Fifty-Minute Hour

by Wendy Perriam

  He peered in at the classroom once again. Why weren’t they all scared, when they’d been thrown into this maelstrom, knew much more than he did, made to face such terrifying concepts as ‘failed worlds’, ‘ghost worlds’, infinite dimensions? They all looked rather bored or supercilious, as if everything were solid still, and safe. He dreaded that word ‘infinite’, couldn’t tie it down. The more he read, the worse he felt – dizzy, since he’d learnt that the earth was careering round the sun at sixty-six thousand miles an hour; bruised, when he discovered that millions of neutrinos bombarded man each day; baffled and unsettled to hear scientists in Houston had come up with solutions, which had, as yet, no corresponding problems.

  ‘E … Excuse me,’ someone said. He jumped, dodged back, came face to face with a petite and blond-haired woman, who would have been attractive, except she’d obviously been crying and had red and swollen eyes. Her fine fair skin was puffy from the tears, and though her clothes looked stylish, they seemed rather creased and crumpled, as if she’d been to bed in them. She was obviously upset still, spine and shoulders drooping, voice tremulous, unsure. He felt instant sympathy, had sometimes nursed a secret shaming wish to be a woman, just so he could cry. There was so much more to cry about in this new world of random chaos, where the only certainty was absolute uncertainty, and nothing stood still long enough for you to measure it or label it.

  The woman rubbed her eyes, left a streak of mauve stuff down one cheek, which made it look as if she’d bruised herself. She already had burns on both her hands; was perhaps a careless cook who forgot the oven-gloves, or nervous in a kitchen (as he was with his Mother). His heart went out to her. She seemed so crushed, despondent, yet her face was soft and gentle, the sort of Ideal Mother he remembered from his children’s books, who kissed your grazes better and stayed with you a whole ten minutes if you’d had a nasty dream, even sat down on the bed and held your hand. She was also small, as well as fair, which made him feel less threatened. His Mother was just five foot one, yet could dwarf a City tower-block.

  He wished John-Paul were shorter. Tall men always shrank him; dark ones bleached him out. And John-Paul was so dramatic-dark, looked foreign, even Jewish, which seemed a double betrayal of his Mother, who blamed foreigners for everything from AIDS and germs and bus-queues to the weather, and refused to shop at M & S because it had been founded by a Jew-boy. The fact he never used his surname did seem a shade suspicious. It was probably long and unpronounceable, with a ‘witz’ or ‘stein’ or ‘lasky’ on the end, and the one he asked his patients to write out on their cheques was just a shortened version or a pseudonym. Even ‘John-Paul’ might be fake, an Anglicised alternative to some strange outlandish Christian name which his mysterious doctor had decided to disown. He found it near-impossible to use his Christian name at all. It sounded disrespectful, like calling his Mother ‘Lena’, or, worse, ‘Mum’.

  It was equally impossible ever to meet his eye – well, lying on the couch, he couldn’t anyway – but even when he first arrived, he couldn’t seem to look at him directly; just a brief glance at a hand or foot to make sure he had shown up, then back turned on the couch. Maybe John-Paul felt the same, since he often wore dark glasses, as if to put an extra barrier between them. (Or he could perhaps be shy and trying to camouflage himself? There’d been a survey in the Daily Mail, just a month or so ago, which revealed that seventy-five per cent of all adults of both sexes admitted being shy, and that included doctors, actors, publicans and prostitutes. It had made him feel much better – almost human.) But although he’d never seen his eyes, he knew they would be black – cold-black like his black-hole voice, crow-black like his hair. He always felt more mousy with his doctor – his own hair wispy, fading, compared with John-Paul’s glossy crest; his skin pasty and anaemic beside that vibrant all-year tan.

  He glanced back to the woman who was still faltering at the door, immediately gained a little colour as John-Paul’s features faded; gained a little courage as he saw how shy she was herself. She took one nervous step into the room, looking bewildered and self-conscious as she scanned the crowded benches for a seat. He plunged in after her, her own bashfulness inspiring him; heard a voice which wasn’t his murmur almost casually: ‘There’s two here at the back.’ Her relief was huge and matched his own astoundment. He’d spoken to a woman, spoken to a stranger, and she’d actually replied, not slapped his face or – worse still – failed to see him, but stuttered ‘Thanks’ and smiled. He wrapped the smile carefully in several layers of Kleenex, stored it in his pocket. Smiles were very rare, especially women’s smiles.

