by Andy Maslen
I don’t know whether I’ve been overworking or what but I need a break, Caro. Really badly. I’ve started having panic attacks too and I’m not supposed to on my meds.
Please come and get me. Tell Peta you need me to do some wedding planning or something.
I love you.
David xxx
From: David
To: Caroline
Subject: Us
Date: 9 October 2010
Dear Caroline,
Please ignore that last email. I was definitely overdoing it. You know how I get with work sometimes.
Look. I don’t know how to tell you this, and I know it’s cowardly to do it by email. But I think we should call off the engagement. I can’t cope with being engaged and working these hours for Peta. She is onto something massive here and I need to focus. In fact, to be honest, I think it’s best if we just, you know, call it off altogether. Us, I mean.
I’m not the best you could do and I know that guy in your chambers has a thing for you. So I want you to know I’m giving you my blessing to go for a truly happy life.
I have to go. Please don’t answer this as Peta has asked for my phone after I send this. Says I am too easily distracted.
Goodbye.
David x
5
[draft post] Ramblings of a free-revving mind – David Harker’s blog, 9th October 2010
I know Caroline thinks I am immune to the charms of other women. It’s true I find it difficult to respond appropriately to sexual overtures (SO). In fact, the real problem is, I am not altogether sure when a woman is making an SO. Flirting is not an activity I am comfortable with. The papers are full of sexual harassment cases, especially in academia, and I for one do not want to get myself embroiled in one of those. So I tend to back away or play dumb. And now Peta is, I am fairly sure, making SOs to me. At least, I think she is. Maybe I should call them SOS, because that’s how they make me feel.
This morning, for example. I was shaving and when I looked up from the basin, Peta was watching me. Just standing there in the doorway to the bathroom. I know it’s her building, and she was good enough to include a self-contained apartment for me inside its walls, but that’s the point, isn’t it? That it’s self-contained, I mean. It’s a container for me, myself. She has boundary issues, I think. Anyway, I jumped when I saw her in the mirror and cut myself. Then it got really, definitely into some kind of SO situation. Her eyelids drooped for a second then she sort of glided across the floor towards me and bent over me (did I mention she’s very tall?) to lick up the blood. I swear she let out a moan as she did it and what was really weird is that the skin on my cheek went numb. I couldn’t feel anything for at least twenty minutes after it happened.
Then she just stroked my other cheek and told me to be more careful, before swanning off without a backward glance.
6
Caroline Murray’s Journal, 10th October 2010
David’s last email made me think he must have come off his meds. First he gets it into his head that Peta Velds was a baby-eating monster. I suspect Ariane must have got to him somehow. Then he dumps me by email. He’d never do that. Not in a million years. Not in a billion. Getting married was his idea in the first place. I decided to write to Peta Velds suggesting I visit him to make sure he was OK. I’d explain he’s very sensitive to stress (and definitely not mention his bipolar disorder). Then I was going to take a few days off work. One of the silks in chambers owed me a favour. I’d peed into a cup for her when she had to submit to a random drug screening – she’d been at a festival the previous weekend and was frightened hers would be full of “happy pill” as she called it. Ecstasy, I assume. So I got her to take on my caseload and wrote to Peta Velds.
7
Emails between Caroline Murray and Peta Velds, 10th October 2010
From: Caroline Murray
To: Peta Velds
Subject: David Harker
Date: 10 October 2010
Dear Ms Velds,
My name is Caroline Murray. Has David mentioned me to you? I hope he has, as we are engaged.
I have received a number of emails from David that suggest to me he is suffering from stress. You may not know this, given the somewhat rapid process through which you hired him, but he is somewhat prone to overworking once an idea has seized him, and, if not managed carefully, his drive can lead him into habits that are injurious to his health. I refer to going without sleep, not eating properly, and, perhaps of greatest concern to me, and I hope you, suffering from occasional distorted beliefs about the way other people think or feel about him.
I should like to pay him a visit. Partly to reassure myself as to his general health, and partly to reconnect him with the world outside his laboratory, to which, I understand, you have more or less confined him.
David is a genius. I understand that is why you hired him in the first place. You must know that such men are rare, like certain species of orchids. And, just like those much sought-after plants, they need the greatest attention paying to their wellbeing, lest they fail to bloom at all.
I plan to travel to Norfolk the day after tomorrow. Please confirm that this is convenient to you.
Kind regards,
Caroline Murray LLD Cantab
From: Peta Velds
To: Caroline Murray
Subject: Re: David Harker
Date: 10 October 2010
Dear Caroline,
Thank you for your email concerning David. Of course, I know all about you. David talked of very little else for the first few days he was here.
I am not sure where you have picked up this idea that his health is suffering while he works for me. He is putting in long hours, that much is true; and he displays the fervency of the genius faced with a challenge that stretches every fibre of his great mind. A mind, incidentally, before which the rest of us mere mortals can only genuflect.
David is engaged in great work here, Caroline, and interruptions are a hindrance to his progress. However, I suppose I should make an exception in your case. Our address:
Velds Solar Solutions
New Road
Great Yarmouth
Our facility lies on the South side of the road between two bends in the River Bure – we are hard to miss. You will see what I mean when you arrive.
