The Heart Broke In (41 page)

For the rest of the day it seemed to Alex that everyone – Bec, his colleagues, his parents, friends from different continents, people who knew him and who had known Harry – was on his side. On Monday lawyers got involved. In them Alex perceived the power to enter a room and without any obvious effort make everyone in it move apart until nobody was within touching distance. He was interviewed by the police, who were annoyed to be obliged to do it by the Moral Foundation, and took their annoyance out on Alex in the form of a sternness that every attempt by him to lighten made colder.

The trustees interviewed him in the board room. In the larger-than-life full-length portrait behind their heads Belford was looking off into the distance and as the interrogation went on Alex kept glancing at the founder’s baggy blue suit, white moustache and watery blue eyes. It seemed to him that the giant Belford knew what was happening and was pretending not to see or hear what was going on beneath him.

Why, the deputy chairman of the trustees asked Alex, had he not followed proper procedures, when he’d been a working scientist for twenty years?

‘If I’d followed proper procedures, I wouldn’t have been able to give him the cells,’ said Alex.

‘Then you shouldn’t have.’

‘I knew it wouldn’t help him. I think he did, too. But we knew it wouldn’t hurt him. He was infused with cells from exactly the same line when we ran safety tests a while back. They were his own cells.’

‘If you didn’t think it would help him why did you administer the cells?’ All five men and two women facing him had printouts of the MF story in front of them. They had other papers but it was the article they kept referring to, shuffling the two pages over and over.

‘He asked me to. I wanted him to be happy. He was about to die and he wanted hope.’

‘You’re not a qualified medical doctor. You had no business carrying out an untried, invasive procedure on such a sick man.’

‘A nurse was present. I was carrying out a dying man’s last wishes.’

‘You have no way of knowing that you didn’t shorten his life.’

‘I have no way of knowing that I didn’t lengthen his life.’

‘I find that an extraordinarily cavalier attitude,’ said the deputy chairman.

One of the lawyers leaned forward and spoke. He was turning a pen in his hands as if he was rolling a long black cigarette. ‘The issue that concerns me is one of consent,’ he said.

‘They were Harry’s cells, it was his request, and his son agreed to it.’

‘There’s no paper trail,’ said the lawyer. ‘There are no signatures. You didn’t sign the cells out, you didn’t tell anyone what you were doing, you don’t have any forms, you didn’t even make notes on the procedure. Now your cousin is saying
that he wasn’t given enough background to give informed consent.’

Alex was sure this face of coldness was assumed, that his inquisitors had forgotten they could relax and deal with it like the decent human beings they were. He leaned forward, spread out his hands in front of him, smiling and frowning, looking from face to face.

‘You knew my uncle,’ he said. ‘He was a great man. He didn’t want to die, and he was afraid of not having done enough to be remembered after he died. It didn’t seem wrong to give him what he wanted when nobody would be hurt by it. I didn’t want to live in his house. I didn’t ask for his wine. I didn’t want to give him the cells. I didn’t want to talk about the cells’ potential to inhibit human ageing in the
Nature
paper. I did it for him.’

He thought of Harry not long before he kicked the bucket, petulantly demanding to be taken upstairs when he thought it might be the end. ‘I don’t want to die in the living room,’ he’d said, and a mellow, staccato croak had come from him, the last warm laugh of a dying man.

‘Don’t you remember how funny he was?’ said Alex.

‘I’m not sure laughter is appropriate here,’ said the deputy chairman.

One of the trustees said: ‘Are you telling us that you altered the conclusion of a scientific report to please a superior?’

‘That’s not what I said, and that’s not what I did,’ said Alex. His mouth had gone dry. He didn’t understand the change that had come over people who’d been so fawning towards him the last time they’d met.

‘It sounded to me as if that’s just what you did,’ said the trustee.

‘We’re all on the same side here,’ said the lawyer.

Alex cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know what you want me to do,’ he said. ‘You know what happened. I’ll talk to Matthew and if you want me to say sorry to anyone I will.’

The deputy chairman pressed his fingertips together.
How old was he when he first did that?
thought Alex.
Does it comfort him?

‘There’s been some serendipity here,’ said the deputy chairman. ‘Because you’re on leave of absence while you make your film, we’re spared the awkwardness of suspending you during our investigation.’

Alex’s lips parted. The sound of ‘ending’ persisted in his ears.

‘We may need to postpone your return for longer.’

‘I have work to do,’ said Alex. ‘People are still falling ill.’

