Dr. Wilfred remained alert and braced. It would get harder than this, obviously. Sooner or later there would be questions put to him, and he would have to find answers.
“I believe you know Senator Hauptmayer, sir?” said one of the faces.
And here it was — a question. A perfectly easy one to deal with, however, even though he so rarely resorted to lies.
“How is the senator?” he asked.
“Poorly, as you know.”
“Give him my best regards.”
“I will, sir.”
Another face: “I read your book … What was it called…?”
Harder, but not impossible. Dr. Wilfred spread his hands helplessly and smiled. He didn’t know, either. Everyone laughed.
“Anyway,” said the face, “you know the one I mean, and I wanted to ask you: when you wrote this book, what were you trying to tell us?”
He could put this one away in the same fashion as he had the last one.
“Heaven knows,” he said. More laughter. “Only whatever it was I was trying to tell you, I obviously wasn’t trying hard enough.”
Another hit. On the edge of the group, behind all the unfamiliar faces, was one that he knew. Pleasantly open eyes, watching him and smiling. He gave her a little wave, and a small special smile that she would be able to see was different from the smiles he was handing out to all the others. She did; she quickly looked away to hide how pleased she was.
Another face: “Now, I’ve read that book, and I was somehow expecting you to be … well, I don’t know … different…”
“No,” said Dr. Wilfred. “I’m pretty much the way I am.”
They loved it. Another face coming up, though: “You won’t recall this, Dr. Wilfred, but we have met before.”
Ironical, obviously. Means he’s met Dr. Wilfred and it wasn’t me. On the other hand … “Where was it? Not at that thing in Mexico?”
“Montreal,” said the face.
“Montreal … In the bar?”
“In the hot tub!”
“I wonder you recognized me with my clothes on.”
“I never forget a face. Though, yes, you’ve changed.”
“Changed? Have I?” The dark depths waiting below the high wire. The audience watching expectantly.
“You’ve got younger, Dr. Wilfred!”
“Hot tubs, obviously.”
Unbelievable, thought Dr. Wilfred. You were who you said you were, even if they knew you weren’t! And even as he thought this he realized that it was Dr. Wilfred who was thinking it. He was Dr. Wilfred not just for the people around him. He was becoming Dr. Wilfred for himself.
It was all too easy! More danger, more danger!
“Just a quick question, if I may,” said a small man in a pair of spectacles held together by sticking plaster. “Oh — Professor Norbert Ditmuss, Department of Applied Dynamics, University of West Idaho. Emeritus, but I like to keep in touch with the subject. Now, sir, you say in your book Planned Innovation, Chapter Seven, I think it is, page 179, am I right, in the footnote on your statistical methodology, that assigning a value of between seven and ten to the theta function in a Wexler Distribution, given that lambda is negative and mu is greater than phi, will yield a solution remarkably close to Theobald’s constant. Now, my question to you, sir, is exactly how close?”
“Oh,” said Dr. Wilfred. “As close as a dog and a flea.”
Everyone laughed respectfully. Except Professor Ditmuss. “Yes, but seriously,” he said.
“Seriously?” said Dr. Wilfred. “An inch and a half.”
“I really do need an answer to this question, Dr. Wilfred,” said Professor Ditmuss, “because I am writing a paper that will reference your work, and I don’t want to be unjust. So would you be kind enough to take us step by step through your calculation?”
“Well…” said Dr. Wilfred.
There was an easy way round this question, just as there was to all the others, but for some reason Dr. Wilfred couldn’t see what it was. He seemed to have come rather suddenly to the end of the golden pathway that had stretched out before him.
Everyone around the table had turned to watch him. None of them had understood a word of the question, and they looked forward to the brilliance that Dr. Wilfred would display in providing an answer not a word of which any of them would understand either.
“Well…” said Oliver, since Oliver was what Dr. Wilfred was now rather swiftly subsiding back into.
“I hate to interrupt,” said a soft and welcome voice. Nikki had stepped forward. “But I shall have to ask you two gentlemen to discuss technical questions at some other time. I’m whisking Dr. Wilfred away for a rather important meeting.”
19
On the pergolas in the shade garden, the plumbago was piled as high and blue as the sky above it. Nikki looked up at it and felt as serenely happy as the blossom. There were forty different things she should have been doing. But she wasn’t doing any of them. She was strolling through the shade garden with Dr. Wilfred.
“This is the important meeting I’ve got to go to, is it?” said Dr. Wilfred.
“It is important,” she said. “We’ve got to discuss your schedule.”
She couldn’t get over the sheer lightness with which he wore his immense distinction. You would never have guessed from meeting him how much he knew and how much he had done. He was totally unlike any other guest of honor they had ever had. And everyone plainly loved him. Of course. How could they not? From the first moment she had set eyes on him at the airport she had known they would. And it was she who had suggested inviting him. He was her discovery.
She found herself telling him about her childhood. She had always wanted to be an artist, she said — she had had such intense feelings stirring in her when she was sixteen, and the longing to express them had welled up like the sap in spring pouring upwards through the plumbago. Somehow, though, she found herself doing a degree in arts administration instead. Then gradually, step by step, by way of jobs in provincial art galleries and touring theater companies, she had made her way to where she was now.
“Actually,” she said, “what I’m doing is not totally dissimilar to your job. I know you’re dealing with billions of pounds, and decisions that are going to affect the whole future of the world. Whereas I’ve only got the odd few million dollars to play with each year for this place. But I have to say who gets it and who doesn’t! I’m the one who has to provide some structure! Scientific research is probably a bit like the arts, isn’t it? I mean … messy. You don’t really know what’s going to happen until it’s happened.”
“True,” said Dr. Wilfred. “Well, I certainly don’t. Not a clue.”
“It’s like kids messing around in the sandpit. Great fun for the kids. Very educational. But someone’s got to look after the sandpit. Stop the cat from using it as cat litter, and the children from walking it into the house. Wash the sand out of their hair and clean it out of their noses. Yes?”
“Science and scientists! A total mystery to me!”
“Arts and artists are the same. Some of the writers we’ve had here!”
“I can imagine.”
She brushed her hand through the flowers in the herbaceous border. A shower of sparkling drops still hanging on leaves and petals from the overnight sprinklers came cascading down. “Orodigia,” he told her. “Flowering pangloss. Jacantha. Smithia. Peloponnesian daisies.”
“My God, you’re a gardener as well as everything else?”
“Of course not. I’m making it up as I go along. Like all the rest of it.”
They walked on in silence for a while.