Going Viral (9 page)

Chapter 11

The next morning, Sunday, the phone went while I was in the shower. Thinking it might be Rebecca, I wrapped myself in a towel and answered it.

‘Hereward? It’s John here.’ Pops, my esteemed father in law. ‘I understand you met your daughter yesterday.’

‘Er – yes, that’s right, John.’

‘And Sarah brought you up to date.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Well, as you probably know, they’re staying with us at the moment. However, they’re going out with Pat this morning,’ Pat was Sarah’s mother, ‘and I was hoping you could come round here for a chat.’

No
. ‘What about, John?’

‘Sarah and Grace, of course. They
are
your wife and daughter.’

‘I did agree with Sarah yesterday that I’d help her financially with Grace. We’re contacting our solicitors on Monday – tomorrow.’

‘You’ll end up paying more to them than to Sarah – which I’m sure you’d rather avoid if you could.’

‘I don’t really see any alternative.’

‘There may be one. That’s what I’d like to talk to you about.’

‘I’m listening, John.’

‘It would be better if you could come here and we discuss it man to man.’

Man
to
man
, one of his favourite phrases… and yet when we were together, he addressed me as
my
boy
… ‘I don’t think so, John.’

‘I want to talk to you about your wife and daughter. My daughter and granddaughter. I think you owe it to them at least to hear me out, Hereward.’

I didn’t reply.

Then he said, ‘Please…’

And I heard myself say, ‘All right.’

‘Good man. An hour, shall we say?’

I went back to the shower in an attempt to warm up, then dressed, had a quick coffee and left.

Yes, you heard right, gentle reader, he called me Hereward. After the Wake, which means ‘the watchful,’ apparently. It’s what my parents named me.

My father was born near Ely and his family claimed descent from the Wake. I think this is probably nonsense, because I’ve since discovered that Hereward actually came from Lincolnshire – although that’s not to say he didn’t sire a few whelps during his stay in Ely.

However… Dad was a sergeant in the Cambridgeshire Regiment and named me, his firstborn, after the Wake. He was killed in Iraq when I was fifteen. My mother never really got over his death and died herself about a year after I’d graduated from Med School. I think she just wanted to see me and Redd through university and into gainful employment, and then went and joined Dad.

What made me choose medicine? The school doctor, who was so decent to me after Dad was killed. Simple as that. And I knew from the moment I first saw a grainy picture of the perfect geometric form of a virus under the electron microscope that
that
was what I wanted to do.

Then onwards and upwards… until I met Sarah, and not long after we were married, I got the Directorship in Exeter. And the rest is history.

Sarah’s family lived in a large – some might say pretentious – house beside the River Exe. Jealous people said it mainly. Me as well, but I’m not jealous. As I said earlier, he had money of his own, but there was no doubting he’d worked very hard to get where he was, just as there was also no doubt that he was a brilliant surgeon and had saved a lot of lives. Didn’t necessarily make him a nice man, though.

He must have seen me coming up the drive, because the door opened before I could pull the bell handle and he ushered me in.

‘Good of you to come, Hereward,’ he said, shaking my hand.

He was the only person I knew who called me that. Everyone else used the diminutive. Even Dad did. You might think it was a mark of gravitas, respect even, but I think he just had to be contrary.

Anyway, he took me into the drawing room and pressed a glass of sherry into my hand. I accepted it because I thought I might need it.

‘First,’ he said, ‘my belated congratulations.’

‘Thanks,’ I said after a pause, ‘although I’m not sure I deserve them.’

‘Nonsense, my boy. Fatherhood always calls for congratulations.’

My
boy
… I was losing control already… I said, ‘The fact remains that my daughter was conceived after our marriage had irretrievably broken down.’

‘But it can’t have, can it? Not completely.’

I closed my eyes a moment. ‘But it
had
, John. She was already involved with Charles.’

‘Marriages have recovered from worse.’

I shook my head, whether in denial or hopelessness, I’m not sure. He offered me a top up. I accepted. He stared at me…

He was a tall man, spare, upright in both carriage and demeanour, with a long, quite good-looking face and a widow’s peak. I always thought he ought to be wearing a frock coat.

He said, ‘I’ve spoken to Sarah, and I’m convinced that if you both tried again, you could make it work. The fact is –’

‘Did
she
say that?’

‘In so many words. The fact –’

‘The last thing she said to me on the subject was that she wouldn’t come back to me if I was the last man on Earth.’

‘But what had
you
said to her just before that, I wonder?’

It was a perceptive question and I tried to answer it honestly. ‘I’d asked her what she wanted. She told me that she’d left Charles and then added:
Don’t
look
so
alarmed
,
husband
dear
,
I
wouldn’t
come
back
to
you
etcetera
etcetera
.’

‘That was her pride talking, you know that. I was trying to say that the… the event of Grace makes a difference – no, hear me out –’

I was shaking my head again, but then he said,

‘Please…’ he said again, and I could see the effort this cost him and listened.

‘…before that, I think your marriage
was
finished. But now, it has a… a focal point to re-group around… daughters need their fathers…’ He looked at me – ‘
I
know that …’

That cost him as well – he hadn’t been a good father, and this was the closest he’d ever get to admitting it. He went on –

‘You both made mistakes. Her behaviour was disgraceful, but the fact is you
had
been neglecting her. Even
I
could see that. And the devil does find alternative occupations for the neglected.’

