I had thought my work was dabbling in the shallows of science fiction. Suddenly it looked tame. To speculate on controlling cell division, or transforming cells taken from the skin or the gut into sperm cells was one thing; to hold the reclaimed DNA of Christ in my hand, the actual genetic blueprint of the God of half the human race, salvaged across two thousand years, was another. This was a quantum jump in ambition, an idea of outrageous hubris. And of stunning simplicity: an idea hidden in full view.
Not that I believed that the beaker of pasta strands in Scanlon’s refrigerator belonged to Jesus Christ — merely that it was possible that it belonged to Jesus Christ. The theory was enough: I had admitted to myself, despite myself, that it could be done. If not here, now, then tomorrow, elsewhere.
This wasn’t all. Complicating things was the small matter of that near intimacy. The disturbing physical presence of the man. As I fled I could still feel his breath on my neck, a ticklish afterglow; I kept wanting to brush it away, like strands of spiderweb. Such feelings were new to me, even at my age. There had been no menfriends in the past; no boyfriends. Boys had never interested me, especially the fully-grown variety.
Scanlon and I had argued for some time; the world outside the Cell Lab was filling with the day shift: clerks, nurses, porters, even that rarity at Schultz Medical Centre, one or two stray patients. I stepped out of the lift on to my own floor to find one of the two department secretaries, Alison Jennings — a semiefficient mother of four, a second-income earner whose real interests lay at home — standing at the coffee machine. She followed me into my office performing her usual balancing act: the morning mail clutched under one wing, my appointments diary under the other, a cup of coffee in each hand.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ she said, predictably.
‘I’m not feeling … myself.’
The room was dark, the venetian blinds shuttered. She set down her various burdens, then turned to jerk open the blinds. Slatted beams of light splashed across my desk; I sat, staring, hypnotised. Steam rose invisibly from the coffee, only becoming visible, swirling and eddying, as it entered the light some distance above.
Alison flipped open the diary, and spun it on the desk before me: ‘Mary-Beth Schultz rang.’
Dust motes swam in and out of the beams of sunlight like tiny glittering fish in a distant aquarium. I tried to focus my thoughts.
‘She wanted your first available appointment.’
I sipped absently at the coffee, then set it down. Alison was still trying to reconnect me to the real world, to earth me: ‘I pencilled her in for this afternoon. 2 p.m.’ I had almost forgotten this third complication: the sterility of Hollis Schultz. The question of why I had been offered my Chair. Too many thoughts were jostling about in my head.
‘I’m not really up to it. Could you postpone the appointment?’
‘You’re going to refuse to see the boss’s wife?’
‘I’m taking the rest of the day off. If anyone needs me I’ll be at home.’
An expression of concern replaced her incredulity: ‘Anything I can do?’
I shook my head: ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘I’ll look in after work,’ she said. ‘In case you need anything.’
An instinctive mother hen. Alison was my age, but saw me more as a dependant than a superior. Her shorthand was bad, her typing worse, but her secretarial skills in more important areas were indispensable: collecting dry cleaning, paying bills, sending out for food when I was too busy to eat. She ran the Department, and in many ways ran my life, and Tad’s: the nearest thing to the traditional ‘wife’ that I had always lacked.
‘Don’t bother. Tad will look in on me,’ I said.
I suddenly wanted to be home, preferably in bed. Not so much sleeping, as taking refuge. Hiding. I left her standing in my office, those two cups of coffee steaming on the sunlit desk.
At home I crawled into bed, fully clothed. I pulled the quilt over my head and lay huddled for a time, thinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking. I wanted to expunge Scanlon from my system, break those strands of sticky web. I felt disturbed, physically and mentally. I had no idea what to do about the physical disturbance, but surely I could do something about his ideas, his actual work.
At length I threw the quilt aside, and began ransacking my bookshelves. The Bible was buried in a row of thick textbooks, all unread for years. Absurd the baggage that I’ve carried with me since my student days, unremembered, never needed. The Bible had stayed with me, near to me, hidden among a thousand other books. They were all still there, every book I had ever owned. Old dictionaries. Atlases. Cubic medical tomes: Gray’s Anatomy, Robbins’ Pathology, Lecture Notes in Gynaecology. The plays and novels from school — Hamlet, Macbeth, Great Expectations, The Invisible Man — that I had recently begun reading again. All had followed me from house to house like loyal pets, intellectual pets packed into tea chests or cartons each time I moved, then unpacked again into their narrow kennels. Why had I kept them? Auxiliary lobes to the brain? Extra reserves of memory — hard memory — that could be called on if needed? Or was it merely sentimental: they were snapshot albums, of a sort; snapshots of my thinking processes from the past?
