Dust to dust

THREE

‘You were very restless last night,’ Cassie Motram said when her husband appeared in the kitchen for breakfast. John Motram wrapped his dressing gown around him and manoeuvred himself up on to one of the new stools that Cassie had bought to accompany a recently installed breakfast bar. He was a little too short for this to be an entirely comfortable procedure and his irritation showed.

‘I feel like I’m in an American film,’ he complained. ‘What in God’s name was wrong with a table and chairs?’

‘We’re moving with the times,’ Cassie insisted, dismissing his complaint. ‘Now, as I was saying…’

‘Bad dreams.’

‘Mmm. You’ve been having a lot of these lately. What’s on your mind?’

Her husband gave her a sideways glance, as if deciding whether or not to come clean, before saying, ‘I don’t think they’re going to renew my research grant for the historical stuff.’

‘They always have in the past. Why should this time be any different? Or are they using the credit crunch as an excuse like everyone else in this country?’

‘It’s not just that; the university’s changing,’ said John. ‘Scholarship’s becoming a thing of the past. The pursuit of knowledge is no longer good enough for the suits in the corridors of power: there has to be an “end product”, something the bean counters can patent, something they can sell. There has to be “economic justification” for what you do.’

‘And researching fourteenth-century plagues doesn’t fit the bill?’

‘They couldn’t have put it better themselves,’ John agreed. ‘Although, of course, they didn’t, preferring instead to go all round the houses using that funny language they speak these days about “moving forward” and being “proactive in the need for networking” as we “embrace the twenty-first century”. Where did they come up with all that junk?’

‘These people are everywhere,’ Cassie said sympathetically. ‘A woman turned up at the WI the other day, giving a talk about detoxifying the system, as she put it. I asked her what toxins she would be removing and she got quite snippy, demanded to know if I was a qualified nutritionist. I said no, I was a bloody doctor and would she please answer the question, and of course she couldn’t. Just what the hell is a qualified nutritionist when it’s at home?’

‘There’s been some kind of fusion between science and fashion which means that pseudo-scientists are popping up everywhere, spouting their baloney.’

‘Maybe we should go for a change of career.’ Cassie accepted the milk jug.

‘I may have to if any more grant money dries up. You know…’ John paused for a moment while he struggled with the marmalade jar. ‘I think I’m going to retrain as a celebrity nail technician.’

Cassie almost choked on her cornflakes. ‘Where on earth did you come up with that one?’ she gasped.

‘I heard some woman on breakfast TV being introduced as that and I thought that’s for me… John Motram, celebrity nail technician. To hell with higher education, let’s do something really important and start polishing the fingernails of the rich and famous. How about you?’

‘International hair colourist, I think,’ said Cassie, after a moment’s thought. ‘Same source.’

‘That’s us sorted then,’ said John. ‘A new life awaits.’

‘It’s just a pity we’re in our fifties,’ said Cassie. ‘And I have a full surgery waiting for me.’

‘And I have a second-year class in medical microbiology to fill with awe if not shock,’ said John. ‘Such a pity. I was looking forward to jetting off to LA or wherever these people go at the weekend.’

The letter box clattered and the sound of mail hitting the floor caused Cassie to swing her legs round on her stool and pad off to the porch in her stockinged feet. She reappeared, head to one side as she shuffled her way through a bunch of envelopes, giving impromptu predictions of their contents. ‘Bill… bill… junk… junk… postcard from Bill and Janet in Barcelona — we must go there: we’ve been talking about it for ages — and one for you from… the University of Oxford, Balliol College no less.’

‘Really?’ John accepted the letter and opened it untidily with his thumb, taking thirty seconds or so to read it before saying, ‘Good Lord.’

‘Well? Don’t be so mysterious.’

‘It’s from the Master of Balliol. He wants to see me next week.’

‘What about?’

‘Doesn’t say.’ John handed the letter over.

‘How odd. Will you go?’

‘What’s to lose?’

‘Maybe he’s heard you’re thinking of a career change and offering you a chair in celebrity nail technology?’

‘Could well be.’ John nodded sagely. ‘But I’ll only accept if you’re given a research fellowship in international hair colouring.’

‘Deal,’ said Cassie, slipping on her shoes. ‘Meanwhile I have coughs to cure and bums to jab… Have a nice day, as we international hair colourists say.’

‘You too. Maybe I’ll have a think outside the box about all this …’

‘Absolutely… Push the boundaries…’

Cassie left for the surgery and John cleared away the breakfast things, still feeling curious about the letter from Oxford. As a senior lecturer in cell biology at Newcastle University, he hadn’t had much to with Oxbridge although he had visited both Oxford and Cambridge for various conferences and meetings over the years and liked them both. It had been almost inevitable that he would: he was a born academic and scholarship was so obviously cherished at both universities. It had been one of the regrets of his earlier life that he had been unable to take up a place at Cambridge after leaving school, but reading science at a university nearer home had made more sense at the time and enabled him to contribute to the family income through part-time work — a not insignificant consideration for the son of a mother who provided for her family by cleaning the homes of the well-off and a father who had been invalided out of mining thanks to the damage that thirty years underground had done to his lungs.

Although both his parents had been dead now for a long time, someone wheezing in the street could still trigger memories of the sound of his father’s laboured breathing. His parents had lived to see him graduate with first class honours from Durham, although his father had died before he completed his PhD and never shared the pride his mother took in calling her son ‘doctor’.

Not going up to Cambridge proved to be no drawback for Motram. His sheer ability had taken him through a couple of successful post-doctoral fellowships at prestigious American universities where he had established himself as a researcher of international repute in the mechanics of viral infection. His particular interest lay in the epidemiology of plagues of past times, although this generally had to take a back seat to the study of more modern problems for which it was easier to attract funding.

John had met Cassie shortly after getting a lectureship at the University of Newcastle, where she had been in her final year of a medical degree, and had decided very quickly that she was the girl for him — a choice not entirely applauded by Cassie’s parents, who’d held higher social aspirations for their clever daughter. However, their love had survived the slings and arrows of outraged parents and they had married six months later.

The marriage had been successful from the outset, surviving the strain of the first few years of the demanding work that goes with being very new in their chosen professions, particularly for Cassie who, as a junior doctor in a busy hospital, seemed to be on call every hour of the day and night. Life had got easier with Cassie’s move into general practice and John’s growing academic reputation, which had made it easier for him to obtain research funding.

Two children had come along and the Motrams had been in a position to give them the best possible start in life. Their daughter, Chloe, was currently a translator with the European Commission in Brussels, and their son had followed his mother into medicine and was establishing a career in surgery. There were no grandchildren as yet but the possibility was a warming thought for both of them, and Cassie, who had an eye for decor, kept an eye out for possible changes to one of the upstairs rooms in their cottage which she felt might be ‘nice for little people’.