Chapter Six
Sid
Sid arrived promptly at the Jack Cole building for computer science. It was a flat-roofed two-story building on a modern campus,
a short walk outside the ancient town walls, an exposed site, separated but hardly sheltered from the ocean by the Old Course.
The sky felt bigger out here, and there was plentiful space around the buildings. A large parking lot was almost full, the
leaves on the trees around it just turning from green to gold. It had the feeling of an out-of-town science park, and Sid
liked it.
Professor Cameron Johns assessed him from behind an uncluttered desk. He looked like he had zero body fat, and his skin was
weathered and tanned. Sid held his gaze calmly and reckoned him to be in his forties, a runner. The office was compact and
faced the ocean. Its window glass was clouded from the salty air.
“This request from Professor Cornish to give you some work is unusual,” Johns said. “Generally, I prefer to hire my own staff.”
Sid was thrown by the acid in his tone. Diana Cornish had assured him he would be welcomed here, and he and Johns had exchanged emails over the summer that had seemed fine.
Though, come to think of it, maybe they’d been rather terse.
A cold feeling lodged itself in Sid’s chest. Had he got this wrong?
Was he being foisted on this department? That would be humiliating.
“I gather from Professor Cornish that your partner is considered invaluable to her institute,” Johns said.
“She’s a new hire there, yes.”
“So that’s why you’re here, too? Happy wife, happy life?”
Sid couldn’t believe how quickly this was going south. It was mortifying. He said, “I think there might have been a misunderstanding.
If there’s nothing for me here, I won’t waste any more of your time.”
Johns picked up a ballpoint pen and clicked the button on the end against his desk. The sound grated on Sid’s nerves. He felt
ready to walk out. “How’s your wife finding life at the Institute?” Johns asked.
“We’re not married.”
“It’s brave of you to relocate for a partner at this early stage of your career. Not many men would do that.”
“I’m working on a project of my own. Look, this has been a mistake.” He stood, but Johns waved at him to sit back down.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m giving you a hard time. I’m sorry. You’re talented and your work is impressive. We both know it. I just
don’t like being told how to run my own department. But here we are. I already have a department fully staffed with people
who went through the normal recruitment process to get here, so I can’t offer you teaching just now because it would be at
the expense of one of them, but I have an opening for an assistant on a project of mine that’s in the cybersecurity arena.
You’d be supervising a few postgrads for a couple of days a week. How does that sound?”
Sid was tempted to refuse because his pride was hurt, he didn’t love the way Johns was speaking about Anya or to him, and
it seemed like he’d walked right into some messy politics, but Johns was offering him a bone and it was probably wise to take it for now. St. Andrews didn’t have too many employment options
for him.
“Sure,” he said. “Sounds interesting. Thank you.”
“Okay. I’ll be in touch with a start date. It’ll probably be in a couple of weeks, after we settle the new students. In the
meantime, we’ll fix you up with access to the lab and some desk space.”
At reception Sid scribbled his initials in the sign-out column of the visitor book and asked about getting his pass. The receptionist
gave him a temporary one to use for now. As he was leaving, she called out, “Hold on. There’s an envelope here for you, too.”
She passed it to him. His name was neatly handwritten on the front in block capitals. He frowned at it. Who knew he was going
to be here?
“Do you know who left this?” he asked.
“I don’t. Sorry. I found it with the post when I got in this morning. I almost threw it away, but Cameron mentioned you were
coming in.”
The phone rang and she answered it. Sid opened the envelope as he crossed the parking lot. It contained a single sheet of
paper with just seven words printed on it:
“You need to know about Minxu Peng.”
Anya
“Dad” was the most loaded word of my childhood.
If you’d looked at Wikipedia the day Diana Cornish and my father ambushed me in his mews house, it would have told you that
for many years Magnus Beaufort was mostly known for his work as a consultant nephrologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge,
and for the limited philanthropy he engaged in using the significant fortune he inherited from his eminent physician father,
who had, in turn, inherited a great deal of money from Magnus’s grandfather. If there was one thing Beaufort men were good
at, it was turning money into more money.
You would have learned that Magnus had enhanced this fortune when he’d helped to develop a drug that was later approved and sold at a scandalously high price.
