Enduring Love

by Unknown

  I was impatient to produce my own present but we were still in the spell of Jocelyn’s. Clarissa pinned the brooch on her grey silk blouse.

  Would I remember the conversation now if I did not know what it preceded?

  We began by joking that the Genome Project gave out such jewellery free by the dozen. Then Jocelyn talked about the discovery of DNA. Perhaps that was when I turned in my seat to ask a waiter to bring us water and noticed the two men and the girl. We emptied the champagne and the antipasto was cleared away. I don’t remember what food we ordered after that. Jocelyn began to tell us about Johann Miescher, the Swiss chemist who identified DNA in 1868. This was supposed to be one of the great missed chances in the history of science. Miescher got himself a steady supply of pus-soaked bandages from a local hospital. (Rich in white blood cells, Jocelyn added for Clarissa’s benefit.) Miescher was interested in the chemistry of the cell nucleus. In the nuclei he found phosphorus – an improbable substance which didn’t sit with current ideas. An extraordinary find, but his paper was blocked by his teacher who spent two years repeating and confirming his student’s results.

  It wasn’t boredom that let my attention shift, though I knew the Miescher story, it was restlessness, an impatience that came from a sense of release after my interview. I would have liked to tell the story of my encounter with Inspector Linley, spice it up a little and squeeze some amusement from it, but I knew that to do so would lead me straight back to the divisions between Clarissa and me. On the next table the girl was being helped through the menu by her father who, like me these days, had to slide his glasses down his nose to see the print. The girl leaned fondly against his arm.

  Meanwhile Jocelyn, enjoying the triple privilege of age, eminence and the bestower of gifts, told his story. Miescher pressed on. He assembled a team and set about working out the chemistry of what he called nucleic acid. Then he found them, the substances that made up the four-letter alphabet in whose language all life is written – adenine and cytosine, guanine and thymine. It meant nothing. And that was odd, especially as the years went by. Mendel’s work on the laws of inheritance had been generally accepted, and chromosomes had been identified in the cell nucleus and were suspected of being the location of genetic information. It was known that DNA was in the chromosomes and its chemistry had been described by Miescher who in 1892 speculated in a letter to his uncle that DNA might code for life, just as an alphabet codes for language and concepts.

  ‘It was staring them in the face,’ Jocelyn said. ‘But they couldn’t see, they wouldn’t see. The problem of course was the chemists . . .’

  It was hard work, talking against the din. We waited while he drank his water. The story was for Clarissa, an embellishment on the present. While Jocelyn was resting his voice there was movement behind me and I was obliged to pull in my chair to let the girl through. She went off in the direction of the lavatories. When I was next aware of her she was back in her seat.

  ‘The chemists, you see. Very powerful, rather grand. The nineteenth had been a good century for them. They had authority, but they were a crusty lot. Take Phobus Levine at the Rockefeller Institute. He was absolutely certain that DNA was a boring irrelevant molecule containing random sequences of those four letters, ACGT. He dismissed it, and then, in that peculiar human way, it became a matter of faith with him, deep faith. What he knew, he knew, and the molecule was insignificant. None of the younger chaps could get round him. It had to wait for years, until Griffith’s work on bacteria in the twenties. Which Oswald Avery picked up in Washington – Levine was gone by then of course. Oswald’s work took for ever, right into the forties. Then Alexander Todd working in London on the sugar phosphate links, then ’fifty-two and three, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, and then Crick and Watson. You know what poor Rosalind said when they showed her the model they had built of the DNA molecule? She said it was simply too beautiful not to be true . . .’

  The accelerated roll-call of names and his old chestnut, beauty in science, slowed Jocelyn into speechless reminiscence. He fumbled with his napkin. He was eighty-two. As student or colleague he had known them all. And Gillian had worked with Crick after the first great breakthrough on adaptor molecules. Gillian, like Franklin herself, had died of leukaemia.

