Soul Read online

  Jennifer Bostock, a precocious young scientist from New York clad in a vintage velvet dress that gave her the appearance of a slightly aggrieved Gothic tragedienne, swung around from her desk.

  ‘Julia, welcome back! Everything stored safely and shipped?’

  ‘The samples arrive tomorrow. You got my email about the commission?’

  ‘Yeah, amazing. Congratulations! Whitehead must be so pissed.’

  ‘It’s certainly one for the little guys.’

  Julia glanced at Jennifer’s laptop. Jennifer’s doctorate was on a link between dyslexia and genetics, but she was in her fourth year and Julia was beginning to suspect that she might be just another perpetual student.

  ‘There’s a position available—I’m looking for an assistant. Are you interested?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d love to, but the university’s just issued an ultimatum—I have to have the doctorate finished by the summer. I’m really sorry, Julia.’

  Julia glanced around the office; another postgraduate was tucked into the corner, studiously avoiding her eye.

  ‘Is anyone free?’

  ‘Well, Hank’s swept up with his slime moulds and Phong’s rushing to get an article published in the Scientific and Shawn’s on sabbatical until April. You know how it is.’

  Swinging around on her swivel chair, Jennifer returned to her laptop. Grabbing the chair, Julia pulled it back to face her.

  ‘Is this about working for the Defense Department, or is this about genuine commitment to our own individual pursuit? I mean, I’d love to think I had a lab full of potential Nobel prize winners, but I suspect not.’

  Jennifer looked sheepish. ‘Look, some of us have issues, and some of us are actually busy.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Don’t worry, the goddess will provide. She always does,’ the student concluded philosophically.

  Julia winced. Through her work she had come to the discomfiting conclusion that there was quite probably a gene for religion or spiritual faith and it was one she seemed to lack. It wasn’t the concept of faith itself that irritated her, more the surrendering of control and determinism she felt it implied. Perhaps Marx was right: religion is the opium of the masses—and Buddhism the ecstasy of the middle classes, she concluded as she fought the temptation to slam her office door behind her. The room was a narrow rectangle lined with bookshelves, the large window at the end looking out over the university grounds. Facing the window was the desk; its black polished surface was impeccably neat, the state-of-the-art desktop computer—the nucleus of all her thinking. Against the wall opposite sat several locked filing cabinets, the files inside obsessively numbered and up to date.

  Sitting at the desk, Julia retrieved the Defense Department file from her briefcase. It contained two computer disks. She slipped the first disk into the computer, then, as she waited for it to boot up, rang home.

  The tone rang out; the answering machine had been switched off. That’s odd, she thought. Klaus was usually writing by this time, having completed his eight-thirty morning run. He compensated for the unpredictable nature of his employment by structuring his days into a rigid timetable. Surprised, Julia decided to ring again in an hour.

  She scanned the computer screen. The files contained a list of five hundred twins from the ex-veterans database. This was the most extensive database available to geneticists and one of the largest twin studies in the world. Half the men on the list were monozygotic or identical twins; the other half being dizygotic or non-identical twins. Using twins in the study would make it easier to discern which traits were genetic and which were more likely to be environmental.

  At least half of the twins were combat soldiers with experience of intensive frontline combat—Delta, rangers, special forces, soldiers who’d seen extreme service in places such as Afghanistan, South America, Rwanda and Bosnia and all of the twins had been in the forces. Their age range ran between nineteen and sixty, which meant that many of the inherent genetic traits would have emerged by now. As Julia read down the list she began dividing the subjects into four main categories: Anglo–American, Latino–American, African–American and Asian–American. This was for sociological uniformity only. External physical differences, including race, accounted for such minor changes in the overall genome sequence that they didn’t count. Homo sapiens really were all the same under the skin—a fact Julia often considered advertising on the internet to counteract racism.

