The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (16 page)

He can’t go back inside the pub to face Lubbock. All he can do is trail back to his lodgings and work out how it has got to this. When he arrives there, he finds another letter from his mother, ‘
Dearest, we didn’t quite know what to make of the fingerprints and the blank sheets of paper in your last
communication to us. Was this a sort of English joke? Or perhaps you simply forgot to include the actual letter! Anyway you will be pleased to know that we have managed to book passages on the Queen Mary – at very short notice – so that we can visit you.’

He checks the date of the letter, they will be in Cambridge a week from now. He hides the letter in his desk, along with Blackett’s money.

The day before they arrive he goes to the market and uses Blackett’s money to buy a bag of apples.

‘Keep the change,’ he says to the astonished greengrocer.

He wants to give Blackett an even chance so he takes care to dip only half the apple in the liquid. The tell-tale smell of almonds is so strong he’s afraid to even breathe it. Perhaps it will fade away once the liquid dries.

He waits until lunchtime when he knows Blackett is dining at his college, before he goes into Blackett’s office and sets the apple on the desk. For a moment he thinks about eating the apple himself, before he leaves the room and goes to wait outside.

The nearest help is a million lightyears away

Not long after we started seeing each other, we lay in the park one spring afternoon and he picked a flower out of the grass. I hoped he would tuck it behind my ear, but he just pulled the white petals away from their yellow centre until the flower fell to pieces.

Then he unlaced my shoes and rolled my tights down.

‘Not here, not in daytime,’ I said, ‘everyone can see us.’

But we can’t meet at night because he has to work. He works at the observatory and he’s bought me a laptop with a webcam on it, so he can watch me lying in bed when he’s operating the telescope.

‘I want to call you Daisy,’ he whispered in my ear. He never uses my real name, he doesn’t like it.

It’s his job to monitor the planets around dying stars and observe them as they fade into endless night. He once told me, ‘Soon we’ll have telescopes sensitive enough to pick up distress signals from the planets. But we still won’t be able to reach them in time. All we can do is watch.’

He touched me between my toes and then between my legs, he’s always very methodical about things like that. I felt so sorry for him as he arranged me on the sun-warmed grass, he must have seen more life coming to an end than any other human being. That’s why I make allowances.

That sinking feeling

Einstein’s in a lift. The front of this lift is a concertina mesh of metal, so he can peer out at the illuminated floors of the building as they float up past him.

He lives in an apartment at the top of this building with his wife Mileva and their two boys. He is a professor at the University where he is highly regarded by his colleagues for having published a series of papers which revolutionised physics. He should be working on the next paper now but instead he is going to visit his lover. He feels no guilt at this visit, the ragged remnants of his home life no longer justify that degree of emotion.

Earlier this morning at home, the boys were fighting over their rocking horse and Einstein watched as Mileva tried to separate them and stop them knocking into the furniture. The small room was jam-packed with overstuffed armchairs, a bookcase holding stacks of papers as yellowed as stained teeth, a dresser displaying a not quite entire set of china decorated with mechanically identical pink rosebuds. The silver cutlery was hidden away, but the presence of the knives gave a sullen metallic edge to the room.

When they first got married and were given so many presents, he and Mileva had laughed at them all. They told each other that they were not going to let themselves be crushed under the carved wooden sofas and crystal decanters and glass ornaments and brass pokers and lace antimacassars. They could continue to live as free spirits, working together on their studies. But they had had to move into a larger apartment because the old one wasn’t large enough. Then the children had come along and it turned out they needed even
more belongings and now whenever Einstein thinks of his wife, he pictures her hidden underneath the mound of bottles, quilts, diapers and wooden toys that seems to accompany her wherever she goes.

The lift moves slowly as it clanks its way to the bottom of the building, and Einstein is getting impatient. But he tries not to show this because he is not alone. A little man in a fancy uniform operates the lift; it’s his job to crank the concertina shut, pull the lever up to start the lift on its journey, and crank the concertina open at the end of the journey to let the passengers leave.

