Reunion (22 page)

She sounded tentative, but perhaps not surprising given he had knocked back so many of her invitations. Or perhaps it was Fleur and she was embarrassed at the rekindling of an affair she had insisted was over. But flush with energy and already toying with an idea for a second essay, he accepted her invitation. It was only when he was in the car and driving to her place that he realised something was amiss. He was not rehearsing the meeting which was about to take place, he was not nervous, he was not racked with yearning. He was excited to be seeing her, but his other usual responses were quiet.

3.

They settled in the courtyard with coffee, not green tea Jack was pleased to note, and talked in a way they had not for a long time, stepping off from his essay on to broader issues of political authority and control.

‘How desperate we must be for security to relinquish so much in the way of responsibility and decision-making,' Ava said. ‘It's not surprising politicians get away with blatant lies.'

‘And blatant neglect of human rights,' Jack added.

Ava was thoughtful, often stopping to find just the right word. In fact, uncharacteristically she talked at his pace, which he found rather touching. Touching and nothing else, certainly not evidence that finally she was loving him.

They talked across a swathe of topics. But after an hour she seemed to be picking her way through the arguments with extra care.

‘Are you all right?' Jack asked.

She blushed as if caught out.

But whatever had embarrassed her it was not Fleur. Ava spoke freely about Fleur's visit to Melbourne, about that vacant space when love has gone, her sense of incredulity that she had loved this woman for years and years, had suffered over her and made others suffer. She could still see Fleur's attractions, she said, but her flaws were now visible as well.

‘Her self-concern, her vanity, her carelessness with people.' There was a long pause, almost as if she were redrafting the relationship as she talked. ‘Even though I suffered as a result of these qualities, I never really saw them before. I expect I didn't want to.'

Might he have deluded himself in similar fashion? Jack wondered. After all – and it took an effort to acknowledge it – most of what had occurred between him and Ava had been produced in his own imagination.

It seemed that the protection, the deception, of years was shedding fast and there was nothing, nothing whatsoever he could do about it. Delusion? He had suffered it in bucketfuls.
Worse still, he had tethered his imagination to his love for Ava, and the imagination, knowing its master, had always placed him at the centre of its conceits. Not only deluded but narcissistic as well. Perhaps all romantic love is.

He looked at her, the love of his life. She sat slumped and pale against the red canvas of her chair – clearly the contact with Fleur had exacted a heavy toll. And for the first time he noticed the lines around her eyes and a faint staining of the skin on her cheeks. Her shirt in the gossamer material she had always favoured clung to her body; she looked as if she had lost weight. He was aware of feeling protective of her, as a parent might for a child.

She sighed. ‘If only all days could be like this.'

And habit kicked in: they can, he wanted to say, I'm available, always available to you. And reason pulled him back. She's weary, she's relaxed, her statement has nothing to do with you.

He leaned back in his chair and he, too, relaxed.

‘Could you kill someone you loved?'

The question so startled him he wondered if he had heard correctly.

‘What I mean is: could you help someone end their life?'

Ava indicated a newspaper lying on the ground. There was a photograph of an elderly man flanked by police officers. The headline read, ‘Husband to stand trial for wife's murder'. Ava related the story: a loving marriage of forty years; wife diagnosed with cancer; years of treatment; no hope; much pain; husband helps to end her life.

‘Could you help someone you love die?' she asked again.

Jack looked at her, this woman he had loved all his adult life, and slowly shook his head. ‘I don't believe so.'

She reached forward and took his hand. ‘I thought as much.'

 

Jack had planned to put in an appearance at NOGA after leaving Ava's place, but instead he went home. He let himself into the flat and walked slowly through the rooms. This place, so full of memories, suddenly struck him as anonymous; with the exception of his old bedroom, a shrine to his eighteen-year-old self, he might not be living here at all.

Lytton Strachey in a letter to his brother James had referred to ‘a one-place-at-a-table-laid-for-six life'. It described Jack's to perfection. Could he pick up his life now? Could he direct it differently? Or would he be like an alcoholic who remains an alcoholic even after he has stopped drinking? Would he always be addicted to Ava?

