‘You don’t like crystal gardens?’ said Saul. ‘They’re my happiest childhood memories.’
‘I hope your therapist is qualified to deal with that level of trauma,’ said Hunter.
‘Are you sure it was a good idea to invite Bill Moorhead now that he’s completely sold out of YouGenetics?’ asked Saul.
‘A good idea? It’s a great idea. It’ll be like watching a bullfight, with two beautiful female matadors torturing a pompous old bull.’
‘I guess it’s good to be closing the matador gender gap,’ said Saul, ‘and it’s more humane than watching gladiators hacking each other to death.’
‘I hope not,’ said Hunter, with one of his big laughs. ‘If Lucy doesn’t finish him off, we can count on Kraftwerk freaking the hell out of him, when he’s used to rocking atheistically to Thomas Tallis in the college chapel.’
‘Kraftwerk,’ said Saul, ‘cool. Robotics Central.’
‘Tomorrow night. Don’t tell any of the guests. Only you and Jade know.’
‘They must be expensive.’
‘Not as expensive as Elton John, the local talent.’
‘OMG,’ said Saul, ‘you got Elton John?’
‘Are you kidding?’ said Hunter. ‘“Candle in the Wind” – get a torch!’
* * *
Olivia was having that feeling, rare since adolescence, that her life had turned into a film. She was reclining next to her best friend in the bulging seat of a night-blue convertible, as it flitted past the hedges and driveways of Cap d’Antibes. They were on their way to a house named (irrelevantly, she hoped) after a murderous thriller, also shot on the Mediterranean coast. The Cap was looking especially photogenic in early May, before the convoys of tourists and the flotillas of sewage and jellyfish, supported by The Airborne Melanomas, moved in to secure the hedonistic headland for the summer.
She had only been given this glamorous part in the back of Hunter’s car thanks to his impetuous visit to Howorth last December. That day had set off a cascade of changes in all their lives, especially for Lucy. Hunter had carved out an enclave of gentleness for her (and for himself) in his at times overbearing personality and by the end of January they were going out together. He seemed to be undaunted, perhaps even inspired, by the insolence of her illness: a hostile take-over to outmanoeuvre, a tax for which there must be a loophole. Lucy had been frustrated by waiting so long for her biopsy results and by the time she finally got her appointment, Hunter was ready to rip apart Mr McEwan for British inefficiency. He calmed down when they were told that the first indications from the lab had been that her tumour was a glioblastoma, the worst type, but that further testing had established that it was in fact a grade-two astrocytoma.
Lucy asked McEwan if she should avoid any particular activity, given her propensity for seizures.
‘My only advice is not to drink a case of champagne and go swimming at night in shark-infested waters,’ he replied.
‘I’m going to give that up as well,’ said Hunter, ‘to show support.’
Since there was no surgical option without a high risk of paralysing the right side of her body, McEwan wrapped up the surprisingly cheerful meeting by saying that he would refer Lucy to his colleague Dr Gray, an oncologist specialising in low-grade brain tumours. Hunter was due back in America and so Olivia and Francis accompanied Lucy to the Gray consultation. To reduce misunderstanding and catastrophic speculation, Lucy had put a ban on internet research with the result that much of the meeting was jarringly harsh for her compared to the tone of her consultation with Mr McEwan. Olivia had overruled the ban, without telling Lucy, and that was part of the reason the meeting had made her so angry.
Dr Gray’s job, it turned out, was to tell Lucy that, sooner or later, her tumour would convert and become more aggressive, but that it should be monitored with regular scans for the time being, since attacking it while it was relatively dormant would be ineffective. When Lucy asked if she could do anything to improve her chances, Dr Gray said there was nothing except chemotherapy and radiation, and possibly surgery at a later stage. He was a short, friendly man in a shirt and tie, wearing a black velvet kippah.
‘So, I can just order fish and chips, a bottle of rum and some deep-fried ice cream?’
