The Stars' Tennis Balls

by Stephen Fry

  ‘His paradox of how Achilles could never reach the winning line? Yes, you told me.’

  ‘Ah, but he had another lesson to teach us. I will show you.’

  Babe led Ned towards a tall pine that leaned away from the slope and towards the high fence at the bottom of the lawn.

  ‘We shall sit under the tree. Great thinkers have always sat under trees. It is an academic thing to do. The word itself derives from the Academia, the grove where Plato taught his pupils. Even the French lycée is named after the Lyceum garden where Aristotle held his classes. Enlightenment came to Buddha and Newton under trees they say, and it shall come to Ned Maddstone there too. Now, watch. I pick up a fir cone, an immobile strobile, and I put it in front of you and ask this question. Is it a heap?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Is that a heap?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Babe added another. ‘How about that, do we have a heap now? Of course not, we have nothing more than two fir cones. Incidentally did it ever strike you as suspicious that fir cone is an anagram of conifer? More dirty work from God, you might think. Look at the arrangement too. A band of three, then five, then eight, then thirteen and so on. A Fibonacci series. Beyond coincidence, surely? Mr God giving himself away again. But that is a side issue. Here we have two cones. All right then, I add another. Is it now a heap?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll add another.’

  Ned leant back against the soft warm bark of the pine tree and watched as Babe scrabbled about fetching fir cones, each time adding another.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last, as much out of pity for Babe as because he thought so, ‘I’d say that is definitely a heap.’

  ‘We have a heap!’ Babe clapped his hands. ‘A heap of fir cones! Seventeen of the darlings. So Ned Maddstone is telling the world that seventeen is officially a heap?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Seventeen fir cones constitute a heap, but sixteen do not?’

  ‘No, I’m not saying that exactly . . .’

  ‘There we have the problem. The world is full of heaps like this, Ned. This is good, this is not good. This is bad luck, but this is a towering injustice. This is mass murder and this genocide. This is child-killing, this abortion. This is lawful intercourse, this statutory rape. There is nothing but a single fir cone’s difference between them, sometimes just the one lonely only little cone telling us that it represents the difference between heaven and hell.’

  ‘I don’t quite see the connection . . .’

  ‘You yourself, Ned, you say a conspiracy brought you here. That is like saying a heap brought you here. Who is a conspiracy? Why? How many exactly? For what purpose? Don’t tell me it was a heap, just a heap, no more no less. Tell me it was seventeen, or four, or five hundred. See the thing as it is in all its quiddity, all its whatness, all its particularity and deep nature. Otherwise you will never understand the blindest thing about what happened to you, not if you were here for a thousand years and spoke a thousand languages.’

  It was deep midwinter and the whole island glowed crystalline white under its eternal shroud of winter darkness. The chairs had been moved from the sun-room into a salon deeper inside the building. In one of the arches Babe and Ned sat playing backgammon over a formica table.

  The stone arches that ran along the side of the salon were one of the few detectable remnants of the original monastery around which the hospital had been built and its Romanesque structure of blank arcading had once allowed for a rare practical lesson in architectural elements. Only the sun and clouds by day, the stars at night and the rounded hills visible through the windows in summer had offered like chances for Ned to use more than his mind’s eye when taking instruction.

  The backgammon they played was of an unusual kind. Since the hospital did not have a set, they played using five paper dice and nothing else. The board and thirty men existed only in their minds. The eccentricity of their games amused the staff. Two of the patients had grown upset however and attempted to pull the imaginary board from the table and trample it – presumably, Ned had suggested, because it played hell with their own sense of the real and the invisible. Their pride, as lunatics, in being able to see what others could not was inflamed when they could not see what others apparently could. By reason of the strong effect their playing had on others, Ned and Babe were allowed to sit in that vaulted arch, away from the central area of tables where the others sat.

  It was easy for Ned and Babe to see the pieces laid out in front of them. They played for a hundred pounds a point and at this time Babe owed Ned forty-two million pounds. They had no need for concentration to remember their positions and were able to carry on conversations of some complexity in languages of their choosing, without ever challenging the other’s sense of where the pieces were, or quibbling over how many men were left to be borne off in the ending. Sometimes, as on this evening, Ned flicked a flat stone around the fingers of one hand. Babe had taught him coin and card magic and he liked to keep in practice, French dropping, palming, stealing and manipulating as he talked.

  For the last week, Ned had been able to do a little teaching of his own on the subject of cricket, a game of which Babe was ignorant.

  Babe was talking now of the writings of C. L. R. James, a historian and social commentator he greatly admired.

  ‘It’s a pity I shall never read him again, Thomas,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I always skipped those passages where he waxed lyrical about cricket. He connected it to West Indian life, to colonialism, Shakespeare, Hegel and every other bebuggered thing. I interpreted it as sentimental hogwash, such was the puritanical ignorance of my youth.’

  ‘I was a fine player, you know,’ Ned said. ‘I think I might have played for Oxford and maybe even for a county if things had turned out differently. God, it sounds absurd to talk about cricket in Italian. Can’t we switch?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Babe in Dutch. ‘This is much more appropriate, don’t you think? They do play a little in Holland.’

  ‘I suppose so. My father’s hero was Prince Ranjitsinji. I told you about him, didn’t I? From the golden age of cricket. Men said that watching his leg-glide was like seeing the Taj Mahal by moonlight.’

  ‘I did see the Taj Mahal by moonlight once,’ said Babe. ‘Very disappointing it was too, the . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Ned, with a hint of impatience, ‘you told me. I couldn’t sleep last night, my father visited me in my dreams again.’

  ‘Your mind always harks on the past in the middle of these long winters,’ said Babe, accepting a double from Ned and placing the cube close by him. ‘The bones in your shoulders ache and you fret. The spring is not so far away. You’ll be more cheerful then.’ Babe softly whistled a tune under his breath.

  ‘Die Walküre,’ Ned said, absently. ‘Act One, Scene Three. “Siehe, der Lenz lacht in den Saal” . . . look, spring smiles into the room.’

  ‘Ten out of ten. And this?’ Babe whistled again.

  ‘Never mind all that,’ Ned reverted to English. ‘I’m not in the mood for testing tonight. I still want to know, you see. I still need to know.’

  ‘What is there that you do not know?’

  ‘You must be aware by now, Babe, that I am not a fool. This is a private lunatic asylum, or as Mallo prefers to call it “élite international clinic”. Nobody comes here for free. Someone has paid for you to be here and for me to be here. And they have gone on paying.’

  ‘The art of good intelligence work is nothing to do with spying, Ned. The art is to manipulate the civil servants and ministers who operate the Secret Fund. The world follows money with a keener nose than it follows anything. If you can hide your bank accounts and your standing orders, if you can siphon and launder and divert streams of government money, then, and only then, can you truly call yourself a spy.’

  ‘All right. So there is no great mystery about the how. But in my case there is still the why. That is what makes no sense. When I first arrived I t
hought I’d been kidnapped. But kidnappers don’t keep shelling out money for their captives. So after a few years I began to believe what Mallo told me, that I was a fantasist whose real life was buried so deep that no memory of it remained. I know that isn’t true and I suppose I always did. I know that I was taken here quite deliberately. But by whom and why? That is what still eludes me. No one can have thought for a moment that I was an IRA collaborator, and if they had they certainly would not bring me here, to the same place they bring people like you.’

  ‘As you have seen, Ned, the genuinely insane come here too. You and I are the only inmates to flatter ourselves that we are political prisoners. You keep denying the possibility, but have you not stopped to think that perhaps those who put us in this place knew what they were doing? Perhaps I was admitted here because I truly am mad? Quite terribly mad.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ned admitted with a smile, ‘naturally I’ve considered that. And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean one who possesses a mind that questions and rejects every civilised norm. And, whatever your condition on admittance, you have certainly become mad. The solipsistic hoarding of your own self and the hubristic munification of your will against the potent authority of the institution, these are textbook psychopathologies. Psychopathologies that privilege the artist, the revolutionary and the lover quite as much as the lunatic, however. You may acquit yourself of insanity on that account.’

  ‘Dear God, Thomas, acquit me too that I ever taught you to speak like that.’

  ‘I choose this style of discourse to provoke you, and well you know it. I return to the same problem again and again. I have somehow got on the wrong side of the British secret service, or whatever one chooses to call it. Can you not at least agree with me on that?’

  Babe bowed his head in assent.

  ‘You remember that time you sat under the picea abies and went through Zeno’s paradox of the heap?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘The idea being to encourage me to look at facts clearly? To separate the concrete from the abstract, the actual from the perceived?’

  ‘I don’t believe I put it quite like that, but yes, I do remember.’

  ‘Well, every night I go over what I am sure are the five salient points in my history and try to be sure that I have seen them clearly. They yield nothing.’

  ‘Tell me what you mean by the salient points.’

  ‘They are obvious. One, I unwittingly agreed to deliver a letter that was given me by an IRA courier. Two, I was arrested for the possession of drugs which had been planted on me. Three, because that letter was also still on my person, I was removed from a police station and taken to what I may assume was a British intelligence safe house where I was interrogated. Four, at the end of the interrogation I was told that I would be taken home. Five, I was not taken home, I was cruelly beaten and transported here, where I have stayed ever since. I don’t believe I’m wrong in identifying those as the important facts, surely?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘What do you mean “if I say so”? I’ve beaten my head against the wall of those facts for years and years.’

  ‘Which might suggest,’ said Babe gently, ‘that they are of no use to you. Perhaps you have still not been approaching matters in the right way. The right way would not endlessly lead to an immovable wall of facts, it would disclose a pattern of events. A pattern that could be unlocked. By labelling your facts one, two, three and so on, you are implying a causal sequential relation between them that may obscure that pattern.’

  ‘But there is no pattern! That’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘Don’t ask yourself what happened to you. Ask yourself what happened to you.’

  ‘And what on earth is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Did you have enemies, for example? You never talk about that possibility.’

  ‘I never had an enemy in the world!’ said Ned with some heat. ‘I was the most popular boy in the school. I was about to be made Captain of School. I was captain of the cricket team. I was in love. I was ready to go to Oxford. How could anybody hate me?’