  The study’s procedures involved testing the men’s DNA (to ensure the exact status of the twins as well as screening for possible genetic determinants), a brain scan, and a series of tests to gauge physiological and psychological reactions to combat and violence. These consisted of measurement of heart rate, blood pressure and particularly blood composition while the subject viewed images of violent combat. There was also to be an interview to research the nurturing and other environmental influences on the twins’ early life.

  When Julia looked up from the computer a couple of hours later, the sun was already high over the eucalyptus trees. Hating the incessant air conditioning and wanting fresh air, she pushed open one of the windows. Outside, she could hear the students milling around; snippets of conversations, bursts of young laughter, a guitar being strummed, the banally bright chorus of a mobile phone and the smell of freshly mown grass, all drifted in. It made Julia remember her own student days: her exhilaration at her first discovery, her first published paper, the pride that infused her whole body the first time she walked into her own laboratory. Out of twenty graduates from Julia’s year only eleven had stayed working in the field, and of the six female graduates she was the only one who had gone on to a career in science. The hours were long and the work highly competitive as well as extraordinarily tedious; great swathes of repetitious research stretched between moments of inspiration.

  Julia’s professor had always reminded the students as they started leaving for the day, sometimes as late as ten at night, ‘Scientists in France, Germany and Japan are just starting their day, all striving to make the same discovery you’re working on. Sleep on it.’

  It took resilience, obsession, obstinacy and selfishness to make a good scientist—and maybe narcissism, Julia reflected guiltily.

  Most of the young women she’d graduated with had given up research and laboratory work when they married. Even her nemesis, a young woman Julia knew was brighter than her, a scientist she had been convinced would have a meteoritic rise through the ranks, had retired at twenty-six to marry a British hedge-fund manager. Others had resorted to part-time commercial laboratory work or other mindless conveyor-belt-style research when they’d had families. The hours and the poor pay meant it was virtually impossible to have a family and a career in science.

  Were there any role models for her as both a scientist and a mother? Julia had met one scientist at a seminar who’d taken eight weeks off work to have her baby before returning to complete her doctorate. ‘Motherhood actually sharpens your mind,’ she’d told Julia. ‘It’s all the multi-tasking you have to do. It forces you to become a master of time management—at least, that’s the delusion I function under. Otherwise forget it.’

  Julia reached for the phone again. There was still no answer at the house. She tried Klaus’s mobile phone. It was switched off. Strange, he never switched his phone off, ever. A nagging anxiety began to play at her mind as she tried to concentrate on the list of research subjects. The irrational notion that he might have had a car accident lurked beneath the written description of each case history. By the end of the chapter she had convinced herself that Klaus’s corpse lay congealing on some mortuary slab.

  She rang their neighbour Gerry, a scriptwriter who was inevitably home. Today he was attending to the vast collection of bonsai trees he kept on his deck, murmured incoherently about a van.

  ‘I thought you might be having a garage sale or something. I mean, I think I saw Klaus helping the guys out with something so I figured it wasn’t, like, you know, a burglary.’ />
  Stoned again, Julia thought cynically. He was hardly ever lucid.

  ‘Thanks, Gerry. I guess I’ll see you later.’

  ‘You will. You know me—the dateless agoraphobic.’

  The phone clicked off. Again, premonition brushed across Julia’s skin. Determined not to fall victim to the psychological tricks of her hormones, she dismissed her fear as irrational.

  16

  Mayfair, 1861

  THE COACHMAN LOITERED at the stone entrance to St George’s. As an Irish Catholic at the door of one of London’s most prestigious Protestant churches, it was impossible for him not to feel intimidated.

  Smoothing down the lapels of his jacket, he pulled himself upright in an attempt to shake off an insidious sense of inferiority. A pox on the English, I’ll not bend to their arrogance, he muttered as he peered through the darkened archway. He could see his young Irish mistress kneeling inside, the lilac brim of her bonnet sitting high amid the pews.

