The Name on the Door is Not Mine Read online

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said (in those days if you owned a car you were ‘sir’). ‘I just wanted to be sure you weren’t dead.’

  I confirmed that I wasn’t, and climbed out. ‘It didn’t seem safe to drive last night,’ I explained.

  He was already back astride his bicycle. ‘Very wise, I’d say, sir. Nasty bit of fog we ’ad last night.’ And he wobbled away, stopping briefly to adjust the clips that held his trousers tight at the ankles before disappearing down the road.

  My limbs were stiff. I was hungry, unshaven. I was also, by now, angry, and I remained angry all of that morning as I made my way back into London. That, I told myself, was the end of Claudia Strange. Damn her! What a bitch! There would be no more cosy letters. She could die, for all I cared … And so on.

  But I think even while inwardly I raged, I knew (and I suppose it added to my rage) that by behaving in that uncivil way she had not really wiped out the fascination she held for me. She might even have added to it. Seeing her sitting with friends around a table, watching her talking, leaning forward, making an impression on them, I’d felt—or believed I had—her intelligence, her wit, the force of her personality. Her outburst had not changed that. Her anger with me had been inexplicable and outrageous. But it was as if she had proved herself. She was not just clever (in those benighted days women who got to a major university had to be clever); she was also complex, intense, mysterious and unpredictable. To wipe her from my consciousness was not going to be easy.

  My recollection is that when I got back to London there was already a letter from her, waiting for me. I don’t see how that could have been possible. But certainly the letter, which I still have, was written that same night of our encounter, and reached me almost at once. She was, she said, ‘truly sorry’. She sent me ‘huge and abject apologies’. I had taken her by surprise, but that, she acknowledged, was no excuse. She wasn’t able to explain her behaviour. She was like that (she went on)—‘badly behaved, given to rages’. Her middle names were ‘Sturm’ and ‘Drang’.

  ‘Life keeps taking me by surprise, and I don’t act well. It’s like when someone comes into a room and you don’t hear them and you get a fright and jump—and maybe shout angrily—do you do that?’ And then she gave up explanations. ‘Oh God, dearest Mark, what can I say to you to make amends? I squirm. I grovel. I die. Forgive me!’

  Dearest Mark? This was new.

  Almost at once I could feel my determination not to see her again dissolving. It wasn’t masochism—I had no appetite for being knocked about by a strong woman. It was more like simple curiosity; fascination; attraction.

  I tried not to write back, but it lasted no more than three or four days—and if I am honest I might have to say it lasted only two. Soon we were exchanging letters as if nothing had happened—except that she now addressed me as ‘ever fixèd Mark’, knowing I would recognise that it came from Shakespeare’s sonnet about ‘the marriage of true minds’. She came down to London. We sat staring at one another across a table in a Lyons teashop while she explained to me in a voice that quivered with intensity that she valued me, that she wanted us to be friends (‘for life’ was what she said), but that we could not be lovers—that was something I must accept and must not argue with. It could not be explained because it was, she said, inexplicable. Simply, it was so.

  I wondered whether she was telling me she was a lesbian—and argued with myself about it. I didn’t think it was so—but that was because I didn’t want it to be, wasn’t it? And yet my instinct said firmly no.

  Later, when we knew one another well (and by this time the game of describing myself as ‘skinny’ had been discovered) she tried to explain why there had been that outburst at our first meeting. She was a great letter writer, and liked to exchange at least brief notes with her friends, even sometimes with men she saw every day in the lab. On paper, she said, people revealed the way their minds worked—something that wasn’t always so clear when their physical presence dominated your consciousness. And by this measure I had been ‘simply perfect’. There was never a word, or a phrase, or an image that gave her the kind of sinking feeling, the sense of crushing disappointment, that sooner or later came with every other person she had ever known. But this had led her to build up a physical image of me that was wrong.

  Trying to soften her explanation a little she assured me that it was nothing to do with ‘good looks’. I had ‘a nice, friendly, intelligent face’. What it had to do with was size.

