The Heart Broke In (17 page)

Harry saw the potential for comedy in his cancer. He imagined strangers asking him what he did, and him saying he was head of a cancer research institute, and the stranger asking him what kind of cancer, and him saying ‘Not the kind I’ve got. I’m jealous of people with
that
cancer. If there’s a commandment, I’m breaking it. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s cancer.”’

But strangers never did pronounce the lines Harry scripted for them. He ended up having to fill in the set-up himself, and before he could get to the jokes, three Os appeared on their faces: two widened eyes and one open mouth. Harry didn’t want that. He wanted the cancer and him to be treated as partners in an ancient country story, The Cancer and the Scientist, like the Devil matching wits with a farmer after dark at a crossroads halfway between the farmer’s hearth and hell. The three Os deferred to death. He felt like a man introducing a friend who knows a celebrity. It was the cancer they wanted to talk to, hoping for the inside juice. ‘Oh, you know Death! What’s he
like
?’

Harry’s former wife lived in New Zealand. She’d removed herself to the land of her ancestors when she told Harry that he’d made a mistake marrying her, that getting hitched
to the first woman he got pregnant had seemed like clearing something complicated off his agenda early when he had other priorities; and Harry hadn’t disagreed, or tried to stop her. His post-divorce affairs petered out in his late fifties. An experience with the heartbreaking jollity of an erotic masseuse had put him off paying for a woman’s company. At night there was no one for Harry to turn to and demand an embrace and a hearing. His was the only warm body in the house.

He woke up when the first planes from Asia descending into Heathrow shook the darkness. At those times it wasn’t so much his own fate that frightened him as a simple disproportion of scale. An image of the Earth as a distinct turquoise speck drifting across a vast yellow sun haunted him and became the gateway to a recurring fit of vertigo in the face of the unknowable. In daylight the fear became a background hum of anxiety about an imminent, important trip he had to make against his will. He caught himself thinking he had to pack and remembered he didn’t.

Chemo and radiotherapy were behind him. Surgery couldn’t help and he was in a lull before the palliatives got interesting. He didn’t have cancer-related tasks to occupy his time. At the institute, he observed a benign conspiracy to peel away his responsibilities. In garrisons preparing for battle, he’d read, officers filled soldiers’ time with pointless drills and parades to tire them out and occupy their minds; but what did the officers do? Harry had thought making his own funeral and burial arrangements might amuse him, but that, too, fell short. He’d ordered his own headstone, chosen the material, the font and the text. It turned out you could do it online. It had seemed funny to have:

HARRY COMRIE, MEDICAL RESEARCHER

IT WORKED IN MICE

chiselled deep in black-enamelled letters in a slab of pink Scottish granite. A few weeks later he woke up with his heart beating fast and his face burning, sure that he’d paid twelve hundred pounds to have a scientific in-joke perpetuated in a Surrey cemetery as his memory on earth. He called the mason’s yard next day, half-hoping they’d say ‘Well, it’s not set in stone. Oh no, it is.’ But the mason’s receptionist told him they wouldn’t start work until long after the client was buried. There was always the danger of subsidence if you put the stone up too early, they said. You had to let the grave settle.

It seemed to Harry that laughing at death was a good way to show he wasn’t afraid of it, and that carelessness in the face of losing everything was the bearing of the noble man he wanted to be. And yet what was it, he wondered, to enclose death in comedy? Was it nobler to show your bravery by laughing at yourself, or to make the purest comedy by cheating death at the end, and make death the fool?

Often the awareness came to him that in a cold room at the institute, suspended in CryoStor solution, bagged, labelled and kept in a Planer freezer at minus one hundred and fifty degrees, was a large supply of his own cells, drawn from him, genetically modified and cultured ten years earlier. A sample had been infused into his bloodstream then to show that they were safe, and they had not had the slightest effect on him. They were designed for a different kind of cancer. There was no scientific reason why they should have any more effect on solid tumours than an injection of orange juice, yet Harry couldn’t stop thinking about them. His cancer was his own;
the cells were, whatever the institute’s lawyers might say, his own; why shouldn’t he put the two of them together? It would be a family reunion.