I lifted the stiff cover of the Bible — it seemed to creak open — for the first time since the age of fourteen, since that last Sunday School picnic. Presented to Miss Mara Fox. Wesley Sunday School, Intermediate Class, 1940. Two signatures were scrawled beneath: a barely legible Christopher Pearson, J.P., Superintendent, and my father’s precise, always legible Rev. B. Fox.
That familiar signature trapped my gaze: a hieroglyph that I hadn’t seen for years, hadn’t expected ever to see again.
He had written to me through my student days, long weekly letters which were nothing more than a systematic chronicle of his week’s activities: letters as flat and dead and dutiful as his sermons. My mother tacked on shorter postscripts: practical advice on the subjects of dress, food, sleep, deportment. Her handwriting was more expansive, less disciplined: large, generous loops, inflated perhaps by whatever frustrated love she felt for me, by feelings she could never actually express. Her great fear (reading between the lines, or within the loops) was always the same: I was heading for spinsterhood.
She had never been entirely happy when my school reports came home: top of the class, invariably. My father was always pleased, mildly; she sometimes pretended to be pleased. She wanted me to do well, she claimed, but not that well. Not showing up the boys, not isolating myself from the girl world of domestic science, netball and average academic achievement.
The choice of medicine as a career had worried her even more.
‘So much hard work, when will you have time to relax?’
Meaning: when will you have time to find a husband? Teaching had been her career suggestion: the district was full of Pretty Young Things posted out to bush schools who had found themselves a Nice Young Man (preferably attached to a sizeable propertyholding), and settled down and lived happily ever after.
At first I wrote back to both of them, weekly. Another Inverse Law: I always replied to my mother’s short, constipated notes at length; and to my father’s long, tedious chronicles in brief. To reassure my mother I invented a full social life, a fictional life that I was soon forced to keep track of in a diary, since she read and memorised and speculated about every word I wrote, and often referred back to events I had dreamt up months before and long since forgotten. Was that Bob the same Bob you went to The Sound of Music with? Patrick sounds like a nice boy, but your father wondered about the name? He’s not a Roman? In fact I was desperately lonely, and might even have gone to Mass or converted to Islam if a boy had asked me.
I was living in a university college: one more island in an archipelago of country girls. Writing that weekly letter on Sunday afternoon helped give shape to the week. Later, as the years passed, my letters dropped off to once a fortnight, then once a month. I was able to plead, truthfully, pressure of studies.
It’s difficult now to remember how much those books once meant to me. As a wheezing child in the country, but also through years of lonely study in the city, I found comfort in books, in some books. Texts of Mathematics, Biology, Physics, Organic Chemistry: these were the friends of my first year in the city. The Bible was already baggage; I no longer believed in any sort of God, had not believed since the picnic. I was interested only in ideas that could be tested and retested, proved or disproved. If I had read the Bible in those years it would have been for purposes of mockery: to ridicule those endless stories of rape and pillage and murder. God — the God of the Old Testament, at least — seemed like nothing so much as a little boy. A spoilt, murderous brat, playing with his toys; shaking them around a bit until they broke. ‘Take the toys from the boys’ — I believed it.
Even as a girl, muttering my prayers each night, I failed to see the point of the random genocide, the petty tests of faith, the putting to the sword of every man, woman, and child in half the cities of the Middle East.
God should be impeached, I once suggested as a teenager to my father. He should be tried for war crimes, I said. He glanced up from his desk and turned towards me; turned as slowly and methodically as he steered his Morris Major around a street corner.
‘Don’t take the Old Testament too literally,’ he told me, mildly. ‘The Ten Commandments and the prophecies are all that count.’
I went away and read. And then came back. Fine, I said. What kind of egomaniac would put Himself at the centre of the first three Commandments — to have no other God but Him, etc — and relegate Thou Shalt Not Murder to seventh spot? ‘For I the Lord am a jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children,’ I quoted.
What kind of Hitler was running the universe? I asked, if not in those precise words. Was it really worse to bear false offerings to Baal, or take the Lord’s name in vain, than to murder?
My father glanced up again from his desk. ‘Read the New Testament,’ he murmured.
I went away again, and read some more. God did seem to have grown up a little in the later Testament. Matured. You couldn’t go past the Sermon on the Mount for a serve of spine-tingling poetry. But what about the magic tricks? If He was a spoilt brat in the Old, He was a teenage exhibitionist in the New: turning water into wine, walking on water, rioting in the Temple.
‘The Holy Trinity,’ I tormented my father. ‘God the Father, God the Teenage Delinquent, God the Spoilt Brat.’
I was something of a teenage delinquent myself, intellectually.