— From your present university? Or from … Cambridge?
— Cambridge?
— Oh, Telford, you promised.
— I know, Liz. But I find it hard to accept that a man can forget to that extent.
Drink Inter-Air, Fly World without End. Read Tell-Star in The Daily Sphere. Say it with bright imperatives to the citizens, and don’t forget to tell the journalists that she bombards the rectilinear room with the particles of a furious relief that spiral round the zig-zags in a magnetic field emanating the fact that I have changed, to that extent, just as you say I have. Let’s say no more about it.
— Elizabeth.
— Yes, Larry. You loved me. You wanted to marry me. And then you didn’t.
— You read … English?
— Yes. Useless thing, English. I never use it.
— What do you use?
— Oh, I got along on charm while it lasted. But Stanley quickly trampled that away. I don’t communicate much in any medium these days, except waves. Waves of unhappiness. And people shy away from those … Oh, don’t pity me, Larry, or feel guilty. I asked for all I got. One attracts it, you know, as an idea attracts another. But it doesn’t help to recognise it.
— A little recognition always helps. Not too much though.
— So you do remember something of me.
— Forgive me, Elizabeth. But our odd social encounters –
— I know. I do know. And you had him on your mind rather than me. Besides, after your –
— My death.
— Yes. That shook me, Larry. It really did. Telford can tell you.
— Telford?
— Liz and I have remained very good friends, ever since –
— I remember. You rather took her over, didn’t you?
— Don’t put it like that, Larry, you sound like Stanley sometimes.
— I know.
— I turned to Telford at the time because I knew he loved you. I wanted someone with whom I could talk you out of my system, yes, in English even, and who, well, who had no sexual interest in me and who wouldn’t get me entangled on the rebound. Though I must say I’ve often secretly also wished he could have. Then I wouldn’t –
— If you had married me, Liz, and after all we did seriously consider it, you would have seen Larry again tonight.
— Yes. Quite right. Those eyes of yours, Larry. They’d look right into me as if they could see something and yet saw nothing. I came to think I had nothing there to see, and of course perhaps I haven’t.
— Nonsense, Liz. Don’t run yourself down so much.
— You always did do that, didn’t you, Elizabeth.
— So you really do remember something of me.
— It used to exasperate me, if only as a slur on my judgment. Because, as you wisely remind me, I loved you. I used to tell you, people will take you at your own estimation, they always do. As in the end I did.
She settles into a gentler radiation from the sofa, the lines less angular, more curving, trebling each other round the kind explanation dropped, lassoing out to catch other associations, memories perhaps but held in tremulous space by a calmer control of things, such as Tell-Star saying your letter, Larry, it had me quite worried.
— My letter?
The small spidery handwriting fills the page at wide impersonal intervals like an equation worked down to the very end of some unlikely resolution as if x could really equal y in the unfamiliar context of the door with no doubt a round window in it behind which a secretary has typed some sort of reply. It sounded so crazy. But then, scientists.
— I don’t call myself a scientist.
— Yes, well, we’ll talk about that. I have an idea I’d like to discuss with you.
— I didn’t come to discuss ideas, Telford. I came to talk about, well, to ask, but now, with Elizabeth here, quite a lot comes back. I just want to explain –
— You don’t have to explain. Like she said, I loved you, Larry. But anyway we’ll have plenty of time. I’ve taken tomorrow off.
— Well, I’d better go, I’ve barged in long enough.
— Elizabeth. I’d like to see you again. I mean, could you lunch with me tomorrow?
— Not if you want to persuade me against divorce. I’ve thought about it for a long time, you know.
— Well, we do have other things to talk about. And we could forget Stance altogether, I wouldn’t exactly mind.
— Stance?
— I mean Stanley.
— Oh yes. All right. Why not? Thanks, I’d like to. But don’t think that I want, I mean, that I’ll try to –
— I don’t think anything derogatory of you, Elizabeth, not until you’ve proved it, so don’t think it of yourself, or in no time at all you will have proved it.
