SCENE SEVEN

SCENE SEVEN

Venice. Hotel room: a good hotel; a floor-level minibar/ fridge with an interior light.

Hilary, wearing a hotel bathrobe, her hair wet from the shower, is kneeling by the bed, saying her prayers.

Sound and spilled light indicate an active shower, which is soon turned off.

Spike enters, wearing an identical bathrobe, wet from the shower. He is only slightly wrong-footed by seeing Hilary at her prayers. He begins putting on his pants and socks. During the scene he puts on the clothes he had taken off.

Hilary stands up. She watches Spike putting on his shirt.

Spike So... how’ve you been?

Hilary Have you got a date?

Spike Did have... drinks party for UCL’s new Nobel, but it’s in the hotel... I’ll catch what’s left of it. I can come back if you like.

Hilary I’ll be asleep. In case I don’t see you, good luck with the physiology of – what? I can’t be there. I’ll be at Leo Reinhart’s session.

Spike ‘The Physiology of High Stakes’. We took saliva samples at the world poker championship. The cortisol levels went crazy.

Hilary Is that good? I don’t mean good.

Spike laughs. A beat.

Spike I haven’t heard from you for years.

Hilary I haven’t heard from you at all.

Spike Really? That’s bad.

Hilary (laughs) Is the sex better at UCL or Loughborough?

Spike UCL. Or it’s to do with being a prof. Won’t I see you on the boat?

Hilary Boat?

Spike The Krohl party, it’s on Jerry Krohl’s boat – an eyesore, frankly, but I had an invitation under my door.

Hilary No, I’m taking off after my round table – Florence, Pisa, Siena... on the cheap. Do you want to come?

Spike Don’t you have anyone to go with?

Hilary You’re anyone.

Spike Hilly.

Hilary Did you read my...

Spike Yeah... Let me make three points about your pre-print.

The pre-print is twenty pages, self-published. Spike takes it out of his jacket, and enumerates his points with his spare fingers.

Don’t circulate it.

If you circulate it, don’t put your name on it.

If you put your name on it, don’t put the Krohl’s name on it.

An afterthought.

Four points. If you circulate it with your name and the Krohl’s name on it, don’t call it ‘Is God the Last Man Standing?’

Hilary Why?

Spike Because it will make you unemployable. You’d have to do philosophy.

Hilary I haven’t written anything which isn’t in plain sight. Materialism is in trouble, and we’re all materialists now. Everything is matter. There is no science that says beauty is truth or truth beauty, but the gondolas are heaving with name-tagged materialists having their minds blown by Venice. What is to be done with the sublime if you’re proud to be a materialist? To save the appearance of value, no theory is too unlikely, no idea too far-out to float so long as it sounds like science – elementary particles with teeny-weeny consciousness; or a cosmos with attitude; or the life of the mind as the software of a biological computer. These are desperate measures, Spike! What does materialism remind you of? It’s a faith.

Spike But it’s pathetic to rely on a supreme being to underwrite what you call your values. Why are you afraid of making your own?

Hilary You don’t claim to make your own. What’s the difference between a supreme being and being programmed by your biology?

Spike Freedom. I can override the programming.

Hilary Who can? Who’s the ‘you’ outside your brain? Where?

Spike I wish I’d pulled that primatologist with the thigh boots who was hitting on me at registration. Why don’t you leave me alone?

At least change the title, will you?

Hilary All right.

Spike At least. But you didn’t write these equations, I know that much.

Hilary I might have done.

Spike No, not these. You shagged a mathematician.

Hilary No, I didn’t. But there’s a Chinese girl in the department who’s phenomenal. She was a quant at KCM before.

Spike Krohl’s hedge-fund? That’s a comedown.

Hilary She doesn’t think so. I’m mad about her, actually. She’s designed an experiment like nothing in the literature – ninety-six kids in four age groups –

Spike (quite impressed) Ninety-six?

Hilary Close to, probably. We’ve got pretty much an entire school participating, thanks to Jerry.

So you liked her equations?

Spike I liked them, but they’re not tied into hard data.

Hilary They show there isn’t enough geological time for the living world to have been selected-out by chance mutations.

Spike Really? Look around. You’re just hung up on your personal incredulity.

Hilary (roused) Well, where’s yours? Someone tells you you can run the film backward billions of years to an enormous bang and nothing but particles joining up into big clumps like this one, except not like this one – because on this one the chemistry came alive and kicked into an algorithm that kept unspooling till there was you collecting spit from a poker game, and you don’t bat an eyelid.

Spike Yup. Love it. Now do God, and see which one of us looks credulous.

I went to Pisa once, a conference, by EasyJet. The control tower was a disappointment; a missed branding opportunity, one felt.

You wouldn’t want someone hanging on to your skirts who thinks when you’ve seen one town in Tuscany you’ve seen them all.

I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if there’s no conference. I get antsy if there isn’t a new journal to look at every day.

Hilary I thought you were going to the party.

Spike Do you mind if I change my mind?

Hilary Why? You’re not going to spoil everything by worrying about me, are you? Anyway, don’t you want to meet the Nobel Laureate?

Spike I met him, he’s a force-of-nature type who’s realised he can act modest now: it’s quite irritating.

Hilary All right, but I’m going to sleep.

Spike, dressed now, starts getting undressed. Hilary takes off her robe and puts on a T-shirt nightgown.

Spike Still saying our prayers, are we? Still God, is it?

Hilary Whoever’s up for it. I wish you’d stop saying ‘God’ like that, as if I’m talking about someone who created the world in six days and then had a rest. He’d think I was a complete idiot. But there are things we believe are right or wrong like, say, cruelty, and if this belief is a brain-state, that’s fine by me, but our brain-state is about something, it’s about cruelty, which is right or wrong whether we’re thinking about it or not.

Spike You don’t need God for that.

Hilary (forcefully) But you need something for it to be true, some kind of overall moral intelligence, otherwise we’re just marking our own homework. That’s what I pray to for Catherine, because somewhere between ape-men and the beginning of religion, we became aware of an enormous fact we didn’t understand.

Spike We did. Its name was death. Who’s Catherine?

Hilary Oh, sorry. I thought I told you. She’s my daughter.

Spike You haven’t got a daughter. Have you?

Hilary Yes. She’ll be thirteen in November.

Spike Thirteen? So...

Hilary Fifteen.

Spike What?

Hilary I was fifteen.

Spike God, Hil. Where is she?

Hilary (shrugs) Catherine was possibly the last ‘shame’ baby. Nowadays the babies are mostly taken away from mothers who neglect them or can’t cope, but shame is pretty much extinct. When she’s eighteen she can ask to see her birth certificate. If she wants to. If she knows she’s adopted.

Spike Oh, Hil. I’m sorry.

Hilary Thanks.

She gets into bed and turns off her bedside light, leaving the room dimly lit. Pause.

Would you do something for me, Spike?

Spike Anything.

Hilary Promise?

Spike Should I get dressed or undressed?

Hilary Will you, though?

Spike Yes. Okay. Sure. What?

Hilary Will you say a prayer?

Spike (pause) What?

Hilary Pray for her. Just for a moment.

Spike No. You mean like pray-to-God pray?

No. Why?

Hilary Just because. If you, of all people, if even you...

Spike No. I mean... Hilly... it would be meaningless, wouldn’t it?

Hilary I don’t know. That would be up to you.

Spike It wouldn’t be up to me. It just is meaningless.

Hilary If it’s meaningless, what’s your problem?

Spike I’d be betraying everything I believe in.

Hilary And that’s a problem, is it?

Pause.

Spike Is that why you pray for forgiveness?

Hilary Did I tell you that? I just want to be allowed to know, to stop imagining, and I pray for her... ‘Please God let Catherine be all right. Please God let her parents be kind to her... ’

Spike Oh. So what happened to ‘Please Overall Moral Intelligence’? Aren’t you embarrassed?

Hilary Yes.

She gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom.

(Leaving.) Do you want something from the minibar?

Spike (to himself ) The minibar?

He hears the shower turning full on.

(Calls.) You already had... Are you having a shower?

She closes the bathroom door. Spike goes to the minibar and crouches to look at the miniatures in the door, then moves the larger bottles around, kneeling to look at the bottles in the back. He finds a bottle of beer, examines the label. He listens to the noise of the water.

(Calls.) You’re crying in the shower. Aren’t you? I know you are.

He pauses to listen, kneeling in the light from the minibar.

⇐ Предыдущая 3 4 5 6 789 10 11 12 Следующая ⇒