Babel (12 page)

She handed Kathy several photocopied sheets of paper. The letter had been typed, badly, on what looked, from the irregular letters, like an old manual machine, on UCLE letterhead.

The Editor

Dear Sir,

In recent years it has become commonplace to read letters to the newspapers complaining about the current state of our universities. These refer to inadequate government funding, overcrowded lecture theatres, low staff morale, and so on. Rarely however do they discuss the fundamental issue underlying these symptoms, which is the extent to which the whole ethos of the universities has been corrupted and betrayed by those who were its guardians. The purpose of the university is scholarship and the cultivation of diverse and creative thought, not the enlargement of the gross national product or the private incomes of its senior managers.

Among those centres of learning which have led the charge into prostitution of their talent, my own university, UCLE, is an outstanding leader in whoredom. On the one hand it adopts a breathtaking promiscuity in soliciting commercial funding for research which distorts and corrupts genuine scholarly activity, and on the other it ruthlessly stifles dissent and debate among its academic staff, who are reduced to the role of intellectual harlots, required to service the needs of whichever drooling customers their glossy senior management mesdames can lure off the street.

The glamorous star of our particular bordello is a siren by the name of CAB-Tech, the Centre of Advanced Biotechnology, a model of its alluring kind, whose groping assignations with commercial interests are not open to public scrutiny, which has produced no tangible benefits for its host university, and whose prime purpose appears to be the enrichment of its sponsors.

All this would be merely distasteful were it not coupled with an arrogance which elevates it to the level of tragedy. For CAB-Tech is so driven by the greed of its clients as to pervert the very nature of human inquiry and human life itself. Under the guidance of its Svengali-like director, Professor Richard Haygill, the whore aspires to the role of God, with results that will surely be catastrophic for us all.

One cannot say these things within the university, which has shut down its forums of debate, yet there comes a point where they must be said, and the intolerable hubris of fundamentalist science exposed. I do not do so lightly, knowing full well the risks involved. Those who speak out against tyranny must offer their very lives to the cause.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Max Springer

‘I can see why you couldn’t print it. It sounds mad.’

‘Yes. When the sub-editor first read it he thought it was one of those crazy feuds you hear about among academics who are supposedly very bright but have no common sense. Like the old joke, “Why are disputes in universities so bitter? Because the stakes are so low.” Only the stakes here aren’t necessarily low, at least as far as CAB-Tech is concerned. From what little I’ve been able to find published about it, it seems to be a very successful outfit, and this Professor Haygill is a highly respected scientist. My editor’s reasoning was that we hadn’t published the letter, and as far as we knew Springer hadn’t denounced CAB-Tech anywhere else, so why would he be at risk from them?’

‘Yes.’ Kathy thought about what she knew about Brock’s case, and about him already interviewing a suspect. ‘I think he’s right.’

‘Do you?’ Clare Hancock looked at Kathy hopefully.

‘Well, the idea of sinister scientists bumping people off to protect their research . . .’ She smiled, and Clare grinned back.

‘That’s what I hoped you’d say. And they wouldn’t do it like that anyway, would they, have him shot in public? They’d put some fiendish chemical in his tea or something, wouldn’t they?’

They both chuckled. ‘I don’t know,’ Kathy said. ‘It just all sounds so hysterical and unlikely. I’ll tell Brock about this if you like, but I really don’t think it’s going to interest him.’

‘Good.’ The reporter took the sheets of paper back from Kathy and turned to open the car door. ‘No one would have given this a second thought if Springer hadn’t died like that. And . . .’ she paused with the door half open, ‘. . . I suppose I also had a lurking worry that we’d been given the fatwa story to put us off this, if this was for real.’

