A wicker bin was overflowing. Anything up to a dozen sheets of paper had been scrumpled up and thrown on the floor. Margaret stooped to pick one up and flatten it out. Her stomach turned over. It was an unfinished letter addressed to her. Handwritten. Dear Margaret, I don’t know where to begin, or how to express my apologies…She started unfolding others. They were all addressed to her. Pathetic, inept attempts at apology. For a brief moment she almost felt sorry for him. She wondered if he had managed to complete one, if it was waiting for her in an envelope somewhere.
She heard a sound behind her and turned, startled. Clara stood panting in the doorway, looking up at her with mournful eyes, as if attempting to ape her master’s contrition. Margaret smiled at her own foolishness and went through to her room, Clara padding at her heels. She looked around, checking in her suitcases, and the boxes of her stuff, for any sign that Mendez might have gone through them. But everything appeared exactly as she had left it.
She picked out some clean clothes and underwear and went in for a shower, locking the door behind her this time. She stood for a long while, letting the water wash away her misery, comforting herself with the thought that even if she never saw Li again, he had left a little of himself with her forever. And there was a powerful element of succour in the thought of the life that was growing inside her.
Towelling herself dry, she slipped into her fresh clothes and immediately felt better. Clara was waiting for her out in the bedroom and followed her downstairs to the kitchen. The back door was unlocked, and Margaret wandered out to a paved patio, moonlight reflecting now in the still waters of a small swimming pool. A security lamp, activated by a motion detector, flooded the back of the house with light. Margaret was momentarily discomfited, and wondered why she was so jumpy. As she went around the side of the house, and the open garage, another light snapped on, reflecting harshly off the metallic paintwork of Mendez’s Bronco. Margaret frowned. He had to be around somewhere if the Bronco was there and the back door unlocked.
The meadow in which the two mares still grazed was washed in the colourless light of the moon. Beyond that, a path led around the side of a pond, a deep, dark pool of water choked by lilies. And beyond that, in a black stand of trees, a light shone in an outbuilding she had only vaguely been aware of in the daytime. It was an old wooden barn with an empty hayloft, and a tractor glinting darkly beyond a half-open door. She could not tell exactly where the light was coming from, or what was its source. She was uncertain if there was a window there. She hesitated to make the walk in the dark. It was, perhaps, four or five hundred yards. But the path shone pale in the moonlight. She could hardly lose her footing or her way.
It took her several minutes to cross the meadow, watched with interest by the horses, which seemed frozen in their dark-eyed curiosity. They returned to their grazing as she skirted the perimeter of the pond. The air smelled damp here, and was filled with the gentle screech of cicadas. As she got closer to the barn, sheltering in the shadow of its small clutch of trees, she saw that the light was coming from an unglazed window at the far end of it. But it was a feeble, reflected light, that appeared to be shining into the barn rather than out of it.
She slipped in the open door, squeezing past the tractor, with its smells of diesel and dried cattle dung, and saw that the light was coming up through a large trap door lying open at the rear of the barn, its wooden lid propped against the back wall. She crossed the dusty stretch of floor, compacted earth and dry, brittle straw, and saw a wide, wooden ladder leading down into a square pit lined with stout wooden planking. An electric light was screwed to the wall on one side. On the other, a deep, studded metal door set in a thick frame was not fully shut. From beyond it she heard the faint sound of music. She recognised the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, a sad, bittersweet melody that raised goosebumps on the back of her neck and along her arms. She climbed carefully down the steps and stood on the concrete floor of the pit. Mascagni’s Intermezzo died into stillness, and a sweet, plaintive soprano sang Puccini, O mio bambino caro from Gianni Schicchi. A haunting piece of infinite sadness. She reached out and pushed the door with the tips of her fingers. Although it was heavy, it swung open easily, and she blinked in the bright fluorescent light of a small underground chamber, concrete walls and low, slabbed roof, painted white. There was a wooden-topped bench in the centre of the room cluttered with all kinds of equipment; a couple of gel electrophoresis machines, a digital camera with UV light for scanning gels, an iMac and flatbed scanner. Two walls were lined with worktops set with stainless steel sinks, a small electric oven for doing blots, a couple more iMacs, a scanning electron microscope, a rack of test tubes, jars and bottles, piles of papers, books, a coffee maker, an ashtray overflowing with cigar butts. Against the third wall stood a couple of incubators, a home refrigerator and an ultracold freezer. A portable stereo next to a small centrifuge was playing the Puccini. Louder now.
Mendez had his back to her. He was wearing a stained white lab coat, and as he moved away from the sink she saw half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose, attached to him by a cord around his neck. He was wearing latex gloves and swirling a small quantity of blue fluid in the bottom of a test tube. He reached up and took something down from the shelf above his head, and then slipped the tube into a rack and wrote in a large notebook open on the worktop in front of him. The voice of the soprano fell away into quiet melancholy and Margaret said, ‘Felipe?’
He was so startled, turning quickly, that he knocked the test tube from its holder and the glass smashed on the counter, spilling its blue liquid content across the top of it. Wide-eyed, barely able to believe what he was seeing, he took in the vision of Margaret standing in the doorway. And then, ‘Shit!’ he said, spinning around to pull paper from a roll and mop up the spillage. He looked back at Margaret, consternation in his face now, and a tenor began singing an aria from La Bohème. He crossed to the stereo and turned it off, and its sweetness was replaced by the deep hum of electrical equipment. He frowned. ‘Margaret,’ he said, as if waiting for her to speak and confirm that she was not some figment of his imagination.
‘I didn’t know you had your own lab out here,’ she said.
He shrugged and looked around, as if trying to see it through her eyes. ‘The previous owner was convinced there would be a nuclear holocaust. He intended to survive it in here. I had it fitted out as a lab when we first bought the place. It’s pretty limited. Just for my own personal research. Any serious work has to be done at Baylor.’ He paused, turning his eyes on her again, drinking her in. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’
‘I’m sorry about last night,’ she said.
He shook his head vigorously. ‘No, no, my dear. Please don’t be sorry. It was entirely my fault. My behaviour was unforgivable.’ He hesitated. ‘Have you come to collect your things?’