Deep Water

by Christine Poulson

  Bryony looked back at him. At first he thought she wasn’t going to answer. But perhaps she was sorry for him, or felt that he was owed something, given his history with Jennifer. She said, “Jennifer thought it was. She asked me to make an appointment with her solicitor. She was devoted to Harry. Nick wanted custody of him. She wasn’t going to stand for that. She intended to fight him all the way.”

  Half way home it occurred to him that Jennifer’s death had settled the question of custody for good. He found that tears were streaming down his face. He couldn’t see the road and pulled over into a lay-by. He folded his arms on the steering wheel, buried his face in them and wept. Oh Jennifer, Jennifer… She had never been Jenny or Jen, even to him. He had once looked her up in a book of babies’ names and found that Jennifer was a version of Guinevere, the name of King Arthur’s adulterous queen. He had not for a moment imagined how appropriate that would turn out to be… or that she would be dead by forty. It was as if he had lost her all over again.

  Chapter Seven

  Katie fiddled with her fork, took another mouthful of pasta. They were in the staff canteen at the lab. Katie had had to dash back to the hospital, heart in mouth, to hunt for her lab book. To lose that would be a disaster. Everything was in it: every detail of what she’d been doing, every step, every formula, so that if she got knocked down by a bus, her experiments could be replicated. Luckily she’d left it on the table in the café at the hospital and it had been handed in to lost property. She only just got back in time to meet Rachel.

  The lunch was turning out to be just as dire as Katie had feared. Maybe she’d just spent so much time with other scientists that she’d forgotten how to talk to normal people. They’d managed a bit of conversation about the DBA society and what it was like being on the board. They’d deplored the loss of Michael Goring and agreed that it was unfortunate that Katie had had to move labs. Then the talk had dried up.

  Rachel poured out a glass of water. It was her third and Katie guessed that she felt just as awkward as she did. She didn’t know what Rachel was normally like, but she seemed on edge; there wasn’t much eye contact. They just didn’t seem to have much in common. And she was dressed so formally it was a bit off-putting. She was Katie’s idea of a middle-class mum up in London for a matinée. Cool scarf, though: gorgeous colours.

  How soon could she decently draw things to a close? Could they skip dessert? Well, at least she hadn’t asked how the research was going.

  Rachel cleared her throat. “How’s the research going?” she asked.

  Katie sighed. “Oh, so-so. Fine really.” She shrugged. “There are always setbacks.”

  Rachel’s face fell. Katie knew what she hoped to hear: that an amazing breakthrough was imminent, that in a year or two there’d be a complete cure or, if not in a year or two, at least by the time her daughter was a teenager. One day she would have to manage those overnight infusions herself and that was a tough regime for a young person. Those who couldn’t handle it risked dying of cardiac failure.

  “There’s still time,” Katie hastened to add, “but, you know, even if I do make a breakthrough, we’re still talking about years. Even if my research is successful, it’ll only mean that it works in vitro – that means outside a human body. What works in a Petri dish might not work in a human being. There’d have to be more experiments using mice and then primates and then human trials…”

  “But if you do crack it…”

  Yes, if Katie – or someone else – did crack it, did manage to replace that faulty gene with a healthy one, or did what was equally miraculous, find a way to alter the gene so that it did its job and switched on the production of red blood cells, Chloe’s condition wouldn’t just be improved, she would be cured. It would almost be as if it had never happened. If a therapy was found before irreversible damage had been done, it would be like turning back time. How Rachel must yearn for that, and how far away from it they still were.

  It struck Katie that this was the real reason she preferred to stay in the lab. It was better to keep the heartbreak at arm’s length. After her degree in medicine, she had decided to switch to research and that had been the right decision.

  “Would you like a pudding or coffee?” Katie asked.

  Rachel shook her head.

  “I probably ought to get back,” Katie said. “I’ve got a cell-line waiting for me.”