A typical conversation with Mileva might start like this, ‘Why don’t you ever talk to me about your work anymore, Albie?’

He winces at her use of this old pet name, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

‘You used to show me what you were working on, so that I could help. Spot the mistakes in your workings.’

Even as he sits at his desk trying to work, she bustles around straightening out the piles of papers and blowing dust off the desk.

Mileva was the best in her class at school. She wanted to go on and be a physicist, and her family paid for her to go to college where Einstein met her. Small, dark, witty and intense, she was the only girl in their physics class.

Now and then he catches her flipping through the books in his study. It doesn’t seem to matter which book, it could be about set theory, logic, mechanics or calculus. She turns the pages fast, as if she’s thirsty and gulping down cold water. Sometimes he clears his throat and she puts the book down and runs out without saying anything, or she lays the book to one side and comes to peer over his shoulder at his work. He resents this, although he pretends not to. She asks questions and points out mistakes in his maths. He supposes he should
be grateful, when they were students she used to check his homework and she always found all the mistakes.

When he next glances up from his books she’s gone again. He goes back to the problem.
What is gravity? Why do objects accelerate at the same rate regardless of their different masses?

As the lift continues its descent, he glances at the lift operator, at his uniform with its sad oversized epaulettes, before realising that the man is staring straight back at him. Even odder, the man is sticking his tongue out the way that kids do. He has a round face and enormous eyes, and the merest wisps of hair clinging to his pink scalp. His body seems far too big for his short stocky legs. Einstein glances at his hand, positioned on the lift lever. It is the chubby hand of a baby. And back at his face. Baby face, the tip of his small pink tongue just visible. Why has he never noticed this before now? Dear God, the lift operator is a baby.

‘I do this all day,’ the baby says, his hand still on the lever, ‘can you imagine how I feel?’

‘No,’ admits Einstein.

‘I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, rising or falling. I never see daylight, I never see anything. Nobody talks to me apart from telling me which floors they want. They just shout numbers at me, as if I were a mathematician.’

‘I like numbers,’ says Einstein.

‘I know you do,’ says the baby, ‘but do you like them more than real things? It would be nice if – just occasionally – someone thanked me. Or told me how much they admired my uniform.’

‘It’s a very nice uniform,’ says Einstein.

‘You’re a terrible liar, Herr Professor Einstein,’ the baby grins.

Einstein doesn’t know what to say to this, he’d rather be outside where he can smoke a cigarette in peace. But this is wartime and there are no cigarettes and no peace.

They’re about half way down now and the lift is picking up speed. Maybe there is something wrong with it, because it shouldn’t be going so quickly at this point, but Einstein realises he is enjoying the flying sensation in his stomach, the feeling of weightlessness. He feels as if he has escaped the pull of gravity, just for an instant. He has escaped his wife.

Elsa lives in the bottom of the building, her apartment is in the basement. Here he eats cakes and drinks coffee with her in peaceful silence. Elsa’s silences are almost the best thing about her, she creates a vacuum that envelops him so that Mileva’s mournful questions, the boys’ incessant chatter, his colleagues’ boring conversations about outdated physics all fade away. She’s like a cake herself, thinks Einstein, as she digs her fork into a fat puff of whipped cream; she’s all pillowy and fair with strawberry-pink cheeks.

The next day as he escapes the apartment, he finds himself looking forward to riding in the lift. He is anticipating that feeling of freedom, of being temporarily cut off from the inertia of the marital bed and the gloomy clouds of his arguments with Mileva which seem to be tinted the same colour as the children’s bruises.

When he gets into the lift, the baby starts to talk almost immediately, ‘You’re visiting your cousin because you’re having an affair with her. You see her every morning for a little
schtup
and some refreshment afterwards. Sometimes you skip the
schtup
and just have the cake. That’s what she prefers, and probably you do too. Neither of you are that young anymore.’

‘Why –’

The baby looks at him enquiringly. The lift hasn’t moved yet, the door is still open. ‘Why – what?’