One of the trustees said: ‘Some of us questioned your commitment to the institute when you went off to get your face on the box.’

‘You encouraged me to go,’ said Alex. ‘I sat here in this room a few months ago and you told me that it would be good for the institute’s image. Why am I having to defend myself? This isn’t a court.’

‘The last time we saw you we thought you were a sober, responsible scientist.’

‘Nobody told me I wouldn’t be able to have a glass of wine if I became director.’

‘So it is true about the drunken episodes?’

‘You’re treating a report in an online scandal sheet, from a vindictive man, as if that’s the truth, and I have to prove otherwise,’ said Alex.

‘You’re saying your cousin is being vindictive?’ said one of the trustees.

‘Not Matthew. Val Oatman.’

‘What do you mean, vindictive?’ said the deputy chairman.

‘That’s a personal matter,’ said Alex.

The trustee cleared her throat and looked down at her papers. The deputy chairman looked at the others. The lawyer said: ‘It would help if we could be sure you were disclosing all the relevant information.’

‘I’ve told you everything you need to know,’ said Alex. He got up. ‘I take it you want me to vacate the house.’

‘It’s an awkward issue,’ said the deputy chairman. Alex walked out. He heard someone calling after him. It seemed to him that he was watching people he knew tearing at each other’s flesh with teeth and talons in a battle between good and evil in the last days of man.

As the week went on, his heart withered. It began to appear that Harry’s decomposed body might actually be dug up. He acquired a lawyer of his own, who said it was unlikely that he would face criminal proceedings. A woman named Jane from the BBC called to tell Alex that in the circumstances the broadcast of the film would be put back by at least a year.

The consequence of Alex’s mid-life introduction to injustice was a yearning for the world to be rebalanced and he began to look forward to the moment when Bec would expose Ritchie. He couldn’t see a way to punish Val or Matthew or to get them to admit they were wrong. He’d forgiven Bec and Dougie. The only possibility of redress was in the punishment of his old friend, and his desire to see him hurt encouraged him. It made him feel that he was a part of the human story after all. Were he able to choose between the ability to want revenge and the ability to dance, he would take the dancefloor
over a longing to see Ritchie in the stocks, but thirsting for revenge was something. He couldn’t understand why Bec didn’t speak about her brother.

On a dark March afternoon they were together in the living room of the Citron Square house, waiting for the removals van to take them to Bec’s old flat. Ragged flakes of snow the size of postage stamps were falling and settling in patches on the roofs opposite, cold enough for the snow to cling to like white moss at the overlap lines of the slates. They’d packed and had nothing more to do. Bec was sitting on the sofa, staring into the fireplace. They’d turned off the boiler and the residual warmth in the radiators was fading. Alex was standing by the door with his hands in his pockets. He went to the window that looked out on the street to see whether the van had come. Bec lifted up the coat lying next to her on the sofa and put it on.

‘When are you going to tell Karin what Ritchie did?’ said Alex.

Bec shivered and rubbed her hands together between her knees. ‘Val was too proud to publish the story about me. He thought he could be cruel to me like a gentleman, by attacking you. That’s what he seems to think he is: an old-fashioned English gentleman. Because they could be cruel, couldn’t they, old-fashioned English gentlemen? They challenged people to duels they knew they’d win. If a woman offended them they’d kill the woman’s lover or her husband and shame the woman’s brother, but they wouldn’t touch her, just leave her crying there with corpses of men around her.’

Alex sat on the sofa beside her. ‘When are you going to tell Karin?’ he said again.

‘I’m not going to.’

‘You’re going to keep your brother’s secret.’

‘Yes.’

‘He betrayed you, and betrayed his wife with a fifteen-year-old girl in his care, and he’s not going to be punished for it.’

‘Not by me.’

‘And we’ve been through hell without having done anything wrong.’

‘I did something wrong. I shouldn’t have had sex with Dougie. You didn’t do anything wrong but what Matthew did has nothing to do with Ritchie.’

‘It’s not fair.’

‘I don’t want to give him away. I don’t want to break up his family. I don’t want him to go to prison because of me. Just because he betrayed me doesn’t mean I have to betray him.’

‘What about the girl?’

