Deep Water

by Christine Poulson

  It seemed no time at all since he had first met her at a postgraduate seminar. She had given a paper and he could see her now – totally absorbed – so absorbed that she had flung out an arm and knocked her papers all over the floor. He got down on his hands and knees to pick them up for her and she’d thanked him, blushing and laughing. She had the most amazing blue eyes. When the seminar was over, they had walked out together, gone for a coffee, and then a meal. They couldn’t stop talking. They had spent the night together, and the next, and the one after that. Six months later they got married. They had been so young, so unblemished, untouched by life…

  Perhaps if she hadn’t dropped the papers, he wouldn’t have fallen in love with her. The entire course of their lives was decided that day. Only one thing has to be different for everything to be different. If he had known how it would turn out, would he have let someone else pick them up?

  “Dan, Dan?” Rachel was calling softly up the stairs.

  “OK, I’m coming.”

  He got up and went down.

  Rachel was sitting on the sofa, working on the quilt she was making. Her hands were never idle.

  There were two gin and tonics on the coffee table in front of her.

  She gestured towards them. “I thought we’d need these.” He sank down beside her and reached for his glass.

  He took a gulp. “You couldn’t be more right.”

  “It was on the news. They said there’s a child,” Rachel said.

  Daniel knew that. A few months ago he had glimpsed Jennifer at Cambridge station, getting off a London train. In the small world of Cambridge and Ely, it was hard to avoid someone completely. He didn’t think Jennifer had seen him and he hadn’t mentioned it to Rachel.

  In most marriages there are things that by common, unspoken assent are not discussed. They had never really talked much about Jennifer. When Daniel first met Rachel, he had been living alone in the little house near the quay where he had moved after Jennifer had left him. He had still been too raw to tell her more than the bare outline of what had happened. And Rachel hadn’t probed. Later it might have helped to talk about it, but he had sensed her reluctance, her jealousy even.

  Daniel cleared his throat. “A funny thing happened. Lyle Linstrum, the man who I went in to meet? The case he wants me to take over – it was Jennifer’s.”

  “It was Jennifer’s?” Rachel echoed. “You mean – ”

  “She was in the middle of a very important case to do with a patent for an obesity therapy.”

  In the silence that followed he could hear the tick, tick of the bubbles in the gin and tonic.

  Rachel put her quilt aside. She turned in her seat and looked at him. She pushed her glasses up her nose, a characteristic gesture that told him she was disturbed.

  “I’ve said yes,” he admitted.

  Rachel thought about it. “Are you sure you’re OK with this, Dan? Wouldn’t it be better if someone else did it?”

  “No one else specializes in this particular area. I can’t justify turning it down. It’s too important for the firm.” He turned to her and took her hand. It lay inert in his. “Look, love, when all’s said and done, it’s just a job, like any other.”

  There was a sound behind them. Chloe was on the stairs, her eyes drowsy, her old cloth rabbit trailing from her hand. “Mummy…”

  Rachel got to her feet. She knew and Daniel knew that it was the first of many reappearances and that she’d spend most of the night in bed with them.

  She went across and picked Chloe up. “Come on, little monkey.” She hoisted her onto her hip and Chloe’s arms went round her neck. Rachel took her upstairs.

  Daniel got up, went to the window, and parted the curtains. If he looked to the left he could just see the edge of the moorings and the gleam of lights on the water. He swirled the gin round in his glass so that the ice cubes clinked.

  He’d been disingenuous, he knew that. How could it be a job like any other, when Jennifer was involved? What he’d said was true: it was a huge thing for the firm, but that wasn’t the only reason. He felt drawn to the case, compelled to pick up where Jennifer had left off. There had seemed to be an inevitability to it, a rightness to it that he couldn’t explain. He just knew that he had to do it.

  He heard Rachel’s footsteps on the stairs. He turned and watched her pick up her glass. She walked over and joined him at the window.

