The pullover was thrown carelessly onto a threadbare sofa which had witnessed too many student supervisions. But the desk was good and of an impeccable neatness. There was a ranked series of trays bearing typed labels: Students, College, Lab, Research. Apart from that, there was only a pad at the desk’s centre and a series of sharpened pencils. Occasionally Stephen would make a note with one of these. She took the opportunity to glance at bookshelves. These sported a predictable assortment of scientific tomes, but she saw other things as well, a range of histories, books whose spines looked decidedly old and foreign, a bottom row of paperbacks, Le Carre, Deighton - a slew of spy and brightly-jacketed cyber fiction. The variety surprised her. A friend had warned her that as brilliant as Stephen Caldwell was meant to be, he would resemble all other scientists of his generation and know nothing about anything except his immediate field, and certainly nothing about the history of science.
She tested him by asking him a question about Cavendish and drew a blank, but on Max Perutz and X-ray crystallography and John Kendrew and his proteins, he was effusive, if critical. She smelled the hunger of ambition and was not altogether displeased. She was also pleased when she turned round to find that the wall behind her was covered in old maps. Her little brother had collected maps, though his were all of the old Empire and he had duly taken himself off to its furthest point, from which the annual letter still reached her. Stephen’s maps were of Europe, though it took her several moments to determine this since they seemed at first glance to bear so little relationship to each other.
When she mentioned her confusion at the flux of borders in his maps, mentioned her brother’s collection, too, he smiled a little shyly. And before she quite knew who had asked whom they were sitting in the Mill and digging into shepherd’s pie. The appetite with which he consumed his made her think he had probably forgotten to eat properly for some time. She had a sudden vision of herself cooking him nightly and wholesome dinners.
With her second glass of cinnamony mulled wine she found herself asking him why he looked so sad.
‘Do I?’ he had flushed a little, fumbled with his glasses, stared into the middle distance. ‘I’m not. Not really. Not now. Today.’
‘That’s good.’ She had sipped her wine and kept her eyes on him, a part of her relishing his embarrassment at her personal question.
Over coffee, he had come back to it. ‘I have been a little sad,’ he said with a slight tremor in his voice. ‘A friend of mine died, you see. Some months back. I…’
‘A girl-friend?’ Tessa had pried uncharacteristically.
‘Sort of. Yes, I guess so. Still…’ He had waved the subject away and given her a smile of such sweetness that she realised she felt altogether happy for the first time in weeks if not years.
They had met again the following evening and the one after that. Stephen, she soon came to realise, for all his verbal passion when it came to the romance of science, stammered when it came to intimate matters. He didn’t like to delve. She took it as a sign of delicacy. He was tactful and gentle and yes, the word struck her as an odd one, good. He asked her about her work at the Press, about her family, but he didn’t question her about her own past loves, which relieved her since the subject would have made her uneasy. She didn’t want to replay the adolescent affairs of her student years. Nor did she want to lie. And it would have mortified her to evoke the tawdry details of what had increasingly become a seamy affair. The last thing she wanted was to infect this fresh friendship with its rot.
Stephen made her feel young and new and yes, like herself. She wasn’t made for scurrying round corridors, living secretly and in fear, whatever the compensations of weekends in grand foreign hotels or what at least initially had been the heated thrills of passion. Everything with Stephen could be open and public. She didn’t have to look over her shoulder or be afraid to pick up the telephone. She could introduce him to her friends, take him to parties or home to her family. For the first time in years she felt wonderfully, blissfully, free. In love, too, she decided, but since the expression had been tainted by her affair with Jonathan, she preferred simply to think that she loved Stephen.
About Stephen’s dead friend, she was consumed with a curiosity she couldn’t quite voice. Prying would have entailed revealing. Tit for tat. But when, now and again, she saw that pensiveness tinge his features, she vowed to herself that she would overlay it with brightness.
For the rest, Stephen had an incisive intelligence and was good company. He was also sane and sensible and provided a wonderful contrast to her harried, lying don. Beyond all that, he intrigued her, for Stephen was at one and the same time boyish and antediluvian. Instead of passes, there was the aura of romance, a kind of chivalric and considerate politeness in which she blossomed. They didn’t make love until their wedding night.
Tessa smoothed the quilt and plumped the pillows on her half of the conjugal bed. She gazed at its arid neatness, felt melancholy as thick as the winter quilt shroud her spirits. On occasion over these last sterile years it had occurred to her that perhaps she had made a terrible mistake, that Stephen had really always preferred men.
There was no one she could share such fears with - none of her friends, not even her sister. It was too shaming. Her friends saw her as a successful professional woman, successfully married too, to a man of undeniable stature. Her residue of pride robbed her of the comforts and laughter of female complicity.
The second problem with her condition, Tessa thought as she pulled trousers and shirt from the wardrobe and forced her gaze to the mirror, was that she felt herself robbed of presence. Of late, when she looked at herself, all she saw was a negative: a woman who couldn’t seem to have children, a woman who was undesirable. Not a woman at all, really. No one.
