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  ‘Merely the cost of my transport from Islington, sir, and enough to cover my inks and pencils. Luncheon, I expect, would be provided, and any other additional expenses would be negotiable,’ Hamish answered tentatively, glancing at the furious wife.

  ‘Then it is agreed: you may start on Monday.’

  ‘But what about my work on your book, the months I have laboured?’ Lavinia demanded.

  ‘You are now free to dedicate yourself to the many delightful pursuits of a society wife. I am surprised you are not more enthusiastic about the arrangement,’ the Colonel concluded smiling.

  ‘I cannot believe you would insult my intellect this way!’ Furious, Lavinia made for the door. ‘I take my leave, Mr Campbell. No doubt I shall have the pleasure of your company thrust upon me regardless.’

  Hamish, being of a modern sensibility, did not take offence.

  33

  Los Angeles, 2002

  THERE WERE FIFTY CASES PINNED up: twenty-five sets of twins. Under each army-file photo was pasted a synopsis of the soldier’s active duty; his family history including any evidence of violence or abuse; medical history (paraphrased into a neat page emphasising genetic illness or malformations); a photographic printout of his DNA blood analysis, tracking circulating hormones and mood-controlling neuropeptides like serotonin, endorphins, adrenaline and noradrenaline; and brain scans and EEG responses to violent visual imagery.

  By a systematic survey of total gene activity profiles and computer analysis, Julia hoped to locate one gene—or possibly a network of genes—that was repeated in all the interviewees, linking their specific behaviour pattern to a genetic origin and thus proving it was a heritable trait.

  The pinboard was the first thing you noticed when you entered the room. The collection of charts looked like some sort of bizarre topographical map, Julia thought. Some of the subjects were smiling; some appeared entirely vacant behind the eyes; and some of them seemed barely grown men. As Julia searched their faces she was surprised to find herself flooded with a sense of protectiveness. She paused, mortified.

  As a scientist, she had learned to objectify the people involved in her research; it was a necessity as any emotional involvement could influence the outcome. Have I been too detached in the past? she asked herself. Does my enthusiasm blind me to the needs of others? Was that why Klaus left?

  Pushing her doubts to the back of her mind, she returned to her work. But her anxieties stayed with her. She couldn’t look at these soldiers any more and see them merely as vessels for chemical codes for form and behaviour; they’d become victims of genetic predeterminism. What made an individual capable of killing without remorse, she pondered.

  A tentative knock on the door interrupted her.

  ‘The Human Genome Project’s principal objective is to determine the sequence of the three billion nucleotide base pairs that make up the human DNA, identify the 20–25,000 human genes embedded in this sequence, and to store this information in databases for further research and for the betterment of mankind—’

  ‘“Advancement” might be a stronger word than “betterment”.’

  ‘I like betterment, better, even better than betterment.’

  ‘Stop being cute. You were doing great up until then.’

  They were sitting at a small Formica table in the corner of Julia’s office. Gabriel had his notebooks spread out, his beaten-up laptop open and running and was reading aloud from a term paper on the debate around the ethics of genetic selection. His mobile phone stuck out of his shirt pocket and his jeans were slung dangeroulsy low.

  He scratched his head, fighting off a desire for a cigarette, then took the opportunity to surreptitiously examine Julia as she leaned back in her chair. She looked sadder than before, if that was possible. It was as if someone had stolen her energy, the very element that defined her. Gabriel thought about the travesty that had been his parents’ marriage; was this the kind of misery he had to look forward to?

  Perversely, he noted that this air of defencelessness suited Julia; it softened the edges of the dispassionate professionalism she usually emanated. Her long slim legs were stretched out before her; her black hair hung to her shoulders and was slightly messy, as if she’d run a comb once through it that morning and not touched it since. She was handsome as opposed to beautiful, he decided; the structure of her face was too strong to be called pretty; only her wide mouth and sea-green eyes saved her from a certain masculinity. She had a face full of stories, he marvelled, stories that begged to be caressed into being. The sensual note continued as his eyes wandered across the breadth of her shoulders and he found himself calculating that she must be almost exactly his height—how would that be in bed?

