Humble Boy Read online

  Felix I’m sorry … I was just – I was experimenting …

  Pause.

  I often use a garden hose. As an analogy, I mean.

  Jim Oh yes?

  Felix Yes. Yes. With superstring theory there need to be six or seven extra dimensions. We can’t see them but it’s like with a garden hose. If you stretch it out between two posts in a field and then you walk half a mile away and look back, it just looks like a one-dimensional line.

  Jim I’ll take that off you, shall I? (Jim takes the hose off him and starts to wind it up again.)

  Felix Yes. Yes. But if you look at the hose through binoculars, if you magnify it, a second dimension – one that is in the shape of a circle curled round the hose – becomes visible. So in the same way there could be extra dimensions in space but you can’t see them because they’re small and curled up, furled around one another. You see?

  Jim Mmm … Well. Knowing my luck, they’ll ban them soon anyway.

  Felix What?

  Jim Hosepipes. Last time we had a summer like this, by this time in July there was all sorts of rules.

  Felix Yes.

  Jim I know lots of people ignore a ban, but I’m not like that. I watched all the plants flounder. And then I go next door but one and they’ve got a symphony of sprinklers going off. Drowning the plants, they were. I wanted to report them.

  Felix Garden rage.

  Jim But then their plants got blight and died anyway. What goes around comes around.

  Pause.

  Felix I haven’t seen any of the bees yet.

  Jim The drones will be out and about soon. Buzzing round the queen. Seven or eight of them joining the mile-high club. Then after they’ve done their bit she flies away with their torn-off genitals still attached to her. That’s women’s lib for you.

  Felix smiles.

  Felix I’d like to see them. Before I go. I’d feel better, I think.

  Jim You will.

  Felix I just can’t seem to – I can’t seem to ask the right questions … I need to make a decision about what I should do next.

  Jim You want to stop asking all the questions.

  Felix But it’s so hard – with my work, I must question everything. I must –

  Jim stops what he’s doing. He looks at Felix.

  Jim Felix, you know, bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly. Aerodynamically they’re too big, their wings are set up all wrong. They don’t obey the laws of physics. But they fly anyway.

  Mercy comes out into the garden. She looks around, although she does not address Jim directly.

  Mercy Doesn’t the garden look lovely?

  Jim looks at Mercy. She smiles but does not look at him.

  Jim Thank you.

  Then he works on in the garden unheeded. Felix glances at him from time to time but he is absorbed in his work.

  Mercy Such a beautiful day. I can’t remember a summer like it. Mind you, I wish it would rain … Now I just popped round with those clothes for you. Jean says she doesn’t want any money for them. I’ve put the bag in your room. But you know I don’t think the jacket will fit you, dear. Unless you like a very snug fit.

  Felix It’ll be fine, Mercy, thank you.

  Mercy Because we’ve just had another suit in. It’s a bit worn round the seat region and the lapels are on the wide side, but apart from that –

  Felix (a little too sharply) I don’t want another suit. I want the suit you brought me.

  Mercy Well, you know your own mind. (absently looking at the garden) Isn’t that African lily marvellous?

  Jim Agapanthus umbellatus.

  Mercy But then I love all the lilies. White lilies.

  Jim Lilium candidum.

  Mercy Tiger lilies.

  Jim Lilium tigrinum.

  Mercy And the sweet peas. I do love sweet peas.

  Jim Lathyrus odoratus.

  Felix You know all the names.

  Mercy Yes.

  Jim I only know the right names for my little world.

  Mercy Even from here, they smell heavenly, don’t they? (She stands awkwardly for a few moments.)

  Mercy So. What are your plans?

  Felix What do you mean?

  Mercy Your mother tells me you’re not going back till the end of summer?

  Felix Does she?

  Mercy Have you fixed on an exact date?

  Felix No.

  Mercy Your mother says you’re taking pills.

  Felix Oh.

  Mercy What are they for?

  Felix doesn’t reply.

  Mercy Have you stopped taking them?