Kathy didn’t really follow that, but waved goodbye and drove on to Finchley where she collected the bills and junk mail from her letterbox and took the lift up to her flat. It seemed hollow and cold when she opened the door, the first time she’d been there for over a week, and the view from the twelfth floor window of suburbs stretching into the distance seemed sodden and bleak. She remembered with regret the bustle and warmth of Suzanne’s house with the children. That was a home, she thought, while this was just a filing cabinet for lonely people. She had two rooms, and her heart sank at the thought of the other, the bedroom, almost filled by the big bed she’d bought when Leon had moved in, briefly, before Christmas. Now that bed seemed like a big, bad, empty joke she’d played upon herself. This is just self-pity, she thought. She made herself a cup of tea, sat at the little dining table and wrote down a paraphrase of Springer’s letter, together with a brief report for Brock, and put it in an envelope which she gave to Wayne later that evening.

He filled her in on Brock’s progress, and she asked him one or two questions about the case. It had occurred to her that it shouldn’t be hard to confirm Springer’s obvious obsession about the scientists at UCLE and his mental state when he’d written the letter to the
Herald
. Wayne told her that, as far as they’d been able to gather, Springer was a solitary man with few friends. Brock had said that he’d found only one person who seemed genuinely upset by his death, his sole student, Briony Kidd.

‘And this Muslim gang that Brock’s arrested. What are they like?’

‘Three kids. Well hard, or thought they were. In a panic now though. I didn’t think they could have done it until we discovered that one of them had met Springer, and believed that he’d refused him a university place. The tragic thing was that it wasn’t Springer who’d done that, it was the university closing down Springer’s course. There certainly never was a fatwa—that idea was always crap. Just some kid in a rage, lashing out at injustice and the fact that nobody would take him seriously. We reckon he acted alone. I’d sure like to know what bastard sold him the gun though.’

‘He hasn’t confessed?’

‘No, and his two mates are sticking to his alibi. At the moment Brock’s staying with the death threat charge, but if he needs more time he can use the Prevention of Terrorism Act and hold them for forty-eight hours, or five days with extensions. Forensic are going through their clothes, looking for gunshot residue. I reckon the kid’ll crack when they find that.’

Kathy also tried to find out more about his undercover work in Special Branch, but he was gently evasive. Neither of them wanted to dwell on work, it seemed, and they turned to other things. Wayne had travelled a good deal, and Kathy encouraged him to talk about the places he’d visited. He was entertaining and good company. They began with a drink in a pub in the King’s Road, then went on to the curry, which Kathy confirmed was the best she’d ever tasted, thinking as she did so that it was ironic that the last man she’d been out with had been Leon, an Indian, who had never, to the best of her recollection, bought her a curry. Come to think of it, she wasn’t even sure if he liked Indian food. The thought of him still hurt, but less so as the evening passed. The two men weren’t at all alike, Leon seeming even more cool and taciturn in her memory the more relaxed and jolly Wayne made her feel. And of course
that
was the root of her problem, she decided with the clarity of revelation, as they continued to a little night club Wayne knew, and another bottle of wine took its effect. She simply hadn’t had enough experience, of life, of men, of the world, to know what suited her best and what would make her
really
happy.

And in the light of this understanding, and the spirit of openness and experimentation it engendered, it perhaps wasn’t necessary for Wayne to spin her the line he did. At least she assumed, when she thought about it the next morning, that it was just a line, but subtly spun, in fascinating little tit-bits of information dropped during the course of the evening, so that by the end of it she was thoroughly taken in. His girlfriend, it seemed, was going through a crisis of the heart. Basically she wasn’t sure whether she loved him or someone else called Kim, who turned out to be a woman. Kathy could imagine, could she not, what that did for Wayne’s sense of self-worth, although in point of fact Kathy hadn’t noticed him at all deficient in that area. The crux was that the girlfriend was meeting with Kim that very evening, in the flat that all three shared, in order to resolve things one way or the other, and Wayne had promised to stay away. So he couldn’t go home. Regardless of what his girlfriend decided however, Wayne had realised that things could never be the same between them again, which made him feel pretty sad, although again Kathy hadn’t noticed that.

