Everybody looked at him.
He blinked at us. ‘Well, isn’t that what it’ll be like? It’s charming. The thought of James here skipping about Schiaparelli like a toddler.’
Silence.
‘Oh, come on, why go all the way to Mars if you’re not going to have a bit of fun?’
It occurred to me that it was we who were being thin-skinned now. Grown men playing tag in the red dirt? The vision was charming! Especially so in the eyes of a man who had fused the infantile and the aged into one constantly renewing – and therefore immortal – form.
‘Fel,’ said Georgy, serious suddenly. ‘What is that you’re drinking?’
Fel reflexively wrapped her hand around her bottle. ‘It’s beer,’ she told him. I had never really taken any notice of her interest in alcohol, which anyway never exceeded the odd half of cider down the pub. Hearing the tremor in her voice now made me realise that breaking with the Bund’s teetotal tradition was a big deal.
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Well.’ Even Georgy’s control slipped occasionally: he shot a glance at me. A corrupter of women as well as an anti-Semite.
‘Has everyone got enough?’ Stella asked. ‘Oh, God. The beans.’ She ran back to the kitchen.
‘They’re on the side,’ I called, and when she didn’t respond, went into the kitchen after her. Stella was peeling the foil off the pan. ‘Oh, look, they’re burned!’
‘They’re not burned.’
‘The garlic’s all brown.’
‘Not very brown. It’s supposed to be toasted, it’s fine.’
‘You can’t do that with garlic.’
‘Yes you can. With this, you can. Stella, look at me. What do you think I cook for Fel? I cook this kind of food all the time. It’s perfect.’
Stella mouthed a thank you and carried the dish out to the dining room. I fetched a spoon.
The beans were perfectly fine. Trust Bob, though, to be meticulously cutting off each tip and edging it with his knife to the side of his plate. Had Stella noticed? No: her gaze was glued to Georgy Chernoy who, having got everyone’s attention with his potentially belittling remark about playtime on Mars, was holding forth on his favourite subject: the reconciliation of what, in a more formal setting, he would probably have dubbed ‘the human family’.
‘It’s absurd!’ he exclaimed, and Jim chimed in, banging the zinc with his beer bottle. (Stella winced.)
‘We’re not afraid of you!’ Jim asserted, slurring slightly.
‘Well, of course you aren’t!’ Georgy laughingly agreed. ‘Where could the conflict possibly lie? The moment you’re in space is surely the moment you realise how absurd all this scaremongering is. Do you know, I read an op-ed in one of your papers the other day that raised the spectre of us dropping Moon-rocks on London? That’s the word they used: “dropping”! As if the Moon were above the Earth! It’s positively medieval. Ptolemaic, even.’
‘Anyway,’ said Jim, overcome with fellow feeling, ‘you live here. You people are half of this city. You’d have a few words to say if anyone dropped rocks on you!’
Chernoy beamed at him. ‘No one’s dropping anything. No one’s throwing anything.’
Bob, joining in, raised his bottle. ‘And to hell with the red-tops!’
‘The tabloids. The papers,’ Stella explained, seeing Georgy’s confusion.
At that, Georgy raised his own bottle. The bottle surprised me, the label even more: now he, too, was drinking Pils. ‘Well, yes, to hell with them,’ he exclaimed, and drank.
Fel was working hard to ignore her father and so had managed to strike up a conversation with mine. Bob had that poleaxed look I had noticed men got when they talked to Fel for the first time – as though he was being truly understood for the first time. ‘Pumps, in the main,’ he was telling her. ‘The pipework for pumps. They made me a checker.’
‘It’s a big deal,’ I told her, chipping in.
Bob shot me an angry glance. ‘It’s shift work, as always.’
‘On spaceships.’
‘The parts for spaceships.’ Poor Bob: he was trapped. Whatever he said about it, his work carried the smack of glamour.
Georgy drew the back of his hand across his lips, stood up and crossed to the fridge. He wanted people to notice him. Above all, he wanted Fel to notice him. He pulled out two bottles of Pils from the door, unscrewed them both as he returned to the table and handed one to Bob. Fel was still managing to ignore him, but Stella wasn’t. I sensed that this was new: that she had not seen Georgy drink till now.
‘An engineer is an engineer,’ Georgy announced, and raised his bottle to Bob to chink.
Bob stared at him.
‘Whatever the engine,’ Georgy added, and took a deep draught of his fresh beer.
Bob frowned. It was all very well him putting his own work down, but what was Georgy about? I could practically see the clockwork turning in him: should he be offended or not? How I hated that about him: that old pendulum inside him forever swinging between pride and fear.
‘God, Daddy,’ said Fel, ‘don’t tell us you’re an engineer now.’
Georgy sucked at his bottle. ‘Well, what would you call it?’
‘Medicine isn’t an engineering problem.’
‘Everything is an engineering problem.’
‘Really.’
‘You’ll discover this in time.’
‘Here we go.’
The pair of them, father and daughter, each nursing their bottles of forbidden alcohol, had been building up to a row ever since Georgy came through the door.
‘What?’ Georgy smiled a combative smile. ‘You think all that art and music you’re so fond of aren’t engineering problems? Talk to any painter! Any composer!’
‘You don’t know any composers.’
‘What, you think you’re the first to step outside the Bund? Stuart, tell her: is there anything you studied at that school of yours that wasn’t an engineering problem?’
‘Well.’ I was painfully aware what his likely opinion of me was. ‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’ Georgy laughed, incredulous. ‘In that case, remind me to bring a hard hat and good insurance next time I visit any structure of yours.’
It was such a clumsy attack, I couldn’t help myself: ‘An open mind will do.’
Georgy was delighted, or made a good show of seeming so. ‘Oh, bravo!’ He raised his bottle in a toast. While he drank, he kept his eyes on Fel. He was showing her how little her trivial dietary rebellion mattered. It would take more than a bottle or two of beer to count as secession. Measure for measure, Daddy could match his brat of a girl. Only it was apparent that he could not match her: his eyes had already acquired a dangerous glassiness.
I expected Stella to head the conversation into calmer waters, but she sat there in absolute silence. In the end, it was Jim who poured oil on troubled waters by offering a little homespun philosophy of his own.
‘Now hang on, Doctor Chernoy. I mean to say, there wouldn’t be much point in good engineering, would there, in making something well, or doing anything well, if others didn’t stand back once in a while and say it was well done? Would there? And isn’t that what art is?’
Georgy clapped, rather slowly. ‘There you are! “Lonely on a peak in Darien”!’ He winked grotesquely, at me or at Fel or maybe at both of us, it was hard to tell. ‘Poetry.’
‘Silent.’ Fel’s voice was taut with anger. ‘“Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” Though what Keats has to do with anything beats me.’ She reached for the pitcher of Vimto Stella had prepared. It was still full, the ice almost melted.