But Einstein can’t decide what the question should be.

When he arrives at Elsa’s apartment, he rushes her through to the bedroom so he can sink into her. Whenever
he’s surrounded by her soft body, it feels like being swaddled in a comforting eiderdown. He doesn’t talk to her about his work, or Mileva, or the arguments.

And for some reason, although Elsa’s apartment is the same size as his and Mileva’s, it feels far more spacious. Even the heavy furniture suits her. The large woollen rugs feel soft under his feet, the chandeliers glint pretty coloured light all over the walls, the coffee cups are so thin and delicate that they are almost translucent. Perhaps she’s just a better housekeeper than Mileva.

Maybe things would have been different between him and Mileva if it hadn’t been for the first child. When they were still both students they went on holiday together and she got pregnant. They talked about getting married when he could afford it, but that would not be until long after the baby was due to be born. In the meantime she would go to her parents’ home in Serbia to wait it out. He still has the letter from her father telling him about the birth, she had been too ill to write herself.

Lieserl. That was the child’s name. She would be twelve now.

While Mileva was in Serbia he would cycle to work at the patent office, the wheels spelling out some complicated rhythm on the cobbled streets and he would try and work out how exactly his life had changed, now that he was a father. Except it all felt too theoretical, the only real noticeable change was that Mileva was no longer around so there was an absence, not an additional presence. But when she finally returned she seemed slightly shrunken, as if something had been sucked out of her.

‘Have you figured out what the question is?’ says the baby.

‘No, not really,’ says Einstein. His mouth feels dry, he needs coffee.

‘Isn’t it something about different masses falling at the same rate?’ the baby looks rather pleased with itself, as if
it’s figured out something quite profound. ‘Isn’t it about the peculiarity of gravity?’

‘How do you know all this about me?’ asks Einstein.

‘Because I’m your baby.’

Einstein is finding it difficult to breathe. The lift definitely feels as if it’s accelerating way too fast now, perhaps it is out of control and they are plummeting to the depths of the building. They must be falling to their deaths. ‘What do you mean,
my
baby?’ He wipes sweat off his forehead.

‘I’m your first child, the one you never saw.’

Down goes the lift, surely they must be past the basement now where Elsa is waiting patiently with hot coffee for him, but it shows no signs of stopping. Einstein can feel their descent in the pit of his stomach, and he wants to vomit.

He’s sitting at his desk staring at the walls, as Mileva bangs around his study, piling books on top of other books, ‘You never even saw her!’ She has said this before, many times. ‘You couldn’t even be bothered to get on a train and visit your own daughter.’

‘There was no time. I had to work and it was too far away,’ he tries not to sigh because that only makes Mileva crosser, ‘but I can imagine just how she looked because you described her so beautifully in your letters. Her little chin, her soft hair.’

‘Those were
my
words! That’s all she is to you – just words. Symbols on a page, like your work. You reduce everything to symbols; light, bodies, the Earth...’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. That is my job, it’s what I do.’ You used to do it too before you got married, he wants to add, but decides he’d better not.

‘Lieserl was just a problem you had to solve, so you wrote a letter and got rid of her. That was your solution, but perhaps it was wrong.’

‘You agreed!’ He is exasperated now. They wrote the letter together. He signed it but she agreed to it.

‘Because I had to! I couldn’t just show up here with a baby!’

‘You could have stayed there with her. If you’d really wanted to.’

‘Don’t you dare talk to me about what I wanted! You never asked what I wanted!’ This comes out as a quiet scream, ‘
You
didn’t even want to see her!’

And so they go round and round. Nothing changes, everything stays the same.

There must have been things for Lieserl, Einstein realises now. He sent money to Mileva just before the birth. Wouldn’t there have been toys or perhaps a blanket embroidered with her initial in one corner, like the ones wrapped around his sons when they were both babies. He wonders what happened to all those things. When Mileva returned after the birth, she was carrying a small suitcase that seemed to weigh her down as if it were filled with rocks. Only now does he wonder what was inside.