneaking suspicion you couldn’t count in it much past four. Imagine a mathematical genius born to a language where you went one fried ant, two fried ants, three fried ants, four fried ants, lots of fried ants, lots and lots of fried ants, lots and lots and lots of— The prospect was too frightful to contemplate.

Smoothing out the dirt he gritted his teeth and addressed himself to the basics. He put a stone on the dirt, and below it he wrote: 1. He put two stones in the dirt, and he wrote: 2. He put three stones in the dirt, and he wrote: 3. Four stones: 4. Iki-go-e (or Pete, as Sorabji called him) squatted down beside him; Sorabji couldn’t tell if 5 came as a surprise.

Six months later Pete and Sorabji were in jail.

A group of loggers had turned up in the jungle. A couple of members of the tribe had been killed, others had scattered in different directions, and Sorabji had set off on the tracks of the trucks for civilisation. Pete had followed. They had come to a small town deep in the jungle, and Sorabji had tried to find a telephone. There was only one in town, at a building marked Polícia; Sorabji had walked in the door and at once been arrested.

Five days later the British consul in Belem flew up the Amazon to Manaus, then headed inland in a borrowed Land Rover.

The British consul in Belem loved Brazil. He loved the language; he loved the music; he loved the wild, savage country; he loved the people. The fly in the ointment was the fact that this marvellous country had not closed its borders to all Britons not travelling on official business. The British were not, in his opinion, actually more intrepid than other nations; they merely had a boundless belief in the powers of their consul, a belief which would have been justified had the F.O. placed at his disposition, for example, a small private army and a slush fund of several millions, but which went well beyond what could be achieved on a small emergency fund and modest entertainment allowance. What do they imagine I can do? he would fume, and What on earth do they imagine I can do? was the refrain as the Land Rover bounced and jolted over the potholes.

He arrived at the logging town in late afternoon. He went at once to the Polícia, was shown into the jail, and nearly threw up.

It was close to 100 degrees outside; worse in the jail. Twenty men were crammed into a room in which ten could have breathed.

The jailer crunched over the cockroaches and pointed at Sorabji.

Sorabji’s hair was long and matted, as was his beard. He’d spent six months in a tropical sun, and was now dark brown. His clothes had been disgusting after the first week; following local custom he had taken to wearing his shirt as a loincloth. Sorabji always liked to say that the unfortunate consul had travelled hundreds of miles into the interior to rescue a British citizen, only to find Gunga Din. It was true that the loincloth had come from Gieves & Hawkes, but this was not something you’d notice on a casual inspection.

Good of you to come, Gunga Din said suavely. So glad you could make it.

And then, because the question had been tormenting him for months, You wouldn’t happen to know if they’ve got anywhere with binary X-ray emissions?

The consul said not to his knowledge. He introduced himself.

And you are?

The name’s Sorabji, said Gunga Din. George Sorabji.

The consul explained that he would need some proof of his nationality.

Gunga Din explained that he had been on a plane that had crashed in the jungle and that his passport had gone up in flames. He suggested that the consul telephone his supervisor at Cambridge, verify his identity and determine the state of play on binary X-ray emissions. He demanded immediate release and repatriation.

And we’ll have to get Pete out of here too, he added.

Who’s Pete? asked his rescuer.

Gunga Din gestured to the corner.

Do you mean one of the Indians? asked the consul.

I don’t think he’d get much joy at the Indian Embassy, Din replied haughtily. He is an Amazonian.

I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do for a Brazilian national. I can tell you the procedure if you’d like to lodge a complaint—

Sorabji looked at Pete. His head had fallen back, and the whites of his eyes were showing. He would die soon but that was not good enough. He could probably get a decent mark at O-level; it was a miracle of sorts but not good enough.

Sorabji said: He is a mathematical genius. I shall take him back to Cambridge.

The consul looked at Pete. If you are a consul people are constantly spinning you ridiculous stories and expecting you to believe them, but this was the most ridiculous he had ever heard. He said correctly: If he is a Brazilian national I’m afraid there is nothing—

Sorabji said: You. Stupid. Ignorant. Bureaucrat.

And he said: Newton is sitting in this cell. If I leave they will kill him. I shall not leave this place unless he goes with me.

But what exactly do you think I can—

Sorabji said: Do you have a piece of paper?

He was handed a piece of paper and a pen, and he wrote on it

1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20

and he said: How long do you think it would take you to add it up?

The consul hesitated—

That boy, said Sorabji very gravely, can add all the numbers between 1 and 500 in 20 seconds.

The consul said: Hm.

Sorabji was a Zoroastrian but he was not much of a believer, and he had been to chapel a lot at school but he believed even less in that, and yet he found himself saying Please Please Please Please. Please let him not know about Gauss please please please please please.

Because Sorabji had taught Pete a trick that the great mathematician Gauss had discovered at the age of 8:

Suppose you want to add 1+2+3+4+5

Add the sequence to itself backwards: 5+4+3+2+1

The sum of each pair is the same: 6+6+6+6+6

But that’s easy to work out! It’s just 5 × 6, or 30.

So the sum of the first sequence is just 30 divided by 2, or 15!

If the sequence went up to 6, each pair would add up to 7, so the sum would be 6 × 7 ÷ 2, or 21; if the sequence went to 7, the sum would be 7 × 8 ÷ 2 = 28. If the sequence went up to 500 the sum would be half of 500 × 501: 250,500 ÷ 2 = 125,250. Easy.

The consul was still staring at the piece of paper.

He said: But how’s that possible?

Sorabji said: Look, don’t take my word for it. Take him up to the office. Write down a sum, all the numbers between 1 and 257, 1 and 366, whatever you choose. He doesn’t know how to use a pen, you’ll have to spread some dirt on the floor for him to write on. Give him the problem and time him and then work it out on a calculator.

The consul said: Well …

He went off to speak to the head of police. It is not standard practice in the Brazilian system of justice to release convicts who can add all the numbers between 1 and 500 in 20 seconds, but all the same there was something very strange about it and the head of police said he would like to see it. So Pete was brought up from the cell.

After a little conferring they decided to try him on 30. The consul wrote out the sum on a piece of paper, and a little dirt was brought in and spread on the floor, and the piece of paper was handed to Pete. 30 times 31 is 930 divided by 2 is 465 and he squatted down and wrote 465 in the dirt while the chief of police was punching 17 into his calculator. The chief of police got up to 30. 465 appeared on the display.

The chief of police and the consul stared at the boy, and their eyes got wider, and wider, and wider.

They tried 57, and 92, and 149, and each time the same thing happened. The boy wrote a number in the dirt, and a very long time later the same number would appear on the display of the calculator.

The consul looked at the boy, and he remembered the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan. He called Sorabji’s supervisor in Cambridge and received confirmation that the brilliant young astronomer had disappeared en route to a conference in Chile six months before. He hung up the phone, and he explained to the chief of police that Sorabji was a brilliant eccentric scientist. That was why he had turned up in the jungle wearing a loincloth. The boy was his pupil. The chief of police looked at him steadily. The consul made polite but firm enquiries as to the precise nature of the charges. The chief of police looked at him steadily.

Accounts differ as to what happened next.

The numbers were the only thing that Pete could understand in the proceedings, and he later said that he remembered doing the sum of numbers between 1 and 30, and the numbers between 1 and 57, and 1 and 92, and 1 and 149, and he remembered five bundles of notes with the number 10,000 changing hands.

The consul maintained that there had been absolutely no irregularity of any kind, the F.O. had extremely clear guidelines on bribery, he had made a call to Britain to speak with Sorabji’s supervisor and had naturally reimbursed the chief of police for the cost of the call, and he had also authorised the purchase of clothes for which he had reimbursed the chief of police and for which he had a receipt.

The chief of police confirmed this story.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Sorabji returned to Britain and sold the story to the papers and got a TV deal and Pete went to Caltech and learned English and eventually developed an interest in physics, and he was reunited with Sorabji for the production of Mathematics the Universal Language.

Most members of the British public are not interested in mathematics, but they were intrigued enough by Pete to tune in anyway, and so got their first taste of Sorabji in action. Most had been sceptical of Sorabji’s claim to have taught an Amazonian the subject from scratch. Sorabji demonstrated his methods using numbers, stones, leaves, flashing eyes, eloquent gestures and not a single word of English, and they changed their minds. Most viewers had never heard of Gauss, nor felt the lack. Seeing Sorabji they felt that things might have been different. Had they had a teacher who looked like Robert Donat, who knew what heights they might have scaled? At the end of the programme Sorabji descended into English to explain that the best-dressed Indians bought their loincloths at Gieves & Hawkes, a tip which most teachers of mathematics are not in a position to offer. Sorabji was even able to persuade people to sit still for a circle of radius 1 described in the Gaussian plane.

People said say what you like he has a sense of humour, and they watched Mathematics the Universal Language and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Sun because he had a sense of humour and because he was like Robert Donat in The Winslow Boy and The 39 Steps but not Goodbye Mr. Chips.

Today the programme began at Wembley Stadium. Sorabji stood in the middle of the field.

He said how big an atom do we need to see the nucleus? He took from his pocket a tiny steel ball. He said that if this were the nucleus of a potassium atom the atom would be the size of the stadium, and 99.97% of its mass would be in the tiny steel ball, which would weigh about 105,000 kilos. For those of you who have trouble visualising 105,000 kilos, said Sorabji, that’s roughly 110 Vauxhall Astras.

Wembley wouldn’t let us stack 110 Vauxhall Astras on the field, he said regretfully. But here’s one we made earlier.

The camera cut to a car park. The stadium was now in the background. In the foreground were 110 red Vauxhall Astras in an irregular polyhedral formation, stacked in scaffolding that looked as though it had gone a heartstopping five times over budget.

There was a helicopter standing to one side.

Sorabji looked up at the structure which was about four times his height. He said the good thing about this example is that we get a real sense of the weight of a nucleus the size of a tiny steel ball. The bad thing is that we tend to lose sight of the electrons. Literally. The electrons of this 105,000-kilo nucleus weigh about 1.5 kilos apiece, and to see what that means we’ll have to go to Luton because the first two are in a shell 30 kilometres away.

The helicopter’s propellers began to turn, and the helicopter to rise. Below it dangled a rope ladder. Sorabji leapt onto the ladder and began to climb. We were in the 39 Steps segment of the programme.

Below the helicopter you could see the red structure shrinking first to the size of a football, then a tennis ball, then a golfball, then a tiny dot and then it was gone.

A camera in the helicopter showed mile after mile of houses and Sorabji on the rope ladder. We had seen the programme before but Sib said she wanted to see it again.

The helicopter came down 30 kilometres away at a field near Luton. Sorabji stepped onto the ground. He said: One of the things that makes electrons so hard to think about is that they don’t have size in the normal sense of the word, and another is the fact that you can never know exactly where an electron is at any given time. This makes an electron highly unlike this 1.5-kilo free weight from a local gym. But a 110-Astra nucleus at Wembley weighs about 72,000 times as much as this 1.5-kilo electron at Luton, and in that it’s highly like the relation of the nucleus of a potassium atom to an electron. He showed on a map that the second shell would be at Birmingham and the third shell would be at Sheffield and the fourth at Newcastle and he said that instead of going on to Birmingham he was going to introduce Mr. James Davis of Dunstable Tae Kwon Do. Mr. Davis was a black belt, fourth dan; he was going to break a brick with his bare hand.