‘Eh, well, there just isn’t enough evidence that diet plays a significant role.’
‘Really?’ said Lucy with resolute scepticism.
When he told Lucy that the median survival of someone with a grade-two astrocytoma was about five years from the time of diagnosis, she was completely shocked and looked at Olivia and Francis in anguished disbelief. Olivia didn’t know whether to intervene. From her own research she knew that Dr Gray was quoting an old study from the nineties with the shortest survival rate. She had seen a more nuanced and more recent one in which women of Lucy’s age lived twice as long.
‘Amongst all the patients you’ve treated over the years,’ asked Francis, seeing that Lucy was too stunned to speak, ‘is there any common factor in those who have done well?’
‘No. None whatsoever,’ said Dr Gray. ‘I have one patient who was diagnosed twenty years ago and is still doing extremely well. His wife prays for him every day. Then again, I have another patient who doesn’t have any religious beliefs at all, and he has also been around for about two decades after being diagnosed.’
Dr Gray seemed relieved by this self-cancelling evidence from beyond the tight perimeter of the world he had portrayed, a world of four objects, containing only a statistic, a scalpel, a poison and a gamma ray. Did he believe it himself? Was he going home to processed food drenched in pesticides? Did he really believe that a sense of purpose, a lower level of anxiety and a capacity for love played no part in ‘outcomes’? His second long-living patient may not have had any religious beliefs, but did he walk the Pennine Way each year to defy his diagnosis, or had he been determined to leave his family with as much security as possible, like Anthony Burgess, who rushed out his first novel after his diagnosis of a fatal cancer, and then continued to rush out novels for decades to come? The world was full of schizoid accommodations: adulterers who loved their spouses, atheists who prayed while they rushed their child to Accident and Emergency, concentration camp officers who went home to relish Proust or marvel at Relativity; not to mention someone like Bill Moorhead, who had been happy to spend much of his career declaring that ninety-eight per cent of the human genome was ‘Junk DNA’, while mocking any shaping power in nature other than natural selection, the ruthless executioner of waste and redundancy. Was Dr Gray another example of this human genius for incoherence and fragmentation, or was he constrained by a hospital culture of legalistic pessimism, so determined not to give out false hope that it was in danger of offering false despair? Perhaps his kippah and his patient’s praying wife were unofficial salutes to the role played by beliefs in the unfolding of results; or perhaps he was a deeply compassionate man, protecting the vast majority of his patients, who might not have a powerful sense of purpose, who could not afford organic chia seeds, who were not surrounded by love, and whose relationship to their illness was a close contest between the high anxiety of living and the unreliably higher anxiety of dying. Whatever the reasoning, Olivia felt that it amounted to putting a curse on Lucy. Dr Gray seemed to be a decent man, telling them candidly about the meagre evidence he was allowed to take seriously, but still, she had been determined to help Lucy rebel against his World of Four Objects from the moment they walked out of the building in which they had been assured of its scientific validity.
‘Nous voici!’ said Gilles, turning off the main road, down a lane marked by a rough wooden arrow with the words Le Plein Soleil written on it in faded red paint. The signpost was more of a veil than a guide, almost certain to be missed by someone who didn’t already know it was there. It was a faint allusion to something that turned out, after a few bends in the lane, to be intimidatingly solid: great arched wooden portals, reinforced with black iron studs and flanked by two lodges embedded in a h
igh wall of massive grey stones. No one without a medieval siege engine could hope to catch a glimpse of what lay behind the bristling spikes that crested the wall. Despite their antique appearance, the gates were already gliding open as the car approached. Beyond them, a serpentine drive twisted down, through a sloping lawn, dotted with oleander bushes, just breaking out in pink flowers, and umbrella pines with clumps of needles so rounded and brightened by fresh growth that they looked like bonsai clouds hanging in a cloudless sky. As the car grew closer to the sea, a large ochre house with dark green shutters came into view.
‘Coo-wee,’ said Lucy.