Harry remembered how doubtful he’d been that the expert cells would work as they were supposed to. Most things didn’t, after all. And yet they
had
worked on those patients. Harry’s mind arranged a pseudo-logical argument that he knew was nonsense but found attractive. It went like this:

I thought a treatment designed for one cancer would probably fail, and it succeeded
.

Therefore, if I think the treatment will definitely fail in another cancer, it will do better than definitely failing
.

The next better thing after definitely failing is possibly succeeding
.

So Harry reasoned, and so he yielded to temptation. He admitted that much to himself, never that he was yielding to hope.

A river the colour of milky tea flowed through London. Once in a while the sun sparkled on its surface and you saw that it was really made of money, a sediment of macerated currency washed off the cash mountains of Eurasia. The river’s looping course at the City and Canary Wharf strained and cleansed the flow as it gushed towards its mouth in Switzerland, leaving a looty silt behind on the banks, and in this fertile tilth sprouted skyscrapers. The tallest grew out of a deposit of Gulf dollars near London Bridge. Its concrete core seemed to have been jacked up seventy storeys overnight, jabbing the skyline wherever you looked.

Harry liked to see London grow tall. As an old man it gave him paternal comfort to watch grand human feats enacted on the scale of skies and horizons, as if when he cheered from the sidelines at the swing of cranes and the pouring of concrete he took part in the future’s common fathering. Each topping out seemed a personal victory. The daring of it thrilled his old heart: the boldness of change was all, in wild strokes slashed across the cityscape.

He didn’t understand his assistant Carol when she told him she’d booked a floor of the tallest tower for his party. To him the manifestation of the building, its sheathing in glass
and the gradual flickering on of its lights were like gestures of the hand of progress. He’d forgotten real people ran it. Carol had noticed the tower one day, thought
Where did that come from?
, decided Harry would like it, made a few calls and fixed a day.

Not long before Christmas, at eight in the evening, a thousand feet above London, the first guests came out of the lifts and wandered towards the glass walls of the banqueting suite to marvel at the ocean of streetlamps and windows fixed in the darkness. A shaggy cloud a block long crept past them over the city, making them tingle with the godlikeness of their position. After a minute they got used to it, and it wasn’t interesting any more, and they turned to each other. A ten-piece swing band in white tuxedos played and a close-ranked company of champagne bottles fresh out of the chiller smoked on a long table, attended by Polish boys and girls in white shirts and black waistcoats. In the kitchen more young Poles, in on the bus from crowded digs in the far west, took cling film off platters of canapés contrived as doll’s house versions of famous foods: hot dogs two inches long, a stack of cigarettes revealed as crispy duck in micro-pancakes, and infernal lumps of guinea fowl tikka, spiced red and roasted black, in ocarina-sized clay tandoors.

The finance director at Harry’s institute had been aggrieved when Carol asked him for money for the party. He was used to chipping in fifty quid for wine and sandwiches. He understood Harry was
a leading scientist
, but he thought it pretty low to make the despised accountant responsible for determining the lavishness of his boss’s wake. What would the trustees say? The institute was funded by the government and medical charities to postpone citizens’ departure from this
world, as far as he knew, not to send the departing on their way with gold-plated hooleys.

The finance director plucked his lower lip, traced thinking circles with the cursor over Harry’s pay spreadsheet and realised he’d felt the same grudging sense of obligation earlier in the year when he’d coughed up thousands in maternity pay to a senior researcher who, he knew, had no intention of returning to work after her baby was born. What if Harry, with the biggest salary in the institute, had got pregnant instead of contracting a terminal illness? The finance director tapped in the codes and stared at the screen in horror. How much more it would have cost him! He deleted ‘maternity pay’ and typed in ‘mortality pay’. He looked over his shoulder guiltily and set aside, for Harry’s farewell bash, a tenth of what he would have paid him as a new mother. Immediately he felt moved by his generosity and sent Carol an email.

