Going Loco (7 page)

‘No, no. Three or four years ago. Tragic. A fire. Best cloning brain outside the US. I suppose most people don’t know about it. He used his own genetic material for research – ghastly end. Led to all sorts of enquiries and bans, but it was mostly hushed up. Wife went mad, terrible stories.’

‘But he’s teaching at Imperial.’

‘Can’t be.’

Jago blinked hard. In a second he had cut off Spink and phoned Imperial. They had no Johansson. He phoned the cuttings library; they promised to e-mail an obituary from an obscure science journal. He cast his mind back (a manoeuvre that did not come easily to him). How much had Viv known about Stefan when they introduced him to Belinda? Nothing. Viv’s sister met him in the canteen, that’s all. He was an impostor! A cheating, clever impostor! Like, like—

‘Get me the names of some impostors quick!’ he ordered his secretary.

Jago was nearly hyperventilating. What a great story! What a madly dangerous scheme to take the identity of a famous dead scientist and, moreover, pretend to be Swedish. Jago’s mind raced, as he scanned the obituary that had just arrived on his screen. Key words leapt out at him. ‘Cloning … brilliant … Swede … pseudogenes … Sweden … reckless … only in the mind of Robert Louis Stevenson … Human Genome Project … very, very mysterious … Malmö.’

Jago couldn’t read it properly, because he never did read anything properly. But he got the idea. The man they knew as Stefan – who was he? ‘Unless, unless—’ he muttered. He scrolled to the end, scrolled to the top again. More key words leapt out. ‘Gene sharing … Malmö … foolhardy experiment … replica … Frankenstein … condemned by scientific fraternity

… Church … offence against God … mutation … Abba … Malmö.’

But then he looked at the picture, and everything changed. It was Stefan. Stefan was dead, yet alive. A great shiver of excitement went up his spine. He heard again Stefan saying, ‘Gosh, hey, this is very original one-off copy!’

The conclusion was staring him in the face.

‘Oh my God. The man we know as Stefan Johansson … is a clone.’

Running from the Gemini café, Maggie choked on tears of humiliation. Good grief, if this was what happened when you just popped out for a bacon sandwich she’d become a vegetarian immediately. For someone with Maggie’s particular invisibility complexes, here was a triple calamity: (a) the man she’d condescended to sleep with had entirely failed to recognize her the next lunch-time; (b) he was a bastard and was the partner of her therapist, to whom she now couldn’t talk about it; and (c) after all that Michael Schumacher nonsense, it turns out he’s really interested in classical dance! ‘They’re all the same,’ she sobbed openly, as she ran home. ‘All the bloody same.’

‘Margaret?’ Leon was now calling after her and, from the sound of it, running. His feet were slapping the pavement, and he was gaining on her. Why was he calling her Margaret? ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard,’ she muttered as she ran.

‘Margaret, could you stop, please?’

She turned into her own street. Nearly home. Her heart was pounding as she picked up speed to escape him, and saw – emerging sheepishly from her flat, with hair slightly dirtier than it had been last night – Leon. He stopped and lit a cigarette, then started ambling in the opposite direction.

‘Aieee!’ she cried. ‘Stop, stop, stop!’

Looking back, she saw Leon running towards her; looking forward, she saw him walking away. What an irony, she thought, as she staggered against the wall, clutching her chest. To spend all your professional life practising double-takes. And then, when a double-take would really come in handy, just fainting away on the spot.

‘Well,’ said Linda, ‘I had no idea doubles could be so interesting!’

As Linda boiled the kettle and opened some biscuits she’d thoughtfully brought, Belinda found herself feeling spectacularly happy. What an intelligent and intuitive woman Linda was. Everyone else scanned the ceiling for flies when she talked about
The Dualists,
or fiddled with a dinner napkin. It had the same turn-off effect as Stefan telling people he came from Malmö or, indeed, from Scandinavia. In both situations, her mother would say, ‘That’s nice,’ then steer the conversation to the new range from Dolce and Gabbana. Linda, however, was of finer empathetic stuff. She had seen instantly not only that Belinda’s book urgently needed writing but that it needed writing well.

‘So do people meet their doubles in real life?’ Linda asked.

‘No. Not that I know of.’

‘Shame. Because, as you say, most of us are leading double lives, aren’t we?’

‘At least double, yes. Or we wish we had two lives, just to deal with everything.’

