I really do wish I could remember more of Inge — I owe it to her, to remember. She took care of me, she who was so much in need of being cared for herself. It seems odd, that in my distress I should have sought out the likes of her and not the strong ones, those big mannish bluestocking types in which my discipline abounds. Helpless myself, I cleaved to the helpless.
I was never a womaniser, not even then, in my wandering year of grief, despite all that was said of me. True, I was and am devoted to women, but not or not exclusively in the expectation of clambering on top of them and pumping away like a fireman at his hose, no, the fascination for me was that transformative moment when one of them would willingly divest herself of her clothes and everything became different on the instant. That was a phenomenon I could never get enough of; it was always a surprise, always left me breathless. How magical it was, how enchanting, when the head I had been talking to in the street, or on a bus, or in the midst of a roomful of people, suddenly, in a shadowed bedroom, unfurled from the neck down this pale, glimmering extension of itself, this body which, naked, was utterly other than what it had been when clothed. And not just the body, but the sensibility, too — a new person on the spot, candid, desirous, intimate, vulnerable. The prospect of the pure astonishment of holding this brand-new, cool-skinned creature in my arms, that was what held me there, in that glassed-in lecture hall, with the sickly taste of cloudberry cordial on my lips and an unyawned yawn making the hinges of my jaws ache, watching Inge, as if she were half blind, make her groping way to the lectern, still mangling her papers, and with a small round dark patch on the seat of her light summer dress where she had peed herself, just a little, in fright at the prospect of standing up and speaking to an audience.
This was in the early days of the great instauration, after we had exposed the relativity hoax and showed up Planck’s constant for what it really is. The air was thick with relativists and old-style quantum mechanics plummeting from high places in despair; I trust they took the opportunity, as they travelled streetwards together, of putting their principles of relative motion and intrinsic spin values to the test. I was in the vanguard of the new science and already an eminent figure in what was, admittedly, at that time, a narrow and specialised sphere. My Brahma hypothesis, so-called — so-called by Benny, in the first place, as it happened — floored them all. In it I posited the celebrated chronotron, ugly name — Benny, again — for an exquisite concept, time’s primal particle, the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation. Simplicity itself, that theory, once someone had dared to think it. To begin with I was laughed at, of course, always a sure promise of eventual triumph. It took them quite a while to get the point, but when they did, my, what a fuss. Looking back, I see myself borne aloft in triumph on the shoulders of a band of hot-eyed zealots, but a stiff and painted thing, like the effigy of a suffering saint carried in procession on a holy day, rattling a bit from being joggled overmuch, my mitre awry and my big toe shiny from the kisses of so many pious supplicants. I did not ask for their adulation. I was my solitary self when I took a flying kick and put my shiny big toe through their big Theory of Everything. The majority of them I despised. How they fawned and flattered when they saw at last the irrefragable rightness of what I had made. But then, did I not despise myself, also, myself and my work, my capitalised Work, of which I am supposed to be so vain? Oh, not that I think my achievement is less than anyone else’s — in fact I think it is more than everyone else’s, more than what any of my peers could have managed — only it is not enough for me. You take the point. The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.
My peers? Did I say my peers? My peers are all dead.
I did not like the look of Benny Grace. He had a distinctly adhesive aspect. At dinner he again weaseled his way into the seat beside me. Inge should have been sitting there, but was in the ladies’ room, crouched in a cubicle, sick and shaking after her public ordeal. However, not the most attentive lover could have been as irresistibly insinuating as Benny. Each time I chanced to look up from my plate those gleaming black eyes of his were fixed on me merrily, meaningly. Benny’s mode is that of a conductor bending and swaying with hooped arms out-thrust in the effort of scooping up from his orchestra greater and still greater surges of magnificent noise. Beyond the plate-glass wall a breeze silvered the grass and set the birch leaves madly fluttering. How melancholy, this evening that refused to end but kept drawing itself out, thinner and thinner, in the pale, northern light. Benny was leaning forward and over the voices of the others at the table was introducing himself, a hand held out at the end of an arm that would not fully straighten, so plumply packed was it into its sleeve. “I, of course,” he said, “know who you are.”
