by James Gault
Chapter 21
The house sprang out in front of them as soon as they turned the bend at the end of the orchard. Thankfully, it wasn’t a mansion, just a rather nice country cottage of comfortable dimensions. Mrs Pratt was coming out of the door as they drew up. She was a tall stick of a woman, with out-of-control grey hair and the same emaciated scarecrow look as her son. She was at the car door as they stopped beside an ancient red Volvo estate parked in a corner of the drive.
“You must be Ant, my dear! Nice to meet you! Do come in!”
Antonia found herself sitting in the kitchen drinking home-made lemonade. She had no recollection of the journey from the car to the table. It was almost as if Ogg had whisked her there, but there was no Ogg. Perg’s mother must have somehow spirited her out of the car, through the door, sat her down and pushed the glass into her hand. It was an innocuous thing to do really, and Mrs Pratt seemed a very nice lady, but Antonia felt uneasy. She was used to being in control of at least herself, and she had this sensation of having been led into this kitchen whether she had wanted to or not. Not that she hadn’t wanted to, but that wasn’t the point. It had given her the same helpless feeling that she got when Ogg dived into her thoughts and helped himself without asking. But she could tell Ogg off when he did it; what could she say to this gentle, friendly helpful lady who was offering her nothing but kindness? Perg’s mum had done her no harm: she had made her comfortable, cosseted her even, yet it was as if her free will had been stolen from her. She looked over at Perg, sitting opposite her with his own glass of lemonade, and wondered if he felt the same. Was this he reason he had left home to live in London?
Mrs Pratt, probably deciding she had catered adequately for her guest by shoving a glass of lemonade in her hand, was talking to her son. It was nothing exciting, the usual motherly questions – ‘was he eating?’ ‘did he get enough sleep at nights?’ ‘he wasn’t forgetting to brush his teeth and wash behind his ears, was he?’ sort of thing. Yet she couldn’t help notice that Perg was assuring her that he was in no imminent danger with consideration, warmth and patience, although he must have been asked the same questions every time he visited. She was reminded of her Dad and her Mum. Her Mum also had Mrs Pratt’s tendency to overwhelm with kindness, and that same vulnerability that you made you afraid to hurt her by refusing even her hints. That was why her Dad always seemed so hen-pecked, and why she ended up wearing home-made clothes she hated. Both Perg and her father seemed to be able to bear this benign oppression with equanimity. She herself might eventually have to run away from it, but she felt sure that Perg hadn’t left home to escape an overbearing mum. There must be some other reason.
Mum Pratt finished her interrogation of her son with a resigned ‘I don’t know why you couldn’t have stayed here with us.’ Perg didn’t answer, and Antonia could see that he wasn’t expected to. She supposed her statement had had some meaning at first, but it had been worn out by being dragged out too often, almost certainly every time her son came back.
Mrs Pratt clapped her hands and smiled at both of them.
“Well, it’s a nice day, I have the dinner to finish, and Dad’s in his study finishing off an article. So why don’t you two go and have a seat in the garden. I’m sure you’ve got lots to talk about!”
Antonia’s offer to help with the cooking was politely declined and she was whisked into the garden the same way she had been whisked into the house.
“Is your Dad a journalist?” she asked, when Mrs Pratt had gone back into the house.
“No, he’s a theoretical elementary particle physicist, if you know what that is?”
“Of course I know what it is. They search for the meaning of life using Maths that no one else can understand. Every so often one of them thinks he has found it. But the problem with every new meaning is that, sooner or later, another new meaning is needed to explain it. ”
“You seem to know a lot about it?” Perg asked.
“I looked them up on Wikipedia. I thought maybe they could shed some light on the end of the world. Didn’t find your Dad there, though!”
“He’s still trying to make his big discovery. His ambition is to have some unknown part of a part of a part of an atom named after him. It doesn’t seem like a big ambition to me, I don’t know why he’s always so tetchy about it. He teaches all week at the university, then comes home and spends all his weekend in his study playing with equations and nurturing his ulcer.”
