The Heart Broke In (33 page)

Still sniffing and wiping his nose he went to the fridge and took out a chocolate pudding. He ate a couple of puddings with a bottle of beer and went to the shelves where he kept his films. He found the DVD he’d ordered, but never watched, after his first meeting with Colum O’Donabháin. He took another pair of puddings and another bottle and sat down to watch
Army in the Shadows
. After half an hour he came to the scenes showing the Resistance’s execution of the traitor Dounat.

Ritchie watched Dounat in the car, realising what was about
to happen to him, swallowing and wiping his thumb over his voluptuous mouth in fear.

The driver drew up on a bleak esplanade, alongside the high Mediterranean surf. Dounat’s former comrades Gerbier and Felix walked the traitor up a narrow alley, holding an arm each. Ritchie could feel the cold wind off the sea.

They entered a rented house. Inside was another young man, Claude LeMasque. In a bare shuttered room, LeMasque told Gerbier that he’d prepared everything for the interrogation. He smiled, rocked on his heels and massaged his left hand with his right ingratiatingly, as if he were talking about arrangements for a party: he’d prepared chairs, desk, paper.

But Gerbier said there would be no interrogation. ‘This is what it’s about,’ said Felix, taking out a pistol.

LeMasque said it was his first time. Gerbier swivelled round to face him and said with passion: ‘This is our first time too. Can’t you see?’

Ritchie swallowed a gulp of beer. He felt such sympathy with these characters: with LeMasque – how could he stand by and watch Dounat, yes, a traitor, but a good-looking, well-dressed young man like himself, be killed? Yet there was Gerbier, who’d seemed so experienced, suddenly revealing that he, too, was writhing with horror inside at what had to be done!

They talked about how to kill the traitor. Felix asked whether they couldn’t just smash his head in and the traitor lifted up his hands as if to hold back a crushing weight rolling towards him. Gerbier ordered him gagged and Felix and LeMasque, brave LeMasque, stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth. The traitor began to whimper and they manhandled him face-down onto a mattress.

Gerbier said that they would have to strangle him, using a towel from the kitchen. LeMasque put his hands to his ears, unable to bear the sound of the traitor weeping through the gag. Gerbier told LeMasque that he’d asked for harder assignments, and now he was getting one.

How right they both were, thought Ritchie, a sweet sadness swelling in his chest, his eyes prickling. How tragic that this noble young man should have to take part in this terrible deed, and how right that Gerbier should remind him how necessary it was to be cruel sometimes, for the sake of justice, for the sake of order, so that good people and their families might live in peace! In ordinary times, this traitor wouldn’t need to die; but now he would have to be sacrificed for the good of others.

Felix drew the curtains over the shutters and switched on the light. LeMasque stood stiffly, looking down at the sobbing, gagged figure on the mattress. Gerbier planted a chair in the centre of the room. They hauled the traitor upright, sat him down on the chair, and Gerbier said: ‘I promise you won’t suffer.’ LeMasque held his arms and Gerbier held his legs, looking into his face – such courage, thought Ritchie – while Felix looped the towel around the traitor’s throat and tightened it by twisting a piece of wood. The traitor died with tears on his cheeks. His head lolled forward. LeMasque started crying. Gerbier stood at the window with his back to the room for a long time before leaving. ‘I could not imagine this was possible,’ said LeMasque. ‘Neither could I,’ said Gerbier.

Ritchie shut down the system and stared with eyes that no longer saw the things in front of them. Forgetting that O’Donabháin had used the film to strengthen his resolve before
he killed his father, he was inspired by the nobility of men who did cruel but necessary things for the greater good.

I nearly died tonight
, he thought.
My wife was almost widowed and my children left fatherless, my company without a navigator
. He barely remembered his affair with Nicole. He could hardly remember what she looked like, and that distant matter seemed unrelated to the business at hand, which was that an evil force had almost destroyed his family. And although technically Bec might not have done anything wrong – technically, scientifically, as if you could measure good by numbers, but that was how they thought! – Ritchie was amazed to realise, the more he thought about it, how close his sister was to the origins of the evil that had nearly ended his life and might yet tear his family apart.

