The Sister (9 page)

“So what exactly is self-awareness, then? Is it a soul, do you think?” someone asked.

Clive’s trial was far from over.

“Well, that’s an issue for a different kind of lecture entirely.”

“I know, but I’m interested in your view. You seem very definite on all of it,” someone pointed out acerbically.

“I am a reductionist, so I do not think that self-awareness is a spiritual attribute. I think that, perhaps, it is a by-product of evolution.”

“By-product? Like a mistake?” came the reply.

“No. Well, I don’t know….” Clive paused, but it was obvious he did. “Perhaps,” he continued tentatively, “as animals get more advanced in their biochemical processes it becomes too complicated to try to orchestrate everything in terms of reflex and reaction. It is, in fact, a simplification to make the creature’s brain responsible for determining its own solutions, to be able to learn by memory and recognition, to compute its surroundings and make a decision for itself.”

He said it all so quickly, as if he’d rehearsed it many times, that it sounded unbelievable, like an actor reciting lines his heart wasn’t in. I was hot and uncomfortable and it occurred to me that it was as if I had dreamed up my worst nightmare and made it a reality: Bernard’s hand was still on my bottom, and now he was moving his thumb up and down in a caress. Was it voluntary or involuntary? It was the same question to which the entire room wanted the answer. Did Bernard think this united us as allies in the team he had talked of? Clive looked exhausted. The crowd drew closer. I could hear the scoffs and general contempt for Clive’s latest theorizing.

“I don’t have the answers,” he was saying with exasperation. “It is my hypothetical belief that everything, including self-awareness, can be reduced to chemical and mechanical reactions, and minute anatomical changes within our central nervous system.”

The walrus-man looked askew at Clive in a mixture of pity and disgust. Clive scratched his beard. The group got bigger and bigger until I now saw swarms of people crowding in on us, encircling us, shrinking us. I couldn’t think straight. The floor melted underfoot and I began to sway as if I were on a boat. The whole of The Hand stroked my bottom now, circularly. The ceiling started to drop, incrementally. The door at the far side of the room was now jammed full of men with beards and long necks all asking questions at the same time, and they were using up the air in the room, they were taking huge breaths of it, gulping it greedily. The Hand stroked harder in big, unrepressed, flat-handed circles, as if it were rubbing beeswax into furniture. Clive scratched his beard. All of a sudden I was naked. Bernard was a dog full of instinct, panting, dribbling. I couldn’t breathe. I closed my eyes so I could go to that place in my head where I would be able to keep calm as I slowly asphyxiated.

At last I heard Bernard’s sonorous voice, not right by my side, but in front of me, a yard or so away. It was unmistakable—he was discussing some sort of water heater he’d had installed in his house, then let out one of his loud distinctive laughs. I opened my eyes sharply and saw him—as I’d thought—two paces in front of me, waving his hands about as he spoke.
Both
hands. It was only as I looked at him that The Hand That Cupped My Bottom gently dissolved away. I glanced discreetly over my shoulder to check that there was
nothing there.

I was still staring at Bernard’s hands when someone else’s passed him a plate of vol-au-vents. Rather than one hand taking one and the other passing on the plate, both hands reached out for a vol-au-vent, and both picked one up delicately between its thumb and forefinger. While holding the surplus fingers aloft Bernard effetely popped them into his enormous mouth, one at a time, and after each I watched him rub the tips of his finger and thumb together to rid them of pastry crumbs. Nausea rose up my throat. Surely those same fussy fingers had been rubbing my bottom. Yet I’d still felt his hand there when I saw it wasn’t. I was a little hot and very confused.

A
LL THE WAY HOME
on the train Clive was silent. When we finally got in, late that evening, Maud gave me a glass of sherry but I couldn’t drink it. With Clive’s gout prohibiting him, I think she would have liked me to have a drink with her, but the last time I’d tried it I hadn’t liked it.

She had made an effort with supper. She’d made pork in cider sauce and put the silver on the table, and I knew she wanted us to sit down and tell her everything about our first lecture together as a scientific team. She had been so excited about it that morning, before we left, and had kept giving me bits of advice and thinking of things I should be ready to expect—listen, don’t talk, keep well back and to the side of the stage so you don’t feel daunted by a room full of people—and I understood she’d be excited to know how it had gone. Now, of course, I can appreciate that we should have given her the time, that we should have sat down and eaten her supper and told her the little details of the day that would help make her feel a part of it, but Clive and I were so weary that we went straight to bed. Maud stopped me as I was going up the stairs.

