Double Blind

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘Well, that’s a very important question which we can take up on Wednesday,’ said Martin, inured to the endlessly repeated phenomenon of the most important material emerging at the end of a session.

  ‘Can I stay here?’ asked Sebastian desperately.

  ‘I’m afraid, as we’ve discussed—’

  ‘Hang on, hang on,’ said Sebastian, switching his tone abruptly. ‘If my name was changed, who’s to say that yours wasn’t?’

  ‘My name has always been Martin Carr,’ said Martin firmly. ‘And we’ll resume—’

  ‘Put a sock in it, Wernher. For all I know, you’re my father. You’re the fucking Nazi!’ said Sebastian, walking out with the belligerence of a man determined to avoid rejection.

  Martin sat motionless in his chair as Sebastian slammed the basement door behind him (if it was behind him). He listened carefully to detect any signs of his patient not having genuinely left. He heard nothing. Could it really be true? Adopted at two, covered in cigarette burns. And he had said it was his birthday last month. It was too much of a coincidence, but a coincidence was always too much, otherwise it would just be an incident. With their passion for synchronicity, this sort of thing must happen to Jungians all the time, but Martin was not at all thrilled to find himself wondering if his maddest patient was also his daughter’s twin. It might still very well be a fantasy, but he couldn’t help being reminded of some of the turbulent family discussions Olivia had provoked during her adolescence, when she was trying to process her own story and had found out that adopting parents often had detailed access to the socio-economic and health backgrounds of the children’s birth families. Describing candidates from the most troubled families, the author of one article had written, ‘One might ask, “Who would adopt such a child?”’ Olivia had confronted Lizzie about how much she had been told about her biological parents’ history and background.

  ‘We knew that it was an accidental pregnancy,’ said her mother, ‘and we knew about your father’s criminal record.’

  ‘Was that appealing to you?’ asked Olivia, half-joking.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it that strongly,’ said her mother, smiling at Olivia. ‘We just wanted to look after you.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Olivia, who had emerged too recently from looking up ‘Adoption’ in the index of dozens of books from her parents’ shelves.

  ‘Was I an experiment?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t be so silly,’ Lizzie said, kissing Olivia on the forehead, ‘you were a child who needed help.’

  Mr and Mrs Tanner must have known about Sebastian’s background, if indeed he was adopted. It seemed to have involved considerable physical abuse, similar to the torment that Karen had described to Olivia when she first told her about Keith. If the Tanners were adoptive parents, they must have been naively or morbidly or courageously drawn to such an extreme situation, but whatever their level of motivation and awareness, they had not been competent to deal with the highly traumatised child they adopted. Martin felt that in some way, by being so difficult, Sebastian might have become an unconscious punishment for the sterility of one or both of the parents. Perhaps they had adopted a traumatised child because of the trauma of spending years trying unsuccessfully to have a child of their own. Instead of making up for their failure, Sebastian summarised it. They were not necessarily bad people, in fact they must have been ambitiously good people, to have adopted a child of nearly two from such a troubled background, and then celebrated his martyrdom by renaming him. If he was Karen’s son and if she had been telling Olivia the truth when she said she had put him up for adoption at eighteen months, Sebastian must also have been kept in a holding pen of social services for nearly six months.

  What was he doing? This was all speculation, and yet he found himself so disturbed by the possibility that he had been unknowingly treating his daughter’s brother that he was tempted to break his own rules and ring the halfway house, or the adoption agency, or one of the psychiatric hospitals Sebastian had been admitted to, and see if he could find out the facts of the case. He gazed at the phone on his desk for a while and then drew back. He couldn’t abandon Sebastian, whatever family he had been born into, and he had a professional obligation not to disclose his suspicions to Olivia, so there was no immediate conflict, but he would certainly have to think about the ethical ramifications when he had time, and disentangle whatever counter-transference might have been triggered by the subject of adoption. For now, though, he had to clear his mind and prepare for his next patient.

  14

  ‘Lord have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us,’ muttered Father Guido, his small eyes tightly shut and his knuckles white from the tension of gripping the armrests. The Cardinal had insisted that he fly directly from Rome to Nice, despite Father Guido’s admission that he had never flown before and had a mortal dread of travelling by plane.