The brick was on a stand. Davis stood in front of it. He raised his arm; he brought down his arm; the brick broke into two pieces and fell to the floor.

Sorabji asked how long he had had to train to learn to do it and Davis said he had been studying martial arts all his life but he would say he had started to take it seriously about ten years ago.

He said: I don’t want any youngsters out there watching to get the wrong idea, obviously there is an element of hardening the body involved but I’d say the essential thing is it’s about training the mind. There are a lot of misconceptions about the sport, people think it’s all blokes acting out some Bruce Lee fantasy and I won’t deny there are some dojangs naming no names where that’s about all there is to it.

He said: Well, you’ve got your programme to get on with but there’s just one point I’d like to make, which is that the more you study any martial art the less likely you are to actually get in a fight and the less likely you are to put yourself in the type of situation where you have to fight. A beginner might do that type of thing but the more you progress the more you realise the skill is something not to be used lightly.

He said: Also the more you progress the more you realise that there is more to it than trying to progress. As a beginner you just want to improve as fast as you can, you tend to obsess about getting to the next colour of belt, there comes a time, or there should come a time, when you rise above that. Obviously you improve your skill by fighting someone as good as you are or better, well, if you think about it, if the only point is to improve your skill there’s nothing in it for the better fighter. There was a time when for that very reason the last thing I wanted was to open a school. But there comes a time when you realise you have to help young people coming along, and in the final analysis that was why I agreed to come on this show. If you, as a Nobel Prize winner, can take time away from the lab to help train young minds who am I to say no.

Sorabji said: Thank you for joining us.

He said: Let’s see this one more time in slow motion, and they replayed the arm rising and falling and the brick splitting in two.

Sib said: Do they teach you all that in judo?

I said we didn’t learn to break bricks because judo was mainly about throws and falls.

Sib said: Oh well.

He said: If the space between a nucleus and the first electron shell is like the space between 110 Vauxhall Astras at Wembley and a 1.5-kilo weight at Luton, and if the space between the first shell and the second is like the distance between Luton and Birmingham, why does it take ten years of serious mental and physical training to get a hand through a brick? At the atomic level both hand and brick are almost entirely empty space. The fact is it is not the matter in the hand which repels the matter in the brick. The repulsion is the result of electrical charge. If it were not for electrical charge we could walk through walls.

The first time I saw the programme I was very impressed by this. Now I suddenly thought Wait a minute.

I said to Sib that I did not think you could have an atom without electrical charge and if you couldn’t have an atom how could you have walls and I said maybe I should write him a letter and sign it Ludo aged 11.

Sib said: If you think he is unaware of the fact you should certainly bring it to his attention. She said you should only sign a letter aged 11 if you were saying something cleverer than the average 11-year-old would say and it was not a good idea if you had completely missed the point.

She said he was obviously trying to communicate a fact to the public at large.

I said: Fine.

She said: I wonder if it’s too late to move to Dunstable.

I said: What?

Sorabji explained that the electrons orbited the nucleus billions of times in a millionth of a second, the effect was similar to that of the propellers of a helicopter and it was the speed of the electrons that made the atom solid.

Sibylla commented that Sorabji was largely self-taught.

Sorabji’s father was a Parsi from Bombay; his mother was English. She first met his father on a visit to Cambridge: her brother was reading mathematics at Trinity College and introduced her to another man on the same staircase. At first they did not hit it off, because she made a comment about India and he had the bad manners to say that as she had never set foot in the country he would be interested to know on what she based her opinion; she said later he was the rudest man she had ever met. He went back to India and she was presented and did the usual things and it was all rather a bore. She had always been unconventional and she got the idea of going out to India just to see the place. At first her father refused his permission, but she turned down three or four offers of marriage and began taking a horse out and setting it at six-foot fences, and when she had broken an arm and a collarbone her father said he supposed he’d better let her go then, before one of the horses got hurt.

She sailed to Bombay and it was not at all what she had expected. The Club defied description. So did the people. Also, it was rather hot. That is, she had expected it to be hot, but she had expected it to be cooler. But she looked up the rudest man she had ever met and this time they got on like a house on fire. She said that now that she had set foot in the country she could say whatever she liked and he said he was delighted to hear that she had overcome the diffidence which had afflicted her on a previous occasion. She said something rather cutting and he said something quite rude. She knew he was brilliant because her brother had said he was one of the most brilliant mathematicians he knew, but though he was brilliant and rude he was not condescending. Her brother’s other friends were unfailingly charming, so that she could not talk to one without instantly afterwards taking out a horse and setting it at a six-foot fence. She had never met a man who could open his mouth without imperilling the life of a horse.

They married in the teeth of opposition from his family, and now she wondered if she had made a mistake. Her husband was much richer than anyone she had ever met, but he also worked much harder than anyone she knew, and his business took up most of his time. His family took seriously things she could not take seriously at all. His mother once told her gravely about a recent gathering of the Kaisar-i-Hind, only Indian Chapter of the Canadian Daughters of Empire.

‘How utterly ghastly’ (the only sane response to the story) would obviously bring on palpitations. Vivian murmured some noncommittal reply and downed a gin and tonic in a single swallow. Her mother-in-law added, impressively, an illustration of the loyalty of the Guides, who had concluded an assembly by rising and shouting fervently ‘One Flag, One Throne, One Empire!’ It looked bad to be having another drink so soon, but what could one do?

It was terribly, terribly hot. She lost three babies and they decided not to try for a while. Then she got pregnant again, and this time she was sent immediately to the hills. Various female members of the family offered to go with her, but her husband (fearing that the cooler climate might tempt her into the saddle) put his foot down. She was allowed to go on her own, and this time the child was born alive, but she was not well for a long time afterwards so she did not see much of it.

