He tries not to think about Ella, whom he hopes to find, several hours from now, on the other side of that window, in his room – i.e., his bed – where they have agreed to meet to ‘compare the findings’ of their respective days. Ella, a literature student, has been coolly bluffing her way into the Press Box at the Old Bailey for the last week or so. For his part, he’d never heard of the infamous novel until the headlines got hold of it, but Ella is gripped and garrulous, and even the sound of her voice in his ear fills him with a desire worthy of the finest dirty book.
He paces, mug in hand. He can’t bring himself to leave his fibres unattended while they heal.
He watches the clock.
He checks the fibres. Too soon.
He deposits his mug on the windowsill and busies himself with his prep. He fills the first glass micro-pipette with potassium chloride, inserts the silver thread-wire and connects it to the valve on his home-made amp. The glass pipette in his hand always brings to mind the old wooden dibber, smooth with use, that his father used during spring planting. Denis can see him still, in his weekend pullover and tie, on his knees in the garden, as he dibbed and dug for a victory that was in no hurry to come. Only his root vegetables ever rewarded his efforts.
Soon, Antony and Günter, his undergrad assistants, will shuffle in for duty. He’ll post Antony, with the camera and a stockpile of film, at the oscilloscope’s screen. Günter will take to the darkroom next to the lab, and emerge pale and blinking at the end of the day.
Outside, the transistor radio and its owner take their leave. He drains his coffee, glances at the clock, and checks his nails for sheep’s blood. How much longer? He allows himself to wander as far as the stairwell and back again. He doodles on the blackboard – a sickle moon, a tree, a stick man clinging to a branch – and erases all three.
At last, at last. He prepares a slide, sets up the Zeiss, switches on its light and swivels the lens into place. At this magnification, the fibre cells are pulsing minnows of life. His ‘dibbers’ are ready; Günter passes him the first and checks its connection to the amp. Denis squints over the Zeiss and inserts the micro-pipette into a cell membrane. The view is good. He can even spot the two boss-eyed nuclei. If the second pipette penetrates the cell successfully, he’ll make contact with the innermost life of the cell.
His wrist is steady, which means every impulse, every rapid-fire excitation, should travel up the pipette through the thread-wire and into the valve of the amplifier. The oscilloscope will ‘listen’ to the amp. Fleeting waves of voltage will rise and fall across its screen, and Antony will snap away on the Nikon, capturing every fluctuation, every trace. Günter, for his part, has already removed himself like a penitent to the darkroom. There, if all goes well, he’ll capture the divine spark of life on Kodak paper, over and over again.
Later still, they’ll convert the electrical ephemera of the day into scrolling graphs; they’ll chart the unfolding peaks and troughs; they’ll watch on paper the ineffable currents that compel the heart to life.
Cell after cell. Impulse upon impulse. An ebb and flow of voltage. The unfolding story of a single heartbeat in thousandths of a second.
‘Tell me,’ says Ella, ‘about your excitable cells. I like those.’ Their heads share the one pillow. Schubert’s piano trio is rising through the floorboards of the student hall. A cellist he has yet to meet lives below.
‘I’ll give you excitable.’ He pinches her bottom. She bites the end of his nose. Through the crack of open window, they can smell trampled leaves, wet pavement and frostbitten earth. In the night above the attic window, the stars throb.
She sighs luxuriously and shifts, so that Denis has to grip the mattress of the narrow single bed to steady himself. ‘Excuse me, Miss, but I’m about to go over the edge.’
‘Of the bed or your mental health? Have you found those canals yet?’
‘Channels.’
‘Precisely. Plutonium channels. See? I listen. You might not think I do, but I do.’
‘Potassium. Potassium channels.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘I’m afraid you didn’t. Which means…’
‘Which means…?’
He rumples his brow in a display of forethought. ‘Which means – and I say this with regret – I might just have to spank you.’ He marvels at his own audacity. He is someone new with her and, at the same time, he has never felt more himself.
‘Cheek!’ she declares, and covers her own with the eiderdown. ‘But I’m listening now. Tell me again. What do you do with these potassium channels?’
‘I map their electrical activity. I demonstrate the movement of ions – electrically charged particles – through the cell membranes.’ From the mattress edge, he gets a purchase by grabbing hold of her hip.
‘Why aren’t you more pleased?’
‘Tell me about the trial today.’
‘I thought you said those channels of yours were the challenge. The new discovery. The biologist’s New World.’
‘I’m pleased. Yes. Thanks. It’s going well.’ He throws back the eiderdown, springs to his feet and rifles through her shoulder bag for her notebook. ‘Is it in here?’
‘Is what?’
‘Your notebook.’
‘A man’s testicles are never at their best as he bends,’ she observes.
‘So did The Wigs put on a good show today?’
She folds her arms across the eiderdown. ‘I’m not talking dirty until you tell me about your potassium what-nots.’
‘Channels.’ From across the room, his back addresses her. ‘They’re simply passages or pores in the cell membrane that allow a mass of charged ions to be shunted into the cell – or out of it again if there’s an excess.’
She sighs. ‘If it’s all so matter of fact, why are you bothering?’