  ‘Think of it as a just punishment for your incompetence, and a test of your faith,’ said Cardinal Lagerfeld. ‘This is the most flagrant case of mystical espionage that has ever come to my attention.’

  The Curia’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Intellectual Property department had declared that the scanning of the Blessed Fra Domenico’s brain by atheistic foreign capitalists, motivated entirely by greed, was ‘an act of diabolical piracy’.

  ‘He is one of our own,’ said Cardinal Lagerfeld, pacing his magnificent apartment in the Vatican City, ‘nursed at the bosom of Mother Church since he was a child.’ He paused next to a small but exquisite Madonna and Child by Raphael, as if to emphasise the magnitude and depth of Father Guido’s betrayal. ‘And you have allowed him to be raped – the word is not too strong: it is not strong enough – by worshippers of Mammon and the machine.’

  It was undoubtedly the most humiliating dressing-down of Father Guido’s life, delivered by the Vatican’s most ferocious enforcer. The Cardinal gave Father Guido a contract, drawn up by The Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, securing fifty per cent of the revenue from the sales of Brainwaves’ Capo Santo helmet, payable into an account newly opened at The Institute for the Works of Religion. Father Guido’s mission was to fly to Nice immediately and persuade Hunter Sterling to sign the contract.

  ‘If he signs,’ the Cardinal explained in a more emollient tone, ‘he will benefit from a harmonious, collaborative promotional campaign. We will recommend our product from every pulpit, make it available in every cathedral gift shop, and have it endorsed by the highest authorities of The Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See and possibly,’ Lagerfeld paused tantalisingly, ‘by His Holiness Himself.’

  ‘That would be wonderful,’ said Father Guido, smiling incredu- lously.

  ‘But,’ said the Cardinal, returning to his more familiar tone as a servant of God’s Vindictive Side, ‘if he fails to sign, we will tie up this predator in red tape for decades to come in every country in the world. Not only do we have two thousand years of experience with red tape,’ he added, standing beneath a sumptuous tapestry depicting the decapitation of Holofernes, ‘but ours is drenched in the blood of Christ.’

  In Father Guido’s modest opinion, there was something distasteful about this remark, but who was he to question the authority of Cardinal Lagerfeld, even if he was the sort of monster who would force an ageing Abbot to confront one of his lifelong terrors? On the way to the airport, Father Guido telephoned his secretary, Brother Manfredi, to tell him that he had left the Vatican, ‘with my tail between my legs’.

  ‘Do not reproach yourself, Father,’ Brother Manfredi replied. ‘We are simple Franciscans and do not understand the politics of The City. You were motivated by the purest ideals: to give ordinary people the chance to enter into the highest union of which the human mind is capable.’

  ‘Where are you now?’ asked Father Guido, clutching at any alternative as he saw the control tower of Leonardo da Vinci airport looming through the taxi window.

  ‘In the vegetable garden, Father.’

&nbs
p; ‘Ah,’ said Guido, close to tears, ‘what I wouldn’t give to be with you there now, Manfredi, in the vegetable garden in Assisi.’

  Since then he had been praying uninterruptedly: ‘Lord have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us.’

  When his plane finally touched down on the runway at Nice, which seemed to have arisen miraculously from the sea at the very last moment, like the finger of God, saving the passengers from drowning in the brilliant waters of the Baie des Anges, Father Guido suddenly realised that due to the administrative demands of his office and his earlier years of managing the immense flow of tourists visiting the many holy sites of Assisi, he had not prayed so long and so fervently since his zealous youth in the seminary. Walking down a corridor pierced by dazzling Mediterranean light, Father Guido understood that far from being a monster, Cardinal Lagerfeld was a great spiritual teacher who had sent him on this outward and worldly journey in order to take him on an inward journey for the sake of his immortal soul. He wept quietly with gratitude, with recognition, with humility and with awe as he followed the increasingly blurred signs for the exit.