  She said, “I’m having lunch tomorrow with Katie Flanagan.”

  It was his turn to demur. “I hope you haven’t taken on too much there.”

  All the same, he was relieved. This meant that for now she’d dropped the question of the case. A fortnight ago, Rachel had joined the board of a charity that raised money for research into childhood blood disorders and this lunch was part of her effort to get up to speed.

  She shook her head. “Better to be doing something, anything.”

  He nodded. They had to fight on, had to believe there was hope of a cure.

  “And it makes sense for me to be the one to go, now she’s moved to that lab near Ely.”

  There had been a serious setback a month or so ago. Professor Goring, the principal investigator for the research the charity were sponsoring, had collapsed and died. The lab he had run was broken up, leaving Katie Flanagan, the sole researcher on the project, without a home – and this with only a few months of her two-year grant still to run. A place had been found for her in Professor Masterman’s lab; the same one, Daniel now realized, where the obesity research was being carried out.

  He reached for Rachel’s hand and twined his fingers in hers. She squeezed back. She had strong supple fingers – her work saw to that.

  “Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” she said.

  That was Rachel all over; she was not one to sit around and brood. She was a doer, so intensely practical, and he loved her for it.

  He leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers, tasting the sweetness of the gin on them. “Let’s have an early night,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  “It’s a real pity you didn’t get a better result with the western blot,” Paul said. “Something we could publish.”

  Katie was sitting beside him at his desk in his consulting room at the hospital. Her lab book was open in front of them. She’d come in early so that he could fit her in before his nine o’clock clinic. And she’d been in the lab even earlier.

  “The band’s in the right place,” she pointed out.

  “It’s just too faint. I’d hoped you were on the verge of a breakthrough here. You’ll try again, of course. You’ve got enough antibody?”

  Paul O’Sullivan was tall and gangly with big hands, had to be in his early forties to have got to this position, though the short, cropped hair and fashionable, heavy-framed glasses made him look younger. On the filing cabinet was a school photo of two little boys, one of them with a gap-toothed smile. Did parents find that reassuring, Katie wondered, knowing that he had children of his own?

  He was a consultant in paediatric blood disorders – and a full professor too, meaning that he had reached the top of the ladder in not just one, but two spheres, the clinical and the academic. To do that it wasn’t enough to be exceptionally able; you had to be exceptionally driven too, and driven people could be difficult people. She hadn’t made her mind up about him yet. This was only her second meeting with him.

  “I am on the verge of a breakthrough,” she said. “There’s enough to run it a couple of times if necessary. I’m in the middle of doing that right now.”

  He turned the pages of the lab book, initialling pages as he went.

  She wasn’t going to tell him that she’d made a mess of it the first time round and had had to start again. It would be a long time since he’d done any lab work – if he ever had – and he’d have forgotten how easily things could go wrong. Yesterday she put her starter culture into the flask and it had spent the whole night in the shaking incubator. This morning she’d been able to t
ell just by looking at it that it hadn’t worked. The broth should have been dense and cloudy with E.coli, but it was just as clear as when she’d put it in. It was a simple enough procedure – a first-year biology student could do it – and she’d done it herself hundreds of times. She didn’t understand what had gone wrong. This particular batch of E.coli was resistant to ampicillin, so that was the antibiotic that she’d put in the broth to kill the other bugs, the ones that she didn’t want to grow. Had she picked up the wrong bottle, put the wrong antibiotic in? Or had she forgotten to put it in altogether?

  Paul nodded, closed the book, and handed it to her. “We’re running out of time and money. Looks like it’ll be down to the wire on this one.”

  As if she didn’t already know that. Still, at least he’d said “we”. Perhaps he was OK after all.

  “Let me know what happens when you run it again,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “Talk to me before you write it up.” He wasn’t quite meeting her eye.

  She wasn’t sure that she’d understood what he was saying.

