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The Primal Urge
Brian Aldiss


How would you like to have a disc set in the middle of your forehead which glowed pink whenever you felt sexually aroused?This is the basis of Brian Aldiss’ amazingly funny and original novel, first published in 1961 and set in a near-future Britain where the discs are to be made compulsory – but not before a lot of hilarious and even frightening events occur, suggesting that perhaps it’s not such a good idea to wear one’s, er, ‘heart’ on one’s forehead.









BRIAN ALDISS

The Primal Urge








This absurd attempt to popularise various sorts of morality is dedicated to Eddie Cooney and Oscar Mellor because they were the first to hear about it in ‘The Gloucester Arms’ – and for better reasons.


Contents

Title Page (#ud7d07a94-7979-5df0-917f-989e3ab3a48b)

Dedication (#u6ff9f87c-9497-55b3-af1e-3a172939c282)

Author’s Note (#uba04a497-1c94-5db5-bfad-aaf5b7ccf903)

Introduction (#u63817350-a005-5b58-9094-ae0f983c5fff)

PART ONE: A Putative Utopia (#u8452d33a-7b0e-5df3-87ed-47465b8b0589)

1 A Fox with a Tail (#u4d9cb3d4-9657-5ff3-89f4-4bb3041a4177)

2 A Towel in Common (#u861bbc8c-a50e-5d53-ade1-6ed6d7929376)

3 At the IBA (#u0e95a80c-87e2-5855-9110-11db9d0c3257)

4 ‘You Don’t Feel a Thing’ (#litres_trial_promo)

5 Breakfast with Paper and White Nylon (#litres_trial_promo)

6 An Interesting Theory (#litres_trial_promo)

PART TWO: Browbeaten but Victorious? (#litres_trial_promo)

7 As Natural as Navels (#litres_trial_promo)

8 The Light that Failed (#litres_trial_promo)

9 Whatever the Band Plays (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Scryban Becomes Involved (#litres_trial_promo)

11 ‘A Bit of a Let Down’ (#litres_trial_promo)

12 The Invaders Have Nice Manners (#litres_trial_promo)

13 Hot Pursuits, Cold Shoulders (#litres_trial_promo)

14 Camera Obscura (#litres_trial_promo)

15 Affairs of State (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Author’s Note


Just as it would be difficult – and fatuous – to write a history of twentieth-century art without mentioning Picasso, I have found it impossible to draw this contemporary picture without mentioning a number of the pillars of our society, from Mr Jack Solomons to Air Chief Marshal Dowding; I have presumed enough to impute to some of these public figures opinions on the hypothetical matters contained in my novel. One particular victim is Mr Aldous Huxley, who has most kindly permitted me to take this liberty with him. May I beg the other sufferers to be similarly indulgent, reminding them that such is the price of fame and semel insanivimus omnes? Of course I realise that their actual opinions could hardly fail to differ from those I have ascribed to them. But their presence here, even if involuntary, has lent me moral support in rough waters.

The same seeking for lifelines has caused me to use a number of branded goods in my pages. I would, accordingly, like to thank the manufacturers of Kosset Carpets, Odo-ro-no, Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade and several automobiles for the sense of security their products have afforded me.

Likewise with institutions. The Harlequins, the British Government and the National Book League are real, and I for one am glad it is so. But the representatives of the British Government who appear in these pages are not real; my Minister of Health, for instance, is no relation to any past, present or forthcoming Minister of Health; for this also one may be grateful.

These qualifications accepted, all characters in this book are fictitious and are certainly not intended to represent anyone living or dead; the institutions in it are purely make believe; such actions and opinions as are ascribed to these characters or institutions are imaginary; even the weather is too good to be true. Readers are asked, nevertheless, to bear in mind the lines of George Santayana:

Even such a dream I dream, and know full well

My walking passeth like a midnight spell.

But know not if my dreaming breaketh through

Into the deeps of heaven and hell.

I know but this of all I would I knew:

Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.



B.W.A.




Introduction


This light-hearted novel has a juicy futuristic edge: someone has invented an electronic device that indicates if the person you are looking at – or talking to – is sexually attracted to you. If attraction is detected, an ER (Emotional Register) – like a coin on one’s forehead – flares with a pinkish glow.

And then? Well, the next move is up to you …

Real figures from the twentieth century feature heavily in The Primal Urge: Rock Hudson, Dr Kinsey, Bertrand Russell, Patience Strong, Eric Linklater, Gaudi and, most importantly, Aldous Huxley are referenced in the narrative. Huxley was a writer I particularly admired; in The Primal Urge I have him speak up for the ERs. I wrote to him in California, asking his permission to include a quote, and to my absolute delight received a friendly letter of consent in return.

Think of it. A real letter from Aldous Huxley!

The least I could do, in my estimation, was to offer him a copy of the finished book. A tactful second letter from him pleaded partial blindness …

By the late fifties, when I began to formulate the idea for the book, I was on the way to becoming an established writer. I had been appointed Literary Editor of the Oxford Mail. I had become rather a man-about-town and was enjoying life. London, with parts still ruinous from the air raids of WW2, was heaving itself back to various fresh pleasures. Khaki was no longer the fashion.

The text of The Primal Urge reflects that enjoyment. Elegant and prankish, it says things like, ‘Now they were together again, the evening was riding on their shoulders once more like a tame raven.’ It puts its protagonist in a swimming pool with the woman he calls Rangy: ‘Her face and the reflections of her face seemed to palpitate before him like butterflies in a cupboard.’ The Canadian physiotherapist – if indeed that is what he is – Croolter, turns out to have the full name of Croolter B. Kind.

The plot drifts pleasantly along, ending with the lovers in London, arm in arm, emerging into the air of the capital, evening-calm, gasoline-sweet …

The British version of The Primal Urge appeared in 1961. I had some trouble in getting it published; when it was accepted, the British publisher asked, ‘Couldn’t you clean it up a little?’ The American publisher, on the other hand, was asking me to make it a bit dirtier …

Nowadays, I doubt such questions would arise. The mores of 1961 have more or less sunk below the sexual waterline. Waterlines themselves have also sunk.

Brian Aldiss

Oxford, 2012



PART ONE




1

A Fox with a Tail


For London it was one of those hot July evenings in which the human mind is engulfed in a preoccupation with the moist palm, the damp brow, the armpit.

Sweating continently, James Solent emerged into the motionless heat of Charlton Square. With a folded newspaper raised to his forehead in an odd defensive gesture, he came down the steps of the grey trailer onto the grass and paused. The door of Number 17, where he lived, beckoned him; but competing with the wish to go and hide himself was a desire to overhear what three men nearby were saying.

‘Such a gross imposition could only be swung onto a politically indifferent electorate,’ one said.

The second, lacking words to express what he thought of this sentiment, guffawed immoderately.

‘Rubbish!’ the third exclaimed. ‘You heard what the Minister of Health said the other day: this is just what’s needed to give Britain back her old sense of direction.’

It was the turn of the first man to burst into mocking laughter. Seeing Jimmy standing nearby, they turned to stare curiously at his forehead.

‘What’s it feel like, mate?’ one of them called.

‘You really don’t feel a thing,’ Jimmy said, and hastened across the square with his newspaper still half-heartedly raised. He let himself into Number 17. From the hall he could hear Mrs Pidney, the landlady, drowsily humming like a drowned top in the kitchen. The rest was silence. Reassured, Jimmy discarded his paper, revealing the disc on his forehead, and went up to the flat he shared with his brother. Fortunately Aubrey Solent was out, working late at the BIL; that undoubtedly saved Jimmy an awkward scene. Aubrey had grown uncommonly touchy of recent weeks.

The flat contained the usual facilities, a kitchen, a living room (with dinerette), Aubrey’s large bedroom and Jimmy’s smaller bedroom. Everything was so tidy that the one glossy-jacketted LP lying in the middle of the carpet looked to be posing. Skirting it, Jimmy hurried into his room and closed the door.

Just for a moment he played a tune on the panelling with his finger tips. Then he crossed to the looking glass and surveyed himself. The suit Harrods had made him before he began his new job in January was daily growing to look better on him, more like him; for the rest he was twenty-five, his brown hair not objectionably curly, his face round but not ugly, his chin neither aggressive nor recessive.

All, in fact, he told himself, sighing, alarmingly ordinary. ‘Oh, ye of the average everything,’ he addressed himself, improvising, as he frequently did, a rhymed oration, ‘Oh, ye of the average height, overtaken by taller folk, undertaken by smaller folk … an average fate one might certainly call a joke.’

One feature only was definitely not, as yet at all events, ordinary; the shining circle, three and a half centimetres in diameter, permanently fixed in the centre of his forehead. Made of a metal resembling stainless steel, its surface was slightly convex, so that it gave a vague and distorted image of the world before it.

It looked by no means ill. It looked, indeed, rather noble, like a blaze on a horse’s brow. It lent a touch of distinction to a plain face.

Jimmy Solent stood for some minutes before the wardrobe mirror, looking at himself and, through himself, into the future. It was a time for wonder: he had taken the plunge at a period when to plunge or not to plunge was the consuming question. He was one of the first to plunge, and the seal of his precipitance was upon him. His preoccupation was gradually banished by the barking of the loudspeaker in the square outside. Slipping off his jacket, Jimmy went over to the window. His outlook here was generally less interesting, being more respectable, than that from his brother Aubrey’s bedroom windows. They looked out on to backs of houses, where people were unbuttoned and being themselves; Jimmy’s window, in the front of the house, stared perpetually out at facades, where people put on closed little public faces.

