Visibility

by Boris Starling

  The fog had thrown up enough of all these, even as it had worked both for and against Papworth and Kazantsev. Against them, in that it had kept them in London when they had wanted to make their escape. For them, in that it had given them the chance to try to get the material Stensness had promised, an offer of whose existence they hadn’t even been aware until pretty much the end of the conference.

  The microdots had always been a bonus, unexpected but desirable. In the end, it was Papworth’s determination to seize them that had got him caught, for without that he would have left this morning when the fog had first partially cleared, and Herbert would never have found him.

  Had he settled just for the defection and the scientists, he would have got clean away; and that would have been enough, for surely Pauling would have discovered the secret eventually. Scientific progress might not be linear, but it was inexorable.

  Herbert looked at Papworth, thinking that something was missing. After a few seconds, he knew what it was.

  Papworth had told him what had happened, and when, and where, and how; what he had not told him was why.

  Not why he had killed Stensness and de Vere Green—that was obvious. But why he had chosen to spy for the Soviet Union in the first place, why he had chosen to betray his country.

  And even as he studied Papworth, Herbert realized where the answer lay.

  Not in the merits of communism over capitalism, or in the preference for world peace over Cold War, but in Papworth himself.

  Any question of loyalty came down to something very simple. To betray, one must first belong; and Papworth had never belonged. He was a vain misfit for whom there was only one cause worthy of his loyalty: Ambrose Papworth and his God-given right to have the world arranged the way he wanted it.

  The answer lay, for lack of a more precise phrase, in Papworth’s DNA.

  Perhaps deep down Papworth had always wanted to be caught, Herbert thought, if only because now the whole world would know his name. There would be a trial, and even the kind of mass opprobrium he could expect would, for such a man, be better than the alternative: an anonymous exile in a Moscow apartment where, after a couple of years, few people would know what he had done, and even fewer would care.

  “So,” Papworth asked, “what kind of deal are we talking?”

  “You’ll have to sort that out back in Washington.”

  Papworth’s jaw dropped. “But you told me …”

  Herbert spoke in a language Papworth could understand. “I lied.”

  * * *

  It was past nine when Herbert made it back to Guy’s, and by then both Hannah and Mary were asleep. Loath to wake them, he told Angela that he would be back in the morning.

  The fog was a strange patchwork quilt: a black nightmare on the Strand but bright and clear at Piccadilly Circus, fine at Marble Arch, and impenetrable in Bayswater.

  Three thousand people were queuing for tickets at Stratford tube station because the buses had stopped.

  River traffic was locked down again.

  The opera at Sadler’s Wells had been halted after Act One because the audience could no longer see the stage.

  Everybody had a fog story, just as everybody used to have a bomb story.

  No one had a fog story as good as his, Herbert thought.

  On the way home, Herbert realized what had been nagging him at Rosalind’s flat the day before.

  Rosalind had been speaking about the way in which she ascertained her facts and fitted the theory around them, and she had compared this with the tactics of Watson and Crick, who started with a theory and saw where the facts fitted.

  Herbert had been following Rosalind’s path, and he should have gone with Watson and Crick instead. He had let the facts cloud his judgments; no, not the facts, but rather what he had seen to be the facts.

  Like Rosalind, Herbert had trusted in what he had seen, and he had been mistaken. Time and again, even after Hannah had shown him the error of his ways, he had looked without seeing.

  In some ways, he had been as blind as Hannah.

  No wonder scientists did what they did, Herbert thought; they preferred science’s exactness and the perfection of its truths. Humanity was rather messy in comparison.

  Stella was waiting for Herbert when he got back.

  He looked at her, and could not for the life of him read the expression on her face.

  There could have been admiration, surprise, jealousy, or uncertainty; there could have been all, or there could have been none.

  Stella’s favors did not come for free, Herbert thought, so why should her emotions? Her makeup was designed to hide as much as to accentuate. Whatever she had learned in her life had doubtless come the hard way; she wasn’t about to make the path of knowledge easy for anyone else.

  He felt a strange desire to screen his face from the scorching blaze of Stella’s eye.

  “Well, my love,” she said at last, “good luck to you.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Herbert, don’t take this the wrong way; it’s good that you’ve found a woman, you know? Now you don’t have to come and visit me no more. You understand?”

  He nodded numbly, but no, he did not understand; there could be very few men in the world who had been rejected by a whore.

  “No,” Stella said, “you don’t see, do you?” She paused, trying to find the right words. “It’s not a personal thing—well, it is, but not in the way you think. It’s because I like you, Herbert; you’re a good man, you never take me for granted. I like you, so I want you to be happy, and to be happy you need a nice girl, and if you have a nice girl then you won’t have to come and see me no more.”

  She grinned, a warrior under her war paint, and he smiled back.

  “Yes,” she said, satisfied. “Now you see.”

  December 9, 1952

  TUESDAY

  The trial of Bentley and Craig was starting at nine o’clock, so Herbert needed to mind the fort at New Scotland Yard, even though he wanted nothing more than a break. He stopped by Guy’s at seven. Even at that hour, Hannah was already back in with Mary.