One of her brothers was growing coffee in Kenya. She had heard the climate was better there, and she asked one day if they could go to Kenya. She did not really think they could, because the family was all in Bombay and the business there took up so much time. Her husband walked up and down for a minute or so, and he said he thought it might be quite a good idea. He said he thought there would be opportunities in Kenya. He said it would mean starting over again, but all this fanaticism was not really his cup of tea.

They left Bombay when Sorabji was five, and his first memories were of the journey by ship to Mombasa.

He would wake late at night and his mother would be by the bed. In the gloom he would see only the glint of diamonds at her neck and ears, the white of her gloves; she would take him in her arms and carry him up to the deck where his father was waiting. She would hold him on the rail; below the pale foam melted into the dark water, above the stars were brilliant and close.

Sometimes some other passenger would come and protest that the child should be in bed. His mother would laugh and say that they might see a comet.

She would point out constellations while his father stood silently smoking. She explained that she had seen different stars as a child; she explained that the earth was like a ball in the air, and that if you were at one end of it you always looked out the same way.

His mother died of malaria when he was 12. His father sent him to a school in Britain.

The head of the school interviewed Sorabji, and he agreed to admit him to the school as a special favour, but he said he would have a lot of catching up to do. He said he was the most ignorant boy he had ever seen in his life.

The fact was that Sorabji knew a lot about mathematics and science and nothing else. He had been taught by correspondence course in Kenya, and as soon as the packet came in the post he would do all the mathematics and science and send it back, so that he made rapid progress in the subjects that interested him. He kept the arts papers in a pile on the floor to be done as time allowed. One day he thought he should do something about it because the pile was five feet high, but the early papers at the base of the pile had been eaten by ants, so he had given it up as a bad job.

He told the head that he knew quite a lot about science and mathematics, and the head said what this showed was that he was completely undisciplined. As he had covered most of the mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics of the O-level syllabus, however, those periods could be used to catch up on what he had missed.

Sorabji ran away from the school 27 times and was sent back each time.

The first time he ran away was at night. He looked up at the Northern sky; it was like going from a Bond Street jeweller to a street trader hawking chips of glass on cheap velvet. The moon was 240,000 miles away and that was far enough. The second time he ran away was just after dawn. He made his way along a canal to the next town and he saw an orange ball of flame shimmering through the trees and it was 93 million miles away. He made it all the way to his father’s house in London, but then he was sent back to the school. He kept running away and being sent back to the school and soon everything in the solar system was too close.

He was obsessed with distance. He had read of stars whose light had left them millions of years ago, and he had read that the light we see may come from stars now dead. He would look up and think that all the stars might now be dead; he thought that they were so far away there would be no way to know.

It was as if everything might really already be over.

One day he found a book on astronomy in the school library. Because he was interested in distance and the deaths of stars he turned first to a chapter on stellar evolution, and the book fell open on something called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which used brightness and temperature to plot the evolution of stars. Sorabji had never seen anything so wonderful in his life. He had never imagined that a piece of knowledge so wonderful could exist in the universe.

He kept looking at the page thinking: Why have I never heard of this before? Why doesn’t everyone know about this? He sometimes said later how strange it was being at the school, knowing that no one had ever tried to give this glorious piece of information to the boys but instead forced them to spend hours turning perfectly good English poems into atrocious Latin ones. He said the frightening thing was thinking of how many other wonderful things there might be which were kept from them at the school. He had run away one last time and put himself in for A-levels independently and got the As and got into Cambridge, and he had never forgotten the things that were kept from people at school.

I thought suddenly Look. If Kambei had stopped recruiting when the first samurai didn’t work out a 205-minute masterpiece of modern cinema would have been over at minute 32. Five billion people on the planet, I’d tried one. And at least someone who’d run away from school 27 times would not leap to conclusions because I had left school at the age of six.

I was about to get excited and think This is it when I suddenly thought Wait just a minute.

I said to Sib: You know that story about the Ugandan from the Lango tribe

Sib said: Yes

I said: Is it actually true?

Sib said as far as she was aware

I said: But how do you know?

Sib said: Well there was an interview when Dr. Akii-Bua got an honorary degree from Oxford and he said he would not be there to tell the tale without the extraordinary heroism of Dr. Sorabji.

I said: And what about the volcano?

Sib said she had once read an interview of the man with the broken arm describing what it was like falling back into the volcano and then seeing Sorabji climb down inside the rim. She said: Why do you ask. I said I just wondered. I didn’t ask about Pete because I had seen Mathematics the Universal Language myself. Pete called Sorabji that maniac and that lunatic, but he never said Sorabji hadn’t saved his life.

All the evidence suggested that Sorabji was not only brilliant but a genuine hero. The question was whether I really had the nerve to go up to someone who was not only a hero but a scientific genius.

At first I thought I was not going to be able to do it. But then I thought if you’re a coward you deserve what you get. You deserve what you’ve got.

When I decided I was going to have to do it I realised I would have to be prepared. There was no point in going up to a Nobel Prize winner and saying the kind of thing that would make him think Sesame Street was about the right level.

The problem was that it was hard to know what would be enough. Finally I decided to do Fourier analysis and Laplace transforms and Lagrangians and I would also learn the periodic table because I had been meaning to do it for a long time and I would also learn the Lyman, Balmer, Paschen and Brackett hydrogen series because of Sorabji’s early interest in spectroscopy and maybe that would be enough.