“Are you sure you won’t have a quick drink?” she asked, pouring herself another.

I shook my head apologetically.

Then she asked me a strange question: “How many of them didn’t have a beard?”

Funny, I thought. “All the men had beards,” I said.

“Oh, I know that,” she said, laughing. “What I really meant was were there any women?”

It was then that I understood the true position of my unchosen career. Not only would it involve a great deal of confrontation and debate, but I would have two ongoing battles: first, like Clive, to be accepted in academic circles without the certificates to prove it, and second, to be a woman in this men-only sphere, even though the famous Bernard Cartwright had welcomed me personally to the team.

CHAPTER
9

Another Trap

I
WANT TO TELL YOU
about what happened four or so years later. It was 1959, the year that changed everything. It was the year of the Plymouth Convention and the year—I’ll never forget it—that Bernard Cartwright threw down his challenge.

But first of all I should tell you about Vivi. While I was busy with Clive and the moths, Vivi had molded herself into a new life in London, sharing a flat with two girls she’d met on her secretarial course. She visited us irregularly, even though Maud was always trying to coax her home, but she wrote every other week. Maud always got to the letters first. She’d fetch the post the instant it arrived, then walk back into the kitchen flicking through the envelopes, hoping to spot Vivi’s handwriting.

After her course, Maud had hoped Vivi would come home and find a job locally, but instead she went to work in a London firm of solicitors. A few months on she’d left and found herself something more interesting, she said, in a newspaper publishing house, but even then she was unsettled. She moved to a doctor’s surgery, and then became personal secretary to a freelance journalist. I lost count, after that, of her different jobs. It seemed to me that each time she came home she’d moved on again, and she always managed to persuade us that the next place would be so much better than the last.

I don’t think Maud had realized when Vivi left home that it would be for good. But Vivi had wanted to make something of her life, and neither a crumbling Dorset mansion nor an attic full of moths was enough. One day, she wrote in one of her letters, she was going to work on a film set, perhaps even at Pinewood, because she’d met someone who knew someone who wanted someone.

During that time Clive and I had formed a remarkable partnership and our research enterprise at Bulburrow was saturated with work and grants. It wasn’t all down to our brilliant teamwork. The fifties, you might remember, were a boom time for experimental science. They saw the invention of the electron microscope and the electronic chip, the widespread use of antibiotics and immunization, Watson and Crick’s double-helical DNA, and then came genetics.

The moth, along with the fruit fly
Drosophila,
became the experimental animal of the moment, for all the same reasons that Clive had identified twenty years before, and by the late 1950s it seemed as if everybody wanted a little bit of moth. The traditional lepidopterists were swept aside as all the other scientific faculties—molecular biologists, biochemists and, in particular, the new evolutionary geneticists—hijacked the moth for their research. Kettlewell published his now famous illustrations of industrial melanism with the Peppered Moth, and the evolutionary geneticists Sheppard and Fisher used many species of moth to help interpret the laws of inheritance and the chromosomal behaviors that allow for continuous variation. Chemists took over the field, trying to find answers, equations and formulas to the questions that Clive, Bernard and others like them had marveled at for years: identifying the specific compounds that control its life cycle, instigate hibernation or emergence, the molecular events that attract a moth to light, that release volatile oil from a female’s scent gland and the structures in a male that can detect it from a very many miles downwind. These considerations, along with the chemical assaying of every compound—pigments, hormones, pheromones, enzymes, neural inhibitors and stimulators—or, at least, an investigation into how they worked or behaved chemically, were suddenly up for grabs and it seemed like a race to be first there and first to publish.

Obviously Clive and I had a bit of a head start as Clive’s solitary life’s work, often derided in the past for being out on a limb between two scientific fields, was now being ambushed by institutional research looking for big business. We got busy. We published more than ten papers a year, gave twice as many lectures, and the grants rolled in steadily.

