by Weldon, Fay
‘Are you all right?’ asked Mavis.
‘I’m just fine,’ said Joanna May.
And the greatest of these is desire, and the second greatest outrage, through which we recognize evil and sweep it away because it has no business hanging around, spoiling things. Joanna May willed: it was like using a muscle forgotten for years: you searched, focused, used – it hurt, but it worked. Enough.
‘I want my life back,’ said Joanna May, petulant and passionate as a child of five. ‘The murdering bastard! He took Isaac, he took Oliver, but he shan’t have the clones. I want them. I need them. They’re mine.’
‘That’s better,’ said Mavis.
38
‘Hey ho, the holly,’ said Carl May, bouncing into Dr Holly’s office, ‘this life is so jolly.’
Perhaps he’s been taking rejuvenating hormones, thought Dr Holly, or is it just those old things, amphetamines, or perhaps youth is indeed in some measure infectious and he’s caught a rather hefty dose of it from the young woman who keeps him company, but this is the third time in a week he’s been to see me, and I wish he wouldn’t. I don’t like it. What does he want?
‘Hey ho, the holly,’ corrected Dr Holly, ‘this life is most jolly.’ Carl May is a powerful and wealthy man, why doesn’t he get his secretary to call me on the phone, why doesn’t he send his chauffeur, what is going on that he needs to see me in person? Does he have nobody to talk to? Or does he just want to show off his young companion? That was most likely.
‘He’s always getting things wrong,’ said the young companion, and then, rather quickly, ‘don’t you, darling?’ and she moved over to plant a kiss just above Carl May’s eyes where the white hairs grew sparsely in stretched skin.
She seemed nervous. Just a two-a-penny scrubber, thought Dr Holly; an old man’s toy, equivalent of a young man’s Porsche, and then thought, no, that’s just defensive, if she were mine I’d take her everywhere too, for all the world to see – could you breed from the emerald eyes? She wouldn’t age well: the bone structure of the face was blurred – she had a look about the mouth: how was it you could tell the whore from other women, just by looking? Psychosomatic damage affected growth, as surely as did hunger: the failure to reach emotional potential left its evidence in the face: the outcome of the psycho-genetic battle was there for all to read. Poor thing. Poor damaged thing. As for Carl May, it was pathetic: a humiliation. Dr Holly did not like to see it. The girl was so clearly bought. He wondered if there would be any point in trying to find the marker for the propensity to use younger members of the opposite sex as symbols of status – it might not be too difficult; some variant in the reproductive organs might well prove to have just such a behavioural link – but decided there were far more urgent matters to attend to. Future generations might locate and shuffle the marker out, if it existed. If they had a mind to. Certainly his own department, after his disagreement with Carl May over the absent-mindedness or otherwise of university professors, could not even begin to take it on board.
‘Did you hear what I was saying, Holly?’
Dr Holly hadn’t. Bad mark, Holly.
‘When do they make you retire, Holly? Got to make way for the young ones, isn’t that so, Bethany?’
‘Young men are boring,’ said Bethany. Then quickly, ‘Anyway, Carl, you’re not old.’ Whew!
‘I’m ageing better than he is,’ said Carl May. ‘I’ve pickled my bones in radioactivity, that’s what it is!’ He poked Bethany’s young flesh with a bony finger. ‘Isn’t that so, Squirrel Nutkin?’
‘Martins don’t enforce a retirement age in their R & D departments,’ said Dr Holly, whose beard was white but whose eyes were bright, alert, even kind. ‘Good men are hard to find. There’s a surplus of competence in the young, but not much imagination.’
‘Is that so?’ said Carl May. ‘No fixed retirement age! I must have a word about that with my friend Henry.’ Henry White, chief executive, Martins International, subsidiary of Britnuc. And Dr Holly wondered exactly what kind of task Carl May had in store for him and how he would get out of it. Certainly Carl May was building up to something.
Dr Holly had read about Carl May’s divorce in the newspapers and had appreciated the silence which followed it. The man, he had hoped, was permanently subdued. But then he had turned up again, Bethany on his arm, bouncing about like a newly-inflated balloon.
On the first visit Carl May, on his way to a board meeting, had talked amiably about the possibility of injecting more funds into Martins R & D. He had then left two specimens for dry-storage, which Dr Holly could see no reason to refuse. Carl May did not volunteer information about the nature of the specimens. Dr Holly did not ask. Bethany had worn white boots, black stockings, a scarlet miniskirt and an old grey-white torn T-shirt.