  Mary was still angry and shaken by what had happened the previous day, and nor was she shy of telling him so.

  “What the hell do you think you were doing, Herbert, bringing those people in here like that? That man tried to kill me, did you see? I can’t eat solids now, just tea or milk, and they won’t even put some brandy in it like I asked them to.”

  “Mrs. Smith, it not Herbert’s fault,” Hannah said.

  “It’s a disgrace, letting …”

  Mary started to choke, her lungs not up to coping with the force of her vitriol. Hannah reached across and put her hand flat against Mary’s stomach.

  “Breathe, Mrs. Smith,” she said calmly. “Breathe from stomach, use stomach muscles there. In and out, my hand I feel move … Good, good.” She smiled. “There! You get better already.”

  Mary’s choking subsided to a gurgle.

  “Now perhaps you’ll listen to me, Herbert,” Mary said. “Think about some other line of work…”

  It was a familiar argument, and one that Herbert had no intention of resuming, at least not there and then.

  There was a strange silence, as though they were all waiting for something they dared not identify. It was Hannah who broke it.

  “Mrs. Smith,” Hannah said. “What did you call him?”

  Mary looked from Herbert to Hannah. “What did I call who?”

  “Herbert’s twin. The one who died.”

  There was a rushing from deep within Herbert, a swelling wave which came breaking up and over his body.

  He was gasping for breath, not just through his mouth and nose, but through every organ, every pore in his skin, as though all the air in the world would not be enough for this immense, inner panting. Perhaps this was what being born felt like.

  Herbert knew, even without looking at his mother, that Hannah was right.

  Reactions flitted like seasons across Mary’s
face; disbelief, fury, shame.

  “Alexander,” she said at length. “I called him Alexander.”

  Who else would have known, but a twin herself? It must have been so clear to Hannah, the girl who could not see; all the things, large and small, that Herbert had revealed to her, while refusing to believe it for himself; refusing, indeed, even to entertain the prospect, except at a depth so distant as to be measureless. The answer had been there all along, and he had erected the thickest of fogs around it.

  “I was going to tell you, Herbert, but I never found the right time,” Mary said. “Perhaps when you got married, or had children of your own; but you never have, have you?”

  And the longer she had gone without telling him, the harder telling him had become; the issue no longer simply the secret itself, but also the keeping of it.

  He saw in a flash what he had showed Hannah without even realizing: the model car with one wheel missing which he used as a paperweight and which she had stood on in his flat; the painting he had bought in Portobello Market, the one of a man banging his fist against a mirror in frustration because there was no reflection in it.

  His mother was still talking through the relief of catharsis.

  “You were locked together in the womb, Herbert. You came out normally, head first, but Alexander was a breech birth, and he couldn’t breathe. Oh, Herbert, how you pined for him when you were a baby; you cried for two years, never a break.”

  He had come into this world a murderer; wrapped around his brother and taking his breath from him. Now he came to this bedside a murderer, having struggled with Mengele the way he had struggled with Alexander; again Herbert had been nearest the air, and again he had survived.

  Too much of him, too little of Alexander. No wonder he had cried for two years.

  “They wouldn’t even let me hold him, Herbert! They gave you to me instead. I had the rest of my life to hold you. I wanted Alexander, just for a short time. Mine! He was mine! They did the postmortem without telling me, and then suggested that I mourn for a while and get over it. How could I mourn someone I hadn’t even seen?”

  How, indeed? And so she had idealized Alexander, forever perfect in imaginary life; a shining triumph wherever Herbert disappointed, popular wherever he withdrew, pillar of the community wherever he skulked in dingy isolation, husband and father wherever he was neither. Alexander; the invented him, braver, cleverer, more lovable, more daring, more of all the things in which Herbert was less.

  “I had never been special, Herbert. Having twins was the only thing that had ever made me stand out; months and months of excitement, people asking every day, sharing in my joy; and then gone, all gone, just like that. An anticlimax; no, a catastrophe. I had been admired; now, I was pitied. No one wanted to talk about it, and those that did said things like ‘You can always have another one’ or ‘How lucky you’ve still got one left.’ Lucky? Would anyone dare say that to someone who had lost a single child? Not in a month of Sundays. But they said it, Herbert. They said it.”

  And she could never escape her loss, because the reminder was there every day, crying, falling ill, demanding her time and attention, tainted by a million quotidian flaws. Half a pregnancy meant half a child. Herbert’s existence was Alexander’s absence, Herbert’s birthday was Alexander’s deathday; how could she celebrate one while mourning the other?

  Hannah followed him out of the room.

  “When I tell you of Mengele and Esther,” she said, “it the first time I tell anyone, because until then I feel no one will understand, but I thought you were different, and I hoped you to be worthy of it. The way you react, I know that you do understand, and that you are worthy; and I know why.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Is not my position. Is for your mother to do so.”

  “When you forced her to.”

  Hannah laughed. “A little kick in the backside is not always so bad.”

