Life (44 page)

“In a sense. But it’s crude and rough. By optimizing, you preserve the net diversity—”

“Otherwise we’d all end up looking like perfect quarter-pounders!” laughed Noelle. “But Anna that sounds so horrible, when you talk about cell masses—”

“It all sounds horrible to me,” remarked Isobel. “I hate to think of what Charles does to his poor vegetables. It’s awfully arrogant, I think, trying to improve on nature.”

“Ah, but you eat them,
belle-mère.
” Charles raised his voice. “Anyone who objects to genetically modified foodstuffs, better speak now, by the way!”

“We can’t stop him from bringing his work home,” rumbled Godfrey. “The potatoes, the maize, the tomatoes, the broad beans, the spinach, where will it end. You should see his spinach seeds, it’s like something from another planet, like a pollen or a virus in gross magnification, all spikes, knobs, and knuckles.”

“That’s nothing to do with transgenics, Godfrey,” said Charles, tetchily. “They always looked like that.”

A small, middle-aged woman, in black with a white apron, cleared the first course. Charles stood up to carve the saddle of mutton, which she brought to him on a trolley.

“But Anna, this TY phenomenon. Do you really think human sexual identity is being jerked around by a virus? Should we be afraid?”

“I don’t know much about sexual identity. I’m interested in the viroid and the implications of finding a lateral transfer on that scale.”

“Oh come on. Admit it; you love the gender-bending angle. You always were a bit of a tomboy.” He looked down the length of the table, with its crowd of gleaming glassware and silver glinting in the light of many candles. “How do you feel about all this, Spence? Isn’t it frightening, living with this female Dr Frankenstein?”

“Doesn’t bother me,” said Spence, helping himself to GM sag alu. He was glad he’d been placed as far from Charles as possible, but he wished Anna wasn’t getting such a pasting. She wouldn’t want to come here again, and he would lose a harmless pleasure. The gentle, graceful profile of his hostess framed by the smooth curve of red gold hair. “As long as she hands over her paypacket at the end of the month, I’ll have her slippers warming and dinner on the table.”

There was a general laugh.

Charles sat down, having divided the meat with aplomb, “But have you let her take a little
cheek-scraping,
or a sperm sample, for analysis? And are you really a New Man?”

“Nah. I don’t believe in that stuff, it’s pure superstition. If I want to know my fortune, I read the horoscopes. Sun in Aquarius, Aries rising, Jupiter in Aries, Moon in Libra. I’m a good teamworker.”

Meret hated dinner parties. The hired servants intimidated her, she could never think of anything to say, and Charles was always in his tetchiest mood—although it was his idea to have things so formal. Spence’s scary wife could probably run a dinner party in her sleep
and
do all the cooking as well. You could see at a glance that she’d never stuffed anything behind the sofa cushions in her life. When Charles started needling Anna she felt near to panic, afraid there would be a stand-up row, that Spence’s wife would storm out and he’d have to go with her, but luckily it passed off. Meret relaxed again and resumed the painful pleasure of secretly watching Spence. He looked so out of place and so relaxed, a woodland faun at the dinner table, with mischievous grey eyes, half human, half lazy animal. She realized sadly, something she’d only suspected until tonight: she had fallen in love.

Spence had often teased Anna about having a career in sex science and an aversion to sexual politics, which was a cheek considering the way he bitched about Ramone. But why did she recoil, why did she so hate to have that subject raised? The rational explanation involved pointing out the absurdity of all ideological squabbles and how it’s never, ever that simple. The short answer might be
Charles Craft.
What does it mean, the horrible passivity that overtakes a woman, when a man she knows lays hands on her against her will? Attack is easy to assimilate, much easier than betrayal… Why does the memory of something like that, really not your fault, linger with so much shame, so much revulsion? Was she envious of Charles’s success? There was no sense in feeling robbed: it was all water under the bridge, and anyway she didn’t want a new BMW, or an opulent dinner service, three different sets of wine glasses for ten people, my God… There was nothing to be done, because she could not bear to explain to Spence why she didn’t want to mix with the Crafts. It was too stupid, too long ago, too embarrassing and pathetic. She’d just have to hope that the difference between the two families’ incomes kept them apart.

It was the football (soccer) season. Football practice should be Anna’s job, Spence felt, coming from Manchester the way she did; but she rarely managed to be free on Sunday mornings. As Spence had understood from the start, “point six” meant the salary, not the work, which filled her every mortal hour, 24/7, my God. So it was Spence who took Jake along to the park and huddled with the other parents on the touch line, the usual suspects: known by first name only, qualified by the names of their children, Rick-Wanni’s-Dad, Delilah-Trev’s-Mum (except that now Spence knew Meret Craft personally). Delilah was distressed because she’d had to give up breastfeeding her ten-week-old baby. She’d had mastitis; she’d recovered, but the baby now preferred her bottle. That was why she was here alone, cheering on Trev, the eldest boy. She couldn’t stand the sight of Caress sucking from a rubber tit and Ben (her old man) so fucking smug about it… Meret had nursed Tomkin until he was three and Florrie for a year. She was supposed to have stopped with Charlie, who was eighteen months, because Charles insisted, but she still (she admitted) sneaked a feed into the bedtime routine, it was so lovely and so much easier.

“I can’t imagine your Charles wielding a formula bottle,” said Rick.

“Charles is all right,” said Meret. “You’d be surprised. He’s the one who insisted they go to ordinary school, instead of private. My father thinks it’s crazy.” She was self-conscious about Charles, who could seem brusque and arrogant, and often felt she had to defend him by citing technical virtues (e.g., his voting habits).

