Stefan thought about it. ‘No, I don’t know that. But it sounds like you.’ He turned to go, then stopped. ‘So I shall look forward to tomorrow night. Now just tell me about Yago and Viv. Why is it that whenever I perorate in their company, they react as though I have dropped a fart?’
This was difficult to answer, but she managed it.
‘They’re scared of you, Stefan. It’s scary, genetics. There you sit, knowing all about the Great Code of Life, and all Viv and Jago know about is Street of Shame gossip and the Superwoman Cook Book. It’s a powerful thing, knowing science in such company.’
‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king?’
‘Exactly.’
‘I have got bigger fish to fry?’
‘That’s it.’
Belinda was glad she’d reassured him. She decided not to mention the fart. ‘Even I’m scared of you, a bit,’ she said, squeezing his arm and looking into his lovely eyes. They were like chips of ice, she thought.
‘Oh, Belinda—’ he objected.
‘No, it’s true. I sometimes think you could unravel my DNA just by looking at me. And then, of course, you could knit me up again, as someone else with different sleeves and a V neck.’
Belinda envied the way Stefan’s work fitted so neatly into the time he spent at college. She imagined him now with enormous knitting needles, muttering, ‘Knit one, purl one, knit one, purl one,’ in a loud, clacky room full of brainy blokes in lab coats all doing the same, trying to finish a complicated bit (turning a heel, perhaps) before the bell rang at five thirty.
People were always telling Belinda that genetics was a sexy science, but Stefan said it was harmless drudgery – and she was happy to believe him. Clueless about the nitty-gritty, she just knew that his research involved things called dominant and recessive genes. ‘So some genes are pushy and others are pushovers, and the combination always causes trouble?’ she’d once summed it up. And he’d coughed and said gnomically, ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.’
At that momentous Sunday lunch, she had not told him much about her own work. As she discovered later, Swedes don’t ask personal questions; they consider it ill-mannered. But she had told him about Patsy Sullivan, and made him laugh describing the horsy adventures. However, the time she regarded as daily stolen from her had nothing to do with her desire to write about red rosettes for handy-pony. It wasn’t time she wanted for ‘herself’, either. Magazines sometimes referred to women making time for ‘themselves’, but driven by her Keatsian gleaning imperative, Belinda had absolutely no idea what it meant. ‘Make time for yourself.’ Weird. Chintzy wallpaper probably had something to do with it. Long hot baths. Or chocolates in a heart-shaped box.
Thus, if well-intentioned people chose to flatter Belinda in a feminine way, it just confused her. ‘Buy yourself a lipstick,’ Viv’s mother had said during her university finals, giving her a five-pound note. But the commission had made her miserable. She’d hated hanging around cosmetics counters with this albatross of a fiver when she could have been revising the Gothic novel in the library. Belinda’s revision timetable had been incredibly impressive, and very, very tight. Only when Viv absolved her with ‘Buy some pens, for God’s sake,’ did she race off happily and spend it.
Yes, for someone who lived so much in her head, it was an alien world, that feminine malarkey. Luckily the other-worldly Stefan didn’t mind too much, but Belinda’s well-coiffed mother despaired of her, and left copies of books with titles like Femininity for Dummies lying around in her daughter’s house. Yet even as a teenager Belinda had flipped through all women’s magazines in lofty, anthropological astonishment, amazed at the ways contrived by modern women to occupy their time non-productively. Facials, for heaven’s sake. Leg-waxing. Fashionable hats. Stencils.
From this you might deduce that Belinda’s secret personal work was of global importance. But she was just writing a book called The Dualists, a grand overview of literary doubles through the ages. Being Patsy half the time had given her the idea. ‘Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ she explained, when people looked blank. ‘Or like me and Patsy Sullivan.’ But if she implied that she took the subject lightly, she certainly didn’t.
In fact, like most areas of study, the closer you got to the literary double, the more importantly it loomed; the more it demonstrated links with life, the universe, everything, even genetics and photocopying. Abba impersonators, Siamese twins, Face/Off – the world was full of replicas. And why was the genre so popular? Because everyone believes they’ve got an alternative, parallel life – in Belinda’s case, perhaps, the ideal existence of that unregenerate toff Virginia Woolf, with her pure and rounded pearls. This parallel life was just waiting for you to join it, to stop fannying about. Every time you made a choice in life, another parallel existence was created to demonstrate how your own life could have been. Surely everybody felt that? Surely everybody looked in the mirror and thought, That’s not the real me. It used to be, but it’s not now. Surely everyone measured themselves against their friends? Especially these days, when everyone was so busy?
Either way, for the past three years, between all the demands of Patsy and socks (and Stefan), Belinda had left unturned not a single existential book in which a malevolent lookalike turned up to say, ‘I’m the real you. And hey, you’re not going to like what I’ve been doing!’ Her office, formerly the dining room, was heaped with books and notes. She had become an expert on the dark world of Gogol and Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Stevenson and Hogg. Name any writer who shrieked on passing a reflective shop window, and Belinda was guaranteed to have a convincing theory about the personal crisis that conjured up his story, and summoned his double to life.
Oh yes, the nearer you stood to the literary double, the more (spookily) it told you universal truths of existence. Unfortunately for Belinda, she could never quite appreciate that the further you stood back from the literary double (as all her friends effortlessly did), the more it resembled leg-waxing by other means.
The phone rang at ten o’clock and Stefan answered it.
‘It was a man from British Telecom, seemed a bit rum,’ he reported to Belinda, who was curled up with a book in her study, Neville snoozing contentedly save for the occasional twitch of his little pink tail. ‘His name was Graham.’
Belinda bit her lip. ‘Oh yes?’
‘He was ringing from home, to check you were recovered. I told him, “This is ten o’clock at night, were you born in a barn?”’
Belinda looked amazed. Neville stirred.
‘You are all right, aren’t you, Miss Patch? He said he only mentioned his money-off Friends and Family scheme and you wept, like cats and dogs.’
She nodded. She felt cornered. When women had breakdowns, their husbands left them. It was a well-known fact. When Stefan’s former wife Ingrid had a breakdown, he left her good and proper, in an institution in Malmö.
‘You try to do too much,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘It’s not my fault, is it?’
Belinda gasped. His fault?
He searched her face, which crumpled under the strain of his kindness.
‘Of course it’s not,’ she snuffled.
‘Come to bed,’ he said, reaching to touch her.
‘All right,’ she said.
‘You must not forget, Belinda. No man is an island.’
‘No.’
She put down her book, and got up.
He