The Song Before It Is Sung Read Free Page A

rightfully belonging to other people — and other contexts
     - and trying to take them home. There was a certain portion of truth in her charges. She also implied — in fact she actually
     said it that night — that he had no ideas of his own.
    'That's nonsense, of course,' he said, foolishly imagining he was being asked to contribute to an entertaining theoretical
     discussion. 'To understand ideas, to be interested in ideas, you have to have ideas.'
    'Here's an idea: why don't you get a job?'
    'I'm working on Mendel's papers.'
    'Are you?'
    'Yes, I am.'
    'And what does that work consist of?'
    'Research, reading.'
    'Oh, I see. And who is paying for this research?'
    'You know the answer. But remember, we very nearly had a TV deal. And there are still people interested.'
    'Your life so far has been a series of nearlies. I've got some hot news for you: no one is interested in E.A. Mendel. He had
     an idea in 1953 but nobody can remember what it was. That's why the publishers aren't giving you any more money and that's
     why the TV deal got nowhere and why nobody wants your film version of his story. Of course I am not in the creative world,
     but even I know what goes on at the cinema: morons eat popcorn while watching cars exploding and aliens turning into spinach.
     They don't want some bollocks about the history of ideas.'
    When Francine was angry she developed a kind of torrential force that could not be stopped. He watched her with admiration
     as she gathered herself. He had the feeling that he had written the script for her, but he had no hand in the delivery. Sometimes
     she started quietly, inviting him to say something provocative. At other times she wanted to deliver a peroration without
     contradiction, as though she had already run through the early charges and was now simply summing up for the benefit of the
     jury. A not very intelligent jury. He knew that she had a desire for certainty, for the incorrigible proposition. And this
     made it very hard for her to live with someone as unformed as he was. For a while she had called him the questing vole, but
     that was while she still found him amusing. Now she thought his curiosity was an excuse, a form of evasion.
    Her face, with its seeping medical tiredness, had a high, feverish colour now, siphoned from the depths by resentment. Her
     eyes were cloudy, the way they used to be during sex, as if her anger had produced a flash of blindness, like looking at the
     sun, and her throat was becoming pink and russet, and slightly mottled — mushroom colours and textures. The violence of her
     feelings towards him was causing this discoloration. Mushrooms have a strange and mysterious life cycle, much of it underground.
     And on the surface Francine appeared calm, although the fungal colour was becoming more intense.
    'Conrad, I go out every morning at seven, I return home at seven - if I'm lucky - I've been peering at samples and slides,
     I have even seen a few patients, I have grabbed ten minutes to eat a piece of microwaved pizza in the canteen, and you have
     been reading the letters and ramblings of a long-forgotten — rightly in my opinion — Oxford don, who knew just how to flatter
     you by talking of your human qualities. And, guess what, the marmalade is exactly where you left it at breakfast.'
    The charges were true. But his alleged human qualities seemed to Conrad to be important, if still unclear.
    Francine continued: 'I have decided to leave you. I can't live like this. I need some support.'
    At the time she surprised him with her resolve. A few months later she said that she had been seeing another man, the consultant
     who was her boss, a man very highly regarded in obstetrics. He had recruited her to his team. He was fifty-one years old,
     sixteen years older than her. That word 'seeing' troubled him. He found it hard to believe that it meant fucking. It was too
     brutal. He had hung around outside the hospital for a few days and once had seen them