  She had built up in her head an image of me as a large man—what I suppose would be called these days a hulk—and this had been so powerful, my bean-pole frame had presented itself to her as if it belonged to an imposter. It was as if I, the faultless letter writer, had, after all, made a mistake. Of course she had no choice but to accept that the image before her and not the one in her head belonged to the man who had written my letters; but at that first moment of shock and, I suppose, disappointment (though she didn’t use the word), it had made her angry.

  So we were to be friends, not lovers; and for a time I developed a private life in which there was always a girlfriend, as they were called in those days, but also a friend—and it was the friend I was in love with. It wasn’t long before I was loving Claudia with an absurd devotion, all the more painful because of my growing conviction, never confirmed by her and therefore never held by me with certainty, that there were times, moments, when she loved me almost as much.

  Much has been written about Claudia’s private life, and though I have my own opinions, and my own small but significant areas of knowledge, it is not my intention either to add to or to subtract from what has been said on that subject. In the one biography I’m aware of, I am hardly mentioned; in another, not of her but of Jack Gibbs, I am confused and conflated with a young man, an American she befriended on the liner from New York to London. So if the question whether Claudia and I were ever lovers should be asked I am content, since no simple answer would be adequate, to leave it unanswered—a matter of semantics rather than one of biology. We held hands in teashops. We kissed our greetings and farewells. There were times when we shared a bed—chastely, as she intended, but not (how shall I put it?) absolutely, or infallibly, or entirely. Let it be left there; because the important, or significant, truth is that we were never lovers in the wholehearted, full-blooded, full-bodied sense; and that was because she did not want us to be.

  Yet I am sure it would have happened. We were approaching it; we were almost there, when Jack Gibbs appeared on the scene.

  CLAUDIA AND I WERE born ten days apart in the same year, but on either side of the line dividing Librans from Scorpios. I, whose professional life was to be devoted to works of the imagination, scorned the idea that our fates were ruled by the stars; she, the scientist, talked as if she considered it a hypothesis as reasonable as any other. Its efficacy, she suggested once, might be said to be demonstrated by our respective temperaments. I, the Libran, was the balanced person, mild-mannered, reasonable, equable—the ‘ever fixèd Mark’. She, the Scorpio, was the one who carried a gun in what she called her pocketbook. She could, she claimed, kill someone she saw as a deadly enemy, or even ‘just anyone—if I was angry enough’. The scorpion was deadly, capable even of stinging itself to death.

  I thought her saying she carried a gun was only an image, a metaphor, part of the joke, but I was wrong. It was during a secret holiday we took together to Paris (the biography, relying on the letters she wrote home to her sister, says she went alone) that I discovered she meant it literally. We had taken separate rooms but were lying together on a bed in one of them, recovering from a day’s sightseeing, waiting to go out for our evening meal. Claudia was reading tourist material, planning what we would do the next day, when I read out to her our horoscopes in a newspaper. I don’t remember quite how the conversation went from there; only that she joked again about being a dangerous Scorpio; and then playfully, but taking me utterly by surprise, she pulled out the small handgun and pointed
it at my temple. ‘Would you die for love, Mark?’ she asked. ‘Of course you wouldn’t. You’re a Libran.’ I leapt off the bed, tripping in the narrow space between bed and window, and falling to the floor. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, putting it away. ‘Don’t panic. There’s a safety catch.’

  Still on my knees I asked why on earth she kept such a thing. She said, ‘Because I dislike it that my life’s ruled by fear.’

  I’d had such a fright I said no more for the moment, but that evening, when we stopped on a wide wooden footbridge over the Seine to look upriver at the floodlit walls and spires of Notre Dame, I suggested she should throw the gun away. ‘Do it now,’ I said. ‘Get rid of it. Drop it into the river.’

  We were leaning on the rail, and she took it out, turned it over in her hand and held it over the water. For a moment I thought she meant to do it; but then she put it back in her bag and walked on.