It felt odd to talk about it. Could Linda truly be interested?

‘So is it that one person is really two people? Or two people are really only one person?’

‘Both. The main thing in most doubles stories is that the hero has his life taken over by a dark, malevolent force that shares his identity and implicates him in misdeed. Or sometimes the double just gobbles him up. I’ve got lots of theories about it. That’s why I’m writing the book.’

Linda made the tea, as if it were perfectly normal to potter in Belinda’s kitchen. With airy confidence, she gave Belinda Stefan’s favourite mug, and opened a new packet of tea-bags because she didn’t know the system with the old brown jar.

‘Well, I think you’re right,’ Linda decided, putting the milk away in the fridge in the wrong place. ‘You mustn’t feel guilty about making time to write your special book. Our special work is what we’re put on earth to do. I firmly believe that.’

Belinda nodded. Should she ask what Linda’s special work was?

‘And, as you said before,’ Linda continued, ‘men have always shut themselves away to write books, without anyone accusing them of neglecting the household chores. I mean, Tolstoy didn’t write
Crime and Punishment
in between trips to Asda.’

‘You say the best things, Linda.’

‘Thank goodness you don’t have any children.’

‘Mm.’

Linda reopened the fridge and ran a professional eye over its contents. She took a deep breath. ‘I feel very good about this,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘I am absolutely sure that, between us, we’re going to write that book.’

Belinda looked at the new cleaning lady and marvelled. What a formidable ally to have. She had a silly schoolgirl urge to tell Linda she was lovely. She had such a fruity firmness about her, plus the easy elegance that is often found in people who, at a crucial moment in their teenage development, chose hockey
club over Georgette Heyer. Paths divide at every moment of the day, of course. But Belinda believed in the universal hockey–Heyer divide most strongly. In her experience, those who at puberty chose solitary reading over group exertion may (oh, yes) have grown up to be brainboxes earning more money, but they could never quite catch up again in self-confidence with those hearty, practical girls, despite all their well-meant gym subscriptions in later years.

Outside in the hall, Mrs Holdsworth ran her Hoover into a coat-stand, and said, ‘Shit,’ as it crashed to the floor.

‘I can’t sack Mrs Holdsworth,’ Belinda said.

Linda shrugged. ‘I can leave her a patch of hall carpet. Where are the phones, by the way?’

‘What?’

‘The phones.’

‘One in my study, one in the hall.’

‘When I’m here, I’ll field your calls. Completely uninterrupted time is what you want, isn’t it? Shall I throw those newspapers away?’

Belinda nodded. It was like a dream.

‘Okey-dokey.’ Linda smiled. ‘Well, the best thing I can do this afternoon is get some shopping and prepare the dinner. I’ll give you a bill at the end of each week. You’re in tonight? What time does Mrs Holdsworth finish?’

‘Four.’

‘I’ll return at four ten. And I’ll finish at six thirty. What are you working on this afternoon?’

‘Oh, hack work. It has to be done. I write for money as Patsy Sullivan. Horsy stories. Patsy subsidizes us all. She’ll be paying you too.’

‘So you’ve got a double life yourself, Mrs Johansson!’

‘I ought to ditch Patsy, really. Now I’m on the same footing as Tolstoy it doesn’t seem right.’

‘Well, one thing at a time. Perhaps you’re fond of her.’

‘Oh, I am. Tell me about yourself, though, Linda.’

But just at that moment the phone rang, and Linda lifted down her coat (a neat ivory mac) from the kitchen door, where she had hung it on a little collapsible hanger. She folded the hanger and put it in her bag. ‘I’ll answer that on the way out,’ she said.

Belinda was startled. ‘What? I mean, you can’t—’

Mrs H yelled, ‘It’s your fucking phone, Belinda!’ above the din of the machine.

Linda gave her a funny look. ‘Trust me,’ she said.

Belinda’s mother regarded herself in her pocket mirror as the taxi bounced along the north side of Clapham Common. With effort and concentration, she twitched the corners of her mouth to form a ghostly smile. She would never actually regret the face-lift, but she had to admit that the general reaction was not what she had hoped for. Instead of her best friends saying, ‘Virginia, you look so good today, so
young,
but somehow I can’t put my finger on it,’ they walked right past her, even in Harrods Food Hall. To make matters worse, meanwhile, complete strangers were jabbing her in the chest, saying, ‘Do you mind me asking? How much it cost?’