  * * *

  John MacDonald had been invited by Saul Prokosh to fly down from Edinburgh to the South of France for a weekend at Plein Soleil, the home of the legendary Hunter Sterling. John was hoping that he would finally get the investment he needed. He had called his company Not As We Know It. It was a Star Trek allusion – ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it’ – which Saul was encouraging him to leave behind. He was fond of the old name, but if the price was right, they could call it Fifty Shades of Grey for all he cared. John had a dream: the creation of inorganic life with no carbon in the mix. Instead of a digital computer that reduced the world to binary information and brought it under the imperium of mathematics, he would make an analogue computer, using matter rather than numbers to inform its simulations. Its rhythms and processes would imitate biology, while freeing the concept of life from the tyranny of carbon. He would synthesise compounds from any of the non-carbon elements to model all the features of life jealously guarded by biology: cellular containment, movement, growth and reproduction. If chemistry could not yet explain life, then the definition of life must be expanded to include the processes that chemistry could describe and demonstrate experimentally.

  ‘Passeport, s’il vous plaît, monsieur.’

  ‘Ah, excusez-moi,’ said John, handing over his passport to the policeman in the glass cubicle.

  * * *

  Bill Moorhead stood by the luggage carousel, keeping an eye out for his cases, but also regretting the sky-blue linen suit he had bought himself as a rejuvenating present, only to find that on its first outing it was already more creased and wrinkled than its owner’s handsome but weather-beaten face. Caroline seemed to have gone completely mad. After thirty years of tolerant, sophisticated and civilised marriage, he had suddenly received a letter from a firm of solicitors banging on about the infidelity, anguish and years of humiliation she had suffered. ‘Frailty, thy name is woman.’ Could the timing have anything to do with the sale of the second half of YouGenetics? Opportunistic bitch. She knew that all his life he had wanted to retire in just the kind of house that a knighted Oxford professor (or at least one with entrepreneurial gusto) should be able to live in. When Little Soddington Manor had come on to the market, a failed hotel that needed to be carefully restored to its natural place as the big house on the edge of a charming Cotswold village, he had snapped it up. It included the land on which the village cricket ground and its black and white pavilion enjoyed their immemorial slumber, waiting silently through most of the year for the crack of bat and ball, the roar of catch and wicket; three large fields let out to local farmers for grazing and, of course, the magnificent garden; the copse at the foot of the garden and the little river that paid its respects to the manor house before gossiping its way through the village, beneath two picturesque stone bridges that only allowed the passage of one car at a time. By demanding half his capital, Caroline knew that she was sabotaging a lifelong dream. Well, it wasn’t going to be that easy to prise Little Soddington from his grip. He still had his consultancy at YouGenetics, his Fellow’s rooms and rights in college and, in a bold move that he must keep under the radar until the divorce was finalised, he had strongly indicated his preparedness to accept, for a very handsome sum indeed, an offer made by the University of Riyadh to spend five years as a Distinguished Visiting Professor. Why not break the back of the British winter in the Saudi capital, and then return for the crack of bat and ball, the long summer evenings and bibulous weekends with splendid old friends in his splendid new house?

  Bad luck, Caroline, thought Moorhead, as he dragged his clattering suitcase towards the unattended Customs, he may be bloodied but he was unbowed.

  * * *

  Jade was waiting for Hunter’s special guests to arrive at the private jet section of Nice airport, accompanied by two young men from the Plein Soleil team, easily identified by their short-sleeved khaki sports shirts emblazoned with a red solar logo. She didn’t usually come to the airport, but Hunter had asked her to take care of Lucy and her friends from England. Jade had watched many women come and go through Hunter’s life; they were the variables; she was the constant. She was always charming to Hunter’s latest crush, friendly without being familiar, sisterly without being presumptuous, and if she thought he had truly finished with one of them (she was always right), ruthless without being rude. To those who might be recycled, or remained occasional lovers connected with a particular city, she was meticulously polite, but showed, in the total rigidity of Hunter’s schedule, the futility of any hopes they might have of ever being on equal or open terms with such a prodigious human being as her boss. Jade had slept with Hunter, but had made no demands and showed no expectations, no sentimentality and no jealousy. Slowly, slowly, though, she would reel him in, and turn out to be the only indispensable woman in his life.