It took about a month to get ready. It was not all that easy to work in the house because Sib kept interrupting to read out amusing extracts from the Magazine of the Parrot Society such as Factors Affecting Parrots, A. Human Interference. Or she would jump up and look at the book on Fourier analysis and say How fascinating. Finally I went over to the Barbican and worked there. At the end of the month I wondered whether I shouldn’t spend another month on it, or even a year. Wouldn’t it be worth an extra year to be in with a chance? A chance of having a Nobel Prize winner for a father, and not just any Nobel Prize winner either, but a Robert Donat lookalike who jumped off trains? If I got this right—I thought if I got this right it would be like jumping onto a moving train, suddenly everything would be fast and easy and I would never look back.

I would have spent a year if I had known what to do, but I was not sure what to do, and I thought the more I did the older I would get and the less surprising it would be that I could do it.

I recited the periodic table one last time for good luck and I went out to look for Sorabji.

Sorabji had started out at the University of London and he still had some kind of affiliation even though he was now at Cambridge. He had kept his house in London when he got the appointment because the children were doing very well in their schools and it made sense for them to stay there. He had rooms in his college in Cambridge. He might be in Cambridge doing research or he might be in London because it was summer.

I took the Circle Line to South Kensington. I went to Imperial College and the woman in reception said there had been an unconfirmed sighting three weeks ago. I explained that I was doing an astronomy project over the summer for school and part of the project was supposed to be an interview with a famous astronomer and was there any chance I could interview Professor Sorabji? I said Please? I said couldn’t she let me have his home address so I could write to him there? I said Please?

She said Professor Sorabji was a very busy man.

I said: Please?

She said she couldn’t just give out his address to every Tom Dick and Harry.

I said I had been studying Fourier analysis every day for a month to surprise Professor Sorabji and Please?

She said: Fourier analysis! What’s that when it’s at home?

I said: Would you like to see me find the gravitational potential at any point outside a solid uniform sphere of radius a of mass m?

She said: Well—

I said: How about a problem with vibrating strings or membranes? Say a square drumhead or membrane has edges which are fixed and of unit length. If the drumhead is given an initial transverse displacement and then released, what is the subsequent motion?

She seemed to be wavering, so I snatched up a leaflet describing Imperial College and on the back hastily used the Legendre function to calculate the gravitational potential at any point outside a solid uniform sphere of radius a of mass m, and on a separate leaflet I began to calculate the subsequent motion of the drumhead but she said Oh all right. She wrote his address on a card. It was within walking distance.

I started walking to his house. I was getting more and more nervous. What if I had the chance of having a perfect father and blew it because I forgot the mass numbers of the three most abundant isotopes of hafnium?

I said: Hafnium. Symbol Hf. Atomic number 72. Relative atomic mass 178.49. Number of natural isotopes 6. Mass numbers of most abundant isotopes with percentage abundance 177, 18.6%, 178, 27.3%, 180, 35.1%. Most stable radioisotope (predominant type of decay) half-life, 181 (β –, γ) 42 d. First ionization energy 7.0 eV. Density in g/cm³ at 20°C 13.31. Melting point 2227°C. Electron configuration [Xe]4f ¹⁴5d²6s². Oxidation state in compounds, IV. Atomic radius 156.4α pm. Covalent radius for single bonds 144 pm. Reduction potential w/ number electrons etc. etc. -1.505(4). Electronegativity 1.2. Terrestrial abundance: 4 · 10^-4.

I knew what some of them meant. I thought I might as well learn them all at the same time. Now I realised I should have found out what reduction potential E° in V with number (n) of electrons was for, and I wished I had gone ahead and learned ionic radius in pm with oxidation number and coordination number. What if it turned out the one thing that had kept me from having Sorabji was not knowing the ionic radius with oxidation and coordination numbers? I was about to turn around and go home again but I thought that was stupid. It was just chemistry anyway so he probably wouldn’t care, and anyway there would always be some other thing.

I found the house and went to the door and knocked. A woman came to the door. She had brilliant black eyes and jet black hair. She was wearing a purple sari. She seemed forceful and decisive just opening the door and listening to my explanation about the school project and the interview.

She said: We’re having a guest for dinner, so I’m afraid my husband won’t be able to talk to you tonight. He may not be able to fit you in at all, you know, he’s terribly busy these days, still you may as well come in, no use letting the grass grow, if he can find a time you can fix it all up straight away. What is your name?

I said: Steve.

She said: Well come in Steve and we’ll see what we can do for you.

I followed her into the house. A television was on in a room to the left off the hall. She led me into a large room to the right.

A tall, thin, grey-haired man stood by the window looking into the street. He was holding a glass of sherry. He said he thought we were a long way from understanding that.

Sorabji said he thought the next few years would be critical. He was standing by the fireplace holding a glass of sherry. He began to talk about stellar winds, gesturing with his free hand and then putting down the glass of sherry to gesture with his other hand. The only thing I could understand was that he was talking about stellar winds. I’d never thought of reading about stellar winds. The other man said something which I also could not understand and Sorabji began to talk about Wolf-Rayet stars. A Wolf-Rayet star is a highly luminous star with broad emission bands in carbon or nitrogen. I could not understand what Sorabji was saying. I would have liked to say something brilliant but the only thing I could have said was that a Wolf-Rayet star is a highly luminous star with broad emission bands in carbon or nitrogen.

Sorabji was still talking impetuously though we were standing by the door. His skin was paler than a dark tan; his eyes were piercing and black; his hair was black and wavy. It did not seem impossible that I could get away with it. He would not decide I could not be his son on the basis of abysmal ignorance of stellar winds and the single scattering maximum and Wolf-Rayet stars, but I did not want to tell him and watch him think that Sesame Street was about the right level.

He was still talking impetuously when his wife interrupted without waiting for a good moment.

She said: GEORGE. This boy wants to talk to you. It’s for a school project. Can we find him a time?