  He glanced at his watch and she saw that the meeting was over. His clinic was about to start.

  She got up to leave.

  He said, “Did you arrange to meet – what’s her name?”

  “Rachel Marchmont. Yes, I’m having lunch with her today.”

  “Good. It’s important to keep the sponsors happy.”

  She went out through the waiting room. There were clusters of people: children with their mothers, who had often brought along their own mother for moral support, and sometimes Dad was there too. Families came from all over the country to see him.

  Their eyes followed her. They were wondering who she was and whether she was someone that mattered. When they took in her jeans and T-shirt and scruffy shoes, they lost interest. They weren’t to know that she was the person who might find a cure for the disease that afflicted their child – if she could only get her act together and stop making silly mistakes.

  A lot was riding on this for her. She was nearing the end of the life-cycle of a postdoctoral researcher. However much you loved bench work you couldn’t go on doing it indefinitely, because as you got older and more experienced, you became more expensive, too expensive. At the most you had three or four cycles of grants of two or three years before you had to try for some kind of permanent post: a lectureship, maybe – though those were very hard to come by – perhaps science writing or patent work. What she really wanted to do was become a principal investigator herself, applying for her own grants and supervising her own postdocs. She could kiss goodbye to that if she didn’t make a success of this project.

  She had a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich in the hospital café. Then she drove back towards Ely across the Fens. The fields had been ploughed, ready for their winter crops, and pigeons pecked the rich dark earth.

  She pondered over what Paul had said. Surely he couldn’t have been suggesting that if the result wasn’t good enough, she shouldn’t write it up? She replayed the conversation in her head. He hadn’t come right out and said it. But then he wouldn’t. Because what he was suggesting, if he was suggesting it, would be the equivalent of falsifying research results, even if it were just by omission.

  Of course, Big Pharma did that all the time. A drug company might run four different drug tests. If only one of the four was positive, that was the one they would publish. They would quietly bury the others and that was perfectly legal. They were under no obligation to make the results public. When Katie had first learned about this as an undergraduate she had been incredulous and, as a scientist, deeply affronted. She still felt exactly the same. But even if she hadn’t felt like that, for her the rules were different. She wasn’t allowed to ignore inconvenient results and Paul knew that. If she failed to record an experiment that went against her earlier findings, and she was found out, it would be career death. In this game, she had the most to lose. But it was frustrating. The procedure did work. It was just the final piece of evidence that was missing.

  She had to pull it off next time, that was all there was to it. She couldn’t afford to be making mistakes at this late stage. Paul was right: she was running out of both time and money. And now she’d have to waste some of that precious time sweet-talking one of the sponsors.

  She thought of Michael, her old supervisor, and tears pricked her eyes. He hadn’t been just her principal investigator; he’d been a friend and mentor. A month ago he had been cooking roast chicken for his wife and teenage son in the kitchen of his house off Parker’s Piece. He had just sat down at the table and was reaching for the carving knife. “Now who wants…” He’d stopped in mid-sentence and his wife looked up from the bottle of wine she was opening. Later she told Katie that she actually saw the light leave his eyes. His son caught him as he slumped sideways. A massive heart attack. It had come completely out of the blue. He was only fifty-six.

  She could still hardly believe he had gone.

  His death had left her orphaned professionally. Most researchers were part of a team, but Katie was working on her own, funded by a charity, and she was left in the lurch when Michael died. After a couple of weeks of uncertainty, she’d had a lucky break. Lyle Linstrum was the father of one of her best friends and he had come to the rescue. He’d pulled some strings and she’d been offered a bench in Professor Masterman’s lab. It was on the outskirts of Ely, miles away from her old lab in the centre of Cambridge. But on the plus side the building was only a few years old and the facilities second to none.

  I’ll do it, Michael, she promised, as she drove into the lab car park. I’ll crack it. I’ll be the one to find a cure for Diamond-Blackfan anaemia and it’ll be thanks to you.

