Pianos and Flowers

by Alexander McCall Smith

  He went first to the science articles.

  “I think I’m going to be a scientist when I grow up,” he said. “In a laboratory.”

  “Good,” said his father. “We need boffins.”

  The war came. The Government said, “We need boffins,” and Francis Crick, now a graduate of University College, London, joined the Admiralty. He was put to work designing mines that would attach themselves magnetically to ships. He knew the work was important, but he did not want to spend the rest of his life designing arms. He went to Cambridge and started to work in the Cavendish Laboratory on the structure of proteins.

  He met James Watson, an American scientist who was twelve years his junior. They worked together in Cambridge, exploring the way in which the nature of DNA might be understood. They attempted to build a model of the acid, but its shape eluded them.

  “Frustration squared,” growled Crick. “The crystallography data’s there, so why can’t we get it to stack up?”

  “Maybe we can’t,” said Watson.

  “No such word. Not in science.”

  “All right,” said Watson. “Maybe won’t. Won’t and can’t are different concepts. Won’t is predictive of what might happen; can’t is expressive of a limitation that we know is there.”

  “I’d probably agree with that,” said Crick.

  Two of the undergraduates, assisting one of the professors in a lab project, had brought with them that day two pogo sticks. Crick was intrigued.

  “You use these for jumping?”

  The undergraduates smiled. “It’s just a bit of fun,” said one. “An alternative means of self-propulsion.”

  “The principle is obvious,” said Watson. “Force transferred back in the exact opposite direction from that in which it comes. Classic.”

  “Yes,” said Crick, smiling. “Chap’s weight applies force through spring in direction of ground. Force meets resistance from ground and is transmitted back, through spring, to send chap back up.”

  “What a bouncing ball does,” offered one of the students.

  Watson said, “Could you show us?”

  “What – here in the lab?” asked the other student. “We’d break something.”

  “Outside, then,” said Watson. “You coming to see this, Crick?”

  “I’ll bring my camera,” Crick said.

  They went outside – the two scientists, and the two students, who were called Evans and Prender. Crick was always confusing them, calling Evans Prender and Prender Evans. They had first names, of course, but he had forgotten what those were. He thought that Evans might be called Tommy, but then he realised that he had once known a Tommy Evans in the Ministry during the war and he might be thinking of him. That Tommy Evans worked on torpedoes and was a formidable chess player. He lived in Maida Vale with a Turkish woman called … Crick could not quite remember. He had once called her Mrs Evans, which she was not, and she had beamed with pleasure at the compliment. “You really should marry that woman of yours,” he had said to Evans. But Evans had simply shaken his head and said, “Good God, no. Not that.”

  Passers-by watched with amusement as Evans and Prender prepared to use the pogo sticks.

  “You know, they invented these things back in the late ’nineties,” said Evans (or possibly Prender).

  “A big step,” commented Watson. “Or bounce, rather.”

  “Hah,” said Crick.

  They started to bounce up and down. Both had clearly mastered the art of staying upright on a pogo stick, although Prender seemed a bit better at it than Evans. He was also less inhibited, emitting shouts of excitement and encouragement to his friend.

  Two women, walking behind them, smiled at the sight of the undergraduate high spirits.

  “These boys,” said Sylvie Manners to her friend. “Look at them – not a care in the world. Not a care.”

  “They say the proctors have a terrible job keeping them in order,” said the friend. “These night climbers, for instance.”

  “Oh, them. Well, I’m surprised they’re still alive – half of them. Did you hear that one of them put an umbrella on top of the lightning conductor at John’s? At the very top? What if he’d fallen?”

  “Certain death,” said the friend, grimly. “But then, at their age you’re immortal, aren’t you? Death is something that happens to somebody else, not you.”