He returns to her side, kisses the top of her head and negotiates his way back into the bed. ‘My supervisor put me on the case, and, like I say, all’s well. I’m getting the results, rather more quickly than I expected, so I’m pleased. Relieved even. Because in truth, I would have looked a little silly if I hadn’t found them. They’re already known to exist in muscle cells, and the heart is only another muscle after all.’
‘Only another muscle?’
‘Yes.’ He nips through her notebook.
‘But this is something that has you running through Bloomsbury in the middle of the night and leaving me for a date with a computer.’
He kisses her shoulder. ‘The computer isn’t nearly so amiable.’
‘Denis Noble, are you doing interesting work or aren’t you?’
‘I have a dissertation to produce.’
‘Please. Never be, you know… take it or leave it. Never be bored. Men who are bored bore me.’
‘Then I shall stifle every yawn.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that. Tell me what you aim to discover next.’ She divests him of his half of the eiderdown, and he grins, in spite of the cold.
‘Whatever it is, you’ll be the first to know.’
‘Perhaps it isn’t an “it”,’ she muses. ‘Have you thought of that?’
‘How can “it” not be an “it”?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she says, and she wraps herself up like the Queen of Sheba. The eiderdown crackles with static, and her fine, shiny hair flies away in the light of the desk-lamp. ‘But a book, for example, is not an “it”.’
‘Of course it’s an “it”. It’s an object, a thing. Ask any girl in her deportment class, as she walks about with one on her head.’
‘Then I’ll re-phrase, shall I? A story is not an “it”. If it’s any good, it’s more alive than an “it”. Every part of a great story “contains” every other part. Every small part anticipates the whole. Nothing can be passive or static. Nothing is just a part. Not really. Because the whole, if it’s powerful enough that is, cannot be divided. That’s what a great creation is. It has its own marvellous unity.’ She pauses to examine the birt
hmark on his hip, a new discovery. ‘Of course, I’m fully aware I sound like a) a girl and b) a dreamy arts student, but I suspect the heart is a great creation and that the same rule applies.’
‘And which rule might that be?’ He loves listening to her, even if he has no choice but to mock her, gently.
‘The same principle then.’
He raises an eyebrow.
She adjusts her generous breasts. ‘The principle of Eros. Eros is an attractive force. It binds the world; it makes connections. At best, it gives way to a sense of wholeness, a sense of the sacred even; at worst, it leads to fuzzy vision. Logos, your contender, particularises. It makes the elements of the world distinct. At best, it is illuminating; at worst, it is reductive. It cheapens. Both are vital. The balance is the thing. You need Eros, Denis. You’re missing Eros.’
He passes her her notebook and taps it. ‘On that point, we agree entirely. I wait with the utmost patience.’
She studies him with suspicion, then opens the spiral-bound stenographer’s notebook. In the days before the trial, she taught herself shorthand in record time simply to capture, like any other putative member of the press, the banned passages of prose. She was determined to help carry their erotic charge into the world. ‘T. S. Eliot was supposed to give evidence for the defense today, but apparently he sat in his taxi and couldn’t bring himself to “do the deed”.’
‘Old men – impotent. Young men’ – he smiles shyly and nods to his exposed self – ‘ready.’ He opens her notebook to a random page of shorthand. The ink is purple.
‘My little joke,’ she says. ‘A sense of humour is de rigueur in the Press Box.’ She nestles into the pillow and relinquishes his half of the eiderdown. He pats down her fly-away hair. ‘From Chapter Ten,’ she begins. ‘“Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had to come into her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry into the body of a woman.” ’
‘That gamekeeper chap doesn’t hang about,’ he says, his smile twitching.
‘Quiet,’ she chides. ‘He is actually a very noble sort. Not sordid like you.’
‘My birth certificate would assure you that I’m a Noble sort.’
‘Ha ha.’
Denis lays his head against her breast and listens to the beat of her heart as she reads. Her voice enters him like a current and radiates through him until he feels himself almost hum with it, as if he is the body of a violin or cello that exists only to amplify her voice. He suspects he is not in love with her – and that is really just as well – but it occurs to him that he has never known such sweetness, such delight. He tries to stay in the moment, to loiter in the beats between the words she reads, between the breaths she takes. He runs his hand over the bell of her hip and tries not to think that in just four hours he will set off into the darkened streets of Bloomsbury, descend a set of basement steps and begin his night shift in the company of the only computer at the University of London powerful enough to crunch his milliseconds of data into readable equations.
As a lowly biologist, an ostensible lightweight among the physicists and computer guys, he has been allocated the least enviable slot on the computer, from two till four a.m. By five, he’ll be on the Northern Line again, heading for the slaughterhouse.
Ella half wakes as he leaves.
‘Go back to sleep,’ he whispers. He grabs his jacket and the hold-all.
She sits up in bed, blinking in the light of the lamp which he has turned to the wall. ‘Are you going now?’
‘Yes.’ He smiles, glancing at her, finds his wallet and checks he has enough for the hearts of the day.
‘Goodbye, Denis,’ she says softly.
‘Sweet dreams,’ he says.
