‘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.’
‘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 them: 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.’
‘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 high 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 interest 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.’
‘Not when it contains a scan of Fra Domenico’s brain,’ said Lagerfeld, ‘handed to him by a servant of the Church.’
‘But—’
‘Need I remind you that not only am I a Cardinal and you are an Abbot,’ said Lagerfeld, ‘but that you are a Franciscan and I am a Jesuit? It is therefore not only impertinent to argue with me, it is futile.’
And with that, the conversation ended, leaving Father Guido exhausted but too shaken to go back to sleep. He lay in bed feeling challenged from every direction. In addition to a thoroughly irreligious loathing for the Cardinal, he was also experiencing, in direct conflict with his vows, a voluptuous entanglement with his surroundings. His bed, for instance, felt as if it belonged in a Baroque painting of angel-laden clouds. It made his simple pallet in the monastery seem like a bed of nails on which an ostentatious yogi might show off his indifference to circumstance. And yet there was more to it than that: the house was beautiful; not the trophy of a vulgar plutocrat, but quite simply marvellous. La Signorina Jade had explained to him that the whole property was decorated with works by artists who had lived at one time or other within a hundred kilometres of Antibes.
‘We’re art locavores,’ she had said, an opaque expression that Father Guido had countered with a polite smile.
They had been standing in front of a paper cut-out by Monsieur Henri Matisse that managed to celebrate, with three simple colours, the joy of sun and sea and leaf. A delicately calibrated Calder mobile in the garden, of equally primitive colouring, responded to a light breeze, which, after the torpid afternoon, nudged it into a gentle rotation in the early evening, so that the shifting relationships between its elements made it seem alive. A large painting of a white bird by Monsieur Georges Braque, like an intersected C, flew across a blue-grey sky in the hall; and his own bedroom was a little museum of oil paintings by Paul Signac, an artist whom La Signorina Jade told him had spent his summers in the famous port of St-Tropez in the early part of the last century. All around him, bright blue, orange, pink and pale green water, trees, boats and bays glistened on the walls. He was reminded that his own faith was far more directly rooted in a love of nature than in the encrypted allegories, disturbing martyrdoms and favourite stories that crowded the monumental if somewhat monotonous art collection accumulated by the Church over the centuries.
When he finally recovered sufficiently from the Cardinal’s dawn raid to get out of bed and prepare himself for the day, Guido drew open his curtains and saw La Signorina Nadia from the Plein Soleil Wellness Team, who had kindly, if somewhat outrageously, offered to book him in for a massage soon after his arrival, leading a yoga class beneath his window. Half a dozen guests were on all fours on the lawn arching their backs in the air and, the next moment, hollowing their backs in a posture from which part of him naturally wanted to avert his gaze, but then found himself looking at fondly, overcome by a sense of sadness that he had been taught to mortify his body rather than enjoy it, to fix his mind on the next life rather than this one. Perhaps he was in error, but it seemed to him that there was something basically healthy about these young people, who were not rushing to be crucified, like the Cardinal’s young protégé, or to have a breast sliced off or have themselves lashed to a burning wheel or strapped to a post and shot full of arrows.
At lunch, Father Guido, instead of placing a restraining hand over the top of his glass, as he usually did, allowed it to be filled with a swirl of deep red wine. He found himself seated next to a charming Frenchman who turned out to be an expert on ceramics.
‘My family was originally from Xi’an,’ Monsieur Marcel explained, ‘where the great Terracotta Army was discovered. I think that ancestral connection is what inspired me, ultimately, to develop my ceramic armour. You are in the business of protecting souls, mon père, and I am in the business of protecting bodies.’
He raised his glass and clicked it lightly against Father Guido’s.
‘To the protection of the vulnerable,’ said Marcel.
‘Yes,’ said Father Guido, ‘an excellent toast. And an excellent wine,’ he added, after taking a mouthful.
‘It is Unico,’ said Marcel, ‘the greatest wine to come out of Spain. The pottery is also by a Spaniard, Pablo Picasso.’
