_The Times_ strewed his grave with ornate wreaths of poisoned ivy. But Archie was essentially a _nice man,_ that highest of sparing, tight-lipped English compliments. And his death brings me now only the feeling of a friend who has left by an earlier train. It also finally struck off that unrusting shackle which binds two men who have shared the bed of the same woman.
'Drink up! I need another pint,' urged David. He was the cleverest student I had ever known, and his bucolic bounce no affectation.
'It's my turn.'
'You're on the dole.'
'I refuse to accept charity,' I said, only half humorously.
'Why not? I accept it from Archie. Look at this tie.' He held it out. 'It's his, pure silk from Jermyn Street. I think I've got his socks on as well.'
'You don't mind sponging on him?'
'It's not sponging, boy, it's socialism. He's a socialist of the pure-minded sort, which is a mug's game. Down where I come from we're all socialists, but on the receiving end. That's different.'
After the next pint-or perhaps the one after, or the one after that-David suggested, 'Why don't you batch with Archie, too? You can't go on living in the servants' hall for ever.'
'I haven't the nerve to ask him. Besides, my parents would miss me.'
'Let them. It's got to come sooner or later. What have you got in common with them? They might have found you on the doorstep. If it isn't you, I'll be sleeping among the dregs of a Mile End doss house. Archie's conscience has been troubling him a lot lately, though I'd put it down to dyspepsia and the wind.' He spotted the journal in my pocket, and frowned as he pulled it out. 'What are you doing with this rag? Even real qualified doctors can't understand it. Not the ones at Mary's, at any rate.'
I turned to Fleming's paper, and told him my part of the story. When I finished he said, 'Yes, I've heard of penicillin. But I didn't know what it was. It's the lysozyme tale all over again, isn't it? You must have seen that famous cartoon in the Mary's
Everybody had seen it at Mary's. It depicted a line of schoolboys being birched at a penny a time by some amiable sadist, over jars labelled 'Tear Antiseptic'. One winter's day in 1922, the Niobe of sinuses had mothered a scientific infant, when a drip from Fleming's nose fell on a Petri dish and dissolved the germs growing there-exactly like penicillin. 'Lysozyme,' Sir Almroth had christened the mysterious substance. Fleming found it in tears, which he evoked from his colleagues by squirting lemons into their eyes, until to everyone's relief he discovered it also in pikes' eggs. Fleming suggested that lysozyme might be used against human infections, but medical London in 1922 was not particularly interested. Medical London was becoming wary of the fine scientific horses with flowing philosophical manes which pranced in Sir Almroth Wright's stables. I heard later that Fleming had given a couple of lectures on the idea, but doubtless these were as usual incomprehensible.
'When I worked as a lab boy, Flem had lost all interest in lysozyme,' I told David. 'That was a big fault of his, according to everyone in the Department. He was far more interested in performing an elegant experiment than in the result which the experiment was supposed to produce.'
'Still, Flem's had some jammy luck. First a blob of snot, then a blob of mould. They just happened to drop on a Petri dish growing bacteria at exactly the right time.'
'Surely there's no talent in the world as useful as a talent for luck?' I snatched back the journal, flicking it over to the last page of Fleming's paper. 'That mould! It didn't bloody drop from Heaven. I can tell you exactly where it came from.
At the end of the paper, Fleming gave the usual courteous thanks to his colleagues. 'That's the fellow!' I exclaimed. 'The Irishman with the French name, Mr la Touche. He was a mycologist. Which means that he did nothing from morning to night except handle moulds of various sorts. Now I come to think of it, that
David drained his glass, disappointingly unimpressed.
'I remember when I worked there in 1928,' I went on, 'la Touche used to grow specimens of moulds in big open dishes for Dr Freeman to make vaccines and inject his hay-fever patients-like immunization against typhoid. And la Touche's lab was immediately below Flem's! Why, it was a fungus factory. The staircase outside must have had more moulds floating in it than any area in London. Flem's mould didn't originate from the hand of God, but from the bedroom slippers of some wheezy asthmatic or rheumy-eyed hay-fever sufferer. Do you suppose Flem would be interested if I told him?'
'I shouldn't think so. It would only indicate that he was working in filthy conditions.'
In the end, I agreed to move in with David. 'I'm prepared to pay Archie ten bob a week,' I told him.
'At Archie's you don't pay, you borrow. Let's go down the road and get some fish and chips. I'll stand treat.'
I still have the journal signed by Fleming. If I sent it along to Sotheby's auction rooms I should get a substantial sum for it. You can still see the grease mark of our fish and chips.
16
Hargraves has just come in. Today, as I write these memoirs on the top floor of Arundel College in Bloomsbury, that most melancholy of districts, where the gaily contentious ghosts of Lytton Strachey and lovely, lesbian Carrington haunt disconsolately the concrete academic groves of London University.
My Arbeitszimmer is but a quarter the size of Gerhard Domagk's in Elberfeld. It looks not upon the Schwebebahn but on British Rail. I stare down on the lines winding away from Euston Station, behind the backs of crumbly houses whose tiles were shivered by Hitler's Luftwaffe and the Kaiser's Zeppelins. I have no Otto Dix on the wall-though our country home sports a couple of Bratbys, who resembles Dix with a splash of Cockney cheerfulness. But I have the same framed photographs of fellow scientists. One is of Domagk himself, a few strands of hair brushed across the dome of his head, in plastic-rimmed glasses and the sleeves of his white lab coat still too long for him. He is working at his microscope in the room where I met the girl with the Slav eyes. It is scrawled upon barely legibly, _freundliche Grьsse Gerhard Domagk 24.12.63._ A year later he died, aged sixty-eight, at No 11 Jдgerstrasse, round the corner from his old home in Walkьrenallee near the Zoo. It was an infected gallbladder. 'The germs got their revenge,' people in Wuppertal said gloomily.
The photograph next to Domagk's is inscribed _To Jim Elgar. Good luck! Alexander Fleming._ Flem is silver haired and unaccountably wistful, with rimless glasses and a spotted bow tie and a herpes lesion on his lower lip. It is a studio study from the time of his second marriage in 1953 to his bacteriological assistant from Greece, Dr Amalia Koutsouris-Voureka-who to my mind achieved even mightier distinction by being the first woman allowed by Sir Almroth Wright to work in his Department. Fleming's photograph is dated November 11, 1954, precisely a year and four months before he died from a coronary thrombosis in bed. He lies in the crypt of St Paul's, with Wellington and Nelson.
My third photograph is from the bacteriologist Leonard Colebrook _(For Professor John Elgar, Regards, Coli)._ A kind scholarly face, a long mouth with a deep upper lip and protruding lower one, beetling brows and beaky nose under heavily-rimmed glasses. He died on September 29, 1967-another coronary. The remaining one was given me by Jack Drummond, one of the editors of the journal which contained Fleming's paper. He signed it when he was knighted in 1944. He was murdered after the war by a French farmer. After such a gallery of fatalities, my wife has strictly forbidden me to sign anything for presentation to anyone.
Hargraves would certainly frame my own photograph and hang it on the wall if he thought it would reliably speed my demise. Hargraves is a coming man, and most impatient about it. I do not like Hargraves. Not that he is in the slightest unpleasant. On the contrary, he is always smiling, encouraging our juniors, joking with our students and shaking hands warmly with our visitors. He is an outstanding chemist and exceptional organizer. He has stylish hair, a fancy moustache, glistening teeth, square glasses, and his clothes always look new. At home, he has a pink
