‘But we’re not cloning anyone,’ he said. ‘We’re not conditioning anyone. The conception can be completely natural. And all of it, the whole thing, parenthood, it is natural, don’t you see?’

The sun had moved lower, was breaking through the branches now and her red hair was ablaze in the light.

‘I’m going to stop you,’ she said. ‘You’ll see.’

And although it was absurd – and when you sat in on meetings with the research staff and heard the directors give their speeches there was no way you could doubt that what they were doing was good – when she leaned forwards to him, over that checked picnic cloth with a fork in her hand and a challenge in her eyes, he wanted to say: ‘Yes, do it. Give it everything you’ve got.’ And then he wanted to kiss her. He could imagine it, even now, leaning over to press his lips against hers.

But Avigail was out of reach. He knew it as the months passed, as he struggled to keep her out of his mind, his skin tingling with the urge to feel her touch. And he knew she did not long to touch him. That he wore glasses that fell down his nose all the time and – no matter how often he cleaned them – were covered in smudges and dust, that he stammered when he spoke and she had to bite her lip to have the patience to let him finish, that people laughed behind his back about his knitted jumpers. He knew he would never be loved by Avigail Goldsmith. But she was always there, in his periphery, and he spent his life waiting for her to appear, a burst of colour and energy that left him breathless with how badly he wanted her. So perhaps what he should have said to her as they sat on the checked picnic cloth was that he loved her. But what he said was nothing, and what he did was ask Julianne to marry him.

He looked up at Eva, who was in the right – he knew it as surely as he knew, looking at that poor, unnatural baby, that he was somehow in the wrong – who had every reason to go public, who had dyed her cropped hair to the exact same blaze of red that Avigail’s had been, and it hit him forcefully that he had spent his entire life loving one woman, whom he hardly knew, and would never be able to speak to again.

Audio log

5 Jan 2016 23:15

Back then you see, when I returned to work, I was still one of the only women in the faculty. Down in the basement, where the physics labs were housed, I was studying early-stage cell development with microfluidic delivery. But King’s was an old university, theology its biggest department, and upstairs the seminary dominated.