Mendel's Dwarf (24 page)

Genetics is of scant interest to musicians, and music of rare concern to geneticists (although tone deafness [dysmelodia] and perfect pitch are probably autosomal dominant traits with imperfect penetrance
¹
); so biographies of Mendel never mention Janáček and biographies of the composer of
The Cunning Little Vixen
never mention Mendel. Such is the narrow way we perceive the past. When, at the age of nineteen, Janáček was appointed to the position of choirmaster in place of Father Pavel Křižkovsky, it was Abbot Gregor Mendel
who
appointed him.

“Parp, parp, parp. I
hate
this kind of thing,” Jean complained delightedly. “And it just makes my headache worse.” She laughed at the clash of brass, and the people beside us stared, both at her laughter and her diminutive companion. She leaned toward me and giggled. “Solemn bastards,” she breathed into my ear in
startling tones. I wondered whether the effects of the night before had quite worn off. And then, “I wonder what Hugo would think.”

“Forget Hugo.” But she couldn’t. Of course she couldn’t. The concert came to the end, and the exiguous audience spilled out into the winter sunlight, and she was still thinking of Hugo.

“Did you love him?” I asked.

“Love him? The question doesn’t mean very much, does it? I was used to him. ‘Used to’ gets as strong as ‘love,’ you know that? Like you love your parents, I suppose. You’re used to them. It’s not belittling. It just
is
.”

“And you felt this way about Hugo? Even though he beat you up?”

“Felt, feel. Still do, I suppose. He can be …” She paused. We turned into the Cromwell Road.

“Can be …?”

“Very loving,” she said.

We checked through the gate and climbed the steps of the Institute. She stopped in front of the doors. “Oh, Christ,” she said. It wasn’t the kind of language Miss Piercey normally used. But then quite a lot about Miss Piercey was different now.

“What is it?”

“It?” She could see through the lights in the door. In my own diminutive world all I could see was polished oak. She glanced down at me. “It’s him.” Taking a deep breath, she pushed the door open. “It’s him,” she repeated.

Hugo Miller was standing in the hallway beneath the bust of Karl Pearson, looking like someone who has been directed to the wrong crematorium. There was an unsteadiness about him, as though he were balancing on the edge of a cliff or the blade of a knife or something. “Where have you been?” he demanded when he saw who it was coming in through the door. “Where the hell have you been?”

I was ignored. I occupy a level of existence in which young
children move. At parties, the Christmas party at the Institute for example, I inhabit a world of legs and knees and crotches, and unless I can maneuver the conversation over to the side of the room where there might be a sofa or something, I have to jump up and down and wave my arms about to get noticed.

“Hugo,” she said.

I pushed past her and stood between the two of them. Piggy in the middle. But Hugo Miller looked over me, overlooked me, didn’t even allow me to swim into the lower reaches of his consciousness. “How dare you run out on me like that?” he shouted above my head. He sounded incredulous. So too did the receptionist, the redoubtable Miss Conway, who, it was rumored, had been at the Institute ever since the days of Bateson and Pearson. “In Christ’s name, where the devil have you been?”

“Your theology’s slipping,” I warned him.

He turned on me, turned
down
to me. “You shut up, you little twerp. It’s probably your fault.”

“Please don’t make a scene, Hugo,” she said quietly. She had the subdued voice of a loser.

“Scene? I’ll give you scene. You just come here.” He took her by the arm. There was a momentary scuffle over my head. Hugo grabbed one of Jean’s arms, I grabbed the other. We pulled. Prom the outside, from Miss Conway’s viewpoint for example, it would have seemed absurd, like something from one of Fellini’s films: a dwarf and a full-grown man pulling at either side of a thin and rather bewildered woman. “Do you want to go with him?” I cried to her. “Do you want to?”

He barged me out of the way. “Get off, you bastard!” But I held on, and so he dragged Jean toward the door with me hanging on the other side like a terrier. “Let go, Benedict,” Jean cried, “or he’ll hurt you.”

Or he’ll hurt you.

“Let go, Benedict,” she cried once more.

Did I release my grip, or did she merely slip out of my grasp?
I thought about it long afterwards. Whatever happened, Miller pulled her away from me and pushed her out through the door. Then he glanced back at me standing helpless in the middle of the checkerboard floor of the hallway, and his face contracted in a spasm of loathing. “It’s none of your fucking business, do you understand? You’re nothing but …” He paused, as though searching through his vocabulary for the right word. Then he found it, got it spot on, hit the target: “Nothing but a nasty little mutant.”

“Well!” exclaimed Miss Conway.

“Well what?” I asked.

“Well, I never.”

I retreated to the laboratory. Emotional? Agitated? Those are the feelings of normal people. I am a little mutant.

“Is everything all right, Ben?” Olga asked. “You look a bit upset.”

“Not me.”