  Stop, she’s your mentor, he cautioned himself; nevertheless, it was her intelligence that he found most exciting—the unique combination of scientific rigour and imagination. Secretly he was terrified he lacked that extra component—the ability to break away from preconceived ideas and look at a problem laterally. Was it fearlessness, or simply a question of practice? Whatever the answer, he hoped to absorb a little of her alchemy and use it to his advantage.

  He glanced at the information board. A navigation of genetic disturbance was what Julia had called it; Gabriel hadn’t been sure whether she was being cynical. Sometimes he found it difficult to tell. The men stared back at him defiantly. Some of Julia’s subjects weren’t much older than him, and some of them looked Latino, too. Remorseless killers or heroes?

  Either way, they all had the look of the outsider, the ostracised. No matter what Julia thought, Gabriel was convinced that nurture was the bigger villain.

  He shifted his gaze to the window; in the distance he could just see the top of the quadrangle and the fountain. It was one of those warm summer days when you could almost smell the faint scent of eucalyptus on the breeze, the air shimmering with a vibrant buoyancy. The warm curve of sunlight falling across his face made him restless.

  Julia’s jacket hung over a chair where she’d thrown it that morning. He liked the way it looked: it made him think of the woman he remembered from childhood: intense, a little reckless, but always focused. Julia had always shown a passion Naomi’s other friends lacked. Gabriel regarded most of them as resigned old hippies. Julia had been different. She was renowned in the way he wanted to be, eccentric in her thinking—and she worked in an industry that would affect future generations for decades to come. There was no ambiguity about the fact that he found her intensity erotic.

  ‘So you think I’m cute?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I think.’

  ‘Don’t say that; it’s a negation of the Self, and I mean that in a Buddhist way, nothing to do with Nietzsche.’

  ‘You are precocious.’

  ‘Apparently. Okay, I’ll change “betterment” to “the advancement of mankind”. Or should I go “human species”? “Mankind’s” kind of sexist.’

  ‘How about Homo sapiens?’

  ‘Yeah, I like that, that’s very Planet of the Apes. What do you think about the rest of the paper?’

  ‘I think it’s good, but a little unsophisticated. The structure of DNA is more complex than that, as is the sequencing of the genes on the chromosome. We may be able to identify which gene or gene mutation makes someone susceptible to schizophrenia, but we don’t yet know the trigger that causes the gene to come into play. To make things even more complicated, the very same gene might have a positive function in another human being—say, to fight off a particular disease. Therefore, to talk about isolating genetic disorder and breeding it out is not a viable future scenario.’

  ‘Then why spend so much money on the Genome Project? Why open the box if you’re not going to play with the toys?’

  ‘Because it helps us understand disease, so we can streamline medicine, and also evolution. In a way, I think it unites us…’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, for a start it proves we really do spring from one mother.’

  He grinned
, thinking about his own mother and how he loved her and would fight to the death to protect her, but couldn’t stand living with her.

  ‘The mother of all mothers. Mind if I smoke?’

  Without waiting for her reply Gabriel produced a cigarette and a lighter.

  ‘I guess I’m confused. On the one hand, I can see the advantages, on the other hand, I can foresee a world where every potential parent will have to go through a screening process before being allowed to procreate, or maybe even get relocated to an area where their unborn baby’s skills will be more in demand. I mean, I have a grandfather who committed suicide, a cousin with obsessive compulsive disorder, and my dad’s seriously word blind—where does that put me as a potential gene donor?’

  ‘I think the word you’re looking for is “father”.’

  ‘Whatever. I mean, how do you feel? You’ve got to have some family skeletons in the cupboard, right?’

  ‘Naturally, but because I know the genetic probability of that propensity, I can change my lifestyle to factor that in. Knowing allows me to make an informed choice. Genes interact with environment; it’s not one or the other.’