  Felix Are you on a retainer?

  Mercy What?

  Felix Or do you just enjoy it, doing duties for her, carrying out her little schemes –

  Mercy Felix –

  Felix Of course she won’t do anything that might chip her nail polish.

  Mercy Your mother didn’t ask me to do anything for her.

  Felix Mercy. You are not a convincing liar.

  Mercy It’s only because she cares –

  Felix How exactly do you fit into the equation, Mercy?

  Mercy I’ve known you since you were born. Your mother and I would play with you here in this garden. I’m a very close, personal friend of your mother’s.

  Felix Ah yes. I see. You like to orbit round her?

  Mercy Yes, no, I don’t know.

  Felix You should be careful. That’s the problem with black holes. The gravitational attraction is so strong you can’t resist. But they warp you, they pull you out of shape.

  Mercy Please don’t be sharp with me, Felix. I am of a very nervous disposition.

  Felix I’m sorry.

  Mercy It’s beyond the pale, really it is.

  Felix I’m sorry, Mercy.

  Mercy Is it your work? Is everything all right with your studies?

  Felix Fine.

  Mercy Are you a professor yet, dear?

  Felix No. Research fellow.

  Mercy Really? Isn’t that wonderful? And I remember when you failed your eleven-plus. What is it that you’re looking for again?

  Felix What?

  Mercy In your studies?

  Felix It’s complicated.

  Mercy Oh! I like hearing all those funny words.

  Felix I’m working on M-theory – trying to unify the various strands of superstring theory.

  Jim Go on.

  Mercy Mmm.

  Felix At the root of everything we believe, I believe – a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of the size of an atom, so many noughts it would dazzle you, the perfect Planck length – there is a loop or a filament of energy – what we call a string – which is the fundamental building block of the universe. And these strings are stretched like the strings on a violin and they’re vibrating to and fro.

  Mercy Really?

  Felix I know they’re there – the strings – the superstrings – and they will bring everything together into a perfect elegant supersymmetry – the jittery, frenzied world of quantum mechanics and the gentle curving geometry of gravity. You see we know the rules for the big things like the cosmos and we know the rules for the small things like the atom, but the rules don’t agree – it’s the superstrings that will bring the forces together. The superstrings will give us a quantum theory of gravity – that’s what I want, what we all want … You know, I’m so close, I can hear them! I can hear the little vibrating strings inside my head. Even though I can’t prove absolutely that they’re there, I can hear the patterns they’re making, like they’re ringing in my ears.

  Jim The music of the spheres.

  Felix Mmm. I’ve just run out of the maths. The equations don’t exist for what I can already sense. The excitation modes – the ringing has too many layers I can’t – hold all the notes, all the variables, all the harmonies in my head. But one day soon, I hope, I’ll have it, M-theory, the mother of all theories, a unified field theory. The theory of everything. And once I’ve done that – I’ll be able to rest. />
  Jim Yes.

  Mercy Well, isn’t that something, Felix? I mean, if you had to research anything, everything would be the thing to research, wouldn’t it? If my brain wasn’t so puddled, I’d probably be after it too.

  Felix I’m just waiting for my moment of intuition. My Eureka moment.

  Mercy I’m sure it will come.

  Jim It will.

  Felix Einstein called his moment the happiest thought of his life.

  Jim You’d better try and have some more happy thoughts then, hadn’t you?

  Jim moves further away. Felix smiles as he exits.

  Mercy Divine inspiration, that’s what you need. Even when I’m arranging the flowers in church I pray for a bit of that.

  Felix I can already sense what it would feel like.

  Mercy Can you?

  Felix I don’t mind if it’s a quiet moment.

  Mercy No. Quiet moments can be very agreeable.

  Felix Stephen Hawking had his breakthrough when he was getting into bed. But because of his motor neurone disease it took him an age. Throwing back the sheets, plugging in the electric blanket, hauling himself up, tucking himself in, required a gargantuan effort. The nerve cells in his spinal cord were disintegrating, his muscles were playing tricks on him, but all the while his brain was buzzing with complex equations. They went showering through him, like Shakespearean sonnets. By the time he set his alarm clock he’d cracked it.

