The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (15 page)

She’s close enough to touch. Off to one side, about fifteen yards away, he can see Blackett and Rutherford, hear their loud, cheerful voices. The old man is talking to Blackett at the same time as trying to light his pipe and Robert can hear him cough and can smell the sweet, rich tobacco. The sun is caught by the leaves on the tree above them, and he watches as Blackett’s wife is covered in moving shadows. Perhaps everything will turn out alright in this place, after all.

‘Do you know whose tree this is?’ she smiles at him. Her teeth are as white as china cups.

‘No, whose? Please do tell me,’ he tries to smile back.

‘Newton’s. It’s where the apple fell on his head and he had his brainwave.’

‘Gosh.’ And he is genuinely impressed. This is where it all started, the great synthesis of ideas and observations that makes their subject. The realisation that what happens out there in the sky, what moves the planets around the Sun is due to the same force that makes the apples fall from the tree. He is standing on the very spot that Newton once stood on, and maybe he too will have an amazing idea and change the world.

‘Is it really that extraordinary? Patrick told me all about it, but I’m not sure I truly understood.’ She frowns a little, as if slightly cross, ‘I must confess I don’t usually understand what he says to me, when he talks about his work.’

And now Robert can picture their marriage, Blackett’s
endless tiresome chatter about physics and departmental business colliding with her unspoken wish to be left in peace, to eat breakfast in silence, to be adored without words. Robert would adore her, if she would let him.

She runs a hand over the smooth mass of her hair, ‘Why don’t you try and explain it to me? Perhaps they have different ways of explaining things where you come from. I might understand it better.’

The apples on the tree are still small at this time of year, not much more than promises of fruit. He talks to her about Newton’s theory of gravitation, about how everything in the Universe is governed by this same mysterious law, and she smiles every so often, and once she lays a hand on his arm.

‘We’re eating from the tree of knowledge,’ she says. Her breath is scented with the weak sparkling wine they have both been drinking, ‘You and me and this tree. All we need is the serpent.’

He feels bold enough to say, ‘If this is before the Fall, then we should be naked and innocent.’

She laughs, ‘Oh, it’s too late for that, Mr Oppenheimer. Far too late for innocence. For me, anyway. Maybe you can still be saved from whatever delicious sin you’re tempted to commit.’

He is trying to tell her about Einstein, when Blackett wanders over, ‘Time to go, dear.’ As she allows herself to be led away by her husband, she nods at Robert with a little dip of her head.

‘See you in the lab, Oppenheimer!’ Blackett booms at him.

Robert is finally given a proper task to do. According to Blackett, this will be a nice job, something to get his teeth into. He hasn’t seen Mrs Blackett since the party, over a month ago. He knows that Blackett sometimes invites his students over for Sunday lunch, but he hasn’t received an invitation yet. Perhaps it was wrong to use that word –
naked
. Or perhaps she has simply forgotten about him.

He starts his task, working away in his office, far away from the lab and all its mess and dirt. He needs only pencil and paper, and his own thoughts. Blackett has set him a deadline for this task, he must deliver a seminar on it to the other students in a month.

He feels like a character in a fairy story or a Greek myth, having to overcome challenges before he is able to win the heart of the beautiful princess. He tries not to think of Mrs Blackett, silent and invisible behind grey stone walls. He picks up his pencil and starts to work.

Finally he receives an invitation to lunch. Lubbock is invited too.

‘Damned nuisance,’ Lubbock says, ‘I really need to spend every minute on my thesis.’ But he doesn’t look too upset.

‘What’s the form?’ Robert asks.

‘The form?’ Lubbock sounds puzzled and Robert worries if he’s used the wrong word. But he has to get things right. ‘Oh, just wear your everyday clothes, nothing fancy. It’s all very relaxed in their house.’

This worries Robert. He can cope with formality, with clear rules. It’s the unspoken customs that trip him up.

The Blacketts live a few miles outside the city in a small village and on the day of the lunch Robert decides to ride over there. He hires a horse, and the feeling of the animal moving beneath him reminds him of the freedom he felt in New Mexico. But this countryside is not the same. It is so flat that he is surrounded by sky, and he feels like he’s in an upturned bowl or lab dish, being inspected by some celestial experimenter.