She was busy proliferating the DNA of a suspected rapist for the scientific department of the Metropolitan Police. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) enables the most minimal sample of DNA (in this case from a smear of dried semen from the victim’s underwear) to be amplified until there is enough of it to carry out comparative tests and so identify the owner. PCR is the photocopier of the world of genetics, quick and easy and taken for granted. You place the sample of DNA that you want to copy in a test tube and heat it up. At 94°C the double-stranded molecule surrenders to the heat: it melts, opening up into two single strands, laying open its molecular message. Then the mixture is cooled to about 70°C, and as it cools a DNA polymerase enzyme assembles new strands on each half of the original molecule, new images of the exposed message, casts from the mold. The sample
(double the DNA now) is heated up again. Once again the double molecules open up, casts separating from molds. Cool again, and new complementary strands are assembled once more, the genetic message reproduced exactly, new cast from mold, new mold from cast. Heat again, and the DNA opens once more; cool, and it is replicated …

The process goes on, the number of molecules of DNA doubling for each cycle: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 … You see nothing. It takes place in a miniature test tube in an automatic heating block. Photocopying the messages of life.

What would Great-great-great-uncle Gregor have made of that? He who inferred the existence of heredity particles only by counting numbers, by reckoning ratios, he who fumbled with language—
merkmal, anlage
—to try to give these unknown, unimagined, unimaginable entities semantic substance, how would he have come to terms with the modern reality—that now you can make unlimited copies of a gene at will?

“I wonder what he was like,” Olga said thoughtfully.

“Who?”

She leaned over the bench, her lower lip bitten in delicate concentration as she pipetted into a tiny plastic test tube. “Our rapist.”

“A man.”

A pause, and then a quizzical glance across at me. “All men?”

“Not all.”

You must picture Doctor Benedict Lambert in white gown and face mask and latex gloves. To work with such tiny amounts of DNA, you must work in conditions of the utmost sterility lest a stray bacterium get in on the act and eat up the carefully preserved sample. DNA is a most nutritious substance, providing sugar and organic nitrogen in abundance, plus essential phosphorus. Quite a treat. There is also the danger that DNA from cells of your own skin may contaminate the sample; if you’re careless, you might end up amplifying your own DNA instead of
the rapist’s. It would be like the witness to a crime identifying one of the innocent men standing in the identification line instead of the suspect.

Olga crossed the lab to the PCR machine and keyed in her requirements—temperatures, time, number of cycles—then popped the tube into one of the hollows on the heating block. She was humming one of her mindless tunes.

“Did you have lunch with Miss Library?”

“Mrs. Miller.”

“You know who I mean. She’s quite pretty. In a mousy sort of way. Where do you go? Not that dreadful Pig and Poke?”

“I like the place.”

Another of those glances. Take it or leave it, answer as you please. “You fancy her?”

“I’m fond of her.”

“Oh yeah?
Fond
are you? I’ve heard of fond. I expect old erection here”—she pointed to the tube of DNA—“was
fond
of his victim.
Fond
is a prude’s word, Ben.
You fancy
her. That’s what you say. You fancy Miss Library something painful. And who knows?” She grinned, gap-toothed, like the Wife of Bath. “Maybe she fancies you.”

Once the amplification has taken place, you digest the DNA with enzymes and separate the fragments by gel electrophoresis. Then the fragments are denatured into single strands using half-molar sodium hydroxide, and transferred to a nitrocellulose filter by Southern blotting. The filter is then washed with a radioactive probe to identify specific DNA repeat sequences. They go by the name of VNTRs—Variable Number Tandem Repeats. The pattern of these sequences is then photographed. The resulting picture looks rather like the bar code on a packet of fish fingers in a supermarket. The pattern is unique to each individual, that’s the point. Your sperm is your undoing.

I wondered, I still wonder, would Hugo Miller’s DNA contain within itself, somewhere within the intricate sequence of its
bases, the seeds of his own violence? Monoamine oxidase A deficiency or something of that nature—a plain
reason
for his behavior instead of the cryptic complexities of upbringing and environment?

The phone rang at the flat when I got back that evening: a woman’s voice with more than a hint of anger in it, and more than a hint of Scots. “Is that Doctor Lambert?”

It was.

“Ruislip police here. There’s a Mrs. Miller with us at the station. She’s been hurt.”

“Hit?”

“I didn’t say that, sir.”

“I didn’t
say
you did. I asked a question.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line and a small hiss of electronic anger from the speaker. “Mrs. Miller gave your name, Doctor Lambert. I think it’d be better if you were to come round to the station, sir.”

They were startled to see me, of course. The whole world is startled to see me. It overlooks me as though it were expecting a normal trunk to appear in the space over my head, like the Cheshire Cat’s body materializing behind its grin; and then, when that doesn’t happen, it looks down at me in something like surprise, something like revulsion, something like the expression of someone looking into the deep freeze and seeing a human head there at the bottom among the frozen peas and the fish fingers. “Are you by any chance a medical doctor, sir?” The Scots accent was even more marked in the flesh—a considerable amount of flesh, in fact. Positively obese. And angry with it.