Dr Isadore Holly looked up from his desk and said, as Joanna May came into his office, ‘Why, Mrs May,’ he said, ‘you’ve hardly changed at all.’
‘Don’t begin by telling lies,’ she said. ‘You haven’t seen me for thirty years. You can’t possibly remember me.’
‘I’m not telling lies,’ he protested. ‘It’s not in my habit to tell lies. I remember you very well. Naturally, you look older; time has passed: I merely remarked that you hadn’t changed, and you may think of that as a compliment, or otherwise. You were the most beautiful of all my patients; your husband claimed you were perfection itself, and I had to agree. The mixture of Scandinavian, Celtic and Norman stock we call typically English sometimes turns out very well indeed. And you have aged well. That too is in the genes; of course. Like mother, like daughter, we find.’
‘And you could say the same of identical twins, I daresay. Like this one, that one. No credit in it.’
‘Truly identical twins are rare in nature,’ he said. ‘When the single fertilized ovum splits, it seems the division of the chromosomes is not necessarily exact. It is possible to get identical twins with different-coloured eyes, did you know that? And eye colour is known to influence behaviour, and therefore personality. But I don’t suppose you’ve come here for idle chitchat. One must not suppose that one’s life’s passion is even remotely interesting to other folk.’
‘Your life’s passion, Dr Holly,’ said Joanna May, ‘has had quite an effect on me. Tell me, if someone came to you and asked you to grow a human with frog’s legs, would you do it?’
‘It wouldn’t be a very practical proposition, Mrs May,’ said Dr Holly, his shrewd eyes crinkling with artificial mirth. ‘We have to respect the laws of physics. Such a creature wouldn’t jump – it would be top heavy. And it wouldn’t look very nice.’
‘I was not talking about practicalities, Dr Holly, nor aesthetics.’
‘You mean the ethical considerations? Rest assured we would not. We are not in the business, Mrs May, of creating monstrosities, but of removing disease and, in the fullness of time, and with all possible ethical and legal safeguards, mental illness – a tricky area, mind you, because what is defined as mental illness differs, as we know, from society to society, culture to culture: what seems insane to one nation is mere dissent in another – but no doubt we’ll come to terms with it. And eventually we will have to tackle the genetic basis of behavioural problems, and that too will be ethically and politically tricky. But nowhere does anyone wish to create monstrosities, Mrs May. Do I look like a mad scientist to you? No, of course not! Don’t you go believing what you read in the gutter press.’
Dr Holly smiled benignly. Joanna May did not smile back.
‘But you could do it.’
‘Of course.’
‘And no one would do it just for money, say.’
‘Good lord, no.’ Dr Holly looked quite shocked.
‘People do all kinds of things for money,’ remarked Joanna May, ‘they make instruments of torture and poison gas, for example. Why not me with frog’s legs, for money: or worse, just for fun, to see just how far I jumped, or couldn’t jump? Fun is a great incentive. There’s always a shortage of it.’
‘Mrs May,’ said Dr Holly, ‘this is very interesting, but I’m a busy man. Can I help you in any way?’
‘I just wanted to know what kind of person I was dealing with,’ said Joanna May. ‘What kind of person you’d turned into since, under cover of performing an illegal abortion thirty years ago, you stole what was rightfully mine, one of my eggs, you and my husband between you. A lot can happen in thirty years. I have come for the names and addresses of the women in whose wombs you implanted my babies.’
Dr Holly was silent for a second or so.
‘I think “my babies” is an unfortunate misnomer, Mrs May. I don’t think ownership comes into it. Does a woman’s egg, once fertilized, belong to her, or to the next generation?’
‘Mine wasn’t fertilized,’ said Joanna May, ‘that was the point. It was jiggled into life. So, yes, I reckon it was mine.’
‘I should point out,’ said Dr Holly, ‘that there was no question of illegality, since as I remember there was no actual pregnancy. But these are interesting points; for lawyers to decide, not us. And, as I say, I am no longer personally engaged in genetic engineering. It’s a young man’s field, these days.’
He felt discouraged and resolved that he would stay with the study of brain cells. They at least would not turn up years later to pester and reproach him.
‘The files,’ said Joanna May. Mavis waited in the car outside, to make sure she persisted. ‘Or has my husband been to see you already? Is that it?’
‘Your husband?’ Dr Holly seemed surprised. ‘I haven’t seen him for a couple of years, since he had this idea about cloning a mummy.’
‘Cloning a mummy? An Egyptian mummy?’
‘The idea was, if we could get enough tissue with at least some segments of DNA intact, we could shuffle it together, insert what we had into a growing egg cell, and the resulting child would have the same genetic make-up as an ancient Egyptian. What a lot we’d learn! Of course, the child’s privacy would have to be respected. Just because someone dates from the past doesn’t mean they don’t have present rights.’
‘How far did you get?’ asked Joanna May. If Dr Holly was playing for time, she had enough of that and more to spare. This was the advantage of being useless. He was a busy man, she was not a busy woman.
‘Well,’ said Dr Holly, ‘not very far, as it happened. Dead’s dead, so far as I’m concerned, and in nature this turns out to be pretty much the case, though your husband finds it difficult to accept. On the whole such scraps of DNA as we managed to retrieve weren’t sufficient for our purposes. We had such a deal of patching and joining to do, whatever we grew might well have had the odd toenail missing. Of course these days we can dehydrate the cell before freezing; every year brings new developments, and indeed, more promising ancient bodies to light. We reckon, eventually, to find a few gut cells inadvertently dehydrated. There’s one fungus which will do it – before death – which would help a lot. Your husband doesn’t give in easily, does he?’
‘No,’ said Joanna.
‘Unhappy childhood; to the point of trauma. Your husband represents the victory of nurture over nature: he is a great encouragement to us all. A source of inspiration. Interesting to reproduce him, wouldn’t it be, and rear him in more benign circumstances, see just how it turned out.’
‘It must have been fun,’ said Joanna May, ‘to clone me and see how that turned out.’
‘Our major concern at the time,’ said Dr Holly benignly, ‘was in the successful implanting of fertilized eggs in stranger wombs, and testing the efficacy of certain immuno-suppressive drugs, rather than in personality studies, or making any contribution to the nurture-nature debate.’
‘The records, Dr Holly.’
‘I must say here and now, Mrs May, I would be happier if the request for information came from the child, rather than the natural parent.’
‘I am not a parent, I am a twin.’
‘You could look at it like that,’ said Dr Holly. ‘These personal and ethical ramifications do keep emerging – one hardly thought about them at the time. But, as I say, in ordinary adoption cases, the natural mother and child are brought together by the relevant agency only at the request of the child. The mother gave up certain rights, knowingly and willingly, when she gave up the child to adoption.’
‘I neither knowingly nor willingly consented to anything at all,’ said Joanna May, ‘wriggle as you want, and I want those records now or I’ll blow the whole disgraceful thing wide open.’ She felt the pressure of Mavis waiting, filling the car with cigarette smoke, thicker and thicker as the minutes passed. She felt the dependence of the Queens of Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups: her sisters, her children, her family. They needed her.
‘There is nothing to blow open,’ said Dr Holly. ‘Nothing that was not approved by the district medical ethics council at the time.’ But he allowed her access to his records just the same.