Double Blind

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘Lucy! How are you doing?’

  ‘Hi, Hunter! I’m loving your flat. Are you looking forward to your visit?’

  ‘I can’t say I’m looking forward to it,’ said Hunter, ‘except for seeing you and the great schedule you’ve lined up. I spent twelve years on those damp islands, until I managed to graduate from Westminster to Princeton. Returning to the States was like going to a Super Bowl game after visiting your grandmother in her twilight home. We moved to London when I was six. When my father gave me my first five-pound note, I thought they’d named the currency after my family – five pounds Sterling. Shrinks always love that: early signs of narcissistic grandiosity.’

  ‘You’ve still got a little bit of that in you,’ said Lucy, tentatively exploring the boundaries of a new relationship.

  Now that he was on the call, Hunter could hear the coke speaking through him, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  ‘You know, Lucy,’ he said, ‘the world is divided between the mediocrity of committees, the paralysis of checks and balances, and the merciful megalomania of the rich. Everybody else is just shouting in a bell jar while the air gets sucked out – however close you lean in you can’t make out what they’re saying: “I’m sorry, what was that? I can’t hear you!” Historical “process” is for human debris, drifting on the tides of fashion and fate. I believe in extraordinary individuals, Lucy; I believe in game-changers and I hope you’re one of them, because that’s the only type of individual I want working on my team. So, what have you got for me?’

  ‘I’ve set up all the meetings you were interested in,’ said Lucy, ‘with the heads of most of the Oxford science departments. The Psychiatry department have a promising psychotherapeutic virtual reality program called Avatar, which apparently is helping people with schizophrenia—’

  ‘I’m not interested in schizophrenia,’ Hunter interrupted her. ‘It only affects one per cent of the population and most of them are poor.’

  ‘Most of any population is poor.’

  ‘You should see my address book!’ said Hunter.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ said Lucy impatiently.

  ‘The higher your socio-economic status,’ said Hunter, ‘the more likely you are to be diagnosed with “bipolar disorder” than with “schizophrenia”, while exhibiting the exact same psychotic symptoms. Not that I’m hostile to Avatar and a human-machine synthesis: internet contact lenses, the world’s knowledge in just one blink. Forget verbal dictation, what about thought dictation? Straight from the synapses on to the screen, we’ve got a sensational start-up that’s making real progress with that, we’re calling it SignApps – patent pending. Anyway, your schizophrenia thing is too specialised, but if it works for bipolarity, we could look into it.’

  ‘Everything in science is too specialised,’ said Lucy. ‘People assume that scientists are intellectuals, but very few of them have an overview, or a critical approach to their methodologies, they’re just too busy securing funding or tenure or zapping individual cells in the Caenorhabditis elegans nematode worm with laser beams – this is a one-millimetre worm, so we’re talking about precision work – looking for that single-cell death-inhibitor.’

  ‘A single-cell death-inhibitor – do you know the guy in charge of that research? I want to meet him. Get it on the schedule.’

  ‘What time shall I meet you?’ asked Lucy, with strenuous neutrality.

  ‘The plane lands at Farnborough at seven a.m. – isn’t it strange the way people more often say “my plane lands” when they’ve rented a seat on a commercial flight and more often say “the plane lands” when they own it?’

  ‘Amazing,’ Lucy confirmed.

  ‘Meet me there. The driver can pick you up on the way.’

  Before Lucy could say anything, she realised that Hunter had ended the call.

  ‘What a wanker,’ she said, chucking the phone on to the cushion beside her – on to Hunter’s cushion. Staying in his flat made her anger more inhibited and more compelling at the same time. Her pulse was throbbing in her neck and wrists. He had been so seductive during the recruitment period, making her feel that her science background would be put to better use, that she would be bringing all sorts of benefits to the world and, of course, by offering to double her income. That combination, and the severance package, if she were dismissed for any non-criminal reason, made her ignore all the warnings she heard about Hunter’s ‘colourful’ past and his ‘explosive’ character. Now she was living under the tyranny of his whims and his threats … Oh, Christ, it was happening again.