  I was a second or two slow on the uptake, but Jocelyn had lobbed me an excellent cue. I reached into my jacket pocket and could not resist the chocolate box lines. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty . . .’ Clarissa smiled. She must have guessed long before that she might be getting Keats, but she could not have dreamed of what was now in her hands, in plain brown paper. Even before the wrapping was off she recognised it and squealed. The girl at the next table turned in her seat to stare, until her father tapped her on the arm. Foolscap octavo in drab boards with back label. Condition, poor, foxed, slight water damage. A first edition of his first collection, Poems of 1817.

  ‘What presents!’ Clarissa said. She stood and put her arms around my neck. ‘It must have cost you thousands . . .’ Then she put her lips to my ear and it was like the old days. ‘You’re a bad boy to spend so much money. I’m going to make you fuck me all afternoon.’

  She couldn’t have meant it, but I played along and said, ‘Oh, all right. If it’ll make you feel better.’ It was the champagne of course, and simple gratitude, but that didn’t stop me feeling pleased.

  A day or so later it became a temptation to invent or elaborate details about the table next to ours, to force memory to deliver what was never captured, but I did see the man, Colin Tapp, put his hand on his father’s arm as he spoke, reassuring him, soothing him. It also became difficult to disentangle what I discovered later from what I sensed at the time. Tapp was in fact two years older than me, his daughter was fourteen and his father seventy-three. I did nothing so deliberate as speculate about their ages – by now my attention was not wandering, our own table was absorbing, we were having fun – but I must have assumed a good deal about the relationships of our neighbours, and done it barely consciously, out of the corner of my eye, wordlessly, in that pre-verbal language of instant thought linguists call mentalese. The girl I did take in, however glancingly. She had that straight-backed poise some teenagers adopt, self-possession attempting worldliness and disarmingly revealing its opposite. Her skin was dark, her black hair was cut in a bob and the skin low on her neck was paler – the haircut was recent. Or were these details I observed later, in the chaos, or in the time after the chaos? Another example of the confusion hindsight can cause memory: I found myself inserting into my recollection of the scene an image of the man who sat eating alone, facing away from us. I didn’t see him at the time, not until the very end, but I was unable to exclude him from later reconstructions.

  On our table Clarissa had resumed her seat and the conversation concerned young men oppressed, put down or otherwise blocked by older men, their fathers, teachers, mentors, or their idols. The starting point had been Johann Miescher and his teacher, Hoppe-Seyler, who had held up publication of his student’s discovery of phosphorus in cell nuclei. Seyler also happened to be the editor of the journal to which Miescher’s papers had been submitted. From there – and I had time later to trace our conversation backwards – from Miescher and Hoppe-Seyler we arrived at Keats and Wordsworth.

  Clarissa was our source now, although outside his subject Jocelyn knew a little about most things, and he knew from the Gittings biography the famous story of the young Keats going to visit the poet he revered. I knew of the visit because Clarissa had told me about it. In late 1817 Keats had been staying at an inn, the Fox and Hounds by Box Hill on the North Downs, where he finished his long poem Endymion. He stayed on a week and walked the downs in a daze of creative excitement. He was twenty-one, he had written a long, serious, beautiful poem about being in love, and by the time he returned to London he was feeling high. There he heard the news and was overjoyed – his hero, William Wordsworth, was in town. Keats had sent his Poems with the inscription, ‘To W. Wordsworth with the
Author’s sincere Reverence’. (That would have been the one to give Clarissa. It was in the Princeton University Library and according to her there were many uncut pages.) Keats had grown up on Wordsworth’s poetry. He had called The Excursion one of the ‘three things to rejoice at in this Age’. He had taken from Wordsworth the idea of poetry as a sacred vocation, the most noble endeavour. Now he had persuaded his painter friend Haydon to arrange a meeting, and they set out together from Haydon’s studio at Lisson Grove to walk to Queen Anne Street to call on the great genius. In his journal Haydon noted that Keats expressed ‘the greatest, the purest, the most unalloyed pleasure at the prospect’.

