by Simon Mawer
You don’t display obsession, you see, not true obsession. You learn to hide it. You recognize the expression of indifference or incomprehension that creeps into the eyes of the listener. You learn the art of self-deprecation, the art of crypsis, the art of blending, mouselike, into the background. But beneath your bland and neutral exterior, you create confections of fantasy.
“You seem unhappy, Mrs. Miller.”
She looked at me with those disparate eyes. “Please call me Jean. ‘Mrs. Miller’ seems so impersonal.”
“Jean. You seem unhappy. Jean.”
Mousy, morose, she perched on a small stool in the pub just around the corner from the Institute, and fiddled disconsolately with a half-pint of lager. I glanced at her legs and imagined, I’m afraid, floral underpants. Apart from those purely hypothetical floral underpants, she was wearing a woolen dress (gray to go with the mouse) and a paisley scarf. Miss Piercey, Miss Mousy. Miss Agouti. The agouti color in mice results from a band of yellow just below the tip of each hair. It is controlled by an autosomal dominant gene. The double recessive form is black-haired.
On her left hand she wore a wedding ring and an engagement ring. “Opal,” she said, fiddling with the engagement ring. “Brings bad luck. I told him when we chose it. Opal brings bad luck, I said. He wouldn’t listen. Fire opal signifies the fire of my love for you, that’s what he said. He said things like that, things that turn a girl’s head. I think he just wanted me for one thing, really.” I shifted awkwardly on my stool, wondering how many things I wanted her for. Perched like that, I was almost at the same level as her. I could almost imagine leaning across the table (beaten copper) to take her hand and squeeze it comfortingly. “But you don’t want to be hearing about my troubles, Doctor Lambert.”
“For God’s sake, stop calling me Doctor Lambert. If I’m to call you Jean, you must call me Benedict.”
“Benedict.” She smiled wanly. “Seems an awful long time ago, doesn’t it? I’d only just left school, you know that. With just three O Levels. Taken on as a trainee librarian under some scheme or other. You know what I used to dream of?”
Hope and flesh rose in strange concord. “Tell me.”
“The chief librarian.” Hope dashed, flesh subsided. “He was a lovely man. That’s why I left and came to London.” Her disparate eyes glistened.
“I don’t follow.”
“Don’t you remember him?”
“I only remember you.”
She giggled, and maybe colored a little. “Oh, go on.”
“It’s true.”
“Anyway, he was the chief librarian, and he was what I dreamed of. Mr. Jacobs, he was. Gordon Jacobs.”
Dimly I recalled a ponderous, graying man who had hovered in the background while I eyed the Piercey thighs. He had seemed old; probably he was only in his forties. “And?”
“He was married, with two children.”
“Was there anything …?”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this …” Her fingers were hairless beyond the first joint. Presence or absence of hair on the middle phalanx of the fingers is under autosomal genetic control. My own fingers carry dark wisps of hair like punctuation marks on the mid-phalanx. I watched hers stroke beads of condensation from the glass of lager as she gazed into the past. “It happened once, after closing, by the fiction shelves.”
“The fiction shelves?”
She looked up. “Fiction, F to H. I remember seeing the works of Catherine Gaskin over his shoulder. Do you know Catherine Gaskin?”
“Not personally.”
“Oh, she’s ever so good.”
“What happened? At fiction, F to H, what happened?”
She blushed and looked away. “What do you think?”
“Right there?”
She nodded. “Right there.”
“Standing up?”
A narrowing of the eyes. “Why are you so interested?”
“I’m trying to imagine it.”
“Doctor Lambert!” She reddened further. “You’re ever so cheeky. You’re just as cheeky as you ever were as a boy.” She took up her glass, almost knocking it over in her confusion.
“Do you mind?”
She took a sip, and laughed with surprise. “Not really. Actually, it’s rather fun, confessing.” She drained the glass and put it down. Not quite so mousy. “I’ve never told anyone this, you know? Didn’t even tell my mum.”
“What happened?”
“With Mr. Jacobs?”
“You didn’t still call him Mr. Jacobs, did you? Not while …”
“It was the first time—”
“You were a virgin?”
