from an Italian who ran a tiny stall, not much more than a cupboard, opening out onto the pavement not far from the laboratory where she worked. The Italian, a voluble man from Naples whose English had hardly improved in thirty years of speaking it, preferred blondes, and every so often he insisted on either giving Sigrid her coffee for nothing, or adding a café-style biscotto as a present, dotted with almonds and chips of bitter chocolate. Sigrid liked all this. It was one of the bonuses—the many bonuses—of living in London. In Stockholm, where she had grown up, true blondes, like her, were two a penny.
Sigrid’s laboratory, independently funded but loosely affiliated with London University, was tucked into the basement of a building in Bloomsbury, behind the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In the mornings, during school terms, and when it wasn’t her turn to drive a carload of small girls to their junior school in Highgate, Sigrid tidied the house, then walked the length of Upper Street to the Highbury and Islington Tube Station, and caught a Victoria Line train to Warren Street.Then, via Marco and his coffee stall, she walked down Gower Street, to work.
Sigrid’s father was an engineer, and her mother a doctor; Sigrid had one brother, who had become an avant-garde composer and wrote scores for cult movies, largely made in Berlin, where he now lived. Sigrid herself had taken a master’s degree in computational science at the University of Uppsala, followed, through English student friends she made there, by research at the faculty of engineering at the University of Loughborough, which was where she had met Edward, who’d gone there to celebrate an old school friend’s birthday. What a weekend that had been! Even twelve, nearly thirteen years later Sigrid couldn’t recall that weekend without smiling.
And now here she was, thirty-eight years old, Edward’s wife, Mariella’s mother, and in command of her own particle accelerator, which could analyze materials without destroying them and was thus invaluable to museums and art collectors alike. Her triumph, the year before, had been to examine a sixteenth-century pen-and-ink drawing for a private collector, and establish that both the ink and the paper had come from the same time period, and geographical location, as Leonardo da Vinci himself. The collector had been beside himself with excited gratitude. He had wanted to give Sigrid and her family a skiing holiday in his chalet in Gstaad. But Sigrid had declined graciously. In her lab coat, with her hair tied back and her spectacles on, she was not the blonde in knee-high boots whom Marco wanted to give free coffee to. And as far as her professional life was concerned, it was the lab-coat Sigrid who prevailed.
Walking into the building off Gower Street, holding her coffee and her briefcase, Sigrid thought gratefully of the prospect of her lab coat. The head of the laboratory was away at a conference in Helsinki, and whenever he was away the assumption was that Sigrid was in charge, an assumption that nobody inthe laboratory seemed to question except for a clever, ginger-haired boy called Philip who craved Sigrid’s attention and believed that challenging her authority was a successful way of getting it. Yet this Monday morning, even the prospect of batting Philip’s tediousness away was attractive; better anyhow than spending the weekend listening to Edward on the telephone to his parents, or his brothers, or his parents again, in an endless cycle of anxiety and suggestion and countersuggestion and exasperation, that had finally driven her to take Mariella, and her three best friends for that week, to eat immense pastel-colored cupcakes at an American bakery that seemed to be the current nirvana for the whole of Mariella’s class.
“So bad for you,” Sigrid said, watching them eat. “All that fat and sugar. Empty calories, every mouthful.”
Mariella’s friend Bella had held out an alarming
Sigrid’s laboratory, independently funded but loosely affiliated with London University, was tucked into the basement of a building in Bloomsbury, behind the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In the mornings, during school terms, and when it wasn’t her turn to drive a carload of small girls to their junior school in Highgate, Sigrid tidied the house, then walked the length of Upper Street to the Highbury and Islington Tube Station, and caught a Victoria Line train to Warren Street.Then, via Marco and his coffee stall, she walked down Gower Street, to work.
Sigrid’s father was an engineer, and her mother a doctor; Sigrid had one brother, who had become an avant-garde composer and wrote scores for cult movies, largely made in Berlin, where he now lived. Sigrid herself had taken a master’s degree in computational science at the University of Uppsala, followed, through English student friends she made there, by research at the faculty of engineering at the University of Loughborough, which was where she had met Edward, who’d gone there to celebrate an old school friend’s birthday. What a weekend that had been! Even twelve, nearly thirteen years later Sigrid couldn’t recall that weekend without smiling.
And now here she was, thirty-eight years old, Edward’s wife, Mariella’s mother, and in command of her own particle accelerator, which could analyze materials without destroying them and was thus invaluable to museums and art collectors alike. Her triumph, the year before, had been to examine a sixteenth-century pen-and-ink drawing for a private collector, and establish that both the ink and the paper had come from the same time period, and geographical location, as Leonardo da Vinci himself. The collector had been beside himself with excited gratitude. He had wanted to give Sigrid and her family a skiing holiday in his chalet in Gstaad. But Sigrid had declined graciously. In her lab coat, with her hair tied back and her spectacles on, she was not the blonde in knee-high boots whom Marco wanted to give free coffee to. And as far as her professional life was concerned, it was the lab-coat Sigrid who prevailed.
Walking into the building off Gower Street, holding her coffee and her briefcase, Sigrid thought gratefully of the prospect of her lab coat. The head of the laboratory was away at a conference in Helsinki, and whenever he was away the assumption was that Sigrid was in charge, an assumption that nobody inthe laboratory seemed to question except for a clever, ginger-haired boy called Philip who craved Sigrid’s attention and believed that challenging her authority was a successful way of getting it. Yet this Monday morning, even the prospect of batting Philip’s tediousness away was attractive; better anyhow than spending the weekend listening to Edward on the telephone to his parents, or his brothers, or his parents again, in an endless cycle of anxiety and suggestion and countersuggestion and exasperation, that had finally driven her to take Mariella, and her three best friends for that week, to eat immense pastel-colored cupcakes at an American bakery that seemed to be the current nirvana for the whole of Mariella’s class.
“So bad for you,” Sigrid said, watching them eat. “All that fat and sugar. Empty calories, every mouthful.”
Mariella’s friend Bella had held out an alarming
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