The Last Samurai (60 page)

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.

I said: My mother says you look like Robert Donat. Are you related?

He stared at me. He said: So you— He said: Might I ask why?

I explained about Seven Samurai.

I don’t know what he was expecting. He said: That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense.

I said I thought it made sense.

He looked down at the pages of Fourier analysis and spread them slightly on the table with his hand. Then he crumpled them up suddenly and dropped them in the bin. He said: So I have no son.

He said: Of course it would have been quite impossible for her, I should have seen that at once.

He looked at me.

I said: I’m sorry.

He said: Come here.

I stayed where I was. I said: I tried to tell you.

He said: It’s stupid, if you were going to make it up what was the point of telling me?

I said: Is it still natural to put me in contact with the right sort of people?

He looked at me. He didn’t say anything. His face was quite cold and expressionless, as if something was calculating behind it.

He said at last in an expressionless voice: You have a piece of information which you shouldn’t have. You may think that piece of information is dangerous to me.

He said: I would advise you to be careful what you say. I think you will find if you try to use it that it will prove extremely dangerous to you.

I said I wasn’t planning to use it and that I had tried to stop him. I thought that there had to be something I could say. He had been so excited about the Fourier analysis before; I couldn’t see why it made such a difference if the person who had done it did not happen to share 50% of his genes. I sensed that this was not the moment to make this point. I said I just wanted— I said my own father tended to get the special and general theories of relativity confused.

Sorabji just looked at me.

I said I didn’t really know him, it was more of a genetic relationship, and I just thought—

He just looked at me. I thought he was probably not really listening to me; he was probably just thinking that there was nothing he could do.

I said: You don’t know what would have happened. Maybe it was the right thing to do. She could have gone insane. Maybe you saved her life. Just because you said the wrong thing doesn’t mean you were wrong about—

I didn’t even see his arm move. He got me on the side of the head with his open hand, knocking me across the room to the floor. I rolled out of the fall back onto my feet but he was already there. He hit me on the other side of my head and knocked me to the floor again. He was there before I could get up this time, but I tripped him and he fell heavily. Mainly on me.

I couldn’t move because he was lying on top of me. A clock which I hadn’t noticed was ticking in the room. It kept ticking. Nothing happened. He was panting as if he’d been in a worse fight; his eyes were glittering in his head. I didn’t know what he would do.

There was a knock at the door, and his wife said: George?

He said: I’ll just be two seconds, darling.

I could hear her footsteps retreating down the hall. I realised I could have shouted something. His eyes were still glittering—

The clock was still ticking.

Suddenly he let go of me and leapt lightly to his feet. I scrambled away across the room but he didn’t come after me. He was standing by the desk with his hands in his pockets. He smiled at me and said pleasantly and conversationally:

I’m sorry, that was completely out of line. I’m sorry I got carried away. My temper flares up and then it’s over, I never hold a grudge.

My head was still ringing.

His hair had fallen into his face; his eyes were sparkling. He looked like Robert Donat in The 39 Steps; he looked the way he’d looked earlier, when he’d talked about the atom and Fourier analysis.

He said: Of course you should be put in touch with the right people.

I said: So I could still go into astronomy?

He laughed. He said: I’d hate to think I’d put you off!

He raised an eyebrow in a sort of quizzical, self-mocking way. His eyes were sparkling with amusement, as if there was nothing calculating behind them.

I just hoped I wasn’t going to have a black eye.

I said: Should I still apply to Winchester? Do you still want to give me a reference?

He was still smiling. He said: Yes, you should certainly apply.

He smiled and said: Be sure to mention my name.

Robert Donat was on again Thursday at 9:00. Sib watched enthralled. I was reading
Scientific American
.

There was an article about a man who had done research in Antarctica and was about to go back. There was an article by a man who had done pioneering work on the solar neutrino problem. I would read a paragraph or two and then turn to another page.

Sometimes I thought about the girls who were not my sisters, and sometimes I thought about Dr. Miller, but most of the time I thought of the Nobel Prize-winning Robert Donat lookalike turning through the pages of Fourier analysis, looking at me with flashing eyes, telling me I was brilliant and I was exactly the way he was at that age. I couldn’t tell from the articles in
Scientific American
whether their authors thought Sesame Street was not the right level; I couldn’t tell whether they had an ill-timed obsession with petroleum by-products; but I didn’t have to read even a paragraph to know I’d never find another one like Sorabji.