  The signs were subtle for the moment, but she knew with absolute certainty that she was starting to have another panic attack. She managed to sit down next to her discarded phone just as the heaviness took over. Gravity seemed to have suddenly been multiplied in one place, dragging her attention to the right side of her body while the rest of her looked on helplessly from above, like a mother watching her child screaming to be released from the adhesive wall of the spinning barrel in a fun fair. Then the spasms came, slowly at first, but picking up pace as the attack reached its peak. Midway through, she felt an alien effervescence rushing down the right side of her body, as if a soda syphon had been discharged into her lower back. It was over in a minute, but Lucy was left feeling dazed, with an enfeebled and shaky leg and a foot that remained numb for several minutes.

  If this was a panic attack, thought Lucy, it was really working. She was in a total fucking panic. As soon as she had recovered enough, she rang her kind, clever doctor friend, Ash, who immediately offered to come over. He ran some tests, making her push her legs against his hands, and also asking her to walk in a straight line, and to stand on one leg at a time. Lucy succeeded in all these tasks and her reflexes responded to his rubber hammer in the expected way.

  ‘Listen, it’s almost certainly all the stress you’ve been under,’ said Ash, ‘but, since the attacks keep showing up in the same place, I’m going to call in a favour from a neurologist I know and see if we can get you an MRI tomorrow, in case there’s any nerve damage affecting your leg. I’ll give you a Zopiclone to make sure you get a good night’s rest.’

  After Ash had reassured her, Lucy felt much better and since she almost never used sleeping pills, she soon fell into a deep, long sleep.

  5

  Olivia was in far too good a mood to really mind, but she couldn’t help wondering why Lucy had chosen to meet at Noble Rot for such an early dinner. It was a dry, clear evening and Olivia had decided to walk from her publisher’s office. It had been tough negotiating for the inclusion of the intergenerationally traumatised mice, but her editor had totally seen the point and had agreed to the disruption of the proofs. Her weekend with Francis had stretched into four nights and she had only been able to focus on the mice that morning, her feet interlaced with his under the table on the train until they were wrenched apart at Victoria station. She had gone to her parents’ house and Francis had set off to a meeting of the Soil Association. Now, after nine long hours, they were converging on Lamb’s Conduit Street.

  Driving home from the station last Friday, Francis had warned Olivia that his cottage was off the grid, at first tempering his confession with an apology, but soon admitting how pleased he was to be able to quit the hive mind of the internet and wander away, like a rogue bee, from the buzzing subjugation of the colony. They sank back for a while into the familiar hammock of ecological catastrophe, until Francis started to describe the counter-proposal being made by wilding and also conjectured that Gaia, a collective planetary intelligence, or at least an intelligent way of thinking about the planet as a whole, was beginning to have her revenge and would soon shrug off the human infestation that was poisoning the ‘critical zone’, that faint blue ring of air and water in which all complex life occurs. A few ancient families of bacteria, viruses, fungi and insects would no doubt survive, as unimpressed by the Anthropocene Age as they had been by the lumbering passage of the dim-witted dinosaur. Olivia wasn’t so sure abou
t Gaia. She felt that the craving for domination and convenience was enough to consume its devotees, one drone delivery at a time.

  ‘With or without Gaia, we’re talking about the same basic angst,’ she said, as Francis drew up into the parking space on the far side of his cottage.

  Instead of replying, he turned to her and smiled disarmingly, as if they both knew that these big topics had only been needed to enliven the journey from the station. Now that they had arrived in a place beyond the reach of tracking cookies, where the microphones and cameras on their devices couldn’t be switched on by invisible supervisors, a place with the timeless banality of simply being where it was, without advertising its location on the world wide web and provoking a cascade of Bayesian data mining, self-reinforcing behaviour patterns and tailored news, now, at last, they could give up working out precisely which great extinction they were taking part in and get down to the real reason for their being there in the first place.