  ‘And what about those guys?’ Gabriel pointed to the pinboard. ‘Why would a gene that allows someone to detach emotionally during violent conflict be successful in an evolutionary sense?’

  ‘The answer to that is obvious. Somewhere in history, evolution favoured an early Homo sapiens who defended his tribe, perhaps even colonised another tribe, ruthlessly. Sometimes I think of genes as a letter that gets handed down the generations, but the letters get scrambled slightly with each delivery, altering the meaning. Okay, back to real work,’ she said, indicating the pinboard. ‘The first thing we have to rule out are the obvious candidate genes that have already been associated with antisocial behaviour, violence etc, like MAOA and any other possible hormonal links.’

  ‘I’ve labelled and filed the DNA samples we have so far. Do you want me run them over the microray as we go?’

  ‘That would be great. Mine for MAOA and any other heightened expression that shows up.’

  Gabriel threw his cigarette butt out the window. Then, without turning, he asked the question he’d been wanting to ever since he’d walked into the room.

  ‘So what happened between you and Klaus? I remember meeting him as a kid and he seemed a really nice guy.’

  He swung back to her and watched her tidying her desk, her cheeks burning.

  ‘C’mon, try me. I am wise beyond my years when it comes to matters of women and men. Believe me, if you’d sat in Naomi’s kitchen for as long as I have listening to my mom and every other jilted woman from here to Haight-Ashbury, you’d be wise too.’

  She put down her files.

  ‘Okay, so what’s your advice then?’

  ‘Become a lesbian. Men aren’t worth it.’

  He threw the comment out and waited, his long angular face set in a morose tightness that he knew she would not be able to read.

  ‘But you’re a man.’

  ‘Yeah, and if you had as much testosterone pounding through your body as I currently do, you’d be a horny, confused bastard too. He left you, right? No warning, no signs.’

  Julia folded her arms resolutely. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Maybe there were clues, but you were just too terrified to go there—you know, fear of abandonment and all that crap.’

  ‘I said I don’t want to talk about it.’

  There was a silence. Outside, a plane climbed its way up out of the afternoon’s smog.

  Gabriel, staring at the pinboard, thought about his parents’ divorce. José, his father, had left Naomi when she’d reached the age of thirty-eight, but the indications had been there before. There were so many differences between them. His father was first-generation American and wrestled with the traditional expectations of the Latino women he’d grown up around. Expectations that Naomi—a secular Jew who came from a lineage of domineering women—had found quaint at first, then repressive. Then, when José’s career as a painter took off and Naomi found herself at home alone with a young baby, she began to blame José for her own lack of artistic success. By the time José introduced his new dealer to the family—a dynamic Latino woman ten years his junior—Gabriel, even as a seven year old, had recognised the demise of the marriage.

  ‘It suits Naomi to think of my father as pathological.’ The earnest tone in his voice surprised even himself. ‘But she’s wrong. If she’d read the signs, she could have saved the marriage. I believe that, I really do.’

  ‘Sometimes things happen that you can’t explain,’ Julia countered gently. ‘Sometimes people just aren’t honest, good or courageous. Even the ones we think we know really well.’

  ‘Does that mean you believe in the concept of amorality?’

  She looked at him. It was a genuine question; a leap into the abstract that had taken her by surprise. She thought about the soldiers she was interviewing, about war, holocausts and all the other morally careless and culpable acts human beings had committed against one another, and in that moment, looking at this boy-man sitting awkwardly astride a chair, the afternoon coming in the open window behind him, she realised that she did. She did believe in amorality.

  ‘Does a genetic disposition to kill without emotional regret absolve the killer?’ Gabriel persisted.

  ‘It’s never that simple. External events, a combination of genetic factors—all come into play to trigger an action—’

  ‘—or reaction.’ Gabriel finished her sentence.