  Wordsworth was a notorious grouch at that stage of his life – he was forty-seven – but he was friendly enough to Keats, and after a few minutes of small-talk asked him what he’d been working on. Haydon jumped in and answered for him, and begged Keats to repeat the ode to Pan from Endymion. So Keats walked up and down in front of the great man, reciting in ‘his usual half-chant (most touching) . . .’ It was at this point in the story that Clarissa fought the restaurant clamour and quoted:

  Be still the unimaginable lodge

  For solitary thinkings; such as dodge

  Conception to the very bourne of heaven,

  Then leave the naked brain:

  And when the passionate young man was done Wordsworth, apparently unable to endure any longer this young man’s adoration, delivered into the silence his shocking, dismissive verdict by saying dryly, ‘a Very pretty piece of Paganism’ which, according to Haydon, was ‘unfeeling and unworthy of his high Genius to a Worshipper like Keats – and Keats felt it deeply’ – and never forgave him.

  ‘But do we trust this story?’ Jocelyn said. ‘Didn’t I read in Gittings that we shouldn’t.’

  ‘We don’t.’ Clarissa began to count off the reasons.

  If I had stood up while she did so and had turned towards the entrance I would have seen across half an acre of talking heads two figures come in and speak to the maitre d’. One of the men was tall, but I don’t think I took that in. I knew it later, but a trick of memory has given me the image as if I had stood then; the crowded room, the tall man, the maitre d’ nodding and gesturing vaguely in our direction. And then what, in fantasy, could I have done to persuade Clarissa and Jocelyn and the strangers on the next table to leave their meals and run with me up the stairs to find by interconnecting doors a way down into the street? On a score of sleepless nights I’ve been back to plead with them to leave. Look, I say to our neighbours, you don’t know me, but I know what is about to happen. I’m from a tainted future. It was a mistake, it doesn’t have to happen. We could choose another outcome. Put down your knives and forks and follow me, quick! No, really, please trust me. Just trust me. Let’s go!

  But they do not see or hear me. They go on eating and talking. And so did I.

  I said, ‘But the story lives on. The famous put-down.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jocelyn said eagerly. ‘It isn’t true, but we need it. A kind of myth.’ We looked to Clarissa. She was usually reticent about what she knew really well. Years ago, at a party, I had gone down on drunken knees to get her to recite from memory ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. But today we were celebrating and trying to forget, and it was best to keep talking.

  ‘It isn’t true, but it tells the truth. Wordsworth was arrogant to the point of being loathsome about other writers. Gittings has this good line about his being in the difficult second half of a man’s forties. When he got to fifty he calmed down, brightened up, and everyone around him could breathe. By then Keats was dead. There’s always something delicious about young genius spurned by the powerful. You know, like The Man Who Turned Down the Beatles for Decca. We know that God in the form of history will have his revenge . . .’

  The two men were probably making their way between the tables towards us by then. I’m not sure. I have excavated that last half minute and I know two things for sure. One was that the waiter brought us sorbets. The other was that I slipped into a daydream. I often do. Almost by definition, daydreams leave no trace, they really do dodge conception to the very bourne of heaven, then leave the naked brain. But I’ve been back so many times, and I’ve retrieved it by remembering what triggered it: Clarissa’s By then Keats was dead.

  The words, the memento mori, floated me off. I was briefly gone. I saw them together, Wordsworth, Haydon, Keats, in a room in Monkton’s house on Queen Anne Street and imagined the sum of their every sensation and thought, and all the stuff, the feel of clothes, the creak of chairs and floorboards, the resonance in their chests of their own voices, the little heat of reputation, the fit of their toes in their shoes, and things in pockets, the separate assumptions of recent pasts and what they would be doing next, the growing tottering frame they carried of where they were in the story of their lives – all this as luminously self-evident as this clattering, roaring restaurant, and all gone, just like Logan was when he was sitting on the grass.