Finally I ought to tell you about the Robinsons trap. It was the only other real excitement that happened during those four apprenticeship years. It was Maud who first read about it in one of her subscription magazines,
British Countryside,
I think. The Robinsons were two brothers from Kent who launched a revolutionary new design of light trap on the market, and it was causing more than a small stir. I remember Maud specifically bringing the magazine up to the laboratory when it arrived with the post. She stood at the end of the workbench and sensationally read out the astonishing leader article: “A Robinsons set on a single night in Hampshire collects more than 20,000 specimens of the Setaceous Hebrew Character, Amathes c-nigrum L., Caradrinidae, along with vast numbers of other species.”

I have never understood why Clive didn’t rush out and buy one then and there but he didn’t seem interested, even though stories of its success were soon to head up every entomological magazine of the season. The Rolls-Royce of moth traps, as it became known, consisted of a mercury-vapor discharge lamp set in a cleverly designed glass bell jar. It worked in a similar way to a lobster pot. From dusk onwards, when most moths are on the wing, they head into the top of the huge bell-shaped jar, attracted by the light, and, once in, they haven’t the wit to get out. The Robinsons trap radically revolutionized the capturing of moths and—more shockingly—altered the current understanding of their national distribution and rarity. Moths that were once thought to be rare were suddenly shown to be abundant and others existed in places they had never before been found. So, you see, the entire bank of national statistics based on more than half a century’s worth of scrupulously gathered distribution data was deemed invalid overnight and the auction rooms, which at the time made a good trade dealing in rare insect collections, were left reeling as prices plummeted overnight on those not-so-rare rarities that passed under their hammer. Not even that made Clive rush to order one.

When I asked Maud, she told me that of course Clive would like one but pride got in the way. She said he’d always made his own equipment, to his own specifications, which he’d perfected over many years, and he refused to believe that his own designs might not give optimal performance. I didn’t believe her. Clive wasn’t the conceited type.

O
VER THOSE
wonderful partnership years Clive never let go of his lifetime ambition—that of resolving the composition of Pupal Soup and, with it, revealing the secrets of metamorphosis—and as each autumn came, it led us, with trowel and chisel in hand, to the broad rides in the local woods or the sheltered borders alongside the furrowed fields in search of those small elusive pupae that had hooked themselves so deeply into Clive’s fascination. Until the following spring we were thrown into this ambitious pursuit, analyzing the contents of cocoons at different stages of their development to try to find the pattern, the trigger, the golden key, to the miraculous process of metamorphosis. But it was frustrating and futile, and we found few patterns. A team in America had reported that pigmentation within the developing imago was affected by temperature, but from our own observations we found temperature had no effect either on the development of the pupa or on the initiation of the reorganization of the imaginal buds. Neither did we find it to influence or control the speed of destruction of the larval tissues and organs by the phagocytes, but that the process varied between a few days and a few years, depending on the species. We also saw no effect on the active phase of pupal life, the reorganization of the new insect or the time of emergence. Having discounted temperature, we looked for other triggers, such as hormones and changes in polarity or pH, but three years on we were no closer to finding the stimulus, catalyst or control that activates the onset of genetic reorganization.

Eventually we had some successes in other areas, especially on the subject of pigments. I particularly remember Clive’s heightened enthusiasm when he discovered that the red pigment in red British moths—the Scarlet Tigers, the Burnets and Red Underwings—was not the same compound found in our red butterflies but, rather, one prevalent in continental species, which, Clive said, shed new light on the British moths’ evolutionary pathway, the details of which he discussed at length in a lecture during an international entomology convention in Plymouth.

This convention brings me to the events of 1959 because it took place in the spring of that year. Clive culminated his lecture—unbeknownst to me—with a most impressive stunt that was to become the talking point for the rest of the three-day convention.

There are only two British moths, the Brimstone and the Swallow-tailed Moth, to share a fluorescent yellow pigment in their wings, and they are both classified
Selidosemindae
because of it. But Clive dramatically illustrated the flaw in this universal classification, in front of the entire auditorium, when he passed an extract of the fluorescing compound from each of these two species under ultraviolet light. It showed—beyond any doubt—that the two phosphorescing compounds are in fact of a very different chemical makeup. With that redoubtable demonstration Clive then concluded by calling for a complete taxonomic overhaul of the entire genera based on new biochemical evidence. It became hotly debated: Should we, or should we not, reclassify when we find evolutionary pathways contradicting our observational classification and nomenclature? As you might imagine, Clive was punctilious when it came to correct classification.

