The Darwin Conspiracy (18 page)

“What was their mission?”

“I have no idea. It was a government lab, doing whatever they do.

Biology.”

They stood up and resumed walking and soon came to the band pavilion.

“This is all so . . . incredible,” Hugh said. “I had no idea he was in trouble.”

“Didn’t you? When he came home, you didn’t notice anything . . .

different? Anything wrong?”

“No.” But he wondered. He was not so sure.

“So you never had that talk?” It was the question he had known was coming and dreaded.

“No. There wasn’t much time. He was only there for two or three weeks before, you know, it happened. And I was away part of the time.

I was running around, trying to find work.”

“I see.” She didn’t sound convinced. “So we’ll never really know.”

“You mean—know what was troubling him?”

“That too.”

They reached the Mall, traffic moving vigorously in both directions, a line of stately government buildings across the way.

“There must be someone who knows,” he protested. “Someone who worked with him, a boss, a friend.”

“As a matter of fact, there is someone. If you want to make contact, perhaps that can be arranged. Perhaps I’ll make a dinner party and then you could meet together later on.”

“Bridge, please do. I’d be deeply grateful.”

“I shall.”

They kissed goodbye and walked in different directions, Bridget toward Buckingham Palace, Hugh toward Trafalgar Square. He turned to watch her and thought for a moment that she might turn also and wave, the way she did when she and Cal had left Paris. But she didn’t, moving away with a steady, sure gait.

Beth was already at the Prince Regent, sitting in a corner, her back to a mirror. She was wearing a clean white shirt, jeans shorts, and sneakers.

Her hair was still piled up on her head, strands curling around her face.

An empty beer glass sat on the table.

She smiled and Hugh leaned over to kiss her cheek.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.

“You’re not.”

“I’m not sorry either—just wanted to see if my apologies still piss you off.”

He went for beers. The place was crowded and loud and a cloud of smoke hung low in the air. He elbowed his way to the bar and made it back clasping two mugs in one hand—no spilling.

“Something tells me you’ve had practice at this,” she said.

“I have.”

She smiled and picked up her drink.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“The research? Fine.” She smiled. “And you?”

“Okay, pretty good.”

The screen was up again.

She looked around. “Wonder how this place would go over in New York.”

“It’d sink in a minute. Too sociable, too well lit.”

“I never really got into the whole pub scene.”

“Me neither. I like the names, though—The Golden Crown. Elephant and Castle.”

“Slug and Lettuce. That’s my favorite.”

“New York goes in for
bars.
Someplace dark, shot glasses, a suspicious Irish bartender, empty stools on both sides of you. Frank Sinatra on the box singing ‘Come Fly with Me.’ ”

“Stop. You’re making me nostalgic.”

“If you want nostalgia, I’ll show you something. Come.”

They drained their beers. She followed him outside. He led her a couple of blocks and stopped in front of Mickey Flynn’s American Pool Hall.

“Now you’re talking,” she said.

They drank two more beers each and played to a one–one tie. They bet five pounds on the third game. She broke like a demon and beat him. He paid up in coins and she scooped them into her shorts’ pocket with a grin.

They walked to Parker’s Piece and sat on the grass, watching an evening cricket match, men in white moving quickly with each
thwack
of the ball.

“I never got this game,” he said.

“It’s baseball, only longer and with stupider rules.”

They talked some more, then walked around the park and settled on a bench near Regent Terrace. It was getting dark.

“Tell me about your marriage,” he said, regretting the way he phrased it—so awkward and predictable in an I-want-to-know-you way.

But he did want to know her.

“What about it?”

“I don’t know. What went wrong?”

“Does anyone ever know the answer to that?”

“Try.”

“Well, at first it was fine, the exciting newness of it. I really cared about Martin. He was witty, charming, more knowledgeable than anyone I knew. He could dazzle you in that subtle, underspoken British way. You never read a book he hadn’t already read, but he didn’t let you know it right away. He’d drop it in after you already tried to explain what you thought it meant—and his explanation would always be more profound.

