‘No one ever calls you that.’
‘No one. Except my mum.’ I felt her waiting for more. ‘She would like me to be in a laboratory in Cambridge. Threatens to cut me off in every letter. And I can’t do this work without her support. We don’t have the kind of grants you have in America. Nor have I written a best-selling book, or any book for that matter.’ She’d ask next about the rest of the family, so I thought I should head her off. ‘Everyone else is dead so she seems to have a great deal of energy for me.’
‘Who is everybody else?’
‘My father and brothers.’
‘How?’
There was an American anthropologist for you. No delicate changing of the subject, no You have my deepest condolences or even How ghastly for you, but just a no-nonsense, straight-on How the heck did that happen?
‘John in the war. Martin in an accident six years later. And my father of heart failure, most likely due to the sad fact that runty old me was all that was left of his legacy.’
‘Hardly runty.’
‘Runty in the brain. My brothers were geniuses in their own ways.’
‘Everyone becomes a genius when they die young. What were they smart at?’
I told her about John and his boots and pail, the rare moth, the fossils in the trenches. And about Martin. ‘My father thought it showed inordinate hubris for Martin to try and write a poem.’
‘Fen told me your father coined the word genetics.’
‘He didn’t mean to. He wanted to teach a course on Mendel and what was then called gene plasma. He felt it needed a more dignified word than plasma.’
‘Did he want you to continue where he left off?’
‘He wasn’t capable of imagining anything else for us. It was all that mattered to him. He believed it was our duty.’
‘When did he die?’
‘Nine years this winter.’
‘So he knew you’d transgressed.’
‘He knew I was reading ethnography with Haddon.’
‘He thought it was a soft science?’
‘It wasn’t science at all. Not to him.’ I could hear my father clearly. Pure nonsense.
‘And your mother is of the same persuasion?’
‘Stalin to his Lenin. I am nearly thirty but entirely in her thrall. My father left it that she hold the purse strings.’
‘Well, you’ve managed to build your jail cell at a good distance from her.’
I felt I should encourage her to sleep. You need rest, I should have said, but did not. ‘It wasn’t an accident. With Martin. He killed himself.’
‘Why?’
‘He was in love with a girl and she didn’t want him. He’d gone to her flat with a love poem he’d written and she wouldn’t read it. So he went and stood under the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus and shot himself. I have the poem. It’s not his best. But the bloodstains give it a little dignity.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘I thought it was Eros in Piccadilly.’ She plucked at a pencil on my desk. For a second I thought she was going to start taking notes.
‘Many people do. But it’s his twin brother, the avenger of unrequited love. Poetic to the last.’
Most women like to fuss around a wound of your past, pick at the thin scab, comfort you after they’d made it sting. Not Nell.
‘Do you have a favorite part of all this?’ she asked.
‘All what?’ I said.
‘This work.’
Favorite part? There was little at this point that didn’t make me want to run with my stones straight back into the river. I shook my head. ‘You first.’
She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected the question to come back at her. She narrowed her grey eyes. ‘It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion—you’ve only been there eight weeks—and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.’
‘Bloody hell.’ I laughed.
‘You don’t get that?’
‘Christ, no. A good day for me is when no little boy steals my underwear, pokes it through with sticks, and brings it back stuffed with rats.’