“You really are awful. It was the first time that I called him Gordon. Up to then it had always been Mr. Jacobs. But there, at the fiction shelves, I called him Gordon.”
“I should hope so. Considering what was going on.”
“I thought it sounded rather silly, actually.”
“And what happened next?” I had a vision of Mr. Jacobs and Miss Piercey working their way round the whole Dewey Decimal System. “Did you move on to nonfiction?”
She giggled wildly. Perhaps that single glass of lager had gone to her head. “You are dreadful. No, afterwards he got cold feet.”
“You felt them?”
“It’s a metaphor,” she said reprovingly. “Gordon told me that it was all impossible, that I must get an abortion—”
“An abortion? You didn’t get pregnant?”
“If I was pregnant. He would pay, but I must keep it all quiet, that it was all a horrible mistake, that he loved his wife and children, that I should go away, find another job, all that kind of thing. He was in a right panic, I can tell you.” She put her hand to her mouth. “Here I am, laughing about it …”
“That’s what you must do,” I told her. “Laugh at it.”
“And I gave in to him, you see. That’s why I left home. I up and left and came down here, just as he wanted. And then I met Hugo Miller.”
“And married him?”
“He married me, more like. Promised me the world and gave me a weekend in Brighton, if you know what I mean.” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, Lor, I’ve got to go or I’ll be late. You scientific staff are all right. You can go in and out at all hours, but we honest workers have to keep to the clock.” She got up, pushing the table aside and almost upsetting the glasses. “See how clumsy I am? Can’t walk straight for thinking. Here, let me pay for my lunch.” She began to fumble in her handbag.
“I wouldn’t hear of it,” I said, “Doctor Lambert’s treating you.”
She looked at me with shining eyes. “Is he? Oh, how nice. I say, this is strange, isn’t it? After all these years.”
“Only seven.”
“Seven years older, seven years wiser.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
Images got in the way of coherent thought. I imagined piercing Miss Piercey in the fiction section, she with her back against the Catherine Gaskins, me standing on the top of a library stool with my face pressed against her inadequate bosom; whereas actually we were leaving the pub and walking along the Cromwell Road and people were looking at us in that sideways manner. “That was nice, that was,” she said.
“What was? The Catherine Gaskins?”
“You don’t stop, do you? The lunch.” She paused, and looked down at me. “I’d expected you to be …”
“What?”
“Difficult. I don’t know. You know what they say about you?”
“No.”
“Difficult. Difficult person, but a first-rate mind. That’s what they say. You don’t mind my telling you, do you?”
“Not at all.”
“That’s the ultimate accolade, you see, first-rate mind. But a bit difficult, that’s what they say. I’d expected you to be talking about things I don’t understand.”
“You do yourself an injustice.”
“I’m only assistant librarian. I’m not anything.”
> “You are to me.”
We turned in at the entrance of the Institute. “Silly,” she said.
Miss Piercey. I haven’t explained her eyes, have I?—her asymmetric, quirky, aberrant eyes: the one sky blue and the other sea green. I have described them but not explained them. They are not the stuff of inheritance, of course: they are the consequence of somatic cell mutation, or one of them is, at any rate. I’m sorry to be didactic once more, but you must imagine an early moment in the life of that amorphous cluster of cells that was destined to become the woman herself: the proto-Piercey, the embryonic mouse. No bigger than a pinhead, the little ball of cells bowls along a distant fallopian tube, wafted by the beating of cilia and entirely unperceived by the owner of the tube, who was, for the sake of the record, Mrs. Janet Piercey, ob. 15 January 1988. The cells are dividing—2 … 4 … 8 … 16 …32 … 64—and, by the purest chance, by entire and complete accident—or perhaps by the subtle intervention of some unknown and unperceived chemical mutagen—a single gene on chromosome 19 in one cell of this cluster is copied imperfectly. In the impoverished alphabet of nucleic acids a single letter in a single position is read incorrectly. Previously this gene was unable to achieve its task, which was to cause a thin layer of pigment to be laid down in the middle of the iris. Thus defective, it coded for an iris of cornflower. But now, miscopied—a mere chemical error—it is returned to its original function. The cell in question lies on the left side of the embryo, and all the descendants of that cell now carry one blue-eye gene and one green-eye gene, where the cells on the other side of the cluster carry what they inherited—two blue-eye genes, one the contribution of blue-eyed Mrs. Janet Piercey, the other from blue-eyed Mr. Reginald Piercey. Thus one half of the embryonic Miss Jean Piercey develops green-eyed while the other half continues blue-eyed. Miss Piercey is a mosaic, a melding of cells with different genetic complements. She is, in her own modest manner, a monster.