Now, however, there was life in the square. This week, a big grey trailer, so reassuringly similar to the Mass Radiography units, stood on the seedy grass beneath the plane trees. A queue of men and women, most of them in summer dresses or shirt sleeves, stood patiently waiting their turn to enter the trailer. At five-minute intervals, they emerged singly from the other side of it, generally holding a newspaper, a handkerchief or a hat, to their foreheads, disappearing without looking to left or right. A few spectators idled about, watching the queue; at the beginning of the week there had been cameramen. From the bedroom window – from safety! – it all appeared rather comical: at once unreal and typically English. Jimmy found it hard to realise he had come through that same mill only twenty minutes ago; just as the government had promised, his forehead did not ache at all. Though he prodded it experimentally, his disc neither moved nor ached. The marvels of modern science were indeed marvellous.

The man in charge of the loudspeaker, being hot and bored, was not talking into his microphone properly. Only occasional phrases were intelligible. One bit sounded like ‘We are free to sit here in a fine old state’; he must have been saying something equally preposterous, like ‘freer citizens of a finer state.’

‘… government’s assurance … many eminent doctors agree … nothing but healthful … far from being an affront to national modesty … greatest assets … no expense … only a minor operation …’

The voice mumbled like a cloud of bees, and the minor operation was a major operation taking place all over the country: for the grey trailers were parked by now in the centre of every town and village from Penzance to John o’Groats. The whole population was potential queue-fodder. Jimmy came away from the window.

Somebody was moving about in the living room. Jimmy straightened his tie. It was unlikely to be Aubrey, but Jimmy called out, ‘Is that you, Aubrey?’ and went to see.

It was not Aubrey. It was Aubrey’s girl, Alyson Youngfield, if the noun ‘girl’ may be used here ambiguously. She had discarded her summer gloves and was fanning herself with the discarded LP sleeve. Jimmy’s face lit at the sight of her.

‘He’ll be late this evening. Alyson,’ he told this charming creature settling herself on the divan with the elegance of a puma. Her fairness took on a special quality with the July weather; under the neat blonde hair, her skin seemed to ripen like wheat.

‘Not to worry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really expect to find Aubrey at home, but it’s cooler here than in my bed-sitter. It gets like an oven just under the roof. Let’s have a little hi-fi to combat the heat, shall we?’

In that instant Jimmy saw she was looking at his forehead. It caused him none of the embarrassment anyone else’s regard would have done; with pleasure, he wondered whether an acquired tactfulness or natural kindness caused her, when she saw his glance, to say matter-of-factly, ‘Oh, you’ve got yours. I must get mine tomorrow.’

With gratitude, to draw her into a conspiracy, Jimmy answered incautiously, ‘Are you really? Aubrey won’t like that.’

He knew at once he had said the wrong thing.

‘Aubrey will eventually be wearing one himself; you’ll see. It’ll come to us all in time,’ Alyson said. But she said it stiffly, turning her fair head with its most immaculate locks to gaze at the window. As always, Jimmy found himself reflecting how hard it was to gauge the precise relationship between her and Aubrey. A serious quality in Alyson and an evasive one in Aubrey made them both not entirely easy people to estimate.

‘I’m going to a party this evening,’ he told her, to change the subject. ‘At the BIL, Aubrey’s HQ; I’m sorry you’re not coming. I shall have to be getting ready soon.’

‘I don’t envy you,’ Alyson said. Nevertheless she watched him keenly as he walked into the kitchen. He there assembled a carraway roll (Jimmy did not so much enjoy carraway rolls as endure them under the impression they were fashionable), a slice of Camem-bert cheese, a spoonful of cream cheese, a wedge of butter and pickings from the garlic-flavoured salad which reposed in the refrigerator. Hesitating a moment, he poured himself a glass of dry Montrachet; it was not quite the thing with the cheese, he realised, but he liked it.

‘Come over here, Jimmy,’ Alyson said, when he appeared in the living room with his tray.

He went over at once to where she was sitting on the divan. She was wearing the green suit with the citron lining that Aubrey had bought her at Dickens and Jones. Underneath it, she wore a citron blouse, and underneath that could have been very little; all the same, Alyson looked warm. And, ah, undeniably, warming.

Changing her mind about whatever she was going to say, Alyson remarked, ‘You are too obedient, Jimmy. You must not come when just anyone calls you.’

‘You’re not just anyone, Alyson,’ he said, but missed the required lightness of tone such an obvious remark demanded. He took his tray sadly into the dinerette, from where he could still see her ankles and calves, curved like a symbol against the plum background of the divan. They looked, indeed, very beautiful; as if he were having his first glimpse of the Himalayas, Jimmy felt humbled by them. Then a hint of colour made him hold one hand up before his face; a pink radiance covered it. The disc on his forehead was doing its stuff.

Feeling both shattered and pleased, Jimmy lingered over his meal. The Montrachet was very good. He sipped it, listening to the music from the record player. A band featuring an overharsh trumpet flipped through the current trifle called ‘You Make Me Glow’; that tune had been lucky; the show in which it was sung had been running for some weeks before the Prime Minister made his sensational announcement. Yet it might almost have been written for the occasion and brought unexpected fortune for the songwriter, who found himself overnight the author of a hit and able to afford the enemies he had always dreamed of.

‘Fate decreed

Your effect upon me should be so:

You not only make me knock-kneed,

You make me glow.

Presently,

Or when all other lights are down low.

Your touch will kindle me, you see

You make me glow.’

Alyson switched it off.

‘What I was going to say, Jimmy,’ she exclaimed, speaking with an effort, ‘is that I feel rather appallingly glum just now. It’s the sight of all those people queueing out there – and all over London – I suppose. They’re so patient! Nobody seems quite to have grasped how epochbreaking these ERs, these Norman Lights as they call them, really are; not even people who are against them, like this politician, what’s his name, Bourgoyne.’

‘Let’s not get onto politics,’ Jimmy said. ‘You know how we always argue. Stay as sweet as you are.’

Although he expected her to take him up on that, she said nothing, moving her legs restlessly. She began to hum, ‘You Make Me Glow’, but broke off as if realising the idiocy of the tune.

‘I sometimes think the opposite of amusement is not boredom but peace,’ she said. She was deliberately misquoting a current poster, and Jimmy laughed.

‘I’m not sure sometimes that boredom and peace aren’t the same thing,’ he said and, having said it, thought it silly. Alyson evidently did not.

‘A lot of people feel like that,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps otherwise they would never have consented to have their foreheads tampered with; they’re eager for anything that makes a change. It’s understandable enough.’ She sighed luxuriously and added, deliberately guying the pathos of what she said, ‘We’re the generation what missed the war, lovie. Remember?’

Jimmy liked her saying that. It put them on an equal footing, for although Alyson happened to be his brother’s mistress, she was Jimmy’s age to within a month; Aubrey, six years older than Jimmy, had been born in 1930, thereby missing the war too, but he had been excluded from Alyson’s remark. Alyson was perceptive; she seemed to know exactly how and when Jimmy felt uncomfortable.

‘Don’t be glum any more,’ he advised. ‘It makes you look so huggable that no one could be expected to have any sympathy for you.’

Alyson gave no answer. Contentedly, Jimmy finished his meal and went to take a shower.

Thirty seconds under the hard, cold spray was enough. He towelled himself, applied Odo-ro-no, sucked an Amplex tablet to remove any anti-social traces of garlic, and dressed for the party. As he did so, he looked out of his window again. The queue outside the grey trailer was no shorter; the shadows in the square were longer.

These ER Installation Centres, to give the trailers their proper name, had dispersed themselves over a bewildered Britain on the previous Monday morning. It was now only Thursday evening, and already some 750,000 people up and down the country, had the Register painlessly – and perpetually – embedded in their brows.

The great conversion, in fact, had begun with many of the omens of success. Although much of this was due to the careful government campaigning which had preceded the conversion drive, the personal appearance of the Prime Minister on TV, wearing his ER, on the evening before the grey trailers opened their doors, had undoubtedly won over thousands of doubters to the cause he favoured. Even the Opposition conceded his speech had been powerful.

His disc gleaming interestingly but unobtrusively below his shock of silver hair, Herbert Gascadder had said to the watching millions: ‘I beg each one of you to realise that only a superficial view can hold that the ER is a menace to society. If you think more deeply, you will see the ER as I do, as a badge of liberty. We have, as a nation, always been diffident about expressing ourselves; that, perhaps, is why some sociologists have called loneliness one of the great curses of our age. The ER is going to break down that barrier, as well as many others.

‘The ER is the first invention ever to bring man closer to his fellow men. Even television, that great institution by whose medium I am able to speak to you in your homes tonight, has proved a not unmixed blessing – in fact, often a disruption – to family life. Over the ages, since we ceased to huddle together in caves, we have inevitably drawn further apart from one another. Now, I sincerely believe, we shall find ourselves drawn nearer again, united by those common impulses which the ER makes apparent.

‘Yet I would not have you think of the ER as something fantastic or crack-brained, a mere aberration of science. It will, in fact, have the same effect as any other invention, once we are accustomed to it; that is, to make a slight but inevitable modification to man’s daily life. We can only continue to exist by a policy of change in this highly competitive world. Let us thank God that the ER is a British invention. More, let us show our thankfulness by getting our ERs installed as soon as we can, so that by simplifying our private lives we can all pull together and make this nation, once more, a land of opportunity.’

‘How Gascadder would love me now,’ Jimmy thought, glancing again at his brow in the mirror while he adjusted his tie. His ER was still there, slightly larger than a penny, a symbol of patriotism and of hope.

‘Be a good boy and don’t drink too much,’ Alyson advised, as he finally appeared, ready to leave the flat.

‘Don’t be so motherly!’ Jimmy said. ‘We are meant to be Unlovable Young People.’

‘Good God!’ she exclaimed. ‘That! It’s hard enough being People!’