  34

  Mayfair, 1861

  WELL, MAMA, YOU WOULD NOT believe the crusade I have been forced to undertake by my husband and his co-conspirator to establish myself in this uppity village of Mayfair. I am to host an At Home—a high tea of cucumber and watercress sandwiches for a select group of eminent guests. Surely there can be nothing more dreary, and all of the persons I wished to invite have been dismissed by Lady Morgan as too ‘bohemian’ or not of ‘our’ class. Naturally, doctors and lawyers are not to be allowed entry. Any single man has to be a baronet, a peer, or at least a commissioned officer. Lady Morgan is partial to the dragoons, and, as the Charge of the Light Brigade and the current misfortunes of the Russian Empire are still of interest, she assures me she will do her utmost to secure an actual eye witness. Frontline raconteurs, she calls them, and tells me such gentlemen are invariably handsome and penniless but essential for ambience.

  I have sent over forty cards to all manner of mansions and city palaces—an exhausting and demoralising experience. Lady Morgan is convinced that the majority of the invited will attend, if only to gape at the exotic Irish renegade. It is a travesty: she has decided I must have an impeccable lineage and has commissioned a family tree from a draughtsman who specialises in such forgeries. It is an impressive piece of foppery, with a family coat of arms of a mermaid seated upon a unicorn, and an ancestry going back to the King of Connacht himself. Papa would die of embarrassment if he should hear of it. Lady Morgan has insisted I hang it in the parlour, where the high tea is to take place. I just pray no one will ask me about my illustrious forebears.

  Even more mortifying is the rumour Lady Morgan has deliberately planted suggesting James is on the brink of publishing a book as scandalous and as controversial as Charles Darwin’s. Suddenly everyone wants to meet the young wife of the man who may be the next candidate to take the scientific world by storm. If only it were true, and if only James had let me continue as his assistant. The ennui of piano lessons, sewing and endless trivia about who is about to marry whom shall yet be the death of me.

  My husband has banned me from both library and study and I now have only dear Aidan to entertain me. I should not complain; the child is a delight. But I miss the hours of industry by James’s side more than I could have possibly imagined.

  Our marriage is much changed, and not for the better. I do not trust this young man James has taken into his circle, and I fear we grow further apart by the
day—’

  ‘Mama!’ Aidan’s exclamation brought her back to the room. Playing at her feet, he held up a toy rabbit. ‘Kiss!’ he demanded.

  Reaching down, she embraced the toy then softly closed the lid of the whispering box.

  It was late and most of the household had retired. James had not returned from his club and Lavinia in nightdress and dressing gown, unable to sleep, found herself pacing the corridor. Before she realised, she was standing outside the door of James’s study. The door, a portal most recently locked from her, now stood tantalisingly ajar. The faint scent of cigars and more masculine odours—leather, boot polish and the lemon-scented cologne the Colonel was fond of wearing—drifted out from the room, drawing Lavinia into the sphere she so missed. The glowing embers of a recent fire still shone from the hearth and she could see the scattered papers of his work abandoned on the desk. She paused, breathing in the scent, then stepped quietly into the study, locking the door after her.

  It was as if her husband had just left the room. Running her hand along the leather of the armchair, she imagined that she could still feel the heat of his skin, the weight of his body still impressed upon the cushion. She wanted him then, wanted his arms around her, his lips on her mouth, her neck, her breasts. She sank into the seat, her thin silk nightdress riding up between her legs. Lit just by the dying fire and the street lamp shining in from outside, the Colonel’s primitive artefacts looked like beautiful libidinous onlookers, consensual in their own erotic writhing.

  Lavinia’s hand wandered down, caressing her thighs. She imagined her hand was James’s hand and that he was taking her there—in the most sacrosanct of all his territories. She was wet, lost in the fantasy, pleasuring herself. She opened her eyes, her gaze falling upon a smooth ebony figurine of a man, his polished head glistening in flicking light. She reached across and picked it up from the low table before her, then spread her legs wide, one over each arm of the chair. She ran the head of the figurine up her thigh and across her sex. The satiny touch of the polished ebony became her husband’s yard, the thickness and weight of it against her skin. Then, imagining his urgency, his measured strokes, she pushed the head into her, faster and faster until exploding, she felt herself contracting around the smooth wood.