He had been flirting with a second essay. He planned to call it ‘Starving for certainty'. It would connect the collapse of communism with the rise of religious fundamentalism in the developing world, and an increasing social fundamentalism with the collapse of liberalism in the West. The essay united the major points of his own past – his parents' beliefs and the values of his formative years as a student – as well as thrusting him deep into the contemporary world.

He made himself a coffee and went into his study. It took just a couple of minutes to remove the ancient flyers and posters from the walls. He wavered in front of the rubbish bin, then folded them in a neat pile and shoved them at the back of the filing cabinet. Before starting his new essay he sent an email to Ava, thanking her for a lovely day.

1.

Waiting, flying, more waiting, flying again, food, films, announcements, computer battery threateningly low and the man in the next seat threateningly large. The journey from Melbourne to Atlanta dragged on and on.

Helen tried to work but her mind ran on a different track. Might this be her last meeting? Might she be forced out of science? And how would she live if she were? The same questions plundered the endless hours. And when she did manage to sleep, it was a pseudo-sleep fractured by a series of microbe-related disasters. It began with the delivery of anthrax into a football stadium, with two sleeping Helens debating how many aerosol squirts of the bug would be required to infect all the spectators. She woke up long enough to drink a bottle of water and then was thrown into the thick of an APEC meeting brought to a halt by watermelon injected with contaminated water. It would be the work of an insider and easily traced, said one sleeping Helen, not so easily traced, argued another, given the army of personnel required to run the show. The APEC incident segued into an outbreak of food poisoning among the
troops in Iraq – a disaster which had, in fact, already occurred, with one Helen arguing sabotage against the other's case for carelessness. From Melbourne to Los Angeles to Atlanta one terror scenario merged into another. When the aircraft finally touched down her brain had jammed.

She limped into the terminal. And then, to her relief, there was a shift in momentum. Her bag was the first to appear on the luggage carousel, security nodded her through, a driver was waiting to whisk her into the city. At the hotel she was welcomed as a returning guest and registered without delay. Her room was comfortable, the shower was vigorous, she changed into fresh clothes and went down to the hotel bar. Her colleagues were expecting her – Josh, originally from Israel but for many years at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Sam from the UK, Takeshi the shigella man from Japan, and Jeanne from Belgium, attending her first international meeting.

Greetings were brief, a drink appeared and soon she was immersed in the conversation. Two hours later and still talking, the group moved to the hotel restaurant. They ate while they talked and when the restaurant closed they returned to the bar to continue their discussion – including, to Helen's amusement, the science behind the food contamination affecting the troops in Iraq.

Josh and his group in Atlanta had coordinated the PFGE work on the outbreak. ‘We eliminated sabotage as soon as the same contamination showed up in salad packs delivered to trainees on bivouac in Texas.'

‘Same contractor do the salad packs?' Sam asked.

‘You got it.'

PFGE, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, a type of bacterial fingerprinting in which bacteria isolated in vastly different
places could be shown to originate from the same source, had brought about a revolution in tracing techniques. And while tracking did not prevent outbreaks, PFGE had been extraordinarily effective in confining the damage. It also connected the scientists on a very regular basis: these days they counted one another as friends.

It was two o'clock when they called it a night. Helen could not say what she had eaten, she certainly could not describe the hotel decor, but the science was memorable and a fitting prelude to the coming days. She slept a deep and dreamless sleep.

The next day after breakfast, she and the other scientists, together with two minders, piled into a minibus. They were heading west to Aiken, South Carolina, a small city not far from the Georgia border. Here they would meet up with twenty-five more of their colleagues for the four-day meeting. The bus was brimming with conversation as it wended its way through the peach state's capital city, past Peachtree Plaza, along Peachtree Boulevard, over Peachtree Creek.

‘What are all these peaches?' Jeanne from Belgium asked.

‘Peaches have greater appeal than diseases,' Josh said in his languid throaty accent. And when Jeanne still looked perplexed he continued. ‘Georgia is known both for its peaches and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – the CDC. But Ebola Plaza and Bubonic Boulevard wouldn't pull the tourists.'

