Authors: Helen de Witt
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—