  Rachel hesitated, and then she said, “I wonder – you’ll say if it’s not convenient, but I’d really like to see where you work. I’ve never been in a lab before.”

  Katie’s heart sank, and she hesitated in her turn. Then she remembered what Paul had said. She knew he was right. She ought to accommodate Rachel as far as she could.

  “Here – best to wear one of these. It’ll protect your clothes from toxins and radioactivity.” Katie handed a white lab coat to Rachel.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she added hastily, seeing the look on Rachel’s face, “there really isn’t any danger. Work involving radioactive isotopes is tightly regulated.”

  “I remember reading a biography of Madame Curie once. Didn’t she die from radiation poisoning?” Rachel said, shrugging on her coat.

  “She died from radium-induced anaemia and her lab books are still so radioactive that they’re kept in lead-lined boxes. People have to wear protective clothing to consult them. Even her cookbook is highly radioactive! They really didn’t appreciate the dangers in those days. Nowadays we fall over backwards to be careful.”

  Rachel looked around. Katie followed her gaze. The lab was such a familiar place, but taking a visitor round, she saw it with fresh eyes. It wasn’t as tidy as it ought to be. The benches running back to back down the room were crowded with notebooks, stray pieces of paper, plastic trays holding test tubes. The shelves above were full to overflowing with beakers, flasks, all sorts of glassware. The desk areas at the end of each bench bore more personal clutter: a copy of Nature, a row of miniature teddy bears, a box of tissues. The walls were covered with photos, calendars, posters of brightly coloured complicated diagrams, cartoons snipped out of newspapers.

  Perhaps Rachel had expected something sleeker, something more high-tech?

  “Not what you’d imagined?” Katie asked.

  “I thought it would all be more…” Rachel said, obviously casting around for a polite way of putting it. “It’s more… homely than I expected.”

  “More of a mess, you mean! Though come to think of it, homely is right in that I sometimes spend more time here than I actually do at home. I’m often in here late at night and at weekends. Sometimes I get so absorbed, I just forget about the time. I’ve got to move out of my place very soon and last week I was supposed to be viewing a flat. I thought I’d just got time to pop in to check on a culture and I was still here three hours later.”

  “That’s how it used to be for me – before I had Chloe. I’m a restorer, I specialize in wood. When I’m working, time just seems to slip away. So which is your desk?”

  “This is my desk and bench over here.” They walked over together.

  “It’s tidier than the others.”

  “Give me time! I only moved in yesterday.”

  “So what are you actually doing? What’s that?” Rachel pointed at a large flask.

  “That’s my E.coli culture. Oh no,” Katie said, seeing Rachel’s eyes widen, “these can’t do anyone any harm. They’re non-pathogenic. In the environment they are generally found in soil, but ours are entirely lab bred, descended from ones first used decades ago.”

  “They’ve been in captivity all these years?”

  Katie laughed. “All these years… and you know what? They have a life cycle of only twenty minutes. That’s a lot of generations.”

  “And what are you going to do with them?”

  Katie hesitated.

  “It doesn’t matter if you haven’t got time,” Rachel said quickly.

  “No, it’s fine. I was just thinking about how to explain it. Look, sit down for
a minute.” Katie pulled up a stool. “You know broadly what I’m trying to do?”

  “It’s to do with a hormone, a growth factor that occurs naturally in the body, and you’re trying to get it into the bone marrow cells and you’re hoping that it’ll stimulate the production of red blood cells.”

  “That’s it. What I do is make a culture that’s a kind of DNA factory. E.coli are reproducing in it and they are carrying the growth factor, so that’s reproducing too. The next thing is to kill the E.coli and take the DNA out. OK, so then I’ve got the copies I need of my growth factor. This is where it all gets a bit complicated, but basically I have to get that DNA into my cell-line. So I insert the growth hormone into a virus. I have to do that very, very carefully, using one of these,” she reached for a pipette, “a drop at a time. Then I harvest the virus in an ultracentrifuge – it looks a bit like a top-loading washing machine.”

