I had to watch the rest of the film but I couldn’t concentrate. I don’t know whether it was any good; all I could think about was the envelope and the book.
At last it was over. Sib said Thank you. She said she’d better do some work.
Ptolemaic Alexandria was in a bookcase behind her back. I got out Volume II and opened it to the description of a tragedy portraying the events of Exodus (Fraser quotes an exchange between God and Moses in iambic trimeters), and there it was. To Be Opened In Case of Death.
I thought: If ’twere done, ’twere well ’twere done quickly. I thought: What’s a sealed envelope? A door marked No Entry or Authorised Personnel Only. Something to ignore if the circumstances warrant it.
I put it inside my shirt and went upstairs. When I got to my room I opened the envelope.
It wasn’t Red Devlin. It wasn’t anyone like that.
I remembered one of his books that I hadn’t bothered to finish. He’d gone to Bali. The men there walk barefoot across the lava field of a live volcano. He didn’t. He stood watching them walk across the lava and then he went back to the hotel and wrote about how he’d watched them. He didn’t know any Balinese. He fucked a woman back at the hotel on the basis of three words of Balinese. Maybe she liked nocturnal animals.
4
Steven, age 11
Three days after I learned his name I realised I’d jumped to conclusions. Quite often in travel books the writer goes from being naive or ignorant or cowardly to doing something quite brave later on. It was stupid to judge him with so little to go on. So I went to the library to look for the rest of his books. Sibylla is right, he’s very popular—they have everything he’s written, but only two books were there.
Right beside them on the shelf was my old favourite, Journey into Danger! I must have read that about 20 times. Well, too bad.
I took down The Lotus-Eaters. There was a picture of my father on the back, taking up the whole back cover. He stared frowning into the distance. He was less handsome than I’d imagined, but it might be a bad picture.
An Antique Land had a different picture on the back. Another audition for the Tyrone Power school of acting.
If the books had been fiction the librarian probably wouldn’t have let an 11-year-old borrow them, but because they were travel writing it did not occur to her to object. She was used to my borrowing from the grown-up section, especially travel books; she probably didn’t realise these were X-rated.
I read the two books I’d found, and then I got three more at the Barbican, and I read the latest one at the Marylebone Library because I didn’t have a ticket. By the end of the week I had read all my father’s books.
Well. I have to admit I’d hoped to find some spark of genius or heroism unnoticed by Sibylla. I wanted to open a page and think But this is brilliant! This didn’t happen. I kept reading anyway. I don’t know what I was hoping to find.
When I didn’t find anything in the books I thought he might be different in person.
He had been married to his first wife when he met my mother, it had ended, and he had married again and moved to another house. So even if I could have discovered the location of the Medley, it would now be occupied only by his ex-wife.
Then I thought he might give a talk somewhere, and I could follow him home. But I thought it would end in drinks, and be hard for me to follow. I could try the hunchbacked midget costume I had to wear when we went to see The Crying Game—but I thought I might have trouble getting into a bar even as a midget sensitive about his height.
Then I had an idea. My father wrote a lot of journalism, and he always got a lot of things wrong. Science held a fatal fascination for him. He had never really mastered the difference between the special and general theories of relativity, but for some reason could not keep from bringing both into his articles whenever he could. Sometimes he would take a word which had both a technical meaning and an ordinary meaning (chaos, string, relativity, positive/negative, half-life, you get the idea) and then take statements applicable to the word in its technical sense to support generalisations about the word in its common sense. Sometimes the technical meaning would be something that could only be expressed in mathematics, so that it didn’t really have a correlate in ordinary language— that never stopped him. It was really just a matter of waiting for his next piece to come out & then writing to correct the mistakes in an engaging, innocent, boyish way, signing the letter Steven aged 11—this would be bound to get a response, and with luck he would put his address on the letter.
The next day was Monday. I went back to the library and went through all the Sunday papers, but there was nothing by my father. I went through all the Saturday papers, but there was nothing there either. Then I went through the papers for Monday, 30 March. Nothing there. I had known who he was for 10 days.
I went back to the library every day to go through the papers. There was nothing by my father. I would stand at the table, leafing through the pages, and sometimes I’d see an interesting story and get excited and suddenly remember. I knew who he was.
On Saturday I went back to the library again, and this time there was a piece in the Independent Magazine on the Galapagos. It talked about extinction and selection. There were lots of logical fallacies, and also some factual mistakes about dinosaurs, and he seemed to have misunderstood the selfish gene theory. Here was my chance!
I wasn’t going to point out the logical errors, which might put his back up, and I decided not to say anything about the part where he mixed up DNA and RNA because I thought that would be too embarrassing, but I thought I could safely point out more abstruse errors of fact, and this would be the type of thing I could sign Steven aged 11. It was hard to know how simply I should put the selfish gene theory: since he hadn’t understood it I didn’t want to make the explanation complicated, but I thought it would sound obnoxious if I stuck to words of one syllable.
I wrote the letter ten times trying to sound clever and not obnoxious. I could have printed it out on the word processor, but I thought my atrocious handwriting might be more appealing, so I wrote the final version out by hand.
It took two days to write. I could have written it in 15 minutes if I hadn’t had to worry about sounding obnoxious. Still, as Sibylla would say, it’s not nice to go around constantly offending people.
A week went by and I thought the Independent might not have passed it on straight away.
A week went by.
A week went by and I thought he must have it by now.
Three days went by and April was over. I thought he might actually be travelling. A day went by and I thought he might have a secretary to deal with correspondence. Four days went by. The secretary might have instructions not to answer letters unaccompanied by SAE.
His letter came the next day.
I took it to my room to read.
The address was handwritten; I thought this looked promising. The envelope was one of those self-stick envelopes; he’d written in black ballpoint. I opened it slowly; there was a sheet of A5, folded once, inside. I unfolded it. It said:
6 May, 1998
Dear Steven,
Thank you for your letter. As you probably know, there are a lot of different theories about why the dinosaurs became extinct. I admit I used the one most convenient for my argument. The point about the selfish gene theory would be fair enough if that was what I was relying on, but in fact Dawkins’ theory does have some rivals.