  Despite her ambition, she seemed deeply uncomfortable with the authority foisted upon her, and there had been complaints in the servants’ quarters about the way Mrs Huntington contradicted her husband’s commands and confused the senior staff with her over-familiar manner. ‘She should know her place,’ Mrs Beetle had muttered more than once. There were only two servants who defended Mrs Huntington’s unorthodox ways—her personal maid and the cook.

  Aloysius pulled out a small clay pipe and packed it with tobacco, the besieged sunlight falling across the broken fingernails and mottled skin of his working hands.

  A robin perched on the font stone looked at him quizzically. Feeling in his pocket, Aloysius found some oats and threw the bird a few flakes. At least the English birds are friendly, he consoled himself. Lavinia’s mouth—that slightly wry curl of her lip—came to mind as he studied the bird’s red plumage. Struggling to dismiss the image, Aloysius reluctantly acknowledged that he was partial to the young wife, whatever her politics, whatever her station, not just because she was unconventional but in the way a man likes a woman.

  ‘Take the gifts God gives you and don’t waste your life hankering after the unobtainable’ had been the advice of his grandfather, who had adopted the small boy after his father, an itinerant farmhand, had disappeared from the village. Well, God had given him and his family nothing but grief and starvation. Everything Aloysius had, he’d earned through his own labour.

  So he liked the woman, so what? Looking was not an offence. Could it be because she was Irish, a warm beacon in all this phlegmatic sensibility? Again, the coachman chastised himself—to imagine he could be anything but a servant in her eyes was an unforgivable vanity and most probably a sin. He held his hand out to the robin, who, after examining him with one beady eye, flew off as if to challenge his luck.

  Aloysius then turned to watch several city gentlemen stride through Hanover Square. The sight of such industry was still a source of wonder to the village boy. The whole of London was a warren of frantic activity: hackneys taxiing merchants to and fro; the ragged army of children that lurked beneath tarpaulins, carts, archways and in doorways—a river of grimy life all ambling towards the one grave. Three flower girls and a hurdy-gurdy man had set up on the pavement opposite the church; the girls’ cries adding a curious lyric to the whirling music cranking out of the painted box.

  It is an idyllic picture, this enclave of Mayfair, the coachman thought, all pomp and circumstance with its parks, its lamps blazing and footmen at the entrance of every grand house. But Aloysius knew that he would have to walk barely a mile to find himself in some typhoid-ridden slum lane. This is a metropolis of many cities, and I should be thankful to be living in a golden corner of it, he concluded, crossing himself for good luck.

  Inside the church, Lavinia was conducting a conversation with her God. It was a dialogue in which her prayers were answered by a voice within herself; an alter ego whose pragmatism always provided a comforting but humorous counterbalance to her own idealism.

  ‘May James desire me again,’ she prayed, before noting that it was both ridiculous and sacrilegious to be asking the Almighty for guidance on such earthly matters. Better to ask the music hall actress or the courtesan—the reply popped irreverently into her mind, prompting her to rise to her feet guiltily. By the time she had wrapped her cloak about her, the afternoon light was already fading.

  She made her way to the imposing main doors, where the coachman was waiting.

  ‘You do not worship yourself?’ she asked, sensing Aloysius’s reluctance to enter the church.

  ‘Madam, I was born a Catholic so I’ve no love of the English steeple. Anyhow, I’ve not been inside a church for over four years.’ He lifted the edge of her cloak to prevent it dragging in the mud.

  ‘Four years is a considerable lapse of faith for any denomination.’

  ‘I lost my faith while watching my mother starve, despite her prayers.’ His face tightened, deterring further inquiry.

  Lavinia paused before stepping up into the carriage. ‘I also have found myself wondering about the value of faith when there appears to be no redemption.’

  ‘Not in this world, anyhow, madam,’ Aloysius added, trying not to notice her slender stockinged ankle, visible for a moment beneath her petticoats.

  The lamplighters had begun their determined circuit, ushering in the evening with depressing swiftness. The coachman paused with his hand on the coach door, the chilly afternoon air making steam of his breath.