We have something in common.
Curious how acquaintance merges into friendship. In retrospect it seems to have been a developmental progression, like the turning on of genes during ontogeny: encounter, acquaintance, familiarity, friendship. But is that it? Is there really this logic to it? Or am I merely ascribing purpose to a thing that is nothing more than the chance coming together of two lost souls? They were lost for quite different reasons, but then castaways on an island might not have come from the same shipwreck.
Whatever the dynamics of the thing, quite soon it was the norm for me to wait every Tuesday and Thursday for Miss Piercey to come out of the library at the lunch break—other days were left for the Primers and Codons and Vectors with whom I worked. But twice a week I would wait for her. Mousy and apologetic, nodding earnestly when one of the staff addressed her, looking at the world with those surprising, mismatched eyes, she would smile suddenly when she caught sight of me. I think she felt safe in my company. I think she felt like a child again. Oh, I know the mouthings of amateur psychology make depressing reading. I know Freud is about as interesting as Ealing on a wet Sunday afternoon. But there must be some reason for Miss Piercey and Doctor Lambert befriending each other; conscious or unconscious, there must have been some end in mind. Was it nothing more than the mutual attraction of unfortunates?
The pub was called The Pig and Poke. “I’m the pig,” the landlord used to say if anyone asked, “and”—pointing to the barmaid, a middle-aged woman of brassy phenotype and terrifying invective—“she’s the poke.”
“You wouldn’t even touch the edges,” she would retort. “It’d be like picking me nose with a matchstick.”
The other members of the Institute used to go to the Prince of Wales, so we had the place more or less to ourselves and after a while the landlord (Mine Host, Eric—proclaimed on a notice above the bar) began to recognize us. “What you do, then?” he asked. “Work round here, do you?”
“I search for genes,” I told him.
He eyed me shrewdly. “I got a mate in Clerkenwell deals in Levi’s,” he confided. “No mucking, genuine article. You interested?”
Peals of laughter from Miss Piercey. The misunderstanding became a standing joke, a link with the place. “Find any Levi’s, then, Professor?” Eric would call from behind his beer taps whenever we came in. “Got any five-oh-ones?”
“Isn’t he a scream?” Miss Piercey would say.
It wasn’t exclusively the pub, of course. There were lunchtime concerts at the Albert Hall, just the thing for the cultivated office worker or the impoverished and intellectual student. Rather hesitantly I suggested we get tickets for a series on the Slav composers. She was very keen. “I love romantic music,” she confessed, as I feared she would; but then, to my surprise, she added, “although I’m happy with the classical period. What I won’t stand for”—and those eyes narrowed surprisingly—“is the twentieth century. Well, that’s not quite true. I’m okay with Dvo?ák, but then Dvo?ák’s not really twentieth-century in spirit, is he?”
“I thought middle-European nationalism was very twentieth-century.”
Her expression was reproving. I’d found out her real passion. “I mean the musical form. Bartók begins to lose me, and people like Janáček—ugh!” She shivered. I’m in the mood for confession: found her shiver alluring. I made her sit through a performance of the absurdly named Glagolitic Mass, and she almost writhed with displeasure in the seat beside me as the chorus writhed with pleasure up and down the scales of the piece. “The whole of my lunch break for that!” she exclaimed. “Great splashes of sound that seem to go nowhere. Have you noticed that every time a melody comes along he deliberately destroys it? Did you notice? What’s wrong with melodies? Why does the twentieth century hate them so?” But she enjoyed the Janáček piano recital I took her to. Afterwards I bought her a recording that included one of the pieces that was played: On an Overgrown Path.