It was Bec who’d provoked Val’s anger by breaking up with him so abruptly; it was Bec who’d released into the world, and to him, twenty years later, the information that two of his heroes thought he was a bad artist; it was Bec who’d stopped him making the film that might have rescued his reputation. You could virtually say, if you took the most extreme view, that Bec had almost killed her own brother. And there she was, in her world of beautiful people, reckoned to be the very best of women.
She has no idea
, he thought.
She has no idea of the gap between how good she thinks she is and what she has actually done
. And as if it had been lying there all along and he only had to find it and pick it up, Ritchie saw how fair it would be if the Moral Foundation showed the world that not everything she did was right.

Ritchie had no idea what secrets she might be hiding, and he wouldn’t go looking. But it seemed obvious to him now that there would be justice in it, rough justice, yes, like the
summary justice of the brave men of the Resistance, but justice none the less, if he should happen to stumble across an awkward secret of Bec’s and quietly, in sorrow yet with dignity, pass it on to the MF. There would be a sort of kindness in it, it seemed to Ritchie; it was risky for his sister to live on in the mistaken belief that she was virtuous. By winging her reputation he would only be pulling her back into the mortal realm where it was safe for women who’d nearly killed their brothers to dwell.

It was around the change of seasons, when it was no longer a surprise to see a leaf fall but the days were still warm and the trees still green, that Bec and Alex’s unspoken pact to keep the house bare began to break down. If in the beginning they hadn’t been afraid to throw away each other’s ephemeral things or tidy up each other’s messes, that same confidence migrated into a contrary regime of being sure that whenever the other brought something into the house there had to be a good reason for it, and it would be aggression to complain. The unwritten rule against superfluous things turned out to have no weight; it was such that any act of enforcement would in itself be a violation.

Neither was conscious of the change when it took place and it was only later, as the evenings grew dark, that they became aware of its effect. Small piles of pieces of paper from the outside world, neither vital nor straightforward to discard, accumulated. Space was found on horizontal surfaces for gifts and photographs. A Tanzanian friend sent a statuette in dark wood for Bec’s thirty-fourth birthday, using an expensive international courier service for fear the regular post would let him down. They put it on a mantelpiece, and at once the space around it looked starved and empty. Family photographs
appeared on either side. They had people to dinner; they bought more chairs. After coming back from a conference where she’d spent too much time in heels Bec said she wanted to lie on a sofa, and soon afterwards she and Alex were looking at photos in a catalogue, and soon after that, they were wandering through a store. She saw well-made things she liked, and a month later, the sofa arrived. That plump red piece of comfort acted as a portal, and almost of their own accord rugs began to appear, curtains – as winter approached, the house turned out to be draughty – unfurled along the edges of the windows, and nests of cables squirmed like eels out of sockets.

In late October goods arrived that Alex had put in storage when he left Maria. Most disappeared into the room he was using as a study, but a couple of paintings went onto the walls of the living room; the walls became conscious of their nakedness. A small round coffee table that Alex had grown up with found its way in. It was neither attractive nor ugly but it seemed to Bec that afterwards it became busy with objects and possessions that, though they were only things, diluted the people. A tiny part of her consciousness and Alex’s were diverted into the furnishings and away from themselves and each other. It seemed like a defeat, a retreat, and Bec wasn’t sure whether it was a retreat from a never-quite-articulated ideal of minimalism, or the first hints of preparations to defend against a future that might not, after all, be with children.

They were citizens of a domain relatively new to the world, a country much younger than America or Liberia but no longer completely fresh, the domain of sexual freedom. They hadn’t won it or been present at its birth; they’d been born into it. Neither had been married before, and were not formally
married to each other now, but their inheritance was such that both had been in long, intimate experimental marriages before this one, each of which had, at the time, seemed to be, as this one was now, the actual, final version. These experimental marriages were called
relationships
, but they were marriages none the less, with the same assumptions of fidelity and assumptions of, if not permanence, durability, at least. From one experimental marriage to another, it was easy to misinterpret ‘different’ as ‘better’, but Alex, who had suffered in the past – and thus made his partners suffer – from familiarity blunting desire could see, when he compared past experimental marriages to this one, that as time went by his familiarity with Bec only intensified his appetite for her. She felt this and it heightened her desire in return and within the secure borders of their ease and confidence anything was permitted. She drank him and he ate her and they licked each other off their fingers and she permitted violations, accepted moments of ruthlessness from him, that she had not taken from anyone else. When Alex was travelling away from her he would rip the sheets off the bed and disarray them round and between his legs before masturbating to better summon up the hours they spent together. At work, at four o’clock one afternoon, the idea of Alex came to Bec with such force that her cheeks burned and it was all she could do to lock the door and close the blinds before sitting down, opening her legs and putting her fingers between them. She called him and asked if there was any chance of him coming home early; and there was, and he did. Yet she was still not pregnant.

