the Third Twin (1996)

No one else knew. Even the other full professors fondly imagined their offices were private. They knew the cleaners had master keys. So did the campus security guards. But it never occurred to faculty that it could not be very difficult to get hold of a key that was given even to cleaners.

All the same, Berrington had never used his master key. Snooping was undignified: not his style. Pete Watlingson probably had photos of naked boys in his desk drawer, Ted Ransome undoubtedly stashed a little marijuana somewhere, Sophie Chapple might keep a vibrator for those long, lonely afternoons, but Berrington did not want to know about it. The master key was only for emergencies.

This was an emergency.

The university had ordered Jeannie to stop using her computer search program, and they had announced to the world that it had been discontinued, but how could he be sure it was true? He could not see the electronic messages fly along the phone lines from one terminal to another. Throughout the day the thought had nagged him that she might already be searching another database. And there was no telling what she might find.

So he had returned to his office and now sat at his desk, as the warm dusk gathered over the red brick of the campus buildings, tapping a plastic card against his computer mouse and getting ready to do something that went against all his instincts.

His dignity was precious. He had developed it early. As the smallest boy in the class, without a father to tell him how to deal with bullies, his mother too worried about making ends meet to concern herself with his happiness, he had slowly created an air of superiority, an aloofness that protected him. At Harvard he had furtively studied a classmate from a rich old-money family, taking in the details of his leather belts and linen handkerchiefs, his tweed suits and cashmere scarves; learning how he unfolded his napkin and held chairs for ladies; marveling at the mixture of ease and deference with which he treated the professors, the superficial charm and underlying coldness of his relations with his social inferiors. By the time Berrington began work on his master’s degree he was widely assumed to be a Brahmin himself.

And the cloak of dignity was difficult to take off. Some professors could remove their jackets and join in a game of touch football with a group of undergraduates, but not Berrington. The students never told him jokes or invited him to their parties, but neither did they act rudely to him or talk during his lectures or question his grades.

In a sense his whole life since the creation of Genetico had been a deception, but he had carried it off with boldness and panache. However, there was no stylish way to sneak into someone else’s room and search it.

He checked his watch. The lab would be closed now. Most of his colleagues had left, heading for their suburban homes or for the bar of the Faculty Club. This was as good a moment as any. There was no time when the building was guaranteed to be empty; scientists worked whenever the mood took them. If he were seen, he would have to brazen it out.

He left his office, went down the stairs, and walked along the corridor to Jeannie’s door. There was no one around. He swiped the card through the card reader and her door opened. He stepped inside, switched on the lights, and closed the door behind him.

It was the smallest office in the building. In fact it had been a storeroom, but Sophie Chapple had maliciously insisted it become Jeannie’s office, on the spurious grounds that a bigger room was needed to store the boxes of printed questionnaires the department used. It was a narrow room with a small window. However, Jeannie had livened it up with two wooden chairs painted bright red, a spindly palm in a pot, and a reproduction of a Picasso etching, a bullfight in vivid shades of yellow and orange.

He picked up the framed picture on her desk. It was a black-and-white photograph of a good-looking man with sideburns and a wide tie, and a young woman with a determined expression: Jeannie’s parents in the seventies, he guessed. Otherwise her desk was completely clear. Tidy girl.

He sat down and switched on her computer. While it was booting up he went through her drawers. The top one contained ballpoints and scratch pads. In another he found a box of tampons and a pair of panty hose in an unopened packet. Berrington hated panty hose. He cherished adolescent memories of garter belts and stockings with seams. Panty hose were unhealthy, too, like nylon Jockey shorts. If President Proust made him surgeon general, he planned to put a health warning on all panty hose. The next drawer contained a hand mirror and a brush with some of Jeannie’s long dark hair caught in its bristles; the last, a pocket dictionary and a paperback book called A Thousand Acres. No secrets so far.