Spence stood beside Meret, smiling vaguely, wishing he could tackle the breast-feeding topic with Rick’s fearless aplomb. When the rain began, Delilah and the other women, along with Rick and Dennis, another male-soccer-mom, took off at a jog for the pavilion, Rick wearing his latest offspring strapped on his chest, inside his jacket but facing
outwards,
which Spence thought weird.

It was half time. Andrew, the coach, loped purposefully towards Meret and Spence.

“Spence, we need a linesman for the second half. Could you—?”

“It would be an honor. But you know, I don’t properly understand the offside rule.”

Many of the tots were not yet six years old, none of them were more than eight, but this was serious. Andrew nodded grimly and loped on with a worried frown. The rain had turned to icy hail. Meret and Spence walked along the line, changing ends. She looked up with her charming three-cornered smile. “Spence, I don’t think you
want
to understand the offside rule.”

“Gee, Meret, how could you imagine that?”

She giggled. “Did Anna breastfeed?”

“She tried, but she was working and traveling a lot. She used to express and leave me to administer the bottles. We switched to formula at three months, I seem to remember.”

“Poor Anna. I love it. I’ll be heartbroken when Charlie doesn’t want me any more.”

“It’s a bitch to lose them. They change so fast.”

“Every hour of every day. It is hell looking after children, sheer hell, but I can’t bear to think it has to come to an end. My life will be a complete blank.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Play resumed. They stood close, fists in their pockets, Meret’s fleecy-hatted head sweet and vulnerable under his gaze. Jake and Florrie’s team, despite a courageous sliding tackle from Senoz in the number two shirt (and the fucking mud will clog the machine’s filter again…), conceded yet another goal.

“Ten minutes more,” said Meret. “Unless there’s injury time.”

“Well, hey. It hasn’t been too bad. I got to hear about Delilah’s mastitis, the hail isn’t
right
in our faces, and I managed not to be linesman.”

“It has been a good day,” remarked Meret.

They laughed together. There’s definitely something Ivan Denisovitch about being a full-time parent. You learn to take comfort in small mercies.

iii

Anna was checking out at the hotel reception desk. The conference program ended at noon. Most people were staying on, especially the internationals, but Anna was going to visit Simon, as she usually did when she came to Sheffield (where “usually” means about once a year, as time speeds up and old friendships stretch out fragile threads between the nodes of meeting). Someone grabbed her around the hips and demanded hotly in her ear: “What color panties are you wearing?”

“Miguel? I don’t wear
panties,
I wear pants, or knickers, and if that’s your idea of a good line, why don’t you try writing across your forehead, I AM A DICKHEAD.”

The hands that had grabbed her hips surged over her breasts. “Wool! Oh God, fine wool, so warm, so firm, so rounded!” The reception clerk smiled indulgently. Anna stepped neatly backwards and ascertained by buttock contact that there genuinely was a rod in his trousers, he wasn’t just talking. When she turned round he was blushing like a rose. Serve you right, she thought. You see, I am not defenseless.

“Knock it off.”

“You’re checking out? This is a disaster!”

“Can’t be helped. My university can’t pay for another night here, and I’m not going to pay it myself.”

“But you know the best part of these things is after the official shit is finished—”

“You mean that
best part
where you start asking me what color panties I have on?”

Miguel shook his head, the blush still fiery on his sharp-cut cheekbones and reaching up to the already-retreating hairpin bends of crisp black hair above his temples. “That’s not all I mean. Come, have a last drink with me?”

They sat drinking lager in the huge and sumptuous South Riding lounge. Anna was thinking how Jake would be sick as a parrot when she told him the extent of the free movie catalogue in her room, how he would vicariously relish the breakfast spread. The very superior pillow-sweeties were saved for him in her bag. Miguel Peñalver, illustrious sex-biologist, Anna’s compadre at these things and on the net for years, was telling her that she had to get her act together. She had made a major impact, though their world had been slow to admit it, with TY. The second paper, especially, had an enviable citation record. Since then, what? The TY concept thrived, a healthy little colony, sending out spores in all directions: yet where was Anna?

“You’re treading water, my beautiful Anna. You have to stop minding other people’s business, seize yourself a piece of the action. You have to find something sexy. The way I did with the universal male-determining gene, long ago; my part in that drama: I made it
work
for me.” It was true, Miguel had made the big time. He could hang out with the heavies, in Shanghai and Guangzhou and Mumbai, at conferences where Anna would not be found—

“I don’t think I’m treading water.”

“Oh yes. The ‘Aether’.” Miguel sighed, looking at her with real concern over his trademark horn rims. “What can I say? Anna, think. We have a viroid that can mediate exact, specific changes to the DNA;
this is exciting.
Your Aether is an ideas thing. It is not exciting here on the shop-floor. Is that right?
In the workshop,
where you and I live. You are not a high-concept media-scientist coffee-table star; rot them all. Your strength is in the lab, beautiful lady, tweaking the software and manipulating those little cultures.”

At that legendary Geneva conference, Anna had proposed that the TY phenomenon (the existence of which had already been accepted, though people refused to grant the implications) joined other significant evidence pointing the way to a new paradigm of life science that saw all species as nodes in a continuous fabric of living particles, viroids, prions, viruses, and their tame relations, interacting with each other constantly, positively, at the nucleotide level. It was a beautiful vision, but Miguel was right. Her part in sorting out the sequence-targeting mechanism in TY had won her far more credit. Everyone knew the Aether was just a new name for Clare Gresley’s Continuous Creation: an idea that had failed; an idea that was tired and old. They switched off their brains, new evidence meant nothing.