He laughed. He said: Does it have to be in the next 18 months?

She said: GEORGE.

He said: I can’t think about it now, I’ve almost convinced this heretic of the error of his ways, isn’t that right Ken?

The man by the window gave a dry smile.

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that.

Sorabji began to talk impetuously again and she said: GEORGE.

He said: I’d have to check my diary. I daresay I can manage something. I’ll have a look later. Why don’t you stay for dinner?

I said: Thank you.

He said: Splendid, my wife will find you some problems to do—

His wife said GEORGE again but he said No, a rule’s a rule, and he explained that the rule was that if you finished a page of problems you got to eat with the grown-ups. He explained that his children had a page of problems to do every night. He said grinning: Don’t take it too seriously, will you? God knows the girls don’t, they’d far rather eat in front of the TV than sit listening to Ken and me talking nineteen to the dozen, if you find you can’t hack it you can stay and watch EastEnders and we’ll go through my diary later on.

His wife took me into the other room.

She said: George has this bee in his bonnet about mathematics, Steve.

I said it was all right.

The TV was on. Three girls were watching it and working on pages of problems. She introduced me and they looked up and then back at the TV. She said I could work on anything I thought I could do, and she said now she really must see about dinner.

The youngest girl was working on a page of problems in long division. I thought that they would take a long time to do, and what was the point? He was not going to think much of it if I brought in a page of long division. It wouldn’t matter whether it was right or not, it would be the type of thing anyone could do.

The middle girl was working on a lot of equations in three variables. He was not going to think much of it if I just came in with solutions to three-variable equations, and they would take a long time to do.

The oldest girl was working on a page of determinants. It would be hard enough to be worth doing, but there were so many problems that it was going to take a long time.

I said to her: Are there any other problems I could do?

She said with a shrug: You can see if you can find anything in there.

She was pointing to a folder on the table. They all laughed. I said: What is it? And they said: Nothing.

I opened the folder and in it was a big pile of printed pages with problems on them. There were a lot of things I couldn’t do, but I could see there were some about Fourier analysis so I thought that would probably be all right.

At the top of each paper it said 3 hours. I said: When is dinner?

They said: He starts at 8:00.

It was 7:15. I thought I would just divide by three the number of problems you were supposed to do and then it would probably be all right if I went in at 8:15.

The problems on the pages were rather miscellaneous, whereas the girls were each doing all one kind of problem. So I got four problems about Fourier analysis off different pages. They were a bit more complicated than the ones in my book. It was about 8:30 by the time I finished.

I went into the dining room. He was sitting at the head of the table pouring out a glass of wine for the other man. He was saying

There’s absolutely no question, Ken, about the importance of this proposal— Yes, what is it?

I said I had finished my problems.

He said: Have you now?

I said: Do you want to check them?

He said: I’m afraid it’ll have to wait—

I said: Then you’ll have to take my word for it.

He laughed. He said: Firoza, would you mind setting another place?

His wife set a place for me, and she gave me a big serving of curry. She told me Dr. Miller had something quite important to discuss but her husband would go through his diary with me later. Sorabji kept talking impetuously and filling Dr. Miller’s glass with wine, and Dr. Miller kept saying To get back to what I was saying earlier. This went on for about two hours but the girls never came in with their problems.

After dinner Sorabji said: We’ll have coffee in my study.

I was going to have to do it soon.

I followed them out of the room with my pieces of paper. We passed the room I had left; the three girls were still sitting at the table watching TV and working on their problems. They had plates of curry beside them.

Dr. Miller followed him into the study and when I followed too he looked at me and said with a smile: I’m afraid we’ve some business to discuss.

But Sorabji said: Oh that’s all right, it’s really only the finer details that need thrashing out— the main thing is that we understand each other

Miller said: I’d like to think so

Sorabji said: You can be sure of it

and he said Coffee or something stronger

Miller looked at his watch and said I really should be going, it’s a bit of a trek

Sorabji said: Sure I can’t tempt you

Miller said: No, better not— now where did I leave my coat?—Ah!

He picked up an old raincoat that was hanging over a chair and put it on, and he picked up an old briefcase that was standing by the chair. He said: Anyway I think we’ve cleared up the main issues.

Sorabji said: Absolutely. I think we’ve really covered a lot of ground

Miller said: Well I hope you’ve got a clearer picture of what we’re hoping to accomplish

Sorabji said: It’s been tremendously helpful, thank you for coming

Miller said: Not at all, and he said I’ll try to get you something in writing by the end of the week.

Sorabji said: I’ll see you to the door.

I heard the door close and he came back down the corridor whistling softly.

He came into the room and saw me. He said: You’re not exactly the soul of tact, are you?

I said: What do you mean?

He said: Never mind. I owe you one. Let’s have a look at these problems.

I gave him the pages. I said: I did some different problems instead because the others would take too long.

He looked down smiling. Then he looked up at me quickly and looked back; he said: Where did you get these?

I said I got them out of the folder.

He said: The folder? You mean the past papers?

He flipped through the pages quickly to see if they were all the same kind of problem and then he looked through them slowly to see if there were mistakes. At one point he picked up a pencil and crossed something out and wrote something underneath it. Finally he put the pages down on the desk. He was laughing.

He said: Good for you!

He said: I’ve seen first-year undergraduates who couldn’t—I’ve seen finalists that this puts to shame.

He said: It almost restores one’s faith in the educational system of this—but then I suppose you’ve had private tuition.

I said my mother helped me.

He said: Well I take my hat off to her!

He was grinning. He said: Make my day. Tell me you want to be an astronomer.

I said I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.

He said: But you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t interested in the subject. I suppose you’d be open to persuasion!

He said: I’m afraid I was rather preoccupied when you turned up, I can’t quite remember exactly what it was you came for. Did you want a signed book?

