Yet as he steps into the downpour of the night, every light is blazing in his head. His brain is Piccadilly Circus, and in the dazzle, he hardly sees where he’s going but he’s running, across Gordon Square and on towards Tavistock… He wants to shout the news to the winos who shelter from the rain under dripping trees. He wants to holler it to every lit window, to every student in his or her numinous haze of thought. He wants to dash up the stairs of Connaught Hall, knock on the door of the mystery cellist, and blurt out the words. Tomorrow at the slaughterhouse, he tells himself, he might even have to hug Marty and Alf. ‘They close!’
He saw it with his own eyes: potassium channels that closed.
They did just the opposite of what everyone expected.
He assumed some sort of experimental error. He went back through Günter’s contact sheets. He checked the amp and the connections. He wondered if he wasn’t merely observing his own wishful thinking. He started again. He shook things up. He subjected the cells to change – changes of voltage, of ions, of temperature. Antony asked, morosely, for permission to leave early. He had an exam – Gross Anatomy – the next day. Didn’t Antony understand? ‘They’re not simply open,’ he announced over a new ten-pound cylinder of graph paper. ‘They opened.’
Antony’s face was blank as an egg.
Günter suggested they call it a day.
But the channels opened. They were active. They opened and, more remarkably still, they closed.
Ella was right. He’ll tell her she was. He’ll be the first to admit it. The channels aren’t merely passive conduits. They’re not just machinery or component parts. They’re alive and responsive.
Too many ions inside the cell – too much stress, exercise, anger, love, lust or despair – and they close. They stop all incoming electrical traffic. They preserve calm in the midst of too much life. They allow the ion gradient to stabilise.
He can hardly believe it himself. The heart ‘listens’ to itself. Causation isn’t just upward; it’s unequivocally downward too. It’s a beautiful loop of feedback. The parts of the heart listen to each other as surely as musicians in an ensemble listen to each other. That’s what he’s longing to tell Ella. That’s what he’s discovered. Forget the ensemble. The heart is an orchestra. It’s the BBC Proms. It’s the Boston Pops. Even if he only understands its rhythm section today he knows this now. The heart is infinitely more than the sum of its parts.
And he can prove it mathematically. The super computer will vouch for him, he feels sure of it. He’ll design the equations. He’ll come up with a computer model that will make even the physicists and computer scientists stand and gawp.
Which is when it occurs to him: what if the heart doesn’t stop at the heart? What if the connections don’t end?
Even he doesn’t quite know what he means by this.
He will ask Ella. He will tell her of their meeting at the kissing-gate. He will ask for the kiss her dream-self refused him this morning. He’ll enjoy the sweet confusion on her face.
Ella at eight.
Ella always at eight.
He waits by the window until the lights go out over Tavistock Square and the trees melt into darkness.
He waits for three days. He retreats under the eiderdown. He is absent from the slaughterhouse, the lab and the basement.
A fortnight passes. A month. The new year.
When the second movement of the Piano Trio rises through the floorboards, he feels nothing. It has taken him months, but finally, he feels nothing.
As he comes round, the insult of the tube down his throat assures him he hasn’t died.
The first thing he sees is his grandson by the foot of his bed tapping away on his new mobile phone. ‘Hi, Granddad,’ Josh says, as if Denis has only been napping. He bounces to the side of the ICU bed, unfazed by the bleeping monitors and the tubes. ‘Put your index finger here, Denis. I’ll help you… No, like right over the camera lens. That’s it. This phone has an Instant Heart Rate App. We’ll see if you’re working yet.’
‘Cool,’ Denis starts to say, but the irony is lost to the tube in his throat.
Josh’s brow furrows. He studies his phone screen like a doctor on a medical soap. ‘Sixty-two beats per minute at rest. Congratulations, Granddad. You’re like… alive.’ Josh squeezes his hand and grins.
Denis has never been so glad to see him.