As soon as they were out on the freeway one of the minders called for their attention. ‘At Aiken you'll be staying at a boutique conference centre.' Her drawl reconfigured the French ‘boutique' into the deep south's ‘bo-wa-teek'. ‘You'll find many excellent walking tracks nearby.'

The minder had been well-briefed. A few years earlier they had gathered near Como in Italy, the first time one of their
meetings had been held in a rural location. The formal sessions occurred as usual, but outside of these, scientists discussed and argued as they walked by the lake and hiked into the surrounding hills, and solitary figures could be seen at all hours pounding the country paths rapt in thought. The formal sessions were nourished by these rambles – ‘On a recent walk it occurred to me,' became a repeated refrain – and since then all their meetings had been held in rural settings.

Several well-documented discoveries in the early years of nuclear physics had occurred while scientists were out walking. Lise Meitner, one of Helen's favourite scientists, first identified nuclear fission while tramping through the Swedish snow with her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch. Meitner, an Austrian of Jewish ancestry, had worked for many years at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Following the Anschluss in March 1938, she had been forced into exile in Sweden, severed from her science, her laboratory and her colleagues. It was a sad and lonely time, and when she was invited by friends to spend the Christmas holiday in Kungälv on the west coast of the country, she was quick to accept. Frisch, also a physicist working in exile, at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, had also been invited for the Christmas holiday in Kungälv.

(It had always annoyed Helen that Frisch, half the physicist his aunt was, had found work with the great Niels Bohr while Meitner had been lucky to get a much lowlier position in Sweden. Meitner had been forced to put up with so many indignities simply because she was a woman. Fortunately she lived long enough to witness the start of a changing attitude towards women in science – she died in 1968 at the age of ninety – but how very different her career might have been if she had been born fifty years later, or a man.)

A few days before she left for the holiday, Meitner had received a letter from Otto Hahn, her long-time collaborator in Berlin, in which he described some puzzling experiments. Meitner suggested to her nephew that they take a walk in the countryside to ponder Hahn's results. Frisch donned his new cross-country skis, the tiny Meitner, barely 150 centimetres tall, relied on a pair of small wooden skis and off they went through the snow. Hours later, after much discussion and some crude diagrams – Meitner was a far better physicist than she was artist – Meitner hit on the solution: what Hahn had demonstrated but had been unable to interpret was nuclear fission. Nuclear fission, experimentally demonstrated by a German chemist working under the Nazi regime and interpreted by two exiled Jewish physicists as they pounded back and forth through the Swedish snow. The history of science is full of such wonders. And full of slights too: Hahn received the Nobel, Meitner did not.

‘And horses,' the minder was still talking in her tour-guide fluency. ‘The conference centre at Aiken has its own stables and the management is happy to provide horses for the guests.' Her tone of voice switched up a register. ‘Aiken is regarded by many as the Florida for horses. Thoroughbreds from the northern states spend the winter there and horse training is one of the major local industries. Polo is popular in the region, and riding to hounds too.'

‘Polo and fox hunting, I can't believe it.' Sam from England spoke so loudly he earned a suspicious glance from the non-speaking minder.

Ruggedly innocuous, this second minder was the sort of middle-sized, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road man who was born to be background. Helen assumed he was one of the
‘observers' who attended all their meetings these days. They usually appeared in pairs (perhaps this man's mate was already at Aiken), had barber-shop groomed hair, were clean shaven (as far as Helen knew they had all been men), wore neither jewellery nor interesting neckties. To describe one was to describe them all. They attended every session, but made themselves so inconspicuous that you soon forgot they were there.

‘Talking of major industries,' Josh said, ‘the Savannah River Plant is – or was – another major employer in these parts.' He turned towards the speaking minder, ‘Does it still produce plutonium?'

The speaking minder ignored the question and drew their attention to the highway turn-off to Augusta, home of the US Masters.

‘I like a game of tennis,' Jeanne said.

Takeshi smiled. ‘It's a golf tournament.'

‘Hard to see the point of golf,' Helen said.

‘Or any form of sport,' Sam added.

An hour later they arrived in Aiken. It was a surprisingly un-American city, pretty, with vast mansions set behind towering serpentine brick walls that unfurled along the roads in long, graceful waves. There were large and well-tended public gardens and a paucity of the usual chain stores; even aluminium siding was less abundant here. Helen had spent sufficient time in America to know there would be an other-side-of-the-tracks part of town and that as a visitor she would not be seeing it. Neither did it matter, for she was here for the science, four days of strenuous work, four days when she was determined to put her career worries aside, four days of willed myopia if need be.

As a result of her Austrian nationality together with the protection of Max Planck of quantum physics fame, Lise Meitner had kept her job at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute long after other Jewish scientists had been barred from working in Germany. At the end of the war Meitner was critical of herself for not having left Germany earlier, but at the time – and what a time it had been for nuclear physics – she was prepared to keep a low profile and manage without several of the benefits enjoyed by her Aryan colleagues in order to do her science.

Helen believed Meitner had been too harsh on herself. Discrimination was one thing but mass murder quite another, and in the early 1930s when most German-Jewish scientists were forced from their positions, no one anticipated the systematic slaughter of Europe's Jews. Besides, where would Meitner have gone? When Hitler took power much of the world was still clawing its way out of the Depression. Jobs were scarce and often poorly paid, and while Einstein, the most famous scientist in the world, was welcomed everywhere, other immigrant scientists would be seen to be taking positions from local scientists.

(And where would she herself go, Helen wondered, if she took a stand on how her work was being used. None of the major laboratories would want her and, unlike Meitner, she had neither the patience nor tolerance to work in a minor one.)

Being born female in 1878 Meitner had struggled every step of the way. Forced by Austrian law to leave public school at fourteen, through private study she had eventually acquired her high school qualification and against much opposition from those who believed university was no place for a woman, she enrolled for her degree. She earned her doctorate at the age of twenty-eight but no university wanted to employ
her. When first she started at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, she was forced to work in a makeshift basement laboratory separate from the men – as if femaleness itself was not simply a distraction but an insult to serious work. For science, however, she was willing to tolerate the slights, the neglect, and certainly the lack of windows. Where other people had pride and envy and ambition, Meitner had only a passion for science.

Just like Helen. Too bright for her local state school, too outspoken for her conformist parents, too big for her rural city, if she had been any less strong-willed or any less passionate about science she would never have become a scientist. And such an exclusive and demanding passion it was. Whenever she returned from one of her scientific meetings, friends would ask about the Hermitage or the Louvre or the Taj Mahal or the Rockies or, as she stared through the window of the bus, Aiken's five-star stables. But in the hot-housing of ideas and argument she would never have voluntarily absented herself before the talking stopped. The tourist attractions, she would tell her friends, would be in the same place and the same form when next she visited. But science would have moved on and she was determined not to be left behind.

How could she give this up? And, more to the point, why should she? She was not living in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, this was not the repressive 1930s or 1950s; the world had moved on. But had it? Had the world really changed? She stewed in the terrible question. She was not naïve, she knew of science's alliances with dictators and murderous regimes, but for most of her life she had been convinced the exceptions proved the rule: that science was essentially good and scientific progress desirable. But with science now moving so fast, and scientists
comprising only a tiny element in enterprises far too large and complex for any one person to grasp, it seemed the exceptions had become the rule. She could no longer pretend that the purposes for which she was working shared much in common with the objectives of those who paid for her work or decided its applications. Well might she love her work, but at what cost?

Lise Meitner, whose research in nuclear fission had led directly to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, never worked on any weapons project. Like Einstein she was outspoken in her belief that the vast energy released in fission should be channelled into peaceful purposes. What makes one scientist speak out and others not? And for those who do not, what is this passion for science that it could so effectively mute ethical standards and beliefs? How can it happen that you find yourself behaving in ways that in a different context you would judge as indefensible?