For a moment he shuffled by the door, looking at her. The rest of the room was nothing; she, sitting there in her Dickens and Jones suit, had an extra dimension, a special reality, a future in the balance. ‘Goodbye, Alyson,’ he said, and went out to the most momentous party of his life.

Jimmy was usually unassuming; yet the feeling had grown on him lately that there was some sort of help he could give Alyson. What help, he did not know; Alyson made no deliberate appeals and, aware of their potentially awkward position in Aubrey’s flat, they both confined their conversations to light chit-chat. Yet the something which remained unsaid had been growing stronger ever since Jimmy arrived at the flat. One day soon it would emerge from its hidden room into the light.

What convinced Jimmy that this was no illusion of his romantic imagination was the contrast between Alyson’s and Aubrey’s natures and their relationship with each other. Alyson was both intelligent and tolerant – but her comings and goings at the flat had a casual quality which implied little passion for Aubrey. Aubrey was a withdrawn young man; the streak which in his brother appeared as diffidence had been transmuted in him into aloofness. He was ‘correct’, in manner, dress and choice of church, food and book. He was a conformist with a career. In short, he was hardly the type to take a mistress; Alyson was hardly the type to become his mistress. They ought to be either husband and wife or strangers, and that was the crux of the matter.

A smell of sausages coiled juicily about the landing. As he descended the stairs, Jimmy could hear them frying.

The kitchen door, as usual, was open. Hilda Pidney spotted Jimmy as he reached the hall and came out, as she always did unless one was moving very rapidly, to exchange a few words. She was stocky and fifty, with the face, as Alyson once remarked, of one crying in a wilderness of hair. Despite her miserable expression, she was a cheerful soul; her first words now struck exactly the right note with Jimmy.

‘Why it suits you a treat, Mr Solent!’

‘I’m so glad you think so, Mrs Pidney,’ he said, putting his hand up self-consciously. ‘I see you’ve got yours.’

He had, in truth, the merest glimpse of it through her mop of hair.

‘Yes, I went straightaway at nine o’clock this morning,’ she told him. ‘I got there just before the trailers opened. I was second in the queue, I was. And it didn’t hurt a bit, did it, just like what they said?’

‘Not a bit, no.’

‘And I mean it is free, isn’t it!’ She laughed. ‘Henry’s been trying to make it work already. I ask you, at my age, Mr Solent. I can see I’m in for something now!’

He laughed with her without reservation.

‘I think these Emotion Registers are going to give a lot of people a new lease of life,’ he said.

‘You know what people are calling them,’ she said, grinning. ‘Nun Chasers or Normal Lights. Funny how these nicknames get round, isn’t it? I’d better get back to me sausages, quickish-like. Cheerio.’

As Jimmy let himself out of the front door, he thought, ‘She wasn’t coy. She has accepted it in the proper spirit. Three cheers for Mrs Pidney and the millions like her. They are the backbone, the backbone of England; such vertebrae, one dirty day, will rise and slay the pervertebrae.’

He strolled gently towards Park Lane, where he intended to capture a taxi, making himself enjoy the heat by contrasting it favourably with the cold, rain-bearing wind which had been blowing only a few days before. Everyone behaved much as usual in the streets. Considering that the grey trailers had been hard at work everywhere for four days, surprisingly few people had additions to their foreheads, but those few were attracting no interest. The man and woman in the bright red Austin-Healey, the cadaverous commissionaire, the two squaddies sunning themselves on the corner of South Audley Street, all wore their Emotion Registers as to the manner born. The cabby who answered Jimmy’s raised hand also bore the new token. Into every class, the ERs were finding their way.

The party to which Jimmy was going, Sir Richard Clunes’ party, was being held in one of the formidable blocks, Kensington way, which had been built at the end of the last decade. It was – with a few exceptions like Jimmy himself – a British Industrial Liasons party for BIL personnel, and therefore more in Aubrey Solent’s line than Jimmy’s, for Aubrey was a BIL man; Jimmy was entangled in literature. But Sir Richard, while promising to lend Jimmy a portrait for an exhibition he was organising, had genially invited him to the party at the same time, on the principle that younger brothers of promising executive material were worth suborning in this way, particularly as party material was always scarce at this season of year.

It was a small party: Jimmy could see that as soon as he arrived – much smarter than the literary parties to which he was more accustomed, which were generally toned down by provincial novelists with no style or reviewers with no figure. These were London people; more, BIL people! – BIL people living useful days and efficient nights. ‘They’re already at their primes, I’m sure they read The Times at breakfast,’ Jimmy told himself, glancing round as he shook hands with a beaming Sir Richard and Lady Clunes. Sir Richard had mobile eyebrows and a chin the shape of a goatee. His manner flowed with milk and honey, and he engaged Jimmy in pleasant talk for two minutes precisely.

‘Now let me see who you’ll know here, Solent,’ Sir Richard said, as that halcyon period drew to its scheduled close. ‘Ah, there’s Guy Leighton, one of our most promising young men. You’ll know him, of course – he has been working on the K. R. Shalu business with your brother. Guy! Can you spare us a moment, my dear boy?’

A dark young man who balanced perpetually on the balls of his feet was expertly prised from a nearby group and made to confront Jimmy. They bowed sadly to each other over their champagne glasses, with the polite dislike one partygoer so often feels for another. Guy and Jimmy were no more than acquaintances; their orbits only intersected when their invitation cards coincided.

‘Shall we dance?’ Jimmy said, and then, very seriously to counteract this facetiousness, ‘This looks a worthy gathering, Guy.’

‘Worthy of or for what, Solent?’ the dark young man parried. He could have been no more than four years older than Jimmy, but his habit of using surnames seemed to give him a good decade’s start. ‘The usual set of time-servers one finds at these bunfights: no more worthy than the next man, surely?’

‘Looking more worthy,’ Jimmy insisted. It was not a point he cared to labour, but he could think of nothing else to talk about. Gratefully, he accepted more champagne in his glass.

‘You, if I may say so,’ Guy said, cocking a sardonic eyebrow at Jimmy’s forehead, ‘look positively futuristic.’

‘Oh … the ER. Everyone’ll be wearing them in time, Laddie, yew mark moi words,’ Jimmy said, with that abrupt descent into dialect with which some of us cover our inadequacies.

‘Possibly,’ Guy said darkly. ‘Some of us have other ideas; some of us, I don’t mind telling you confidentially, are waiting to see which way the cat will jump. You realise, don’t you, you are the only person here wearing one of the ghastly things.’

He could not, announcing Armageddon, have shattered Jimmy more thoroughly.

‘You’re all living in the past, you scientific fellows. These are the nineteen sixties, the Era of the ER,’ he replied, but he was already looking round the large room to check on Guy’s statement. Every brow, high or low – some of them were the really interestingly low brows of genius – was unimproved by science. The wish to conform hit Jimmy so hard that he scarcely heard Guy’s remark about oppressed minorities.

‘The Solent pioneering spirit …’ he said.

‘And another thing I ought to tell you,’ Guy said. ‘I’m sure you will not mind my mentioning it. People in the swim refer to these discs as Norman Lights; after the firm of Norman which invented them, you know. I rather think it’s only the lesser breeds without the law who refer to them as ERs – or nun chasers, which being pure music hall might just possibly catch on. Of course it’s too early for any convention to have crystallised yet, but take it from me that’s the way the wind’s blowing at the BIL.’

‘I’ll be terribly careful about it,’ Jimmy said earnestly. He concealed his earnestness by a parody of earnestness; Guy, the born Insider, had just the sort of information one listened to if one hoped to get Inside oneself.

And then the group of men and women from which Guy had been separated flowed about the two young men, and a welter of introductions followed. Everybody looked well, cheerful and in good humour; that they were also interested in Jimmy lessened his interest in them. As if they had been waiting for a signal, they began talking about the registers; they were the topic of conversation at present. After a long burst of animation, a pause set in, during which all eyes turned on Jimmy, awaiting, as it were, a sign from the fountainhead.

‘As the only fox with a tail,’ he said, ‘I feel I ought not to give away any secrets.’

‘Has it lit up yet, that’s what I want to know?’ a commanding man in heavy glasses said, amid laughter.

‘Only once, so far,’ Jimmy said, ‘but I haven’t had it more than three hours.’

More laughter, during which someone made a crushing remark about fancy dress parties, and a sandy woman said, ‘It really is appalling to think that everyone will know what we’re thinking when we have ours installed.’

A man, evidently her husband by the laboured courtesy with which he addressed her, took her up instantly on this remark. ‘My dear Bridget, will you not remember that these Norman Lights go deeper than the thought centres. They register purely on the sensation level. They represent, in fact, the spontaneous as against the calculated. Therein lies the whole beauty of them.’

‘I absolutely couldn’t agree more,’ the heavy glasses said. ‘The whole notion of submitting ourselves to this process would be intolerable were it not that it gives us back a precious spontaneity, a freedom, lost for generations. It is analogous to the inconvenience of contraceptives: submit to a minor irk and you inherit a major liberty.’

‘But don’t you see, Merrick,’ Guy said, perching himself on tiptoe to address the heavy glasses, ‘—goodness knows how often I’ve pointed this out to people – the Norman Lights don’t solve anything. Such an infringement of personal dignity is only justifiable if it solves something.’

‘Personal dignity is an antique imperialist slogan, Leighton,’ a smart grey woman said, giving Guy some of his own medicine.

‘And what do you expect them to solve?’ Merrick of the heavy glasses asked, addressing the whole group.

‘Abolishing the death penalty entirely last year didn’t solve the problem of crime, any more than contraceptives have done away with bastards, but at least we are taking another step in the right direction. You must realise there are no solutions in life – life is not a Euclidean problem – only arrangements.’