Now he goes back to join my daughter at the window, overlooking the garden, and begins to explain to her my theory of infinities. Benny loves to explain. Petra is silent; she has heard it all before, but is too polite and well brought up not to give at least the impression of being entranced by novelty. I who now from this angle can no longer see her picture her instead, eyes lowered, arms tightly folded as if to prevent herself from flying apart in fragments, nodding and nodding like a child’s mechanical toy. When she makes herself attend like this, such seemingly is the intensity of her concentration that she takes on the appearance of being thoroughly frightened, of being frozen in fright— of being, in a word, petrified. All the same, it occurs to me that it is she of all the household who will suffer the least agitation at Benny’s coming, I am not sure why — why I think it so, I mean, though I do, or hope so, anyway. That must be the reason the rest of them left it to her to bring Benny up here, to view the remains: they too must have seen that she is not the one to be overwhelmed by him. She is a dear girl, but troubled, troubled. Did I do wrong by making her my confidante, my familiar, my misused muse, when the whim took me? From the day she was born I favoured her over my son, that poor epigone — he was here earlier, blubbering at my bedside — yet now I think I was perhaps as unfair to her as I was to him, in singling her out as I did. Ursula used to assure me, in her kindly way, that by my attentions to the girl I gave her confidence, strength, tenacity of purpose, and perhaps I did foster in her a smidgen of these qualities, which, heaven knows, she is so much in need of. But I am not persuaded. I have done many wrongs, to many people, and I fear that if — But ha! is this where I embark on the famous deathbed confession? With not a soul to hear it, save the gods, who do not have it in their power to absolve me? Let us eschew the unbosoming and quietly proceed, unforgiven.
Over at the window Benny is telling Petra how her father as a young man at his sums succeeded in turning so-called reality on its head. “What he did is not fully grasped or appreciated even yet,” he says, with large disdain — I picture him doing that circling motion he does with his right hand, winding the ratchet of his contempt. “There is only a few of us that understand.” I am impressed by the trill of earnestness in his tone. He is putting it on for Petra’s sake, to urge on her the glory of her pa’s greatest days, the light of which glory, she is to understand, reflects on him, my mentor and my pal. Yet in those days of glory it was always Benny who was the one who was least impressed. When the rest of the academy were struggling with the disgraceful strangeness of this or that of my hypotheses, adjusting their frock coats about them and gravely tugging at their beards, Benny, sitting way up in the middle of the farthest row of the lecture hall, would lean back slowly and hook his thumbs in his belt and stick out his little round belly and smile. Oh, that shiny-faced smile. Whatever I did, whatever I achieved, Benny gave it to be understood that he had long since anticipated it. Nothing of mine was novel to him, and never enough. And he was always there, when I stepped down from the lectern and the scribbled-on blackboard, always there but always content to hang back while the others pressed forward in murmurous admiration or, as often as not, in consternation and outrage, even fury. Benny could wait. He had another gesture of the hand that I remember: he would hold it out before him, palm forward, one finger lifted, like that conductor again, commanding a pianissimo, tilting his head to one side with eyelids lightly shut and his lips pursed, the man whom nothing could surprise, nothing daunt, nothing confound. Even when I laid my ladder against the mighty Christmas tree that all the others before me had put up over ages and popped the fairy on the topmost spike, whereupon her little wand lit up in what before had been the outer dark an endless forest of firs, hung with all manner of baubles, a densely wooded region the existence of which no one hitherto, including myself, had suspected — even then Benny was there to tell me with gently patronising scorn how foolish I had been to imagine that anything could be completed, I of all people, who knew far better than anyone that in the welter of realities that I had posited everything endlessly extends and unravels, world upon world. And it is true, of course — how could there be any finish to what I and a few others, a very few others, started? Was it that I thought to be the last man? he would enquire, and gaze at me in head-shaking, compassionate reproof, smiling. And he was right — look at me now, the last of myself, no more than that.