Bec bent forward and reached into her bag. She took out a folded page ripped from a celebrity magazine, unfolded it and gave it to Alex. It was a page covered in small photos of people with heavily styled hair, white teeth and shiny skin in various tones of orange, yellow, terracotta, chocolate and flashbulb white. A circle had been drawn in black pen round one of the faces and a line drawn from the circle to the edge of the page, where the words
the ‘victim’!!!
were written. The marked face was of a thin young girl with pronounced cheekbones and lots of eyeliner. She was wearing a tight, strapless black dress and a silver necklace and was grinning into the camera. A boy with a shaved head and an earring, looking shy and eager in a suit and tie whose knot was too big, had his arm around her. The caption read
Craig Arbutnot with girlfriend Nicole
Culhame
. Alex recognised Arbutnot’s name; he was a footballer.

‘Ritchie sent me that,’ said Bec.

‘This is him showing you he hasn’t done her any harm.’

‘He wants to show me he did her nothing but good, I think. She’s seventeen now. I looked her up. She looks older in the pictures, doesn’t she? It must be the make-up.’

‘Or the life. Or Ritchie taking away her childhood. This picture doesn’t tell you anything. There’s a reason it’s against the law to have sex with people younger than sixteen. We don’t know how fucked up she is. She might be an alcoholic. She might be on cocaine. She might be on Prozac.’

‘She might be. She might have been that without Ritchie. It might fuck her up more to have to testify against Ritchie in court.’

‘People like us are always rolling over,’ said Alex. ‘We never fight back.’

‘I don’t want to be people like us,’ said Bec. ‘I want to decide what’s right and wrong. I want to be able to do things that don’t make sense if you’re selfish like Ritchie.’

‘That’s weakness.’

‘Now you sound like the Old Testament.’ Tears formed in Bec’s eyes. She pressed her hands to her belly. ‘I did this for you. I never wanted a child before, and I want one now, because of you, and there’s still so much I have to do. And instead of us talking about how the three of us are going to get through this all you can think about is persuading me to take revenge on my brother. That’s not how I want to live.’

One day the Moral Foundation collapsed. Its last act was to publish a complete list of sources for the dozens of exposés it had run in its short existence. Scores of people were revealed to have betrayed their friends and colleagues. Since Ritchie’s treachery had not resulted in a published story, his name wasn’t on the list. Midge’s was. When the people on the list contacted their lawyers, asking what had happened to their certificate of immunity, they got various answers. Some lawyers said that the certificates were cunningly worded; they guaranteed immunity from exposure of past misdeeds in return for the denunciation of others, but they didn’t guarantee immunity from exposure of the denunciations. Others reckoned their clients had a case. But when they began issuing writs against the Foundation, they found it had melted away. Its offices had been shut down a month earlier and its staff paid off. Its servers in Chile were paid up a year in advance, and no one seemed to know how the data could be accessed. Val disappeared, leaving his children in the care of the sister who had looked after them ever since Val had his breakdown and left the newspaper.

The question of what happened to Val became a perennial mystery. He became more mythic in his disappearance than
he had been as the unseen genius of the MF. Each report and sighting was picked apart and rewoven into a set of stories, superficially different, that were in fact the same myth of the zealot doomed to be trapped within the shrinking walls of his own zealotry. He’d grown a beard, converted to Islam, learned Arabic and lived in a compound in Riyadh, where he kept four wives and consorted with Wahhabis. He’d grown a beard, converted to Greek Orthodoxy and lived in a cell on Mount Athos. He’d grown a beard, joined a strict Calvinist sect and lived on a croft in the Hebrides. He was a Mormon in Utah, a Jesuit in Manila, a rabbi in Jerusalem. As for his dovecot of orphaned consciences, the consciences, abandoned by their new keeper, presumably starved to death. Despite the social upheaval caused by the Moral Foundation’s last act, their original owners didn’t seem to want them back.

It seemed to Ritchie that the end of the MF marked a rejuvenation, a sharpening of senses that had been dull and pinched for too long. He would have felt pity for Midge had his former friend not lashed out at him so bitterly. ‘Typical of you to rat on somebody so lame they weren’t worth humiliating in public,’ Midge said.

Midge had no more idea than anyone that Ritchie had given his sister up to the moral authorities; the right reaction to the absence of Ritchie’s name on the MF’s valedictory traitor list, Ritchie felt, would have been to assume that Ritchie had never betrayed anyone, and Midge’s claim of general astonishment among mutual acquaintances that Ritchie hadn’t been fingered was surely wrong.

More than anything in those strange times he took pleasure in Ruby’s guitar lessons. He taught her to play Sisters of Mercy one day while Karin was off touring. They sat in Karin’s
room at one corner of the house, with windows on two sides.