But she doesn’t stretch and settle back under the eiderdown. She remains upright and naked even though the room is so cold, their breath has turned to frost on the inside of the window. He wonders if there isn’t something odd in her expression. He hovers for a moment before deciding it is either a shadow from the lamp or the residue of a dream. Whatever the case, he can’t be late for his shift. If he is, the porter in the unit won’t be there to let him in – which means he has no more time to think on it.
He switches off the lamp.
In his later years, Denis Noble has allowed himself to wonder, privately, about the physiology of love. He has loved – with gratitude and frustration – parents, siblings, a spouse and two children. What, he asks himself, is love if not a force within? And what is a force within if not something lived through the body? Nevertheless, as Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, he has to admit he knows little more about love than he did on the night he fell in love with his mother; the night their shelter was bombed; the night he felt with utter certainty the strange and secret life of the heart within his chest.
Before 1960 drew to a close, he would – like hundreds of thousands of other liberated readers – buy the banned book and try to understand it as Ella had understood it. Later still in life, he would dedicate himself to the music and poetry of the Occitan troubadours. (‘I only know the grief that comes to me, to my love-ridden heart, out of over-loving…’) He would read and re-read the ancient sacred-sexual texts of the Far East. He would learn, almost by heart, St Theresa’s account of her vision of the seraph: ‘I saw in his hands a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it.’
But what, he wanted to ask StTheresa, could the heart, that feat of flesh, blood and voltage, have to do with love? Where, he’d like to know, is love? How is love?
On the train to Totteridge, he can still smell the citrus of Ella’s perfume on his hands, in spite of all the punched paper-tape offerings he’s been feeding to the computer through the night. He only left its subterranean den an hour ago. These days, the slots of his schedule are his daily commandments.
He is allowed ‘to live’ and to sleep from seven each evening to half past one the next morning, when his alarm wakes him for his shift in the computer unit. He closes the door on the darkness of Connaught Hall and sprints across Bloomsbury. After his shift, he travels from the Comp. Science basement to the Northern Line, from the Northern Line to the slaughterhouse, from the slaughterhouse to Euston, and from Euston to the lab for his twelve-hour day. ‘Seven to seven,’ he declares to his supervisor. He arrives home to Connaught Hall for supper at seven-thirty, Ella at eight, sleep at ten and three hours’ oblivion until the alarm rings and the cycle starts all over again.
He revels briefly in the thought of a pretty girl still asleep in his bed, a luxury he’d never dared hope to win as a science student. Through the smeared carriage windows, the darkness is thinning into a murky dawn. The Thermos jiggles in the hold-all at his feet, the carriage door rattles and clangs, and his head falls back.
Up ahead, Ella is standing naked and grand on a bright woodland path in Tavistock Square. She doesn’t seem to care that she can be seen by all the morning commuters and the students rushing past on their way to classes. She slips through the gate at the western end of the square and turns, closing it quickly. As he reaches it, he realises it is a kissing-gate. She stands on the other side but refuses him her lips. ‘Gates open,’ she says tenderly, ‘and they close.’ He tries to go through but she shakes her head. When he pulls on the gate, he gets an electric shock. ‘Why are you surprised?’ she says. Then she’s disappearing through another gate into Gordon Square, and her hair is flying away in the morning light, as if she herself is electric. He pulls again on the gate, but it’s rigid.
The dream returns to him only lat
er as Marty is scooping the pluck from the first sheep on the line.
He feels again the force of that electric shock.
The gate was conductive…
It opened… It closed.
It closed.
He receives from Marty the first heart of the day. It’s hot between his palms but he doesn’t reach for his scissors. He doesn’t open the Thermos. He hardly moves. Deep within him, it’s as if his own heart has been jump-started to life.
In the operating theatre, Mr Bonham and his team have been at work for three-and-a-half hours, when at last he gives the word. Professor Noble can be disconnected from the bypass machine. His pulse is strong. The new heart, declares Mr Bonham, ‘is going great guns’.
His dream of Ella at the gate means he can’t finish at the slaughterhouse quickly enough. On the train back into town, he swears under his breath at the eternity of every stop. In the lab, he wonders if the ends of the Purkinje fibres will ever close and heal. He has twelve hours of lab time. Seven to seven. Will it be enough?
Twelve hours pass like two. The fibres are tricky today. He botched more than a few in the dissection, and the insertion of the micro-pipette has been hit and miss. Antony and Günter exchange looks. They discover he has amassed untold quantities of film, and he tells Antony he wants a faster shutter speed. When they request a lunch break, he simply stares into the middle distance. When Günter complains that his hands are starting to burn from the fixatives, Denis looks up from his micro-pipette, as if at a tourist who requires something of him in another language.
Finally, when the great window is a chapel arch of darkness and rain, he closes and locks the lab door behind him. There is nothing in his appearance to suggest anything other than a long day’s work. No one he passes on the grand staircase of the Anatomy Building pauses to look. No one glances back, pricked by an intuition or an afterthought. He has remembered his hold-all and the Thermos for tomorrow’s hearts. He has forgotten his jacket, but the sight of a poorly dressed student is nothing to make anyone look twice.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 41