  He got out his green notebook, hoped it would impress her. He still hadn’t dared the red, but green had seemed real progress. Green for life and youth and hope, and what he’d thought was science – before he’d read the books. He wished now he’d gone to nature study: Patterns of Migrating Birds or Badger Habitats. Nice to sit beside a mate and take notes on nests or burrows. A mate! He must be joking. He didn’t even know her name, and she’d probably move seats anyway once they came back from the coffee-break. He racked his brain for something else to say. ‘Do you come here often?’ was obviously redundant, since she must come every week. (There was quite a strict paragraph at the front of the prospectus about regular attendance and no refunds if you just stopped turning up.) He could ask her where she lived, but it might sound rather nosy, and even a casual ‘What’s your name?’ could well seem too familiar.

  He sat in silence, which swelled the general silence in the room. No one else was talking, just a cough or two, a scrape of chairs, the faint rustle of a paperback, and one impatient tapping pen. The tutor must be late. Bryan checked his watch – almost half past six. He could have stayed at work, finished his report, even grabbed a cup of tea. He glanced up at his neighbour once again. Her hair looked soft, and real. His Mother’s hair was steel and very tightly sprung, and she kept it in a hairnet which seemed to say ‘Don’t touch’. There’d been few things he could touch, especially in his childhood – not earth or sand or shop displays, not dogs or cats or feathers, not even sugar-lumps, without the tongs. He cleared his throat, edged his chair a tiny fraction closer. Perhaps a casual word about the tutor. He could ask his name, instead of hers, inquire if he were good, or often late?

  There was a sudden ripple through the rows of chairs, people sitting straighter, thrillers whisked away. A smallish, fairish, slimmish man with greyish hair and lightish hazel eyes had just shuffled into the room and was stumping up to the dais, loaded down with a Waitrose plastic carrier, a battered vinyl briefcase, and what appeared to be two raincoats, and murmuring ‘Sorry sorry sorry!’ in a boyish faintish voice. Boyish, no. He must be in his fifties. Bryan half-got up, reached forward, fighting shock. This was his dead Father – he knew it instantly. The same narrow shoulders, neatish nose, apologetic eyebrows, so faint they weren’t quite there; the same smallish squarish face-shape and none-too-certain chin – even the same nervousness, as he flustered with his notes, dropped a dozen pages, banged his head as he stooped to pick them up.

  But there was one overwhelming difference. This man was clever, brilliant, understood the infinite, felt quite at home with spacetime, never fell into Black Holes; wasn’t bruised or even grazed when alien worlds kept crashing and he was in the driving seat. Bryan stared at him, kept staring. His Father – a scientist, a genuine intellectual with degrees from universities, a study full of books, a scholar’s gown with ermine trim, like he’d seen on Dreaming Spires (A shame he hadn’t worn the gown, and was dressed in just old corduroys and a hairy sort of jacket with bulges in the pocket. But those bulges could be Knowledge – calculators, test tubes, even a miniature microscope.)

  The man had started talking. He spoke in little bursts, the words eager, frisky, tumbling out, then drying up suddenly, as if they’d been too bold and breathless and had to skulk and blush a bit before bubbling up again. Bryan could hardly concentrate. What were words when this was his own Father – the man he’d nev
er seen, never thought to see, the half-god who’d half-created him, given him his genes? Of course his Father hadn’t died, as his Mother always claimed. That was just her story, to Save her face, invest herself with Tragedy, escape the blame for driving him away. He must have simply left, upped and gone in the middle of the night, or the middle of a mouthful, started a new life. Bryan admired him doubly, not just for his intellect, but for escaping from his Mother. That took heroism, a very special sort of valour he didn’t have himself.

  He gazed still more intently, trying to see inside the man, see his lungs and heart and liver, his bowels and his intestines, compare them with his own. He felt sure they’d match and tally – same brand, same size, same pattern, same noises and same smells. He kept jabbing at his thumb with his BRB free biro, wished it were a syringe so he could trap a drop of blood, then prick his Father’s thumb as well, rush the still-warm samples to some waiting judge or doctor, their verdict like a chorale in his ears: ‘Paternity proven’.