  Mercy He should have had a duvet. I resisted for a long time, but they’re so easy. You just throw them on.

  Felix Mercy, you are an original.

  Mercy What a lovely thing to say!

  Felix It’s true.

  Mercy You’ll have your moment, Felix. Probably when you least expect it. Bingo! There it’ll be: ‘Humble’s unified theory of everything.’

  Felix I have a terrible fear that I will go through life just missing it. Walking past the love of my life.

  Mercy Well, we’ve all done that.

  Felix Have you ever seen an apple fall? Actually fall?

  Mercy I don’t know. I must have done, mustn’t I?

  Felix goes over to the apple tree.

  During this Flora comes out and listens. She carries a gift. Felix and Mercy do not see her.

  Felix I’ve never seen it. I once sat out here, I was ten, I must have just learned about Newton and the force of gravity and I thought I’d watch an apple fall from a tree – I wanted to see that moment – well, what would it be, say, the half second that it takes an apple to drop four metres. I sat out here for eight hours. Nothing. In the end my mother made me go in for my tea. I wasn’t even hungry – I nearly choked the food down. I came back out after half an hour and there were three of them on the floor.

  Mercy Well, Newton just got lucky.

  Felix And he didn’t have my mother.

  Mercy I’m sure she didn’t mean it.

  Flora On no, it was clearly my fault.

  Mercy (jumping) Flora!

  Flora You don’t know this, Mercy, because you have never been blessed with children, but ultimately everything that goes wrong in your child’s life can be laid squarely at your feet. It’s what they call chaos theory, isn’t it, Felix? I sneezed in public in 1968 and as a result my son found it difficult to connect in social situations for the rest of his life.

  Mercy He’s just shy.

  Flora I picked up a sweet wrapper that he dropped when he was three and consequently he’s a total failure with women.

  Mercy He went out with Rosie Pye.

  Felix This is not chaos theory, Mother.

  Flora Oh well, pardon me for failing in my use of scientific terminology. I didn’t have the benefit of your very expensive private education. Mercy, do you mind leaving us for a minute? I want to talk to my son alone.

  Mercy Of course. (Mercy exits.)

  Felix (to the exiting Mercy) End of your commission. Report back for duty later on.

  Flora Felix –

  Felix You’ve got her well-trained, Mother. She’s like a very earnest springer spaniel. She flushes the wild fowl off the water so you can come and take a pop at them.

  Flora She has precious little else to keep her occupied.

  Felix I hope she gets rewarded.

  Flora Of course. She gets to bask in my reflected glory … You know, paranoia is very unattractive in a man, Felix.

  Felix What do you expect with my education? I have been taught to apply the uncertainty principle to every p–problem.

  Flora Do you know how utterly bored I am by all this science? I have been doubly unlucky in my life. To marry a biologist and give birth to a physicist. Who on earth said God didn’t play dice?

  Felix Do you want me to go?

  Flora If I had been Marie Curie I would have used my bunsen burner to make crème brûlée.

  Felix Just tell me to go.

  Flora I found three more grey hairs this morning. They were not there a week ago.

  Felix What do you want me to do about that?

  Flora I want you to – you are always welcome, this is your home but I can’t bear to see you lolling about out here –

  Felix Lolling? Is that what I am doing?

  Flora I don’t know. I have no idea what you are doing. You never speak to me properly.

  Felix You never listen.

  Flora Stop it! Stop this! I can’t bear it! Your father would have hated this. (Pause. She touches him lightly.) Do you remember the first time we took you to prep school? I didn’t want to leave you there, you seemed so small, but your father said I had to be strong. And I stood and waved to you while you walked up the long driveway and James was telling me that we ought to go but I didn’t stop waving. I wanted you to know that I wouldn’t go away that easily. And you got smaller and smaller and further away until you were nothing but a black dot, but I kept on waving. Even when you’d stopped being a black dot, I kept on waving.

