The Science of Appearances
Page 28
From the back of the theatre, Peter Baxter, the class wag, calls out, ‘What’s the structure, Professor? I’m dying to know. Can you sketch it for us?’
Taylor caps his pen and slides it into his breast pocket. ‘I’ll leave the sketching to you, Baxter. A perfect diagram, fully labelled, on this board, in two weeks’ time.’
At the library the following week there’s a waiting list for copies of the journal. Dom sits near the librarian’s desk until his name is called. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ the librarian says.
The pages are greasy from others’ hands, and the one he seeks is marked by a dog-eared corner. We wish to put forward a radically different structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid, he reads. This structure has two helical chains, each coiled round the same axis (see diagram) … Both chains follow right-handed helices, but owing to the dyad the sequences of the atoms in the two chains run in opposite directions … it is found that only specific pairs of bases can bond together. These pairs are: adenine (purine) with thymine (pyrimidine), and guanine (purine) with cytosine (pyrimidine) … It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
The diagram is light and elegant, so inconceivably simple: two spiralling ribbons anchored by horizontal hydrogen-bonded base pairs. He traces it with his finger, sees one strand of DNA peeling from another and a new strand formed against its parent template. Structure, coding and replication solved. How could it be so perfectly done? He opens his workbook and sketches the double helix and the sequence of base pairs. A to T, G to C he chants to himself as he leaves the library. It has been found experimentally that the ratio of the amounts of adenine to thymine, and the ratio of guanine to cytosine, are always very close to unity for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Chargaff was bloody right!
Outside, the last of the autumn sun warms the walls and paths of Professor’s Walk. He sits for a moment on the steps of the Herbarium and watches the passage of students, the ebb and flow at the top of the hour, marking the end of one lecture and the beginning of the next. The girls’ heels ring against the pavement. All about him is laughter, excitement, friendship, the thrill of ideas. Sex, too: he feels it in the hazy air, and his spirit rises. He’s at home here; more than that, he loves this place. At the end of the year he could choose to walk away with a degree, but to where? Honours now beckons, and beyond that more study, more research. Genetics, of course. Plants and animals; humans, too, if he can find the courage.
‘I’m lucky,’ Hanna said to him once, when they were lying in bed at her parents’ house. ‘But luck isn’t something I wear lightly. I have to invest in it, make the most of my chances.’ It might have been that first weekend. The welcome weight of the sheets, cool against his skin, her dark hair spread on the pillow; he’d never been happier. ‘My parents and I survived. That needs to mean something. Otherwise we dishonour those who didn’t.’
His life’s been given back to him, renewed twice over. That needs to mean something, too.
He’s on the South Lawn ten minutes early. He waits to see Hanna walking towards him over the emerald grass, just as he’s waited before. He wants to look at her and feel some hope of happiness. The slenderest shaving, the tiniest crumb: enough, at least, for now.
He telephoned her yesterday evening. ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he said. ‘Face to face. Would that be all right?’
‘It’s good news, isn’t it? Your mother gave you good news.’
‘Yes.’
‘Tomorrow. South Lawn. Let’s say three-thirteen? I’m glad, Dom,’ she said.
And here she comes: yellow jumper, green beads. ‘Hello, old friend,’ she says.
At the hardware store on Sydney Road, Dom buys five yards of fine-bore plastic tubing, a roll of picture wire, four sheets of coloured cardboard and a roll of Sellotape.
‘What you want with this lot?’ asks the bloke behind the counter. ‘School project?’
Dominic grins. ‘Something like that.’ He gathers up his purchases and heads out into sunlight.
In the Rose Street kitchen there’s dinner left for him on a plate: lamb chops, mash and peas. He takes it to the bungalow and eats it cold at his desk, his purchases spread at his feet. It’s half-past seven, long since dark. The stakes in the Nevilles’ yard stand bare, the last of the tomatoes picked, the climbing beans harvested two months ago. His mother will already be knitting for the winter ahead: babies’ clothes for the orphanage in Bendigo, a jumper for him.
Dom cuts the plastic tubing in half and threads a length of the wire through each. When he begins to twist each length into a spiral, he finds he can’t keep the curves uniform. He returns to the kitchen and searches the cupboards for one of Dot’s preserving jars, which he takes back to his bungalow. Using the jar as a template, he wraps the tubing tightly around it, working with his right hand, inside to out. A right-handed helix. He soon has two strands of twisted tubing, even in length and diameter. The coloured card he cuts into rectangles: red for adenine, green for thymine, orange for guanine, blue for cytosine. One of the pair must be a purine and the other a pyrimidine for bonding to occur. He lays the spirals side by side and begins to attach the cardboard pieces, red to green, orange to blue, sticking everything down with tape, working the spirals around each other as he goes. It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. He sits back on his haunches, surveying his model. Is it possible that he, too, might one day be part of a discovery that carries a tenth, a hundredth the weight of this? The simplicity of it, the elegance, the sheer bloody brilliance. It has not escaped our notice. The scientific understatement of the decade. He laughs.