  “When did you first think that—about Alexander?”

  “The first night, when I saw your loneliness, your complete isolation, because that only come from losing something in the heart. You the watcher, solid and solitary; me the doer, fiery and independent. They are not so far apart, Herbert; they are just different ways of expressing the same feeling.”

  A breeze stroked Herbert’s forehead as he walked through the car park; then a sudden gust, skidding pages of a newspaper across the ground like tumbleweed.

  He looked up, and there was the sun, back with an insouciant shrug as if it had never been away. Clouds hurried across its face, escorting away the fog and its chemical storehouse of unwanted outriders: soot, ash, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, organic acids, methane, acetylene, phenols, ketones, and ammonia, all ripped away on the east wind.

  Herbert would have liked to think that the complacency and self-interest which had caused the fog in the first place were also disappearing, but somehow he doubted it.

  His mother was his mother, he thought. He would tell her that she had betrayed him, and then he would tell her that he would always love her. Why else would that be, except for something as yet undiscovered which had been passed from her cells to his?

  She had, at least, given him the reason for his loneliness, perhaps for his life itself, and it was now that he knew the reason—perhaps only now that he knew the reason—that he could begin work on redressing it.

  In the ambulance the day before, he had seen that he was someone who could love, because he had despaired at what he might lose. No longer would there be the gray choke of emptiness, because love lived, too; not as prophylactic but as counterweight, a provider of purpose.

  The concourse at London Bridge was half-full, and Herbert smiled, at everything and at nothing in particular.

  He was among people, and that was enough.

  Perhaps life had brought Herbert more than his fair share of darkness, but without it the light would not have seemed as special as it did now.

  They were each as valid as the other, he saw, the darkness and the light; and the only way to deal with them was to endure one and enjoy the other, for as long or as short a time as they lasted.

  He had hated some of his life, tried to escape it and push it away; he had rendered himself indifferent to a great deal more of it.

  No more. He would embrace it all and clasp it to his hip; so close that they would be, in a manner of speaking, twins.

  Herbert walked onto London Bridge.

  Around him, upstream and down, north and south, huge cranes swung across the newly cleaned sky. Bulldozers heaved, thrust, and grabbed. Buildings sprouted with the promise of a new, spacious city, a matrix of glass and steel and aluminum, of fresh shapes and clean air.

  Halfway across, he stopped, leaned against the parapet, and looked downstream.

  On the river, boats of every size and description had raised steam and were now sweeping past docks and landings; a vast armada of mudhoppers, liners, coasters, colliers, tows, and motor barges, tooting their foghorns in joyous cacophony as they ducked beneath the upraised arms of Tower Bridge and headed for the sea, free at last, free at last, free at last.

  AFTERWORD

  In January 1953, Maurice Wilkins showed—without Rosalind Franklin’s permission—her X-ray photograph 51 to James Watson, Francis Crick’s colleague at Cambridge. In his book The Double Helix, Watson recalled: “The instant I saw the picture, my mouth dropped open and my pulse began to race.”

  Convinced that the helix was indeed a double, Watson and Crick set to work in a frenzy. Within weeks, they had deduced the two crucial elements of the molecular structure that Rosalind had missed; that the chains ran antiparallel rather than parallel, and that the base nucleotides were invariably paired together, adenine with thymine, guanine with cytosine.

  At lunchtime on 28th February, Crick walked into The Eagle pub, just round the corner from the Cavendish laboratory where he and Watson worked, and announced to everyone within earshot that they
had found the secret of life. And indeed they had.

  They were more circumspect, however, when it came to publishing the details of their research. The issue of Nature on 25th April that year contains one of the most celebrated of all scientific understatements, when, having outlined their theory, they said: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

  The magnitude of their discovery is hard to overstate.

  Hardly a day seems to go by when some aspect of genetic research is not in the news, be it in the field of agriculture, medicine, forensic science, or ethical debate. It is as integral a part of the modern world as electricity or the automobile, and will only become more so as technology continues to advance.

  It is therefore Francis Crick and James Watson whose names have entered the history books, as well known and influential a double act as any in modern times—as natural a pairing as Bonnie and Clyde, Lennon and McCartney, Rogers and Astaire, or indeed their own double helix. Every schoolchild who studies chemistry or biology knows their names.

  Together with Maurice Wilkins, Watson and Crick’s work on DNA won them the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Nobel Prizes can be shared between no more than three people, but tragically the question of Rosalind Franklin’s claim on a place in Stockholm was purely academic; she had died from ovarian cancer four years previously, at the age of thirty-seven.

  Francis Crick stayed in Cambridge to continue work on the genetic code until the 1970s, when he left to take up a post at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in San Diego, California. His death in July 2004 at the age of eighty-eight was reported on the front page of newspapers in Britain and elsewhere.

  Maurice Wilkins, who had been involved in the Manhattan Project during the war, became a prominent figure in the world of scientific ethics, campaigning against the involvement of scientists in weapons research. He died three months after Crick, also aged eighty-eight, and again his death made headlines around the world.