* * *
‘I suppose you’re wildly excited to be seeing Lucy tonight,’ said Lesley. ‘She must be even more tantalising now that she’s shacked up with a billionaire.’
‘My sister tells me she’s blissfully happy with Hunter,’ said Charlie.
‘My sister would probably have lied just to torment me,’ said Lesley.
‘I know,’ said Charlie, reminding himself that one day he really must stop understanding Lesley, and break up with her instead. ‘I’ll just have to settle for the kind of sister I have, my ally in all things.’
‘Anyway, it’s not Lucy’s happiness I’m concerned about,’ said Lesley, ‘it’s your fantasies of happiness at her side.’
‘I’m not so confused that a woman being delighted by her existing situation, as well as unavailable, acts as an aphrodisiac on me,’ said Charlie, pleased not to be strapped to a polygraph.
‘Oh, because you’re all so psychoanalysed,’ said Lesley. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You know this subject makes me irrational and you know that it’s only because I love you so much.’
‘Sure,’ said Charlie resignedly, ‘but could we have a go at enjoying this party tonight.’
‘My lips are sealed,’ said Lesley, zipping them up with her right hand and throwing away the key.
* * *
The world is information, and life is an arrangement of information that enables it to grow, replicate and achieve some level of interactive sensitivity with its environment – that much was obvious, at least to John MacDonald. Man was clearly destined to build machines far more intelligent than Homo sapiens. They would become the 3-D printers of the future, in turn building any further machine that the species desired, made out of an informed rearrangement of atoms, which, to all intents and purposes, were in limitless supply. Humanity would be released from the resource anxiety that afflicted men and women less visionary and scientifically rigorous than John. In the rudimentary stages of the escape from planet scarcity (or Planet Scaremongering, as he liked to call it), there might be some value in the kind of information gleaned by Brainwaves, but only while sentimentalists remained attached to the biological substrate that evolution had handed down, with a brain that had not wavered from its three-pound and fifteen-billion-nerve-cell format for over a hundred thousand years, despite the explosion in knowledge that had taken place during this period of cerebral stagnation. Although that seemed to show that the capacities of the mind were not entirely inherent to the design of the brain, and that the mind had been able to evolve without changing the physical basis of its existence, John had plans for upgrading that antique vehicle to something altogether more potent, while keeping it aligned with the interests of the human race – in so far as they could be imagined at this early stage of The Greatest Upgrade in the History of the Universe.
It was a frustrating but unavoidable fact that he would need a great deal of money to make that transition happen and it would involve a deeper collaboration with Digitas than he had originally envisaged, but he had a plan for getting what he needed later today at the launch party.
* * *
Father Guido could not resist lowering and raising the brown and purple blinds of his hotel room one more time, using the remote control on his bedside table, while doubting that this was an entirely proper pastime for a Franciscan Abbot. He was not simply giving in to the childish pleasure of playing with a toy that had never been in his possession before, since the act of raising the blind had become entangled in his imagination with the miraculous power of Our Lord when he raised Lazarus from the dead, although, Father Guido reminded himself, Christ had not raised and lowered Lazarus three times; in fact, he had rather bided his time before raising him at all. Guido placed the remote control firmly back where he had found it and promised himself not to touch it again until nightfall, which, at this time of year, was quite soon enough to soften his renunciation with the promise of an imminent return to pleasure.