Harry reckoned it was mean and told Carol he’d triple what the institute spent from his own pocket. He thought modest public servants like himself had a duty to stage princely entertainments. ‘Am I supposed to live like a monk just because I’m not the director of an oil company?’ he asked. An American colleague muttered about the war on cancer. Oh, said Harry, if you knew what a lot of off-ration champagne the prime minister guzzled in wartime while our brave boys were dying! Churchill knew, said Harry, that nothing was wasted like a life without superfluity, without the grand gesture.

Two young women in low-cut dresses, a media assistant at the Wellcome Trust and a friend with only an idea of a job, in heels and dark tights, with a little gold about them, stepped into the party; feared having gone too formal; feared having chosen a
lame
event from many possibles; were relieved by
the rasp of trombones, beat of a double bass, bright colours, bare shoulders, smart jackets, pearls on skin, hammering of talk; felt unknown to all; were nervous; had cold champagne offered; smiled at the cute waiter boy; sipped; had tongues tickled; felt triumph in the big city; saw London lit up below; went to the great window; felt dizzy at the distance from the ground; took bigger sips; agreed it was like they were flying over London; saw the flashing lights of an aircraft landing at City airport; said it was weird to be looking down on it; noticed islands of light in the sea of lights; identified the City, Canary Wharf, the O2, Stratford where the Olympics had been; edged away from the window; were offered food; bent to put bite-sized pizzas in their mouths, making their earrings swing and glint; drew the attention of two men.

A lonely geologist in his forties who thought his life had gone wrong tried to make conversation with the jobless one; was told she was
trying to get funding for a pilot multimedia project to enhance public understanding of science
; considered telling her it was a waste of time; found her young, pretty; tried to impress instead with gossip about Harry; reported that Harry hadn’t invited his son to the party; was asked which one was Harry; pointed him out, standing by the champagne table in an electric-blue suit, a mauve shirt and a pink tie, speaking to a semi-circle of people, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forward, laughing and talking at the same time; was told by the media assistant how well Harry looked; told her he’d lost a lot of weight, that he’d be gone by spring; accidentally fascinated the women by the casual confidence with which he said this; made his friend feel neglected.

The friend, a handsome young hack from the
New Scientist
who hadn’t dressed up, crossed the room on a pretext; joined
an American biologist talking to a writer who’d predicted the end of the world in a forgotten bestseller; asked the biologist whether she’d come all the way from America for this; was found to be cocky and trivial; was told she’d come to celebrate a well-lived life; said he’d heard Harry hadn’t invited his son; heard from the writer that Harry’s nephew Alex was present, at the great man’s right hand; stepped back to allow others into the circle; heard someone ask if it was true that Alex would be Harry’s successor at the institute; confirmed it; pulled out his iPhone; said he wanted to check that the word ‘nepotism’ came from the Latin word for nephew; was jeered at and giggled with.

The biologist pulled away from the group and looked around the room, wondering where you could go on the seventieth floor if you needed a smoke. The din was getting to her and she was disappointed by Harry’s choice of venue. She’d come here via Shanghai. The duel of the towers, she thought, wasn’t one London was going to win. She recognised Alex in the crowd, a tall, restless fellow with a shark’s-fin nose and big eloquent hands, nailing some innocent into the ground with sweet reason.

A woman walked into the room with a distracted intentionality, as if the party was a corridor she was obliged to traverse on her way somewhere. She was in her early thirties, with black shoulder-length hair that framed her face in thick-waved strands. She was tanned, with bright black eyes, and a touch of natural red on each cheekbone, visible even under the tan. She had on an indigo dress, plum-coloured tights and black pumps and was too full-figured for modern glamour; a pre-photography ideal of curves above and below a narrow waist, a plenitude that was light in motion but might seem
heavy stopped in a picture. A waiter approached her with champagne on a tray.

The biologist asked the journalist if he knew her.

‘The good-looking one? Rebecca Shepherd. Malaria researcher.’

The biologist wanted to talk to her, but she saw that Harry’s nephew had seen her come in, and was already going to meet her.