  The anger I’d felt at being frightened, and which I had suppressed, burst out now. ‘For God’s sake,’ I barked at the back of her head. ‘You don’t need that thing. It’s insane. It’s probably illegal. Throw it away.’

  But to seem to command Claudia was always a mistake. She turned to face me. Who did I think I was? Did I think I had the right to tell her what to do, how to live her life?

  And who did she think she was, I responded, carrying an illegal weapon, threatening people?

  As we crossed the remainder of the bridge I kept on at her. She fell into a grim silence, and then suddenly, as we went down the steps to the street, she turned. ‘Find yourself a nice sane safe girl, Mark. Get on with your nice safe boring literary life, and let me get on with mine.’ And she walked away from me, fast, disappearing down a narrow crowded street.

  I let her go. Then I regretted it, and went looking for her around the streets where we’d intended to choose a restaurant. When I couldn’t find her, I returned to our hotel. She wasn’t there. Worried now, I walked all the way back to the 7th and wandered the streets again. It must have been nearly midnight before I stumbled into a café and ordered something very ordinary, a pizza, or a croque-monsieur—not at all the gourmet feast we’d been planning to have together.

  That night I left the door of my room unlocked and at two or three in the morning she came in and sat on the edge of my bed. She talked happily about where she’d been, what she’d seen and done; about the Frenchman, a photographer, met in a bar, who had taken her in a taxi to see his studio somewhere near Montmartre. They had eaten couscous in a local restaurant and drunk a bottle of wine, and she had smoked one of his Gauloises, which had made her feel sick. I must have felt it all deeply, because I remember it as if I had been there.

  There was no reference to our quarrel. It was as though it had never happened. I was baffled, helpless, angry with her, jealous of the photographer, suspicious about what might have happened, yet unwilling to show any of this because I was afraid of losing her again. I asked myself was I simply weak, and answered (a good Libran’s balanced assessment) that I was not inherently so, but that my position with her rendered me helpless. Claudia was weird, even ‘possibly, at times’ (I sidled up to the word, afraid to face it) deranged—and I was in love with her.

  While she talked she removed her outer garments and, in pants and bra, climbed into bed beside me. I thought perhaps she wanted to make love to me as an act of contrition, but I wasn’t sure. I felt helpless, almost afraid of her, and I made no move towards her side of the bed.

  I was wide awake now, and we went on talking. I had been remembering her saying that she carried a gun because she disliked it that her life was ruled by fear, and I asked what she’d meant, what she was afraid of.

  ‘Of dying,’ she said. And then, after a moment, ‘Not just of dying. Other things too. Everything. Nothing. Myself.’

  She told me how at the age of fourteen or fifteen she had been troubled and depressed by thoughts of infinity—for example that our whole cosmos might be only a molecule in the knee of a giant who was himself as insignificant in his universe as we are in ours; and that conversely, there might be a whole minute universe locked away in a single atom. Infinity of space and time were horrifying enough. But infinity of scale had seemed to her the final horror. Thoughts of this kind, she said, had turned her towards science. But science hadn’t really helped. Most scientists shut their minds to everything but what was (I remember her phrase) ‘proximate and measurable’. And those who went beyond—the theoretical physicists—were beyond her scope. She’d come to the conclusion that there was no escape from her own thought processes—‘brain storms’, she called them. ‘I just have to suffer them.’

  ‘So you resort to astrology,’ I said.

  She reached over in the bed, feeling for me in the dark, finding my neck and running her fingers up into my hair. ‘You don’t understand me at all, do you, Mark?’

  IT WAS JACK GIBBS who rescued me from Claudia, and I did not (and I suppose still do not, though I should) thank him for it. He was the hulk of her dreams—six foot three, handsome, broad-shouldered, strongly built, articulate, a top scientist, a ‘two cultures’ man, well-read and with wide intellectual interests. He was four or five years her senior, had graduated from Cambridge, done post-graduate research in America at MIT, and was now back on his home turf, appointed to a senior position in the laboratory where she was working towards her doctorate.