  ‘Lucy! Hi, I’m Jade. I feel like we know each other already, after all the emails. It’s such a pleasure. Welcome to France. You must be Olivia and Francis. A pleasure to meet you, too. Hunter has sent his own car, so let’s get you on the road before the other guests find out that they’re not travelling in a convertible Bentley. We don’t want to start the weekend with a riot! Gilles is right outside. Don’t worry about your luggage; we’ll take care of it.’

  Jade lowered her sunglasses and led the way to the car, her black hair shining, her white T-shirt, mysteriously burnt open at exactly the right places to reveal glimpses of her perfect body, her tight black jeans, carefully frayed at the ankles, and her vintage cream sneakers, making her impossible to lose sight of.

  ‘Ah, Gilles, voici les invités speciaux de Monsieur Sterling.’

  ‘Enchanté,’ said Gilles, opening the back door for Lucy, while Olivia went around to the other side and Francis settled into the front passenger seat.

  ‘See you guys back at Soleil,’ said Jade. ‘Enjoy the ride!’

  * * *

  ‘So, your ceramic guy is flying himself down,’ said Hunter, scanning the guest list, under a canopy of wisteria that shaded his private terrace. The air was motionless and, beyond the edge of his vast lawn, a rearing speedboat slowly unzipped the silky surface of the bay.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Saul, ‘he’s not the guy with the air ticket, or the guy with the private jet, he’s the guy with the pilot’s licence and his own prop plane.’

  ‘I know that guy,’ said Hunter. ‘So, is it family money or did he invent something before the armour? What kind of a name is Marcel Qing, anyway? Are they Chinese?’

  ‘It’s a strange story,’ said Saul. ‘Marcel is ultra-French. He went to all the right schools, the Lycée Henri-IV, the École normale, wears black corduroy suits and round tortoiseshell glasses and complicated scarves – all of that – but his grandfather was the young Chinese cook to a French family in Shanghai. They fled when the Japs invaded Manchuria in ’thirty-three and took Marcel’s grandfather with t
hem: they couldn’t face life without his General’s Chicken. He worked with them for five years in Paris, but then his employer sacked his mistress one day and she knew the thing that would piss him off the most would be to lose his cook, so she financed the grandfather’s first restaurant. By the time he died in the eighties, he had five great restaurants scattered around Paris. Out of respect for the old man, Marcel’s father waited until he was dead, then he froze Master Qing’s ancient, secret recipe for General’s Chicken and turned it into a supermarket staple.’

  ‘So, there’s no way he’s selling more than forty-nine per cent.’

  ‘It’ll depend on the manufacturing costs,’ said Saul. ‘He’s determined to prove to his father that he can make his own fortune in something more glamorous than frozen foods, but he may not have enough to build the factory and go into full production.’

  ‘Okay, got it. And what about John MacDonald? Can we buy him out and, if we can, do we want to?’

  ‘He’s at the other end of the spectrum,’ said Saul. ‘We could probably buy his company for the price of an abandoned crofter’s cottage. The trouble is that we’re a long way from any application, but the IP on fake life could be huge. On the other hand, if it turns out to be the model for life itself, we’ll be in Genome territory, where Clinton stopped Craig Venter from getting patents on genes and genetic structures: three hundred million down the drain. The government says it’s pro-business, but when it comes to the secrets of life, capitalism is left begging on the sidewalk outside the party.’

  ‘Especially when it gets daily results from a three-billion-dollar, publicly funded research programme while only publishing its own results once a year,’ said Hunter. ‘It’s confusing to let people patent someone else’s work. Besides, socialism in America was never intended for some schmuck to shadow the most conspicuous global science project of all time; it has to be ideologically purified by only being given to its most ferocious opponents in the Pentagon or on Wall Street. If someone wants to start an illegal war or get bailed out after bringing the world’s economic system to its knees, then, by golly, if the beneficiaries are already rich and powerful, we can show the world what a welfare state really means.’ Hunter glanced at his phone, throbbing on the broad arm of his deckchair. ‘Guest alert, Gilles has just turned on to the Cap. He’s got Los Tres Amigos in the car. Anyhow, as long as MacDonald has got something better for us than a crystal garden, and less “public domain” than the secret of life, we can buy him out.’