On the other side of the bed, his wife touches his shoulder. Her face is tired. The fluorescence of the lights age her. She has lipstick on her front tooth and tears in her eyes as she bends to whisper, hoarsely, in his ear, ‘You came back to me.’
The old words.
After a week, he’d given up hope. He realised he didn’t even know where she lived, which student residence, which flat, which telephone exchange. He’d never thought to ask. Once he even tried waiting for her outside The Old Bailey, but the trial was over, someone told him. Days before. Didn’t he read the papers?
When she opened his door in January of ’61, she stood on the threshold, like an apparition who might at any moment disappear again. She simply waited, her shiny hair still flying away from her in the light of the bare bulb on the landing. He was standing at the window through which he’d given up looking. On the other side, the copper beech was bare with winter. In the room below, the Schubert recording was stuck on a scratch.
Her words, when they finally came, were hushed and angry. They rose and fell in a rhythm he’d almost forgotten. ‘Why don’t you know that you’re in love with me? What’s wrong with you, Denis Noble?’
Cooking smells – boiled vegetables and mince – wafted into his room from the communal kitchen on the floor below. It seemed impossible that she should be here. Ella. Not Ella at eight. Ella.
Downstairs, the cellist moved the needle on the record.
‘You came back to me,’ he said.
His eyes filled.
As his recuperation begins, he will realise, with not a little impatience, that he knows nothing at all about the whereabouts of love. He knows only where it isn’t. It is not in the heart, or if it is, it is not only in the heart. The organ that first beat in the depths of Ethel in the upstairs room of Wilson & Jeffries is now consigned to the scrap heap of cardiovascular history. Yet in this moment, with a heart that is not strictly his, he loves Ella as powerfully as he did the night she re-appeared in his room on Tavistock Square.
But if love is not confined to the heart, nor would it seem is memory confined to the brain. The notion tantalises him. Those aspects or qualities which make the human condition human – love, consciousness, memory, affinity – are, Denis feels more sure than ever, distributed throughout the body. The single part, as Ella once claimed so long ago, must contain the whole.
He hopes his new heart will let him live long enough to see the proof. He’ll have to chivvy the good folk at the Physiome Project along.
He wishes he had a pencil.
In the meantime, as Denis adjusts to his new heart hour by hour, day by day, he will demonstrate, in Josh’s steadfast company, an imperfect but unprecedented knowledge of the lyrics of Jay-Z and OutKast. He will announce to Ella that he is keen to buy a BMX bike. He won’t be sure himself whether he is joking or not. He will develop an embarrassing appetite for doner kebabs, and he will not be deterred by the argument, put to him by Ella, his daughter and Josh, that he has never eaten a doner kebab in his entire life.
He will surprise even himself when he hears himself tell Mr Bonham, during his evening rounds, that he favours Alton Towers over the Dordogne this year.
The Lost Seed
Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue (b. 1969) is an Irish-born playwright, literary historian and novelist. She has published seven novels, eleven plays and four collections of short stories. Her 2010 novel, Room, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
In this world we are as seed scattered from God’s hand. Some fall on the fat soil and thrive. Some fall among thorns and are choked as they grow. Some fall on
hard ground, and their roots get no purchase, for the bitter rocks lie all around.
I, Richard Berry, make this record in the margins of the Good Book for those who come after, lest our plantation fail and all trace of our endeavors be wiped from the earth. Shielded by the Lord’s arm, our ship has traveled safe across the ocean through all travails, to make landfall at the colony of Plymouth. Today we stretched our legs on land again. The snow reaches our knees. We never saw stuff like this before. It is bright as children’s teeth and squeaks underfoot.
On the first day of June came the quake. So powerful is the mighty hand of the Lord, it makes both the earth and the sea to shake. Many of our thatched huts fell down.
But we and the settlers who came before us keep faith with our Maker and our mission. We go on hacking ourselves a space in the wilderness of Cape Cod: our settlement is to be called Yarmouth. The mosquitoes bite us till we are striped with blood. May we cast off the old sins of England like dust from our boots.