‘Picasso,’ said Father Guido, looking around at the owl-jugs bulging on the table, and at the bullfight taking place within the arena of his own plate and, as the food was served, the dancing figures and the heavy-uddered goats and serene women’s faces and the men’s profiles, like the heads on ancient Greek coins, that gradually emerged from beneath the platters of green beans, pomegranate, feta, rare beef and grilled fish. Was he falling into Epicureanism? Was it sinful to feel such delight, surrounded by these exuberant ceramics, in this magnificent garden, with the sea glittering through the drifting Calder and the best wine he had ever tasted flowing into his glass, as if he were a guest at the Wedding Feast at Cana? Although he was not at Mass, he suddenly felt that all wine was sacred; in fact, that if anything was sacred, everything must be. Was he falling into the Error of Pantheism? He didn’t care! If he was, he had been driven to it by Lagerfeld, a Cardinal who had ordered a special Cruciform MRI machine to be made so that he could watch pictures of poor Ignatio’s brain lighting up as nails were driven into his hands and feet; a bully who had ordered him to steal another man’s property.
Marcel explained that Picasso’s Communist leanings had inspired him to mass produce pottery at Vallauris, a nearby town, in order to make ownership of his work more accessible to ordinary people.
‘Communism is practical Christianity,’ said Marcel.
‘I suppose it is,’ said Father Guido, who was by now on board for more or less any heresy. ‘To Communism!’ He clicked glasses with Marcel again and drank another gulp of the splendid Spanish wine.
Marcel showed him photographs of his ceramic armour and told him that the design had been inspired by snake scales.
Father Guido found himself wondering why the poor serpent had been selected to carry the burden of emblematic evil. Were snakes not also God’s creatures?
‘To serpents!’ he said. And that was the last toast he could remember making.
When he woke, Father Guido was thoroughly confused. He had so seldom left the monastery it was fundamentally bewildering for him to imagine himself anywhere else. It was already night, and yet a pulsing green light suffused the air outside his windows and an eerie, amplified voice was counting slowly in German: ‘Fünf … Sechs … Sieben … Acht.’
For a moment, he imagined that Cardinal Lagerfeld was speaking to him in a dream, counting the seconds before a detonation, or some other terrible punishment that would be unleashed on him and his fellow guests. And then he remembered: he was in the South of France, staying with Signor Sterling. With that recognition came a wince of shame. He had obscure but intermittently piercing memories of the afternoon, like blades gleaming in the fog. Had the lovely Signorina Nadia really persuaded him, after his crushingly delicious lunch, that it was his turn to come to the spa area for a massage? He could feel his heart tightening at the uncertain recollection of a candlelit ceremony; the knots of tension that she had kneaded with her powerful hands, and the warm tears spilling from his eyes, down his nose and dropping through the hole in the massage table on to the petals of a lotus that floated in the pewter bowl below. After he was fully dressed again, she had given him advice on his posture, easing back his burdened shoulders and delicately touching his lower spine and the crown of his head, making him feel taller and taller, although in truth he was not a tall man. Somehow, in that moment, he had felt his deepest aspirations turn into sensations, as if his body was part of a cord that ran from the core of the Earth into infinite space, lifting his mind effortlessly towards heaven.
The rest was blank. He must have passed out after returning to his bedroom. Now he was still fully clothed and was clearly missing some important scientific lecture organised by his host. Where were his manners? He must join the others with all possible haste. He hurried out of his bedroom and down the broad, curving staircase that led to the hall. He felt guilty and dehydrated, but luckily there were two waiters standing at the foot of the stairs, one with a tray of champagne, which Father Guido had no intention of drinking, and one with glasses of icy lemonade. He smiled at the waiter and took a tumbler of the cold yellow liquid, drinking it eagerly.
‘I’m sorry, I was so thirsty,’ he said, placing the empty glass back on the tray.
‘Would you like another?’ asked the waiter.