  ‘If the area of the hole is used as a measure of disorder, then the black hole obeys the same relation between disorder and temperature as does …’

  He fumbled for the prospectus, turned to page sixteen, so he could check the tutor’s name. Disappointment seared the page like lava. Not Payne, but B.K. Skerwin. He glanced back at the dais. Could he be mistaken, imagining that resemblance? No. Even their four hands were so identical that if they each cut one off and swapped, the resulting pair would still match quite remarkably, give or take a few odd hairs or lines – broad, blunt-fingered, compact hands with knobbles at the wrists. Anyway, it wasn’t just a matter of resemblance; it was a feeling deep inside him, a sense he knew this man, knew him from his daily childhood fantasies when they’d shot the rapids, swum the Hellespont, won the Battle of Trafalgar, always hand in hand. Payne must be his Mother’s name, her so-called maiden name, though the term ‘maiden’ seemed quite wrong for her. She had never been a maiden, never been a girl; been Mother from the start, Mother in her cradle, Mother as a foetus, Mother as an ovum. No wonder Skerwin left. She would have stifled him completely, flattened all his bulges, made him keep his gown in cellophane, with mothballs in the ermine. And in revenge, he’d removed himself in toto, snatched away his surname, as well as just the books, packed it with the microscope, left his Mother only Payne.

  ‘The striking similarity between gases and black holes comes from the latter’s compliance with an interesting new law which …’

  Bryan let his biro drop. He should be taking notes, scribbling like the rest of them, but his fingers wouldn’t work. He had lost all co-ordination, could only sit and gaze, trap a few rare words – macrocosm, analogue, anthropic, synchrotron. He remembered now – his Father had used words like that when he’d told him bedtime stories, those wondrous silent stories which ranged from Istanbul to Saturn, from Yentai to the Pole Star.

  Skerwin. He sucked the name, rolled it round its mouth to try to get its flavour. Yes, he really liked it. It was bracing and unusual, ended on an upbeat with that triumphant clinching ‘win’. He chewed at the B.K. ‘B’ could stand for Bryan. Perhaps his Father’s last request had been that his son should bear his name – another bond between them. And that mysterious middle ‘K’? Not Keith, he prayed, or Kevin, but something bold and regal like Kentigern or Kingsley. His Father deserved a more stirring second name than his own boring low-key Vernon.

  ‘Even if the disorder-probability arguments have only very approximate validity, the conclusion must be that we live in a world of …’

  He glimpsed a young man yawning. How dare he yawn, insult his Father who was now in fullish flood. The woman beside him was quite a different story – obviously quite fascinated, and scrawling notes so fast her hand seemed battery-powered. He glanced sideways at her jotter. ‘Tracheotomy,’ she’d written. ‘Uncongulated hyper– bilirubinaemia’, ‘Ventricular Peritoneal shunt’. He stared down at the words – long impressive words again, yet he couldn’t remember hearing any one of them, and why had she jotted ‘Neonatal’ at the top? Had Skerwin been alluding to the birth-pangs of the universe, that violent cosmic havoc he’d read about with terror, when the new-born earth exploded out of madly crashing planets? He must have missed a good half of the lecture; been so deep inside his Father he’d been listening to the fanfare of his heart-beat, the sigh of his intestines, not his voice from the outside. He tried to burrow out, catch the shoals of words like flying fish, admire their gleaming scales, their writhing shining bodies.

  ‘The exact mathematical relationship between disorder and probability is, in fact, a so-called exponential relationship, but we’ll deal with that more fully after the break. So if you’d like to get your coffees now and be back at seven-thirty …’

  Bryan checked his watch. Seven-twelve exactly. Almost a whole hour had passed – the swiftest of his life. It had seemed like just five minutes, five leaping singing minutes. He rose, half-dazed, locked chairs with his neighbour who was also getting up.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Their voices locked as well now. Both blushed, both tried to speak again at exactly the same moment.

  ‘Are you going for a …?’ ‘Where d’you go for …?’

  Both stopped again, confused. ‘Yes, coffee,’ Bryan said clinchingly, drawing on new powers. ‘Er … may I ask your name?’

