Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
I learned at medical school how the colour of blood changes with its state of oxygenation, from dark, almost purplish, through to the brightest lurid red, but whatever its precise colour, our earlier selves must have formed a deep relationship with it. Relationship, that’s the only word I can use, and still, after all my time thinking about it, I cannot find an answer to the question of blood.
Chapter 14
At some point after my return from Paris and before Marian’s arrival, I was called in to see the Head of Department, Dr Downey. My boss.
Although he didn’t refer to it once, it was obvious that I had not impressed in Paris. Somehow word had reached him of my performance at the rostrum, and I wondered if he also knew I’d skipped a couple of sessions. All this sat unspoken on his desk between us, and I was unable to defend myself, for the accusations were not said aloud, and they were all the more damaging because of that.
Downey was a forbidding figure, old school, of uncertain age, probably in his late sixties, though I speculated idly about whether he’d been a classmate of Darwin, he was so antediluvian. He spoke to me in the kind of way that made you think he added
Listen here, young man
to everything he said to you, though it was done just with his eyebrows and his forefinger.
He sat before me in the gloom of his office and after some ambling around, saying nothing really, he got to the point.
‘You’re going to have to make up your mind what you want in life,’ he said. I sat up a bit straighter. This sounded like plain speaking – something I had rarely heard from Downey. ‘Do you want to be a consultant for the rest of your life, or do you want to try something different? God knows you’ve got there at a frighteningly young age; that’s going to mean a long career in the hospital, practising your art. The board has approved the plans to move to a new site. In about ten years from now there’ll be a grand new hospital to work in on the edge of town. We intend it to be the finest in the country. So you can work there, putting into practice everything you’ve learned, or you could do something else: you could be the one to move on our sum of learning, the one who discovers the laws that others will learn.’
He was, of course, selling me only one choice, and I knew what he expected.
‘Is there an area that interests you? Something you’d like to look into? Think about it. I’ll give you a small team of researchers. Just bring me something we can be proud of.’
I stumbled out of Downey’s office feeling as though I’d been told to invent gravity, but by that evening, over drinks with Donald, I realised it wasn’t so bad. Off the top of my head there were at least four interesting areas in haematology at the time, and I just needed to pick one that would interest me, and that I had a chance of cracking.
I think it was that evening Donald told me he was moving to London, to set up in private practice. He had got married earlier that year, and although I liked his wife, she certainly had expensive tastes.
‘She wants children,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘and I need more money.’
I was sad that Donald was leaving, but just then it didn’t bother me too much, because I had something I was anticipating, greatly.
Marian.
When she arrived I went to meet her at the station. She’d wired her arrival time, and the train was punctual.
When I saw her step down from the carriage, it felt like a small physical blow, as if something had knocked into me from behind. I think I actually caught a breath, then told myself to act as coolly as I could and went to meet her, my arms frozen to my sides, though I wanted to put them around her. And by the time we walked into town, me carrying her bag, and we got to St Andrew’s Street, I knew I was in love with her, and I felt sick, because I didn’t get the slightest impression that she was in love with me in return.
I felt swept along, out of my depth in waters I knew little about. My experience of women was limited; I had been to a boys’ school, so my first encounters with any girls of my own age apart from my sister had to wait until I came up to Cambridge. In the war, in France, there were those times when the men queued underneath a red lamp on some filthy street corner, but I chose not to accompany them. One more thing that set me apart from them. I pretended it was because I was wary of disease.
So the mere presence of Marian was almost too powerful for me. The click of her heels on the cobbles, the smell of her hair as it brushed near me, the warmth of her hand on my arm.
Marian talked away happily, and I found it was all I could do to answer her. She was fascinated by Cambridge, and had a hundred questions for me about this building and that church, and I quickly remembered what a remarkable place it rightly was to any visitor, let alone a young American on her first trip to England.
‘I found you a guest room at Caius,’ I told her. ‘It’s not far.’
‘That’s your college?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but I don’t live in the Old Courts any more, I have a flat now, by the cricket ground. Here we are. Look, just wait here while I get your key.’
We ducked into the gates of Gonville Court, and I set Marian with her case just inside while I went into the porter’s lodge. My heart sank. The porter was one I knew well, a curmudgeon from my own time as an undergraduate.
‘I’ve booked a room for a visiting academic from Paris,’ I said. ‘Fisher.’
I waited while the porter made the slowest job possible of looking up something in a large book, all without saying a word to me. He glanced up again, and was just about to turn and start a presumably equally laborious hunt for a key when he saw something over my shoulder.
Marian had drifted into view, her case in her hand.
‘Monsieur Fisher is a lady?’ the porter asked, sarcastically.
I groaned.
It took half an hour of wrangling before they agreed to let Marian use a guest room in the all-male college, even just for one night, until other arrangements could be made.
‘I’m so sorry about that,’ I said, as I found our way to the third floor and unlocked the room.
Marian didn’t seem to mind; on the contrary, she found it amusing.
‘What century is this, anyway?’ she laughed.
‘You’d be surprised. I’ll have a word with the Master. He likes me because I was a good student. Did them proud, you know?’
‘Were you a good student, Charles?’ asked Marian, her eyes twinkling, teasing me.
She walked round the large but simple room overlooking the courtyard. It was quiet, most students were down for Easter, and as dusk fell over the rooftops, it suddenly seemed rather spooky.