‘Well, you are so kind. It is very refreshing. Thank you,’ said Father Guido, taking another glass and wandering towards the double staircase that led into the garden from a terrace on the far side of the hall. As he approached the branching steps, the music grew louder and a screen gradually appeared, perhaps a hundred metres from the house, seething and twisting with lurid green numbers. Four figures silhouetted against the giant screen, in black costumes ribbed with strips of light, stood behind sharply delineated consoles on which they made delicate adjustments to invisible instruments. Father Guido walked down the steps in a trance, unable to work out whether he was attending a concert or some sort of science presentation about the robot future that Signor Sterling and his associates were planning to unleash on to the public. Suddenly, COMPUTERWORLD appeared on the screen. That must be the name of the product. Next, a series of huge words appeared, while at the same time being spoken by a portentous, half-human, half-synthesised voice: INTERPOL/ DEUTSCHE BANK/ FBI /SCOTLAND YARD/ CIA/ KGB/ CONTROL DATA/ MEMORY/ COMMUNICATION/ TIME/ MEDICINE/ ENTERTAINMENT. It was clearly a product with a list of powerful clients and a wide range of applications, but what really moved Father Guido were the vibrant irregular patterns of colour that started to dance around the screen, sometimes in sync with the underlying beat of the music, and sometimes with the long breaths and plangent echoes that shimmered and stretched over the frenetic bass. Father Guido drained his second glass of lemonade and looked on with amazement. He was reminded of the ever-changing combinations of tumbling stained-glass fragments in the rotating kaleidoscope his mother had given him for his sixth birthday.
‘Infernal racket,’ shouted a familiar voice in Father Guido’s ear. It was Sir William Moorhead. ‘I suppose we can at least agree on that!’
‘It reminds me of stained glass,’ said the enchanted Abbot, ‘but modernised, of course, for young people.’
‘These Krauts have been pretending to be robots for at least half a century. It’s retro-futurism rather than modernity,’ said Moorhead witheringly. ‘I think you’ll find Soviet poster art, medical monitors and musical visualisation have had a rather larger influence on their work than the rose window in Amiens Cathedral.’
Father Guido could not really understand what Moorhead was complaining about, but he recognised the tone of a man who was used to proving that he was right about everything. Although His Eminence wanted to anathematise Moorhead, Father Guido couldn’t help feeling that these two dogmatic, ill-tempered men were really spiritual twins. The truth was that, at this moment, he didn’t care what either of them thought; he simply felt too well, too delighted to be part of this jubilant occasion. He only ever watched television at Easter for the Pope’s blessing – and also, caving into pressure from the younger friars, when Italy played in the World Cup Final of 2006. Now he could not help gazing in wonder at the film of a white spaceship approaching the snowy ground outside a large institutional building. When it landed, the music also came to an end, with some applause, whistles and whoops from the audience. The stage went dark but soon, out of the pregnant darkness, a new melody emerged. There was a roar of recognition from the guests as the stage lit up again.
Suddenly, La Signorina Jade appeared before the two old men in a short red dress, her black hair stacked up and pierced with a beautiful ivory chopstick, chased with red and black pictograms. ‘Come on, guys! This is a classic, we’ve got to dance.’ She joined the musicians in singing the opening words of the song.
She’s a model and she’s looking good
I’d like to take her home – that’s understood
‘No possible definition of dancing…’ Moorhead began, but Father Guido did not hear the rest of the paragraph, since Jade had clasped his hand and was dragging him towards the stage. When they reached the outer edge of the crowd, Jade let go of Guido’s hand and threw herself into a frenzied dance, thrashing her body from side to side, undulating her arms, and then, still swaying, more slowly now, she bowed towards Father Guido and, as her head drew closer, unpinned the grenade of her hair and lashed it from side to side only millimetres from his somewhat prominent waist. Just when the poor Abbot thought he might faint, she arched backwards, making the same writhing motion, but this time with her own waist thrust forward until the longest strands of her hair were touching the grass behind her.
Madonna, thought Father Guido, moving his elbows nervously back and forth and trying to make his old knees move at the same time. Then, in an abrupt change of style, Jade jumped neatly beside him and started to do a perfect impersonation of an old-fashioned cyborg, as if to make Father Guido’s rather awkward and rigid dancing style seem like the perfect complement to the music.
‘Go Guido!’ shouted Jade. ‘The mensch-maschine merger! Yay!’ She mirrored the old Abbot, walking on the spot with exaggerated jerkiness; shadowing his movements, while gradually encouraging him to increase their complexity. When the song stopped, she leant over and kissed him on the cheek.
‘Thanks, Father, I loved that. You’re quite the dancer,’ she said, bumping her hip against his and then swaying down among the pines and palms and people, artfully reassembling and skewering her hair as she disappeared from view.
Guido was stunned. His heart was pounding and his face trickling with sweat. He felt that perhaps he was in love. What a confusing weekend it was proving to be.