Bec looked up. A tall man with brown eyes was standing over her, appealing for recognition, but she didn’t know him until he said he was Alex Comrie. She looked away towards the room. ‘Why does your uncle wear such bright clothes?’ she said.

‘He thinks his face has become interesting since he became ill. Strong enough for colours.’

‘He doesn’t look ill. He looks happy.’

‘He’s full of drugs and life force. He’s not at all resigned to it.’

‘Nobody’s resigned to it,’ said Bec.

Yesterday, she remembered, the grave had hardly been big enough for Huru, and Batini had spent a long time pressing him into the hole carefully, with dull satisfaction, like a mother squeezing sandwiches into a child’s lunch box.

Alex said: ‘He’s less resigned. There’s a lot of him in the thing I’m working on and he wants me to change the last sentence to say I’ve found a way to make people live forever.’

‘Have you?’ said Bec.

‘It’s a theory. It’s hard to make the values stick when it gets complex. If you wanted to make it practical you’d need a computer the size of Wales for each person.’
She’s listening
,
he thought.
She’ll notice the unsteadiness in my voice
. Time had left little trace on her since they’d last met and she seemed as open as she had then. He had a desire to lift her hair aside and press his lips to her neck.
I can’t get there
, he thought. In the state of absolute focus on Bec he was able to see that a sadness was distracting her. He wanted to make her smile but found he couldn’t stop gabbing on about his problem with Harry. ‘It’s not the complexity that stops us living for centuries,’ he was saying, feeling his tongue flap leatherishly with every
l
. ‘To be truly immortal we’d need the power to forget we’d seen it all. To be young you have to be not long born.’

Bec laughed and Alex, who’d seemed a little preacherly to her as he said this, laughed too, not sure what they were laughing about.

‘You haven’t seen it all,’ she said.

‘Sometimes I think I have,’ said Alex. ‘And then I meet someone who reminds me that I haven’t.’

Bec regarded him, not wanting to accept that he might mean her, which would oblige her to remember the details of his strange incursion into Cambridge, and to weigh the immense distance of time, her whole adult life, that had passed between then and now.
Too late
, she thought,
I’m doing it
.

‘Your uncle surely doesn’t think you’re going to come up with a way to make him live for ever,’ she said. ‘He wants you to put his work and your work together so that when he goes he knows he’ll have left his mark.’

‘He’s already left his mark. He’s immortal. He has a son. He’s got four grandchildren and another one on the way. He’s part of an unbroken family line going back to the first eukaryote a billion years ago.’

‘We’re all cousins in that family,’ said Bec. ‘Salt of the earth, us eukaryotes.’

‘Some of us let our part of the line break,’ said Alex. ‘Getting together with another eukaryote and replacing yourselves, that’s the only way to live for ever. You can’t forget, so you make a replacement instead, and the old one dies, and on you fly for another billion years.’

Bec listened carefully. He had a way of stating the obvious with such urgency that it no longer seemed obvious. She could barely remember what he’d been like at Ritchie’s party; she kept an impression from then of eagerness, shyness and arrogance. It didn’t correlate with the Alex in front of her. He was still eager but the other attributes had faded. He was full of will. It made him powerful. She saw her silence worrying him. He watched her closely as if she might be about to bolt. He had attractive hands, she thought, and there were no rings. Bec hadn’t been with a man since Val. It would be nice to be held by him, to touch; why not? She was free.

She asked Alex to show her which one was Harry’s son, and Alex told her that father and son didn’t get on. Matthew was religious, he said, and there was a rift; he hadn’t come.

‘What about your replacement?’ said Bec. ‘Your reproduction?’

‘I don’t have one,’ said Alex. ‘We tried. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me or my ex. There are still only two of us.’

‘That was rude of me, wasn’t it. To ask like that.’

‘You can ask me anything you like,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll tell you.’

‘There was something I was curious about. This woman you call your ex. Is she your ex or isn’t she?’

‘We’ve split up, but we’re still living together.’

‘And sleeping together.’

‘For the time being.’