In the past Bec had imagined being pregnant and imagined having a baby. She’d never imagined the state of trying to
get
pregnant. In the beginning this and the delirium of sex and
the confidence of love seemed braided together, indistinguishable. As the months passed, and Alex’s nonchalance became strained, the strands separated, and the intangibility of the barrier began to irritate her. She was used to working hard to overcome the obstacles she’d set for herself, and here the work was pleasure and there was no overcoming. It was like waiting to begin a journey without knowing whether there was a journey or where it would take her if it began.

The mind prioritises of its own accord, and although Bec tried to maintain the equilibrium between hoping to get pregnant and taking her research to the next stage, the having of a child would creep ahead. The diagrams and descriptions of the malaria parasites at work contrived to provoke her. The parasites bumped up against a human blood cell and stuck to it, then rolled, swivelled, butted their way inside and started splitting. It was a clever trick, as if a mouse could butt its way through the skin of an inflated party balloon and get inside without bursting it. In one person, a few thousand malaria merozoites could do it a few thousand times. Yet Alex’s millions of gametes couldn’t butt their heads into Bec’s even once. And Bec’s eggs were twenty times the size of a blood cell. The medical databases covered human reproductive science as thoroughly as parasitology; she only had to tweak the search terms to find more scientific papers about human conception than she could read in a dozen lifetimes, and she realised guiltily that over the weeks she had gained more mastery over the mysteries of the human reproductive cycle than the reproductive cycle of the parasites she was supposed to be studying.

Alex’s cousin Matthew, Bec knew, didn’t believe in evolution. He didn’t believe humans and apes were descended from a common ancestor. He thought God had made the world a
few thousand years ago. Bec wondered what Matthew would say if she told him that humans and malaria parasites had a common ancestor millions of generations back. That the cousin cells had gone their separate ways, some to be animals, some to be plants, some to be moulds and slime and parasites. ‘You just go ahead and evolve,’ said the malaria parasite ancestor to Bec’s ancestor. ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’ But the parasite had been lazy. It’d gone to some red algae and said: ‘I like your genes. Can I have them? Save me all that evolving.’ And the red algae said: ‘OK.’ Bec and the parasites were alienated now. Not really kin. It was her species against theirs.

Bec didn’t like it when Alex told her he’d been asked to make a TV documentary about the genetics of ageing, and that he wanted to do it. What about his work, she asked him? Was he going to drop it, when he’d gone so far, and there were still so many pathways to discover? If he had to give up his job as director, they’d have to leave the house; where would they live?

‘I won’t have to give up the job,’ he said. ‘The trustees are keen. They think it’ll be good PR for the institute. They’ll give me three months’ unpaid leave.’

‘Then you won’t be a scientist, you’ll be someone who talks about science,’ said Bec. ‘They already have people for that. It’s as if people think the highest form of anything in this country’s not doing it, it’s going on television and talking about doing it.’

Next day Alex told her that he’d cancelled the project. She was right, he said. It was a distraction, when there was so much work to do.

Now that Alex had done what Bec told him she wanted, she hated herself. Why, she wondered, had she stopped him?
Who was she to bully him out of following his desires? It wasn’t as if he would be giving his research up. It hadn’t occurred to her that if she asked him to change his mind about something so important he would do it. The realisation that he would do such a thing for her, so lightly and quickly and with such sincerity, made her want to reward him. She told Alex she was sorry.

‘I was jealous,’ she said.

‘You convinced me,’ said Alex. ‘What you said made sense.’

‘It didn’t. Really it didn’t. Go back and tell them you want to do it. I’d like to see your mug in TV land.’