  Rachel was frowning in concentration. “Then the virus can carry the DNA into the stem cell?”

  “Yup. You’ve got it. Once it’s inside, the virus inserts the engineered gene into the stem cell genome and the cell can now produce the missing protein.”

  “And that will switch on the red cell production?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Rachel sat silently for a few moments. Then she said, “Your job, it must take a lot of manual dexterity.”

  Katie was surprised. “Yes, it does. Most people don’t realize that. They think it’s all computers and software.”

  “It’s important in what I do, too. But the things you work with – can you even see them under a microscope?”

  “Only just. And that’s all you can see. You can’t see inside them.”

  “Yet those tiny, tiny things make us what we are.”

  There was a thoughtful silence.

  “I’d better let you get on,” Rachel said. “Thanks for showing me round.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” Katie said, and realized that against all expectations that was the truth. “I’ll see you out.”

  As they made their way down the corridor, Rachel said, “Are you still looking for somewhere to live?”

  Katie groaned. “On top of everyone else. It’s a nightmare. My landlord’s daughter’s coming back to live at home and he wants the flat. He gave me a month’s notice and that was two weeks ago. Problem is, I only need somewhere for a few months.”

  “For a few months…” Rachel repeated. She seemed to be thinking something over. “I wonder… how would you feel about living on a boat?”

  Chapter Eight

  When Katie got back to the lab, Minnie was waiting for her. She had the bench next to Katie and was in her first year as a postdoc. To have a doctorate she had to be twenty-four at least, but she looked about eighteen and from the scraps of conversation that Katie overheard, she was still leading the life of a student; whereas Katie wouldn’t see thirty again and was worrying about getting a permanent job and if she’d ever be able to afford a mortgage.

  Minnie was looked flustered.

  “What’s up?” Katie asked.

  “My radio-labelled methionine. I ordered it in last week and it arrived yesterday. It was in the fridge.”

  “And it isn’t there now?”

  Minnie shook her head.

  “Someone must have taken it by mistake,” Katie said. “Or maybe it got shoved to the back of the fridge. Let’s double-check.”

  She followed Minnie back to the fridge. Together they moved everything, but Minnie was right. It wasn’t there. Katie hadn’t really thought it would be, because it wasn’t something you could easily overlook. The glass vial containing the radio-labelled methionine was itself fairly small, but it would be in a lead container and that in turn would be in a plastic box. And the box would be bright yellow to indicate the presence of radioactive material.

  They looked at each other.

  Minnie said, “I don’t see how someone could have taken it by accident. I checked the book. No one else has ordered one in the last week.”

  Katie looked at Minnie’s anxious face. The isotopes weren’t hugely radioactive, but they weren’t something that you wanted to lose track of either. At the training sessions, you were always told that cabin crew get higher doses of radiation because of the height at which they travel, but all the same no one took any chances. People stuck to the rules. Perspex shields and lead-lined containers were used, and if you were working with a radio isotope, you had to wear a body badge on your lapel to tell you if radiation levels were too high.

  “Look,” Katie said, “most likely someone got muddled, thought they had ordered one, and that it was theirs when they spotted yours in the fridge. Have you asked around?”

  “No…”

  “OK. Well, that’s the first thing to do. No, on second thoughts, why don’t you ask Ian first?”

  Ian was the head technician. Katie guessed that he would be the father of the lab, the old hand who knew the ropes, the one that everyone turned to for help.

  Minnie brightened. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. He always knows what’s going on – and he’s the lab’s radiation officer too. Hey, thanks, Katie.”

  “You are very welcome.”

  Minnie went off with a backward wave of the hand.

