Enduring Love (21 page)

However, on this particular occasion she did not quite succeed, for I briefly achieved what Linley had claimed to be impossible for his policemen. I was excited by Clarissa, but I was actually reading about the queen. She was off to visit a town called Yellowknife in the remote Northwest Territories of Canada, a region the size of Europe with a population of fifty-seven thousand, most of whom, apparently, were drunks and hoodlums. What caught my attention as Clarissa writhed above me was a paragraph about the territory’s appalling weather, and these two desultory sentences: “Recently a blizzard engulfed a football match north of Yellowknife. Unable to find their way to safety, both teams froze to death.” “Listen to this,” I said to Clarissa. But then she looked at me, and that was as far as I got. I was hers.

The act of reading and understanding engages a number of separate but overlapping functions of the brain, while the region that controls sexual function operates at a lower level, more ancient in evolutionary terms and shared by countless organisms but still available to the intercession of higher functions—memory, emotion, fantasy. If I remembered that morning of Clarissa’s birthday so well—cards and torn envelopes scattered across the bed, intrusive sunlight burning through the curtained gap—it’s because one of our little playful episodes brought me for the first time in my life to a full and complete experience in two places at once. Aroused by Clarissa, fully sentient and appreciative, and yet gripped by the tragedy behind the newspaper tidbit, the two teams scattering midplay in the violent winds to die in their boots on the edge of the invisible field. All copulating creatures are vulnerable to attack, but selection over time must have proved that reproductive success was best served by undivided
attention. Better to allow the occasional couple to be eaten midrapture than dilute by one jot a vigorous procreational urge. But for seconds on end I had wholesomely and simultaneously indulged two of life’s central, antithetical pleasures, reading and fucking.

“Don’t you think,” I had asked Clarissa later in the bathroom, “that I’m some kind of evolutionary throw forward?”

Clarissa the Keats scholar was crouching naked on a cork stool, painting her toenails—a gesture toward birthday festivity. “No,” she had said. “You’re just getting old. And anyway”—and here she had mimicked a know-all radio voice—“evolutionary change, speciation, is an event that can only be known in retrospect.”

Now, inwardly, I congratulated her on her grasp of the idiom, and as a taxi drew up for me I realized how sharply I missed our old life together, and I wondered how we would ever return to such love and fun and easy intimacy. Clarissa thought I was mad, the police thought I was a fool, and one thing was clear: the task of getting us back to where we had been was going to be mine alone.

I arrived
twenty minutes late. The place was doing good lunchtime business; conversation was at a roar, and stepping in from the street was like walking into a storm. It was as if there were a single topic—and an hour later there would be. The professor was already seated, but Clarissa was on her feet, and even from across the room I could see that she was in that same elated mood. She was creating a little fuss around her. A waiter was on his knees at her feet, praying style, wedging a table leg; another was bringing her a different chair. When she saw me she came skipping through the din and took my hand and led me to the table as if I were blind. I put the skittishness down to celebratory mood, for we had some cause to raise a glass: it wasn’t only a birthday. Professor Jocelyn Kale, Clarissa’s godfather, had been appointed to an honorary position on the Human Genome Project.

Before I sat down, I kissed her. These days our tongues never touched, but this time they did. Jocelyn half rose from his seat and shook my hand. At the same moment champagne in an ice bucket was
brought to the table and we pitched our voices in with the roar. The ice bucket sat within a rhombus of sunlight on a white tablecloth; the tall restaurant windows showed off rectangles of blue sky between the buildings. I had a hard-on from the kiss. In memory, it was all success, clarity, clatter. In memory, all the food they brought us first was red: the bresaola, the fat tongues of roasted pepper laid on goat cheese, the raddiccio, the white china bowl of radish coronets. When later I remembered how we had leaned in and shouted, I seemed to be remembering an underwater event.

Jocelyn took from his pocket a small parcel done up in blue tissue. We drew down an imaginary silence on our table while Clarissa unwrapped her present. Perhaps that was when I glanced to my left, at the table next to ours. A man whose name I learned afterward was Colin Tapp was with his daughter and his father. Perhaps I noticed them later. If I registered at the time the solitary diner who sat twenty feet away with his back to us, it left no trace in memory. Inside the tissue was a black box, and inside the box, on a cumulus of cotton wool, was a golden brooch. Still without speaking, she lifted it out, and we examined it on her palm.