The smart grey woman laughed briefly. ‘Come, Merrick,’ she said, ‘We can’t let you get away with that; there are no “directions” in the socio-ethical meaning you attribute to right.’

‘Oh, yes, there are, Susan,’ Merrick contradicted imperturbably. ‘Don’t reactivate that old nihilist mousetrap. There are evolutionary directions, and in relation to them the Normal Lights are an advance. Why are they an advance? Because they enable the id for the first time to communicate direct, without the intervention of the ego. The human ego for generations has been growing swollen at the expense of the id, from which all true drives spring; now—’

‘Then surely these Norman Lights are causing a reversion,’ Bridget interrupted. ‘A return to the primitive—’

‘Not primitive: primal. You see, you’ve got to differentiate between two entirely separate but quite similar—’

‘I can’t help thinking Merrick’s right off the beam. However it comes wrapped, an increased subservience to the machine is something to reject out of hand. I mean, in the future—’

‘No, wait a moment, though, Norman Lights aren’t machines; that is to say, they aren’t instruments for the conversion of motion, but for the conversion of emotion. They’re merely registers – like a raised eyebrow.’

‘Well, I’m still capable of raising my own eyebrows.’

‘And other people’s, I hope.’

‘Anyhow, that’s not the point. The point is—’

‘Surely a return to the primitive—’

‘The point is, to wear them voluntarily is one thing; to have this law passed by our so-called government is quite—

‘And who elected this government, Susan? You, Susan.’

‘Don’t let’s go into all that again!’

‘After all, why drag evolution into this? How can a mere mechanical—’

‘My dear man, mechanisation is a natural step – natural, mark you – in man’s evolution. Really, some people’s world pictures are so antiquated. Darwin might as well never have sailed in the Beagle at all!’

‘I cannot honestly see how anyone could expect anybody—’

‘All I’m trying to say is—’

‘—in the nation’s best interests. Everyone bogged down by inhibition, and then like a clean slash of a scalpel—’

‘If you’ve ever observed an operation in progress, Merrick, you will know surgeons do not slash.’

‘—comes this glorious invention to set us free from all the accumulation of five thousand years of petty convention. Here at last is hope handed to us on a plate, and you worry—’

‘Last week he was attacking and I was defending.’

It was at this point in the argument spluttering around him that Jimmy, listening in interested silence, found that a man he had heard addressed as Bertie was tipping rum into his – Jimmy’s – champagne from a pocket flask.

‘Give it a bit of body,’ Bertie said, winking conspiratorially and gripping Jimmy’s arm.

‘Thanks. No more,’ Jimmy said.

‘Pleasure,’ Bertie said. ‘All intellectuals here. I’m a cyberneticist myself. What are you?’

‘I sort of give exhibitions.’

‘You do? Before invited audiences? You’d better count me in on that. I tell you, when I get my red light, it’s going to wink in some funny places.’ He laughed joyously.

‘I’m afraid these are only book exhibitions,’ Jimmy said, adding, for safety, ‘Clean books.’

‘Who’s talking about books? They’re full of antique imperialist slogans,’ Guy said, butting in and making a face at Susan. ‘Don’t change the subject, Jimmy. There’s only one subject in England at the moment – it’s even ousted the weather. You, presumably, are more pro NLs than anyone else here. Why are you pro?’

‘For practical reasons,’ Jimmy said airily. The champagne was already making him feel a little detached from the group; they were only talkers – he was a pioneer. ‘You see, entirely through my own stupidity, Penny Tanner-Smith, my fiancée, broke off our engagement last week. I hoped that if she could see how steadily my ER glowed for her, she would agree to begin again.’

There was much sympathetic laughter at this. Susan said, ‘What a horribly trite reason!’ But Merrick said ‘Bloody good. Excellent. That’s what I mean – cuts through formality and misunderstanding. Our friend here has inherited a major liberty: the ability to prove to his fiancée exactly how he feels about her; try and estimate what that is worth in terms of mental security. I’m going to get my Norman Light stuck on tomorrow.’

‘Then you disappoint me, Merrick,’ Guy Leighton said.

‘I cannot wait on fashion, Guy; I have an aim in life as well as a role in society,’ Merrick said amiably. It sounded as if he knew Guy fairly closely.

Gazing beyond them, Jimmy could see Sir Richard still welcoming an occasional late arrival, his eyebrows astir with hospitality. A tall, silver man had just come in escorting a tall girl with a hatchet face who, in her survey of the company, seemed to ‘unsee the traffic with mid-ocean eye’, to borrow a phrase from a contemporary poet Jimmy disliked. The man smiled and smiled; the girl seemed barely to raise a grin. She wore the silver disc on her brow.

‘There’s someone—,’ Jimmy said, and then stopped, foreseeing an awkward situation. But Guy had also noticed the newcomer; he became tense and his manner underwent a change.

‘Oh, she’s here, is she!’ he muttered, turning his back on that quarter of the room and shuddering as if he had witnessed a breach of etiquette. ‘I say, Solent, here’s a chance for us all to try out your gadget.’

‘Include me out,’ Jimmy said hastily. ‘I don’t like public demonstrations. Besides, I can tell from here that she would have no attraction for me; she doesn’t look as if she could make a firefly glow.’

‘You haven’t met her yet,’ Guy said, with surprising fierceness.

‘You never know what’s in your id,’ Bertie said, appearing again with his pocket flask. ‘Or in hers, Freud save us.’ He crossed himself and nudged Merrick, who did not smile.

The inevitable, as it inevitably does, happened. Guy, with unexpected delicacy, did not go over to the newcomers. Instead, Sir Richard and Lady Clunes ushered them over to Jimmy’s group in a frothy tide of introductions, among which two waiters sported like dolphins, dispensing drink.

‘Martini for me this time,’ Jimmy said and, turning, was introduced to Felix Garside and his niece, the hatchet-faced girl, Rose English.

Seen close to, she was no longer hatchet-faced, though her countenance was long and her features sharply moulded; indeed she could be considered attractive, if we remembered that attraction is also a challenge. As Rose English glanced round the company, she was making no attempt, as most of the others present would have done upon introduction, to conceal the engagement of her mind and feelings in her surroundings. In consequence the unconventional face, less a mask than an instrument, drew to itself the regard of all men and most of the women. Her countenance was at once intelligent and naked; invulnerable perhaps, but highly impressionable.

Her clothes, although good, seemed to fit her badly, for the jacket of her suit, in the new over-elaborate style, did her disservice, making her look to some extent top heavy. She was tall; ‘rangy’ was the word which occurred to Jimmy. She might have been thirty-five, perhaps ten years his senior. Under her cheekbones faint and by no means unattractive hollows showed, ironing themselves out by her mouth, which, together with her eyes, belied the hint of melancholy determination in her attitude.

Her eyes rested momentarily on Jimmy’s brow. She smiled, and the smile was good.

‘Et tu, Brute,’ she said and then turned with a suspicion of haste to talk to Guy, who showed little inclination to talk back; though he remained on the balls of his feet, his poise had deserted him. This at once disappointed and relieved Jimmy, for he discovered he was flushing slightly; Merrick and several of the others were watching his Norman Light with eagerness.

‘It is just turning faintly pink, I think,’ the sandy woman said. ‘It’s rather difficult to tell in this lighting.’

‘The maximum intensity is a burning cerise,’ a clerical-looking man informed them all.

‘Then cerise will be the fashionable colour next season,’ Lady Clunes said. ‘I’m so glad. I’m so tired of black, so very tired of it.’

‘I should have thought it ought to have registered a little more than that,’ Merrick said, with a hint of irritation, staring at Jimmy’s forehead. ‘Between any normal man and woman, there’s a certain sexual flux.’

‘That’s what it’ll be so interesting to find out,’ Lady Clunes said. ‘I am just longing for everyone to get theirs.’

‘Oh yes, it’ll be O.K. for those who’re exempt: a damn good sideshow, I’d say,’ Bertie remarked, precipitating a frosty little silence. The new ER bill just passed through Parliament, which specified that everyone should have a Norman Light fitted by September 1, exempted those under fourteen or over sixty; it was generally agreed that this upper age limit would preserve the status quo for Maude Clunes. Her friends were waiting, hawk-like, to see if she would have a disc installed.

Guy, to fill the gap in the conversation, brought Rose back into it with a general remark. Seizing his chance, Merrick bunched heavy eyebrows over his heavy spectacles and said, ‘Miss English, your having your Norman Light installed so promptly shows you to be a forward-looking young lady. Would you cooperate in a little experiment, a scientific experiment, for the benefit of those of us who have still to, er, see the light?’

‘What do you wish me to do?’ she asked.

He was as direct as she.

‘We would like to observe the amount of sexual attraction between you and Mr Solent,’ he told her.

‘Certainly,’ she said. She looked around at each one of them, then added, ‘This is a particular moment in time when our – my – responses may seem to some of you improper, or immoral, or ‘not the thing’, or whatever phrase you use to cover something you faintly fear. In a few months, I sincerely hope, such moments will be gone for ever. Everyone will register spontaneously an attraction for everyone of the opposite sex and similar age; that I predict, for the ER’s function at gene level. And then the dingy mockery which our forebears, and we, have made of sex will vanish like dew. It will be revealed as something more radical and less of a cynosure than we have held it to be. And our lives will be much more honest on every level in consequence.’

She spoke very simply, very intensely, and then turned to look into Jimmy’s eyes. Listening to her, watching her moving mouth, seeing her tongue once briefly touch her lips, taking in that face a sculptor would have wept at, Jimmy knew his Norman Light was no longer an ambiguous silver. He caught a faint pink reflection from it on the end of his nose. When the rangy girl surveyed him, he saw her disc redden and his own increase output in sympathy. She was so without embarrassment that Jimmy, too, remained at ease, interested in the experiment. Everyone else maintained the surprised, respectful silence her words had created.