‘Another margarita, sir?’ asked a waiter.
‘Oh, yes, thank you, I am quite hot from dancing,’ Father Guido confessed, picking up another glass of the excellent lemonade.
‘Un-fucking-believable, hey?’ said Signor John MacDonald, the young Scotsman he had shared a ride with from the airport. ‘Kraftwerk! Un-fucking-believable. I am properly impressed, properly fucking impressed. What’s also totally blowing my mind, at a totally different level, is that some of their visuals look amazingly similar to the simulations I’m getting with my Inorganic Life Modelling Program.’
‘Perhaps it is a sign pointing to a deeper pattern,’ said Father Guido, trying to sound supportive, without having the least idea of what the young Scotsman was talking about.
‘That’s right! That’s what I’ve ended up thinking,’ said John. ‘If I were even more paranoid than I am – which would make me really fucking paranoid, I can tell you – I might think that Kraftwerk had been hacking my Computer World – do you know what I mean? But, as it is, I’ve taken so much E, I’m much more into the “great-minds-think-alike-slash-two-aspects-of-a-higher-unity” type of space – basically, what you were saying. Would you like some, by the way?’ he asked, holding up a rhomboid orange pill. ‘It’s a religious experience.’
‘Believe me,’ said Father Guido, ‘I have them all the time.’
‘Really?’ said John. ‘That’s great to hear. I didn’t know you were allowed to. I’m a bit hazy on the vows.’ He gave Father Guido an unexpected hug. ‘I know you’ve got your own supplies, but this is really good stuff,’ he said, dropping the orange pill into Guido’s lemonade and giving him a wink.
‘But I do not have a headache,’ said Father Guido.
John seemed to find this remark inexplicably funny and only recovered from his fit of laughter when the music changed again.
‘Fuck!’ he shouted, clutching his head in disbelief. ‘It’s “Radioactivity”. I love this song.’ He squeezed Father Guido on the shoulder, gave him another embrace and set off into the crowd with his arms outstretched.
A slow synthesised basso profundo exhalation of the word Radioactivity throbbed through the air. On the screen, a finger tapped out a Morse code, establishing a feverish pulse beneath the deep and resonant syllables. Soon, huge individual words flashed on to the screen, simultaneously pronounced by the robotic voice: CHERNOBYL. HARRISBURG. SELLAFIELD. HIROSHIMA. A red and yellow radioactivity hazard sign receded down a red and yellow tunnel. STOP RADIOACTIVITY.
Father Guido drifted further down the gentle slope towards the stage, sipping his drink appreciatively. Everyone was so friendly. He was in love with La Signorina Jade, and also, if the truth be told, far from indifferent to the lovely Signorina Nadia, with her special healing gifts. The young Scotsman had been unusually affectionate and although the aspirin he had insisted on giving him was completely unnecessary, it was a generous gesture that Guido couldn’t help admiring. As he drew closer to the stage, Guido was arrested by the sight of two young women dancing together. One, he recognised as Signor Sterling’s lovely blonde girlfriend; the other he had not been introduced to yet, but the two of them were clearly close friends, singing along to the lyrics, while interpreting them with dance.
Stop Radioactivity
Is in the air for you and me.
They both looked up and around with stylised alarm, pointed at each other and then reached out for mutual protection.
Discovered by Madame Curie.
They sang these words while holding each other’s shoulders. The line seemed to give them both special pleasure, but they soon suppressed their smiles, separated, widened their eyes and clasped their cheeks as they continued:
Chain reaction
Mutation
Contaminated population.
‘Hi, Father G,’ said Saul Prokosh, approaching Guido from behind and wrapping an arm around his shoulder. ‘Don’t you love them?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Guido, ‘truly I love all of them.’
‘Is this the best party you’ve ever been to?’
‘It is, it is,’ said Guido, feeling a pang of disloyalty towards Brother Manfredi, whose birthday party in the vegetable garden last year had been the talk of the monastery for weeks.
‘Signor Saul, I wanted to discuss a delicate matter with you…’
‘You want the number of my proctologist in LA?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Father Guido, ‘I do not understand.’
‘Just kidding,’ said Saul. ‘Say it how it is, Guido; tell me what’s on your mind.’