  Pause.

  Flora (handing him the gift) This is for you.

  Felix It’s not my b–birthday.

  Flora No, well. It’s not a birthday present.

  Felix I don’t need presents.

  Flora No, well you don’t need to need it. That is the appeal of gifts.

  Felix What is it?

  Flora Why are you always so analytical? Really, you were like this when you were a child. Why don’t you open it?

  He opens it. Flora smiles a little. He takes out a smallish earthenware pot with a lid on it. He is obviously a little baffled by the gift.

  Felix What –?

  Flora It’s a copy of an ancient honey-pot. Etruscan or Egyptian or something. It’s not really to my taste. But your father bought it for me. I thought you would like it.

  Felix Thank you. (Felix smiles a little, he takes off the lid.)

  Flora Careful!

  He inadvertently spills a little of the contents – a fine powdery ash.

  It’s filled quite full.

  Felix Oh, Jesus.

  Flora What?

  Felix Is this what I think it is?

  Flora I didn’t like the other receptacle they sent them in.

  Felix You mean the urn?

  Flora It was a very ugly, horrible vulgar tinny thing. I thought a honey-pot would be much more appropriate.

  Felix This is him?

  Flora The ashes, yes.

  Felix Oh, Jesus.

  Flora You criticised me for throwing his belongings out.

  Felix I just spilled some! I just lost a bit of his nose or something.

  Flora I lost more transferring it to the new pot. I had to use a funnel.

  Felix Jesus Christ.

  Flora They got stuck to the sides and I had to rinse them out.

  Felix I don’t believe this.

  Flora I’ve thrown the funnel away.

  Felix I think you’re psychotic.

  Flora Oh well, I can’t do anything right.

  Felix This is my father. You have just handed me my father in a pot.
/>   Flora Don’t be so melodramatic.

  Felix You wrapped him up, for God’s sake.

  Flora I … I … thought it would make it more formal – more precious.

  Felix You wrapped him up in ‘Happy Birthday’ paper.

  Flora Well, it was all I had to hand … I thought this would help. I thought you could say the words that you were going to say. I thought that was what was making you so miserable. I thought that we could have a little ceremony. And that then you could scatter him.

  Felix What’s left of him. You tipped half of him down the sink.

  Flora Of course there’s no guarantee that this is your father. These crematorium places are often very slipshod in their arrangements. And let’s face it, one man’s ashes is … another man’s ashes.

  Felix What are you saying?

  Flora I am saying that your father is gone. I am trying to help you come to terms with this fact.

  Felix Well, I’m sorry, Mother. I am very sorry that I do not have the same facility as you for letting go –

  Flora I said my goodbyes at his funeral like any sane person would.

  Felix You spent nearly forty years of your life with him –

  Flora You are a selfish, selfish boy. I know what this is about. I know why you couldn’t speak about your father. Because you think that you are better than him. What on earth could you have said? He was only a teacher, after all. Head of Biology. And at a girl’s school, of all places! Oh, and he dabbled in bees. Some might call it a pathetically small life. What did he ever achieve, compared to you?

  Felix Mother –

  Flora So you look down on him and me and this place. It’s all too middling for you with your grand ideas and your big life.

  Felix That’s not true.

  Flora Well, you don’t have to say anything. I know what you think. Just scatter the ashes and be on your way. That can be an end to it. Your father’s car is out there, I’ll give you the keys.

  Felix I’m not ready to scatter them.

  Flora Well, give them to me then, and I’ll scatter them.

  She tries to grab the ashes off him. There is a small kerfuffle.

  Felix Mother, please. Stop it. I’m not ready yet. Just give him b–b–back. Let him b–b–b–be.

  Flora All right. All right. This is so undignified. And mind my nose. I’ve just paid hundreds of pounds for it.

  There is the noise of a car horn off. Flora breaks off. She takes a small compact out and checks her appearance.