  Babe laughed.

  ‘And what’s so funny?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Let me try and explain. You have just summarised the situation of a person who might have good cause to be happy, but how does it answer my question? It is a description of someone for whom the classic response “Don’t you just hate him?” was invented.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t heard that kind of cliché banter before? “What, he’s good at sport and work? And he’s good-looking? Don’t tell me he’s nice as well, or I’ll really hate him.” That’s how real people in the real world talk, Ned and you must know it.’

  ‘But I was nice . . .’

  ‘Nice is a heap word. You pile up enough “nice” actions and you think that makes you a whole heap of nice? What were you really? What did you do? It is your actions that define you, not your qualities.’

  ‘I did nothing.’

  ‘Your inactions then.’

  ‘You’re saying some people hated me?’

  ‘Not hated necessarily. It might be worth separating a number of these salient facts of yours. Let’s forget the big one, your arrival here and concentrate on the initiating fact. Let us suppose the dope was planted on you to disgrace you. Now who might benefit from that?’

  ‘No one. How could anybody benefit from such a stupid thing? It would just upset those who loved me that’s all.’

  ‘Ah, well. Maybe that was the very benefit sought. But perhaps too there was a more tangible advantage for someone. Captain of School, captain of cricket and in love with a beautiful girl. There are plenty of hot youths who might covet any one or all three of those things to distraction. Who would become Captain of School, for example, if you were expelled for the possession of drugs?’

  ‘How can I know that?’

  ‘You must have some idea.’

  ‘Well, Ashley Barson-Garland probably.’

  ‘Ashley Barson-Garland. Tell me about him. Everything you can think of. Talk in numbers, not in heaps.’

  So Ned told Babe all about Ashley, concluding his description with ‘. . . but he liked me, I’m sure of it . . .’ which sounded a little lame, even to his own ears.

  ‘You don’t think he suspected that you had looked through those five private pages of his innermost thoughts?’

  ‘I was incredibly careful not to show it. No, he couldn’t possibly have known.’

  ‘Oh Ned. Poor Ned. Think back on yourself. Think back on the pretty, smiling lad you were. How much did you know then? How well were you able to hide anything? What guile did you possess? Don’t you see that a sophisticated, prickly, bitter and self-aware creature like this self-styled Barson-Garland could have read you more easily than you read his diary? Snobs see social slights wherever they go and frauds can read exposure in every glance. Even if he did not know, can you not believe that he might have suspected?’

  Ned chewed his bottom lip in irritation. ‘All right, but even if he did, why would he hate me?’

  ‘Use your imagination.’

  ‘I thought you told me to examine everything dispassionately. If I use imagination I can dream up anything, what help is that?’

  ‘Don’t confuse imagination with fantasy. Imagination is the ability to project yourself into the mind of others. It is the most hard-headed and clear-eyed faculty we have. If you use your imagination, you can see that from Ashley’s point of view you were every single thing that he was not. My own instinct, I must tell you, is that he was also in love with you but unable to see it.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake!’

  ‘Think back what you read. Masturbating with all that fury into the boater he kept. I won’t labour the point, it’s just a theory.’

  ‘That’s all any of this is, just theory.’

  ‘Then why does it upset you so much?’

  ‘It doesn’t upset me . . .’ Ned’s knee began to bo
unce up and down, a thing that had not happened for a long time. He stopped himself. ‘All right, perhaps it does. Because it’s so useless. Because it doesn’t get us anywhere.’

  ‘It upsets you because it is not useless, because it might get us closer to the truth. The truth that others may not have seen you as you believed they did. Maybe they saw you as arrogant, thoughtless, obnoxious and vain, as so self-assured that even your politeness and charm were like daggers in their poor fucked up adolescent hearts. But you’re a grown man now, and you should be able to see all that without hurting yourself.’

  ‘Well even so,’ said Ned irritably, ‘you can’t tell me that Ashley Barson-Garland would go so far as getting hold of drugs deliberately to have me thrown out of school. He didn’t know the first thing about . . . Cade!’ Ned brought his fist down on the table, crushing the paper doubling cube. ‘Oh Jesus, Rufus Cade.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ said Babe, as Ned tried to reassemble the cube. ‘Rufus Cade. That’s not a name you’ve mentioned before.’

  ‘He wasn’t anyone. I did drop him from the First Eleven . . . but that’s ridiculous. No one, I mean no one could be so vindictive and petty-minded as to . . . he smoked cannabis though, I do know that. All the time.’

  ‘Well now, suddenly we have two boys with motives, however trivial. And one of them even has access to what we might call the murder weapon.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Ned, only half-listening. ‘I think deep down I always had a feeling that Rufus didn’t really like me. I can’t quite explain it. There was something in the way his eyes slid away from mine when we talked. He was never exactly rude, but I do remember the time I had to skipper the Orphana back to Oban, after Paddy died. Rufus was on board then and he was horrid to me. I think he resented my taking command. It really puzzled and upset me. Maybe I was arrogant. But you’re asking me to believe that he and Ashley were like insane Iago figures plotting to bring Othello down. I wasn’t Othello for God’s sake, I was just a schoolboy.’