Cardinal Lagerfeld was staying in the honoured guestroom of the Apostolic Nuncio, in his magnificent Residence overlooking Wimbledon Common. Father Guido had been given a room in the Hospitality Inn, around the corner, overlooking the car park of the Hospitality Inn. In some ways, this visit to England was a sad occasion. The Blessed Fra Domenico had died during a cold snap at the end of November, only a couple of weeks ago. He had been found by Manfredi with a ‘beatific smile’ on his face, in the hut where he had spent thirty years of austere silence. Cardinal Lagerfeld was giving a Solemn Pontifical Mass of Thanksgiving for the life of the Blessed Fra Domenico in the private chapel in the Apostolic Nuncio’s Residence, and then descending on the Brompton Oratory to perform another Solemn Pontifical Mass, but combined, on this more public occasion, with a sermon to console the faithful that the brain of the greatest mystic of the modern era had been scanned just in time and that Fra Domenico would not only be interceding for them from the supernatural realm, in the usual fashion, in response to their petitionary and intercessory prayers, but would also be available in the form of the Capo Santo, which promised to plunge the owner into the profoundest mystical state by replicating the Blessed Fra Domenico’s neuroimagery and stimulating the mystical centres of the brain. One hundred Special Edition Capo Santo helmets, signed by His Eminence, would be on sale after the Mass. With no time to spare, he and the Cardinal would then be rushing over to Signor Sterling’s Brainwaves launch party at the Palazzo Spencer, which belonged to the family into which the lovely Princess Diana had been born, a truly beautiful and virtuous woman. What a day! He must set off to the Residence – but first, thought Guido, reaching eagerly for the remote control, he had one last task to perform.
* * *
Everyone has cancer all the time; that was the perspective that Lucy had been given in her immunotherapy meeting with Dr Seaford. Those diagnosed with cancer had immune systems that had failed to eliminate the cancerous cells efficiently enough to stop them from growing dominant. Once a brain tumour formed, it sent out chemicals to suppress the immune system everywhere, as well as finding ways to disguise its own abnormality. T cells, the infantry of the immune system, gradually became exhausted by the long-term presence of a tumour. The tumour, however, was not a homogenous entity, it was a mixture of cancerous cells and other cells whose immune defences could be boosted.
Immunotherapy was potentially the most exciting development in the history of oncology. Its collaborative rather than adversarial approach created a new set of odds for the patient. Whereas a surgeon would have to remove the entire tumour to cure the disease and would only think that it was worth ‘buying time’, considering the risks of surgery, if ninety per cent could be cut out, the immune system just had to be stronger than the cancer by fifty-one to forty-nine per cent in order to achieve a cure, a cure which was a self-healing, rather than a burning, a poisoning or an excision. Dr Seaford had kindly agreed to include Lucy in his immunotherapy trial, starting in January. He had managed to get a few doses of the startlingly expensive Ipilimumab. Brain cancer was the most underfunded cancer in the country, because its small patient population usually made Big Pharma unwilling to participate in trials. As one of Seaford’s assistants had told Lucy before the meeting, ‘The problem is that with other types of cancer, like breast and colon and prostate, survivors do a lot of fundraising, but with brain cancer, there just aren’t that many of them around, and I’m not sure you want to roll them out, if you know what I mean.’
‘Well, here I am,’ Lucy had said, giving him a defiant stare.
He had tried to amend his tactlessness by saying that he normally worked with glioblastoma patients and that Lucy’s situation was not as grim, but she was shaken and as she sat down to the meeting a small seizure clutched at her right leg.
Some of the shock of her initial diagnosis had dissipated over the last year, but there was still a basic sense that as a thirty-five-year-old woman she was out of step with conventional mortality. The teenage years of anxiety and grief, which had someti
mes made her life close to unbearable, were far behind her, and the failing faculties and spreading pains, the fatigue and the arthritis, the increasingly limited possibilities of redeeming a disappointing life – the veiled kindnesses of old age that might encourage a person to join the queue for death with a certain eagerness – had not yet come her way. Her desire to ‘end it all’, in so far as she had ever had one, had been at a record low when she received the news.
And yet, although she would be embarking on an immunotherapy trial at the same time as her best friend was embarking on motherhood, she still felt immensely lucky to be surrounded by so much love. She was also encouraged, as a patient, to be living at a time when oncology might be about to enter a revolutionary change rather than just make incremental refinements to its old attacks on the ‘emperor of all maladies’, as the famous oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee had called it. Whether a revolution was about to occur or not, she must, as she had often discussed with Francis, resist the lure of optimism as much as the lure of terror and ‘rest in not knowing’, as he put it. Amazingly enough, that was what she was doing now, looking out of Hunter’s windows at the darkening park, perhaps more at ease than she had ever been, not just with her tumour, but with being alive.