It is a long drive from London, and as I have meetings all day I suggest you arrive at six p.m.
Kind regards,
Peta Velds
8
Caroline Murray’s Journal 11th October 2010
I have to say that, right from the start, I didn’t like Peta Velds. Something about the tone of her email just rubbed me up the wrong way. She managed in those few words to suggest that I knew my own fiancé less well than she did and that by displaying a normal human compassion I was disrupting his work. The first thing I needed to do was to find a decent hotel in Great Yarmouth and book a room. As I quickly discovered, the first part of that task was virtually impossible. I settled for a room in one of those ghastly Ye Olde Coaching Inne places that at least promised wifi in every room along with the usual amenities. In fact, two rooms, as I had persuaded my best friend, Lucinda Easterbrook, to come along. I said it would be like Thelma and Louise – “a girls’ road-trip” is how I put it. She’s up for anything; she’s an actress and rather likes spontaneity. I collected her from her place in Pimlico at 11.00 a.m. She was standing on the pavement with her bag and looked, well, actressy. Black velvet coat, purple knitted scarf wound round her throat and a rather dashing black fedora keeping her abundant hair in place.
Lucy has always had a bit of a crush on David. He doesn’t know it, being oblivious to such things, and she doesn’t care that I do. So when I said we’d be going up to visit his new lab, she was terribly excited. She was patting and twirling those tresses of hers all the way up to Norfolk.
About one thing, Peta Velds was right. The drive from London was long. And arduous. I don’t mind driving, though I would hardly put it on my
list of favourite ways to spend five hours on a Friday. I also discovered something else. Picking a car for its suitability for London driving, London parking and London looks brings with it certain drawbacks when one is faced with a few hundred miles of high-speed cruising. Audrey made, I’m afraid to say, somewhat heavy weather of it; her little engine sounded almost frantic at any speed above 50 and we had to turn the music up to cover it.
Have you been to Norfolk? Yes or no? Either way, I hope you journeyed by train. The drive was excruciating. Mile after mile of featureless dual carriageway up the A12, a road I imagine was designed by a team of sadists working in conjunction with a group of Philistines. How else to explain the atrocious road surface, whose unremitting acoustic torture is leavened by not so much as a single interesting feature to look at as one grinds out the miles on one’s journey to the Mystic East. No streetlamps, of course, so that as the sky darkened, we had to rely on Audrey’s rather pathetic headlights, another feature that the designers obviously felt would mostly serve an aesthetic purpose.
Am I being a little harsh? I suppose so. There was a pretty church in Blythburgh, lit from beneath by yellow floodlights, which provided a moment’s pleasure. And a marsh through which we drove on a straight stretch of road that afforded views across to the sea at Southwold with its own church and lighthouse. But from then on, I am afraid, the approach to the Norfolk county boundary was as dull as ditchwater. Dishwater? No, ditchwater. I digress. On through Lowestoft and then we arrived in Great Yarmouth.
No doubt in the summer, Great Yarmouth is a pretty town. This was October. The sky was a depressing mixture of wet slate and bruised flesh – a dark, greyish purple that presaged something bad in the weather department. I wanted to press on and get to David’s lab but my bladder, forgive me, was urging me to stop. We found a place to leave Audrey that didn’t look as though the local wildlife would key her and went in search of a cup of coffee and, more importantly, a loo.
We found both. A lovely little independent café called Cortado – I abhor the chains and would cheerfully wipe every last one of them off the face of the Earth. Like Peta Velds they’re a symbol of globalisation and the creeping homogenisation of our culture. You could venture inside one of those temples to corporate caffeine and have no idea whether you were in Mumbai or Manchester. Not for me, thank you.
Having freshened up, as our American cousins call it, we returned to our table to enjoy surprisingly good lattes and scones. Well, I had a scone. Lucy said she was “trying to keep my figure for a part I’m up for”, though I suspect she imagined looking just that little bit slimmer for David. Silly girl! We were the only customers and the proprietress came over to chat. Normally I find such advances as welcome as a not guilty verdict to prosecuting counsel. But I’d had enough of my own company, and Lucinda’s endless chatter was beginning to grate. If I am honest, I was a little nervous about my meeting with Peta Velds. She took a quick look at Lucy and decided I was in charge.
“Up here on business, love?” she asked me. I suppose it was my outfit. I don’t really do casual so even though I wasn’t working, I’d dressed conservatively, in a navy trouser suit and a white silk blouse.
“Not exactly,” I replied. “I’m visiting my fiancé. He works at Velds Solar Solutions.”
“Oh, does he now? He’s one of them scientists, is he? He wants to be a bit careful working up there for that Peta Vells or whatever she calls herself.”
“Oh, why is that?”
“Well you probably don’t get our local news down there in London. But there’ve been a couple of problems over at that there laboratory of hers. People getting ill.”
“Ill? What kind of ill? Accidents, you mean?”