  I thought of him as Antony to her Cleopatra, and I used to comfort myself with lines from that play, saying to myself that I should not lament my loss,

  But let determined things to Destiny

  Hold unbewailed their way.

  Jack eclipsed me. He eclipsed everyone in Claudia’s firmament. She went for him, went at him, and told me all about it, not out of malice or to make me unhappy, but blindly, because she needed to tell someone, and that need made her unaware of, or perhaps even indifferent to, the pain it gave me. I found her fierce focus on him, her sense of purpose, terrifying; and I remember joking about it, telling her that it put me in mind of an example, under the heading ‘Figures of Speech’ in my fifth-form English grammar book, illustrating the pun: ‘Three strong girls went for a tramp. The tramp died.’

  But Jack Gibbs was not going to die. He was the first to recognise in Claudia Strange not just a competent scientist but a brilliant one. Perhaps for him, at least during those first few years of their association, she fulfilled a dream almost as much as he fulfilled one for her.

  Jack, now Professor Sir Jack Gibbs, has had a hugely successful career—how could it be otherwise for a scientist who won a Nobel Prize while still in his thirties? Yet it is Claudia whose biography has been written as if Jack was someone who figured in it, and not as a mentor but as a kind of demon. He used her, it has been said. Her work and not his own was crucial to the discoveries that earned him his prizes and his fame.

  I am no scientist and don’t pretend to understand anything of the intricacies of their work together; but on the face of it, and little as I care about Jack, I should say at once that those attacks seem unfair. If Jack used Claudia it was because she wanted to be used, and was grateful for it. He was the one who recognised her real potential and employed it towards ends beyond the mere attainment of a PhD. And, furthermore, we know how important her contribution was only because Jack took the trouble to acknowledge it.

  Some considerable time after her death (and that, remember, happened long ago, around the time of the assassination of President Kennedy) Jack wrote a long magazine article recounting how he and Claudia had spent weeks together going over the theoretical implications of his experimental work. Without her brilliant and penetrating analysis, he acknowledged, it would have taken him much longer, many years possibly, to arrive at conclusions which in the meantime others might have reached before him. And in a note specifically on his Nobel Prize (it may have been the text of an acceptance speech) he wrote, ‘I accept this prize humbly, on behalf of my team and my university, and most particularly I accept it on behalf of the late Dr
Claudia Strange. Her work as much as my own earned this reward.’

  But the more Jack Gibbs acknowledged her share in his success, the more the acknowledgement was taken as proof of a debt amounting to theft, and as a cover-up of its real extent. At best it was seen by Claudia’s advocates as an admission of guilt, at worst as a forestalling of his critics—dust thrown in their eyes. It was said that he had made use of her during those first years of marriage and then, once his great breakthrough was made, had simply abandoned her in favour of another woman—one who was no use to him as a scientist, but who would be compliant and easy-going at home.

  These decades have not been fortunate for a man in his position. Jack Gibbs has his glory—his professorial chair, his Nobel Prize, his knighthood—but over it all has fallen the terrible shadow of the Wronged Woman. It is the shadow of Claudia Strange.

  JACK APPEARED IN CLAUDIA’S life soon after our return from Paris and at a time when I was sure we were about to become lovers. From that moment on everything changed between us. There were fewer letters. We met seldom now, and when we did I had to listen to stories about Jack—his brilliance, his kindness, his good looks, even his size! He was now her supervisor (she had contrived to put herself into his charge almost at once) and her lover (that followed as the night the day), the new star in her heavens, the new principle governing her universe …

  I exaggerate, do I? Only a little, if at all. Of course I was hurt to see myself fading from her consciousness like the thin, frail wisp of a vanishing comet. But I don’t misrepresent her mood of that time. She seemed inspired, a muse of the laboratory, a poet of mathematical calculus; and so totally focused on Jack and on his work it doesn’t surprise me that in time he would come to feel it was her thinking as much as his own that carried him over the final obstacles.