Two gold bands were entwined in a double helix. Crossing between them were tiny silver rungs in groups of three representing the base pairs, the four-letter alphabet that coded all living things in permutating triplets. Engraved on the helical bands were spherical designs to suggest the twenty amino acids onto which the three-letter codons were mapped. In the full light gathered from the tabletop, it looked in Clarissa’s hand more than a representation. It could have been the thing itself, ready to cook up chains of amino acids to be blended into protein molecules. It could have divided right there in her hand to make another gift. When Clarissa sighed Jocelyn’s name, the sound of the restaurant surged back on us.

“Oh God, it’s beautiful,” she cried, and kissed him.

His weak yellow-blue eyes were moist. He said, “It was Gillian’s, you know. She would have loved you to have it.”

I was impatient to produce my own present, but we were still in the spell of Jocelyn’s. Clarissa pinned the brooch on her gray silk blouse.

Would I remember the conversation now if I did not know what it preceded?

We began by joking that the Genome Project gave out such jewelry free by the dozen. Then Jocelyn talked about the discovery of DNA. Perhaps that was when I turned in my seat to ask a waiter to bring us water and noticed the two men and the girl. We finished the champagne and the antipasto was cleared away. I don’t remember what food we ordered after that. Jocelyn began to tell us about Johann Miescher, the Swiss chemist who identified DNA in 1869. This was supposed to be one of the great missed chances in the history of science. Miescher got himself a steady supply of pus-soaked bandages from a local hospital (rich in white blood cells, Jocelyn added for Clarissa’s benefit). He was interested in the chemistry of the cell nucleus. In the nuclei he found phosphorous, an improbable substance that didn’t sit with current ideas. An extraordinary find, but his paper was blocked by his teacher, who spent two years repeating and confirming his student’s results.

It wasn’t boredom that let my attention shift, though I knew the Miescher story; it was restlessness, an impatience that came from a sense of release after my interview. I would have liked to tell the story of my encounter with Inspector Linley, spice it up a little and squeeze some amusement from it, but I knew that to do so would lead me straight back to the divisions between Clarissa and me. At the next table the girl was being helped through the menu by her father, who had to slide his glasses down his nose to see the print. The girl leaned fondly against his arm.

Meanwhile Jocelyn, enjoying the triple privilege of age, eminence, and the bestower of gifts, told his story. Miescher pressed on. He assembled a team and set about working out the chemistry of what he called nucleic acid. Then he found them, the substances that made up the four-letter alphabet in whose language all life is written: adenine and cytosine, guanine and thymine. It meant nothing. And that was odd, especially as the years went by. Mendel’s work on the laws of inheritance had been generally accepted, and chromosomes had been identified in the cell nucleus and were suspected of being the location of genetic information. It was known that DNA was in the chromosomes, and its chemistry had been described by Miescher, who in 1892 speculated in a letter to his uncle that DNA might code for life, just as an alphabet codes for language and concepts.

“It was staring them in the face,” Jocelyn said. “But they couldn’t see, they wouldn’t see. The problem, of course, was the chemists …”

It was hard work, talking against the din. We waited while he drank his water. The story was for Clarissa, an embellishment on the present. While Jocelyn was resting his voice there was movement behind me, and I was obliged to pull in my chair to let the girl through. She went off in the direction of the lavatories. When I was next aware of her, she was back in her seat.

“The chemists, you see. Very powerful, rather grand. The nineteenth had been a good century for them. They had authority, but they were a crusty lot. Take Phoebus Levine, at the Rockefeller Institute. He was absolutely certain that DNA was a boring, irrelevant molecule containing random sequences of those four letters, ACGT. He dismissed it, and then, in that peculiar human way, it became a matter of faith with him, deep faith. What he knew, he knew, and the molecule was insignificant. None of the younger chaps could get
round him. It had to wait for years, until Griffith’s work on bacteria in the twenties. Which Oswald Avery picked up in Washington—Levine was gone by then, of course. Oswald’s work took forever, right into the forties. Then Alexander Todd, working in London on the sugar phosphate links, then ’fifty-two and ’three, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, and then Crick and Watson. You know what poor Rosalind said when they showed her the model they had built of the DNA molecule? She said it was simply too beautiful not to be true …”

The accelerated roll call of names and his old chestnut, beauty in science, slowed Jocelyn into speechless reminiscence. He fumbled with his napkin. He was eighty-two. As student or colleague, he had known them all. And Gillian had worked with Crick after the first great breakthrough on adapter molecules. Gillian, like Franklin herself, had died of leukemia.

