Authors: Helen de Witt
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.