“I was the American, the breath of fresh air, the one who said what others were thinking. I was falling in love with England and Martin was part of all that. Good dinners, lots of friends, deep conversations. Rainy Sundays with a fire going and a huge pile of newspapers next to my chair. Country weekends in drafty old houses. Dinners at Oxford with half a dozen different wines. Radical politics filled with rectitude and judgments—judgments about everything and everyone. It was all very . . . secure.”

“Sounds good.”

“Yes, it was for a while. But then Martin got sick. He began acting strangely, wild mood swings, deep depressions. His friends told me he had been that way off and on for years before I met him. I would have stuck with him—at least I like to think I would have—but we were still too new to each other. I wasn’t really in love with him, I mean, not in a head-over-heels sort of way. I thought when we were married that that was okay because my love would grow over time and become stronger.

But that didn’t happen. It didn’t grow. We became just friends. It all came to an end one day at a luggage carousel at Heathrow.”

“Explain.”

“We were away on a trip. We had been fighting almost nonstop for over a year and we went on one of those desperate, let’s-work-it-all-out trips. We went to a little island off the coast of Montenegro, a place called Svedi Stefan, with converted fishermen’s cottages. It was beautiful. But we began having rows. The littlest thing would set us off. Martin got violent, then depressed. One day while I was out swimming, he trashed the room. He knocked out every single windowpane. We had to leave. On the plane back he wouldn’t sit next to me and then we tried to make up and we did make up and there were more promises—but I knew they wouldn’t work. As we got to the airport and were waiting for our suitcases, I looked at him. His jaw was set in a hard, familiar way and I suddenly realized it was hopeless. So we talked and decided to call it quits. We got divorced. That was two years ago. And we’re on better terms now, we’re almost friendly. I sometimes feel there’s no one who knows me inside out the way he does.”

The words had come out in a rush, and when she stopped, she looked directly at him.

“Here we go again,” she said, running her hand through her hair.

“Talking about me. How about you? Tell me something about you.”

“Interesting, isn’t it, this need to exchange confidences? It’s like a script or something.”

“No, you don’t—you’re just trying to escape. Tell me something.”

“Like what?”

“Tell me about your brother.”

He glanced at her. She was looking at him searchingly, ready to listen. He remained silent for a moment, wondering whether to plunge ahead.

“His name was Cal. He was older than me and I looked up to him.

He was everything I wanted to be. In some ways he was more of a father than my real father. And then, six years ago, he died in an accident. Except that he didn’t have to—I mean, I think maybe I could have saved him.”

There—he had said it. It was out.

“What do you mean?”

“He came home to Connecticut from his job in Oxford—he was working in a lab there. He was a biologist, brilliant, very committed.

We had always been close, but this time, for some reason, we were a little awkward together, maybe because it had been several years since we had seen each other. And so this day, we went out to Devil’s Den, that’s a swimming hole we used to go to when we were kids—rocks, a steep cliff, a big waterfall. Way off in the woods. You have to walk an hour just to get there. I guess we wanted to connect again, the way we did when we were young.”

He paused, took a breath, then continued.

“We always knew it was dangerous—to swim at the bottom of the falls. We never did it. We were told by someone . . . I don’t remember who . . . all the kids knew it, that you never went in there. Something about the way the water falls, when it hits it becomes aerated. It churns around and just won’t support you. Trying to stay afloat is like trying to tread water in thin air. There was this story of some kid who went in and just went down like a stone. So we all knew you didn’t go there.

“And this day Cal and I thought for old time’s sake we’d go to Devil’s Den. It was a hot day. I carried a six-pack. We didn’t know if we’d swim or not, up above the falls where it was safe, but we had our suits on under our pants just in case. And we got to the waterfall and we were walking up the trail next to it . . . And he slowed down. I got a bit pissed off, it was so hot and I decided I wanted to swim. I wanted to get there and put the beer in the water and he seemed to be holding back so I went on up ahead—”

He stopped again. The memory loop played.

