The Prize (26 page)

The servant had pulled the champagne away from the stranger’s outstretched hand. Madàme had been explicit, the night before, about this. ‘No—it is not for you. I have seen her husband.’

Claude had then realized that this was a mistake. ‘I am sorry, but you have the wrong room.’

‘This is the right room,’ insisted the witless servant. ‘I spoke to Madàme here last night.’

Claude had become impatient with this tomfoolery. ‘What makes you think I am not her husband?’

‘I saw
him
in there last night.’ He peered past Claude just as Denise rose from the sofa, and he recognized her. ‘Madàme, here is the gift you ordered for your—’

Something had begun to penetrate Claude’s head, and he wheeled about in time to see his wife desperately waving off the room-service relic.

‘I—I—yes, it is the wrong room.’ The servant had begun to retreat when Claude was galvanized into action. He had gone after the man in the corridor and roughly collared him.

‘You saw a man in the room with my wife last night?’

The servant had been struck speechless, but a severe shaking had rattled the truth out of him, quickly, stumblingly, even to the admission that the tall young man glimpsed with Denise had been in pyjamas.

Claude had returned to the suite, slamming the door behind him, and advanced on Denise like the
procureur général
on a quaking defendant. The skirmish had been brief, and the defence had collapsed entirely. Foolishly, Denise had tried to take the whole burden of guilt upon herself, had even tried to transfer some of it to him. If she had not been so widowed and hurt by his affair, if she had not been so needful of love and reassurance, she would not have succumbed so easily to Oscar Lindblom’s blandishments. There, the name was out—Lindblom! The betrayer, the traducer, the Nordic Casanova! For now, to absolve herself, the truer truths poured out—Lindblom’s silken persuasion, his ardent whisperings and practised hands, his strong and urgent body, his overwhelming and irresistible passion—Lindblom!

‘There is the laboratory, Dr. Marceau,’ the butler was saying.

‘Thank you,’ snapped Claude. ‘That will be all.’

He left Motta behind, and strode vengefully to the door, gripping the knob with a strong hand that would, in seconds, bash in the face of the rapist. Since Count Axel von Fersen had played his little game with Marie Antoinette, every young Swede had fancied himself a Fersen.
Au revoir
, Lindblom, you will be the last of the line, Claude promised himself, and he burst into the large laboratory work-room.

At first, to his stinging disappointment, he thought the place vacant, and then, from behind the far row of beakers, he heard a voice.

‘Who is it?’

Claude rushed around the counter, and then pulled up short.

Not Lindblom, but Ragnar Hammarlund, ridiculous in a onepiece suit of overalls such as Winston Churchill had once affected, confronted him.

‘Dr. Marceau—what a delightful surprise!’

‘Where’s this chemist—this Oscar Lindblom of yours?’

‘Lindblom? Out. I sent him out on an errand. He should return shortly. May I be of service, Dr. Marceau?’

‘No, it is this Lindblom I want,’ said Claude belligerently.

Hammarlund pretended not to notice his visitor’s vexation. ‘Does he expect you?’

‘I think not.’

‘He will be honoured by your appearance, as am I. His admiration for you and your wife exceeds worship.’

Claude was too irritable to enjoy insincerity. ‘You flatter us.’

‘Not enough,’ said Hammarlund, bringing a silk handkerchief from his hip pocket and brushing his forehead. ‘Dr. Lindblom is a shy, retiring young man of modest attainments who is well acquainted with your work, and for years you have been his idol.’

This did not coincide with Claude’s picture of a lecher. ‘I had a different impression of him at your dinner—a brash, over-confident fellow—’

‘Surely you must be thinking of someone else,’ interrupted Hammarlund. ‘Why, when your wife came to visit the laboratory the other morning, Dr. Lindblom was incoherent with excitement.’

‘My wife came here?’ Claude glanced coldly about the laboratory. So this was the sordid scene of the seduction. This was where it began—and the egotism of the lecher, to celebrate the insult further, in the husband’s own hotel suite last night!

‘Yes,’ Hammarlund went on, ‘your wife was intrigued by Dr. Lindblom’s findings in the field of synthetic foods.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Claude bitterly. He looked about again, and a thought came to him: where had the seduction taken place? On the hard floor? Too incredible to conceive. ‘Is this the only room here?’

‘No, by no means. We have what we call our “think” room. Come, you can wait there for Dr. Lindblom. It will be more comfortable.’

They walked into the adjoining office, and Claude stared at the offending sofa, and it all became clear.

‘Have a seat,’ said Hammarlund. ‘May I order you something from the house?’

Although he had not yet eaten this day, Claude wanted no hospitality from a host whose employee he would momentarily reduce to minced sausage. ‘No, thank you.’ He sat stiffly on the sofa, and was somehow glad it did not squeak. He extracted an English cigarette from his silver case, and accepted the flame from Hammarlund’s lighter.

‘Have you come to see Dr. Lindblom on a matter of professional interest?’ inquired Hammarlund, finding a place at the far end of the sofa.

Claude wished that the hideous man would remove himself from the premises, but then good reason reminded him these were, indeed, the hideous man’s own premises, and that he would have to be answered. For a moment, Claude considered revealing to Hammarlund the real motive for his visit. But he wanted no forewarning, no bickering, no alarm. He wanted only one swift punch at Lindblom’s leering superior blond face—one would do it—put him down whimpering, and salvage all pride and honour. Underlings simply did not cuckold Nobel laureates, he told himself, and the rebellious ones must be put in their places, even if by violence.