“Most of it is about the death of the composer’s daughter,” I told her, after she had said how much she loved it. That didn’t put her off. I would sometimes go into the librarian’s office and find her playing it on her portable tape recorder. Mousy Miss Piercey. There was a little more to her than I had assumed.
So we would lunch together, and occasionally listen to a concert together, and then we would return to the Institute and go our separate ways, she to the stuffy confines of the library, I to the laboratories, the penetralia, the holy of holies, the inner sancta of the twentieth century.
What would Great-great-great-uncle Gregor have made of the labs, I wonder? He had to argue with Abbot Napp for extra space to plant more peas in the garden at the back of the monastery. What would he have made of the corridors and rooms with their humming machinery, their computer terminals, their ultracentrifuges, their slabs of electrophoresis gel, their oligonucleotide synthesizers, their automatic DNA sequencers? What would he make of the fact that we can actually read the messages enshrined in the hereditary particles whose existence he could infer only from watching the way they behave?
“What do you actually do?” Miss Piercey asked. “Aside from the joking with Eric and all that, what do you actually do?”
Many things. But one thing in particular. I search for the gene that caused me.
Frau Rotwang’s skirts brushed the dew from the grass as she walked beneath the lime trees. A dachshund scampered alongside her and, from time to time, tied its leash around her ankles. When this happy event occurred, Mendel supported her elbow while she skipped on one foot and bent down to disentangle herself. Her ankles—one of them was disclosed for a moment while the leash unwound—seemed impossibly slender. Her dress was buttoned tightly to her neck, where a small froth of white lace bubbled up from underneath. Narrow ankles, narrow waist, slender neck. A mere slip.
Glancing at him with that smile, she asked, “Are lady visitors allowed?”
“Within the gardens, of course they are.”
One of the fathers—Anselm, it was—came along the path. He nodded to the couple as he passed. There was
a faint hint of disapproval about his expression. “They are so forbidding,” she said when he had passed.
“Who are?”
“The monks.”
“But I am one.”
Briefly she touched his forearm. “Not you, Gregor. The rest.”
“Anyway, we are not monks.”
“I thought—”
“Friars. Our vocation is amongst the people. And fifty percent of the people …”
“… are ladies.”
“Fifty percent are women,” Mendel corrected her. “I’m not sure that is the same thing. I think rather fewer are ladies.”
“I’m sure I know nothing about that, Pater Gregor.” She laughed, blushing faintly, bringing color to her name. “Now show me your … children.”
“Over there.” He pointed across the lawn, beyond the greenhouse (a building in its own right, this, with brick wings two stories high), toward the wall of the refectory. Peas. He was becoming quite obsessed with them. At first it had been fuchsias, sensible, pretty fuchsias. But now it was only ever peas.
“Lead me to them.”
They crossed the grass, ducking under the lower boughs of the limes, caught up in the heavy, cloying scent of the trees, a sensual, female smell at odds with the dusty masculinity of the place. Beneath the refectory windows were the beds, with peas standing in chaotic, anarchic rows, hanging from the pea-sticks like drunks. Rows and rows of peas. “A kitchen garden,” she exclaimed.
“An experimental plot. Over there you may see the fourth-generation hybrids from the first series—”
The dachshund lifted one stunted leg and sent a stream of yellow piddle onto the base of one of the plants. Frau Rotwang cried out in horror: “Adolfus! You ill-mannered child!” Almost apologetically, almost as though he were to blame, Mendel muttered something about the exigencies of nature. The dog sniffed at his handiwork.
“But why are there paper bags?” Frau Rotwang asked, as much to distract from the embarrassment as out of any particular interest. The peas—perfectly ordinary garden peas—appeared to have blossomed paper bags. One wondered, one did wonder, whether dear Gregor wasn’t a little eccentric. As though in answer to the question, he took one of the uncovered flowers, a deliciously purple and mauve creature just like a butterfly, and opened the petals with his blunt, farmer’s hands.