Chapter 6

Act 2, Scene 3: Moving on

Kate’s reaction to overhearing my valedictory address changed the ethos of the laboratory. We were still laughing at the lipstick evidence collected from my cheek on a tissue now being waved about by Elizabeth, when Kate came in to say that the visitors had departed, and that Paul wanted me in his office without delay. She and the other girls knew, of course, that the lipstick was Kate’s, but I, like I suspect the rest of the men, missed this undercurrent.

It was not until I got to the open door to her office that I noticed that Kate was not following me. The inner door was also open, and Paul was sitting grinning at me, so I gave no further thought to what Kate was doing. There was a bottle of Fino on his desk and two glasses, both full.

“Is this a farewell drink?” I asked, sipping the dry crispness of the sherry.

“Not yet,” he chuckled. “Although Bowen has promised to come back and publicly castrate you if you fail him.”

We drank in silence, and it was not until Paul refilled our glasses that he spoke again.

“You know, Mark, I’ve always struggled to picture you as a soldier. You’re such a reasonable guy that I imagined you persuading your men while the other officers barked orders. Today you sat quietly for hours showing little interest in being involved when, all of a sudden, you’re the Black Prince at Agincourt, Robert Bruce at Bannockburn. It was magnificent.

“You deserved a better audience. I’m too much of a coward and Archer has a mean little spirit. Bowen was impressed – he referred to you from then on as Doctor Ferguson and he wasn’t being ironic. Kate heard every word, so I’m afraid it will be all round the lab by morning. I can see now why the army gave you medals.”

By the time I left at about quarter to five, Kate had not returned, and I was feeling a bit of a buzz. I do not recall just how strong sherry is but three large glasses in a little more than an hour was enough to leave me feeling no pain. Before they left at five, every member of the team dropped by my office, happy smiles replacing the laughter we had earlier shared. A few minutes after the hour, David and I were left alone.

“Did you really say that any one of us could earn a billion for the company?”

“Something like that, certainly. You must understand that my outburst wasn’t scripted, although I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”

“We’ve all been feeling a bit guilty, you know. We’ve been asking ourselves if there was more we could have done in the last year or so. It was such a relief when you said that we had worked as hard as we knew how to. I think we trust each other a little more – I know that I did my best but perhaps James wasn’t trying as hard as he might.”

“Go home, David. Tomorrow morning, I want you fresh when you tell the rest of our team what we will be doing next.”

“It’s your team, Mark. Don’t you want to be the one to tell them?”

“My team, my rules. We all get the credit for our own ideas, and tomorrow that means you’re in the chair, so get a good night’s sleep.”

I thought about my earlier doubts about the loyalty of the team members. I had learned in the army that expecting people to be loyal was an important step in gaining their trust. An officer who constantly doubts his men finds that they pick up on his concerns and respond by withholding their wholehearted support. I will show my team of scientists that I trust them, but I will keep a watchful eye for any signs that my faith is misplaced – that is another thing I learned as a platoon commander.

That reminded me that I had found files on our linked computers that were password protected. Each team member could raise a protected file, but the password had to be available to the team leader. Molly had left her wall safe open when she departed but it had contained nothing of any value. Early in our relationship we had chatted about memory, and she admitted that she had to make a written list of passwords. There had been nothing of any relevance in her desk, although I looked again at everything we had found in the drawers, searching for a coded list.

It was almost an hour later that I sat at her desk and made an effort to remember that conversation. I had been avoiding thinking of our happy times together for more than a week and it caused me some pain to recall them now. She linked the discussion to novels; she shamefacedly admitted to an addiction to detective stories written between the world wars. I got the idea that her passwords will be on a piece of paper interleaved in her favorite book: who better than Miss Marple to hide your secrets?

I phoned Amanda and went to her home to spend the evening going through Molly’s library. I began by skimming through, but Amanda pointed out that a single piece of paper was unlikely to be dislodged by this process. She willingly helped but by midnight we had made a thorough search of less than a quarter of the volumes. Amanda insisted that we share a cup of cocoa, and it was while we were sitting chatting about her daughter’s taste in literature, that she sparked a memory.

