The turnout had been promising. The racks of the cloakroom were thick with coats, male and female, of every description and colour. The open guest book, at his fingertips, gave further evidence of a success. He scanned the four pages and estimated that over one hundred reporters were present. Representatives of all the Swedish newspapers and periodicals had signed in, and so had, he could see, foreign representatives of the great weeklies of the world, Der Spiegel of Hamburg, Świat of Warsaw, L’Express of Paris, Il Mondo of Rome, the Spectator of London, Life magazine of New York, and O Cruzeiro of Rio de Janeiro. Above all, there were present the foreign reporters of the important wire services, Associated Press and United Press International and Consolidated Newspapers of America, Tass of Russia, Reuters of Great Britain, Agence France-Presse of France, and so on and on.
He was alerted by the hall door of the cloakroom softly opening. Mrs. Steen wriggled in and closed the door behind her.
‘How is it going?’ Jacobsson inquired anxiously.
‘Smoothly, as far as I can tell, sir.’
‘No trouble from the press members?’ asked Jacobsson. He did not object to good-natured raillery. (Along with the reporters, he had enjoyed the fun at the press conference in 1960 for young Dr. Donald Glaser, the American laureate in physics. Dr. Glaser’s trip to Stockholm had doubled for a honeymoon, and jesting reporters had inquired of Mrs. Glaser, ‘Did you know he was going to get the Nobel Prize-is that why you married him?’) What Jacobsson did object to was celebrity baiting. Every year, there proved to be several reporters who invited irritation by asking rude or personal questions, in order to create front-page copy.
‘The press seems tame enough,’ said Mrs. Steen, ‘but then, it is still the early stages. A few more drinks, and-’ She shrugged her shoulders.
‘And our laureates-are they controlled?’ By this, Jacobsson really meant, had any one of them made any intemperate remarks. Only this noon, in an hour of divine privacy in his apartment, he had added a painful jotting to his Notes: ‘In September, 1930, in Paris, Eugene O’Neill, who would become a literary laureate six years later, told Nathan, the American critic: “I think the Nobel Prize, until you become very old and childlike, costs more than it’s worth. It’s an anchor around one’s neck that one would never be able to shake off.” Distressing.’
‘They are all being most moderate,’ Mrs. Steen was saying. ‘But the questions are still moderate, also. They are being asked their feelings when informed of winning the prize, and about their trips to Sweden, and about their first reactions to Stockholm. That sort of thing. I do not know what they will say, when the interviews become bolder.’
Jacobsson lifted himself erect. ‘Perhaps I had better look in myself to see if the interviews are becoming bolder. Our guests may feel less uneasy, if they see a familiar face and an ally.’
As quietly as possible, Count Bertil Jacobsson took his place on a vacant folding chair to the rear, and peered past a portion of the fifteen or twenty press members to see how Dr. Denise Marceau and Dr. Claude Marceau were performing.
Claude Marceau was speaking to a reporter in the first row, measuring and doling out each phrase, brandishing his burning cigarette as he spoke. His full greying hair, serious Gallic countenance almost handsome, neat pin-striped dark-grey suit, offered the appeal of assurance and authority. In the opposite corner of the divan, at least four feet apart from him, sat Denise Marceau. She did not watch her husband as he spoke. In fact, she hardly seemed to be listening to him. She sat tensely, with her back straight and knees together, her hands working a white handkerchief in her lap. Occasionally, she jerked her shoulders, as if even the gently shaped green tweed suit she wore were too binding. She stared impassively ahead.
Jacobsson wondered if anyone else noticed that she was unhappy. Perhaps, he hoped, he was wrong, and she was shy of public appearances and merely nervous. Chemists often were a peculiar lot. It was probably the result of too many hours among their glass stills, and heaters, and vacuum pumps. Perhaps their compounds and camphor, unbeknownst to themselves, depressed them. Jacobsson prayed that Madame le docteur would eventually say something amusing.
On the divan, so composed and detached to the unprobing and insensitive eye, Denise Marceau was not entirely unaware of her husband’s monologue. He is hypnotizing them, she thought. He is impressing them favourably, the great genius offering the chiselled phrases and opinions from Olympus, she thought. And then she thought: I wonder what those reporters would say if I told them the old lecher’s condition when I informed him that we had won this damn prize. And I wonder how they would react if I suddenly stood up, and shouted at Claude, ‘Oh, merde!’ and walked off.
The impulsive thought pleased Denise, and forced a smile to her lips, and she realized that her smile had been noticed by the ancient Swedish Count in the back row, and that he was smiling back. For a moment, her ordeal became less tormenting. She told herself that after all, if she divorced Claude (and, much as she detested the necessity, she could see no other course this afternoon), she would be a widow, no, not a widow but a divorcée, a single unit, and she would have to stand on her own feet. Her future would then be based on her fame as one Curie, not two. She must not allow Claude to leave her behind, floundering, helpless, dependent upon him. She must rise alone, and show the world that she never needed that skirt-chasing fool. In short, she must be practical. And the time was now. The Nobel Prize was their stepping-stone to immortality. If she permitted him to dominate it, the world would think that the honour was his alone. Her duty was to make it her prize, too, as a safeguard against the near future.
She pushed the fantasy of Claude and Gisèle on their future wedding night-how could he enjoy that bag of bones? but he had, damn him!-out of her mind, and became attentive to the opportunity at hand.
‘-and so we stopped our researches on coenzyme A,’ Claude was saying, ‘and we concentrated our full attention on this new possibility, which we had conceived, that of preserving and banking male hereditary semen.’
‘Did you tell them, dear, exactly how we came on this new project?’ Denise asked with a tight tiny smile.
‘Well, as you heard, I indicated that we had both become interested-’
‘Of course. But I mean the whole story, dear.’
The Stockholm Expressen reporter in the front row was immediately interested. ‘What is the whole story, Dr. Marceau?’ he asked her.
Denise abandoned Claude to his perplexity and firmly took over the reins. ‘I think it is rather amusing, an ironic sidelight, that this discovery of ours, for which we are being honoured, deals with the male spermatozoa, yet the project was initiated by a female. As my husband will generously corroborate, it was I, quite by chance-but who knows? perhaps nothing like this is pure chance-who first brought up the possibility.’