So she had taken him back to Finchley, to sleep on her sofa, except that it didn’t work out that way. After he’d slipped away the next morning, with a kiss and a cup of tea brought to her in bed, she ran her hand over the warm rumpled bedding at her side and told herself, through her hangover and without complete conviction, that she had done absolutely the right thing, and was on the road to building a new, happier, freer Kathy Kolla. And there was something else—for the first time in weeks she hadn’t dreamed about that room, and had to face its terrors. It was a sign, surely, that she could escape for good, and the first step was her interview that day. Her appointment with the agency wasn’t until the late morning however, and she decided that in the meantime she might have a look at this glitzy university in the docklands, and, if she was around, have a quick word with Springer’s only student. Clare Hancock’s parting comment had stayed in her mind. No matter how mad his rantings in the letter seemed, Springer’s prophecy had come to pass. Kathy thought she probably owed it to Brock to do this much.

Briony Kidd was again at her desk, and again the only postgraduate student in the little shared study, which today was blue with cigarette smoke, despite the ‘no smoking’ sign that someone had pinned to the door. The others, if there were any, had perhaps found more congenial places to work. She barely glanced at Kathy’s identification and seemed distracted and low. Her eyes kept returning to a blank sheet of paper on her table. Kathy had trouble getting her to talk at first.

‘Is this a bad time?’

Briony shrugged, her eyes straying back to the blank paper.

‘I mean, if you’re busy working . . .’

Briony took a deep, exhausted breath. ‘I can’t work. I haven’t written a word since Max . . .’

‘A thing like that is bound to upset your concentration,’ Kathy offered, pulling up a chair.

‘I’ve got to finish it this year, but I don’t think I can, without him. It was all going so well.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Hannah Arendt’s theory of action,’ she said reluctantly, sounding as if any kind of action would be too much for her.

‘She was a philosopher?’

‘Yes. A German Jew, like Max. She escaped from Germany before the War, and worked in France helping to get Jewish children out of Germany for a time, then she went to America.’

‘Ah yes. Max met her there, didn’t he? I remember reading that.’

Briony nodded and lapsed into silence. She looked very pale and frail, and Kathy suspected she wasn’t eating much. That’s probably how I looked to Suzanne in the café that morning in Hastings, Kathy thought, and realised that something, her night with Wayne perhaps, had lifted her out of that, at least for the time being. The thought of it aroused a tingle of pleasure.

‘So, what was her theory of action?’

The student looked round at her slowly. ‘You don’t really want to know.’

‘Is it too complicated for me to understand?’

‘No, but . . .’ She shrugged, as if the effort of arguing was too much. ‘She believed that there are essentially three modes of human activity. The most basic mode she called “labour”, satisfying the necessities of life, in which individuals are submerged in a common task, behaving according to patterns, playing pre-ordained roles, becoming members of classes.’ Her voice, becoming more lethargic, trailed away.

‘Right. So that’s number one.’

‘Mm. The second mode is called “work”. That’s where the individual is able to express himself through his activity, as a craftsman or creator of something. This mode has greater freedom, but the individual is still subordinate to the end product. Arendt believed that capitalism is intent on turning all work into labour, and that almost the only true work left is that of the artist.’

‘And the third?’

Briony roused herself a little. ‘The third and highest mode of activity is “action”. This means initiating undertakings and interacting with other individuals who are also capable of action. It’s only in action that people are able to realise their individuality and reveal what they personally are. Even they themselves don’t know what this is until the event they precipitate reveals them to themselves and to others. They cannot know in advance what kind of self they’ll reveal by their actions.’

‘Oh. I think I see. Vaguely. And her life, was it one of action?’

‘Yes, it was. Through her books and arguments and the expression of her ideas.’

‘And mine is one of labour, I should think.’

She said it as an attempt at a joke, but Briony didn’t smile. ‘Yes. Most people’s are.’

‘What else did she believe?’

‘Lots of things. That there’s a conflict between truth and freedom, for instance.’

This was said with some sharpness, and Kathy wondered if it was aimed at her, the police. ‘You’ll have to explain that. I kind of thought they supported each other.’

‘She was repelled by the uniformity of the truths of religion, and now of science. She believed in the constant struggle of ideas and opinions against one another, rather than the inevitability of ideologies.’