I was a second or two slow on the uptake, but Jocelyn had lobbed me an excellent cue. I reached into my jacket pocket and could not resist the chocolate-box lines. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty …” Clarissa smiled. She must have guessed long before that she might be getting Keats, but she could not have dreamed of what was now in her hands, in plain brown paper. Even before the wrapping was off, she recognized it and squealed. The girl at the next table turned in her seat to stare, until her father tapped her on the arm. Foolscap octavo in drab boards with back label. Condition: poor, foxed, slight water damage. A first edition of his first collection,
Poems
of 1817.

“What presents!” Clarissa said. She stood and put her arms around my neck. “It must have cost you thousands …” Then she put her lips to my ear and it was like the old days. “You’re a bad boy to spend so much money. I’m going to make you fuck me all afternoon.”

She couldn’t have meant it, but I played along and said, “Oh, all right. If it’ll make you feel better.” It was the champagne, of course, and simple gratitude, but that didn’t stop me feeling pleased.

A day or so later it became a temptation to invent or elaborate details about the table next to ours, to force memory to deliver what was never captured, but I did see the man, Colin Tapp, put his hand on his father’s arm as he spoke, reassuring him, soothing him. It also became difficult to disentangle what I discovered later from what I sensed at the time. Tapp was in fact two years older than I, his daughter was fourteen, and his father seventy-three. I did nothing so deliberate as speculate about their ages—by now my attention was not wandering, our own table was absorbing, we were having fun—but I must have assumed a good deal about the relationships of our neighbors, and done it barely consciously, out of the corner of my eye, wordlessly, in that preverbal language of instant thought linguists call mentalese. The girl I did take in, however glancingly. She had that straight-backed poise some teenagers adopt, self-possession attempting worldliness and disarmingly revealing its opposite. Her skin was dark, her black hair was cut in a bob, and the skin low on her neck was paler; the haircut was recent. Or were these details I observed later, in the chaos, or in the time after the chaos? Another example of the confusion hindsight can cause memory: I found myself inserting into my recollection of the scene an image of the man who sat eating alone, facing away from us. I didn’t see him at the time, not until the very end, but I was unable to exclude him from later reconstructions.

At our table Clarissa had resumed her seat and the conversation concerned young men oppressed, put down, or otherwise blocked by older men—their fathers, teachers, mentors, or their idols. The starting point had been Johann Miescher and his teacher, Hoppe-Seyler, who had held up publication of his student’s discovery of phosphorous
in cell nuclei. Hoppe-Seyler also happened to be the editor of the journal to which Miescher’s papers had been submitted. From there—and I had time later to trace our conversation backward—from Miescher and Hoppe-Seyler, we arrived at Keats and Wordsworth.

Clarissa was our source now, although outside his subject Jocelyn knew a little about most things, and he knew from the Gittings biography the famous story of the young Keats going to visit the poet he revered. I knew of the visit because Clarissa had told me about it. In late 1817 Keats had been staying at an inn, the Fox and Hounds by Box Hill on the North Downs, where he finished his long poem
Endymion
. He stayed on a week and walked the downs in a daze of creative excitement. He was twenty-one, he had written a long, serious, beautiful poem about being in love, and by the time he returned to London he was feeling high. There he heard the news and was overjoyed: his hero, William Wordsworth, was in town. Keats had sent his
Poems
with the inscription “To W. Wordsworth with the Author’s sincere Reverence.” (That would have been the one to give Clarissa. It was in the Princeton University Library, and according to her, there were many uncut pages.) Keats had grown up on Wordsworth’s poetry. He had called
The Excursion
one of the “three things to rejoice at in this Age.” He had taken from Wordsworth the idea of poetry as a sacred vocation, the noblest endeavor. Now he persuaded his painter friend Haydon to arrange a meeting, and they set out together from Haydon’s studio at Lisson Grove to walk to Queen Anne Street to call on the great genius. In his journal, Haydon noted that Keats expressed “the greatest, the purest, the most unalloyed pleasure at the prospect.”