Therefore Choose (3 page)

“These class exercises,” said Douglas as they left the Physiology Building. “Supposed to show how medicine is founded on science. Total nonsense.”

“But it is founded on science.”

“Not what we've just done. Procedures in a prescribed order: grasp the pipette in the right hand.”

“You're already skilled with the pipette, but what about everyone else?”

“I've worked in a lab, that's all. I need Part I Physiology, so I go through the motions. I need to put the elements in place to do a Ph.D.”

“On what?”

“To find out how memory works,” he said. “It's the next big problem, the basis of how we learn … everything.”

They walked across the Downing Site, turned right into Downing Street.

Douglas stood on the pavement, talking emphatically.

“That building we've just been in, Physiology. Some of the most important research on the nervous system is going on right there. That would be learning about science, but of course as undergraduates we see nothing. But that's the place. Professor Adrian is there. It's electronics now. That's how the brain works.”

“And that's what you want to do?”

“In Part II, I want to do Experimental Psychology. It's a small group, but with Bartlett, the head of the department. He's got the right idea.”

Whereas for George the syllabus on the way to medicine was mapped out for him, Douglas had somehow managed to create his own mixture: maths, physics, physiology.

With a father who'd been to Cambridge and was a professor at Manchester, Douglas knew where to go, who to talk to, what to do. Not the kind of thing on which George's mother, a primary-school teacher and the widow of a gentleman's outfitter, could offer guidance.

One drizzly afternoon
in his last term of his last year at Cambridge, George lost patience with his revisions for finals. He bought some crumpets and went to visit Werner.

Werner was in. His wood-panelled room overlooked Great Court. On the walls, he had put up reproductions of Holbein, Dürer, and Cranach. He lit his gas fire, picked up the toasting fork, and started to toast the crumpets.

“I want to write a thesis,” he said. “Can you get the butter out, and plates?”

George did as he was asked.

“It's the big unsolved problem.”

“What is?” said George.

“How minds meet,” said Werner. “When minds are so different from each other, how can they connect?”

“Wittgenstein, will he help?”

“He is the most complete intellect in philosophy. Whether he will help … I don't have a route yet, or a method.”

“I should introduce you to Douglas Hinton. He wants to find out about memory.”

“Is he doing philosophy?'

“Experimental psychology.”

“That would be of no help to me. In psychology, problem and method pass each other by.”

“How do you mean?”

“Here's the problem,” said Werner. “When silk first came from China to Europe, the Romans, who knew about cotton, thought it must come from a bush, with a fruit in which the silk fibres grew.”

“Now we know it comes from silkworms.”

“You're not following. We see everything through what we know, through that by which we make propositions. If we had telepathy, even then I could not read your thoughts because minds are too different.”

“But we can talk to each other.”

“Perhaps we only think we do.”

“Is that what your thesis will be on?”

“I want to solve the problem of how minds can join.”

“And that's the most important problem?”

Suddenly Werner looked very deliberate. “If minds cannot join,” he said, “how do we know we are not mad?”

Werner could be uncomfortable to be with. He sometimes made George feel inadequate. He had grand ideas, which he took up with total commitment.

George thought: What do I have? Attracted to knowledge but don't know much. Knowledge of Hegel nil. The Hanseatic League — what was that? A medical student without that essential fascination for the workings of the body. Werner talks about connection between minds. Am I even connected to my own mind?

Until George was thirteen, things went for him much as one would expect. It was as if life were a jigsaw. It wasn't that he knew which pieces were which, but they were all there. He needed merely to fit each into its place as time went along. After his father died, there was a change. Things no longer had the right shapes. They took on a disconcerting unpredictability.

George grew up in a smallish life in the smallish town of Salcombe. His family had a house above the town, with what he later realized are the most stirring views in the south of England. To the south the estuary opens exuberantly out to sea between great coastal cliffs — Gara Rock and Bolt Head. On many days a line of breakers across the estuary shows where the bar is, dangerous, exciting. To the east, the sands of East Portlemouth, where the little ferry goes. To the north, the land becomes flatter and the river widens and spreads up towards Kingsbridge. Every day difference, in the clouds, the waves, the boats. To George as a schoolboy they seemed unremarkable. He grumbled to himself as he climbed steep pavements on the way home from school.

It was the first mild day of spring when his father disappeared, a Sunday. His mother made a picnic, and after church, off they went: George, his mother and father, and his sister Gwen, two years younger than George, in their Austin Seven, to South Sands. Although the day was warm, the wind was surprisingly blustery.

George's father said, “Let's walk to Bolt Head.”

At the age of thirteen, George didn't like walking, but he said he would go. His mother and sister thought they would stay on the beach, sheltered from the wind. The path is gentle at first, through sturdy trees, but then steep, exposed, with a jagged drop to the left. A sudden gust, far too strong for a mere wind, frightened George, made him think he would be blown from the cliff.