I thought: I can’t stop now.

He raises his bamboo sword. He draws it back with a slow sweeping motion.

I said—

I said it so quietly he couldn’t hear.

He said: Sorry, what was that?

I said: I wanted to see you because I’m your son.

He drew in his breath sharply. Then he looked at me quickly, and then he picked up the pages again and looked down at them without speaking. He looked at one page, and then at another, and then he turned his head away.

He said: She told me she—

He said: She never told me—

He looked down at the pages of Fourier analysis again.

He said softly: The son I never had.

He looked up at me. His eyes were wet.

He put a hand on my shoulder and laughed, shaking his head. I don’t know how I could have missed it, he said shaking his head and laughing, you’re exactly what I was at that age—

I did not know what to say.

He said: Did she tell you—

I said: She never told me anything. I looked in an envelope that said To Be Opened In Case Of Death. She doesn’t know—

He said: What did it say?

I said it did not say very much.

He said: And you live here? I don’t quite understand— she’s still in Australia, isn’t she, there was an article just the other day—

I said: I’m staying with my grandmother.

I thought he would be bound to see through this.

He said: Of course. Stupid of me, she’d have had to do something like that.

He said: So you go to school here? You see her in the summers?

I said I didn’t go to school, I was just working independently.

He said: I see. He looked again at the pages of problems and smiled, and he said: All the same I wonder if that’s wise?

And he said suddenly: Tell me what you know about the atom.

I said: Which atom?

He said: Any atom.

I said: An atom of ytterbium has 70 electrons, a relative atomic mass of 173.04, a first ionization energy of 6.254 electrovolts—

He said: That’s not quite what I meant. I was thinking more about the structure—

I thought: What happens if I explain the structure?

I said: The structure?

He said: Tell me what you know.

I explained what I knew and I explained why I did not think it made sense to say that if it were not for electric charge we could walk through walls.

He laughed and he began asking more questions. When I got a question right he would laugh; when I did not know the answer he would explain, waving his hands. It was a bit like the show except that his explanations were more complicated and sometimes he would write a mathematical formula on a piece of paper and ask if I understood it.

At last he said: We’ve got to get you into a school. Put you into the right school and there’ll be no stopping you. What do you say to Winchester?

I said: Couldn’t I just go straight to Cambridge?

He stared at me and then laughed again, slapping his knee. He said: Well you don’t want for effrontery!

I said: You said you knew university students who couldn’t do this.

He said: Yes, but they’re not very good university students.

Then he said: Well, it depends what you want to do. Do you want to be a mathematician?

I said: I don’t know.

He said: If you want to—if you’re sure that’s what you want to do—you might as well get on with it, the sooner the better. If you want to do any kind of science there are other considerations. Look at poor old Ken.

I said: What about him?

He said: Well just look at him! They cut our contribution to ESA last year, so he can’t get on HERSCHEL. He can’t get on it, his graduate students can’t get on it, now they’re stuck trying to scramble aboard elsewhere, you can imagine the kind of research record the department is going to have now the government has made it impossible for them to do any research, well what kind of funding do you think they’ll get if they don’t produce any research?

He was looking at me very seriously, the way he had looked when he had written formulae on a piece of paper that he would not have expected most people to understand. He said: Any science is expensive and astronomy is more expensive than most.

He said: More expensive than most and less likely to get any money from industry.

He said: If you need hundreds of millions of pounds sooner or later you are going to have to talk to people who don’t understand what you’re doing and don’t want to understand because they hated science at school. You simply can’t afford to cut yourself off.

I could think of two things to say. One was that I was not actually cut off because I was taking classes at Bermondsey Boys Junior Judo. The other was OK.

I said: OK.

He said: You say that but you don’t understand. You think because you’re clever you can understand anything. I don’t suppose anything like this is going to give you problems— and he glanced at my paper. You need to be able to understand things you’re going to find almost impossible to believe. If you don’t learn to believe them now it will be too late.

The thing that was almost impossible to believe was that he was really saying this. A Nobel Prize winner was saying he thought I could do anything. A Nobel Prize winner was glad I was his son. The whole time he was saying it, even though he was saying it seriously, he would suddenly break into a smile as if he had been saving the smile for the son he had always wanted and never had. He was brilliant and he thought I was brilliant. He looked like a movie star and he thought I looked exactly like him. Instead of testing me on capitals of the world he was talking about what it would take to do the most expensive science in the universe. Sometimes I thought, well if he wants to be my father why shouldn’t he be my father? Or I’d think that any moment now he would suddenly decide to test me on Lagrangians and realise I wasn’t his son after all.

He said: You’ve got to be able to believe— It’s not just that the people who write the cheques don’t like science. They are elected by people who don’t like science. They are reported by papers edited by innumerate middlebrows who are prepared to read the odd snippet about dinosaurs. You have got to be able to believe that the papers which report their decisions are prepared to publish an astrology column each day which neither the publishers of the paper nor its readers believe to be entirely without foundation.

He said: What you’ve got to understand is that you simply can’t afford to act as if you were dealing with adults. You’re not dealing with people who want to understand how something actually happens to work. You’re dealing with people who would like you to rekindle a childlike sense of wonder. You’re dealing with people who would like you to eliminate anything tiresome and mathematical because it will impede the rekindling of a—

The phone rang. He said: Excuse me just a moment.

He went round and picked it up. He said: Yes? Oh no, not at all, I think it went pretty well, I don’t think we’ve anything to worry about from that quarter. He said he’d get me something in writing by the end of the week so you’ve a few days’ grace.

There was a short pause and then he laughed. He said: You can’t possibly expect me to comment on that—no, no, just get it in as soon as you can. Right. Cheerio.