‘A rosy light!’ exclaimed the sandy woman and the momentary tension relaxed.

‘Not by Eastern casements only … !’ Jimmy murmured. It surprised him that, although he still glowed brightly, he consciously felt little or no attraction for Rose. That is to say, his fiancée, Penny Tanner-Smith (not to mention Alyson Youngfield), was still clear in his mind, and he felt no insane desire to go to bed with this strange, self-possessed woman.

‘The attraction is there and the ERs detect it,’ Rose said. ‘There lies their great and only virtue: they will force a nation of prudes to recognise an incontrovertible natural law. But, as I say, they work at gene – or what will no doubt be popularly termed ‘subconscious’ – level. This force lies like a chemical bond between Mr Solent and me; but I feel not the slightest desire to go to bed with him.’

Jimmy was amazed at how unpalatable he found this truth, this echo of what he had just been thinking; it was one thing silently to reject her; quite another for her openly to reject him. This absorbed him so completely he hardly listened to the discussion which flowed around him.

Merrick was shaking Rose’s long hand; she was admitting to being a ‘sort of brain specialist’. The wife of the clerical-looking man was squeaking something about ‘like a public erection …’ and urging her husband to take her home. Everyone was talking. Sir Richard and Felix Garside were laughing at a private joke. Bertie was signalling to a young waiter. Drink and olives circulated.

When Sir Richard excused himself to greet someone else, Jimmy also slipped away to another part of the room. He was disturbed and needed time for thought. From where he stood now, he could see Rose’s back, a rangy figure with a handbag swinging from her crooked arm. Then a heated discussion on the effects of colour TV on children rose on his left and broke like a wave over him. Jimmy joined in vigorously, talking automatically. He emerged some while later to find the subject held no interest for him, though he had been as partisan as anybody; muttering a word of excuse, snatching another drink, he went into the corridor to stand by an open window.

Here it was distinctly cooler and quieter. Jimmy leant out, looking down four stories to the untidy bottom of the building’s well. He lapsed into one of the untidy reveries which often overcame him when he was alone. His thoughts went back to Rose English, the woman with the unlikely name, and then faded from her again. Euphoria flooded over him. A waiter brought him a drink. He groaned at his own contentment. The world was in a hell of a state: the political tension in the Middle East was high, with war threatening; the United States was facing a worse recession than in 1958; the British political parties were bickering over a proposal to build a tunnel under the Severn; gold reserves were down; the whole unstable economic edifice of the country, if one believed the newspapers – but who did? – tottered on the brink of collapse; and of course the ERs would deliver a rabbit punch to the good old status quo of society.

But it was summer. It was summer in England, hot and sweet and sticky. Everyone was stripping off to mow a lawn or hold a picnic or dive into the nearest dirty stretch of river. Nobody gave a sod. Euphoria had its high tide willynilly, come death, come danger. The unexpected heat made morons of us all, quite as effectively as did the interminable wretchedness of winter.

He sighed and breathed the warm air, full of discontent and indifference, those hallmarks of the true-born Englishman. As Jimmy withdrew his head from the window, Rose English was approaching, coming self-assuredly down the corridor.

‘Hello,’ she said, without noticeably smiling. ‘I wanted some cool air too. People should not give parties on nights like this.’

‘No,’ Jimmy replied, rather glumly. Yes, she had something about her.

‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you in there, Mr Solent.’

‘Jimmy, please. I’ve got such a wet surname.’ He had trained himself not to wait for laughter after making that modest joke. ‘You didn’t embarrass me; as you say, everyone’ll soon be in the same boat.’

‘No, I didn’t mean that. I mean, I hope I said nothing to hurt you.’

‘Of course not.’ His Norman Light was glowing; without looking directly, he could see hers was too. To change the subject, he said, ‘I could do with a swim now.’

‘Same here.’ He thought it was a schoolgirlish phrase for somebody of her seriousness to use and wondered if she was in some way trying to play down to him.

‘I know a fellow – he was at Oxford with me – who’s got a private swimming pool. Would you care to come for a bathe with me?’

‘Thank you. I should really prefer dinner,’ she said. He knew by her tone she thought he had tried to trap her into that; how could she believe him so subtle? He took one of her hands, thinking at the same time he must be a little tight to dare to do so. A lunatic notion blossomed in his brain, swelling like a blown balloon.

‘I’ve just thought of the idea!’ he said. ‘Quite spontaneous – there’s no catch. An evening like this is wasted in a place like this; it’ll probably pour with rain tomorrow! We could go out and have a swim with them – Hurn, their name is – and then we’ll still have time for a meal afterwards. Honestly! I mean how about it? It’s a genuine offer. It would be great fun.’

‘Perhaps it really would be great fun,’ she said pensively. A waiter, watching them interestedly, gave them gin-and-its. And all the while a drowning Jimmy-inside was telling him, ‘She’s not your kind, kid. You don’t like the cool and stately type. She’s nearly as big as you are. She’s too experienced: she could blow you into bubbles. She’s too old for you – she must be thirty-five if she’s a day. I warn you, Solent, you’ll make the biggest gaffe of your life if you persist in this bit of foolishness.’

‘You can ditch Uncle Felix, can’t you?’ he implored her, grinning ingratiatingly, and swallowing the gin-and-it.

‘Uncle’s no obstacle,’ she said. ‘He’s staying afterwards to talk to thingme – Clunes.’

‘Come on, Rangy!’ He said, taking her hand again. ‘Nothing’s stopping us. Nobody’ll miss us. Down that drink and let’s go while the going’s good.’

Jimmy-inside noted with disgust the lapse into basic American and the abuse of adverbial ‘down’ as a verb. He also noticed that this large, handsome girl was about to surrender herself to Jimmy’s care. ‘She’s a wonderful creature! Just be careful, that’s all I can say,’ Jimmy-inside sighed, and went off for the night.

They put their glasses on the window sill: superstitiously Jimmy slid his over till it touched Rose’s. Then he took her arm and hurried her down the carpeted stairs. The unending roar of the BIL party died behind them.

‘You’re telling the truth about this swimming pool, Jimmy?’ she asked.

‘Wait till you see it, Rangy!’

From then on she seemed to banish entirely any qualms she might have had. It was almost as if the idea had been hers rather than Jimmy’s.




2

A Towel in Common


The innocence, simplicity and diffidence which formed a good proportion of Jimmy Solent’s character were often ousted by male cunning; now mixed drink had precipitated their expulsion. Anyone who drinks at all knows there are a hundred degrees of sweet and subtle gradation between sobriety and the doddering old age of intoxication; Jimmy was a mere thirty or forty notches down the slide, and still firing on most cylinders. Only his old aunt Indecision had been shut away.

He conjured up a taxi directly Rose and he got outside and urged it to Charlton Square as fast as possible. Knowing something of the oddness of women, he had realised the cardinal fact that once they had bathing costumes and the question of nude bathing was thus disposed of, the whole stunt would seem, by comparison, respectable. He wanted to borrow Aubrey’s car: taxis to and from Walton-on-Thames would be expensive. He had yet to tell Rose exactly where the pool was, for fear that she would object that it was too far away.

Jimmy found when he reached the flat that Aubrey had evidently come in and gone out again with Alyson. That was bad; perhaps he had taken the damned MG. Moving like a clumsy wind, while Rose sat downstairs in the ticking taxi, Jimmy seized his own swimsuit and Alyson’s from the airing cupboard – it would have to fit Rose, or else. Sweeping into the kitchen, he pulled two bottles of Chianti from the broom closet which served as wine cellar. Then he was downstairs again, shouting goodnight to a surprised Mrs Pidney, and back in the taxi with his arm round Rose.

At the garage they were in luck. The MG was there. Aubrey and Alyson would be walking; it was a nice evening for walking, if you did not have to get to Walton. Jimmy paid off the taxi and bustled Rose into the coupé.

‘They’re looking at us as if you’re trying to kidnap me,’ Rose said, waving a hand in indication at a couple of mechanics.

Jimmy laughed.

‘No, it’s because we’re both bright pink,’ he said.

Laughing, they backed out of the garage. Jimmy drove with savage concentration, fighting to keep the whiskers of drink away from his vision. They could crash on the way back and welcome, but he was not going to spoil the evening now. He was full of exaltation. He had won a prize!

‘Had an old car when I was up at Oxford,’ he shouted to her. He should not have said it; he reminded himself of Penny, who had ridden in that car. Dear little, dull little, Penny! Penny had not the sheer presence of this great luscious lascivious lump …

‘What happened to it?’ she asked.

… nor that look in her eye.

‘Sold it to Gabby Borrows of Corpus for £20.’

You still owe me £4 on that deal, Gabby, you sod.

‘He got a bargain, didn’t he?’

What, off me, Ikey Solent!?

‘You should have seen “Tin Lizzie”! She was about tenth hand when I got her. And what am I sitting here talking to you about automobiles for, Rangy, my sweet pet?’

He drew into the side of the road without signalling, braked, and took a long, deep kiss from her. She shaped up round him immediately like a young wrestler. Together, they plunged. The next thing he recalled afterwards was cursing loudly because he could not unhook her brassière. It popped most satisfactorily, and he slid his hands over her breasts, cupping them, kissing them. They excited and bemused him; he hardly realised what he was doing.

‘Let’s have a swim first, sweet,’ she said, gasping.

Jimmy struggled up and looked at her. They were bathing each other in pink light. It was like a warm liquid over them. The long face had undergone a change. Her brow was wide and tolerant; every line of her face had relaxed, so that she seemed plumper, less mature, even less sure of herself. Here, now, she was beautiful. He took a long look at her, trying to remember it all.