‘I have been asked by the Curia,’ Father Guido launched in blindly, ‘to approach you about a share of the profits from the scan of Fra Domenico’s brain.’
‘Well now, technically, that’s our data,’ said Saul, ‘because of a certain form you signed before we did the scan, and without which we would not have done the scan, but we’re hoping for a big endorsement from His Holiness – we don’t want you guys saying we stole one of your relics, right? – so we could certainly look into profit sharing on that basis. I’ll get our legal team on to it on Monday, but I can tell you we’d be totally open to a collaborative approach.’
‘Oh, wonderful! God be praised!’ cried Father Guido. ‘It is a great weight off my mind.’
‘Don’t sweat it,’ said Saul. ‘Just keep on enjoying the party.’
‘Yes!’ said Father Guido. ‘Thank you. I am enjoying this party more than I can say.’
On the screen, there were now vertical blocks of brilliant colour. The synthesisers were playing a gentle meandering melody.
Neon lights
Shimmering neon lights
This city’s made of light
Father Guido felt the radiance of each colour filling his body. Stained-glass windows had been designed to make cathedrals into images of Paradise, but here he was, in the open air, flooded with light, in the cathedral of nature: the whole world was Paradise, these musicians were angels masquerading as robots to camouflage themselves in the contemporary world; his heart, in fact every cell in his body, was a rose window through which the light of eternity was streaming, but also from which it was streaming at the same time. It seemed to be everywhere, not just beamed down like a spotlight from a remote location beyond the sky.
‘This is the city of light,’ he whispered to himself. ‘This is what I was looking for through the kaleidoscope.’
So much lawn, thought Francis, and so much night lighting, disorienting the moths and bats. Although it was still quite early and none of the other guests were yet in circulation, most of the signs of last night’s party had already been dismantled and removed. He had promised Hunter that he would take a look around Le Plein Soleil and see what could be done to increase the biodiversity of the property. Ploughing up the lawn would be a good start. A field of mixed grasses, with mowed paths winding through it, would be filled at this time of year with wildflowers and poppies. Hunter had nine acres, an astonishing amount of land in the circumstances, but a relatively small amount in the context of wilding. The larger drama of this part of the Mediterranean landscape was its dryness and the abandoned, unmanaged scrub covering the hills and mountains a few miles back from the monstrously popular coast. It was a brittle zone, a fire hazard made more incendiary by the lack of animals, wild or domestic, to control the accumulation of leaf litter, pinecones and dead wood that made fires so violent and hot that nothing could survive their passage. The average amount of dead wood was three times higher than a hundred years ago, and after each fire, the rain washed away more topsoil making a poorer environment for the regeneration of pines and oaks.
On the smaller scale of Le Plein Soleil a lot could be done by taking simple measures. The property was divided and contained by walls that could be turned into dry-stone walls by removing the cement fillings, leaving nooks for lizards and salamanders and lichens. Hunter could join the Mediterranean ‘amphibian ark’ by creating a shady pond for frogs to breed in. A third of amphibians in the region were endangered, and worldwide the whole class of Amphibia was under threat from chytridiomycosis, a deadly set of fungal diseases with no known cure. To prevent the pond from becoming a stagnant nursery for mosquitoes, there could be fish that ate mosquito larvae while the tadpoles grazed the algae growing on the walls, and lily pads for the frogs to sit on when they were grown up, and a gentle flow of water that would eventually run into an orchard, irrigating trees to provide unsprayed fruit for Hunter’s household, as well as food and flowers for bees and wasps and caterpillars and birds. Amphibians were especially sensitive to chemicals in water and so he would suggest large storage tanks, hidden along the top of the slope, perhaps behind a new olive plantation, for collecting the winter rainwater and then releasing it slowly through the arid summer months. At the far end of the orchard there could be a few log hives and tree hives, not to harvest honey but for pollination and support for the beleaguered bee. Lavender, which would attract butterflies as well as bees, could replace the fertilised, heavily irrigated beds of gaudy, flimsy flowers. Maybe he could persuade Hunter to plant a small oak grove. Oaks supported over three hundred other species, many more than the palms and pines that currently dominated the property. Yes, an oak grove, perhaps beyond the orchard, among the wild beehives and a new herb garden of rosemary and thyme and basil and sage, and lemon verbena.