‘Those arrangements never work,’ said Bec impatiently. She grabbed two glasses of champagne from a tray that was going round and handed one to Alex. ‘Either you stay with someone or you leave them. No woman’s going to sleep with you until you’re single.’

‘How ready any woman is to say what no woman will do.’

Bec blushed, swung her head to look over to where people had started dancing and said to Alex: ‘Would you like to dance with me?’

‘I can’t dance.’

‘How can a drummer not dance?’

Alex went red. ‘You remember,’ he said.

‘It’s not every day somebody plants a drum kit outside a girl’s window in the middle of the night.’

‘Even for you?’

Bec laughed. ‘You gave up easily. I was only eighteen, remember. I thought I might find you shivering on the doorstep next day. Come and dance.’

Bec felt her arm being grabbed and tropical cloud colours tumbled into her vision. ‘Dr Shepherd!’ said Harry. ‘I read your last paper! It was wonderful, very clever. But if only they still sprayed with DDT! What do you think of Dietrich and Knapheim’s work on DDT?’

‘I haven’t read it,’ said Bec.

‘Of course you have!’ roared Harry with a piratical grin.

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘Nonsense, we’ll talk about it later. You must come back to the house for the post-party. You see?’ he said to Alex, jigging his thumb at Bec. ‘That’s what I’m talking about. Gets herself
infected with some wretched parasite to tackle the problem. That’s guts.’ He swung his head back to Bec. ‘Has he told you about his latest masterpiece? Genius and he won’t spell it out! Bloody nightmare! Look at this!’ He spread his arms out. ‘Look at that!’ He gestured to the city below. ‘Could they have built this tower fifty years ago? Progress! Action! If it were up to Alex we’d still be living in caves and dying at twenty-five.’

‘I went to somebody’s funeral yesterday,’ said Bec. ‘He lived in a house made of mud bricks and he died when he was three.’

Alex saw that this was the sadness, his rival for her attention, and asked what had happened, and Bec told them not to worry; that she didn’t want to talk about it.

‘Look,’ said Alex. He pointed out of the window across London to where a procession of car lights glittered along a foreshortened highway. Thousands of identical white particles of light shuffled west towards the centre of the city and as many identical red particles of light moved east away from it. ‘Suppose that’s your bloodstream,’ he said to Harry. ‘As scientists, this is as close as we can get. If we see the cars stop moving, what can we do from up here? How can we make them start moving again?’

‘I’m glad you’re not my doctor.’

‘Here, where we’re standing, that’s where the doctor is. He can’t get down there and he can’t grasp the totality. He sees the city getting old. Towers fall. Traffic slows down. Buildings sprout where they aren’t supposed to. Medicine’s come so far, and even now, even now, the best way we have to stop the city dying is to drop bombs on one part to try to save the rest. And even when we manage to send agents into the city,
to help without destruction, we can do as much harm as good, because we don’t know every pathway that every citizen takes at every moment, and how they all connect. Suppose we find out that everyone in the city who wears a red hat has gone crazy and is sabotaging the city’s water supply. So we find a way to go in and put all the red-hatted citizens to sleep, and the water supply’s safe. But then we find out these red-hatted saboteurs, as well as vandalising the pipes, were the ones who’d been delivering bread around the city. So we’ve saved the city from being poisoned, but now we have to stop it starving.’

‘You see how he treats me, in my condition?’ said Harry to Bec.

‘You’ve got months yet,’ said Alex.

‘Alex,’ said Harry, putting his hand on his heart. ‘Humour a dying man. Put the sentence in. Help me. Help yourself. Give the world hope. Rebecca, persuade him.’

Talk of research gave Bec an urge to leave the party and put in an immediate shift at the lab. She knocked back the rest of her glass. ‘Would it be so terrible?’ she said to Alex.

‘If I agree he’ll ask me to do something else,’ said Alex.

‘What an old bugger you think I am. Trust your uncle.’ He counted on his fingers. ‘And, has, potential, to, delay, or, suspend, human, ageing. Nine little words. Shake on it.’ He held out his hand and Alex shook it.