‘He doesn’t want to be a pop star, he wants to take photographs.’
‘My point still stands. It is simply not true that you can achieve anything if you love it enough — it just isn’t. Life has limitations and the sooner he faces up to this fact then the better off he’ll be!’
Well, that’s what I said. I believed I had my son’s best interests at heart. That was why I was so vocal, because I wanted him to have a secure professional life, a good life. Listening up in his bedroom, no doubt he had caught all of my words and none of my intention.
Still, the argument was not my finest moment. I had become shrill and dogmatic but even so I was surprised to discover that Connie was now standing still, wrist pressed to her forehead.
‘When did it start, Douglas?’ she said, her voice low. ‘When did you start to drain the passion out of everything?’
‘So why did you become a scientist?’
‘Because I never really wanted to do anything else.’
‘But why … I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten the subject …?’
‘Biochemistry, that’s my PhD. Literally the chemistry of life. I wanted to know how we work; not just us, all living things.’
‘When was this?’
‘Eleven, twelve.’
Connie laughed. ‘I wanted to be a hairdresser.’
‘Well, my mum was a biology teacher, dad was a GP, so it was in the air.’
‘But you didn’t want to be a doctor?’
‘I thought about it, but I wasn’t sure about my bedside manner, and the great thing about biochemistry over medicine, my dad said, was that no one ever asked you to look up their bum.’
She laughed, which I found intensely gratifying. Clapham High Street late at night is not the most scenic of routes, and at a little after one in the morning it has its own perils, but I was enjoying talking to her — or talking at her because she was, she said, ‘too off her face’ to do much but listen. It was a bitterly cold night, and she clung to my arm, for warmth I supposed. She had swapped her high heels for clumpy trainers, and wore a wonderful old black coat with some kind of feathery collar, and I felt intensely proud and protective, and strangely invulnerable too, as we strode past the drunks and muggers, the hens and stags.
‘Am I being very boring?’
‘Not at all,’ she said, her eyelids heavy. ‘Keep talking.’
‘They used to buy me this magazine, World of Wonder or something it was called — my parents wouldn’t allow the other ones, the silly ones, Dandy or Whizzer and Chips or whatever, in the house. So I used to read this terribly dry, old-fashioned magazine and it was full of projects and diagrams and jolly things to do with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, how to turn a lemon into a battery—’
‘You can do that?’
‘I have that power.’
‘You are a genius!’
‘Thanks to World of Wonder. Fun facts! Did you know caesium has atomic number 55? That sort of thing. Of course at that age you’re just like this big sponge, so it all went in, but the bit I loved the best was this cartoon strip, “Lives of the Great Scientists”. There was one about Archimedes, I could draw it for you now: Archimedes in his bath, making the connection between volume and density, dancing naked down the street. Or Newton and his apple, or Marie Curie … I loved this idea of the sudden beautiful realisation. A light bulb going on, literally for Edison. One individual experiences this flash of insight and suddenly the world is altered fundamentally.’
I hadn’t spoken this much for years. I hoped, from Connie’s silence, that she was finding me fantastically interesting, but when I looked her eyes were rolled far back into her head.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m sorry. I’m just rushing my tits off.’
‘Oh. Okay. Should I stop talking?’
‘No, I love it. You’re bringing me down, but in a good way. Wow. Your eyes look massive, Douglas. They’re taking up your whole face.’
‘Okay. So … should I keep talking, then?’
‘Yes, please. I like listening to your voice. It’s like listening to the Shipping Forecast.’
‘Boring.’
‘Reassuring. Let’s keep walking. Tell me more.’
‘Anyway, these stories were nonsense for the most part, or hugely over-simplified. Most scientific progress is a slog, and more often than not it stems from a dialogue within a community, lots of people thinking along the same lines and inching forward, rather than these great bolts of lightning. Newton did see the apple fall, but he’d been thinking about gravity well before that. The same with Darwin, he didn’t wake up one day and think: natural selection! There’d been years and years of observation, discussion and debate. Good science is slow-moving, methodical, evidence-based. Method. Results. Conclusion. Like my old tutor used to say, “To assume makes an ass of u and me!’’’ Here, rather optimistically, I had hoped she might laugh, but she was staring open-mouthed at her wiggling fingertips. ‘Still, I was hooked. It seemed heroic, or at least the kind of heroism I might have access to. Normal boys aspired to be footballers or pop stars or soldiers, and I wanted to be a scientist, because wouldn’t it be incredible to have a moment like that? An entirely original idea. A cure, an insight into space and time, a water engine.’
‘Anything occurred to you?’
‘Not as yet.’
‘Well it’s still early days!’
‘Of course it was all a lot easier in the past. Much easier to make your mark when people still thought the sun revolved around the earth and there were four bodily humours. Not much chance of me making that kind of breakthrough now.’
‘Oh no!’ she said with real feeling. ‘That’s not true!’
‘’Fraid so. Science is a race, you’ve got to get there first. There’s no second prize. Look at Darwin — those ideas were in the air, but he was the first to get his paper published. The only way I could really make a mark now is to be transported back to, say, 1820. I’d jot down some pointers on evolutionary theory. I’d explain to the Royal College of Surgeons exactly why washing your hands is a good idea. I’d invent the combustion engine, the light bulb, the aeroplane, photography, penicillin. If I could get back to 1820, I’d be the greatest scientist the world has ever known, greater than Archimedes or Newton or Pasteur or Einstein. The only obstacle is being a hundred and seventy years too late.’
‘Clearly, what you need to do,’ she said, ‘is invent a time machine.’
‘Which is theoretically impossible.’
‘There you go again, being negative. If you can make a battery out of a lemon, how hard can it be? I’m sure you could do it.’
‘You hardly know me.’
‘But I can tell. I have a sense. Douglas, some day you are going to do something quite amazing.’
She was very far from sober, of course, but, if only for a moment, I thought she really did believe this of me. Even that it might be true.
And so we journeyed on, three of us now, in what I chose to take as a companionable silence, sneaking out of London through the back door and surfacing in dreary countryside, all pylons and motorways, a sudden glimpse of a river — the Medway? — crammed with holiday cruisers sulking in the overcast English summer, then more scrappy woodland then the motorway again. Soon enough the guard announced that we were about to enter the Channel Tunnel and the passengers looked obediently to their windows in the hope of seeing — what? Shoals of brightly coloured fish swimming past aquarium glass? A tunnel under the sea is never quite as visually splendid as one hopes, but it is no less an achievement for that. Who designed the Channel Tunnel? No one knows the name. There are no more Brunels or Stephensons, and tunnels, by their very nature, never get the attention of great bridges, but still this was a great feat. I voiced the thought aloud; how tunnels were underrated and it was miraculous, really, to imagine that great mass of rock and water over our heads and yet to feel safe.