The strangest part for me was that I had no idea, not even a suspicion, that Clive was going to perform this spectacle and challenge the entire classification system. I knew by heart the lecture he was going to give, I’d heard him practice it enough, but he’d never rehearsed this last little stunt. You’d have thought he would have mentioned it, but it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to everybody else.

The most memorable thing about the Plymouth Convention, however, was what happened when we got home.

We’d set off on a Tuesday afternoon and arrived back at teatime on Friday. When we walked in, the house was quiet and there was no one to greet us. I almost skidded on a pile of post on the hall floor. In previous years Basil might have been the first to the door but he’d died a couple of years before when his kidneys packed up. We called for Maud but, unusually, there was no reply. In the kitchen a great pile of washing up haunted the sink and the overloaded bin smelt sweetly putrid. It was most unlike Maud. In the library the cushions on the sofa were limp, the curtains half drawn. A saucerless cup and an apple core, browned with age, had been left stickying on the mahogany card table, sure to mark it. In other places things were curiously out of place: one of the ancestors had been knocked and tilted on the wall up the stairs, a small framed certificate had fallen off the paneling onto the floor and the whole house had a mildly shambolic feel.

Clive moved quickly now, checking the rooms downstairs one by one. I followed him. I felt the slow, sickening panic of a child who loses sight of its mother for a moment in town. Clive didn’t speak but I felt his fear. It was in his short, sharp steps, in the way he swung open each door as if boldly standing up to his own dreaded imagination, in the curt, composed way he enunciated her name—“Maud”—as he entered each room, with intensity but not volume. My mouth was dry. My stomach was dancing. First we checked the downstairs—the potting shed, the shallow pond in the orangery, the steep stone steps descending from the loggia, round the back to the parlor where the meat hooks hang…

There was no sign of her downstairs so we made our way back to the hall. But just as Clive began up the stairs ahead of me, I saw, to my unimaginable relief, Maud at the top, sashaying elegantly down in a green and blue peacock-print evening dress.

“Hello, darlings,” she called halfway down, glowing with exuberance. “Good trip?”

Her dress was cut high and rounded at the neck, and pinched her small waist with a sash. I hadn’t seen her dressed up for a long time. Tight, lace-edged sleeves finished on her upper arm and two lengths of amber-colored beads hung in low loops round her neck, tied together in a loose knot. It was the kind of thing she had worn when she was much younger. Tarnished silver bracelets jangled round her wrists and a quarter-glass of sherry dangled off her right hand. She might have been neglecting the housework but she’d certainly made an effort with herself. Undoubtedly she was striking.

“It looks like you’ve had a party,” said Clive, glancing into the kitchen.

“Oh, I did, darling. I’ve had lots of parties while you were away. And don’t worry about the clearing up. It’s all under control.”

“I’m not worried,” he said, meeting her on the stairs with a kiss.

I was still marveling at her appearance. I was sure I’d never seen her in that dress, yet it reminded me of something. I thought if I stopped trying to think of it, it would spill unexpectedly from my memory sometime soon.

“Did you really have parties?” I asked.

“No, I’m just
teasing
you, darling.” She made a funny face and held my earlobe, shaking it a little. “Pulling your ear…”

She seemed animated, restless. “I’ve got you a present, Clive. It can be an early birthday,” she said coquettishly, even though his birthday wasn’t this side of the year.

She put her glass on the arm of the settle in the hall and pulled out from under it a large box wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. She said, “There you are, darling,” and smoothed down the waist, then the sides of her dress with her hands.

“What do you think?” she said. “Do you recognize it?”

He looked down at the parcel. “No. I have no idea. What is it?”

She laughed. “Open it,” she urged. “Go on, open it.”

Clive took out his pocketknife. Deftly, he sliced the string and split off the brown paper. I caught sight of the writing on the box before all the paper had come away.

“It’s a Robinsons trap!” I exclaimed, as the paper fell away.

“So it is,” Clive said plainly.