I felt obliged to defend myself. ‘I only neglected her inasmuch as I wanted to do justice to my new job. You can’t do that and party all night.’

‘I think she just wanted a bit of a social life.’

‘And I think we’ll have to agree to differ on that.’

He said tightly, ‘If you say so.’

I didn’t reply.

He said, trying to be emollient, ‘You
did
both make mistakes and I think that if you could find it in yourselves to acknowledge that and say you were sorry, you could start again.’

‘That I should apologise, you mean?’

‘That you should apologise to each other.’

‘Who goes first?’

It was his turn to close his eyes for a moment, then – ‘If you could somehow find it in yourself to do that, Hereward, I think it would bring results. By which I mean genuine contrition on her part. She
is
aware of how badly she’s behaved.’

I’ve wondered since what would have happened if, at that point, I’d genuinely tried to engage with him. But Sarah wasn’t the only one with pride and instead I said,

‘And in spite of her behaviour, you think that
I
should apologise to
her
?’

‘As a gambit,’ he said, still trying.

‘No,’ I said. ‘If she sincerely apologises to me, then I shall accept it, and concede that I shouldn’t have neglected her. And that may be a basis for an understanding. That’s the best I can do.’

‘It’s not enough,’ he said, ‘and you know it.’ I could tell from his tone that he’d given up. And I was glad. He went on, ‘You knew what she was like when you married her, and you should have taken it into account.’

‘I thought I did.’

‘Not enough, evidently. When you marry into a family, you have to accept some of their ways.’

‘Did you?’

He hadn’t, and he knew I knew it.

‘It’s not the same thing, as you perfectly well know.’

‘Why not? What exactly
is
the difference between you and me that
I
have to accept some of another family’s ways, while
you
don’t?’

That did it – he went white, the usual signal that he was about to ignite, which he duly did –

‘
One
of the differences is that you would never have got that job if it wasn’t for me. And the
quid
pro
quo
was that you look after my daughter. This, you signally failed to do – as you are now signally failing to look after your own…’

‘Not true. I’ve said I’ll play my part, now that I know she
is
my own.’

‘Just go, will you? Go on, get out of my sight. Now.’

I carefully put my glass down on the occasional table and went. He said to my back,

‘This won’t be forgotten.’

I drove away, too full of adrenaline to think properly, but by the time I got back to my house, I was shaking. I brewed some strong coffee, but it only made it worse.

Was
it my fault? Well, some of it, obviously, but how much? How guilty should I feel?

I suppose it was a case of three proud, bigoted and resentful people who simply couldn’t mix. Any two of them might, so long as they made an effort, but add in the third and you got chaos.

Would it have made any difference if I’d insisted that Sarah and I had lived somewhere a long way from her parents? I don’t know. It might.

*

Monday morning was busy. First, there was a call from Brigg, asking me how I felt about the lab in Bristol Cabot.

‘Is it serious enough for us to have a proper look at?’ he said.

‘Yes – although that depends to an extent what you mean by a proper look.’

‘I’m thinking of sending a Health and Safety Inspector in there, accompanied by you.’

‘Can you really do that?’

‘Certainly…’ He sounded surprised I should even ask. ‘We’ll say that your man had reported the lax security to you, and you’d reported it to the Health and Safety Committee, who’d decided to look for themselves. We’ve got a tame inspector.’

‘When were you thinking of?’

‘Tomorrow.’

I thought for a moment. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You realise that if we found nothing, it wouldn’t necessarily put them in the clear?’

‘Yes, I am aware of that. Can you meet her at Temple Meads – say at ten?’

I agreed and he said he’d fix it up now. ‘If you don’t hear from me in, say, an hour, assume it’s on.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Donna Williams.’

He didn’t ring me back, but two hours later, Fenella did, to inform me that His Nibs had just phoned her, saying he’d been apprised of my domestic problems and was pressing for my replacement as Team Leader by Dr Wade-Stokes. She thought that Roland must have been on to him earlier.

‘I can’t imagine how he found out,’ she said.

‘I can,’ I said heavily, ‘I think my father-in-law’s probably the prime suspect.’ I told her what had happened. ‘He would have either told Roland, or maybe gone direct to His Nibs.’

‘Would he know him?’

‘Probably, he knows an awful lot of people.’ I sighed. ‘I thought he might make trouble, but I wasn’t expecting this.’ Another pause, then I asked her, ‘Is it inevitable?’

‘No. After what you told me about Commander Brigg, I decided to contact him. He’s pleading your case as we speak.’

After she rang off, I reflected on the irony that although I hadn’t wanted the job, now that someone was trying to take it away from me, I was clinging to it like a child with a toy. And there was another irony: that the existence of a child could spark off such political manoeuvrings…

In the event, Brigg prevailed. He phoned me himself to let me know.

*

The trip to Bristol the next day bore no fruit. The Head of Microbiology at Cabot, Professor Lee, was livid with me for not sorting it out with him informally and didn’t bother to hide his feelings. Donna Williams, an attractive woman of around thirty, made a very thorough inspection, which allowed me to poke my nose into every corner I wanted. I found nothing, but that still left the chance that someone may have hidden what they were doing very cleverly.