With a shiver, Tessa curled her fingers round the card in her dressing gown pocket. The keys next to it set up a nervous jangle. She straightened her shoulders and looked at the card again. Simone Lalande Debray. At least the voice on the telephone had been a woman’s. That was a start. Tessa laughed, suddenly alert to the humour of her thoughts. It was not every wife who could extract a blessing from the notion of a mistress. A mixed blessing. She was angry, too. But anger was a fuel, one which could propel her out of the grey limbo of suffering and into action. She would find proof of Stephen’s transgressions.
And then what?
One step at a time, Tessa counselled herself. A step out of an impasse was already a change. It was a great deal.
Midsummer Common was a misty wash of green, but above the spire of Jesus College Chapel the sky showed a streak of pale lemon light. By the children’s playground on the banks of the Cam, the brown and white and polka-dot cows munched away, oblivious to weather.
Tessa pulled her cloche of a hat down over her ears and clipped the lead into the golden retriever’s collar.
‘Quick walk to the river and then it’s off to the kennels, Paws.’
The dog gave her a single beseeching look, as if he had already accepted his fate, then matched his pace to hers.
No sooner had they reached the last of the row of house’s which gave onto the Common, than the first of Paws’ infant admirers was upon him, tickling his ears, rubbing against him, making lop-sided faces. Tessa smiled and waited patiently.
Had Stephen known, when he had brought the dog home one day soon after her miscarriage, that Paws would have every child under ten on the Common scurrying towards her? Probably. Paws was a sop, a sweet bounding creature on which to fasten the runaway emotions of those sad and bitter days. But a dog wasn’t a child and it was a child she wanted.
Why? Tessa asked herself for the thousandth time. She didn’t really know the answer. It wasn’t only to do with a contrariness which made the most difficult, the most desirable, nor with her mother’s callous harping or her perennial jealousy of her older sister with her two children. Nor was it that she was particularly avid for the battle scars of child-bearing which she had had recounted to her in rigourou
s detail on any number of occasions. Nor, she told herself, was she especially romantic and gooey-eyed about babies. She knew about the dangers of post-partum depression. She could list the upheavals which a child would bring into one’s life - the inattention of husbands, the boredom and sheer tedium of mothering, the desire for a world which wasn’t all nappies and mindless babble and endless chores and responsibility and not a moment of one’s own.
She had enumerated all this often enough to herself as she tried to come to terms with her childless condition. Yet for all that, she couldn’t get rid of the desire. And she had only to be with her niece and nephew for five minutes or with the children of her friends to find the want engulfing her.
Sometimes, when her niece and nephew came to stay for the weekend, she felt she was close to an answer. The empty, cloistered silence of the house filled up. There were no more shadowy corners. Life and bustle reigned everywhere.
Her own childhood home had always been crowded with ringing voices and stray socks and bickering. It was hard for her to admit, since she wasn’t particularly close to her parents now, but she missed that - the busyness, the clutter, the noisy sense of casual chaos, out of which one carved a momentary order.
Stephen’s home hadn’t been like that. But they had had so much in common in those early days, that she had assumed they had this, too. Nor was Stephen particularly uncomfortable when her niece and nephew came to visit. It was true that he talked to them in his usual tone, as if they were already grown up. But they didn’t seem to mind. And on their last visit, when Tom had fallen over and gouged his forehead on the corner railing, it was Stephen who had calmed him down, even made him laugh on the way to the hospital, held him as the doctor administered the single stitch.
Tessa shook herself. They had reached the car. It wasn’t time for her customary reveries. It was time to face realities, write new scripts, ones which might take Stephen out of her life altogether.
As if in recognition of that, she gave Paws a fierce hug and urged him towards the back seat. ‘It won’t be so bad, old thing. You’ll make new friends while I’m away. You’ll see.’
She edged into the Saturday morning traffic, saw a cyclist overtake her with omnipotent glee and race away. Perhaps that was the trouble with living in Cambridge. Once the realisation that you were no longer a student suddenly came upon you - far too late - you were confronted at every juncture by the signs of your aging. While the students renewed themselves, ever young, ever fresh.
The journey round the outer edges of the town centre, past the botanical gardens and into the flat countryside was slow, but it gave her thoughts time to consolidate. That seductive foreign voice in her ear had grown a body, lush dark hair, a hotel room, a bed on which scenes of rapturous love were played out. They acted as a spur. She was faced with the fact that she had allowed herself to sink into a habit of waiting - waiting for Stephen to make love to her, waiting for a child, waiting for change. It was more than time to lift that shroud of depression which had covered their marriage and all but obliterated her.
She dropped Paws off at the kennels, didn’t allow herself to be dragged into conversation with the keeper and retraced her route. Half way back, she turned into a side road and stopped at a car-park marked ‘staff’ next to a sleek, modern building. The sign announcing Camgene to the right of the glass-fronted door with its bronze double helix was as discreet as she remembered it and in the same place.
She slid the plastic key into the identity slot beneath it, heard the answering click and made her way into a deserted reception room where a vast wall chart in bold plastic colours paraded as a work of abstract art. Lines of apple green and blood red, some with additional purples and blues and oranges strained towards the ceiling. A code at the bottom announced, ‘Products in Development’, and cited strings of letters and numbers designating particular pharmaceuticals and the stages they had arrived at: green for research and discovery, red for preclinical development, all the way up to the orange sky of large scale trials and product registration. Stephen, she knew, was at the head of the green stage.
And there was his picture, suitably serious, staring out at her from the more smiling faces of Chairman and Chief Executives and Finance Directors. Tessa grimaced. When Stephen had first had the offer of a part time link with the then nascent Camgene in the third year of their marriage, she had joined in his excitement. Until then, they had made do with a shared arrangement between his College rooms and her old flat. Now there would be far more money, a new home, the children she had taken for granted. Not only that. There would be far more resources for research, a sparkling new lab. She was thrilled for him.
Then, it must have been at the turn of the decade, soon after she had lost the baby, Camgene with its race for patents and products had taken Stephen over. The romance of science hid a world whose competitiveness she had only remotely glimpsed at the outset. And it had gradually swallowed Stephen up. He had become a man of import and a certain fame, but all of it, work, travel, excluded her.
Not that he hadn’t been immersed in his work or travelled before. But now, for long weeks she would hardly see him except over morning coffee or at dinner parties which had too quickly lost their gloss. Stephen inevitably went off to discuss incomprehensible matters with colleagues while she tried to make conversation with wives who shared few of her interests and talked of little but their children’s schools.
And there was the rub again. Her persistent childlessness made her desire for a child somehow shameful, as if it were a perverse wish which could only be aired when it was satisfied.
In the meantime, Stephen had become as grey a presence for her as the muted tones of his photograph. When she thought of him, it was as the man who wouldn’t give her a baby. And of this she thought obsessively. Sometimes at night she would wake in such murderous fury at his softly snoring limpness, that in the morning she couldn’t find the requisite voice to ask him to pass the butter.
With a sigh, Tessa made her way up to the second floor, slipped plastic through a second identity slot. The laboratories were too quiet. She felt she could hear the rodents scuttling in their basement cages while her heels clacked out her presence as an interloper. She stilled her feet and her nerves. She had never been here on a weekend before, had indeed not been here at all for some time. She moved briskly down the corridor with its lining of labelled refrigerators and averted her eyes from the doors where she might spy some hard-working technician who would spy her.
Stephen’s lab was at the end of the corridor, past the room with the vast electron microscope encased in glass. He had taken her in there one day to show her the structure of a protein and she had been stupidly astonished to see that the microscope took no looking through apertures, but automatically reproduced its findings on a computer screen. It made pictures of the invisible.
Stephen was good at some forms of the invisible. Not her forms. Once, in the early days of their marriage when they still talked while looking into each other’s eyes, she had charged him with blindness, with refusing to see beneath the surface of things. It had been a very mild charge, really just a tease. But he had baulked.
He had asked her what she thought water looked like and she had answered, like a child being tested, that it was a transparent liquid, clear and wet, and she had laughed. He had marched her to his old microscope, left her for a moment, and then come back with a slide. ‘Look,’ he had ordered her. ‘Coloured water.’ She had put her eye to the lens and seen a mass of shapes engaged in erratic movement. The vision had both delighted and distressed her.
Yes, Stephen knew that things were not always what they seemed. Yes, Stephen was good at some forms of the invisible. Too bad she couldn’t isolate a molecule for humiliation or longing or fear and offer it to him on a slide.
She had arrived at the door of his lab and nervously she searched for the appropriate key. The first one wouldn’t fit, nor the second. She hesitated, unsure now of the necessity which had driven her
this far. She steeled herself, tried a third key, heard the awaited click. She opened the door to find a young, broad-shouldered man barring her way. Startled, she stepped back, tried to prise an apology from dry lips. But something about the man’s bullish demeanour made her stand her ground.
‘What may I ask are you doing here?’ Tessa used the clipped tones of authority.
‘Surely that’s for me to ask.’ Dark eyes focussed on her with a hint of menace.
Tessa pulled the cloche hat from her head, shook out blonde strands of hair.
‘I’m Dr. Caldwell’s wife.’
‘And how do I know that?’
‘You don’t.’ Tessa’s momentary confidence began to dwindle. ‘Look, Dr. Caldwell asked me to fetch something for him.’
The man examined her with scrupulous slowness. Was there a particular way one looked if one was Stephen Caldwell’s wife, Tessa wondered.
‘Do you have any I.D.?’
Feeling like a criminal, Tessa dug out her driver’s licence and handed it to him.
‘I know. You must be Pavel. Pavel Kat…’
‘Katuretsky,’ he finished for her with a sheepish expression. ‘And you are Tessa Hughes. I am so sorry. But these days we cannot be too careful.’
‘Yes, of course. Animal rights,’ Tessa mumbled, hoping he wouldn’t press her any further.
‘Not only that…’ He hesitated.
‘You’re from Brno, is that right?’
‘Yes. Good to meet you.’ The man suddenly stretched out his hand and gave her a smile which reminded her she was a woman. ‘My apologies again. I was working and you took me by surprise.’ He waved at a lit computer screen. ‘Dr. Caldwell has warned me about security.’
They looked at each other at a loss for the next conversational gambit.
The Things We Do For Love Page 2