‘“And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,”’ he quoted, half-shyly. ‘Have some Chianti?’ Just how much had she drunk before the party, he wondered, that she should ever want him?

They drank gravely, companionably, out of the one glass Aubrey kept stowed in his locker, then drove on. Jimmy covered the road more slowly now. For one thing, he had caught the savour of the evening; it was something peaceful, relaxedly relentless – a kind of homecoming. He was going to be a proper man and take the correct tempo; Rangy would appreciate that. She knew and seemed to tell him exactly how these things should go. For another thing, he was having misgivings about the Hurns and their pool.

Rupert Hurn had been at Merton with Jimmy. Their friendship had not been close, but twice Rupert had taken Jimmy and another friend to his home. They had met Rupert’s younger sister (what was that plump child’s name?), and his docile mother, and his pugnacious little stockbroker father; and they had swum in his pool. But the last visit had been two years ago. Rupert might not be at home; the family probably would not remember him. They might even have moved. Jimmy’s idea began to look less bright with every mile they made.

He mentioned no word of his misgivings to Rose. If the evening was going to spoil, it should do so without any help from him.

The sun was setting as the MG passed Walton station. To Jimmy’s relief, he remembered the way clearly and picked up Ryden’s Road with confidence. He could recall the look of the house now; it crouched between two Lutyenesque chimneys; the porch rested on absurdly fat pillars and a laburnum grew too close to the windows. Jimmy had passed the place before he realised it; they had had the sense to chop the tree down.

He backed into the drive and climbed out. Rose climbed out and smoothed herself down. She took his arm, looking at him quizzically; her irises were a perturbing medley of green and brown. Jimmy wondered how on first impression she had seemed unattractive.

‘Er … come on,’ he said. Their Norman Lights had ceased to burn. He stepped between the fat pillars and rang the bell; in reply, a mechanism in the hall said ‘Ding Dong Ding Dong’. There was no other sound.

‘Perhaps they’re out,’ Rose said. ‘There are no lights anywhere. Surely they won’t have gone to bed yet?’

‘You’re beautiful,’ Jimmy said. ‘Forgive me for not mentioning it earlier. You’re beautiful, wonderful, unique.’

The door opened, and a very young man thrust his head out. After a searching glance at them, he stepped onto the porch, pulling the door to behind him. He wore a soft black suit with a mauve bow tie and big suède shoes; he had a (violently) contemporary fringe-cut to his hair, while on his brow an ER disc glinted metallically. His little, enquiring face was at once sweaty and fox-like.

‘Who are you? You aren’t Fred,’ he said, surveying them anew.

‘Touché,’ Jimmy said, with an attempt at what he called his society laugh. ‘What can we do to redeem ourselves?’

‘What do you want?’ the young man asked, refusing to be deflected into a smile.

‘We are friends of the Hurns,’ Jimmy told him. ‘We beg entry in the name of hospitality – or don’t they live here any more? Tell me the worst.’

‘Which Hurn do you want? They’re nearly all out.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ Rose said, making a determined entrance into this asinine conversation, ‘Who are you, a bailiff?’

The young man shot her the look of dumb endurance one sees on the faces of wet dachsunds. He was about to speak when a girl appeared in the open doorway, wearing a severe blouse and slacks, the austerity of which was relieved by a hundredweight of charm bracelet clanking on her left wrist. In the dim light, she looked very young, very lovely. She also wore an ER, though her hair was swept forward so as partly to conceal it.

‘Jill!’ Jimmy exclaimed. The name of Rupert’s sister had returned to him suddenly, just when vitally needed. Jill! That podgy creature who had swooned over Rock Hudson and played Jokari from a sitting position had transformed herself into this moderately svelte little armful. He wished two years had done as much for him.

‘My giddy aunt, you’re – aren’t you Jimmy Solvent, or someone?’ the girl said.

‘Solent. Wish I was solvent. Fancy your remembering my name!’

They clasped each other’s hands.

‘My dear, I had a perfectly silly crush on you once. You used to look so sweet on the back of a motor bike!’

‘Cross my heart, I still do,’ Jimmy said, sliding in the nicest possible way round the fringe-cut, who stood there nonplussed by this turn of events. ‘This, forgive me, is Rose English; Rose English, this English rose is Jill Hurn.’

‘And this,’ Jill said, swinging up the charm bracelet in the direction of the scowling youth, ‘is my boy friend, Teddy Peters. You’d better come in. Were you looking for Rupert, because he’s not here. He’s in Holland.’

‘Each to his destiny,’ Jimmy said easily, forging into the hall. ‘Actually Rose and I came to ask you if we could have a swim. It seemed a shame for a couple like us to waste a bath like yours on a night like this.’

With Jill leading and Teddy following, they had reached a living room at the back of the house. A teleset radiated dance music softly from somewhere upstairs. Jill switched on a light on a corner table; in the illumination flowing over her face, Jimmy saw she was too heavily made up and a trifle spotty. All the same, it was a good attempt for – what? – sixteen, she would be no older. She headed for an expensive cocktail cabinet, moving with a copybook grace.

‘You must have a drink,’ she said. ‘Daddy and Mummy are out.’ That was a slip, although it told Jimmy nothing he had not already guessed. To readjust the role she was playing (and that little lout Teddy wouldn’t have noticed the slip, Jimmy thought), Jill sloshed whisky into three glasses, squirted soda at them and doled them out like Maundy money. She reserved something else for herself; perhaps a Pepsi-Cola.

Jimmy took his glass, looking askance at Rose, wondering just how she was feeling. She took a sip and said, ‘What a lovely room you’ve got here’ – which greatly cheered Jimmy; even half stewed, he could see it was a ghastly, ostentatious room.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he lied. ‘Your chandelier must have been particularly expensive. And your Jacobean radio – gramophone.’

‘Let’s get back upstairs, honey,’ Teddy said, speaking for the first time since his setback on the porch. Turning to Rose, he added, with a sort of rudimentary parody of Cagney courtesy, ‘We were dancing.’

‘How heavenly,’ Rose said gravely. ‘I love dancing.’

Jill, tilting her tightly covered rump like a snub-nose, was edging Jimmy into a corner. He was content to be edged until the vital question was answered; this now popped impolitely out of him again: ‘Can we have a swim?’

She did not answer at once, being busy breathing somewhat industriously.

Her eyes were ludicrously wide. Her perfume was as painful as a trodden corn, and then she smiled. The performance would be better in a year; in eighteen months you would not be able to tell it from the real thing. Perhaps, indeed, there wasn’t a real thing: only a series of undetectable fakes. It might be one of those shams which Rose said that Norman Lights would abolish. Apropos of which, Jill’s, old boy, was turning pink on you. Keep your ruddy genes to yourself, you in the ruddy jeans. It’s useless getting sanguine over me. Title for a song …

‘Of course you can swim, Jimmy,’ Jill was saying. She had made her voice husky for extra appeal; perhaps, Jimmy thought, she did it by holding Pepsi-Cola at the back of her throat; and he watched her mouth eagerly to see if she dribbled any. ‘Only you see, Jimmy,’ she continued, ‘Daddy isn’t very broad-minded about couples swimming after dark – we had a lot of trouble in the spring with Rupert and an awful girl called Sonia MacKenzie – you ought to hear about that some time – but of course I’m broad-minded, so I don’t care, but you’d better be out before Daddy gets back. Teddy and I would come with you, but Teddy can’t swim.’

‘Pity about that,’ Jimmy murmured.

‘Here’s the key to the changing hut,’ Jill said, handing over a large label tied to a tiny key. Her hand touched his and stayed there. He stroked her chin with his free hand.

‘You’re an absolute darling,’ Jimmy said. ‘I love you, and I’ll remember you in my will.’

‘I never think that’s a very practical suggestion,’ she said frowning. The remark amused Jimmy considerably; he choked over his whisky.

‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘owing to present commitments, I am unable to offer you anything more practical!’

Still laughing, he turned to find Rose dancing a slow quickstep with Teddy. Both of them still clutched their drinks. Both scowled in concentration. Both were showing faint pink on their ERs.

‘Hey, you’re meant to be swimming!’ Jimmy said, forgetting his manners. Catching hold of Rose round the waist, he dragged her away, turning to wave at the other two as he pushed her through the door. Shoving her down the hall, he got her into the open and shut the front door behind them.

‘That was very rude!’ Rose said admiringly. Under the stars she drained the last of her glass, let it drop onto the gravel, and slid forward into his arms. They kissed, rapturous with reunion. In the house they had been apart: it was another world. Now they were together again, the evening once more on their shoulders like a tame raven.

Jimmy grabbed the Chianti and the swimsuits out of the car. ‘I just don’t give a damn,’ he thought wonderingly; ‘Not a damn!’

‘Hang on here a moment, pet,’ he whispered. ‘I’m going to take the car just down the road a bit, in case the old man comes home early and spots it.’

‘What old man?’ she asked curiously.

‘Any old man, Rangy, my love, my bright shiner.’

He seemed to be away an age, finding an unobtrusive place for the car and relieving himself heartily into a hedge, but when he returned Rose still stood in the centre of the drive and asked him again, with the same puzzlement in her voice, ‘What old man, darling?’

‘Jill’s old man. Old man Hurn. Come on; let’s go see the puddle.’

The swimming pool was at the rear of the house. By daylight it looked small and impoverished; the concrete was a maze of cracks, the diving boards both drooped. Now, camouflaged by night, Aphrodite could have risen from it without putting it out of character. On the other hand, the changing hut (the Hurns showed a surprising modesty in not labelling it ‘the pavilion’) was even smaller, darker and stuffier now than by daylight. Inside the door with the frosted glass window was one room with a partition down the middle, opposite sexes who changed there together being trusted not to look round it – a simple-minded but ideal arrangement, Jimmy thought.