I put down
Scientific American
and picked up my book on aerodynamics. Sometimes I thought I understood it and sometimes it was hard to follow, and when it was hard to follow it wasn’t easy to tell what would help; the thing that would really help would be to be able to ask someone who didn’t sum up the mathematics required as 18th 19th century stuff. Any idiot can learn a language, all you have to do is keep going and sooner or later it all makes sense, but with mathematics you have to understand one thing to understand another, and you can’t always tell what the first thing is that you have to understand. And even then either you see it or you don’t. You can waste a lot of time trying to work out what you need to know, and a lot more time just trying to see it.

If I hadn’t said anything to Sorabji I wouldn’t ever have had to waste time that way ever again. In the first place I would have gone to Winchester at the age of 12, and in the second place whenever I had a question I could have asked someone who not only knew the answer but couldn’t do enough for his longlost son. And if I’d just seen Sorabji on another night—if I’d just spent one more day on the periodic table—I wouldn’t have seen Dr. Miller, and I wouldn’t have heard any phone calls, and I wouldn’t have known there was anything to see or hear. I could have stopped wasting time and been the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. Instead I was going to have to do everything myself.

I had another look at the Kutta-Joukowski theorem. It wasn’t so much that I knew for a fact that I wanted to win a Nobel Prize. It’s just that if you’re
not
going to win a Nobel Prize you might as well do something else worth doing with the time, such as going up the Amazon or down the Andes. If you can’t go down the Andes you might as well do something else worth doing, such as having a shot at a Nobel Prize. Whereas this was just stupid.

I put down my book on aerodynamics.

Sorabji looked out from the screen with flashing eyes.

I thought suddenly that it was stupid to be so sentimental.

What we needed was not a hero to worship but money.

If we had money we could go anywhere. Give us the money and we would be the heroes.

In the morning I decided to go the library. A day one way or the other was not going to have a significant effect on my chances of either winning a Nobel Prize or going down the Amazon. My chances of earning a lot of money soon were slim to non-existent. I thought I would read one of my old favourites just for fun.

Journey into Danger!
was out so I got
Half Mile Down
instead.

I took the book to read on the Circle Line, and I turned to the first descent in the bathysphere before starting the whole book again.

It was of an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world, and it excited our optic nerves in a most confusing manner. We kept thinking and calling it brilliant, and again and again I picked up a book to read the type, only to find that I could not tell the difference between a blank page and a coloured plate. I brought all my logic to bear, I put out of mind the excitement of our position in watery space and tried to think sanely of comparative colour, and I failed utterly. I flashed on the search-light, which seemed the yellowest thing I have ever seen, and let it soak into my eyes, yet the moment it was switched off, it was like the long vanished sunlight—it was as though it had never been—and the blueness of the blue, both outside and inside our sphere, seemed to pass materially through the eye into our very beings. This is all very unscientific; quite worthy of being jeered at by optician or physicist; but there it was … I think we both experienced a wholly new kind of mental reception of colour impression.

And I suddenly thought of someone who had made a lot of money out of reading this paragraph in
Half Mile Down
.

I thought of someone who had never pretended to be a hero.

He was a painter. He had read the passage from Dr. Beebe which I had read. He had read this passage and he had said:

How can I paint when I don’t know what I paint?

He said:

I paint not things in the world but colour. How can I paint colour if I don’t know what it should look like? Is blue paint merely to represent blue?

And he had said that he must find a bathysphere, or something, that would take him down to see blue.

He had found a centre for oceanography and they had refused to let him go down. And he had gone to the yard and talked to the boatman, and the boatman liked Picasso’s Blue Period. The boatman would have taken him out at night, but then there would have been no blue. One weekend the oceanographers went to a conference and the boatman took him out and sent him down. And when he came up he said to the boatman Have you seen the blue, and the boatman said No. And he said You must see this. I can’t paint this so you must see it. You must show me how to send this capsule up and down and you must go down. The boatman was nervous but excited. He showed him how to send the capsule up and down and he stood by while the painter practised and sent the capsule up and down. Then the boatman got into the capsule and the painter winched it over the side.

The painter never painted what he saw, for he said it could not be done.