He tried to recall Hammarlund’s question, and then he did. ‘Yes, you might say I have a professional interest in seeing your Lindblom.’

‘Stimulated by your wife’s visit here, I hope?’

‘You might put it that way,’ answered Claude wryly.

‘Then she informed you of Dr. Lindblom’s remarkable talent?’

‘Only too well.’

This was deteriorating, Claude saw, into one of those sex skits at the Concert Mayol all full of innocent questions and answers that had double meanings, and elicited from French audiences rollicking merriment. Although the immediacy of his anger had abated for lack of outlet, Claude was in no humour for this nonsense. He wanted to change the tenor of conversation. Now Hammarlund gave him the cue.

‘Well, before Dr. Lindblom returns to speak of his work in person,’ Hammarlund was saying, ‘perhaps I could brief you on some aspects of it that might be of interest.’

‘By all means—do,’ said Claude, trying to display interest, but only eager to pass the time as quickly as possible.

At once, with the enthusiasm of a monomaniac, Ragnar Hammarlund began to expound on the necessity and value of discovering basic food synthetics. Edibles produced by chemical means would be healthier, would be cheaper, would bring an end to undernourishment, even to starvation, throughout the world. Once chemists could discover the synthesis for fats, proteins, carbohydrates, utopia would be on the earth.

‘I am not alone in believing this,’ said Hammarlund. He jumped to his feet, went to the desk, ran a finger across a row of books and found what he was looking for. ‘Here is an American chemist, Jacob Rosin, who wrote a fine book on the subject,
The Road to Abundance
.’ Hammarlund was turning the pages, until he had what he sought. ‘Listen to him. “Once the industrial synthesis of the carbohydrates, proteins, and fats is achieved, the bondage that chained mankind to the plant will be broken. The result will be the greatest revolution in history since man learned how to make fire. Hundreds of millions of hard-working farmers and farm workers will be replaced by chemical machinery. The surface of our earth will be freed from its dedication to food production. A new way of life will emerge.” ’ Hammarlund cast the book aside. ‘You see what is possible?’

At first, Claude had not listened carefully, but now Hammarlund’s condescension as he assumed a pedagogue’s lecture stance irritated him into a certain attentiveness. He was not, he reminded himself, a callow student. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry. ‘I know the goal well enough, Mr. Hammarlund. There are always these dreamers’ goals. The problem comes down to the obstacles—the hard obstacles we find in the laboratory—that usually make the end of the road unreachable.’

Now that he had the laureate engaged, Hammarlund became more forceful. It was almost as if his invisible face had taken on human colorations of emotion. ‘Of course, Dr. Marceau, I am not so impractical as to ignore the obstacles. But what are these in the field of synthetic foods? First, we must overcome the belief of the public—coveted also by too many scientists—that the only healthy foods are nature’s foods. You know that is rot, and so do I. Cauliflower, beans, peas, raw eggs, whole wheat, coffee are all hoaxes, filled with countless poisons that we have survived only because of restraint in our eating habits. Synthetic foods could be manufactured without these poisons. Second, we must sell the world the belief that chemical substitute nutriments can be as pleasurable as doctored meats and vegetables and bakery products, can look as attractive, smell as good, and taste as wonderful as the so-called natural foods. Third, we must prove to mankind that synthetic foods can be made to contain all the necessary values of known foods—carbohydrates, proteins, fats, water, vitamins, minerals.’

What was annoying to Claude Marceau was that Hammarlund was making it all child’s play. He was an industrialist and a superficial dabbler in the sciences. What did he know of the real problems of synthesis? For the first time in years, Claude began to recollect his early trials in the laboratory with Denise by his side, the days of toil, the weary nights of monotonous persistence, the tumbling into bed fatigued to the marrow, eyes bleary and neck constricted and bones almost arthritic, and in the brain, a chaotic spinning.

He was sorely tempted to expose Hammarlund to himself. He began to bait the millionaire, and to his surprise, Hammarlund delighted in the challenge and fought back with an amazing fund of case histories, facts, figures. It became evident, as the time passed, that while Hammarlund had no creative scientific imagination, he had sound knowledge of what had been done and what, indeed, might be done.

Gradually, without being fully aware of what was happening to him, Claude found himself locked in a rigorous debate with Hammarlund on the limitations of algae as a natural food substitute, on the degree to which synthetic edibles could be produced wholesomely and free of dangerous poisons, on the value of the findings in the synthesis of vitamins as they might be applied to foods as yet undiscovered, on the probability of breaking down the chemical structure of various proteins and inventing cheap man-made substitutes, on the usefulness of Chlorella and soyabeans as springboards to other nutrients.

The minutes sped by, but so engaged and absorbed was Claude Marceau that he had no realization of the passage of time. It had been months since he had truly discussed a new field in biochemistry. After the discovery that he and Denise had made in the sperm field, their interest in that subject, already worn thin, had flagged. Lectures in France, and speeches and panels here in Sweden, had been undertaken as duties. The old subject had been discussed publicly as if by rote. For so many months now, it was as if Claude Marceau’s scientific mind had been an arid desert, where nothing living could be seen, where nothing living stirred. And now, suddenly, so unpredictably, the desert was being populated by a clamouring mob, materialized divinely from nowhere, begging for the sustenance of life, dinning their desperation and their problem, an unknown civilization on the desert to be organized and led and saved.