‘This is a lovely chord sequence,’ said Ritchie. ‘Shall we try it? D. That’s right.
Brought me
… D’s the mother chord, she’s mellow, she’s bright, steers clear of the low strings. You’ve got to love D. Now A …
their comfort
… A’s like D’s husband, absolutely straight, strong, reliable, holding it all together. Then we’ve got G …
and later
… G’s the son, the one they’ve been waiting for, he spans all six strings, he’s low and he’s high at the same time, G’s kind of magnificent. D, A, G – that’s all you need, you can change the world with those chords. And now what comes along? F sharp minor! …
they brought me
… it’s the difficult daughter, sad, complicated, in a different place altogether. That’s right, it’s a bar chord. Press all the strings down with that finger. I know, it’s hard. And then E …
their song
. E for end.’

‘Am I a difficult daughter?’ said Ruby.

‘Of course not,’ said Ritchie.

‘I’m not sad and complicated.’

‘I never said you were, darling.’

‘You said you were going to put me on television.’

‘I’m sorry, darling. It just didn’t work out. Sometimes entertainment’s like that.’

Big tears splashed onto Ruby’s guitar and her shoulders shook. She began to bawl. Ritchie put his guitar down and tried to take Ruby’s from her so he could clasp her in his arms but she clutched the soundbox and twisted away from him and went on crying.

‘You said you would put me on TV if I didn’t tell Mum about the phone and I didn’t tell her about the phone and you didn’t put me on TV.’

‘Oh darling,’ said Ritchie. ‘I do lots of nice things for you.’

‘I want to be on television,’ said Ruby, snivelling and letting Ritchie take the guitar away from her. He lifted her up and put her on his lap. She was getting big. He reached for a bunch of paper hankies and carefully wiped her nose.

‘I’m going to tell Mum about the phone,’ said Ruby.

‘OK,’ said Ritchie. ‘Let’s have a talk about this, shall we? Because Mummy’s not coming back till tomorrow.’

‘I’ll tell her then.’

‘Fine. So, let’s see where we are, shall we? You want me to put you on TV, and if I don’t, you’re going to tell Mummy about the phone.’

‘Yes.’

‘You know something about me that I don’t want Mummy to know and you’re using that to try to get what you want.’

Ruby thought about this for a moment and nodded.

‘You’re very clever,’ said Ritchie. ‘This is something grownups do. It’s called blackmail.’

‘Why’s it called blackmail?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Ritchie. ‘There’s email, and there’s Gmail. Why shouldn’t there be blackmail?’

‘They should call it Bmail!’ she said.

‘You really are a clever girl, aren’t you? Now the thing about blackmail is, it’s like F sharp minor. It’s tricky. Do you want to learn a bit about it?’

‘OK.’

‘Well, the first thing is that if you’re going to blackmail somebody, you have to make sure that you’re not going to hurt yourself even more than the person you’re blackmailing.’

‘What does that mean?’ said Ruby. She sounded a little bored.

‘Well, here’s an example,’ said Ritchie. ‘I haven’t kept my promise to you about putting you on television yet, so you want to tell Mummy about the phone. But if you tell Mummy about the phone, then Daddy will have to go away.’

‘Where?’

‘Just away. Far away.’

‘For how long?’

‘I don’t know. For ever, perhaps. You don’t want that, do you?’

Ruby looked down and played with her fingers and began to cry again, silently this time.

‘You love Daddy, don’t you?’

Ruby nodded.

‘You don’t want to be on television so much that you want me to go away for ever, do you?’ Ruby shook her head.

‘Well, you’ll have to keep the phone thing secret. I know it’s unfair but that’s one of these things you have to learn in life. Blackmail doesn’t always work.’

‘Why’s the phone secret?’ said Ruby in a small voice.

‘The thing about families,’ said Ritchie, ‘is that no one has to know everything about everyone. You don’t know all the things I’ve said to Dan and he doesn’t know all the things I’ve talked about with you.’

‘Can I have some ice cream?’ said Ruby.

‘Of course, let’s get some,’ said Ritchie. He took his daughter’s hand and they went to the kitchen together. ‘It was the same with me and Auntie Bec and your grandfather,’ he said. ‘We had our secrets from each other. The daddy you see is like Dan’s daddy but there’s the dad only you see, your own special secret daddy, that nobody else knows about. And when
you grow up and have children you won’t show all your children everything, either. Each of your children will have their own special secret mummy. That’s the way people are. Now, what have we got? Pistachio!’