Molly had not talked about hiding the passwords in a book, but of using a book as her inspiration.

“She was always doing things like that when she was a little girl. She would read something in a book and try it out on me and her dad. Some of the things were quite ingenious.”

Amanda identified four books that had inspired the teenaged Molly, and I took them away with me. I made a start on the first story before I settled to sleep, but I regret to say that the action portrayed was not enough to keep me awake. The following morning, I was twenty minutes late getting to work. I told myself it was so that I could call in my team at once to save fraying David’s nerves, but the truth is that I hoped to catch Pat alone in reception.

I thought about what I would say to her while I was shaving, one of those conversations where I played both roles. I began by being upset that she had shunned me without giving me a chance to explain but, by the time I reached for the aftershave, I was much less sure of my position. I like her but not enough to commit myself to a long-term relationship; she needs me to do that because of the effect my departure could have on her children. For the first time I acknowledged that I had made a bigger impression on them than I planned. I enjoyed their company and I set out to win their approval, but I did it without ulterior motives. The fact is that I gave no thought to the consequences.

By the time I opened the outer door to enter the foyer, I was prepared to beg Pat for time to get my team started. She was at her desk but surrounded by half a dozen colleagues. They had been chatting as I walked in, but they stopped as I came through the door, watching me silently as I entered. Pat was smiling although it may have been the result of the discussion before I came in. The others were smiling too, and I wondered if there was a blob of breakfast marmalade on my cheek.

I had aimed for the desk as I stepped through the door, diverting towards the lift when I noticed the crowd. Apart from their smiles, I hardly noticed them, until I called out a cheerful greeting. At that point Elizabeth detached herself from the group.

“Hi boss, hold the lift, please.”

When we got in, I asked if there was something sticking to my chin; she laughed and hugged my arm:

“You’re our hero.” She noticed my raised eyebrows for she continued. “How many other men would put their jobs on the line to defend a team you hardly know?”

I just had time to tell her that I did not think the risk was all that great, when the lift arrived at our floor. I had misjudged David; he is normally diffident but, faced with presenting an approved procedure to his peers, he was relaxed and confident. All scientists learn how to present a proposal, but David was particularly competent. Before he was finished the other team members were thoughtfully nodding their approval. When he stopped and asked for questions, there was a collective sigh and an outbreak of contented smiles.

I spent the remainder of the morning assigning specific tasks. Mostly I acceded to their requests since I did not yet know them well enough to dictate to them. I set them to work drawing up a schedule that we could agree to. You can never be sure how a piece of research will develop, of course, but I have found it useful to have some sort of timetable if only to avoid the danger of following a bad path for too long.

I was about to leave my office to brief Paul when I got a call from Morag who had put her client Samantha through the wringer to get the information I wanted.

“Sam invited Molly for supper,” Morag told me. “The harpy was all dignified reticence at first, but Sam got her weeping and then it all came out. She blames her team for the disasters of the last couple of years, calling them useless and disloyal. She was appalled at the very idea of recruiting any of them to her new team. The only person in the lab that she had any time for is Jon, whoever he is.”

Jon is the computer expert in common services. As soon as I had put the phone down, I instructed the team to put nothing on the networked computers until I gave them permission.

It sounded as if Molly had unloaded everything onto her new friend Samantha. She is still absolutely convinced that her approach is the right one. She even mentioned her relationship with me, although I found it difficult to recognize. She told Samantha that I was a threat – ‘too nosy for his own good’ – and that she began dating me to worm my plans out of me. Molly had been in total control, which was certainly true, and that I was just another clueless man led by his dick.

“Samantha’s longing to meet you,” Morag chortled after she had given me Molly’s assessment of my character.

I was greeted with friendly smiles on my way to Paul’s office where I was given another hug by Kate before I was allowed in. He was rather nervous at first until I mentioned Molly’s praise for Jon.

“He came to see me before lunch,” Paul sighed. “Molly called him to offer him a job in her new place. She turned on the feminine wiles, probably because she couldn’t match his salary here. She assumed he would be getting less than a team leader but he actually gets ten grand more.”

“Can we trust him? His role in the lab is pivotal. Molly had every man in the place lusting after her. Will he succumb?”

“Molly did suggest that she could become very friendly in return for information passed to her privately,” Paul was chuckling now. “She mentioned hot weekends in a hotel in Brighton.”

“This doesn’t strike me as funny, Paul. Can we trust the guy?”

“Strictly between us, what Molly has to offer is not to Jon’s taste.”

Paul knew that David was a model aircraft enthusiast and now I find he knows that Jon, for whatever reason, chooses to remain in the closet. I am constantly surprised by the director. I went home that evening feeling much happier with life than I had been since Molly went off with her professor.

The following morning, I arrived at my usual time armed with the four novels I had borrowed from Amanda. My eyes closed after less than twenty pages when I tried reading in bed; whether this was the fault of the author failing to grip my attention or accumulated tiredness, I cannot say, but I resolved to ask if anyone on the team was prepared to read a book looking for a clue to a secret hiding place.

Pat was alone at her desk, and she greeted me with a rather tentative smile.

“I’m surprised that you have time to read novels,” she quipped.

So, I explained that Molly may have used an idea from one of the stories to hide the passwords to some of her computer files. Pat took the books from me and studied them, even reading the blurb.

“You know, I think my mum has read some of these. They’re certainly the kind of rubbish she laps up. I could ask her if you want me to.”

I handed over all four volumes with a courtly bow and heartfelt thanks. I had just dared to ask how her children were when the outer door opened to admit James and Elizabeth, smiling fondly at each other. At least she was smiling fondly but I thought that James was checking out Pat. I hoped that there was not going to be heartbreak ahead. They came to the desk, and we joked about my taste in reading before they turned towards the lift. It was only as I began to move away that Pat spoke, so softly that only I could hear:

“Alice keeps asking when you’re coming to finish the story.”

I felt tears forming and I was glad to be distracted by Elizabeth calling that the lift was waiting. I spent the rest of the day agreeing the timetables offered by my team. It was a new experience for most of them and I carefully explained the importance of my request, underlining my promise not to hold it against them if they missed a deadline. It was time consuming, but it helped us to get to know each other better. Time spent with them now will, I am sure, save time later.

When I was not explaining my modus operandi, I was getting wilder and weirder ideas about where Molly would hide the missing passwords. I went from the purely physical – think Edgar Alan Poe in the Purloined Letter – to the Bletchley Park Enigma solution – was there a mnemonic in the open files that would unlock the secrets? You will not be surprised to learn that my efforts went unrewarded. Pat had gone by the time I left the lab.

The following morning, she was hopping from foot to foot when I approached her desk. She was talking to one of the girls, but she demanded that I wait when I would have greeted her and made for the lift.

“Mum has solved the problem,” she crowed when we were alone. “At least I think so. Can I come up to your office when I find someone to spell me at the desk?”

She just laughed at me when I tried to get her to tell me more. When I got all solemn, telling her that she was holding up vital research, she was unimpressed.

“You’ve waited days and I’ll bet you can’t find the answer before I arrive and show you. I thought scientists were supposed to be patient?”

“There’s no man on earth with the patience to put up with a woman,” I grumbled, with a grin.

“It’ll be worth it. You just wait and see!”

David was with me when she breezed in twenty minutes later. “Under the drawer,” was all she would tell us, gesturing to the desk. Now Molly had put paper lining into the desk drawers, and I had a sinking feeling that I had missed something obvious. I had emptied the contents out, but I had not disturbed the liners. David and I set to work to empty them again with Pat mocking our efforts, loudly enough to attract the attention of the rest of the team.

“You’re not even warm,” she kept telling us, as we ripped the paper out, looking under it and even holding it over the desk lamp when James suggested that that could reveal secret writing. Eventually, Pat let herself be persuaded by Elizabeth to reveal the secret. She pulled the top, right drawer fully out of the desk and turned it over revealing – nothing but the wooden underside of the drawer.

Pat’s face was a picture of consternation, and I thought she was going to burst into tears. James saved the day when he stepped forward to pull out the other top drawer under which was taped an ordinary white envelope. Pat had retreated to the door and the sight of the envelope took the last strength from her legs, so she collapsed in my visitor’s chair. We had the missing passwords in our hands, news that I quickly passed to Kate since Paul was out of the office.

We took Pat to the canteen for coffee and cakes. She was having trouble bringing her emotions under control. She had been delighted when her Mum mentioned hiding documents on the base of a drawer, almost the instant she saw the four books. She and Pat had even decided that the top drawer would be most convenient, and it would be natural to use the right side. The reasoning was impeccable but, unfortunately for Pat, Molly is left-handed. She tried to deny the credit for the achievement, but she accepted the praise we showered on her after Kate joined us.

It was Kate who persuaded Pat to let me take her and her mum to lunch. We had the rest of the afternoon off so, for the second time, I had the pleasure of collecting first Brian and then Alice from nursey and school. Brian was unreservedly pleased to see me, demanding that I make him another Lego model. Alice was much more subdued; this time it was more than simple shyness that was bothering her.

When it was time to leave, Pat was fussing with Brian, already in his car seat, while Alice stood beside Audrey, her grandmother. It was only when she was told to get in the car that the little girl ran and threw herself at me. I grabbed her and lifted her to a height where she could wrap her arms around my neck with her legs scissoring my waist.

“Don’t you like my mummy anymore?” she whispered in my ear.

“I do like her, sweetheart, but it’s difficult.”

Pat had emerged from the car, calling Alice to hurry to her place.

“I still love you and Brian,” I added. Alice kept her arms round my neck but pushed herself back far enough to look me in the eye: “We know that, silly!”

Audrey stepped forward to take the child from me and we all had tears in our eyes when she did so. Pat’s face was expressionless as she passed her mother and daughter, coming up to me and holding out her right hand to be shaken.

“Thanks for lunch, Mark. I’ll explain to the children how important your new work is.”

I ignored her hand, looking over her shoulder at Alice being bundled into the car with one anguished cry. Pat shrugged and walked away leaving me feeling lonelier than I had since my mother walked out on dad and me. I had to sit in the car for several minutes until I recovered enough to drive home alone. Up to the moment when Alice skipped out of school, Pat had been guardedly friendly; I knew there was a long way to go but we seemed to have taken the first steps to some sort of understanding between us.

The evening was spent considering every look, every gesture to try to identify the moment when Pat decided to reject me totally. It was midnight before I concluded that I was guilty of a sin of omission; there was something I should have said or done, but I missed the cue. It was particularly destructive to know that Pat had given me a second chance by agreeing to go to lunch and that I had blown it. Like when I knew that I was going to survive my wound, there seemed very little to be gained by trying to fight against my destiny. Jen had saved me from despair then: who would save me this time?

I did not sleep much that night but, by the time I reached the lab the next morning, I was ready to devote my whole energy to my work. The foyer was empty when I stepped through the outer door - empty, that is, except for Pat watching me intently. I shouted ‘Good morning’ as I took the dozen paces to the lift. She did not reply, watching me, unsmiling as I made my way across the floor. That became the pattern for our interactions in the weeks ahead. In my head I was a celibate monk devoted to the rituals of science; when I was not working, I took my feelings out on a little black ball on the squash court.

Fortunately, David’s suggestion began to bear fruit very quickly. The Covid 19 virus, like Sars before it, was the subject of intense study in every laboratory in the world. What Molly proposed, as a graduate student, was a study of all animal viruses that might mutate and cross the species barrier to infect humans. Her early work was successful, leading to a test that has been rolled out worldwide; poultry handlers are routinely tested for antibodies. The test was developed by a much larger lab, of course, but the basis of it came from Moly’s team in our little outfit.

We did no experimental work, no electron microscopes – not so much as a test tube. We use the results from other labs, poring over the maps of DNA that they provide. The work is painstaking, and there are no ‘Eureka’ moments; nevertheless, it was clear after less than a week that David’s ideas had opened a promising line of enquiry. We could already anticipate a time in the future when we could predict the structure of the next dangerous mutation. Our role was to satisfy the scientific community that our methodology was sound; after that the project would be taken on by a major laboratory.

You must forgive my vagueness, but our work has potential monetary value: developing our ideas will cost enough to run a moderately-sized country and our company must be able to recover that expenditure if it is to be able to continue to fund research in the future. The diversity arising from commercial competition may be a clumsy tool, but it has resulted in developments that have benefited all of us. Our funding continued and the excitement within the team continued to grow.

Part of my job as team leader was to guide the others in distinguishing between the scientific and the commercial. Ideas develop by being shared, so scientists want to be as open as possible in communicating with rivals. Individuals understand the need for discretion in the personal sphere: no one wants his pet idea stolen by a rival. It is sometimes difficult to get scientists to appreciate the need for commercial discretion. I have listened to the arguments that the moneymen place an unwarranted restraint on scientific freedom. As a student I certainly subscribed to that view.

Nowadays, I have accepted that I cannot change the world, so I must accept the rules of society or drop out. In the present instance, I have no difficulty in keeping many aspects of our work secret. What made it easier was that there was only one other group working in the field, so far as we knew. It was very unfortunate that our rivals were led by Molly, the former boss of my team.

When I took over from her, I was concerned that some of my new team would defect to the opposition. Then I discovered that Jon, the computer expert, was the only one Molly wanted to entice away from us. It was Paul’s job to keep an eye on Jon, a member of the common services group within the lab, so I let the whole matter of possible disloyalty slip out of my mind. I had witnessed the enthusiasm with which they greeted David’s ideas, and I was more than satisfied with both the quantity and quality of their support.

My status in the laboratory had changed as a result of my rant at Bowen, the vice president of the parent company. Almost everyone accepted it as a genuine outpouring of my feelings, although Peter, predictably, interpreted it as a carefully planned attempt to get myself noticed. The success of the team reinforced his opinion. I ignored the jibes he made at the Monday meetings of the team leaders and kept out of his way for the rest of the time. Pat was the only other person who seemed to be against me: she would now return my greetings but without even the hint of a smile.

Six months after Molly left, I was thoroughly happy in my work and more or less content with my private life. Paul was keeping a fatherly eye on Jon and was using his contacts to follow the progress that Molly was making; or lack of progress, as was becoming increasingly obvious was the case. I attended the few social functions organized by the lab but otherwise my human contact was confined to the mothers of the two women in my life.

Amanda and I had dinner together once a week until her house in Cambridge sold and she bought a property in Brighton, where she could provide home comforts for her daughter. Jeremy Witherstaff was still living with his wife and Molly was missing the companionship of her mother. Amanda was insistent that Molly still loved me and would eventually find herself – Amanda’s words – and come to me looking for forgiveness. I had managed to bar the subject, but it was dragged back into the open on the eve of completion of the house sale when Amanda had cooked a special meal for me.

“I know you still have feelings for Molly,” she began, the tears already coursing down her plump cheeks. “A mother can tell these things, you know.”

She stopped and looked at me, expectantly. I really like Amanda, whose only fault, so far as I was concerned, is that she has a blind spot about her daughter. She is almost the diametric opposite of my own mother, and I envied Molly for the love she did very little to deserve. Given what Amanda offered, I would have adored her. Perhaps it was this thought of mum that prompted me to make a grave tactical error.

“I think the thing I found so attractive in Molly was her resemblance to my own mum. They are both capable of deep and lasting love, but they express it in a way that is very hard for a mere man to understand.”

I thought that let Amanda down gently and I was pleased when her tears dried up and she clasped her hands in joy.

“I knew it! I just knew it!” she cried, crossing the room to kneel at my feet and putting her hands on my shoulders. “It’s true when they say that every man is looking for his mother in his bride.”

Her face was radiant, and I did not have the heart to disillusion her. She was leaving the next day and it seemed to me that no harm could be done by letting her believe that her daughter and I were destined for wedded bliss. It seems that it is also true when they say that no good deed should go unpunished. I went home feeling noble and Amanda went to Brighton to set in motion the disastrous events that followed. I had forgotten the incident before I went to bed.

While I met Amanda openly, my meetings with Audrey were a closely guarded secret; between us we had to corrupt a couple of innocent children. Fortunately, Alice and Brian took to the game with great enthusiasm and no little skill. Audrey had been surprised when Pat dismissed me after our lunch together, but she might have left things alone if it had not been for Alice persistently asking why her mum did not like me anymore. Audrey set out to ferret out what had happened and why Pat had reacted as she did.

Unsurprisingly, it was a complex tale, beginning with the impact I had on the two children: they liked me - a lot. Pat liked me a lot too, but not enough to risk her children being heartbroken if I did not stick around. Better, her argument went, not to get to know me in the first place than to learn to love me only to be abandoned when I deserted their mother. Her conviction that I still had feelings for Molly forced Pat to take immediate action.

After listening to her daughter, Audrey reached a different conclusion based on her own experience. Her husband had run off with another woman when Pat was about the age Alice is now. Audrey did not bring another man into the house and now regrets it; she loves her daughter but believes that she would have been a better person if there had been a man in her life as she was growing up. At that point, Audrey extended her investigation to include me. She accepted that Pat had to find the right man and the question was, did I fit the requirements?

Enter Portia, known to you as the heroine of Shakespeare’s play, but known to us as Alice, a dedicated believer in the suitability of yours truly, Mark Ferguson. I have no idea why two human beings suddenly ‘click’, but it happened to Alice and me. It has nothing to do with age or gender, looks or social class. Audrey, to her great credit, recognized the bond and set out to explore it. I was invited to join the kids at a swing park where their grandmother watched their interaction with me.

Clearly, I did something right because I regularly stole a couple of hours in the afternoon to join them after school. During the school holidays we had a picnic every day, moving indoors to Audrey’s living room where we sat on the floor on a blanket, when the weather was inclement. The kids were sworn to secrecy; a good bit of the pleasure for them was in keeping a secret from their mum. I dare say social services would have been appalled but Audrey had the courage of her own convictions. I should add that she never left me alone with the children – she was not that trusting!

Did Pat know? We have never discussed it but, on reflection, she must at least have suspected. She might have accepted that her mum had suddenly developed a taste for telling stories, but she could hardly have acquired the skills to build the complex Lego models Brian took home. Then, it must have come as a shock when her daughter, mounted for the first time on her new bike, proved to be an accomplished cyclist.

I often regretted that Pat was excluded from some of the fun I had with the kids. She would have loved to be there when we disposed of the stabilizers on the bike that lived in my car boot when Alice was not riding it. Brian and I wanted to throw them in the river, but Alice insisted that we act more responsibly. I have a wonderful memory of the owner of a scrap yard, accustomed to dealing with tonnes of material, solemnly thanking the children as he accepted the little scraps of metal. He even printed out a certificate, signed it with a flourish, and handed it to Alice. I stole something from their mother that day.

I should have faced Pat with the truth, but I did not recognize it until it was forced on me. I did not love Pat at the moment she sent me away, but I learned to love her by spending time with her children. Through their eyes, I saw the woman as she could never reveal herself to a man. Perhaps she let our masquerade continue because she was learning about me through talking to Brian and his sister. We were having an affair by proxy. It was an act of betrayal by a third party that brought the house of cards crashing down.