  It was only when she got back to the lab that she realized she hadn’t got her lab book.

  Chapter Five

  The chisel slipped and bright beads of blood sprang up on the back of Rachel’s hand.

  “Oh, damn!”

  She grabbed a handful of tissues, pressed them onto the wound and walked over to the sink. She turned on the cold tap and let the water run over her hand, washing the blood away. Just a scrape, luckily. She got the first-aid kit, cleaned the wound, and put a long strip of Elastoplast on it. She couldn’t remember the last time she had had an accident like this. She was normally so careful.

  She went back to her workbench. No blood on the trumpet she was carving, thank God. She ran her hand over the dark oak, stroking it as you’d stroke the fur of an animal. This was the sort of job she loved, restoring two baroque angels that belonged to the organ case of a church out in the Fens. They had been found stored away in the loft of the church hall, battered, dismembered, and covered in treacly brown paint. One of them was missing a wing and one a trumpet. She had stripped away the paint and now she was doing the part she liked best: making good the damaged or missing pieces. It was at times like this that she felt close to the original craftsman. Her aim was to add her voice to his: to produce something so much in the spirit of the original that only another woodworker would know the difference.

  She spent three or four mornings a week in her studio while Chloe was at her playgroup. Their lovely GP had persuaded her not to give up work altogether. Chloe should have as normal a life as possible. “It won’t do Chloe any good to have you anxiously brooding over her the whole time. She needs other children and you need to have something else in your life.” Daniel had thought that, too.

  Her studio had become a refuge, somewhere to escape from her preoccupation with the relentless round of blood transfusions and overnight infusions that kept Chloe alive. Here she could lose herself in the work, her hands busy, her senses fed by the feel and smell of the wood.

  But today she just couldn’t settle. She decided to knock off for the day.

  She had about forty minutes before she had to set off to meet Katie Flanagan. She quickly tidied the studio and put on her good coat and her favourite scarf: yellow chiffon with swirling organic shapes
in crimson and black and orange. It made her think of paintings by Matisse. She was already wearing her one pair of smart trousers. As a board member of a charity supporting research into Diamond-Blackfan anaemia she felt she had something to live up to. And she was nervous about meeting this very clever young woman. Her own scientific education had stopped with GCSE biology.

  She locked up and set off up Back Hill. She was lucky to have her studio so close to the centre of Ely, and only five minutes’ walk from their house on Quayside.

  The cathedral tower came into view, and just the sight of it brought a sense of calm. This had been a place of prayer and worship for 1,300 years, and the thought of that always made the hair rise on the back of her neck. Over the centuries so many people had gone there with their problems and their sorrows and found consolation, and today she was following in their footsteps.

  As she turned the corner into The Gallery, a blast of cold air hit her full-on. She gasped and hunched her shoulders. It was like having icy water dripped down your neck. These Fenland winds: however well you wrapped up, they somehow worked their way under your clothes. She hurried on past the King’s School and the Bishop’s House. She reached Minster Place and turned right into the shelter of the cavernous porch of the cathedral.

  Her footsteps echoed on the stone floor. She lifted the iron latch of the small oak door set in the larger one, and pushed it open.

  She passed the café and the gift shop and reached the ticket desk. As a resident of Ely she had a pass that allowed her in free, but she didn’t need to show it. The woman on duty smiled and waved her on. Rachel came so often – once a week at least – that they all knew her.

  The nave stretched ahead, immensely long and narrow, the pillars soaring to a breathtaking height. Beyond was the dark tracery of the screen, the dimness of the choir, the golden glow of the altar, and far away at the very end of the cathedral, a glimmer of stained glass. It was a sight that Rachel usually rejoiced in. The glorious space made her feel at once very small and yet infinitely cherished. But today as she made her way down the centre of the nave, the clip-clop of her shoes loud in the stillness, her thoughts churning, she was scarcely aware of her surroundings.