I have written nothing in this book for a time, being much occupied with laboring for the good of the Lord and this plantation. We have made new laws, and set down on paper the liberties of all freemen. The Indians have shown us how to bury dead fish with our seeds to sweeten the soil. We have sold them guns.
I am still unmarried. I thought on Sarah White but she laughs overmuch.
Of late I have been troubled by a weakness of spirit. I dwell on my mother and father and come near to weeping, for I will never see them again in this life. But I must remember that those who till the soil beside me are my brethren.
There are few enough of our congregation aboveground. Edward Preston lost his wife this past month, and so did Teague Joanes, a godly man whose field lies next to mine. For ye know not the hour. There are others in Yarmouth who seek to stir up division like mud in a creek. At Meeting they grasp at privilege and make much of themselves. But our dissensions must be thrust aside. If we do not help each other, who will help us? We are all sojourners in a strange land: we must lend aid, and stand guard against attack, and carry our faith like a precious stone. We hear of other plantations where there is not a Christian left alive.
Our court sentenced Seb Mitchel to be fined three pounds for his unseemly and blasphemous speeches. He spoke against his Maker for taking all three of Seb’s children. He will have to give his hog to pay the fine.
Our numbers in Yarmouth are increased with the coming of ships, yet I dislike these incomers, who are all puffed up and never think of our sweat that built this town. I pray they be not like the seed that springs up quick and eager but is soon parched and blasted by the noonday sun.
Sarah White is married to Hugh Norman these two months past. She is lightsome of countenance and speech. She forgets the saying of the Apostle, that wives should submit. If she does not take care, her behavior will be spoken of at Meeting. I went by her house the other day, and she was singing a song. I could not make out the words, but it was no hymn.
These days some play while others work. Things that are lawful in moderation, whether archery or foot-racing, tobacco or ale, are become traps for the weak. Each man goes his own way, it seems; there is little concord or meekness of spirit. I remind my brethren that we are not separate, one from the other. Another bad winter could extinguish us. In this rough country we stand together or we fall.
God has not yet granted me a helpmeet. I look about me diligently at the sisters in our plantation, but some are shrewish, and others have a barren look about them, or a limp, or a cast in the eye.
In the first days, I remember, we were all one family in the Lord. But now each household shuts its doors at night. Every man looks to his own wife and his own children. I think on the first days, when there was great fellowship, through all trials.
Last night there was a snow so heavy that the whole plantation was made one white. I stood in my door and saw some flakes as wide as my hand, that came down faster than the others. Every flake falls alone, and yet on the ground they are all one.
Twice in these last months a woman has come big-bellied to be married, and she and the man put a shame-face on and paid their fine to the court, but it is clear think little of their sin.
Our court sentenced Joan Younge’s master to pay her fine of two pounds, for she was rude to her mistress on the Lord’s day and blocked her ears when the Bible was read, and the master should have kept her under firm governance. I would have had the girl whipped down to the bone.
Teague Joanes is the only man now who says more to me than yea or nay.
At sunset most evenings I meet him where our cornfields join. He tells me that though marriage be our duty, it brings much grief, and from the hour a child is born his father is never without fear.
Hugh Norman’s daughter was found in the well, five years old. I went by their house and offered a word of succor to the mother, Sarah, but she would not leave off howling like a beast. One of John Vincent’s daughters was there.
Good news on the last ship. King Charles has been cast down for his Popish wickedness. Men of conscience govern England. Heathenish festivities no longer defile the name of the Lord, and there is no more Christmas.
Here we work till the light fails. We have indentured men, some blacks among them, to hoe the land, but still too much of the crop is lost in the weeds, and strangled in rankness.
Mary Vincent is fifteen, and comely, but not overmuch.
Our court found Nathaniel Hatch and his sister Lydia Hatch guilty of unclean practices. They have strayed so far from the path, they are sheep who cannot be brought home. He is to be banished to the south and she to the north. We are not to break bread with them, or so much as throw them a crust. If we happen to pass either of them in the road, we are to turn our faces away. If either tries to speak to any of our community, we are to stop up our ears. No other town in Plymouth, or any other Christian plantation, will take in a cast-out.
I gave my view in Meeting that the pair should have been put to death for their incest, as a sign to waverers. (And after all, to be cast out is itself a sort of death, for who would wish to roam this wilderness alone?) It has seemed to me for some time that our laws are too soft. If any man go after strange flesh, or children, or fowl or other beasts, even if the deed be not accomplished, it should be death. If any man act upon himself so as to spill his seed on the ground, it should be exile, at least. For the seed is most precious in these times and must not be lost.
I spoke to Mary Vincent’s father, and he was not opposed, but the girl would not have me.
I am a fruitless man. My grievous sins of pride and hard-heartedness have made me to bury my coin in the ground, like the bad servant in the parable. I have begot no children to increase our plantation. All I can do is work.
There is talk of making a law against the single life, so that every unmarried man or woman would have to go and live in some godly family. But what house would take me in?
Nathaniel Hatch is rumored to be living still in the woods to the south of Yarmouth. I wonder if he has repented of his filth. Even if the wolves have spared him, he has no people now. As for his sister, no one has set eyes on her.
Mary Vincent is to marry Benjamin Hammon.
My face is furrowed like a cornfield. The ice leaves its mark, and the burning summer turns all things brown. But I will cast off vanity. The body is but the husk that is tossed aside in the end.
Benjamin Hammon said to Teague Joanes that Sarah Norman told his wife I was an old killjoy.
It matters not.
Sin creeps around like a fog in the night. Too many of us forget to be watchful. Too many have left their doors open for the Tempter to slip in. I puzzle over it as I lie on my bed in the darkness, but I cannot tell why stinking lusts and things fearful to name should arise so commonly among us. It may be that our strict laws stop up the channel of wickedness, but it searches everywhere and at last breaks out worse than before.
I consider it my pressing business to stand sentry. Where vice craw
ls out of the shadows, I shine a light on it. Death still seizes so many of our flock each winter, we cannot spare a single soul among the survivors. Better I should anger my neighbor than stand by and watch the Tempter pluck up his soul as the eagle fastens on the lamb. Better I should be spurned and despised, and feel myself to be entirely alone on this earth, than that I should relinquish my holy labor. They call me killjoy, but let them tell me this, what business have we with joy? What time have we to spare for joy, and what have we done to deserve it?
The Lord has entered into the Temple and the cleansing has begun. Let the godless tremble, but the clean of heart rejoice.
This day by my information charges were laid against Sarah Norman, together with Mary Hammon, fifteen years old and newly a wife, the more her shame. I testified to what I witnessed. With my own eyes I saw them, as I stood by Hugh Norman’s window in the heat of the day. His wife and Benjamin Hammon’s were lying on the one bed together. They were naked as demons, and there was not a hand-span between their bodies.
It is time now to put our feet to the spades to dig up evil and all its roots.
But already there is weakening. Our court was prevailed upon to let the girl go, with only an admonition, on account of her youth. The woman’s case has been held over until the weight of business allows it to be heard. But I have faith she will be brought to judgment at last after all these years of giddiness. In the meantime, Hugh Norman has sworn he will put her and her children out of his house. I gave my belief that she should be cast out of Yarmouth.
Teague Joanes came to my house last night after dark, a thing he has never done before. He said, was it not likely the woman and the girl were only comforting each other when I saw them through the window, and what soul did not need some consolation in these hard times? I reminded him that consolation was not to be sought nor found in this life, but the next. He would have prevailed upon me to show mercy, as the Father did to his Prodigal. But I gave my belief that by their transgression Sarah Norman and Mary Hammon have strayed far beyond the reach of mercy.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 42