He said, “Can we go back?”

“You go back,” his father said. “I'm going on, up to Bolt Head.”

“Is it all right if I don't come?”

“Look after your mother and sister,” he said.

By the time they knew something was wrong, it was dark. Mr. Smith's body was found the next day.

George's mother gathered her two children to her.

“Just the three of us now,” she said.

The only time George saw her cry was at the funeral. George did not cry.

The house, the shop, the car were sold. They moved to Peckham, in South London, where George's mother's sister lived. Mrs. Smith got a job as assistant headmistress.

George got a scholarship to Alleyn's School. “Without that we couldn't afford it,” George's mother said. “We don't have much money. Your father's investments did not do well. We've enough to get by, but not much over.”

George felt guilty that he only half loved his father. The part he loved was when he would take George sailing in the boat he owned, a Salcombe Yawl. There were a few of them. The owners all knew each other, and there would be races, in which Mr. Smith and his son once did as well as third place. What George liked best was when his father would just take him off, to a destination prompted by wind and tide, and he would let George steer without directions to do this or that. They would share the sandwiches.

The part George could not love was his father's churchgoing talk about how everyone was sinful. He never talked like that on the boat. A year before his death, as if to prove him right, George stole a shilling from the till in the shop. The cane was brought out, a piece of family equipment. George leaned over the arm of a sofa and was thrashed.

“That's six,” said his father. “How many do you deserve?”

“I don't know.”

The pain was bad.

“How many?” He was in a rage, out of breath, his voice raw.

George's mother came to intervene.

“Alfred, no. That's enough. You'll hurt him.”

“What he deserves … for his own good.”

Six more.

His mother stood aside. There was blood from the welts. For a week he could not sit. In school and at meals he had to lean sideways on his thigh.

When his father disappeared, George would think, I shouldn't have let him go off on his own. If his death was something he did to himself, he wouldn't have done it if I'd been there. If it was an accident, I could have gone for help. I am guilty.

Did the death of his father affect George's life in a profound way? Without it, George might have stayed in the small Devon town, might not have won scholarships. Without it, he might have been more confident. Without it, he might not have suffered from such yearning.

George got a scholarship to Trinity. He was able to postpone taking it up for a year, so that he could work and save enough money. With these savings and the scholarship and money he earned from giving lessons in German and French, university was possible.

In his first year at Cambridge, George started to find his way around. In his second year, he saw more clearly who was who. Most of the medical students were decent enough, but not many had intellectual pursuits. Some were in the Boat Club, some played cricket, some seemed mainly to frequent the pubs. If they did talk about medicine, it wasn't about the nature of science, or the latest discoveries, but about what they'd understood or misunderstood about the spleen. The only person in Physiology with whom George spent much time was Douglas.

In his second year, George found himself in a group of people in Trinity who talked knowledgeably about Stalin and Mussolini, who were taken with Keynes's economics, who knew about Virginia Woolf, and about T.S. Eliot's “objective correlative.” Sometimes discussions, in the room of one or the other of them, would last long into the night. In the group, Peter seemed knowledgeable on an astounding range of subjects.

Peter and Douglas were members of a kind of intellectual aristocracy. Peter's father had been to Trinity, and was something important in the Treasury, and Douglas's father was a professor. Cambridge was a life they knew.

Peter told George he was in the Apostles Society, at which people gave talks each week. He said he was supposed to keep it secret, but he thought secrets were childish so he didn't mind George knowing, so long as he didn't tell anybody.

Douglas talked to George about conversations with Professor Adrian, head of the Physiology Department, who was a friend of his father's, and who'd won a Nobel Prize for discovering how sensory receptors work in the nervous system.

While George was wondering what he should be, Peter and Douglas were on their way to doing what they wanted to do.

It was the summer of 1936
when George travelled with Werner to Berlin. They crossed the Channel to Ostend. Their train stopped at the German border, at Aachen, where there were uniformed men with stamping boots.

The train set off again, and busied along. On the left side, George gazed out of the window. The day was bright. The atmosphere had the kind of transparency that occurs sometimes after it has rained, every impurity washed from the air. Grass and leaves looked utterly green, as if in a painting by Stanley Spencer, buildings picked out with peculiar distinctness. Fields, farms streamed past: people he would never know, houses he would never enter.

At Cologne they stayed for the night.

“A lot of men in uniform,” George said.

“The area was demilitarized. The army has reoccupied it,” Werner said.

“Quite a presence.”

“The army is large. Everyone does military service.”

“What about you?”

George wondered whether Werner's parents had pulled some strings.

“The army has become more popular than university,” Werner said. “People go straight from school to officer training.”

“You're in a minority.”

“If you go to university now, first you must do six months' manual work.”