“I presumed you’d given it to her in case of emergencies. Her being your partner.”
There is something barbed about the word partner but Carol isn’t sure who or what is being mocked.
“We’d have come to the wedding,” says Robyn. “I like weddings. I like America.”
“What are you both talking about?” says her mother.
“I’m taking Mum out for dinner,” says Carol, though the thought had not occurred to her until that moment.
Robyn stands close enough so that their mother can’t hear. “She’s not a toy, Carol. You can’t do this. You just can’t.”
Then she is gone.
“There’s too much going on.”
Carol looks around the half-empty Pizza Express.
“Too much noise,” says her mother. “Too many people.”
There is a low buzz of conversation, some cutlery-clatter. Rod Stewart is singing “Ruby Tuesday” faintly from the speaker above their heads. She rubs her mother’s arm. “I’m here and you’re safe.” She wonders if her sister’s apparent care disguises something more sinister, her mother’s supposed fear of the outside world a fiction Robyn uses to keep her in the house. But her mother is becoming increasingly agitated and when the food arrives she says, “I really don’t feel very well.”
“Come on. That pasta looks fantastic. When was the last time you had a treat?”
Her mother stands up, knocking a water glass to the floor where it shatters. Carol grabs her mother’s arm but there is no way she can hang on to it without making the scene look ugly. She lets her mother go, puts thirty pounds on the table, runs for the door and finds her sitting at a bus stop, crying and saying, “Why did you bring me here? I want to go home.”
When they pull up outside the house her mother says, “I don’t want you to come inside.”
She could throw her bags into the car and go, to London, to Edinburgh, to anywhere in the world, leaving her mother to live the narrow and grubby life to which she has become addicted. But the phrase anywhere in the world gives her that queasy shiver she’s been experiencing on and off since Aysha left, the sudden conviction that everything is fake, the fear that she could step through any of these doors and find herself on some blasted heath with night coming down, the world nothing more than a load of plywood flats collapsing behind her. “I’m staying. I don’t want to leave you on your own.”
“One night.”
She lies in a sleeping bag on the blow-up mattress, orange streetlight bleeding through the cheap curtains, sirens in the distance. It is thirty years since she last slept in this room. For a brief moment those intervening years seem like nothing more than a vivid daydream of escape. She’d got into Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, driven in equal parts by a fascination with the subject and a desperation to put as much distance as possible between herself and this place. A doctorate at Imperial and a postdoc in Adelaide. Jobs in Heidelberg, Stockholm…working her way slowly up the ladder towards Full Professor. Four years max in any one country had been the rule. Out of restlessness, partly, though it was true that she ruffled feathers, and ruffled feathers were easier to live with if they were on a continent where you no longer lived.
She is not a team player, so she has been told on more than one occasion, usually by men who were quite happy to stab someone else in the back so long as the victim wasn’t a member of whatever unspoken brotherhood they all belonged to. But she has run successful groups and the grants have followed her and in the end the world doesn’t give a damn about a few cuts and bruises if it gets a firmer grip on ageing or diabetes, or a clearer picture of how one cell swallowed another and ended up flying to the moon.
Boston was her fourth position as a group leader, running a lab working on the mammalian target of rapamycin complex. Two years in, however, Paul Bachman became the institute’s new director and everything started to turn sour. He brought with him a blank cheque from Khalid bin Mahfouz and instead of supporting the existing faculty went on a global hiring spree. Enter the Golden Boys who deigned sometimes to attend faculty meetings or listen to sub-stellar visiting academics but only as a favour. Paul himself had a house in Bar Harbor and a yacht called Emmeline and a younger wife with a breathtakingly low IQ. Feeling at home wasn’t Carol’s strong suit but under the new dispensation she started to feel like a junior member of the golf club.
In other circumstances she’d have put out feelers, quietly letting colleagues elsewhere know that she had itchy feet. But she’d just met Aysha and, to her astonishment, they were sharing a house, so she knuckled down and put up with the Cinderella treatment.
Eighteen months later, out of nowhere, Aysha said she wanted to get married. Because that’s what loving someone meant, apparently, gathering your families and friends from the four corners of the globe, dressing up, making public vows, getting a signed certificate. Like you hadn’t proved it already by putting up with the subterfuge and the vilification. Carol didn’t understand. The straight world shut you out for two thousand years, the door opened a crack and you were meant to run in and curl up by the fire like grateful dogs. What was wrong with being an outsider? Why this desperate urge to belong to a world which had rejected you?
A year later she and Aysha were no longer sharing a house because…the truth was that she was still not entirely sure. It was the kind of puzzle there was no point trying to solve, the kind of puzzle you didn’t have to solve if you sloughed off all the human mess every few years, trimmed your life down to a few suitcases and headed off for a new skyline, new food, a new language.
Two months of panic and claustrophobia came to an end when Daniel Seghatchian from Berkeley threw her a lifeline, asking if she’d come over and give a chalk talk, meet the faculty, meet the postdocs. Just getting off the plane in California was a relief. Space and sunlight and opportunity. The Q&As were tough but they felt like the respectful aggression meted out to a worthy opponent and by the end of three days the position seemed pretty much in the bag.
She wonders now if the whole thing had been a trap of some kind. Is that possible? Or was it merely her blindness to the allegiances and loyalties and lines of communication upon which others built whole careers?
Her first morning back in Boston she was summoned by Paul who asked what she had against the institute. He didn’t explain how he’d heard the news so quickly. Only later did she realise that he wasn’t asking her what they could do to persuade her to stay. He was giving her enough rope to hang herself. He listened to her diatribe and if she had been a little less exhausted by three days of non-stop thinking she might have asked herself why he seemed untroubled, pleased even. He waited for her to finish then leaned back in his chair and said, “We’ll miss you, Carol.” And only walking away from his office, thinking back to this obvious lie, did she wonder what unseen wheels were turning.
Three days later she got a call from Daniel Seghatchian saying that there was a problem with funding.
“Three minutes of grovelling,” Suzanne said, sitting in her office that lunchtime. “You won’t really mean it. Everyone else will know you don’t really mean it. Paul will know you don’t really mean it. Or, shit, maybe you will mean it. Either way, you go through a little ceremony of obeisance. Kneel before the king. Ask for a pardon. He loves all that stuff.”
Why had that seemed such an impossible thing to do?
After talking to Suzanne she went to the regular meeting with her three postdocs working on the PKCa project. They were in the room that looked onto the little quadrangle with the faux-Japanese garden. Minimal concrete benches, rectangular pond, lilac and callery pear, wind roughening the surface of the water. She was finding it hard to concentrate on what was being said. She was thinking about the last walk she took on Head of the Meadow Beach in Provincetown with Aysha. She was thinking about the humpbacks out on the Stellwagen Bank. Three thousand miles a year, permanent night at forty fathoms, cruising like barrage balloons above the undersea ranges.