“Nobody knows, do they?” My sister-in-law’s boy, Ian. He works up there as a lab technician. Night shift. Thought he’d got his dream job, what with his A-levels and that. He’s always loved science, so when he got offered it, well, he was over the moon, he was.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, it was all right at first. Good wage, nice people, and he hardly ever saw Ms Vells, just these two blokes what look after her while she’s staying over. Suits and dark glasses most of the time, he said. One was in charge of security, well you can’t blame her for that I suppose, not if she’s finding a cure for cancer. But the other one, well, he was some sort of lawyer, Ian said. Made him sign something on his first day about not telling nobody what he was working on.”
Lucy had already grown bored with the conversation and was checking her phone.
“A little heavy-handed perhaps,” I said. “But it’s standard practice for many industrial firms nowadays. To keep their intellectual property protected.”
“Well, I don’t know about any intellectual property. What I do know is how Ian started coming down with little bugs after a couple of weeks there. You know, fluey things. No energy. Had to go to bed for a day or two. We thought it might be viruses they was breeding but he said they wasn’t doing anything like that – it was all cells and stuff. But viruses is cells, aren’t they?”
I forgave her execrable grammar in favour of learning more of the story.
“Go on,” I said, though she needed little encouragement by this point and even brought me a fresh coffee, “on the ‘ouse”, as she put it.
“Well, one day, he comes home to his Mum and Dad’s, he lives at home still, you see, and complains he’s not feeling right. And Dawn, she’s my sister-in-law, she told me he looked so pale. She put him to bed, but he was worse that evening. So they calls the doctor. And the doctor come out and when she saw him she said he was anaemic. Anaemic! That family is strong as carthorses, always have been. If you saw Ian, you’d say he was a policeman or a builder, not a scientist. He’s that well built. Anyway, he got better after a week of bed-rest and went back to work. But then—”
She stopped talking. Her voice had thickened and I could tell she was close to tears. I offered her a tissue but she shook her head and fished one out of her sleeve.
“He only managed another day before the accident. They said he was too weak and shouldn’t have gone back to work. He slipped, apparently, gashed his neck on one of them flasks they use, lost a lot of blood. They took him to hospital. The A&E? But he got some sort of infection.”
The poor woman was crying properly now, and her face had gone blotchy. I made the right noises, though to be honest I am never terribly comfortable around other people’s emotions. She managed to get herself under control again and finished her story.
“He only lasted another day, poor lamb. One of them super-bugs they called it. That’s what the coroner said. MRSA, is it? But I know who’s really to blame. That bloody Vells woman, that’s who! So mind yourself up there at that laboratory of hers, my darling, because others have gone down with that virus what our Ian had.”
The mention of the poor man’s name set her off in another paroxysm and I felt unable to offer any more sympathy so I patted her on the shoulder, placed a ten-pound note under my saucer and tapped Lucy on the arm to rouse her from Facebook or whatever she’d been absorbed in. We left the café. We planned to drive back the following morning after dinner with David. Lucy decided she’d rather not meet the great Peta Velds after all. I think she has a chip on her shoulder about rich people, but in any case, she said she’d check in and then read her script “in a bloody great big bubble-bath” till I came back with David.
I left Great Yarmouth by way of Fullers Hill, then made my way back to the A47 – Acle New Road. I was very close now and switched off the satnav in favour of my eyes. I have always found those devices rather infantilising, since one always used to manage to find one’s way to new places without them. Although on trips to Crown Courts in the quainter parts of the UK, I must confess they do have their uses. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The road was – is – a strip of tarmac laid across one of the most boring landscapes I have ever endured. Mile after mile of flat, featureless grassland – marsh, perhaps, I don’t
know – and then, I saw it: a low building surrounded by a dim pool of pink light from a handful of streetlamps – those tall ones you see in supermarket carparks. It was painted in receding shades of blue as one neared the roof, giving the effect of a landscape disappearing from view in the distance. No windows that I could see – oh, how depressing, I thought instantly – but a sign indicating that The Harker Laboratory, Velds Solar Solutions was approaching 55 yards on the right.
Well, David had kept that quiet. I began to wonder whether there was more to his relationship with Peta Velds than he had led me to believe. Don’t get me wrong, David is a sweet man, and I know he loves me, and I, him; but he is less worldly than other men, and barely notices when women come onto him. Which believe me, they do. His curls and blue eyes may have something to do with it, but I prefer to believe it’s the combination of his intellect and an innocence they find so irresistible. Only last year I more or less had to prise him from the grasp of a drunken particle physicist at a conference in Copenhagen. She said she was just trying to get an insight into his work with solar radiation, but I suspect her motives were somewhat less pure. Especially as she had enough buttons undone that he could have fallen into her cleavage and never climbed out again.
I parked Audrey in the row of spaces marked Visitor Parking just outside the main doors. I reversed in: I can park efficiently and well and always prefer to leave straightaway I have finished a meeting. The building was set amongst that particular type of planting that characterises out-of-town business parks and retail centres: lots of sharp-leaved Mediterranean plants set in shingle, as if the landscapers were embarrassed to be designing a garden in the middle of England. There was a loud hum emanating from the side of the building behind some yuccas – a huge air vent protected by a spiral wire cover.