  The young men’s antics were observed by somebody else. Pushing his bicycle up the same pedestrian alley, glancing discreetly at the display, was a man of thirty-two, who felt the cold terribly and was well wrapped up in his heavy twill overcoat. He was Mr James da Silva, a scholar of English literature from Cochin, in the Indian state of Kerala. James da Silva was the son of Matthew da Silva and his wife, Kitty. Matthew was the owner of a pharmacy in Cochin, Da Silva’s First Class Pharmacy, and of a small pepper estate in the Western Ghats, the range of hills that rose in the Cochin hinterland. The pepper estate was run by Kitty’s parents, who had lost their own business through the depredations of a dishonest book-keeper. Matthew came to their rescue, allowing them to occupy the main house on the pepper estate, and to derive a small income from the sale of the crop. “You’ve saved my parents’ lives,” said Kitty. “You’re a good man, Matthew.”

  Until 1896 the da Silva family had been Hindu, but had been converted in that year by a missionary from Bristol. Now they were members of the Church of South India, a loosely Anglican denomination, although James had sympathies for at least some of the Hindu pantheon, especially Ganesh. The elephant-headed god seemed to him to be so reassuring, less stern, perhaps, than some of the Christian saints, and less judgemental, as were all the Hindu deities. As a boy, he kept a small Ganesh figure, carved in soft stone, in a drawer in his room. His mother would not have approved; for her eyes, a picture of the Blessed Virgin was displayed on the shelf above his bed, portrayed as she had appeared to Tamil Krishnannesti Sankaranarayanan on the road to Nagapattinam. He thought that the Virgin would have been at ease in the company of Ganesh, were they ever to meet, and it did not help, he felt, for the followers of one to deny to the followers of the other that their object of devotion ever existed, or was false.

  James was the cleverest boy in his school. That was the judgement of the school principal, who helped him win a prestigious scholarship to the University of Bombay. Now here he was in Cambridge, studying for an advanced degree, writing a thesis on the novels of Trollope. He had arrived the week before, and the October weather had chilled him to the bone. He knew that England would be cold – everybody had warned him of this – but he had not expected this relentless wind that seemed to come sweeping in from somewhere far away, Russia perhaps, which was even colder, they said.

  And it was all so odd – so familiar, and yet so foreign. He had known plenty of Englishmen in Bombay – there were still professors at the university, who were staying on after the hand-over – and his father knew some pharmacists and doctors who seemed not to have noticed that the Raj had officially packed up, or did not mind, perhaps. But they seemed very different from the people he was meeting here in Cambridge, who seemed so much less interested in the world, so much more buried away in their cold and draughty homes. Englishmen in India belonged to clubs and played tennis. Where were the clubs and tennis courts here?

  And these young men with their strange devices, jumping up and down like children. These were not boys of the sort you would find in any village in India, entertaining themselves with stilts and the like – these were young men, in their twenties, it seemed to him, and they were playing with toys on the public street. What were they thinking of? He averted his gaze. He felt suddenly homesick for Cochin and for an England that he dreamed of and that now he thought might not exist any longer.

  The demonstration over, and Crick having photographed Evans and Prender on their pogo sticks, the four of them returned to the laboratory. Crick asked Prender to show him one of the pogo sticks.

  “Remarkable things,” he said. “Quite sturdy, I shou
ld imagine – to take your weight.”

  “Yes,” said Prender. “The works are down there at the bottom – obviously. There’s a very tough spring.”

  Crick examined the pogo stick. It was possible, he noticed, to unscrew the barrel of the stick at that point to expose the spring within.

  “Quite a device,” Crick said. “Look at it. A sort of double helix.”

  Watson looked up sharply. “What?” he asked.

  “A double helix,” said Crick, pointing to the spring inserted in the base of the pogo stick.

  Watson stared at Crick. Crick stared back at Watson.

  In the street, James da Silva parked his bicycle outside a tearoom and went inside to order a pot of tea. The woman behind the counter smiled at him, and for a short time he felt rather better.

  La Plage

  AND MADELEINE SAID TO HIM, AS THEY WALKED ALONG the beach, on the raked sand, “Mother never liked that young woman, you know – the one who became engaged to Henri. Remember her?”

  He was looking over to the left, towards the bathing machines, which seemed to him to be like the war devices of an invading army, bright besiegers with their flags and devices, like Greeks lined up against Troy. And there amongst all those people, he thought, were Achilles and Patroclus and all the others. And the sea, which Homer always described as wine-dark, but which was so different here in Normandy.

  She continued, “Mother was right, you know. It’s an odd thing, isn’t it: you never want your mother to be right, but the older you get, the more right you realise your mother was. All those things that mothers say, all those annoying things, turn out to be right.”

  He thought: oh yes? Did I ever listen to anything my mother said? Not really. Do I listen to anything that any women say to me? They’re always addressing me, it seems – all the time. Which is kind of them, I suppose, and I should pay more attention, I know I should, but …

  “You see,” she went on, “I know Henri is my brother and that means I’m biased. Of course I am. I did try, you know; I tried my best to be positive towards her, right from the time he first brought her back to the house. That must have been, what? Almost a year ago? Was it June, do you think? June, or possibly July?”

  He thought it was June, but he did not say as much. What did it matter? June was pretty much the same as July, when you came to think about it. And when you looked back, from the vantage point of September, when he would sometimes go fishing with his friend, Alphonse, who was bankrupt now – poor Alphonse! That investment that I should have warned him against because I had read somewhere about how those plantations were susceptible to bad weather – to hurricanes, even – I should have persuaded him to leave his money in the bank. I should have.

  “It was June,” she said. “I remember that because it was shortly after the curé’s horse died. He made such a fuss about that, although the horse was twenty-eight, at least, and that’s quite an age for a horse. Anyway, it was after that, because the curé had been round at the house and going on and on about his wretched horse, and we had to sit there and listen because Mother wouldn’t drop one of her hints for him to go. Remember how she tried to get rid of the mayor once by looking at the sky and saying it was going to rain and he should hurry up and go home if he wanted to avoid being soaked to the skin. And the sky was cloudless – absolutely not a cloud to be seen – and rain was the very last thing that anybody was expecting. Remember that? And the mayor looked out of the window and said, ‘But, Madame de Villiers, the weather is remarkably fine,’ and Mother said, ‘Au contraire …’ She was always saying au contraire when she didn’t have a leg to stand on, and she said, ‘Au contraire, M. le Maire, there is every chance that there will be rain – and heavy rain at that. I would not want to be responsible for you catching pneumonia.’ You’d have thought he would take the hint, but sometimes these people – well, you know what they’re like. It would take a bomb to shift them from their seat once you’ve served them their tea and there are still some cakes and sandwiches on the plate.”

  He gazed over at the bathing machines. He knew a man who had bought four of them, as an investment, or so he told people. But all along this man had been a deviant who had drilled small holes in the back of the bathing machines so that he could watch people inside when they changed into their bathing costumes. He pretended to be maintaining the machines but all the time he was peeping in from the back. What an absurd thing to do! How desperate must one be to do a thing like that. That man was never caught – not by the authorities – although some husband found him out. He saw an eye staring in through a hole in the woodwork and poked at it with the tip of his walking stick. The man was lucky not to lose his eye; he had a bad bruise, but he deserved it. He could have been in even deeper trouble. That’s the thing about trouble, of course: no matter what trouble you’re in, there’s always deeper trouble around the corner. It’s a good thing to remember that when you’re feeling sorry for yourself.

  “No, it was definitely June, and Henri rather sprung it on Mother. He asked her whether he could bring somebody round for lunch on Sunday, and she thought it was one of his friends. Somebody like that fellow Charles – you remember him? The one who was so greedy when he came to lunch – had three helpings of everything – three! – and talked about a German motor car that his father had recently bought that had two reverse gears? Do you remember that? I sat there thinking Why would anybody need two reverse gears? And I still don’t have an answer to that. I suppose Charles has his good points, and he did make a very good marriage eventually – not that he invited us to the wedding. You’d think after all the food that he’d eaten in our house he would have the decency to reciprocate, but no. She came from Lyons, apparently – his new wife – and she had inherited a small fortune from some uncle or other. Charles bought a chateau on the Loire – not one of these big ones, it wasn’t Villandry by any means, but quite a nice place nonetheless. He had a bit of land as well, along the river, and he had some tenants who were troglodytes. Those cliffs along the river lend themselves to that sort of thing. Those houses carved into the cliffs can be quite comfortable, they tell me. Cold in summer and warm enough in the winter. I suppose you don’t get any draughts, really, and that must make a difference.”

  He thought, but darkness would be the issue for a troglodyte. The rooms in the front would have natural light, but everything behind that would be pitch dark. You would need to have the lights on all the time, and even then, it would be a bit dim. Would he like it? It would be a good place to keep wine. It would, in fact, be like living in a wine cellar, which some people would like, he supposed. Some bibulous individuals.

  “I knew something was up,” she said. “I knew that Henri was planning to bring somebody special, because he spent hours in the bathroom that morning, before he went off to collect her. Hours. And when I went in, there were all those pomades he puts on his hair – you know, that sandalwood stuff, and the wax that he uses for his moustache – and his eyebrows too. Did you know that Henri puts wax on his eyebrows? He does, you know. Wax. And so I knew that he was going to spring something on us, and I was right.

  “I always remember the way she came into the drawing room and looked around, as if to pass judgement on it. You don’t do that, Paul, you just don’t. You don’t go into somebody else’s drawing room and look around as if you’re an auctioneer come to appraise the furniture. And then she brushed the seat of the chair before she sat down – actually brushed it – as if we would have dirty upholstery. What an insult! It was nothing less than an insult.

  “And I realised pretty much straight away that she was illiterate. Because I said to her something about Montaigne, and, you know, she looked absolutely blank. Face as flat as a pancake. All I said was something like, ‘Montaigne would agree, would he not?’ And she stared at me. Then, a little bit later, I mentioned Proust, and again no reaction. To Proust! No reaction when half of Paris is talking about Proust. You’d think that she would have a view on him, even if she ha
dn’t read a word he’s written, but no, not a flicker of an eyelid.

  “Poor Henri, he was doing his best. He said, ‘Annette is very interested in the theatre.’ He was trying to impress us, to make up for her only too evident ignorance of Montaigne and Proust. So I said, helpfully, I thought, ‘What plays have you seen recently?’ and she opened her mouth and not a syllable came out. Not one. So Mother, bless her, said, ‘My goodness, it looks like rain again,’ but of course it was another completely cloudless day.”

  He stared at the people on the beach. None of them was in a bathing outfit. Nobody. Even the children were fully dressed. They were sitting about on the beach, some on chairs, some on the sand itself. Some stood idly, as if waiting for something to happen. And the wind was blowing garments tied to a line, the arms flapping as if signalling something to somebody somewhere else altogether.

  He thought: life is a long road that all of us have to walk along. We don’t always know where we’re going, but we trudge along it dutifully, for the most part. Of course, you can wander off; you can let go of the arm of the person who walks beside you and you can wander off. I could wander off, over this odd rampart that separates one part of this beach from the other, and I could find myself amongst these people who seem to be waiting for something to happen. But I shall not do that, because my lines in the play require me to be on this stage, rather than that. So you carry on, although every so often you look off to the left, or to the right, and you think about other things and the wind blows and the sand gets in your eyes, as it can do, and the crowd in the distance mills around the patisseries, as crowds will mill, and the band playing in the bandstand works its way through the bars of music that it is its duty to play all the way to the end and to the silence that comes at the end.