Mendel's Dwarf (17 page)

“Please don’t fuss,” I said to Jean. “Just let me go.” But of course she saw me out just the same, apologizing as she opened the door, following me down the crazy-paving to the gate, apologizing
all the time. “Hugo doesn’t mean harm. It’s just his manner. He likes to provoke …”

I told her to forget it. I explained that, like freckles or a harelip or a squint, you get inured to it. It was water off a duck’s back. And suddenly she gave a little cry, as though of pain, and crouched down as you might for a child, and kissed me on the lips, there on the pavement outside number 34 Galton Avenue, encircled by the embarrassing spotlight of a street lamp. “You’re so brave, Ben,” she whispered. “You always were. So brave.”

I shook my head. “Not brave,” I told her. “In order to be brave, you’ve got to have a choice.” Then I clambered into the car and slammed the door.

She stood on the pavement to watch me drive away. She didn’t wave, but held out both her hands open, as though in supplication. I noticed the Downstreams peering through the net curtains of the bay window, making of the scene whatever they could. There was no sign of Hugo Miller.

A curious sensation. There is a desire to weep, of course, but you learn early not to give in to that. Lachrymal duct defect may be an inheritable condition, but my dry eyes have nothing to do with any such mutation—they are simply a result of practice. Instead of tears you learn to feel anger, anger directed at a variety of targets: the perpetrator of the offense; humanity in general; the nameless forces that have driven you to this fruitless, impotent emotion; and yourself—as though somehow you are to blame for your condition. And this anger is combined with a desire for revenge, of course. I’m only human, after all. So, a desire for revenge, a desire to see Hugo Miller beg for forgiveness or mercy or something. And something else, something infinitely more dangerous than any of those emotions: hope. That kiss, you see. Oh, like Dinah’s kiss, of course: an accident, a pure piece of mismanagement,
a stray shot, aimed at the cheek but wandering off target because of the effort of bending down to my level. Or worse, if not an accident, if actually intended, then perhaps meant as some kind of consolation. Whichever way, not significant. And yet I hoped. You hope against hope, even after thirty and more years, you hope.

I didn’t return home that evening. Home was a cheerless, empty basement flat purchased with the money that Uncle Harry left, and furnished with some of those pieces of furniture my father had made for me—diminutive chairs, a low table, reduced wardrobes: a veritable fairytale dwarf’s cave it was. But I couldn’t face the place that evening, so I drove instead to the laboratories, where the night staff were on duty and one or two colleagues would be at work late. I had an alibi—a culture incubating, or something similar—and I had things I could do, trivial tasks that would bring comfort through distraction. Work is a palliative, you see.

“You all right, Ben?” I was asked.

I was fine. I turned on the computer and logged on to Johns Hopkins to look through some recent papers. I was fine. I read about fragile-X syndrome and about familial colonic polyposis and about mismatch repair. The telephone rang twenty minutes after I’d got there, the direct line to my lab. It was Jean. Her small gray voice fluttered in my ear. “I thought I’d find you there. I rang to apologize.”

“You’ve already done that.”

“Actually, I wanted to see if you were all right.”

“I’m all right. Just wonderful. How did you know I would be here?”

“I sort of guessed. I sort of knew. I thought maybe that’s where you’d go. Am I forgiven?”

“For you, there’s nothing to forgive.”

“Those bloody people have gone. They went soon after you left. Hardly surprising, I suppose. Hugo has gone to bed.”

“And you haven’t?”

“I stayed to do the washing up. Hugo’s asleep, and I thought I’d give you a call.”

The incubators hummed. Someone opened and closed the doors to the sterile room. All around me was the timeless, chalky light of the labs. Above the shelves of gleaming bottles, the windows were as black as ebony. “Are you ready for bed?”

“I’m just going. Ben, I just rang to say how sorry I was—”

I could imagine her, of course. My imagination in such matters is fine-tuned. I could picture her in the narrow hallway, holding that ridiculous imitation Edwardian telephone receiver to her ear and standing awkwardly, with one foot perched on the other. I could imagine her toes, distorted by a lifetime wearing narrow shoes. I could imagine her hair freshly brushed out. I could see the simple cotton nightdress and the pallid legs. There would be a faint trace of hair on her shin where the razor had not quite done its work. I am an expert on legs. I live at the level of legs. Bereft of their armor of nylon tights, her legs would have an awkward vulnerability.

“I think you’d better finish what you’re doing and go home,” she said. “Drive carefully.”

Oh, poor, sad dwarf, hidden in your cave, your trident hands (fine, roguish, neptunian adjective) working away with method and expertise at solitary delights, your mind nosing into the declivities of bodies both imagined and imaged there on the bedspread in full and iridescent color—“Glorious Gloria is Game for any Guy,” so the captain claims, no doubt mendaciously. The imagination works, the fantasies blossom. One tries to keep things pent up for a while, tries to prolong the meager ecstasy, but the inexorable tide is rising. Gloria becomes Olga Codon, becomes the glimpse of Mrs. Downstream’s knickers, becomes a
distant memory of Dinah, a vivid memory of Eve, becomes Jean … Sensation wells up. The surge comes suddenly and anti-climactically, flushing all fantasies away like flotsam from a storm drain, to deposit them, a glutinous liquid, onto the strategically placed towel.

