The waiter told them their table was ready and as they made their way towards it Newton said: ‘A guy can live very comfortably at Dubette. You remember the president’s salary-review promise at the seminar?’
‘Yes?’ said Parnell, questioningly.
‘It’s going to be ten per cent. You haven’t even started to work properly yet and your salary has already gone up ten per cent.’
Parnell dismissed what had clearly been a conformity warning from Dwight Newton, just as he’d dismissed the much earlier but virtually identical conversation with Russell Benn. But not contemptuously. Both job-dependent men were overlooking how long it might take – years, potentially – genetically to refine a drug cocktail to a single constituent dosage. Until that happened it wasn’t a personal consideration, if indeed it would ever become one. He was concerned with his science and its beneficial use, not the price on the label.
Parnell had had time on his hands during the appointments hiatus and, partially to fill it, established a rigid fitness schedule at the health centre. By the end of the month he’d dropped almost 10 lb, most of it, he was sure, excess stomach flab. When he ate lunch with Rebecca he swapped salt-beef sandwiches for salads and after three days she started to do the same and complained that she’d picked him out for sex, not healthy eating. In the comparable period she lost 3 lb.
Their relationship settled to both their satisfaction, although it was Rebecca who occasionally insisted that it remained only a relationship, with no binding commitments. They spent most weekends together, more often at his more central apartment than at Bethesda, where she rented a small clapboard house with a garden, which turned out to be her hobby. Parnell helped on the occasions they did stay there, but strictly under her direction after killing a long-established honeysuckle climber he believed himself to be pruning.
The honeysuckle mistake occurred on the final sixth week, and he took her withdrawal as annoyance at his gardening stupidity. Finally he said: ‘If you want me to say it again, I’m sorry I cut your flowering thing down. I’ll buy you another to replace it.’
‘What?’ asked Rebecca. They were in the lounge of the Bethesda cottage, littered with the fallout of the Sunday newspapers.
‘You haven’t said more than four words since I cut the honeysuckle down.’
‘It’s not the fucking honeysuckle!’
The vehemence startled him. He came forward towards her and said: ‘Hey! What’s the problem here?’
‘There’s something odd happening.’
‘At Dubette?’ They couldn’t dodge it all the time – when he’d told her of the psychological assessment, she’d mocked that it was totally right, that he was an arrogant son of a bitch – but most of the time they avoided talking about the firm.
She nodded, saying nothing.
‘What, for Christ’s sake!’
‘I told you I don’t know!’
‘Rebecca, you’re not making a lot of sense! You want to talk about it, I want to listen. But talk in words I can understand.’
Rebecca straightened in her chair, forcing herself out of her reverie. ‘There’s some stuff coming in… stuff I’m not being allowed to assess and pass on up the line.’
‘You’re being sidelined?’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘It’s bypassing my line manager, too. It’s divisional director to Dwight Newton… we wouldn’t have known it was even happening except for a misdirected email, asking for confirmation that it had arrived. Which didn’t tell us anything but sent Newton into apeshitting cartwheels.’
‘So, it’s not personal?’ persisted Parnell.
‘It’s never happened before: not since I’ve been in the division.’
‘Relax. There’s got to be a hundred reasons why things go between sub-director to God himself, without going the normal route.’
‘It’s never happened before!’ Rebecca insisted.
‘I heard you the first time.’
‘The email came from Paris.’
‘So?’ said Parnell.
‘Haven’t you wondered what our ultimate God, Edward C. Grant himself, meant at the seminar about a way to prevent our products being reverse-analysed, for cheaper manufacture?’
‘I am now,’ said Parnell.
Six
Richard Parnell looked around his finally assembled staff and said: ‘There were times I never thought we’d get here!’
‘That bad?’ smiled Beverley Jackson, sympathetically.
‘That long,’ complained Parnell. It seemed far longer than just a month and a half and, now that everything – and everyone – was in place, there was a hesitating moment of anticlimax. Parnell said: ‘But at last we’re here. Now we’ve got to prove ourselves and that ours is not a jungle science.’
‘A what?’ challenged Mark Easton, at once. He was one of the two original geneticist applicants, a languid, blond-haired, clipped-voiced Bostonian who’d worked at John Hopkins.
Parnell smiled, hoping to cover the thoughtless, too-glib expression. ‘Pharmacogenonomics is new: we’re new. There’s got to be a coming together with everyone else here.’ Which he singularly hadn’t bothered to do since his arrival, he acknowledged.
‘We’re surely among qualified people… sufficiently qualified, at least, to know about the existence of genes and their potential application!’ took up Ted Lapidus. There was little trace of an accent. The Greek had a very full, drooping moustache that made him look permanently dolefuclass="underline" even the smile, which accompanied the overstressed cynicism, was mournful.
‘I misspoke,’ Parnell apologized. This was sliding downhill into an awkward opening day. ‘Let’s just not forget our newness and human nature. Dubette go in for rules, although they’re mostly understood rather than official. Within Dubette the recurring theme is that it’s one big happy family. We’re not an accepted part of that family, not yet…’ Oh Christ, he thought, hearing his own voice and seeing the expressions of those facing him. ‘I was trained that science builds upon the free exchange of ideas and theories. That’s how I want us to operate. Any of you get – or already have – an hypothesis, you follow it. And talk about it, to each and every one of us. If, in the end, it doesn’t pan out, it doesn’t pan out. More experiments and research fails than succeeds, as you all know. At least we’ll have taken a possibility as far as we can…’ He paused, as an idea came to him, but decided against proposing it until he’d more fully thought it through, supposing that it was something he should mention first to Dwight Newton.
Before he could go on, Deke Pulbrow said: ‘You mean there isn’t going to be a formulated schedule, integrated with what other sections are working on?’
Parnell decided that Pulbrow would definitely need advice about the dress code for the next seminar: beneath the regulation, nameplated laboratory coat, the man wore bib-and-braces overalls and a denim work shirt. Parnell said: ‘No, I don’t mean that at all. I very definitely expect – and intend – to work in tandem with the rest of this division. And to get channelled through to us, via the ongoing research here, anything that comes in from overseas. It’s our contribution that’s got to be innovative. The most obvious is nucleotide polymorphism of Dubette products. We’ve been set up genetically to research and develop treatments and drugs, in conjunction, if necessary, with the traditional chemical experimentation that until now has been Dubette’s established route.’ Parnell accepted that he was preaching to the converted but he hoped at least he was making better sense than the careless way in which he’d begun.
‘Bacteria are genetic,’ declared Lapidus. ‘Already there’s been complete genetic sequencing of Streptococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Helicobacter pylori, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Vibrio cholerae. Genetics – and its engineering – in the drug development for treatment of such conditions has already been scientifically accepted. Are you seriously telling us that there’s a resistance here?’
Parnell acknowledged that he was very obviously, before an audience, being tested – by the man whom Dwight Newton had judged to be a potential challenger for his job. ‘You missed off your list the genome of a prototypic streptomycete, Streptomyces coelicolor,’ reminded Parnell, confronting professional knowledge with professional knowledge. ‘And yes, that’s exactly what I’m seriously telling you. And that is my battle to fight, as head of this department.’ No one broke into the pause this time. Smiling at the Greek geneticist, determined to come out the winner of the exchange, Parnell said: ‘I’m grateful for your listing, although I know none of us needed reminding of it. Any more than any of us needed reminding of the potential of genome exploration in combating disease.’