‘Can you see to undress?’ he asked Rose.

‘Yes, by the light of your ER,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered, turning tactfully away.

‘How’s the costume?’ he asked, when they emerged into the night air a minute later.

‘A bit tight.’

‘So’m I. Feel O.K.?’ She looked like a lusty goddess.

‘Hungry,’ she said, wrapping her arms round her middle.

‘We’ll eat later, that I swear: Jimmy’ll never let you starve. The night’s young!’

Suddenly he knew indeed that the night was young and he was young. The excitement of the dark purred through his body. In one grand flash, he recalled all the events of the day, getting up, his work, having his ER fitted, the party, Rose. It was all unreal, bygone, prehistoric. A new era had begun; the ERs were going to change everything. In Merrick’s words, he had inherited a major liberty.

He raced round and round the lawn, puppy-like.

‘The world’s begun again, Rangy my love,’ he shouted. ‘You and I are the only ones to guess it yet, but the jolly old millennium began today? Hurray! Life’s the greatest invention yet!’

‘Not so loud, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘You’re crazy!’

‘Nuts to you, you great big lovely ploughable adult of a woman,’ he called. Charging at the pool, he bounded in and disappeared with a resounding splash. Rose followed more gracefully, diving off the side of the bath.

‘Distinctly frappé,’ she said in a small voice, as they swam together. She shook her head vigorously in distress.

‘Where have they kept this pool all day?’ he asked. ‘Feels like liquid oxygen. Death to the loins.’

‘Oh Jimmy, I do feel funny. I think I’d better get out.’

He put an arm round her shoulders. Her flesh was as heavy and cold as refrigerated meat.

‘Come on then, pet,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a hand out. You’d better go indoors and have a warm-up. A sip more whisky’s what you need.’

‘No, wait a tick … Ugh, better now, I think. It was just one of those momentary things. Sorry. I seem to be functioning properly again now.’

Rose trod water, and then they began swimming slowly round the tank like a goldfish in a bowl. The water had evidently had a cooling effect on their genes, for their Norman Lights no longer glowed, spoiling what might have been rather an unusual effect.

‘Are you sure you’re all right, Rangy?’

‘I told you I was.’

‘The water’s quite hot when you get used to it.’

‘What I was thinking.’

He floated on his back, gazing into the clear night sky with its complement of stars. Somewhere way up there was a super-civilisation which had solved all its troubles and wore new suits every day; it was not having half the time he was.

‘I think I’m ready to get out,’ he said. ‘How about you, Rangy?’

‘I could stay here till dawn now I’m properly in. One becomes acclimatised, you know.’

He drifted over to her. Her face and the reflections of her face seemed to palpitate before him like butterflies in a cupboard. Reaching out, he caught and kissed her; they climbed together up rickety wooden steps, trotting over short grass and gravel to the changing hut.

There, Jimmy thoughtfully locked the door on the inside, and proceeded with the next stage of his master plan. Waiting a moment, he called softly in mock-consternation. ‘Rangy, what a fool I am! I forgot to bring any towels.’

‘You are lying to me, Jimmy, and I hate lies,’ she said from her side of the partition.

‘I’m not lying!’ he said angrily. ‘I did not bring any towels. I was in such a hurry I forgot.’

In the faint light, he noticed as he spoke a towel hanging on a hook, on the rear wall of the hut. Rose presumably had found one too and believed Jimmy had provided it. Snatching it off the peg, he bundled it up and thrust it under the seat. Then he bounded round the partition.

‘If you’ve found a towel, you’ll have to let me share it, pet,’ he said. He saw at once that she had one.

‘Go away, Jimmy,’ she said quickly, clutching the towel round her body as he bathed her in his ruby light. ‘I haven’t got any lipstick on yet.’

He was too intent to laugh.

‘It’s a lovely warm towel!’ He exclaimed, grabbing a corner of it. ‘Don’t be greedy! It’s big enough to cover two of us! How about saving me from the foggy, foggy dew? I’m shivering.’

The odd thing was, that when they were pressed together under the towel, Jimmy did begin to shiver. Excitement made him shiver as he felt her wet limbs wet upon his. He ran his hand down the great hyperbola of Rose’s back, sliding it over her buttocks and gripping them, then working it round her thigh.

‘Oh, Jimmy, you know I’m hungry!’ she wailed.

‘For God’s sake, give me time,’ he said.

She did. He fed upon the riches of the wide world on that cramped wooden floor. Sometimes he wondered, with only the mildest concern, whether she would not suffocate him, sometimes whether she would not crack his ribs; sometimes whether he had not bitten off more than he could chew, but always he rose triumphantly to face a fresh attack, always they were matched. She had spoken at the party against making a mockery of sex; of that she was not guilty; the core of earnestness Jimmy sensed in her was there even in her gladdest abandonment; she swam with him up the mountainside of love like a salmon leaping up a waterfall. In the end, he was flooded with a delighted and transcendent surprise, cast on a shore beyond Ultima Thule. Exhausted, thrilled, jubilant, panting like a dog.

‘Oh, darling …’ Rose sighed at last, ‘what a rough brute you are!’

‘Me! You’re the brute! – you’re the beauty and the beast. Rangey, you’re all things. Rangey, how old are you?’

‘Don’t ask petty questions,’ she said, giving him a final hug, tugging his hair gently, kissing his neck.

‘But I know so little about you!’

‘That’s just as well for you,’ she said, getting onto her knees. He tried to pull her on top of him again but she wisely would not come, so he got up and fetched the Chianti bottle. She was dressing as fast as she could and would take no wine.

‘We must be filthy from this beastly floor!’ she said. ‘It’s all gritty and beastly. Don’t they ever sweep the damned place?’

‘Wonderful, heavenly floor!’ Jimmy said. ‘We’ll come and visit it and lay an offering to Venus on it every anniversary of this date, won’t we?’

When she did not reply, he knew he was being hearty. More, he knew they would never come here again. He was about to say something else when she seized his arm. Footsteps sounded outside on the concrete path. A pause while the grass muffled them. Then the handle of the changing hut door was turned. Jimmy clapped his hand up to his forehead to cover his ER in case it should be visible through the frosted glass, but it had ceased to glow. They listened while the footsteps receded.

‘We could always have said we were waiting for a bus,’ Jimmy said.

‘Jill’s old man keeps late hours,’ Rose said tugging on her skirt. ‘It’s past midnight.’

‘And a good time was had by all. Oh, Rangy, I love you so! This has been such a wonderful evening for me. I can’t really believe your name is English Rose.’

‘Does it sound so very unlikely?’ she asked, with a strange seriousness in her voice.

‘Very,’ he said. It astonished him that he should be feeling suddenly irritable with her, and hid it as best he could; we resent those who please us, for they can guess our weakness. ‘I’m going to get you a meal now, woman.’

‘Really?’ She relaxed at once. She was nearly dressed. He regretted it was too dark to see anything of her underclothes; such things were a mystery to him. Pulling himself together, he blundered round the partition to put his own clothes on.

‘Where, Jimmy?’

‘Where what, pet?’

‘Where are we going to eat?’

‘Your uncle Jimmy knows a dirty little Chinese restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue which stays open till two in the morning.’

She came and stood on his side of the partition then, to show him she was proud of him. When they were finally ready, they crept out of the hut, leaving the key on the outside of the lock, and walked quietly round the pool. Its surface was as still and black as oil. Keeping on the grass as far as possible, to avoid the scrunch of gravel, they skirted the house, where no lights burned.

A voice softly called ‘Goodnight!’ from above them. They looked up to see Jill Hurn leaning out of her bedroom window, shadowy under the eaves. She must have been there a long while, watching for them. Jimmy raised a hand in silent salute to all good things and led Rose back to the car.

They ate their chow mein, sweet and sour pork and crispy noodles in a quiet mood; when, after the meal, Rose insisted on catching a taxi and going off alone, Jimmy protested without vehemence and yielded without delay.

They were tired and had nothing more to offer each other.

It was a quarter to two when he let himself into 17 Charlton Square, and after three before he fell asleep. When he awoke next morning, it was to find his sheets full of earth, dead grass and dirt picked up from his session on the changing hut floor.




3

At the IBA


The Home of the International Book Association, where Jimmy worked, was a tall, undistinguished building just off Bedford Square. Unlike its rival and elder sister, the National Book League, the IBA claimed no Regency graces. There was American capital behind it: it was modern and proud of it.

As you went through plate glass doors into a foyer ambushed with cactus, a sign in sanserif announced, ‘Only books stand between us and the cave. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ The IBA ran mainly on dollar lubrication supplied by the Clyde H. Nitkin Foundation, and the words of the great man, at once original and obvious, were in evidence throughout the building. In the cafeteria downstairs, among the Mojave Desert décor, was ‘To read is to strike a blow for culture. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ In the Main Exhibition room on the ground floor was ‘Speech is silver: silence is golden: print is dynamite. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ Up in the library, appropriately enough, was ‘Only by libraries can man survive. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ And, most touching heart cry of all, reserved for the board room up by the roof, was ‘Dear God, I would rather be an author than Clyde H. Nitkin.’