“How does your Mum feel about it?”
“She doesn’t understand what he does. I don’t understand what he does. And that makes his ulcer worse.”
“Hmmm!” Antonia murmured. She wondered where Ogg was. She hadn’t found out much that was useful from her internet research on theoretical physicists. She supposed that Great Scientific Questions were no more than a special kind of Great Philosophical Questions, with the exception that maybe scientists had found some answers to their questions. But, as far she could tell, their answers, when you looked at them closely, were also no more than elegantly disguised further questions. Still, she had never had a live theoretical physicist in her hands before and now she was about to have lunch with one. Maybe something would come out in the table banter that would throw a light on everything. It was at least a good a bet as hanging around in the desert waiting for aliens to turn up, or wandering hopefully around in Perg’s computer games. Ogg should have been there to sit on her shoulder and prompt her with the right questions when needed, so where was he? Never there when you need him!
“Lunch is ready!”
Perg’s Mum bustled out into the garden and hustled them back into the dining room. The theoretical physicist was sitting at the table already, looking like a theoretical physicist. Grey slacks, open-necked blue shirt, white hair flowing over his collar, his eyes constantly darting left and right without focussing on anything. A man still doing sums in his head.
“Dad, this is Ant!”
Antonia waited until his eyes focussed. It took him a few seconds, the time for a couple of ‘if and only if’s or ‘ implies and is implied by’s.
“Nice to meet you, Mr Pratt!”
“Professor Pratt!”
“Oh, sorry! I didn’t know. Perg forgot to say.”
Perg’s Professor Pa emitted a long loud sigh.
“Yes, well. I’m afraid Peregrine isn’t so interested in his father’s work. Such a pity! You know, he could have been a good physicist, almost as good as me. It wasn’t as if he was bad at school, but no, no finishing university for him. Too fond of spending hours in front of that computer, playing games, not a serious thought in his head! What kind of contribution is he going to make to the world? I ask you!”
It seemed to Antonia that a successful computer game would bring more enjoyment and benefit more people than the discovery of another sub-microscopic ingredient of a photon, but she judged that it wasn’t the right thing to say just at the moment. Mr Pratt’s eyes were wandering back and forth at even greater speed than before, and her proffered hand was dangling unwanted in front of her. So instead of speaking she waved it around, and tried to think of something she could say that wouldn’t set the tetchy professor off again.
“We’ve got a really good physics teacher at school,” she offered, nonchalantly. “He can really make the subject interesting, you know.”
“Perhaps you’re considering studying it at university, then,” the professor said in a tone that signified that to study anything else was the work of a wastrel.
Antonia’s face fell. Could she lie? Hadn’t Ogg shown her that truth was a spurious thing anyway? At least she could have chosen some vague uncontroversial platitude, but, to be honest, the words just came out before she could stop them.
“I was thinking of philosophy, actually”
She caught the professor midway into swallowing a spoonful of sou
p, most of which he regurgitated back into the bowl.
“Philosophy!” Then again, more loudly and an octave higher, “Philosophy!”
Antonia was tempted to defend her choice, but this time she managed to swallow her words. The prof was visibly distressed, and she wondered whether maybe he had had a bad philosophical experience in his youth – perhaps his first love had thrown him over for the works of Marx and Hegel. It had to be something like that, she could see he was behaving in an extremely emotional way for a man of science. Normal people don’t splash the bottom of their spoon into the soup and mutter ‘philosophy, bloody philosophy’ over and over. Mind you, neither Perg nor Mrs Pratt seemed to be taking a blind bit of notice. Embarrassed, probably.
“Come on dear, eat up your soup!” Mrs Pratt whispered, with an encouraging rub on her husband’s shoulder.
“Charlatans! That’s what they are, Marjorie, charlatans! Plato, Kant, Descartes –the lot of them! And they’ve seduced that poor girl already, with their woolly notions and imprecise thinking.”
“Yes dear,” Mrs Pratt was saying, “but just finish your soup. The joint’ll get cold.”