  Going straight to bed without taking her luggage out of the car, or being ‘shown around’, dispersed the expectations of awkwardness or unbridled passion that had been running through Olivia’s mind since she accepted Francis’s invitation. What she could not have imagined, along with the thick sky-blue and cream stripes of the wallpaper and the worn elm of the beams and the window frames, was the depth of trust she already felt for Francis, or spontaneously felt – it was hard to tell, since their only previous encounter had taken place in the kind of haze that can make impulsiveness look like spontaneity, and drunkenness feel like destiny.

  When he had taken her upstairs in his cottage soberly and silently, they had soon cut through any lingering fog associated with that evening in Oxford, meeting face to face, holding each other’s gaze, not distracted by shyness or fantasy, smiling effortlessly at the delight they found in each other. And then, as they lay side by side, entangled but still speechless, not bothering with compliments or professions of bliss, because they both knew what had happened; in that vibrant stillness, her mind seemed to have obliterated all impressions except for her awareness of the vibrancy and the stillness. They started to kiss again, like two people who change their minds after taking a few steps across the burning sands of a tropical beach and decide to dive back into the breaking waves. They had too much to tell each other to go on talking. Words would only multiply distinctions that were being abolished by something that permeated and surrounded them, like a magnetic field, drawing iron filings into the shape of a flower.

  Conversation returned when Olivia came downstairs after a bath. Her thick socks blunted the sensation of walking over the cool, uneven flagstones of the kitchen floor. Francis greeted her through the steam rising from the potatoes he was pouring into a colander. He was preparing dinner with what struck her as impressive calm. Her own cooking was a combination of monotony and panic, always making the same meal without losing the conviction that this time it was going to go wrong. She seemed to remember a distinction Steven Pinker had made in one of his immense books between ‘blending grammar’ and ‘analytical grammar’, or something of that sort. Cooking and painting, amazingly enough, turned out to be in the ‘blending’ category and she wasn’t any good at either of them.

  ‘That’s all the cooking I can do for the moment,’ said Francis, as he transferred parboiled potatoes to a pan, shook them around, blending them (grammatically, she supposed) with the olive oil and rosemary and then sliding the pan into the oven. He invited her into the sitting room, where they stretched out on the big sofa, with their heads cushioned at the far end, looking at the fire, smouldering and crackling on a soft pile of ash and embers.

  ‘God, I love it here,’ said Olivia.

  Anticipating the rush to self-revelation that inaugurates every love affair, she had decided during her bath that she would tell Francis that she was adopted, unlike her brother Charlie, who was Martin and Lizzie’s biological child. And so, she let him know the bare facts and how her parents had told her when she was sixteen.

  ‘Do you think that’s why you became a biologist?’ he asked.

  ‘Probably, but it took me a while to work out. My father was very restrained in not interpreting my choice of A levels: Biology, Chemistry and Sociology.’

  Francis laughed and held her closer.

  ‘I had certainly worked it out for myself by the time I was an undergraduate,’ said Olivia. ‘I was totally invested in refuting the idea that the most important contribution to my formation was a genetic inheritance handed down to me by a couple of strangers.’

  She had chosen not to track down her biological mother, feeling that it would be a betrayal of her real parents in favour of the outsider who had chosen to give her away. It was only when she was twenty-six and a friend of hers had her first baby, that Olivia’s resolve was broken. She was allowed to hold her friend’s newborn child in her arms and felt the encircling tenderness that sprung up spontaneously between them in the few minutes before the baby’s mother reached out to take him back, craving, despite her exhaustion, the need to comfort and protect her child. The experience inflamed Olivia’s imagination, making her wonder about her mother’s motives for giving her away, and so she finally set about arranging to meet Karen Hughes, as the culprit turned out to be called.