* * *
Saul and Chrissy Prokosh sat in the bar of Dukes hotel, which Chrissy had told Saul was ‘one of the world’s best’, according to the New York Times.
‘Better get used to it, baby,’ said Saul, clinking his prodigious, frosted Martini against Chrissy’s cloudy yellow margarita, while raking up a handful of nuts from the silver bowl on the elegant table between them.
‘This was Ian Fleming’s favourite bar,’ said Chrissy.
‘And this was his favourite drink,’ said Saul, taking his first gulp. ‘Boy, that is a great Martini.’
‘So, why should I get used to the “world’s best”?’ said Chrissy, half coy and half challenging.
‘Because I have plans,’ said Saul, draining the rest of his drink and fake shuddering as it slipped down his throat. ‘Can I get another one of these?’ he asked a waiter who was passing.
‘Plans? I thought you had to wait until your contract expired,’ said Chrissy, leaning forward, ‘so you could get away from the long and vengeful arm of Hunter’s legal department.’
‘I’m putting out feelers,’ said Saul, ‘preparing the ground, so that when we make our move, there’ll be things in place, but it’s all legally watertight.’
Chrissy raised her glass.
‘To getting used to it,’ she said, sinking back in her dark blue armchair and giving him an admiring smile with just enough wickedness in it to remind him that he wouldn’t be in this enviable position without the relentless pressure she had put him under to act like a man.
* * *
‘So, what’s it like making love to a pregnant woman?’ Hope asked, amazed by the domed and indented ceiling of the Palm Room in Spencer House, like a curved honeycomb which, to her enhanced visual centres, seemed to be dripping gold.
‘Realistic,’ said Francis. ‘Thanks for asking; it makes this situation even more relaxing than it is anyway.’
‘Would that make us virtual, if we ever made love?’ said Hope, destroying his defensiveness by pressing her leg lightly against his.
‘Totally,’ said Francis. ‘When they move on from Focus and Relax to the Brainwaves Flirt series, they’ll be begging us for a scan.’
‘You make it sound so romantic,’ said Hope, breaking contact.
‘There’s another effect,’ said Francis, trying to disguise his devastation at the interruption of the erotic transfusion between them, ‘to go back to your first question about sex with a pregnant woman, or at least one you’ve made pregnant – I don’t claim any general expertise – it’s like a painter being shown a canvas that no longer belongs to him, hanging in a house that never belonged to him, in a place of honour, over the fireplace – important and lost at the same time. There’s a mixture of intimacy and usurpation. Some women get post-natal depression; some men get pre-natal depression.’
‘Lucky I’m here to cheer you up,’ said Hope, restoring contact.
‘Yes,’ said Francis, delinquently grateful. ‘I’m not sure that it was a good idea to take quite so many mushrooms, although those golden palm trees look pretty great.’
‘I love the ceiling, too.’
‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘We really ought to circulate.’
‘Our hips or our tongues?’ asked Hope.
‘You’re impossible,’ said Francis.
‘Who is that?’ asked Hope, amazed by the vivid contrast between the red face, white hair and glacial blue eyes of the figure in front of her grasping a glass of champagne from one of the circulating staff. ‘He looks like a neon man who swallowed a French flag.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Francis. ‘From Olivia’s point of view, he’s more of a bête noire than a tricolore. His name is William Moorhead…’
‘Oh, him…’
‘He’s just been thrown out of the University of Riyadh.’
‘So, how come he’s looking so unhappy?’
‘He left in disgrace, for emptying a hip flask of whisky into his lemonade at a party and then hitting on the wife of a fellow academic. Standard behaviour, you might say, but he was spotted by the deputy head of the religious police and the wife was a devout Salafist who despises alcohol and worships her husband, the Vice-Chancellor. Moorhead was lucky to escape lashes and prison. Apparently, his line is, “I forgot to change my SIM card at the airport.”’