  What takes a minute to describe took two seconds to experience. I returned, and compensated for my absence by telling Clarissa and Jocelyn a genius-spurned story of my own. A retired publisher, married to a physicist friend of mine, told me that back in the fifties he had turned down a novel called Strangers from Within. (By then the visitors must have been ten feet away, right behind our table. I don’t think they even saw us.) The point about my friend was that he only discovered his error thirty years later when an old file turned up at the place where he used to work. He hadn’t remembered the name on the typescript – he was reading dozens every month – and he did not read the book when it finally appeared. Or at least, not at first. The author, William Golding, had renamed it Lord of the Flies and had excised the long boring first chapter that had put my friend off.

  I think I was about to draw my resounding conclusion – that time protects us from our worst mistakes – but Clarissa and Jocelyn were not listening. I too had been aware of movement to one side. Now I followed their sightlines and turned. The two men who had stopped by the table next to ours seemed to have suffered burns to the face. Their skin was a lifeless prosthetic pink, the colour of dolls, or of medical plasters, the colour of no one’s skin. They shared a robotic nullity of expression. Later we learned about the latex masks, but at the time these men were a shocking sight, even before they acted. The arrival of the waiter with our desserts in stainless steel bowls was temporarily soothing. Both men wore black coats that gave them a priestly look. There was ceremony in their stillness. The flavour of my sorbet was lime, just to the green side of white. I already had a spoon in my hand but I hadn’t used it. Our table was staring shamelessly.

  The intruders simply stood and looked down at our neighbours who in turn looked back, puzzled, waiting. The young girl looked from her father and back to the men. The older man put down his empty fork and seemed about to speak, but he said nothing. A variety of possibilities unspooled before me at speed: a student stunt; vendors; the man, Colin Tapp, was a doctor or lawyer and these were his patients or clients; some new version of the kissogram; crazy members of the family come to embarrass. Around us the lunchtime uproar, which had dipped locally, was back to level. When the taller man drew from his coat a black stick, a wand, I inclined to the kissogram. But who was his companion who now slowly turned to survey the room? He missed our table, it was so close. His eyes, pig-like in the artificial skin, never met mine. The tall man, ready to cast his spell, pointed his wand at Colin Tapp.

  And Tapp himself was suddenly ahead of us all by a second. His face showed us what we didn’t understand about the spell. His puzzlement, congealed in terror, could not find a word to tell us because there was no time. The silenced bullet struck through his white shirt at his shoulder and lifted him from his chair and smacked him against the wall. The high-velocity impact forced a fine spray, a blood mist, across our table-cloth, our desserts, our hands, our sight. My first impulse was simple and self-protective: I did not believe what I was seeing. Clichés are root
edin truth: I did not believe my eyes. Tapp flopped forwards across the table. His father did not move, not a muscle in his face moved. As for his daughter, she did the only possible thing – she passed out, her mind closed down on this atrocity. She slipped sideways in her chair towards Jocelyn who put out a hand – the instincts of an old sportsman – and though he could not prevent her fall, he caught her upper arm and saved her head from a bang.

  Even as she was falling the man was raising his gun again and aiming at the top of Tapp’s head, and would have killed him for sure. But that was when the man who had been eating alone jumped up with a shout, a dog-like yelp, and just managed to cross the space in time to tilt the barrel with extended arm so that the second bullet sank high up on the wall. Even though his hair was cropped, how had I failed to recognise Parry?

  On our table we could not move or speak. The two men moved away swiftly towards the entrance. The tall one tucked the gun and silencer into his coat as he went. I didn’t see Parry leave, but he must have gone off in another direction and left by one of the fire exits. Only two tables witnessed the event. There may have been a scream, then for seconds on end, paralysis. Further off no one heard a thing. The chatter, the chink of cutlery against plates went stupidly on.

  I looked at Clarissa. Her face was rouged on one side. I was about to say something to her when I got it, I understood completely, it came to me without effort, in that same neural flash of pre-verbal thought that comprehends relation and structure all at once, that knows the connection between things better than the things themselves. The unimaginable lodge. Our two tables – their composition, the numbers, the sexes, the relative ages. How had Parry known?

  It was a mistake. Nothing personal. It was a contract, and it had been bungled. It should have been me.