  On the day of the visit, Olivia woke at four in the morning in her parents’ house, bathed in sweat. She was in that superstitious state of mind in which everything seemed overloaded with metaphor and meaning. She wanted to stay at home, the home she actually lived in with her loving family, not the home she might have had in the meaningless dimension of a conditional past tense. She left Belsize Park far too early and was so preoccupied on the Underground that she overshot her stop by two stations. She decided to work her way back to Karen’s neighbourhood, exchanging so many texts and calls with Lucy and Charlie that the battery on her ageing phone went flat. She would have to ask someone the way – although she certainly wasn’t going to ask that hollow-cheeked man who was being dragged towards her by the rolling gait of his bulldog. The grey tower blocks across the road were darkened by patches of rain and so densely studded with satellite dishes that they looked to her like the tentacles of an octopus. At their centre, a balding patch of grass was planted with bushes that discouraged vandalism, not only with their ferociously serrated leaves, which stuck out like a gargoyle’s tongue, but also through their perfect ugliness, which it was impossible to enhance. Two of them had taken the further precaution of dying. Olivia was disgusted by her attitude to her unfamiliar surroundings. Bloody psychotherapy, it ruined the random discharge of negative emotion. The mixture of terraced houses and blocks of flats was typical of dozens of areas she had walked around in London, but now she was projecting her fear of meeting a treacherous parent on to some rain-soaked buildings and a man walking his dog; and her fear that it might turn ugly on to some neglected plants.

  She told Francis that her paranoid state of mind had been temporarily dissolved by a friendly passer-by who told her that Mafeking Street was, ‘Second on the right, can’t miss it’, but that it rebuilt itself as she approached the turning. Her pace slowed. What, in the end, did any of this have to do with her? A sense of hysterical reluctance weighed down her steps. Whatever reservoir of genetic information lay inside Karen’s house was already, for what it was worth, inscribed in her own body. She suddenly felt that she must turn back, but then the front door opened and a tired, but kind-looking woman with thick, loosely stacked grey hair was standing in front of her in an old sweater and a pair of jeans.

  Karen led her into a little sitting room crowded with books. They were on the shelves and on the tables, but also on the floor beside the armchair. The room was quite dim apart from the pool of light around the armchair and the glow of an electric fire, which lit up some black and orange logs with the brazen fraudulence of what would have been kitsch, if the rest of the room hadn’t pointed towards austerity and indifference. In the first awkward minutes Karen poured some tea and Olivia turned down a
biscuit. Once Karen was sitting in the armchair, a tortoiseshell cat jumped into her lap and she began to stroke it with an emphatic haste that seemed to have more to do with her own state of mind than any needs the cat might have.

  ‘There was an unframed photo lying flat on one of the lower bookshelves,’ Olivia told Francis. ‘It looked to me like a younger Karen holding a baby in her arms. Is that burning?’ she interrupted herself.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ said Francis, jumping over her. ‘I was too caught up in your story. Tell me what happened over dinner,’ he said, opening the smoking oven and salvaging the unusually crispy potatoes and chicken.

  She did tell him the rest of the story over dinner and felt even closer to him than before. They stayed close for the next three days until they were forced apart that morning. Soon, mercifully, they would be back together.

  * * *

  As she approached Noble Rot, Olivia could see through the big glass windows that Francis had already arrived and that Lucy was there also, but at a separate table. It was strange to see two people she knew so intimately sitting in the same room, alone and unknown to each other, waiting for her arrival to create a new compound, like a clear liquid suddenly swirling with colour as a third solution is poured into it. At least, she hoped that’s what would happen. Francis got up while she was still outside, as if he had already seen her, or sensed her in some other way, although he had been reading when she first spotted him. He opened the door for her and kissed her hello. Lucy was slower to notice her arrival, but soon came over and gave Olivia a big reunion hug. After Olivia had introduced her friends to each other, they were all led to a table at the far end of the restaurant, where Lucy sat down in the corner with her back to the wall, facing Olivia and Francis.