After long days of lessons, we were given two or three hours of homework every night. For most of that first year at the High School I aimed for average marks that would not draw anyone’s attention. I wasn’t consciously holding back — it hadn’t yet occurred to me to desire praise, prizes, distinctions. In science and maths I struggled anyway. The physics teacher was merciless. Handsome, tall, unmarried, with a rope of white hair twisted round her temples, she belonged to the generation of women who had sacrificed everything for their education. We were supposed to learn the principles of physics not by rote but through problem-solving. One evening I was wrestling with a question about acceleration: the hare catching up with the tortoise in a race. Actual tears splashed on to the page, blotting the blue ink of my workings; my mind ached with the effort. At junior school I had been good at problems: ‘If Harry and Dick together weigh nine stone four pounds, Dick and Tom together weigh eight stone twelve pounds…’, and so on — but those problems had been for beginners, I saw now. I urged my mind to take the intuitive leap into comprehension, but again and again it baulked. Gerry looked in on me, bringing the cup of milky, sugary, instant coffee my mother usually brought. He really was trying hard.
— What’s the matter? Are you stuck?
Our voices startled us, alone in the house without Mum — they seemed to break a silence locked like rusting machinery. I knew how I must look to him, slumped in defeat at the table, pasty-faced with worry. The teacher’s scorn made no distinction between those who tried and failed and those who didn’t try. I had no pride where my school work was concerned — it occurred to me that Gerry might be able to help me. He worked with numbers all day in the office; I took it for granted he would understand the problem.
— So long as it isn’t French, he said cheerfully enough, and pulled up a chair beside me, striped shirtsleeves rolled businesslike up to the elbow. He always radiated a clean heat, from those strenuous sessions in the bathroom which left the walls dripping and the mirrors cloudy. I explained that the hare was sleeping at a location twelve hundred metres from the finish line; the tortoise passed him at a steady speed of five centimetres per second. Six and a half hours later, the hare woke up. All of these elements by now had attained a hallucinatory meaninglessness in my head.
Gerry read the problem over to himself, biting my pen, frowning down at the worn-soft, scrambled page of my homework book. What minimum acceleration (assumed constant) must the hare have in order to cross the finish line first? He worked out easily in his head how long it would take for the tortoise to get there; then went over and over the other elements, sketching a little diagram for himself, the hare’s trajectory cutting across the tortoise’s just before the finish line. I saw that he wanted it to be like one of the Dick and Harry problems, giving way to common sense or to a trick of thought.
— How do we calculate acceleration? he asked. — Haven’t they taught you how? Have you done other problems like this one?
I found in the back of my book a formula that the teacher had given us, expressing D in terms of O, V, T and A, but I didn’t even know what those letters stood for. Gerry thought that perhaps D was distance, but we already knew the distance. His hand began to leave sweat marks on the page as mine had. He wondered just when the hare needed to pass the tortoise in order to get to the finish line ahead of it; how tiny might the difference between them be? His efforts snagged on this doubt, building up behind it. — You have to concentrate better in class, he said. — She must have shown you how to do this. Can’t you remember?
I shrugged, recoiling. I should have known that I would be to blame.
— Physics is boring.
He tried again, stating the elements of the problem over in a reasonable, steadying voice. All the time, he must have been consumed with his real worries about my mother’s condition and what lay ahead for them; about his responsibility for me.
— Write me a note, I said. — Tell the teacher I was ill.
— Don’t be silly. All you need to do is to ask her to explain it to you.
— You don’t understand what she’s like! I wailed.
And then somehow we upset my coffee cup. It really wasn’t clear to me which one of us did it: I may have thrown out my hand rhetorically; he may have reached for a pencil without looking. Hot, milky, sugary coffee flooded everywhere, soaking instantly through the layers of newspaper, slewing into our laps, pooling on the precious polished surface of the table. We both threw ourselves backwards. I snatched up my homework book — though not before a few splashes dashed across the page, elegant illustrations of the physics of liquid form. (The teacher, the following week, would ring these splashes in red biro, writing ‘Disgusting & slovenly presentation’ — but by then I didn’t care.) Gerry grabbed at a heap of bills, and Mum’s sewing — she was making things for the new baby. Too late; coffee stains had seeped already into the cut-out pieces of the little gingham romper suit.
— Stella! You idiot! he yelled, shoving me roughly out of the way of the coffee dripping on to the carpet, and on to my fawn socks.
I stumbled backwards, genuinely confused. — Was it my fault?
Gerry ran to fetch tea towels from the kitchen to soak up the coffee, then filled a bucket with soapy water and disinfectant. He set to work systematically, mopping and rubbing and wiping just as my mother would have done, changing the water every so often. Spilt milk was one of the things Mum and Gerry dreaded above all else; if you failed to eradicate every trace, the smell as it soured came back to haunt you. While he wiped, I stood frowning at my homework.
— What are we going to do with that skirt? Gerry said, his voice embittered, doomsday-flat. — You’d better take it off. If I wash it out, it’ll never be dry for tomorrow. I’ll try to leach the worst of the coffee out of it without soaking it. At least you’ve got a clean shirt I can iron.
I unbuttoned the skirt and stepped out of it, still staring at the book. Something had happened; I could see all the elements of the problem differently now, as if they had arranged themselves naked under a bright light. — Look, I said, exulting. — D is distance. A must be acceleration. We need to rearrange the equation so that A is by itself on one side of the equals sign. OV must be original velocity, which is nought — the hare’s asleep — so that cancels out. Times both sides by two, divide by time squared. Acceleration equals two times distance over time squared.
He didn’t even answer; naturally enough, at that moment he didn’t much care about my physics homework. He was too busy trying to sop spilt coffee from the carpet while his sulky stepdaughter stood in her knickers, not lifting a finger to help him.
Or he hated his failure to know more than I did, be cleverer than I was.
That was how I got to know that I was clever. When I cleaned my teeth that night in the bathroom, my face was different in the mirror: as if a light had gone on behind my eyes, or an inner eye had been strained open. Every inch of my skin, every pore, every fixture in the bathroom was accessible to my vision pressing remorselessly onward, devouring the world’s substance, seeing through it. I could see my own face as if it wasn’t mine. I pressed my nose to the mirror, baring my teeth at myself, misting the glass with breath. At first this cleverness was like a sensation of divinity; then after a while it ate itself and I couldn’t turn the mind-light off, couldn’t stop thinking through everything, couldn’t sleep. I saw Gerry — and my mother, and my school — all as if they were tiny, in the remote distance. I believed that if I wanted to I could solve all the problems in the physics teacher’s book. When eventually sleep came, I seemed to hear the soughing of trees outside in the empty air. I understood all about those trees, I grasped what they were: how they existed and did not exist, how both contradictory realities were possible at once.