‘My thoughts exactly,’ said Olivia.
The car turned into a parking area, clearly designed to be invisible from the house.
‘How did she get here before us?’ said Lucy, seeing Jade sitting on the bonnet of a black Porsche, texting.
‘Hi!’ said Jade, putting away her phone just when it would have been rude to continue using it.
‘You must have driven fast,’ said Olivia.
‘Well, Hunter told me to welcome you, so I thought, “I can’t just welcome them at the airport, I have to welcome them at Soleil.” Also,’ she said, in a confessional whisper, ‘I love to race this car. You can take the girl out of LA, but you can’t take LA out of the girl.’
‘Really?’ said Olivia. ‘The only time I went there, it seemed to be one huge traffic jam.’
‘Not if you know the short cuts.’
‘I bet you’re an expert on those,’ said Olivia.
‘The expert,’ said Jade, opening the door for Francis.
* * *
It was already Saturday afternoon and Father Guido was pacing his bedroom, rehearsing ways to raise the subject of profit sharing with Signor Sterling’s Brainwaves and praying that an opportune moment would present itself before the end of the day. It had seemed too precipitous, not to say ill-mannered, to slam the contract down on the dinner table the very evening of his arrival. Cardinal Lagerfeld, however, took a different view of the matter, as he had made clear when he rang Father Guido at quarter to six in the morning to ask him if he had locked down the deal.
‘I have only just arrived, Your Eminence,’ stammered Father Guido, patting the bedside table in search of his glasses.
‘My patience is not infinite,’ the Cardinal warned him.
‘I can see that,’ said Father Guido, as the digits on his clock came into sharper focus, ‘but you must understand that the house is crowded with guests, many of whom are working with Signor Sterling on scientific projects of great complexity. Besides, I had to share the journey from the airport with two British intellectuals, one of whom turned out to be a famous enemy of the faith, Sir William Moorhead, the author of Why the Sublime is Ridiculous. It was extremely taxing on my nerves—’
‘That man!’ interrupted the Cardinal. ‘If only the Index Librorum Prohibitorum had not been suspended, The Sacred Congregation of the Index would certainly have placed his odious work at the top of any contemporary list, but alas, the epidemic of lies which is ravaging the minds of the faithful has proliferated beyond our control. Gone are the days when we could have ordered Sir William Moorhead to be burnt at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori, after “imprisoning his tongue”.’
‘Indeed, they have,’ said Father Guido, without the nostalgia that clung to the Cardinal’s vocal cords like pleading children. ‘And I must tell you,’ he continued, determined to complete the tale of his traumatic transfer from the airport, ‘the other passenger in the car told me that he is trying to create life in a test tube, or on a computer of some kind, I’m not quite sure, without using carbon, which I suppose is good for the environment, but still, it seemed to me that there was something sacrilegious in his attitude, or, at the very least, extremely arrogant.’
‘Where will it end?’ sighed the Cardinal. ‘Even in profane literature, we are warned again and again against Man’s hubris, whether in mythology, with the stories of Icarus and Prometheus, or in the well-known tales of the Terrible Doctors: Faustus and Frankenstein, with their blasphemous lust for unconstrained power and forbidden knowledge.’
‘You are wonderfully learned, Your Eminence,’ said Father Guido, trying to appease the volcanic irascibility of his superior.
‘Surely, you are familiar with these works,’ said the Cardinal, demonstrating the suppleness of his disapproval.
‘My parents urged me to shun works of fiction and only read the words of God, and of course of distinguished theologians such as yourself.’
‘Very commendable,’ said Lagerfeld. ‘It must be wonderful to come from such simple stock. I can scarcely imagine how much less demanding my life would have been if I had not felt obliged to master the great achievements of human civilisation, of philosophy and literature, of art and science, of theology and engineering.’
‘Well, it can still feel demanding, even for those of us who have not been endowed with such a majestic intellect,’ said Father Guido, feeling that he really knew what he was talking about.
