Marcus was also writing a book that summer of ’76. Not so much a book (in Joyce’s sense) as a study. It was called Chimeric Mice: An Evaluation and Practical Exploration of the Work of Brinster (1974) Concerning the Embryonic Fusion of Mouse Strains at the Eight-cell Stage of Development. Joyce had read biology in college, but she didn’t attempt to touch the many-paged manuscript that was growing like a molehill at her husband’s feet. Joyce knew her limitations. She had no great desire to read Marcus’s books. It was enough just to know they were being written, somehow. It was enough to know the man she had married was writing them. Her husband didn’t just make money, he didn’t just make things, or sell things that other people had made, he created beings. He went to the edges of his God’s imagination and made mice Yahweh could not conceive of: mice with rabbit genes, mice with webbed feet (or so Joyce imagined, she didn’t ask), mice who year after year expressed more and more eloquently Marcus’s designs: from the hit-or-miss process of selective breeding, to the chimeric fusion of embryos, and then the rapid developments that lay beyond Joyce’s ken and in Marcus’s future – DNA microinjection, retrovirus-mediated transgenesis (for which he came within an inch of the Nobel, 1987), embryonic stem cell-mediated gene transfer – all processes by which Marcus manipulated ova, regulated the over or under expression of a gene, planting instructions and imperatives in the germ line to be realized in physical characteristics. Creating mice whose very bodies did exactly what Marcus told them. And always with humanity in mind – a cure for cancer, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s – always with the firm belief in the perfectibility of all life, in the possibility of making it more efficient, more logical (for illness was, to Marcus, nothing more than bad logic on the part of the genome, just as capitalism was nothing more than bad logic on the part of the social animal), more effective, more Chalfenist in the way it proceeded. He expressed contempt equally towards the animal-rights maniacs – horrible people Joyce had to shoo from the door with a curtain pole when a few extremists caught wind of Marcus’s dealings in mice – or the hippies or the tree people or anyone who failed to grasp the simple fact that social and scientific progress were brothers-in-arms. It was the Chalfen way, handed down the family for generations; they had a congenital inability to suffer fools gladly or otherwise. If you were arguing with a Chalfen, trying to put a case for these strange French men who think truth is a function of language, or that history is interpretive and science metaphorical, the Chalfen in question would hear you out quietly, then wave his hand, dismissive, feeling no need to dignify such bunkum with a retort. Truth was truth to a Chalfen. And Genius was genius. Marcus created beings. And Joyce was his wife, industrious in creating smaller versions of Marcus.
Fifteen years later and Joyce would still challenge anyone to show her a happier marriage than hers. Three more children had followed Joshua: Benjamin (fourteen), Jack (twelve) and Oscar (six), bouncy, curly-haired boys, all articulate and amusing. The Inner Life of Houseplants (1984) and a college chair for Marcus had seen them through the eighties boom and bust, financing an extra bathroom, a conservatory and life’s pleasures: old cheese, good wine, winters in Florence. Now there were two new works-in-progress: The Secret Passions of the Climbing Rose and Transgenic Mice: A Study of the Inherent Limitations of DNA Microinjection (Gordon and Ruddle, 1981) in Comparison with Embryonic Stem (ES) Cell-mediated Gene Transfer (Gossler et al., 1986). Marcus was also working on a ‘pop science’ book, against his better judgement, a collaboration with a novelist that he hoped would finance at least the first two children well into their university years. Joshua was a star maths pupil, Benjamin wanted to be a geneticist just like his father, Jack’s passion was psychiatry, and Oscar could checkmate his father’s king in fifteen moves. And all this despite the fact that the Chalfens had sent their kids to Glenard Oak, daring to take the ideological gamble their peers guiltily avoided, those nervous liberals who shrugged their shoulders and coughed up the cash for a private education. And not only were they bright children, they were happy, not hot-housed in any way. Their only after-school activity (they despised sport) was the individual therapy five times a week at the hands of an old-fashioned Freudian called Marjorie who did Joyce and Marcus (separately) on weekends. It might appear extreme to non-Chalfens, but Marcus had been brought up with a strong respect for therapy (in his family therapy had long supplanted Judaism) and there was no arguing with the result. Every Chalfen proclaimed themselves mentally healthy and emotionally stable. The children had their oedipal complexes early and in the right order, they were all fiercely heterosexual, they adored their mother and admired their father, and, unusually, this feeling only increased as they reached adolescence. Rows were rare, playful and only ever over political or intellectual topics (the importance of anarchy, the need for higher taxes, the problem of South Africa, the soul/body dichotomy), upon which they all agreed anyway.
The Chalfens had no friends. They interacted mainly with the Chalfen extended family (the good genes which were so often referred to: two scientists, one mathematician, three psychiatrists and a young cousin working for the Labour Party). Under sufferance and on public holidays, they visited Joyce’s long-rejected lineage, the Connor clan, Daily Mail letter-writers who even now could not disguise their distaste for Joyce’s Israelite love-match. Bottom line: the Chalfens didn’t need other people. They referred to themselves as nouns, verbs and occasionally adjectives: It’s the Chalfen way, And then he came out with a real Chalfenism, He’s Chalfening again, We need to be a bit more Chalfenist about this. Joyce challenged anyone to show her a happier family, a more Chalfenist family than theirs.
And yet, and yet… Joyce pined for the golden age when she was the linchpin of the Chalfen family. When people couldn’t eat without her. When people couldn’t dress without her assistance. Now even Oscar could make himself a snack. Sometimes there seemed nothing to improve, nothing to cultivate; recently she found herself pruning the dead sections from her rambling rose, wishing she could find some fault of Joshua’s worthy of attention, some secret trauma of Jack’s or Benjamin’s, a perversion in Oscar. But they were all perfect. Sometimes, when the Chalfens sat round their Sunday dinner, tearing apart a chicken until there was nothing left but a tattered ribcage, gobbling silently, speaking only to retrieve the salt or the pepper – the boredom was palpable. The century was drawing to a close and the Chalfens were bored. Like clones of each other, their dinner table was an exercise in mirrored perfection, Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself infinitely, bouncing from Oscar to Joyce, Joyce to Joshua, Joshua to Marcus, Marcus to Benjamin, Benjamin to Jack ad nauseam across the meat and veg. They were still the same remarkable family they always had been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers – judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers, actors and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at – there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed passengers of The Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. They were bored, and none more than Joyce.