On the second visit they’d talked about the quest for the new non-addictive painkiller the world was looking for, and how after the expense of Factor 10 Martins deserved to be the ones to find it. Bethany had worn a grey suit, a white blouse and pearls and would have looked like a businesswoman only her hair kept falling out of its combs. On that occasion Carl May had been called away abruptly, back to Britnuc. Chernobyl was causing an uproar, apologized Carl May; the world had gone mad; and the thought came into Dr Holly’s head that Carl May believed he was the world and was trying to tell him something. Carl May certainly had delusions of omnipotence.
On this occasion Bethany wore a long flowered skirt and an ethnic blouse, which kept falling open at the front where a buttonhole was too large for its button, and Carl May said, ‘Tell me more about what you’re doing,’ and Dr Holly, who thought Carl May knew very well, told him more. He was studying brain-cell function in addiction, said Dr Holly, using identical twins as subject and control, stimulating the pleasure centres of the inner brain, rather than the pain centres – which would hardly be ethical –
‘Impractical, shall we say,’ said Carl May, ‘since I daresay you’re dependent upon volunteers, and only masochists would turn up, and then you’d have a biased sample.’
‘Quite so,’ said Dr Holly, calmly. ‘How well you put it. Fortunately, you get much the same kind of hormonal excretion from the brain cells whether they’re excited by pain or pleasure.’
‘Much the same!’ scorned Carl May. ‘Time was when you wouldn’t be satisfied with “much the same”. Time was when you could have got a Nobel Prize, if only you’d pressed ahead, not backed out, sold out, let me down.’
‘Well,’ said Dr Holly, ‘chance would have been a fine thing. It just so happened that Martins halved my funding one fine day for no reason that I could see.’
‘Perhaps they halved it,’ said Carl May, ‘because you, being a professor, were such an absent-minded old fart and only half there most of the time.’
Bethany stirred uneasily. Language! Another button popped open.
‘Perhaps they did,’ said Dr Holly, ‘perhaps I am,’ and Carl May smiled. He always won, in the end.
‘Time was,’ said Carl May, ‘when you’d have bubbled the vats and brewed the broth and grown a million million brain cells and not have had the bother of asking in living twins and parking electrodes into their brains, and perhaps the time will come again, sooner than you think.’
‘Do you think so?’ asked Dr Holly. ‘At least stimulating the pleasure centres of consenting twins, triplets, quads if we’re very lucky, is ethical.’
‘Ethical smethical,’ said Carl May. ‘What do you think Martins are doing in the other labs, or don’t you ask? Pushing ahead with what you began but didn’t have the guts to see through. The transfer of nuclei, perfect and whole, dried not frozen, from the frog right up to the mammal – and by mammal I mean human, you bet I do.’
‘So much is interesting,’ said Dr Holly. ‘There is more to science than genetic engineering. Perhaps, as you say, the field should be left to younger men.’
‘Potter on, potter on,’ sang Carl May sweetly, which meant he was taken aback, ‘to the end of the road, and
you’ll never walk again,’ and he pinched Bethany so that she squealed and leant forward and the next button came undone.
‘Walk on, walk on,’ corrected Dr Holly, ‘to the end of the road, and you’ll never walk alone.’
‘How’s the wife?’ asked Carl May kindly. ‘She must be getting on.’
‘She’s very well,’ said Dr Holly.
‘No arthritis, no spondylitis? A fluttering of Alzheimer’s in the brain?’
‘A little,’ admitted Dr Holly.
‘Pottering on to the end of the road,’ said Carl May. ‘I really must take young Bethany home. Look at her! I’ll be back for your answer within the week. A plague on your living twins, I say. I need you back in the field. Money no object.’
Dr Holly nodded and smiled vaguely as if he hadn’t quite understood, but Carl May seemed satisfied and left with a cheery ‘Hey ho, the holly’, and when he was gone, in spite of the relief that he was gone, Dr Holly’s office seemed oddly dull and quiet, as if Carl May had sucked out all the energy through the door, like juice from a hole in the skin of an orange, leaving nothing but pith and fibre behind. He wondered what would happen next and he hadn’t wondered that for quite a while.
39
Dr Isadore Holly looked up from his desk and said, as Joanna May came into his office, ‘Why, Mrs May,’ he said, ‘you’ve hardly changed at all.’
‘Don’t begin by telling lies,’ she said. ‘You haven’t seen me for thirty years. You can’t possibly remember me.’