By the time he arrives at the Blackett’s he is sweaty and it seems to have been the wrong thing to do, although nobody says anything. All of them, the Blacketts, Lubbock and even the Blackett’s maid, look surprised to see the horse. He has been long enough in England to know that surprise is designed to indicate bad manners on behalf of the person doing the
surprising. There is the language of words which he initially thought he spoke in common with the English, and then there is the language of gesture and habit which he knows he doesn’t understand at all.

As he stands in the Blacketts’ garden holding the reins of the horse which is showing far too much interest in the apple tree, Mrs Blackett directs the maid to fetch blankets and towels and pails of water without ever once looking at him. Lubbock and Blackett stand some distance away talking physics. He is hot. He thought England was supposed to be cold, but it is damned hot. Only the people are cold. He removes his jacket and drapes it over the horse which is now cropping fallen apples as they lie in the grass. He wipes his forehead and resolves to say something brilliant to Mrs Blackett.

He gestures at the apples, ‘The fruit of knowledge.’

Mrs Blackett replies, ‘Do come inside for lunch, it’ll get cold. Come on Patrick, come on Mr Lubbock.’ She still hasn’t looked at him. Perhaps she’s wearing the same dress, he wishes he could remember the pattern of the earlier one. It may be a sign.

Now he has no choice but to troop into the dining room. From there they can all look out of the window and watch the horse as it starts to eat the remaining apples on the tree.

‘Won’t it get colic if it eats too many?’ asks Lubbock.

The maid serves them soup, and they are silent as they spoon it up. Robert finds he is aching from the ride, he must be out of practice.

‘So,’ Blackett starts, ‘electrons.’

‘Patrick,’ Mrs Blackett murmurs, ‘it’s Sunday. No talk of work, please.’

As he sips his soup which has a peculiar jelly-like consistency, the only sound is the clatter of cutlery. Blackett and Lubbock both seem content to stay silent if they’re forbidden to talk about work. But he has better manners than that.

‘I remember what you told me,’ he has managed to get
through the soup and gratefully abandons the spoon, ‘that afternoon.’ He dares to look at her but she is still gazing at the horse, ‘About the tree. Newton’s tree. Remarkable to think it’s survived all this time.’

She gestures to the maid to clear away the bowls, ‘Newton’s tree?’

Robert stares at the wrinkles in the tablecloth left by his soup bowl. Is she going to pretend she didn’t tell him? That they didn’t talk together, didn’t exchange the words
innocent
and
naked
with each other?

Blackett looks over from the top of the table where he is attacking the meat with a carving knife. ‘Newton’s tree?’ he repeats, and he chuckles, ‘that’s the story we like to tell visitors to the University.’ He lays on a plate the thinnest, greyest slice of beef Robert has ever seen. ‘But Newton wasn’t even in Cambridge when he came up with the idea of gravity. He’d gone back to his family home in Grantham, because of the plague.’

The plate is handed across the table to Robert. They all watch him as he is invited by the maid to help himself to roast potatoes and boiled vegetables. The vegetables slither off the serving spoon in a sort of greenish mass. He is not sure how many roast potatoes he should have and they are all watching him, so he serves himself just one. Perhaps it will compensate for the horse eating all their apples.

Mrs Blackett glances at her husband, ‘Patrick dear,’ she murmurs in a way that seems designed to sound private, ‘do make sure our guest gets enough to eat. In America they must eat so much more meat than we do here.’ Another thin grey slice of beef lands on his plate.

After lunch the horse is clearly paying the price for the apples and won’t let itself be mounted, so Robert has to lead it all the way back to the stables, six hot and aching miles away.

His mother has written to him, ‘
– and, my dearest, by chance I met Mrs Powell who suggests that you do write to her daughter. They all know you meant no offence by your remarks. But if I may offer some advice about women –
’

Robert screws up the letter and throws it onto the floor. On his journey to England he hoped to leave Mrs Powell and her daughter behind, ideally somewhere in the mid-Atlantic to be eaten by fish. But he cannot pick and choose what to remember and forget, because to his horror even Harvard itself is now wavering in his mind, the brick sidewalks lead to impossible destinations, the seminars have faded to murmurs and even his own prized essays are just tangles of words. He looks out of the window at dull sky and stones and tries to superimpose on it a picture of New York City, its streets so alive with all hope. It can’t be done. That image feels like heaven, something once believed in that has fallen away. Cambridge is reality and everything else has dwindled to this. He presses the nib of his fountain pen into his thumb, hoping for the skin to break, for blood to appear, for some sort of transformation. But the clock ticks on and he is left with schoolboyish ink on his fingers. Maybe it would be easier if he had a knife.