“—and then I don’t really know what happened. I was walking ahead and I heard something behind me, a sound, a sort of cry, and I turned around and I saw Cal going down, he was falling against the rocks, only sort of slowly, like maybe he could catch himself . . . But then he went faster and he actually spun around, tumbled upside down, and went 
straight into the water. I saw the splash. I saw his head up for a moment and then an arm, I could tell he was struggling, and then suddenly he disappeared below the surface. He just wasn’t there anymore. Nothing, nowhere. And I ran down the slope as fast as I could but when I got there, there was nothing I could do.

“I was just looking at the water—it was dark and filled with little bubbles. I thought . . . I thought I should go in, jump in after him. But I was afraid. Because I knew if I went in, I’d never come out. And so, that was it, I just let him drown. I didn’t even try to save him. I went looking for a stick, some kind of branch maybe, to shove down in the water, see if he could catch it down there. But there was nothing. And then time seemed to be going by very fast. I remember thinking, How long can he hold his breath? How long can a human being live without breathing? What happens? When does brain damage set in? And then I thought, Not this long. I went downstream to see if maybe he came up down there but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere, no one was around and suddenly it just seemed very quiet. I couldn’t tell how much time went by, I couldn’t hear anything much, even the waterfall sounded far away.

“So . . . I had to hike back. I went to the road and got in my car and drove to a crossroads where there was a phone and I called the cops.

They came and we went back in and they looked a while, and called for more reinforcements. And then this one cop comes over and puts his arm around me and gives me a cell phone and asks if I want to call anyone. And so I call my dad—I had to walk off in the woods by myself to do it—I remember looking up at the trees and the leaves and thinking, So how do you do this, what do you say? How do you tell someone that there were two of you and now there’s only one, the other one’s gone?

What words do you use? How do you say, I let him die? And he answered. And I don’t remember what words I did use. But he came.

He knew right where we were. And by then more police were there and they dredged for his body, and Cal came up. He had the hook caught in one leg, and he looked so pale. His hair was plastered down on his head and he looked water-logged; he weighed so much it took three men to pull him on the rocks. They didn’t even try resuscitation.

“So that’s it. I had a brother and that’s how he died.”

By now it was dark. Headlights from Gonville Place swept through 
the trees. Beth, who had been holding his hand, reached over and pulled his head down to her chest.

He said: “If I hadn’t been so . . . childish, if I hadn’t gone up ahead, maybe I could have saved him . . . caught him before he fell, stopped him somehow.”

“That doesn’t sound likely.”

He couldn’t talk any more without crying.

They sat there for a long time not saying anything.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve never told anyone all this before—not like this.”

“Everyone has a secret—that’s what my mother used to say. Some are good to talk out, some are not. Yours is one of the good ones.”

Hugh sat up and looked at her.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know. Anyone can see that.”

“I always felt—I don’t know how to say this—I always felt my father favored him. Cal was clearly so much better than me, in every way.

And so the real thought I had later that day, and the next day, and just about every day ever since, was”—he paused, it was hard to talk—“that
the wrong son died.
”

“Your father never said that, did he?”

“No, not in so many words. But I bet he thought it.”

She reflected for a moment, then said softly: “You could be right.

Some parents do have favorites. Maybe some even love one child more than another. But what’s certain is that many more children believe they’re not deeply loved even when they are, especially kids growing up in the shadow of an older brother or sister. So there’s the distinct possibility that you’re wrong. Then think of all the needless suffering you’re causing yourself. And maybe even your father.

“And another thing,” she added. “If you had gone into the water after him, then your father would’ve had no one at all.”

“There’s something else,” he said. “I’ve been finding out some things recently.”

“Like what?”

“That Cal quit his job at the lab. That he was depressed and needed help.”

“It sounds like you want to get to the bottom of that.”