Hypocrite's Isle (2 page)

‘Hasn’t stopped him publishing at least a dozen papers on that nonsense,’ said Gavin. ‘So much for peer review …’

Simmons gritted his teeth. ‘Peer review isn’t perfect, but it’s still the best way we’ve got of screening new material for publication, Gavin,’ he pointed out.

‘On the other hand, there are so many old pals scratching each other’s backs, you’d think they’d come clean and have a blazer badge and club tie made for themselves,’ said Gavin.

‘Oh, Gavin,’ said Mary, running out of patience. ‘Sometimes you behave like a kid who’s lost his lollipop. No system is ever perfect, and if you go on setting impossibly high standards for all those around you, you’re going to have such a disappointing life.’

‘I’m just saying what’s true,’ said Gavin.

‘What you
think
is true.’

Gavin looked at the floor and took a deep breath. ‘Okay, what I
think
is true,’ he conceded.

‘Well, maybe it’s a jaundiced view. Maybe you should just stop and consider for a moment before you say anything.’

Kiss arse, you mean?’

‘No, I do not,’ said Mary. ‘Just think before you speak.’ She said this so calmly and pleasantly that Gavin smiled and showed no heart for continuing the exchange.

‘Anyone want to hear what happened to the G45 cloning I’ve been doing?’ asked Tom – an interruption welcomed by the others.

‘We all do, Tom,’ said Simmons.

Mary passed him the chalk stick she’d been weighing in her palm and glanced at her watch before getting up. ‘Back in a mo. I have to take a sample.’

Tom took up a gangling stance beside the blackboard, adjusted his glasses so that they were no longer in danger of falling off his nose, and turned to face the others. ‘As you know, I’ve been trying to put the C1 gene into a cloning vector so that I could move it into the H12 strain … well, no joy I’m afraid. Three attempts and absolutely zilch.’

Mary came back into the room, ducking her head and making exaggerated tiptoe movements as she returned to her seat.

‘What vector did you use, Tom?’ asked Simmons.

‘Alpha 12.’

Simmons bit back the comment he was about to make. He wanted to see if anyone else would say something.

‘Copy number,’ said Gavin, without looking up from the doodle he was making in his notebook.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Alpha 12 is a high copy-number vector. Hector and Jameson showed last year in
Molecular Microbiology
that C1 can’t be cloned in high copy number – it’s toxic to the cell when present in large quantities.’

Tom scratched his head. ‘Really? I must have missed that.’

‘No great harm done,’ said Simmons. ‘Use a low copy-number vector next time, Tom, and you’ll have a different tale to tell next week.’

‘Wish I’d seen that,’ mumbled Tom as he returned to his seat. ‘I feel a bit of an idiot now.’

Gavin continued his doodle.

Mary took Tom’s place and chalked up some figures on the blackboard. ‘I’ve been doing some control experiments to make sure the effect I spoke about last week was scientifically valid,’ she said. ‘And it is.’ She chalked up some more data. ‘An 80 per cent increase in the test culture, none at all in the controls.’

‘Well done, you,’ said Simmons.

‘But you haven’t shown any result for the Beta cell line,’ said Gavin, glancing at what was on the blackboard.

‘Well spotted, Gavin,’ said Mary with an icy smile. ‘That’s what I’m doing today and so far, it’s looking just as good as the others.’

‘Touché,’ said Gavin with an amused smile.

Simmons enjoyed the sparring between Mary and Gavin. He was pleased that Gavin had been so quick to spot the hole in Mary’s data, but equally pleased that Mary had been ready to plug the gap. ‘Well, that should wrap things up nicely,’ he said. ‘How about you, Gavin, what have you been up to?’

‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘About anything in particular?’ enquired Simmons with a
deliberate
vagueness that made Tom and Mary smile.

‘The approach we spoke about for altering membrane structure. I’m not sure we’ve picked the best way.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just a feeling.’

‘Does this mean that you have come up with a better way?’ asked Simmons calmly.

‘Not yet.’

‘Well, do let us know when you make the breakthrough.’

Mary hid another smile by putting her hand to her mouth. Tom stared intently at the floor.

It was six thirty when Simmons left the lab and said good night to the servitor on the door. ‘Brass monkeys out there tonight,
Doctor
,’ said the man, looking up from his book. Simmons found out what he meant almost as soon as he left the warmth of the building and saw his breath swirl in clouds around him as he made his way to the car park. He tugged his collar up and fumbled for his keys in his coat pocket, taking care with his footing on the icy surface of the inner quadrangle. He had a ‘why did I ever leave California?’ moment when his breath started to freeze on the windscreen almost as soon as he’d got into the car and his attempts to clear it by hand only made things worse.

Although Scottish by birth, Simmons had spent five years at the University of California at Los Angeles and had only returned to Scotland a year ago when he and his wife, Jenny, decided that they wanted their two children, Mark and Jill, to have a Scottish education – or, more correctly, grow up as British children rather than develop the mores and attitudes of sun-kissed Californians. They had bought a house a few miles outside Edinburgh – a converted farm steading – and Jenny, a nurse, had returned to working part-time as the practice nurse at the local GP’s group surgery.

 

‘You’re very quiet this evening,’ said Jenny as they cleared away the dishes. ‘Something on your mind?’

‘You could say,’ agreed Simmons.

‘Why don’t you go up and tell the kids their story and then come down and tell me all about it? I’ll have a whisky waiting for you.’

 

‘But you can’t feel personally responsible for the slowness of cancer research,’ exclaimed Jenny when Simmons told her about the doubts he’d been expressing to Jack Martin at lunchtime.

‘I’m part of it, though. I can’t divorce myself from it and blame the lack of progress on other people.’

‘But you work hard and you’ve been very successful. That’s why they gave you the position in the first place.’

‘It’s academic success,’ insisted Simmons. ‘I’ve published a lot, but when it comes to the question of whether that has made the slightest difference to people actually suffering from the disease … that’s another matter.’

‘But surely the only alternative is to stop doing it and walk out. Will that help them?’

‘No, but …’

‘Look, you said yourself, you need lucky breaks in science and if you’re not there at the bench when the break comes along, you’ll miss it, right?’

Simmons nodded and took a sip of his whisky.

‘What brought this on anyway? You’re not usually so negative.’

‘I suppose it was that damned seminar.’

Jenny smiled. ‘What else is bugging you?’

‘Gavin Donnelly.’

Jenny raised her eyes. ‘The charming Gavin. What’s he been up to?’

‘Damn all. That’s the trouble.’

‘Well, he’s not a child, even if he acts like one. It’s his funeral if he doesn’t do any work and finishes up not getting a PhD.’

‘True, but he’s clearly not stupid. He knows a lot. He obviously reads the journals. He saw right away why Tom’s experiment last week hadn’t worked: he noticed immediately what was missing from Mary’s results when she chalked them up. It’s just … that he does damn all himself and thinks he knows everything …’

‘Which is your prerogative,’ smiled Jenny.

‘… and has the social skills of a lamp-post.’

‘Quite. I’m not liable to forget his first visit here.’

‘Let’s not go there. How was your day?’

‘Remarkably stress-free, I’m pleased to say.’

Simmons looked at her affectionately. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ he said. ‘You’re always the same; so supportive, so steady. I go up and down like a yo-yo and …’

‘Sssh. You’ll be telling me next I’m your rock.’

‘Anything good on the telly tonight?’

Jenny looked up the schedules in the paper. ‘Nothing inspiring … there’s a documentary on ancient Egypt on Channel 5 at ten – a quest to find the treasure of someone-hotep. But Channel 5 at ten? … I think we both know what they’re going to find, don’t you?’

‘Zilch.’

Gavin Donnelly left the medical school, pausing to fasten up all the buttons on his denim jacket and wrap a scarf round the lower half of his face as he felt the cold air hit him. He stopped at the hospital gates, considering whether he should go back to the flat and have spaghetti on toast or nip round for a pie and a pint at the postgrad union. The halo round the street lights – a sure sign of a heavy frost to come – swung his decision in favour of the union and he skipped across the road, dodging in and out of the stopped and slow-moving traffic of the evening rush hour. The union was nearer and it would be warm – unlike the flat, which depended on electric heating, and whoever was in first to turn it on. He shared a
third-floor
tenement flat with three other people – a nurse and two office workers – about two miles away from the med school, in Dundas Street on the north side of Princes Street. This had been his choice over the alternative of staying in halls of residence when he arrived in Edinburgh some two months before.

Gavin ordered his food and picked up a pint of lager at the bar, before moving to a seat and shrugging his rucksack from his
shoulder
to guide it under the table with his foot. He draped his jacket over the back of the chair and smoothed his collar-length hair back before straightening the holed green sweater he favoured most days – Carla, the eldest of his four sisters, had knitted it for him when he’d first left home for Cambridge.

‘Pie and beans!’ the short, bald man behind the bar called out as the microwave bleeped. Gavin went over to pick up his food. He was halfway through eating it when he became aware of a figure at his shoulder. It was Mary Hollis.

‘That looks good,’ she said pleasantly.

‘Then it looks better than it tastes.’

Mary sat down opposite, looking both amused and exasperated. ‘Don’t you ever lighten up, Gavin?’

Gavin looked bemused. ‘What’s the problem? I just …’

‘Told the truth? Yes, I know.’

Gavin sighed and looked at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘What should I have said?’

Mary shook her head and spread her hands, ‘God, I don’t know; made a joke or something. If you’d laughed before you said it looked better than it tasted it would have been fine, but you automatically slap people down. You defend yourself when no one’s attacking you. People generally mean you no harm … honestly.’

Gavin suddenly smiled broadly and Mary capitulated. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Lecture over.’

‘All right, Mary,’ said Gavin. ‘I’ll believe you … despite a long list of acquired evidence to the contrary. I haven’t seen you in here before.’

‘I’m meeting Simon, my boyfriend; he’s a houseman at the
hospital
. He gets off at seven. This is as good a place to meet as any and it’s warm.’

‘Can I get you a drink?’

Mary shook her head. ‘He’ll be here any minute, thanks all the same. We’re going to see something at the Filmhouse. How about you? How are you going to spend your evening?’

‘Medical library.’

‘Is this to fuel the thinking process?’

‘You got it.’

‘You’ll be doing experiments next.’

‘Ouch. What was it you said about not slapping people down?’

‘Sorry, but you haven’t exactly been bursting a gut in the lab since you arrived and people have been noticing.’

‘It’s the easiest thing in the world to keep busy in a lab.’

‘So?’

‘Keeping busy is not doing research. It’s window dressing.’

‘Doing nothing isn’t doing research either.’

‘Like I said, I’ve been thinking.’

‘I won’t say you don’t get a PhD for thinking when you do, but eventually you have to do something with the fruits of your thinking …’