‘Ho-ho-ho,’ said Hope.
‘Ho-ho-ho,’ said Francis. ‘He’s spent his career as a public intellectual pouring scorn on all fields of human enquiry that are not susceptible to the scientific method, without applying the scientific method to itself, saddling us with “missing heritability”, generated by genetic dogma, not by evidence; “dark matter” generated by the need to balance equations; multiverses, also without a shred of evidence, generated by a Many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory. It was great when empiricism displaced ignorance, but now mathematics has usurped empiricism…’
‘Baby, you’re so intellectual,’ said Hope, resting her palm at the base of Francis’s spine. ‘That’s just one of the things I like about you. Remember the sleeping snake coiled here.’ She spread her palm over his sacrum. ‘And when it wakes up it shoots up the spine,’ she went on, running her hand up the centre of his back, ‘and strikes at the base of your skull and your whole mind explodes into light.’ She ran her nails through his hair towards the crown of his head.
Francis closed his eyes and felt the firework display inside the sky of his skull and then inside the dome of the sky and then in a pulsing expansion of coloured light exploding in all directions with no limit.
‘You can’t,’ mumbled Francis, still vaguely tethered to the fact that he was at Hunter’s party surrounded by dozens of people, including Olivia and Lucy and Martin and Lizzie and George and Emma and Hunter and Saul – the list went on – who might see this strange scene and be amazed by his dumb ecstasy. ‘You mustn’t.’
‘Sorry,’ said Hope, quickly removing her hand.
‘No,’ said Francis, ‘don’t stop.’
She put her hand back with a quiet sigh, and ran her fingers through his hair again, provoking another burst of light in Francis’s imagination and, for all he knew, everywhere.
* * *
Olivia was resting on the green velvet cushion of a golden chair, watching Bill Moorhead through the doorway, beneath the palms. She remembered the room well from her tour of the house, when she and Lucy had been taken by Jade to admire her choice of location for the party: that astonishingly gilded space, with palms on the principal columns, which fanned into the ceiling and then reappeared in miniature in the inner frame of the golden mirror above the fireplace and in the legs of the sofa and chairs designed for the room. The architect, whose name she had forgotten, had been inspired by Inigo Jones’s plans for a r
oyal bedroom. Palms were a symbol of marital fertility. She had the fertility down, although marriage wasn’t something that interested her or Francis. Still, perhaps he would lose his head and propose, if she could stagger across the threshold.
Moorhead was grabbing a glass of champagne from a passing tray. He drank it with the abandon of a man recently ejected from a dry country, called the waiter back and exchanged his empty glass for a full one. The waiter clearly made some remark, which left Moorhead staring indignantly at his back.
‘There you are!’
‘Oh, hi, Luce; I was just having a rest.’
‘Laying down your burden,’ said Lucy, sitting down next to her.
‘I’m looking on the obesity crisis with renewed compassion,’ said Olivia. ‘Look who’s drinking at a reckless pace in the Palm Room.’
‘Oh, heavens, as I live and breathe, is it not Sir William Moorhead?’ said Lucy, pretending to fan herself with the agitation of an aspirant bride in a BBC costume drama.
‘It is indeed that sad gentleman,’ said Olivia, playing along, ‘much oppressed by his tribulations in the Orient.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s been emailing Hunter over the last two days asking him for help in getting a job at Google. He wants to be their Spokesman for Public Discourse on Science and Technology.’
Lucy and Olivia were caught in one of the fits of laughter that had swept through their friendship over the years.
‘I think Hunter should endow the Sir William Moorhead Prize for Premature Denigration,’ said Olivia, ‘rather than introducing him to Silicon Valley.’
‘Yes, I’m sure he was a member of the Stop Continental Drift Society,’ said Lucy. ‘In fact, he was probably at Galileo’s trial, probing the sincerity of his recantation…’
Double Blind Page 23