In the last tapering triangle of Hunter’s land, there was a whitewashed hexagonal pavilion, its arched windows edged with pale orange marble and an open doorway overlooking the sea. From the pavilion, two paths curved through the rock garden to the edge of the water, where a flight of steps led down to a private harbour, tucked out of view from the house. There was nothing growing on or immediately around the pavilion at the moment, which could easily have an orange-flowered trumpet vine encircling it, or evergreen ivy with dark berries to feed the birds in late winter and early spring; or honeysuckle, favoured by the amazing hummingbird hawk-moth. Two or three lime trees with their soporific blossom might replace some of the rock garden and mark the far end of the property with shade and a place to rest.
As he was staring at the pavilion, imagining the appearance and impact of various climbing plants, Francis saw Father Guido on its threshold, still gazing at the sea in the early morning light. He eventually stepped out, seeming rather dazed and lost in thought.
‘Good morning,’ Francis called, across the rock garden.
‘Ah, buongiorno,’ said Father Guido. ‘It is very beautiful. Everything is very beautiful, you agree?’
‘I agree,’ said Francis, walking over to the pavilion, smiling. ‘You’re up early.’
‘I have not been to bed,’ said Father Guido. ‘I have felt too exhilarated by the party and the kindness of the guests and the power of the concert, and then, when I was determined to go indoors, I was enchanted by the rising sun. I have been sitting here.’ Father Guido indicated the cushioned bench inside the pavilion.
‘May I?’ said Francis.
‘Of course,’ said Father Guido, seeming delighted to have an excuse to go back to his favourite spot. ‘Let’s sit down and look through this archway. For some reason it is even more beautiful, when it is…’ Father Guido searched for the English word.
‘Framed?’ suggested Francis.
‘Exactly. Like a picture,’ said Father Guido. ‘Nothing is added to the view, except the edges, and so it becomes a picture!’
‘Yes,’ said Francis.
‘So, you are the one who is up early,’ said Father Guido.
‘That’s right,’ said Francis. ‘I’m a naturalist, and Hunter asked me to have a look around and think of some ways to help more plants and animals make a home here.’
‘Oh, that is excellent,’ said Father Guido. ‘I am a Franciscan and we love all forms of life, all aspects of creation.’
‘Perhaps you can help me come up with some ideas,’ said Francis. ‘Saul tells me you have some lovely woods and gardens around your monastery.’
‘Ah, yes, it is lovely,’ said Father Guido. ‘I have always lived in Perugia, which is very fortunate, but you know, everything has grown quieter there since I was a boy. The birds are quieter in the spring, the cicadas are quieter in the summer. When we were children, we used to go into the woods to watch the fireflies; now many of the woods are dark. My mother used to warn me to watch out for the cinghiale, how you say?’
‘Wild boar.’
‘Yes! Now I would be so happy to see more of them. The country has grown…’
‘Thin?’ suggested Francis.
‘Yes, thin. Instead of an orchestra, we have a harpsichord, an old harpsichord, so to speak, with many dead keys.’
‘Ninety-three per cent of the biomass of all the birds and mammals on this planet is made up of human beings and their domesticated animals,’ said Francis, ‘only seven per cent is wild.’
‘Can this be true?’ said Father Guido.
‘Yes, that’s how much wildlife is crushed under existing conditions.’
‘Incredible!’ said Guido, removing his glasses and wiping his eyes with his sleeves. ‘Forgive me, I am very emotional today. We must help.’
‘Everyone can help,’ said Francis: ‘plant a window box with seeds rather than with plants propagated with pesticides, reintroduce bison to the Carpathian Mountains, give the sea a rest, stop drowning dolphins and turtles in fishing nets, put out a birdfeeder; and between now and lunchtime, you and I can help by coming up with some ideas about how to revitalise this little park. The distribution of species is not fixed, it changes constantly with local immigrations and extinctions. Unless we insist on extinction, the natural cycles of a place are like a kaleidoscope, with pieces falling in and falling out.’
‘Ah, sí!’ said Father Guido. ‘Yes, yes, I have had this vision also, last night, it is…’ He took Francis’s hand, but seemed unable to say anything, wonder and incomprehension taking turns in his old and innocent face. ‘Forgive me, I have not the words.’