The enemy is self-pity. You guard against self-pity, build bastions of cynicism, dig ditches of irony and sarcasm; but sometimes, just sometimes, the barriers are breached.

Sleep of a kind. The sleep of the damned. To dream of Jean.

I
dream a great deal. What would the Blessed Sigmund Fraud have made of that? I dream of a railway line. Long ago the Blessed Sigmund decreed that railways signify death, so according to him, I dream of death.

My railway line runs from nowhere to nowhere. The empty tracks stretch away into the distance while the train sweeps along, drumming over the rails. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack the wheels go, and the track is everything, the sum total of perception, the only landscape. Sometimes, rarely, there is a disturbance: a signal flashes past, followed by a signal box with a name written on it, a curious and childlike name to go with the childishness of the dream—TATA—and after it comes the sudden relief of a station, the concrete platform rising out of the verge like a wave, the line of forlorn people standing in the rain, a long and bewildering nameboard like an anagram in a crossword, and then there is the open line again, the monotonous thrumming of the wheels, the flashing sleepers, thousands and thousands of them, all without meaning or sense or significance.

The blessed Sigmund is wrong—my dreams are not about death, they are about life: the vacuity of life.

“What do you
do?
” Miss Piercey asks over lunch in The Pig
and Poke. You can hear the italics in her speech. “I want to understand what you
do
.”

“At least you’re not like your husband. He already seems to know what I do better than I.”

She ignores the taunt. “Tell me. Explain.”

It is very simple, that is the important fact to grasp. Nuclear physicists, astronomers, chemists—the quintessential scientists, the inheritors of alchemy—have always lived in a world apart, a world bound by the impenetrable barriers of complex equations, of techniques and ideas beyond the feeble grasp of you and me. Not we molecular geneticists. Oh yes, there is a bit of trickery. You need a certain aptitude for puzzles, for riddles, for brainteasers—but little more. If you have a gift for anagrams or a fluency with crosswords, or if you can worry away at the kind of conundrum you find inside the back cover of a magazine, then you could do it too:

Suzie has a piece of string one yard long. Bill cuts it into five pieces of different length. Then Jim cuts Bill’s fragments into a further six pieces. Suzie now wants to reconstruct her original piece of string. She knows that Bill’s cuts were …

The molecular geneticists among you will have smiled at the mere mention of the word
fragment
. It has semantic power. But others will have merely shrugged, like Miss Piercey does, “It can’t be just a kind of game,” she protests.

Oh, but it is. And the techniques are simple, too. About as difficult as haute-cuisine cookery, say: occasionally tricky, but nothing that Miss Piercey couldn’t turn her hand to, if need be. Furthermore, in this particular instance the dish and the cook are one and the same thing, which brings a pleasant tartness to the palate.

Meet My Maker, the Mad Molecule

The molecule in question—the celebrated double helix, the acronymic DNA—is by now known to all in one way or another. Even high-court judges need to have some idea of it, even readers of the popular press recognize it, if only as a way of catching out a rapist by analyzing his sperm. When I speak of this, Miss Piercey makes a face which signifies disgust and disapproval.

“But it’s there,” I assure her, “whether you like it or not, there in the nuclei of all of your cells.”

“The sperm?”

“The DNA. The molecules are there in every cell, carefully folded away like linen in a bottom drawer. Every function of every cell depends on it.”

“You mean”—a frown puckers her forehead—“it’s there at this moment, wriggling round inside me?” She shifts on her seat, as though things are moving beneath her skirt. And there is that sound as she moves: the faint, intimate whisper of nylon against nylon.

“Every second.” I draw a diagram on a paper napkin to explain. I’m afraid it’s my didactic manner once more, but it brings results; she leans forward to look. A lock of her hair brushes my face, and her scent envelops me, a faint breath of musk. Are such messages intentional? Does she know what she is doing? As I sketch my diagram, I am constrained to rearrange matters within my trousers. “The molecule has the shape of a twisted ladder,” I tell her. “A Jacob’s ladder, if you like, but a Jacob’s ladder that goes both ways; we may use it to attempt to ascend to the throne of God … but we can also use it to descend into the pit. So beware.”

“And which way are you planning to go, Dr. Lambert?” Jean asks as she flips the errant lock of hair behind her ear.

The Message

The message of the genes lies along one of the strands of the ladder, and it is written in an alphabet of only four letters—
A, C, G
, and
T
. That is the alphabet of life. The letters are really chemical groups called bases, and the bases of one strand grasp the bases of the other strand to form the rungs of the ladder. They bond thus: an “A” on one strand always bonds with a “T” on the other; a “C” always bonds with a “G.” The result of these rules is that the sequence along one strand is exactly complemented by the sequence along the other. The sequence of letters, say: