So she had taken him back to Finchley, to sleep on her sofa, except that it didn’t work out that way. After he’d slipped away the next morning, with a kiss and a cup of tea brought to her in bed, she ran her hand over the warm rumpled bedding at her side and told herself, through her hangover and without complete conviction, that she had done absolutely the right thing, and was on the road to building a new, happier, freer Kathy Kolla. And there was something else-for the first time in weeks she hadn’t dreamed about that room, and had to face its terrors. It was a sign, surely, that she could escape for good, and the first step was her interview that day. Her appointment with the agency wasn’t until the late morning however, and she decided that in the meantime she might have a look at this glitzy university in the docklands, and, if she was around, have a quick word with Springer’s only student. Clare Hancock’s parting comment had stayed in her mind. No matter how mad his rantings in the letter seemed, Springer’s prophecy had come to pass. Kathy thought she probably owed it to Brock to do this much.
Briony Kidd was again at her desk, and again the only postgraduate student in the little shared study, which today was blue with cigarette smoke, despite the ‘no smoking’ sign that someone had pinned to the door. The others, if there were any, had perhaps found more congenial places to work. She barely glanced at Kathy’s identification and seemed distracted and low. Her eyes kept returning to a blank sheet of paper on her table. Kathy had trouble getting her to talk at first.
‘Is this a bad time?’
Briony shrugged, her eyes straying back to the blank paper.
‘I mean, if you’re busy working…’
Briony took a deep, exhausted breath. ‘I can’t work. I haven’t written a word since Max…’
‘A thing like that is bound to upset your concentration,’ Kathy offered, pulling up a chair.
‘I’ve got to finish it this year, but I don’t think I can, without him. It was all going so well.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Hannah Arendt’s theory of action,’ she said reluctantly, sounding as if any kind of action would be too much for her.
‘She was a philosopher?’
‘Yes. A German Jew, like Max. She escaped from Germany before the War, and worked in France helping to get Jewish children out of Germany for a time, then she went to America.’
‘Ah yes. Max met her there, didn’t he? I remember reading that.’
Briony nodded and lapsed into silence. She looked very pale and frail, and Kathy suspected she wasn’t eating much. That’s probably how I looked to Suzanne in the cafe that morning in Hastings, Kathy thought, and realised that something, her night with Wayne perhaps, had lifted her out of that, at least for the time being. The thought of it aroused a tingle of pleasure.
‘So, what was her theory of action?’
The student looked round at her slowly. ‘You don’t really want to know.’
‘Is it too complicated for me to understand?’
‘No, but…’ She shrugged, as if the effort of arguing was too much. ‘She believed that there are essentially three modes of human activity. The most basic mode she called “labour”, satisfying the necessities of life, in which individuals are submerged in a common task, behaving according to patterns, playing pre-ordained roles, becoming members of classes.’ Her voice, becoming more lethargic, trailed away.
‘Right. So that’s number one.’
‘Mm. The second mode is called “work”. That’s where the individual is able to express himself through his activity, as a craftsman or creator of something. This mode has greater freedom, but the individual is still subordinate to the end product. Arendt believed that capitalism is intent on turning all work into labour, and that almost the only true work left is that of the artist.’
‘And the third?’
Briony roused herself a little. ‘The third and highest mode of activity is “action”. This means initiating undertakings and interacting with other individuals who are also capable of action. It’s only in action that people are able to realise their individuality and reveal what they personally are. Even they themselves don’t know what this is until the event they precipitate reveals them to themselves and to others. They cannot know in advance what kind of self they’ll reveal by their actions.’
‘Oh. I think I see. Vaguely. And her life, was it one of action?’
‘Yes, it was. Through her books and arguments and the expression of her ideas.’
‘And mine is one of labour, I should think.’
She said it as an attempt at a joke, but Briony didn’t smile. ‘Yes. Most people’s are.’
‘What else did she believe?’
‘Lots of things. That there’s a conflict between truth and freedom, for instance.’
This was said with some sharpness, and Kathy wondered if it was aimed at her, the police. ‘You’ll have to explain that. I kind of thought they supported each other.’
‘She was repelled by the uniformity of the truths of religion, and now of science. She believed in the constant struggle of ideas and opinions against one another, rather than the inevitability of ideologies.’
Kathy grasped at this. ‘I’ve heard that Max was antagonistic to science, and I couldn’t understand why. Is that the reason? He thought like Arendt?’
‘Yes. He believed that the whole project of science is to construct a single unified truth that will exclude all other views of the world. In that sense it is like a fundamentalist religion, and he hated it.’
‘What about the scientists here on this campus? Did he hate them?’
‘ Especially them, and they hated him for challenging their “truth”.’
‘Are they particularly bad here, then?’
‘Oh, God, yes. Haven’t you heard of the CAB-Tech research project? That’s the ultimate obscenity. They don’t just want to find perfect truth, they want to create the perfect man.’
Kathy smiled as if this was a joke, then realised that she was serious. ‘What, they say that?’
‘That’s what it amounts to.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s true! They’re getting all this money to make everybody’s genes the same.’
‘That’s how Max described it, was it?’
Kathy couldn’t keep the scepticism from her voice, and Briony abruptly turned away. ‘What did you come for, anyway?’
‘Oh, I was just trying to establish what Max’s state of mind was like over the past three or four weeks. I thought you might be a good person to ask, working closely with him.’
‘State of mind?’
‘Yes.’ Kathy really wanted to ask if he was normal, but was beginning to suspect that normal wasn’t quite the term for Max Springer. ‘Was he at all agitated, would you say, under stress?’
‘Oh, you mean, did he feel threatened by the people who did this? No, not at all. He seemed very calm and normal to me. Almost… well, serene.’
Kathy nodded and began to get to her feet. ‘All right. Well, I won’t-’