Antonia found cold Sunday roast as unpalatable as anyone, but the professor obviously had something interesting to say, something she felt that Ogg would want her to hear, and sometimes sacrifices had to be made for the sake of knowledge. So she stirred Professor Pratt’s pot again.
“What exactly do you mean by ‘imprecise thinking’?”
“All their theories and notions, utter claptrap! No logical or experimental basis whatsoever! All pure fantasy! All complete rubbish! Coming up with all sorts of weird ideas with absolutely no vestige of proof”
Antonia wasn’t sure she saw the logical or experimental basis on what he had just said, so she thought she might ask about it.
“Can I have a question?” she said.
The professor screwed up his face and squinted at her, as if he was amazed she hadn’t understood his meaning exactly. As far as he was concerned, he had been perfectly clear. He was constantly being surprised by how frequently his perfectly logical explanations were met with puzzlement. Of course, as a genius he could hardly expect to be communicating very often with an intellectual equal. Well, almost never, in fact. Still, it was amazing that the vast majority of people, and among them all his colleagues, seemed unable to grasp what he saw as the obvious, or to follow what he considered to be relatively straightforward steps in the logical progress of his arguments.
“So you don’t agree with me,” he growled at her.
There was a scream. Both the professor and Antonia turned from each other’s faces and looked round. Perg had pushed his chair back and was standing at the table,
“Stop it! Stop it, Dad! Why are you picking on her? She’s only asking a question.”
The professor tried to answer but Perg had only stopped to inhale just enough air to keep the momentum and the volume going.
“You’ll never change, will you? You always have to be right, everyone always has to think like you. Why do I come back here? It’s the same every time. Pushing your opinions down everyone’s throat, refusing to listen to anyone else, making us all dance to your tune! Mum, me, your students, and now Ant! Leave her alone, stop bullying her, she can think for herself!”
With that, he got up and ran from the room back into the garden. Mr Pratt dedicated himself to finishing his soup. Mrs Pratt smiled wearily and started gathering up the soup plates. Antonia wondered what to do? Although his father was to say the least exasperating, and it was flattering to have Perg spring to her defence like that, she hadn’t expected him to be so excitable. Maybe he would come back in when he calmed down. The professor slurped the last of his soup and offered the empty plate to his wife, who took it while looking through the French doors at her son’s back. Antonia followed her eyes. Perg was sitting on the bench seat, leaning forward, his head in his hands. It didn’t look like he would be coming back in for the main course.
“I’ll go and have a word with him,” she offered.
Mrs Pratt smiled thankfully. Mr Pratt shuffled nervously but silently in his seat. Ant went out into the garden and sat beside Perg. Not being sure what was the best thing to say, she said nothing. She put an arm around his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Ant, I didn’t mean to flare up like that. It’s what I’m like, I’m afraid. Quick tempered.”
“I think you had some justification. Your dad can be quite … hard.”
“Bloody impossible!”
Still not confident enough to risk words, Antonia tried smiling at him.
“I didn’t want to do that in front of you, Ant. We shouldn’t have come. He does this to me very time. I’m sorry!”
“No problem.” Her arm was still lying around his shoulder so she used it to squeeze him a little. They sat for a while. Antonia found herself wondering why Ogg had chosen Perg. He had some weird ideas, and he was too ready to let his emotions overwhelm him. For a great being who set such store by correct thinking, bringing Perg into the team was a very mysterious way to move. Had he done it for her benefit, was he trying to tell her something? And if that was the reason, was it fair on Perg? It seemed to her that in all this, he had always got the short end of the stick … the ridicule at his crazy alien theory, her personal scorn at his declaration of love, an overbearing and insensitive father. If Ogg had set him up for all this just to make some point or other to her, it; well, just wasn’t a nice thing to do. Poor Perg! She squeezed his shoulder a little tighter.
“Shall we go back in? Your Mum’s joint will get cold.”
“Yes, I suppose… I just hope he can keep his mouth shut…”
“Come on, we can handle it. Let’s go”