‘I’m not telling lies,’ he protested. ‘It’s not in my habit to tell lies. I remember you very well. Naturally, you look older; time has passed: I merely remarked that you hadn’t changed, and you may think of that as a compliment, or otherwise. You were the most beautiful of all my patients; your husband claimed you were perfection itself, and I had to agree. The mixture of Scandinavian, Celtic and Norman stock we call typically English sometimes turns out very well indeed. And you have aged well. That too is in the genes; of course. Like mother, like daughter, we find.’
‘And you could say the same of identical twins, I daresay. Like this one, that one. No credit in it.’
‘Truly identical twins are rare in nature,’ he said. ‘When the single fertilized ovum splits, it seems the division of the chromosomes is not necessarily exact. It is possible to get identical twins with different-coloured eyes, did you know that? And eye colour is known to influence behaviour, and therefore personality. But I don’t suppose you’ve come here for idle chitchat. One must not suppose that one’s life’s passion is even remotely interesting to other folk.’
‘Your life’s passion, Dr Holly,’ said Joanna May, ‘has had quite an effect on me. Tell me, if someone came to you and asked you to grow a human with frog’s legs, would you do it?’
‘It wouldn’t be a very practical proposition, Mrs May,’ said Dr Holly, his shrewd eyes crinkling with artificial mirth. ‘We have to respect the laws of physics. Such a creature wouldn’t jump – it would be top heavy. And it wouldn’t look very nice.’
‘I was not talking about practicalities, Dr Holly, nor aesthetics.’
‘You mean the ethical considerations? Rest assured we would not. We are not in the business, Mrs May, of creating monstrosities, but of removing disease and, in the fullness of time, and with all possible ethical and legal safeguards, mental illness – a tricky area, mind you, because what is defined as mental illness differs, as we know, from society to society, culture to culture: what seems insane to one nation is mere dissent in another – but no doubt we’ll come to terms with it. And eventually we will have to tackle the genetic basis of behavioural problems, and that too will be ethically and politically tricky. But nowhere does anyone wish to create monstrosities, Mrs May. Do I look like a mad scientist to you? No, of course not! Don’t you go believing what you read in the gutter press.’
Dr Holly smiled benignly. Joanna May did not smile back.
‘But you could do it.’
‘Of course.’
‘And no one would do it just for money, say.’
‘Good lord, no.’ Dr Holly looked quite shocked.
‘People do all kinds of things for money,’ remarked Joanna May, ‘they make instruments of torture and poison gas, for example. Why not me with frog’s legs, for money: or worse, just for fun, to see just how far I jumped, or couldn’t jump? Fun is a great incentive. There’s always a shortage of it.’
‘Mrs May,’ said Dr Holly, ‘this is very interesting, but I’m a busy man. Can I help you in any way?’
‘I just wanted to know what kind of person I was dealing with,’ said Joanna May. ‘What kind of person you’d turned into since, under cover of performing an illegal abortion thirty years ago, you stole what was rightfully mine, one of my eggs, you and my husband between you. A lot can happen in thirty years. I have come for the names and addresses of the women in whose wombs you implanted my babies.’
Dr Holly was silent for a second or so.
‘I think “my babies” is an unfortunate misnomer, Mrs May. I don’t think ownership comes into it. Does a woman’s egg, once fertilized, belong to her, or to the next generation?’
‘Mine wasn’t fertilized,’ said Joanna May, ‘that was the point. It was jiggled into life. So, yes, I reckon it was mine.’
‘I should point out,’ said Dr Holly, ‘that there was no question of illegality, since as I remember there was no actual pregnancy. But these are interesting points; for lawyers to decide, not us. And, as I say, I am no longer personally engaged in genetic engineering. It’s a young man’s field, these days.’
He felt discouraged and resolved that he would stay with the study of brain cells. They at least would not turn up years later to pester and reproach him.
‘The files,’ said Joanna May. Mavis waited in the car outside, to make sure she persisted. ‘Or has my husband been to see you already? Is that it?’
‘Your husband?’ Dr Holly seemed surprised. ‘I haven’t seen him for a couple of years, since he had this idea about cloning a mummy.’
‘Cloning a mummy? An Egyptian mummy?’
‘The idea was, if we could get enough tissue with at least some segments of DNA intact, we could shuffle it together, insert what we had into a growing egg cell, and the resulting child would have the same genetic make-up as an ancient Egyptian. What a lot we’d learn! Of course, the child’s privacy would have to be respected. Just because someone dates from the past doesn’t mean they don’t have present rights.’