  ‘Madam, forgive my impertinence, but it is now past four o’clock and it would be considered unseemly for a young woman such as yourself to be seen in Bond Street at this time.’

  ‘In that case we shall definitely make the visit, and I shall take you along as my valet.’

  Was this an example of her determination to shun convention and court controversy, or was it simply ignorance, Aloysius wondered as he swung himself up to the front of the carriage.

  The carriage wound its way past the elegant Georgian arcades of Regent Street, negotiating the omnibuses, carts, the mingling crowds, and on towards Piccadilly Circus. The evening’s entertainment at the Princess Theatre was ‘M. Fechter’s Hamlet’, proudly advertised on a banner illuminated by burning gaslights, only just visible through the yellowish fog that had moved in from the Thames—as it did most afternoons.

  An omnibus materialised out of the haze. It was filled with singing drunken men—a guild of journeymen from the north on an excursion to the big city. Their deep voices boomed out like an invisible chorus as Aloysius swerved to miss the vehicle with its heaving carthorses.

  The brougham turned back into secluded Mayfair, where omnibuses were banned and only muffin-men, lavender-sellers and the occasional wandering musician with his barrow organ and monkey were allowed entry. Instantly it was quieter, and the smell of seclusion and money gave the insidious impression of safety. Lavinia, who had been staring out of the window, settled back against the leather upholstery.

  They entered Bond Street, trotting past the booksellers and publishers and the gentlemen shoppers, several of whom tipped their hats at Lavinia—a woman strikingly alone at this hour of the day.

  Aloysius reined in the horses beside the covered entrance of the Burlington Arcade. Two beadles in distinctive black and red uniforms stood guard at the entrance to ensure that the Bond Street loungers—bored dandies and revellers who had emerged early from the gentlemen’s clubs—did not enter the sedate and elegant arcade.

  Above the entrance climbed a canopy of steel vines. Inside, gaslights illuminated the shops’ displays of dresses, hats, jewellery and all manner of frivolous objects craved by the very wealthy, creating an effect as seductive as Aladdin’s cave.

  Lavinia barely glanced at these treasures as she stepped out of the carriage. Instead, escorted by Aloysius through a milling group of curious male onlookers, one of whom whistled rudely, she made her way to John Brindley’s bookstore at 29 Bond Street.

  Together, Lavinia and Aloysius almost filled t
he tiny emporium whose every wall was crammed with books, the shelves climbing to the very ceiling. The place appeared empty of assistants.

  Squeezing her way around several piles of boxes, Lavinia navigated a path to the high oak counter and peered over.

  ‘I believe the American statesman Abraham Lincoln has published a volume of poetry?’

  A diminutive man with a very large nose that divided his saturnine face into two distinct sides, sad and sadder, sat eclipsed by a large volume he held in his lap. He looked over his half-moon spectacles at her, then, shrugging indifferently, returned to his reading.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Lavinia repeated, raising her voice in case the bookseller was hard of hearing, ‘I believe—’

  ‘I heard you the first time, madam. And yes, Mr Lincoln does write poetry, however he is a better politician than poet, therefore I suggest you save your pennies. Besides, you have the look of a Mrs Gore reader.’ He sniffed contemptuously and pointed a long dirty fingernail to a pile of books on a table near the door.

  ‘Appallingly prolific but salacious enough to sell; literature with the endurance of a gadfly. Pin Money is the one to read, or so they tell me.’

  Insulted, Lavinia placed her purse on the counter. ‘I detest Mrs Gore’s halfpenny scandals. I know what I wish to purchase and it is Mr Lincoln’s poetry. I am a great admirer of the statesman.’

  Sighing heavily, the bookseller slipped off his stool and, muttering, pushed a set of library steps along the sloping wooden floor at an excruciatingly slow pace. There, with surprising agility that reminded Lavinia of the bed bug she’d once seen under her father’s microscope, he clawed his way up the steps and reached to a high shelf. He pulled out a book and shook it vigorously, releasing several dead moths that plummeted to the floor.