Mendel's Dwarf (22 page)

I emerge into a calmer, more relaxed world. There is time to hurry into the bedroom and consign
Playmate
and
Stud
to the bottom of a heap that also contains copies of
Science
and
Trends in Genetics
and offprints of my latest paper. In the kitchen Miss Piercey is apologizing, fussing over the teapot and a packet of plain chocolate digestive biscuits that she has found among the cornflakes and the pasta. “Do you have a special mug?” she is asking as she bends down to open a cupboard that for me lies at the correct height. “How did the lecture go? Gosh, you must be
so nervous facing all those people and they all know so much, don’t they? Aren’t you afraid of being caught out?”

Nothing like as afraid of being caught out with you. A naturalist with a butterfly, the specimen settled on his hand, its wings opening and closing as though contemplating flight: a moth, a miller, flexing its wings and inducing a tornado in a distant, foreign land.

“Sit down and relax,” I command her. “Just relax.”

She does as she is bidden, suddenly and without argument. “I’ll be fine after a nice cuppa,” she assures me. “Just fine. And then I’ll be out of your hair. I don’t want to give you any trouble. It’s awfully good of you to do this for me, but …”

“Where will you go?”

“To my aunt back home, I suppose. I can’t go back, not to him.”

“What happened?”

She shakes her head.

“Tell me about it,” I suggest.

She shrugs. “It’s not as easy as all that. Not that I don’t want to. I mean, I need to get it off my chest to someone, but it’s not that easy to explain.”

“But he hit you. That’s fairly straightforward, isn’t it?”

“He does hit me, sometimes. Slaps. This was maybe worse than usual, I don’t know. But he does.” Another shrug. The gesture is important in Jean Piercey’s life. It signifies all those things you can’t do anything about, and they are legion. I shrug often enough, I suppose. But I prefer a bleak and humorless smile.

“Why don’t you go to the police?”

“He’d go mad.”

“He seems to go mad enough as it is. What’s his reason?”

“Reason?” Another shrug. She stares into her mug of tea, as though maybe there’s a reason in there. “Hates me, I suppose. Just fed up with me.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Six years.”

“And no children?”

“Hugo says it’s my fault.”

“And then he hits you?”

She didn’t answer directly. “Silly thing is, he’s no bigger than me. You’ve met him. He’s no bigger than me.”

E. B. Ford, Fellow of All Souls and Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, sometime Emeritus Professor of Ecological Genetics at Oxford University, known as Henry to generations of undergraduates:

“… the XYY type tends to be ill-adjusted, being aggressive in a way which often leads to crimes of violence, so that such people find their way into prisons. Here we have an instance of the widely established fact that intelligence and psychology are under genetic control.”
¹

Here we have an instance of the widely established fact that experts are frequently stupid and prejudiced and usually have their heads stuffed firmly up their arses. By the time the good Henry wrote those words it had been established in the United States (Pyeritz et al., 1977) that a
maximum
of one percent of XYY males may spend part of their lives in mental-penal institutions.

That leaves a
minimum
of ninety-nine percent who won’t.

I wonder what the percentage is of Emeritus Professors of Ecological Genetics who ought to spend part of their lives in mental institutions? Does All Souls count?

I feel obliged to report that in the course of my own research, I, Benedict Lambert of the Royal Institute for Genetics, have discovered
an inherited factor that is a
certain
causative agent in criminal behavior. It is particularly closely correlated with criminal behavior of a violent nature. There is no doubt about this. The figures are incontrovertible. I am talking about 99.9 percent confidence limits. Perhaps my name should be given to this factor, in the way that discoverers so often become eponymous. Think of Down and his syndrome; think of Huntington and his chorea. Perhaps this one ought to be the Benny factor. I suppose I’d be accused of flippancy.

Ninety-five percent of the total British prison population possess the Benny factor; the proportion goes up to ninety-seven percent
when
you consider violent crime. With sex crime the correlation between the Benny factor and the crime is virtually total, complete, one hundred percent. Thus, to follow the argument of the good E. B. Ford and others to the logical conclusion, all we have to do is identify people who possess this factor (a trivial task, let me assure you; anyone with a modicum of intelligence can be trained to do it) and isolate them from the rest of the population. Perhaps we could get them to wear some kind of distinguishing mark on their clothes; possibly we could introduce some kind of preventive detention, camps where carriers may be kept under careful supervision. Clearly there would be unfortunate ramifications of such a policy, but the advantages to society will far outweigh the disadvantages, for with this genetic marker identified and crime banished from the streets, who will care that these people will be shunned by all decent citizens, discriminated against in the workplace, refused insurance or mortgages? Who will worry that their credit rating will be zero, that people will stare at them in the street and children will throw stones? The world will be a safer place without them.

Later, when the general population is used to the situation, we might even consider a … final solution.

You’ve guessed, haven’t you? The Benny factor is the Y chromosome. Not the possession of an
extra
Y chromosome, but the
possession of just
one
. It is the simple fact of being male. Whenever the biological determinists, the eugenicists, the E. B. Fords of this world, start mouthing their rubbish, remember that: lock up all the males and violence will disappear from the streets.

“You’re staying here,” I told Jean.

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

“What’ll people say?” She wept silently, her face patchy and ugly. “What’ll they say?”

“For God’s sake, what do you think they’ll say? They won’t imagine there’s anything between us, will they? For Christ’s sake, they won’t imagine
that!
”

The tears dried. She looked at me with a strange sadness. “You shouldn’t say that kind of thing.”

I laughed. “My dear Mrs. Miller, I’ve been saying that kind of thing all my life. I don’t aim to stop now. I offer you some kind of refuge from your foul husband—incidentally, I thought he was quite revolting—”

“He’s not really like that—”

“Oh, for God’s sake! I offer you refuge, and it is entirely your
own
affair whether you accept my offer or not. But don’t try to get me to pretend I’m not what I am. Or that he isn’t what he is, come to that.”

“But you must—”

I held up my hand, my small, pudgy hand that probes into the intimate secrets of the human genome. “I’m not going to argue about anything. You just stay safely with me for as long as you like.”

She did feel safe, of course, for she knew that what I said was true: there was no danger. No danger from me, I mean. So she stayed for supper and we chatted a bit afterwards, and then she went to sleep in my bed and I went into the sitting room and
made some kind of bed on the sofa; and when she was fast asleep I crept softly back into my room to look at her.

She was in no danger. I merely coveted the sight of her crushed face on my pillow, the mousy hair sprayed carelessly across the cotton. As I stood there looking at her she stirred gently, entirely oblivious of my presence. I am in the mood for confession. While she slept I cautiously extracted her underwear from the neatly folded pile of clothes on the chair—pants, brassiere, tights, the whole delicious, fragrant bundle—and tiptoed out to the sanctuary of the bathroom. I sorted through my trophies in an agony of tumescence and expectation. The bra was 34A. The knickers bore the name of the patron saint of Judeo-Christian commerce,
Saint Michael
, and were decorated with pink and red and yellow blooms. Sweet pea? At the gusset there was a faint mark like a brushstroke of pollen—a delicate suggestion of nether, perhaps equally bruised, lips. I pressed the scrap of cotton to my face and drew in her sharp, sour, sweet, secret scent and knew things about Miss Piercey that I had only imagined …

Coming into the tiny kitchen the next morning she had a rueful smile on her rather less bruised lips. “You washed my under-things.”

“I thought you’d want them clean.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“A labor of love.”

She smiled the kind of smile that warns you not to be silly. Perhaps she knew. I had never granted her much in the way of understanding, but perhaps she understood. “I don’t normally do this, you know,” she observed as she sipped her breakfast coffee.

“Do what?”

“Stay the night with other men.” She even giggled.

That morning we went to work together, going up the steps of
the Institute together, calling a “Good morning” to the receptionist together, and climbing the grandiose stairs side by side to the first floor. She had to go slowly to let me keep up with her. The librarian looked askance as she went in.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get in yesterday, Mr. Blackwall,” she said. “I wasn’t well.”

The man sniffed disapprovingly. “There’s been a phone call for you. Your husband. Wants you to call him as soon as you get in.”

I watched her expression. I saw fear. I know fear well. I’ve grown used to it. Fear for me is a matter of existence. I walk among giants and I know fear. I stood, abject with terror, in the bike shed at school and watched bare and grimy knees advance on me, and I knew fear. I probe with small, plump fingers among the molecules of inheritance and I know fear. The mere act of existence for me is an act of fear. I feel fear merely by being; but none of this is the fear that I saw in Jean’s expression as she went into the library office to phone Hugo Miller.