— Yes. Yes. Quite right. Thank you. Ring me tomorrow before ten at my hotel, I expect you two want to talk. Goodbye. Don’t see me out, Telford. Thanks, and she jerks her once again angular attitude out of the rectilinear room from left to right.
— Well, Telford.
— Well, Larry old twin. Do you remember our joint birthday party, champagne popping on the punts, just before our vivas?
— Bang in the middle of Gemini, yes. We drank to our astrological future as humanists.
— You didn’t know you’d turn from physics to medicine, then, and find yourself in the end among mad star-gazers,
— Mad among star-gazers, Telford.
— I wouldn’t say that, Larry, no. But I have an idea.
The amphitheatre grows immense, a spiralling galaxy of faces, bright cepheids, Blue Giants at the outer rim, roaring incessant noise in collision with other galaxies unseen, unheard by the Red Giants towards the centre who carry on regardless, expanding, heating up inside but cooling their outer layers as their luminosity increases, moving from the main sequence, unstable, pulsating, then contracting, fading, cooling, entering on their final stage as White Dwarfs of small mass and high density, each grain of dust weighing a ton no doubt and radiating faintly, unless filaments of gas perhaps, beginning a concentration that may ultimately become something. But the noise drowns the words inside the spheric globe, for sound-waves require matter and can’t get through the empty space immediately around. The microphone has died, the acoustics cork the space, or the noise from the collisions at the outer rim drowns all the words, the complex inscriptions, the parabolic gestures that create situations, the angular attitudes that send things off into elliptical orbits until the crowd yells, hisses, stamps its feet. Then the bull comes in, lunges and hoofs the dust, plunges his horn into the attitudes and contortions and tosses them at the crowd that roars, good people. Well, now that you’ve made your gesture I hope it didn’t hurt. Sit on you? My dear good man, why should I sit on you?
Inside the rectangle the face of Tell-Star peers through the horizontal lines of a harp recumbent plucked in quick arpeggios. How do you feel, he says.
— Terrible. Why did you have to do this to me?
— I didn’t do anything, Larry.
— No. You left me to it.
— You had a nightmare. I came down to see.
— I had an omen, Really.
— Why don’t you tell me about it?
— I think that I shall die, quite soon. I wish I could, Really, once and for all.
— We all do that, at times.
— I thought I never dreamt. But recently, I do, now and again.
— It doesn’t necessarily mean what you think, Larry, you of all people should know that.
He walks to the long table behind the sofa for cigarettes and the rectilinear room fills with smoke wisps, filaments of gas, voices that swim for dear life and noise, the vibrant hum of waves merging, doubling, trebling each other and overlapping, expanding, bursting the walls, the street, the entire sky in ultra-violet light when before dawn the degree of ionization in the lower atmosphere has fallen off and the higher layer then reflects, something at least. A little consciousness can do a lot, although in this type of communication the echo decreases with the fourth power of the distance between two bodies. But even if you could see an atom coming into existence the problem would remain as to the forces which had created it. And besides, the same principle of indeterminacy applies, compared, I mean, with the determinacy in regard to large numbers of atoms. The moment you try to find out its condition the very process of investigation must disturb it. So with ideas and people, compared to mass ideas, mass people. And causes. And so, of course, with the primeval atom. You couldn’t inquire as to what made it, or how it disintegrated, even if the time and space hadn’t gone for ever. Let’s put it this way, Laurence, we merely pierce the apple with a pin. And yet we try to live without causality, she said, who said, oh, I don’t know, the fat woman, the professor or someone, pretending that each moment has its own separateness, that anyone might come or go in that moment like an electron, why, you might as well ask for the moon. I know you didn’t. Or the noise either. Tell me one thing, the noise around the orbits, Telford, in Cambridge, at twenty-four, did I like noise? What sort of noise, Larry? Well, cars and motorbikes. And jazz, that sort of thing. Surely I didn’t, I collected silences.