~
The sky a study in Payne’s grey; lovely thick dabs of it for the bursting clouds. The shoreline in Van Dyke brown, the water cinereous and silver. Wash over the sky in rose quartz, as if now the sun’s broken through. Why, there should be a Melbourne grey! She knows its hue and chroma well enough, she who spends all her spare time watching the sky.
A cargo ship drifts across the horizon and Mary goes with it, riding the foam. To the ports of Naples and Lisbon, where a sea brume peels the paint from the harbour cafés. And perched on those green hills high above the sea, the grand old fairytale palaces, the mosaics of the ancients still gracing the floors. She’ll lose herself in the Louvre, cross the Atlantic to find herself in the Whitney, dance until dawn in the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village. In the deserts of New Mexico she’ll paint flowering cacti at sunset — oh, the cacti of Georgia O’Keeffe! — and then take a sleek silver train back to New York, just in time for the opening of her first American show. She came to St Kilda so she could go elsewhere. The breeze comes up, the lapping water teases her. When will you go, Mary? One day soon.
She leans over the railings and lets the wind take her hair, the hem of her skirt. How weathered her hands have become; chafed and reddened from water and soap, paint and varnish. The hands of a working woman. Her mother’s hands.
Tom pops his head around the kiosk door. ‘All right, Mares?’
‘Right as rain.’
In the shed behind the kiosk sits a sculpture she’s making from scrap metal and sailor’s rope, a twisting, rising thing. She’ll learn how to weld — Joyce will teach her — and she’ll make it anew, something that holds together, something sinewed and strong. She imagines it now: two strands of burnished metal curving around each other, drawing close and then pulling apart, going on forever, a wave travelling around the earth.
Author’s Note
While Dominic and Mary Quinn and the events of their lives as described in these pages are entirely fictional, I’ve drawn on historical fact to flavour the narrative in some places.
My characters Tom, Eric and Molly Jessop are fictionalised portrayals. There was a fa
mily who lived on St Kilda Pier during the 1950s — the Kerbys — and while some specific details, such as Tom brewing beer and cutting telephone wires, have a basis in fact and can be found on the historical record, the vast majority of the Jessops’ actions, as well as all their dialogue and their relationship with Mary, have been created for the novel.
Some minor characters or individuals mentioned in the narrative were real people alive at that time. For example, Hannah’s psychology professor Oscar Oeser was a German national who, in 1945 and 1946, headed the German personnel research branch of the Control Commission, assessing the suitability of locals for leading roles in a reconstructed Germany. In 1946 he took up the foundation chair of psychology at the University of Melbourne. Jim Duggan and Harry Portelli were real Kyneton rabbit merchants of the 1950s.
Details of certain places and events, such as the 1952 fire in Wilson Hall, are based on material found on the historical record. The Argus review of Mary’s painting on page 251 was taken and adapted from an article in the Sydney Morning Herald dated 6 February 1946 and entitled ‘Melbourne Painters’. The words were originally meant for a young Sidney Nolan.
The Victorian Eugenics Society was a real entity, in operation in Melbourne from 1936 to 1961. To the best of my knowledge the society did not hold meetings at the University of Melbourne, although Richard Berry, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Melbourne from 1903 to 1929, publicly espoused eugenic ideas. Berry’s university tenure was more than two decades prior to the events of this novel, and the influence of eugenics as a tool for social reform waned significantly after the Second World War. Humanity’s Mirror: 150 years of anatomy in Melbourne by Ross L. Jones (Haddington Press for the University of Melbourne, 2007) was a helpful resource in this area.
My novel borrows its title from an illuminating treatise on painting technique by the respected twentieth-century Scottish-Australian artist Max Meldrum, who is himself mentioned briefly in these pages.
I am indebted to the following authors and their works: Jan Mitchell’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor: the life of Colin Kerby OAM (Create Space, 2011); Anne Longmire’s St Kilda, The Show Goes On: the history of St Kilda, volume III: 1930–1983 (Hudson Publishing, 1989); John Poynter and Carolyn Rasmussen’s A Place Apart: the University of Melbourne — decades of challenge (Melbourne University Press, 1996); and Felicity St John Moore’s Classical Modernism: the George Bell circle (National Gallery of Victoria, 1992).
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the following people for their wise counsel, guidance and support during the writing of this book: Trevor Byrne, Clare Forster, Aileen Halloran, Rosalie Ham, Maria Hyland, Antoni Jach, Leah Kaminsky, Tali Lavi, Ellie Nielsen, Sonia Orchard and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
To Henry Rosenbloom and everyone at Scribe Publications, thank you for championing books, including mine. Special thanks to my tireless editor, Julia Carlomagno, who now knows this novel backwards, and who has given countless hours to improving it.
I am very grateful to the Australia Council for the Arts for a 2014 New Work Grant.
To Daniel, Jesse and Myles Loughnan, thank you for being yourselves. And to Michael Loughnan, gratitude and love, always.
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prologue
Punctuated Equilibrium
1
2
3
4
5
Drift and Adaptation
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Homeostasis
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements