Mendel's Dwarf (23 page)

“Go back if you think you must,” I told her over a flabby meat pie in The Pig and Poke. Her husband had wept on the other end of the phone, wept and pleaded for her to come back, begged for forgiveness, swore devotion, all the usual things. He needed her more than he needed anything else in the world.

She thought about it hard. She wasn’t stupid, Jean Piercey wasn’t. Wasn’t, isn’t. She is just one of those people who have been educated to be stupid, that’s all. Failed the eleven-plus. Cannon fodder. Someone’s got to stamp the cards, someone’s got to sweep the streets and empty the bins, someone’s got to lick the stamps and check that the forms are filled in properly. Someone’s got to say “yes, sir; no, sir.” Someone has got to have narrow horizons.

“The second time you leave, it won’t come as such a shock,” I warned. “You don’t want to lose the advantage.”

I didn’t want to lose the prize.

“I can’t stay. I haven’t got any things.”

“Go and get them. When does he finish work? Go and get them. Now.”

She giggled. The word
giggle
has a bad press. Children giggle, schoolgirls giggle, giggling is what you do round the back of the bike sheds when they take their dicks out to show you. Jean Piercey’s giggle bubbled with something else—genuine amusement, the rich, dark, unexpected amusement of anarchy. “That’d teach the bastard, wouldn’t it?” she said.

Bastard? Not mousy Miss Piercey at all.

So I drove her out to Ruislip. We left the Institute at three o’clock and I drove her out to Galton Avenue and I waited in the car on the other side of the road outside number 35, while she crept up to her own front door like a housebreaker. She took only a few minutes inside, and then she was out again and hurrying down the drive with a small suitcase in her hand.

“Did you see the curtains?” she asked breathlessly as we drove away. “Did you see?”

“Which curtains?”

“Next door, of course. Twitching. This is net-curtain country. They see everything, they know everything. They’ve got me labeled now. Tart. Going off with …” I noted the pause, “… a strange man. Just you see.”

“What’ll he do when he finds out?”

“Stew in his own juice.”

We went out to dinner that evening at a little place in the Old Brompton Road. To celebrate the escape from Colditz. That’s what she called it. “Isn’t that where they locked everyone up? I
saw it on the telly ages ago.” She insisted on
truite aux almandes
as the only thing she could recognize on the menu. I offered to translate the rest, but she appeared happy with the choice. “Hugo always says French food is a load of pretentious nonsense. Normally we eat Indian. Or Chinese. Do you like Chinese?”

I agreed that I did like Chinese. “Chinky nosh,” she said with relish. “We used to have one every Friday, Hugo and me. It used to be fun.” She raised flakes of white meat to her mouth. “We never had trout.”

Trout Hatcheries

In trout hatcheries you don’t want males. Males are inconvenient. Quite apart from the fact that they don’t produce babies, they mature earlier than females and once mature they show aggressive tendencies, particularly at high population densities. In a normal trout population (50:50 male and female), half the population is therefore a potential danger to the other half. So why not do away with the males?

But you need males to breed, I hear you cry. Your tone is a little desperate, I must admit, because I suspect that you realize that, with all the sperm a male trout produces (or a male human, come to that), you don’t need very many; but you do need one or two.

A short, and I hope unnecessary, biology lesson:

Male trout, just as male humans, are XY; that is, in every body cell there is one X and one Y chromosome. It is that fact which makes them male (and, as in humans, gives them criminal tendencies). Females, on the other hand, are XX. This means that the sperm cells from each male may
either carry
an X or a Y chromosome; whereas all the eggs from a female will carry an X. When a Y chromosome sperm cell fertilizes an egg, the result is an XY baby—a male. When an X sperm does the job you get an
XX female. So, just as with humans, fifty percent of trout are male and fifty percent are female. And your next generation has fifty percent nonproducers, fifty percent that are nothing more than bags of sperm, fifty percent with criminal tendencies.

It’s that damned Y chromosome again.

So this, in trout hatcheries at least, is how it’s done:

You rear some female trout (XX, of course), but you dose them with male sex hormone. This turns them into males of a kind. They produce sperm, for example. But genetically they remain XX, and so every sperm cell produced carries an X chromosome. Using these “males” as a source of sperm, every fertilization will be by an X sperm with an X egg. Every baby trout that these “males” father (if you’ll forgive the expression) will turn out a female.

“I think that’s disgusting,” Miss Piercey said, but it didn’t stop her eating the fish. I ordered a bottle of white Burgundy, and then another. She ate and drank with abandon, and her laughter sounded loud in the land. We drank a toast to freedom and the death of bullies. “I always thought Burgundy was red,” Jean said, eyeing her fifth or sixth glass with suspicion. “I’ve got a burgundy coat at home. That’s red.”

“There’s red and there’s white. Mix them together and you get rosé.”

She looked at me slyly. “They don’t do it like that. I read it in a magazine …”

“Oh, but they do. Pure red crossed with pure white makes rosé, like with sweet pea. Incomplete dominance, like with sweat pea.”

“Sweet pea sounds rude …”

“Diabetes mellitus. Autosomal control with low penetrance.”

She giggled over the dissected corpse of her trout. “What on earth are you on about? You don’t half talk, you know. I don’t understand half of what you say sometimes, truly I don’t. What’s penetrance, if I might ask? That sounds rude as well.”

“Penetrance is as pure as the driven snow. Mere genetic jargon.”

“You know, Hugo never really talks to me. Maybe that’s the problem. Wonder what he’d think if he knew where I was now. When people talk, at least you know what they’re thinking, don’t you?”

“Do you? Do you know what I’m thinking?”

She stopped, and considered me, head on one side, looking at me directly, not with that sideways and evasive glance that so many people have. “You’re thinking I’m a silly chatterbox, like as not.”

“I’m not thinking that at all,” I said, quite truthfully.

“What did you used to think all those years ago in the library back home, I wonder?” She had a strange and distant smile. The question didn’t seem to be directed at me, so I didn’t offer an answer; but I could see that she knew, more or less. She wasn’t stupid. I think I’ve said that before.

Our absurd, trivial chatter meandered on, and by the end of the meal Jean was gently pissed, slightly unsteady on her feet but putting a brave and earnest face on things. “I’ve had too much. Got no head for it at all. My father was TT, did I tell you that? No drink in the house. Ooh, what a disgrace I am.”

We found our way back to the flat and let ourselves in with conspiratorial whispers. “What the hell would Hugo think if he saw me now?” she wondered aloud. “Staying with a strange man, I mean. What’d he think?” She was skipping on one foot and trying to take her shoes off at the same time. “What d’you think he’d think?” She spluttered with laughter at her muddled
WO
rds. “What d’you think he’d think I’d think?”—and lurched into the doorjamb. To save herself from falling, she balanced with one hand on the top of my head. It was the first time she had touched me. The second shoe finally came off, and she flipped it into the bedroom. I followed her stockinged feet (big toe sadly distorted by narrow shoes) into the bedroom. “What’d he think, Benedict? What’s Benedict think?”

I offered no answer. I’m not sure I was capable. I was stone cold sober, but more intoxicated by far than ever she was. I watched her undress. “What are you looking at?” she demanded, but she didn’t stop. Jacket, shirt, skirt, tights, all of them came off. They lay in a puddle on the floor. “What are you looking at, young man?” Her skin was very white, as though it had never seen the light of day. Slightly unhealthy. Almost albino. Her breasts seemed paltry in their flimsy cups of nylon. There was a soft fold of flesh over the top of her pants, an unevenness in the flesh of her thighs. She had a large mole about two inches across on the inside of her right thigh—a somatic cell mutation with the ever-present possibility of transformation into malignant melanoma. I hadn’t pictured that. Much of the rest, yes—the prominent navel, the faintly mottled skin, the scribble of hair in the crease of her groin; but not that melanic blemish. “I’m not taking any more off with you standing there, you know.” Her hips were wide and rather clumsy. She put her hands on them. “I’m not, you know.”

“I thought you might want me to wash your things.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” Her tone was faintly belligerent, alcohol doing its work. Miss Piercey far from mousy. Pissed as a newt, in fact. She considered my suggestion through clouded mind, and me through ill-focused eyes. “That’s what you want, is it?”

I shrugged. It wasn’t, but it’d do.

“Turn around,” she said, finally. “And no peeping.”

I did as I was commanded. There was a confused movement behind me, and I turned to see a flash of white flesh and a heaving of the bedclothes and Miss Piercey lying as sleek as a corpse beneath the sheet and eyeing me over the top. The garments in question lay on the floor in front of me. “Night, night,” she said; and giggled.

1
.
Understanding Genetics
, Faber 1979, p. 42.

N
ext morning she was contrite. She stood at the door to the kitchen looking pale and slightly ill. And curiously young, like a child caught out. “I feel awfully embarrassed.”

“There’s no need.”

“I must have been disgusting.”

“Lovely. Funny.”

“Drunk. There’s nothing funny about drunk. My father used to be really cross when he saw a comedian acting drunk. Perverting the young, he used to say. I think I ought to go.”

“Don’t. Please don’t.”

It was framing it as a request that did it. She was so used to being told what to do, but I
asked
her to stay, and the tone was one of pleading. It was surprising coming from me, I suppose. She came into the kitchen and sat down. It was all a bit absurd: me on my own chair at the low table; she perched awkwardly on a stool above me. “You
want
me to stay,” she said. She wasn’t looking for confirmation. It was a statement of fact, edged with amazement.

“Of course I do.”

That lunchtime it was Janáček’s
Sinfonietta for Orchestra
at the Albert Hall, with a brass section like the band of the Grenadier Guards. In 1864, at the age of ten, Leoš Janáček joined the choir school at the monastery of the Augustinians in Brno, where he studied under the choirmaster Pavel Křižkovsky. Thus said the program notes.

Like Mendel, Janáček was from northern Moravia. They would have shared the accent. Like Mendel, Janáček was fascinated by the countryside and by wildlife. He must have walked around the monastery garden with the friar; he must have seen the mice in their cages and the bees in the hives on the slope behind the chapter house; he must have played with the pet vixen, an orphaned animal that had been rescued as a cub by a friend of Mendel’s; he must have heard the fat friar’s stories about animals, and lectures condemning catapults. Mundane things, the matters of childhood that etch themselves more deeply into the memory than any adult experience.