It had cost thousands, of course. Cheekbone enhancement, lips like sofa cushions, realigned eyebrows, and a revolutionary polymer skin treatment guaranteed to keep the whole lot immovable for at least five years, as long as she took certain precautions. She could go swimming, she could be kissed on both cheeks, and she could sunbathe as long as she wore an enormous hat. ‘But if you feel at all tempted to peek inside a blast furnace,’ her surgeon told her darkly, ‘don’t.’

Lucky, then, that there were so few steel mills still under commission in Knightsbridge. Nevertheless she had taken
this alarming advice very much to heart. At home, in her Primrose Hill flat, she’d stopped using the oven, and turned all the radiators down. The iron was permanently set to one-dot, and was used at arm’s length. Selling chestnuts on street corners was now totally ruled out as a profession. On the plus side, however, she had given up smoking. After decades of fruitless begging from Belinda, Mother had now kicked the habit overnight, and had even started decrying it in others. In fact, along with rabid jealousy of her facial upholstering, this was the main reason her old friends were dropping her. It gets on your nerves if every time you light up a Benson and Hedges, your companion shrieks, ‘No!’ and shades her face like Nosferatu. Auntie Vanessa, her identical twin sister (though not as identical as she used to be), was a champion smoker and now flatly refused to see her.

‘Hello?’

‘Belinda, darling! What a terrible line!’

‘This is the Johansson residence. Who is this speaking, please?’

Mother regarded her mobile phone with a puzzled expression, and knocked it against the car door a couple of times. ‘Belinda?’

‘I’m afraid Mrs Johansson is working at the moment. May I pass on a message?’

‘It’s her mother, for heaven’s sake. And I’m just on my way to see her.’ The taxi purred at traffic-lights. ‘Right here, then Armadale Road,’ she yelled, pointing.

Linda effortlessly took an executive decision. In fact she took two, because she bobbed down and unplugged Mrs H’s Hoover at the same time, leaving the old woman open-mouthed.

‘Oh, I’ve heard so much about you!’ she lied. ‘Mrs Johansson was just saying how much she’d like to see you. But she is so terribly busy today. I’ll ask her either to call you later
or to give me a message for you. Did you have a nice day shopping?’

‘What?’

‘I very much look forward to meeting you. I’m Linda.’

She plugged the Hoover back in, and replaced the receiver.

‘You must be Mrs Holdsworth,’ she smiled, extending her manicured hand. ‘What a lovely scarf. Is it new?’

Jago spent his afternoon making secret calls to Dermot on his mobile from the gents’. He had no idea that the vile Dermot had been smooching with his wife the night before – or, indeed, that as he spoke to Dermot, mobile-to-mobile, he was in bed with her, showing her the extremely out-of-the-way places where his tan stopped.

Dermot, it has to be said, was more excited by the human clone in their midst than he’d been about making love to Viv – and, to Viv’s chagrin, did not try hard to disguise it. In fact he waved her away rather nastily, and she retreated to the
en suite
while he offered Jago his professional opinion – viz., that if Stefan were really a clone in our midst, Jago could get half a million for a book, plus serialization fees. However, if it turned out that Stefan was merely in our midst (and not a clone), he’d be lucky to get a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

‘You’re not an investigative reporter, Jago. Did you ever do anything like this before? What’s the nearest you’ve been to cutting-edge stuff?’

‘I interviewed Tom Stoppard when his marriage was breaking up.’

‘What did he say about it?’

‘About what?’

‘His love life.’

Jago’s voice rose. ‘You saying I should have asked him? Jesus, can you imagine how awkward that would be?’

Dermot didn’t have time for this. He sat up in bed and tucked a pillow behind him.

‘See what you can get, Jago. But you know how it is. You’ll need patience and perseverance and tact to get this story.’

Jago winced three times. He hated all those words.

‘My suggestion is, hire someone to watch him. Find out what happened in Sweden. And don’t get obsessed with the clone thing. Do you think Belinda knows she might be married to a clone?’

‘No.’

Dermot looked up at Viv, who was suddenly standing next to him. If she had overheard, there was nothing he could do about it.

‘Don’t tell her.’

‘You’re right. I mean, for one thing I don’t want to alarm my oldest friend unnecessarily. And on top of that—’

Dermot was there already. ‘She might get in first with a book deal?’

‘Exactly.’