What might have interested you, too, was the paragraph about what he wanted to do with the money.
My father, who had rejected his own flesh and blood, was paradoxically very interested in immortalizing his legacy in bricks and mortar instead.
In the eponymous Magnus Beaufort Library, to be specific.
Designed by a leading architect, a man who had worked on world-class buildings across the globe, the library was intended
to be an exceptionally avant-garde and inspiring space, but also one of the most technologically advanced libraries and teaching
spaces in the world.
Critics weighed in as soon as the plans were made public. They said the design was terrible and impossible to realize in the
materials suggested, that the materials themselves were flawed and ugly, that the site was wrong, that the construction was
going to run catastrophically over budget. They asked whether the millions and millions it would cost couldn’t be better spent
elsewhere. They wrote that the Magnus Beaufort Library was a vanity project.
Mum said the same: Of course, Narcissus named it after himself.
My father went into whitewash mode, writing robust op-eds in defense of his library and throwing money at reading and literacy
programs for children and in prisons. He released patents for his drug so that third-world countries could make it, but nobody
forgot how many had died in such places while his company raked in millions in the West. Even as he broke a sweat ostentatiously
doing good, even as they broke ground on the library, the controversy waged on. Magnus Beaufort had a PR problem, and it couldn’t
have delighted my mother more.
The prospect of watching his library get built in a dominant position was one of the reasons I would never study or teach
at Cambridge University. The other was the danger of running into one of my half siblings. There were three of them. I saw
them on social media but had no idea whether they knew I existed or not.
Now, here I was, in my father’s arms, in his mews house, under the watchful eye of Diana Cornish. Magnus Beaufort and I had never touched before. A deeply buried part of me wanted him to hold me longer, but I was trembling because he felt so forbidden and because I was so angry with him.
Over his shoulder, I stared at the de Kooning painting, at the woman’s body exploded in streaks of fleshy paint. It was what
he’d done to Mum. He’d blown her life up, and mine. I wrenched myself out of his grip.
“You look just like my mother,” Dad said. His eyes were glassy. With tears? I felt unbearably raw, and my anger flared. How
could he be having a moment where he was feeling his feelings because I reminded him of my grandmother, who I’d never met? It was too much.
I ran down the stairs so fast, I almost slipped, and ignored their shouts behind me. I didn’t stop to put my shoes on, just
grabbed them and burst onto the street in my socks. I stood, shocked, blinking in the daylight, feeling as if the little street
was pivoting around me. When I heard them behind me I took off.
I didn’t know where I was going. I just ran and walked and ran again until I felt like the mews house was lost behind me and
I became aware of a stabbing pain in the side of my foot. I sank down with my back to someone’s wall in a quiet corner and
tears rolled down my cheeks. I gripped my foot where it hurt, and when I took my hand away there was blood on it.
“She’s here!” My father knelt beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder. I felt as if it was scorching me. I slapped it away.
“Fuck off!”
He stood up, backed away. He looked distraught. Cece was there. He said, “I don’t know if I should hug her.” It made me even
more angry. If he was my father, he should know the right thing to do. Not that I did. I wanted never to see him again, but then I’d wanted him all my life and here he was.
So. Very. Close.
Diana knelt beside me. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.” She had a lot to answer for. I was so angry with her, and I could see in her eyes that she knew it.
My father said, “I think that foot needs attention.”
“It’s fine.” I stood up. Diana offered me her hand, but I ignored it. I tried to walk, but it hurt badly, and blood smeared
the pavement. My sock was soaked red. I sat down again.
My father approached. I wrapped my arms around my knees defensively, but he didn’t touch me this time.
“Let us help you with that foot and my driver will take you anywhere you want afterward. I promise. I also think Diana has
some explaining to do. To both of us.”
I looked at her. She nodded. My foot was throbbing like crazy. The sight of blood made me queasy. Something in me gave up
fighting, and I let him help me up.
It was my first proper look at him. We had the same eyes. I knew there were similarities between us from when I’d obsessively
searched the internet for pictures of him, but seeing it in the flesh was totally different. It was like a body shock, a too-real