‘How far did you get?’ asked Joanna May. If Dr Holly was playing for time, she had enough of that and more to spare. This was the advantage of being useless. He was a busy man, she was not a busy woman.
‘Well,’ said Dr Holly, ‘not very far, as it happened. Dead’s dead, so far as I’m concerned, and in nature this turns out to be pretty much the case, though your husband finds it difficult to accept. On the whole such scraps of DNA as we managed to retrieve weren’t sufficient for our purposes. We had such a deal of patching and joining to do, whatever we grew might well have had the odd toenail missing. Of course these days we can dehydrate the cell before freezing; every year brings new developments, and indeed, more promising ancient bodies to light. We reckon, eventually, to find a few gut cells inadvertently dehydrated. There’s one fungus which will do it – before death – which would help a lot. Your husband doesn’t give in easily, does he?’
‘No,’ said Joanna.
‘Unhappy childhood; to the point of trauma. Your husband represents the victory of nurture over nature: he is a great encouragement to us all. A source of inspiration. Interesting to reproduce him, wouldn’t it be, and rear him in more benign circumstances, see just how it turned out.’
‘It must have been fun,’ said Joanna May, ‘to clone me and see how that turned out.’
‘Our major concern at the time,’ said Dr Holly benignly, ‘was in the successful implanting of fertilized eggs in stranger wombs, and testing the efficacy of certain immuno-s
uppressive drugs, rather than in personality studies, or making any contribution to the nurture-nature debate.’
‘The records, Dr Holly.’
‘I must say here and now, Mrs May, I would be happier if the request for information came from the child, rather than the natural parent.’
‘I am not a parent, I am a twin.’
‘You could look at it like that,’ said Dr Holly. ‘These personal and ethical ramifications do keep emerging – one hardly thought about them at the time. But, as I say, in ordinary adoption cases, the natural mother and child are brought together by the relevant agency only at the request of the child. The mother gave up certain rights, knowingly and willingly, when she gave up the child to adoption.’
‘I neither knowingly nor willingly consented to anything at all,’ said Joanna May, ‘wriggle as you want, and I want those records now or I’ll blow the whole disgraceful thing wide open.’ She felt the pressure of Mavis waiting, filling the car with cigarette smoke, thicker and thicker as the minutes passed. She felt the dependence of the Queens of Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups: her sisters, her children, her family. They needed her.
‘There is nothing to blow open,’ said Dr Holly. ‘Nothing that was not approved by the district medical ethics council at the time.’ But he allowed her access to his records just the same.
40
I, Joanna May; not so young as I was, not so strong as I was, but braver: finding courage. My bed is empty again, but I dream it is filled, with lovers real and unreal, lovers I remember and men I never knew I wanted. I wake to find Joanna May sleeps alone, to face a day now peopled with the ghosts of the past: they throng around me, reminding me, instructing me. This, they say, relates to that. How simple! Why did you never see it before? But still the nights are stronger than the days. When the days triumph, I will act.
How the feelings of childhood haunt us. We think we forget, but we don’t. Those initial pains grow stronger with the years: instead of fading, as one might expect, they merely afflict the present more and more. One image now torments me. I remember standing on the wide polished staircase in the big house in Harley Street. A scarlet carpet runner ran down the centre of the stairs. The pattern was both boring and complicated. I must have been very small. The front door bell rang and the receptionist walked through the hall. She wore a white coat, and was not friendly to me, or anyone. She opened the door to the patient. On the step stood an old woman. She had on a black coat with a fur collar and brought with her an air of what I can now see was genteel despair mingled with anxiety: the sense of a life misspent, of opportunities missed, of knights in white armour who never came, of husbands, children who were never grateful. So many of the patients were defeated women. Women, I perceived at that moment, were by their very nature supplicants. The outside world knocked on our front door and yielded up its goodies, and its goodies were nothing but female desolation, decay and disappointment. My father’s voice sounded from behind closed doors in one direction: my mother’s from another. My mama played bridge, and I was not supposed to disturb her. I ate in the kitchen, with the receptionist: rationing was in force. There was a war on. Food was simple and boring: so was conversation. My mother and I were not evacuated from London: she said we must defy Mr Hitler but I thought it was because she did not want to miss her bridge. My father said the same about Hitler and I thought that was because he did not want to miss his patients. Even fear was a deceit. Sometimes bombs fell and the outside world trembled and crashed and the door knocker banged of its own volition, but the house didn’t fall down, which was what I wanted to happen.