‘I dare say, I dare say,’ muttered Lagerfeld. ‘So, Father Guido, it is your sacred duty to retrieve the knowledge with which God has endowed Fra Domenico from this noeud de vipères in which you have allowed it to fall. Do not let me down! Ring me before Morning Mass tomorrow and give me something to celebrate.’
‘Surely, the sacrifice of Our Lord—’
‘Impertinent idiot! Do not lecture me on the meaning of the Mass,’ shouted Lagerfeld. ‘I was intending to shelter you from the full consequences of your crime, but you leave me no choice but to tell you, in the very strictest secrecy, that the Vatican Laboratories have been working on a virtual reality project, codenamed Crown of Thorns, not dissimilar to Brainwaves. We were intending to engage the young, who are addicted to these virtual worlds, with our Via Dolorosa package, following the traditional fourteen Stations of the Cross, and then, after a debate which took place at the very highest levels, and with the blessing of His Holiness Himself, exceptionally, we decided to include in our Crown of Thorns Platinum Package, the Via Lucis, the highly controversial fifteenth Station, the Resurrection itself, not accepted as one of the Stations in some conservative circles. It was our intention to scan Fra Domenico’s brain in order to give the faithful the full experience of Our Lord’s Resurrection and perhaps even beyond that, to His ecstatic reunion with His Father in Heaven.’
‘What have I done?’ said Father Guido, giddy with remorse.
‘You have done immeasurable harm,’ said Lagerfeld, unable to resist tearing out another fingernail before offering his victim a cigarette. ‘However, you can show your remorse not only by getting the contract signed, but also by finding out exactly how these so-called Brainwaves work. The Vatican Laboratories have run across certain technical difficulties. They have successfully scanned members of the clergy meditating on each of the Stations – except the fifteenth, thanks to you. Imagine the shock, and yet the deep fulfilment, of His condemnation to death; the tenderness and sorrow of His meeting with His Holy Mother; the humiliation of the Falls, taking on the Fall of Adam on our behalf; the relief and the mutual compassion shown by allowing Simon to share the weight of the Cross – I suppose your parents at least allowed you to learn the names of the Stations. I take a particular interest in the eleventh Station…’
‘The Crucifixion,’ said Guido.
‘Ah, bravo, Father Guido,’ said Lagerfeld, ‘you’ve heard of the Crucifixion! Well, as an expert, I am sure you know that some of our more enthusiastic brethren, in Mexico and the Philippines, for instance, have themselves crucified at Easter. I had my doubts about the literalism of this approach to The Passion. It is the redemptive power of Our Lord’s suffering that requires faith, after all; our own suffering is painfully self-evident. So, I decided to go and see for myself, and I can tell you that it is truly inspiring to see these young men stripped of their clothes, humiliated and nailed to a cross, in the great tradition of The Imitation of Christ. I took a particular int
erest in a sincere young man called Ignacio Gomez, who had himself crucified year after year, from the age of fourteen, when I first met him, without any impairment to his hands or feet.’
‘A miracle,’ said Father Guido.
‘That will be determined by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints,’ said the Cardinal, ‘not by a gullible fool like you, who allows himself to be bamboozled by an American businessman.’
Not for the first time, Father Guido found himself conflicted between his profound commitment to Obedience and his growing feeling that the Cardinal was a fiend, who took pleasure in hurting others.
‘Your penitential path is clear,’ said Lagerfeld. ‘Not only must you persuade Signor Sterling to sign the contract, but you must confiscate the personal computer of Signor Prokosh and bring it to the Holy See tomorrow evening so that our technicians can understand the algorithm Brainwaves has been using.’
‘But, Your Eminence, that would be theft,’ said Father Guido.
‘Theft is not theft when it returns property to its rightful owner,’ said the Cardinal.
‘I am not a philosopher, like Your Eminence, but surely Signor Prokosh’s computer is his personal property.’
Double Blind Page 14