  She smiled shyly, picked her bag up. ‘Mary Hampton.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Mary.’ Oh, how he wished John-Paul was here as witness! He’d never been so forward, so absolutely shameless.

  ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Was she offering him, a drink? He was so elated by his triumph he’d completely lost the thread.

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Oh, I see. Er … Bryan. Yes, Bryan – Bryan Skerwin.’

  ‘Skerwin?’

  ‘Yes.’ He felt a huge weight leave his shoulders – all his childhood sufferings: the asthma and the eczema, the hours locked in the coalhole with the Devil peering in, the greenfly on the lettuce, the brown skin on the rice, the white socks he’d had to wear still when he was fourteen and a half – all gone, all someone else’s.

  ‘The same name as the tutor?’ Mary clicked her bag open, dropped her jotter in.

  ‘Yes.’ He shrugged, made his voice more casual. ‘He’s my Father, actually.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yes.’ Three yeses. He’d never felt so positive, even gestured with his hand to indicate that Mary should go first, that they were now definitely a twosome. She glanced up at the dais, where Skerwin was still sorting through his notes. One of his fawn raincoats had fallen on the floor and was lying like a skin he’d shed, a limp and dingy skin.

  ‘Yes,’ she said herself. ‘I can see the resemblance now. It’s actually quite striking.’ She looked back at Bryan, her blue eyes narrowed slightly, as she appraised his form and features with what he felt was new respect. ‘Gosh! He’s frightfully brainy, isn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  I’m afraid I couldn’t grasp quite all of it. I mean, it’s very sort of technical and I’m not that …’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang quite soon.’ He nodded to the tutor, a collusive knowing nod, the sort that sons gave fathers, and which he knew Mary was observing. Skerwin blinked, seemed nervous dared a smile, grabbed it back immediately, dropped his second raincoat and a pen.

  ‘But I’ve been coming four whole weeks now. Do you come every week?’

  ‘I shall be doing, yes. I had to miss the first month. I’ve been busy, very busy – business meetings, trips abroad, you know the sort of thing?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I certainly do.’

  She seemed worried suddenly, as if she’d slipped back to another world, one he couldn’t enter. He mustn’t let her go. ‘Well, how about that coffee?’ he said what he hoped was nonchalantly, aware the room was empty now and that they’d never get a drink at all if they didn’t make a move. He held the door for h
er, even dared to pick her coat-belt up where it was trailing on the floor. This was Friday, the worst day of his week, and he was walking down a passage with a woman – a real woman – not just a fantasy, a dream or wish-fulfilment. Mary Hampton. He liked her name. Not quite the ring of Skerwin, but simple, honest, English, easy to pronounce. He also liked her clothes: a matching skirt and jacket in a flattering blue fabric which so exactly matched her eyes they looked as if they’d been run up from an offcut. And a pretty frilly blouse with tiny summer flowers on – summer in October. His Mother still wore mourning; had worn it thirty years.

  He could smell the canteen long before they reached it. It smelt of disinfectant, not of food; must be almost closing, since despite the crowd queuing at the counter, two girls in nylon overalls were trying to scrub the floor, banging chairs on tables, knocking shins with mops. The walls were shiny eau-de-Nil, the floor curry-coloured, with darker khaki wet patches. ‘Don’t slip,’ he warned, wishing they could escape from the long and jostling queue, those astronomers and physicists who now looked rather boring and were all in Mary’s way. He might not find a seat for her, let alone a table to themselves. He frowned at the remaining food, a few dusty squares of fruitcake, where ‘fruit’ meant half a cherry or one lonely orphaned currant; a custard tart with a crater in its custard, and two stale and curling sandwiches labelled ‘prawn’ and ‘ham’ respectively, though he could see nothing much inside them save the same pink-tinged liquid putty. Nice to have offered Mary something chic: Black Forest gateau, eaten with a fork, or an open sandwich garnished with a lemon slice and made from that expensive bread with the little nutty bits in.

  She reached out for an Aero, put it on her tray.

  ‘This is on me,’ he said, gesturing grandly to the counter, as if to suggest his bank-account was limitless, and if she wished to eat the tea-urn or the hotplate, he’d gladly meet their cost.