  Katie turned her attention to her work. Sometime later, she heard the door of the lab swing open and looked up to see Professor Masterman come in. She crossed the lab, heading for Will Orville’s bench. Will had his head down. Katie couldn’t quite see what he was doing. He was a stocky, fair-haired guy, about Katie’s age and at about the same point in his career. They had been introduced briefly, but she hadn’t managed to have a chat with him yet.

  As for Honor, she was quite a contrast to the male heads of labs that Katie had known, with their nylon shirts and awful haircuts. She was wearing narrow black trousers and a wool jacket in black and white with a small geometric pattern: Jaeger or something like that. And you rarely saw lipstick in the lab. Her greying hair was cut into a sleek bob. She looked great for fifty. Actually she looked great, full stop.

  Honor had reached Will’s side, and he was turning to look at her. Honor put her hand on his shoulder. There was a gentleness in the gesture that made Katie wonder; of course, she was old enough to be his mother…

  The two of them conferred, faces serious, Will frowning at whatever Honor was telling him.

  There had been a profile of Honor in The Guardian not long ago. She was married to another academic – older, Katie seemed to remember – but she’d married late and didn’t have any children. Had the chance just passed her by, Katie wondered, or had it been a deliberate decision? The life of a young scientist, in and out of the lab all hours of the day and night, wasn’t easy to combine with children. Would Honor be running her own lab with a Nobel Prize in the offing if she had taken time out for babies? Katie wondered if further down the line she herself would end up in a Jaeger suit with research students as surrogate children.

  She could almost hear what they were saying, but not quite. It was tantalizing.

  Then she reminded herself that if she didn’t complete this project successfully, she wouldn’t have a scientific career next year, let alone in twenty years. She turned back to her lab book, determined to give it her full attention. But she’d no sooner picked up her pen than Minnie arrived, breathless, at her side.

  “It’s alright,” she said.

  “Ian sorted it?”

  Minnie nodded. “It was in the fridge in the lab over the way – on the other side of the corridor.”

  “Panic over, then.”

  “Well, yes, but…”

  Katie pushed back her chair. “Well?” she prompted.

  “I know I didn’t put it there. Why would I? I haven’t set foot in that lab for weeks – ” she broke off, gazing over Katie’s head.

  Katie spun her chair round to see what Minnie was looking at.

  Will was on his feet. He was shaking his head, as though he couldn�
��t believe what he’d just heard. Honor’s lips were pressed into a thin line and she was nodding her head as if to confirm that yes, it really was that serious.

  “Bad news,” Minnie said in a low voice.

  “Looks like it.”

  Chapter Nine

  Katie parked where Rachel had suggested, on Ship Lane. It wasn’t quite raining, but a fine drizzle was hanging in the air and forming haloes round the street lamps. As she got out of the car she felt the chill on her face and wrapped her scarf more closely round her neck. Half past six on a November evening, and it was so quiet that she could hear her own footsteps. She passed just one person walking a dog. She emerged on Quayside opposite the duck feeding station, where the sleeping geese were pale, grey shapes in the dark. She wondered if she’d feel comfortable living down here.

  She found herself yawning. It had been a long day and it wasn’t over yet. She had to go back to the lab to run her experiment again. If it didn’t work this time… But it was no good thinking like that. It would work. Fingers crossed, the result would be unambiguous and it would be publishable. She had to have something to show for two years’ work.

  She found the house with no difficulty and saw that the brass door knocker was in the shape of an anchor. The whole area had a nautical, seaside flavour: higher up the hill she’d noticed a ship’s chandler with a window full of barometers and clocks.

  Katie rapped on the door and Rachel opened it immediately.

  There was an impression of warmth and soft light and colour. The door opened straight into the living room, where a man was sitting on a sofa with a pile of papers on his lap.

  “Come in, come in,” Rachel said.

  Katie closed the door behind her and stood with her back to it. “I won’t come any further, my boots are dirty.”

  “I’ll just get the keys from the kitchen.” Rachel moved away, adding as an afterthought, “This is my husband, Daniel. Dan, this is Katie.”