‘Will you be all right here?’ I asked, quite seriously.
‘As long as you keep that dinosaur off my back,’ she said, laughing again. ‘Well? Were you a good student?’
‘One of the best,’ I said, quietly. ‘Or so they said. And this is a college with strong links to medicine. That goes all the way back to John Caius himself, though he would admit no student who was blind, dumb, deformed, maimed, or otherwise diseased. Or Welsh.’
Marian looked at me sharply.
‘Is that English humour?’
‘Sadly not, it’s true. Or so they say.’
‘So they say. So they say. I can see I still have a lot to learn about Englishmen.’
Suddenly I was powerfully aware that we were alone in her room. The door stood open still, her bag just inside, and yet there was a strong sense of seclusion, of intimacy. She stood by the large window, almost in silhouette; beyond her, the roofs of the college were cut out against a light grey sky. Everything was quiet. I noticed her waist, so slim, and the curve of her hipbone through her dress, and for a fraction of a second, I pictured myself on my knees before her, kissing her stomach.
The moment seemed to stretch on, but was broken as someone clattered past in the corridor heading for the stairwell. The footsteps receded.
‘Can we eat?’ Marian asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
It was the closest we ever were.
Chapter 15
The following evening, I took her to meet Hunter and of course they got along famously.
They spoke about Dante Alighieri, and his work. They spoke about things I had little or no understanding of, and as they spoke on, it was as if I grew invisible, so forgotten had I become.
We sat in Hunter’s rooms in Sidney, and as he poured generous libations for his guests, he peppered Marian with questions.
‘Charles tells me you want to write on blood in Dante. What on earth possesses you to do such a thing?’
The question seemed impertinent, challenging, but Marian was not intimidated, or if she was, she did not show it. While she gave a long and reasoned and somewhat passionate explanation of what it was she wanted to do, Hunter sat and listened. Even I, knowing him so well, could not tell for a moment what he was thinking. When she was finished, Marian leaned back slightly in her chair and at last I saw a trace of nerves. So, she did care what the great Hunter Wilson thought, and what he thought was this:
‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘Quite a brilliant notion. To show that for Dante, blood is not simply a metaphor, but that it is, at times,
literally
the seat of love, or of fear, or of bravery. Wonderful. As far as I know, there is no one else in the world working in this way.’
He looked up and sideways slightly, something he always did when quoting from memory.
‘
Vedi la bestia per cu’ io mi volsi
aiutami da lei, famoso saggio,
ch’ ella mi fa tremar le vene e i polsi.
’
‘From the
Inferno
. “She makes me tremble, and the veins in my wrists.” So beautiful,’ Marian said, nodding enthusiastically. ‘Or consider when he sees Beatrice, miraculously alive, the first time after her death. “
Men che dramma, di sangue m’è rimaso che non tremi: conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma.
”’
Even I could understand the thrust of that without Hunter saying, ‘“What drama! There remains blood in me that does not tremble. I recognise the signs of an ancient flame.”’
And if I understood it, I understood it because it made clear what I’d felt at the station when I saw Marian again: a stillness amongst the trembling of my blood. And that, I thought, is why we turn to the great poets of our world, because they simply say these things better than we do.
Their conversation deepened, and I faded more and more into the background of the room, but I was not jealous, because Hunter in full flow was always a thing to behold, and it gave me more of a chance to look at Marian without fear of censure.
They spoke in greater detail about what it was that Marian wanted to do, which, as far as I understood, was to link Dante’s work to his understanding of Aristotelian medicine, to show how his use of blood went far beyond the metaphorical.
‘He has this concept,
sangue perfetto
, and I believe it lies at the heart of everything he does, that it links everything from the creation of a human being to their development and nourishment, to the relationship between body and soul, to their relationship with God.’
Hunter agreed.
‘That’s true.
Sangue perfetto
. According to Aristotle, this perfect blood was the source of all the body’s fluids, from mother’s milk to semen. They are just distillations – mere purifications – of that blood. He even supposed there was a vein of love, the vena amoris, that ran all the way from the heart to the fourth finger . . .’
‘Which is why we wear a wedding band there even today,’ Marian said.
If I’d thought before that she was not beautiful, I was wrong. That evening, as she lost herself in what was for her a thrilling conversation with Hunter, she had a beauty deeper than some surface show. She loved what she spoke about, and she loved that Hunter knew as much as she did, more in fact. It gave her a kind of honesty, an openness. A kind of innocence, as she forgot to pretend to be the cool American girl who had been tough enough to leave home and lose her parents in doing so, and instead became a young soul marvelling at what the world had put in front of her. And that was beautiful.
‘But,’ said Hunter, after a while, ‘you still haven’t answered my first question.’
Marian didn’t reply. She seemed as mystified as I was; wasn’t that what they’d been talking about for hours?
‘My original question was why?
Why
do you want to study this thing about blood? Not
what
do you want to study . . .’
Still Marian didn’t reply, and I could see that the question had hit home.
‘I . . . I have no idea,’ she said in such a serious way that a moment later all three of us burst out laughing. ‘Really, no one’s ever asked me that. Not even me.’
‘Is it something you’ve always been interested in?’ I suggested.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘No. Not really. I just enjoyed reading Dante and . . .’
‘And you came up with an idea that no one else ever has,’ Hunter proffered. That was one of the things I admired in him: he was generous, intellectually generous, in a way that so few people are, and even fewer academics.