He should reply to his mother. He packs the pen away in the desk and makes prints on his blank writing paper with his inky thumb. Finger prints are unique, so perhaps these blots say more about his character than mere words could do.

The following week Lubbock gives a seminar. He’s due to report on the work he’s done for his PhD. Robert is keen to see what Lubbock is capable of, so he gets to the lecture theatre early and takes a seat in the front row. As the others arrive he realises he is sitting amongst the faculty, the lecturers and professors. Rutherford is two seats away, next to Thomson, and Blackett is at the end of the row. Between them are some other men that Robert hasn’t seen before, perhaps they’re visitors to the department. Twisting his head, Robert can see
the other students are all at the back. There is a collection of empty seats between him and the rest of the students. He wonders why they don’t sit closer to the faculty.

Lubbock enters, picks up a piece of chalk, turns his back to the assembled staff and students and starts to talk. As he talks he writes strings of equations on the board.

The lecturers on either side of Robert fall asleep, their heads resting on their chests. The one to the left of him makes a slow mooing sound, the one to the right of him snorts in sharp bursts. Blackett is awake, and clearly following Lubbock’s work.

Robert can’t understand what Lubbock is saying because the words are muffled and disappear into the black surface of the board, but he can understand the equations. It is standard stuff to do with a basic application of Bohr’s model of the atom. He has done all this stuff before, at Harvard. He relaxes, he is still ahead of the others.

Lubbock has made a mistake. Robert glances at Blackett who appears not to have noticed so he gets to his feet and points at the offending equation, ‘Say, that bit’s wrong.’

Lubbock falls quiet. Robert goes up to the blackboard, and takes the chalk from his sweaty hand. He wipes part of the board clean and chalks up the correct version of the equation, ‘There you go, it should be easy from now on,’ before going back to his seat.

The rest of the room is silent, Lubbock included.

In the pub later, he stands at the bar, watching the beer splash into the glass. He is buying Lubbock a pint, by now he knows what he likes to drink. And Lubbock looks like he could do with a drink. After Robert’s intervention he didn’t really seem to get back into his seminar, he carried on making mistakes and couldn’t answer the questions at the end. Robert had to answer one of them for him.

Robert carries the pints over to the table where the students
are all sitting. Sometimes the lecturers join them for this post-seminar drink, but not today. Nobody looks at him as he rests the heavy glasses on the table.

‘Say,’ starts Robert, jiggling his foot, ‘all that twiddling around with Bohr’s model. It’s a bit old hat.’

Lubbock slowly raises his head from his pint, ‘Old hat?’ he repeats.

‘Yes,’ says Robert. They’re not normally so quiet. He thought they were beginning to warm to him, but now it feels the way it did at the start of the term, when he was in the lab breaking things.

Blackett appears, and the students sit up a bit straighter. He doesn’t normally come to the pub. ‘Oppenheimer, a word please?’ he murmurs, so Robert has no choice but to get up and follow him outside.

Blackett stares at a point on the wall of the pub some distance from Robert, before speaking, ‘It’s not usually the done thing to interrupt a man when he’s giving a seminar.’

‘But he’d made a mistake! I was just helping him!’ Robert tries to stop his voice from squeaking.

‘It was his talk. His responsibility to explain his work to the audience. Not yours.’ Blackett smiles now, and remains standing there, feet planted wide apart on the pavement. Robert sees now why he was a loved and admired officer in the war. ‘Here,’ and Blackett holds out a ten shilling note, ‘buy Lubbock a drink. I think he’s earned it. And yourself of course.’

Robert can picture Blackett handing out largesse to his servants and although he wants to fling it onto the ground, he has to pocket the money. And Blackett isn’t quite finished with him, ‘We must go riding together sometime. I’d enjoy that.’