— Well –
— Pa, I did brilliantly. Two years younger than everyone and top of the whole country in maths, pa, and chemistry, and very high marks in biology, but I failed in English and Latin. They said it doesn’t matter, I can get a scholarship, pa, so if you can’t afford it –
— Did your mother send you?
— Course she sent me. To try and get some sense into your head and some money out of you. We can’t live only on what she earns, though let’s face it, she’s done well, hasn’t she. I want to take up astrophysics, like her.
— Well –
— Don’t say well like that, pa. Haven’t you any pride in me, don’t you take any interest in what I’ve done?
— Of course I do, my darling, of course. It fills me with a very, very peculiar pride. I mean that. Because I know, well, what infinite pleasure could come your way, but sadness too –
— Pooh … Why sadness?
— Oh, I don’t know. Hard work, for a sense of –
— But I love hard work, pa.
— I expect you do. Tell me, my pet, why this get-up?
— You like?
— Well, you look so geometrical. All those zips. And with, turn round, a hole in the left buttock of your trousers.
— Where? Oh, so they have. How teasing. Anyway, you can’t blame me, pa, you give us no money. All the girls have –
— So, you lay the blame for the hole on your buttock at my door?
— No I don’t, pa. Kiss kiss. Bang bang, steady state, ow that tickles, stop, you dirty old man. Say, pa, how about it?
— Hmm. How about, what?
— I mean all this nonsense between you and ma. So banal you know, sort of, common, I don’t mean vulgar but, yes, well, it does have a kind of vulgarity. What the crowd does. All the girls at school have split parents or ménages à quatre or any way lots of them. I always prided myself on my originality. You’ve let me down, pa.
— Patricia, your mother has said she never wants to see me again.
— Oh, phooey. I say that to my boy friends a thousand million times. It doesn’t mean anything, pa.
— You seem to know a lot.
— Well, I don’t know much about adultery but I know what I like. My pa at home, not quarrelling with ma, not quibbling poor old Martin about things, laughing and joking about his funny old patients and his crazy scientists, helping me with my equations –
— I’ve forgotten all my equations, Pat. I must have left them in the pocket of, well, my student’s gown. Anyway, you’ll have gone way beyond me by now.
— Yes, I expect so. I’d hate to do medicine I must say. What made you change, pa?
— I don’t know. Losing my equations, perhaps.
— You mean they didn’t come out? Mine always come out. I’ll show you.
— Thank you, Pat. Thank you.
— So you’ll come back, and work, and everything?
— I’ll … think about it, my sweet.
— Oh, that means you won’t.
— Really I will.
— I mean come back. Well, at least work again, pa, even away from us, here, start up again, you’ll find plenty of sick people around. A man must work.
— A conventional little girl, after all. So all you want is my money?
— Course. Why not? Besides, it’ll keep you sane, pa. You can’t just sit around and mooch in this godawful boarding-house, living on bread-and-butter or something.
— One could live on square roots for ever, just raising them to the nth power.
— Oh, you lovely man. I really fancy you.
— Too.
— Let’s make a deal, pa. I work for my scholarship, and win it, you get a practice going again, here, anywhere you like, and then, who knows, time heals or if it doesn’t, well, at least you’ll have helped some square or other out of his spinning circles.
— Physician, heal thyself.
— How about it, pa?
— Sounds to me easier for you than for me. You show me your equations and I show you a mended crumbler.
— You’ve got a deal. Bye, pa. Love love.
Great clusters occur, moving at many thousands of miles per second, radiating infinite processes with the collision of interstellar matter and high energy particles from the atmosphere of young stars, filling the room with wavering outlines, as on a map of ocean depths, doubling, trebling each other’s trebles, bursting its walls, the house, the square, the street, the entire sky. Words drop into the overlapping rings that lasso out to catch faces, voices that swim for dear life through the heavy water, some drown, some float, some gasp in the chilly depth, some slice the water with a skilful crawl, while Stance or someone walks nonchalantly out of his hiding place, smoking a big cigar. Good man, he says, can you repeat, we’ll do a take next time. I won’t, I won’t repeat, why didn’t you have your camera on, your little individual flan through which you photograph the world? Well, I wanted to get the galactic background first, tricky, you see, in ultra-violet light, but we’ll mix you in, don’t worry. The door ushers in the decoy blonde, no, not that one, I replaced her, he never noticed. Shoot. My God, your eyes. You didn’t ring, so I came all the same, I thought, oh, Larry you look dreadful.
— I — er –
— Haven’t you slept? Did you have any breakfast?
— I — er — had some coffee somewhere. I walked all night.
— Telford?
— How did you know?
— I thought he might — try something like that.
— No. No. Not what you think.
— I don’t think that. No, Larry, I don’t think the obvious worst of people in advance, only of myself. Telford wouldn’t. He just wanted, so much, to understand, what had happened to you. So did I. But we all have our clumsy ways of trying to understand. Mine the unhappy woman’s way, his, the journalist’s way. Let’s put it like this, Larry, he can’t himself understand until he has reformulated it so that all can understand.
— Appropriated it.
— If you like.
— I don’t. I see little difference between that and the woman’s way. A possessive way.
— Or the artist’s. Do you find that so very hard to forgive, Larry?
— Oh, forgive. But accept and live with yes.
— Live with! But surely Brenda has never shown that kind of possessiveness.
— Brenda! Who cares about Brenda! I must get that thing back. You must help me.
— Of course I’ll help you, Larry, if I can. But you mustn’t talk like that about Brenda, she –
— Oh, yes, yes, I suppose, if you insist, she would have shown possessiveness if I had let her.
— I see. Yes. I do see. So very well. Because in the end this comforted me most. The knowledge, I mean, that you would never have let me either, and the sense of irrelevance fills the room as she bombards it with the particles of her self-absorption, her eyes trying to intercept more than a long habit of merely professional listening to the failures of men that takes over and says let you what or something, I only meant, that I would have preferred that kind of not-possessing to not-possessing someone I don’t want to possess. I mean, someone I don’t respect, and so on in this language English, that she never uses until the long habit of asking all the wrong questions and so getting all the wrong answers gathers itself with a why did you marry him, anyway.
— Larry, my dear, you have a genius for attracting self-punishing women. And the self-punishing woman, when she can’t get what she wants, destroys the little she might have and attracts, or can’t repel, the man best qualified to punish her. Brenda did the same.
— Yes, yes. Energy works that way. Look, Elizabeth. I must get that thing back.
— We all want things back, Larry. I said to Stanley once, I had serenity until you barged in. Because you know, I did achieve serenity, quite soon in fact, don’t flatter yourself. I got a secretarial job, in Angola. Then Kenya. It made me happy. I met Stanley in Kenya.