He came back. He was frowning and smiling slightly.

He said: There’s a cheap jibe people make sometimes at Christian fundamentalists, they say if you think the Bible is literally the word of God and that the word of God is more important than any other thing how can you possibly not learn the languages God chose for the original text, well if you think there’s a Creator and if you think that matters you’ve only to look around you to see the language it thinks in. It’s been thinking in mathematics for billions of years. Of course when you get right down to it you can’t beat the religious for sheer wanton contempt for Creator and Creation alike—

He broke off and hesitated, and he said: I think you said she didn’t tell you—that is, what did she say exactly?

I said: Well

He said: It doesn’t matter. You’ve a right to know. I owe you that much.

I thought: I’ve got to stop this

I said: No—

He said: No let me finish. This isn’t easy for me, but you’ve a right to know

I thought: I’ve got to stop this

but Sorabji had had so much practice on the programme stopping people who were trying to stop him that I did not know what to do.

I said: No. I said: You don’t have to tell me anything.

I said: I’m not really your son.

He said: God knows I deserve that. You’ve every right to be bitter.

I said: I’m not bitter, I’m just stating a fact.

He said: All right, a fact, but what about this— and he smacked the pages of Fourier analysis with his hand and said That’s a fact too, you can’t just walk away from it. The relationship’s there whether you like it or not. You know that as well as I do or you wouldn’t be here. Well you may as well know all the facts,

and he began striding up and down the room and talking very fast to keep me from trying to interrupt—

He said: My wife is a wonderful woman. A wonderful woman. She’s always done her part and God knows I entered the marriage with my eyes open. It was an arranged marriage—my father wanted to help out an old business associate, and also though he’d married out himself—perhaps because he’d married out himself—he wanted me to marry a Zoroastrian and for one reason or another he hadn’t seen anyone suitable here. I don’t mean there was any pressure, don’t get the wrong idea about this, my father realised I’d been brought up to be thoroughly Westernised. He just asked me to meet her, he said she was a beautiful girl, well educated, delightful personality, of course if I didn’t like her there was no more to be said but it wouldn’t hurt to meet the girl, he’d pay all my expenses to fly out to Bombay and we could just take it from there.

Well, of course we didn’t fall in love at first sight but we got on pretty well, all things considered; and I realised if I went ahead with it I could count on my family 100% in my career which frankly was the only thing I really cared about, and all in all I think it worked out pretty well. There’s something to be said for it, you go into it with your eyes open.

He put up a hand to keep me from interrupting and he said—but then in the early 80s I went to a conference in Hawaii on infrared. That’s where I met her. She gave a paper; one thing led to another; before we knew it we were head over heels in love. She was—I don’t know what she’s like now, but when I first saw her I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life. She took my breath away. It sounds trite but it’s just a description of fact, it was like being kicked in the stomach. One of those things you don’t believe until it’s happened to you. And she was brilliant too, had some amazing insights for someone her age; I’d never imagined what it would be like to be with someone you could talk to without thinking about how to explain it.

He was silent for a moment. Before I could think of a way to take advantage of this he was talking again.

He said: It was hell to go back to London but I did it somehow. She went back to Australia. We kept meeting at conferences for the next few years. Finally I said things can’t go on like this. I didn’t want to hurt my wife but things couldn’t go on. Colossus was about three years behind schedule but it really did look as thought it would go up in another four maybe five years, I said as soon as Colossus was in orbit I’d ask Firoza for a divorce, she could come to England if she liked, it wouldn’t be hard to find her something, or I’d start looking for something in Australia, she said she was pregnant and I said What do you want to do.

He said: She just kept looking at me. I said What do you want me to do? She started to cry—it was dreadful to see her like that. I said What do you think I can do? You must be aware of the implications. I said—these things torment you later but at the time I had a terror of being swept along, of not thinking clearly—I said What is your estimate of our fossil fuel reserves? What kind of science do you think people will be able to do without petroleum by-products? How much longer do you think people will be able to do the kind of science we do? Can we be sure they will be so brilliant they will be able to do what we do without petroleum by-products?

I must have been in a state of shock myself, I realised that later, but at the time it seemed desperately important to get her to make some kind of statement about fossil fuel reserves, it used to come back to me later. It would have come to the same thing in the end, but why wasn’t I kinder? I could have comforted her and instead I kept going on and on at the poor girl about petroleum by-products—it seemed desperately important that one of us should keep a clear head. She just kept crying. But what could I do? Colossus was at a stage where I couldn’t possibly go through the disruption of a divorce—and anyway the financial parameters were impossible. Academic salaries in this country being what they are I couldn’t possibly support two families—well, I’d had some offers from the States over the years, I might have swung it financially but the disruption of switching institutions, not to mention countries, there was simply nothing I could do.

She kept crying and looking at me. She said George—I said Why are you looking at me like that? Did I make the world? Am I a magician? Do you think I like this?

I said What do you think I can do?

She stopped crying and she said maybe she could manage something but I couldn’t let her do that. She was so brilliant and she’d worked so hard—grown up in the Outback and saved up money herding sheep or knitting or some such thing to send off for her first telescope—I couldn’t let her throw it all away. She’d only just got her lectureship, so she’d no entitlement to maternity leave—I said You’ve got to be practical, what are you going to do, go back to the sheep? Spend your life spotting comets?

She said all right, she would deal with it. She asked me for some money. There was nothing I could do. Anyway I didn’t hear from her after that but of course I could see that she continued to be productive in the field and her career was going ahead full tilt, so I naturally assumed … I thought maybe one day she’d put in a proposal for some of the unscheduled time on Colossus and I could help push that through the unscheduled time being at such a premium, but in the event she did all her work through other observational facilities so nothing came of it.

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 left 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.