So Alex went back and looked forward to his film. Bec thought her envy was not about her being office-and lab-bound while he was free; it was envy in advance, of her being pregnant and then a mother with a baby to look after while Alex was less tethered. Her anger towards him for turning his back on his work for the sake of television was anger in advance at her own turning away from the defence of the malarial lands for her selfish, childbearing purposes.

Maddie asked to see her. They had lunch in an Italian place with a bowl of enormous pink meringues in the window and heavy white furniture moulded as single pieces of plastic. Tiny waitresses with porcelain faces served them precise salads of small, brightly coloured elements, like boxes of watercolours.

Maddie began talking to Bec about the fate of her vaccine, now that it had left the realms of research and was in the hands of manufacturers, bureaucrats and politicians. In the director’s severe cheekbones, the swing of her bulbous terracotta earrings and the dark shadows of her eyes, which would avoid, avoid, avoid, then suddenly meet hers, Bec felt a great care
and purpose. Feet, Maddie said, were being dragged. Heads needed to be knocked together, but nobody wanted to stick their neck out. There was talk of an ambassador, a charismatic, eloquent, knowledgeable figure who could be the go-between to
roll the vaccine out
in Africa.

‘Your name’s been mentioned,’ said Maddie.

‘Is it because I haven’t come up with a new line of research?’

Maddie put down her cutlery and lifted one corner of her mouth by a couple of millimetres. ‘You make it sound as if I’m suggesting a punishment. You’re not fastidious about power, are you?’

‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Bec.

Maddie began telling a story of the future in which Bec was the main character. She was flying from city to city, from meeting to meeting. She was making speeches; she was bringing people together. She was the one who was taking the philanthropists inside the huts of the malaria victims, and taking the malaria survivors to the counsels of the wise and coaching them into telling their story. It was Bec who was bringing the scientists together with the politicians, the politicians with the vaccine makers, the African bureaucrats with the European bureaucrats. And all the while, as she was enduring the cocktail parties, the dinners, the small talk, the tedious glamour of fundraisers in Hollywood one night, Hong Kong the next, she was learning how power works, how deals are done, how countries talk to each other, the body language and cryptic signs of the international healthocracy.

Bec tried to think what Maddie had published since she became director. There wasn’t much. She had a grown-up daughter and an ex-husband who had taken pride in moving
for her career, then become bitter about it.

‘Women in London are good at frightening themselves into being pragmatic,’ said Maddie. ‘It becomes all or nothing. Research or admin. Responsibility or freedom. Work or motherhood.’

‘Why do you mention motherhood?’

‘You can switch pages on your screen when I come to your office,’ said the director. ‘But down the side I can see the last half dozen pages you’ve been reading.’

Bec blushed. ‘I have been distracted,’ she said.

She began to think that perhaps she could have all she wanted. Still, by November, nine months after she’d come off the pill, she wasn’t getting pregnant.

Harry had been of that generation that reckoned one bathroom in a house was enough. One dark frosty morning Bec stood leaning against the wall in her dressing gown, hands behind her back and one bare foot pressed against the cool white plaster, waiting for Alex to finish in the shower. She heard the water lashing the enamel and Alex whistling monotonously and cheerfully. She tried to work out, from the splashes, which part of his body he was working on, and how long it would be before he finished. It seemed to her that he was washing his whole body three times, and still he whistled.

She pushed the door open and stood on the threshold with her arms folded. Alex looked round from behind the shower screen, grinned and went back to washing, as if he thought she’d come to watch.

‘Why are you whistling the same four notes over and over again?’ she shouted.

Alex switched off the water and asked her to repeat herself. ‘It’s Philip Glass,’ he said.
‘Akhnaten
. That’s how he writes.’ He
stood there naked with the water pouring off him, clapped his hands together rhythmically, pedagogically, and began singing the same four rising notes.
La la la la, La la la la, La la la la, La la la la —

‘I want to see the test results from when you were trying to have a baby with Maria,’ said Bec.

Alex stopped clapping and singing, stepped out of the shower and took a towel, his shoulders and head slightly hunched, as if she’d struck him and he was bracing himself for her to do it again.

‘They couldn’t find anything wrong,’ he said, tucking the towel in around his waist and looking at her bravely.

‘I know, but all the same.’