This morning, Jimmy came in rather late. He stood for a moment in the rear of the foyer, exuding general goodwill. It was only six months since he had come to live in London and take this, his first job. Pleasure still filled him at the thought of it; he surveyed everything with a contentment at once filial and avuncular. Posters and book jackets jostled convivially here under busts of Shakespeare, Sophocles and Edna St Vincent Millay. Mr J. B. Priestley would speak on the 18th next on ‘What the Canadian Theatre Means.’ Angus Wilson’s new play Regular Churchgoers in its fifth week at the Criterion. Thyroid Annerson’s new play at the Stumer. The new Francis Bacon exhibition – the one with the laughing dogs – at the Hanover Galleries. Kingsley Amis to speak, mysteriously, about ‘The New Distaste’ on the 25th. The posters at least were quietly, staunchly English.

The book jackets struck a more exotic note. Peter Green’s name appeared on the serpent-haunted jacket of his large new novel Patinotoxa’s Donkey. Monkeys chased themselves round the latest Mittelholzer title from Secker’s. A formal jungle surrounded the word ‘Popocatepetl’ on Edmund Wilson’s new collection of travel essays. Orange prisms crashed across Berg and the Instability of Our Times. It was all, Jimmy told himself, at once homely and exciting. ‘The hoi polloi are rather coy at facing the printed word, but mad dogs and publishers care nought for the midday herd,’ he intoned to himself.

He nodded amiably to Mrs Charteris, the receptionist (somehow he could never think of anything to say to that woman) and went to his room. This room, lying beyond the Main Exhibition chamber, was isolated from everyone else in the building; nevertheless, it was nice to have a room at all, and Jimmy, who was second-in-command of exhibitions while Dirk Hanahan was away being ill in Boston, relished its privacy – especially this morning.

He was in a golden daze. He wanted only to sit quietly and think of the raptures of last night, with Rose alive in his arms. His room was almost bare; even the inevitable bookcase contained little more than Webster’s Dictionary and a pile of IBA pamphlets on people like Svevo. A Ben Nicholson relief on one wall only added to the austerity. That suited Jimmy well; the fewer external distractions the better.

The intercom on his desk buzzed.

‘And now a word from our sponsor,’ Jimmy groaned.

He depressed one of the ivory keys and said ‘Solent’ in a suitably crisp tone.

‘Scryban here, Jimmy. We’re having an informal discussion on next month’s activities, just pooling a few ideas. You’d better be in on it from the exhibition angle, I think. Would you kindly come up, please?’

‘Certainly.’ That was a blind. Jimmy felt perfectly fit, except for a dry mouth, but he just did not want to face people this morning. However, Scryban was Scryban and business was business … In Jimmy’s drawer lay a manila folder labelled ‘Haiti Exhibition’; he debated taking it up with him to Scryban’s room but, as that exhibition would not be held until September, decided it would look irrelevant or self-important or something equally horrid. Instead, he took the lift up to Scryban’s room.

‘Literature is a jealous god: serve it in deeds and words,’ adjured Clyde H. Nitkin from eye level.

Four people were already closeted with Scryban. Donald Hortense, the IBA librarian, a science-fiction magazine tucked in his pocket, winked at Jimmy. He was the only one here Jimmy could really say he knew. Mrs Wolf, a little, lipsticked woman with a big, difficult husband, smiled at him: Jimmy smiled back, for Mrs Wolf was always very sweet to him. Paul de Perkin, whose office door bore the enticing word ‘Social’, acted up to his label, indicating a chair for Jimmy and offering him a cigarette. The only person to ignore Jimmy’s entrance was standing looking out of the window; this was Martin ‘Bloody’ Trefisick, who called himself a Cornishman, though his detractors claimed he came from Devon. He was the declared enemy of Mrs Wolf, and his office door bore the oblique message ‘House Organ’.

Sitting sideways behind his desk, his neat knees crossed, was Conrad Scryban, the Managing Director of IBA. Jimmy had quietly admired this man from their first meeting; so effectively and unassumingly was he the English literary man, that Jimmy felt sure there must be fraud in the fellow somewhere. It made him roughly ten times as interesting as any of the other solid but transparent characters in the room.

Apart from Scryban and Trefisick, everyone in the room already bore a Norman Light on his forehead. It lent an air of strangeness and newness, like a paperback found among Roman relics.

‘Splendid,’ Scryban said vaguely, as Jimmy sat down between de Perkin and Mrs Wolf. Scryban’s baldness, like a tonsure, gave him a monastic look which his clothes quietly refuted. ‘We were saying before you joined us, Jimmy, that next month, being August, is rather a dog month generally. Anyone who is anyone will be no nearer Bedford Square than Tenerife. Nevertheless, we are duty bound to offer some sort of diversion to such of the general public as wander through our doors … Have you, I wonder, any suggestions? I hasten to add that none of the rest of us have.’

‘Actually, I believe the centenary of the publication of The Cloister and the Hearth falls some time next month,’ Mrs Wolf said cautiously.

A hush settled over them. ‘I ought to suggest something,’ Jimmy told himself, as gradually the dread of being laughed at by Trefisick was dwarfed by the dread of being considered unimaginative by Scryban. He cleared his throat.

‘How about some sort of tie-in with politics?’ he asked the company generally, following up with a brilliant improvisation: ‘I’ve been thinking about the Nitkin pearl that every poem is a pincer movement. Couldn’t we drag out some contemporary examples of that?’

‘I can see the implications,’ said Scryban, appearing actually to view them in a far corner, ‘but how exactly do you visualize … I mean, what I don’t see …’

He was too gentle to name what he did not see, but Jimmy suspected it must be the same thing he himself did not see: just what the deuce he was suggesting. He tried a countermove.

‘Well, how do you feel about the present political situation?’ he asked.

Scryban did not immediately answer. Instead Paul de Perkin leant forward, his face gleaming with interest, and said, ‘I think you have something promising there, old boy. Do you mean the international situation?’

‘Heavens, is he really fool enough to think I’ve got something?’ Jimmy asked himself drearily, and then decided that de Perkin, also unsure of himself, was also trying to appear bright.

‘Yes, the international situation,’ he said at random.

‘Ah now, let me see,’ said Scryban, conscientiously. ‘We have the Western bloc on one side and the Soviet bloc on the other, have we not? And the Middle East shuttling tediously about in between. That is how matters have been, internationally, for some years, I believe, and I confess I find it an uninspring situation: an unfruitful situation.’

‘We are all in a perpetual state of non-combatancy,’ Mrs Wolf said. Jimmy liked the remark and laughed; she smiled at him and laughed herself.

‘All very trying for everyone,’ Scryban agreed. ‘One may, in fact, quote the words Donne employed in a somewhat different context: “The foe oft-times having the foe in sight. Is tired of standing though he never fight.”’

‘We shall see a change now,’ Trefisick said, wrestling to fit his broad shoulders into the window frame. ‘These ERs completely topple the status quo at home; they are bound to have repercussions abroad. Without being in any way a prophet, I’d say that chaos will come again. Britain is already the laughing stock of Europe.’

‘That just isn’t so! The Guardian says Scandinavia is green with envy,’ Jimmy said hotly, venturing for the first time to contradict Trefisick.

‘Really? In those very words?’ asked Scryban, interested at last.

‘I see the New Statesman is less outspoken about Tory intrigues than it was last week,’ de Perkin observed. ‘And certainly the Commonwealth seems to commend us … Especially Australia; I always think Australia’s very forward looking …’

‘There was a paragraph in the Telegraph,’ Mrs Wolf said, looking round as she whipped out her paper. They had all brightened considerably under the new topic of conversation. ‘Here we are. It points out that we have inaugurated a social invention whose power potential is far greater than that of the hydrogen bomb.’

‘And we go and use it on ourselves!’ Trefisick exclaimed bitterly. ‘My God, but I never saw such bloody folly. You’ll never catch me wearing one of the beastly things, I can assure you of that!’

‘Life has grown too complicated, Martin,’ said Scryban gently. ‘We have said that so often in past years that it has become a platitude. Now that something has come along which, it is claimed, will simplify things for us, surely we are morally obliged not to look our gift horse in the mouth – especially when they are free on the National Health Scheme?’

‘But will these damned gadgets simplify life, that’s what I want to know?’ Trefisick said pugnaciously, squaring his shoulders by inserting his thumbs in the top of his trousers. ‘Have they simplified your sex life, Solent? What about yours, de Perkin? Find things easier for having a tin medal over your nose?’

‘I’ve only had mine a day,’ Jimmy said, simultaneously feeling his cheeks redden and cursing himself for not standing up to this man.

‘You’d better ask all my mistresses about that, Trefisick,’ de Perkin laughed feebly, and Jimmy cursed him for being another time server.

Mrs Wolf rolled up her Telegraph pugnaciously. She was at least forty-nine, and every wrinkle showed; but for a second defiance gave her back her youth. ‘This damned gadget as you call it, Martin, has certainly not simplified my life,’ she said without heat, her sharp teeth gleaming as she faced Trefisick. ‘On the contrary, it has complicated it. My husband and I are in the situation which comes to many couples: we are out of love with one another. Whereas for years we have manoeuvred unceasingly to hide this state of affairs from each other – and from ourselves – and from other people – we can no longer conceal it. The Norman Lights confront us with the truth.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Trefisick said, rubbing his neck, abashed; he added, despite himself, ‘All the same, Veronica, you’ve proved my point about their being a menace.’

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘For the first time my husband and I are free to be perfectly honest with each other. I have only hope for the future; forced to acknowledge the facts at last, we may reach something better than a dead compromise.’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have …’

‘Dear Mrs Wolf,’ Scryban said, lifting his hands from his knees and replacing them there, ‘I refuse to allow you to apologise. What you say only makes us respect and admire you the more; our vegetable love for you grows marvellously quicker than empires. You do show—’

‘I’m just trying to show you,’ she interrupted a little breathlessly, ‘that these Norman Lights really should have our utmost faith: they are the first scientific invention ever to make us face ourselves.’

They had been embarrassed by revelations about Mrs Wolf’s marriage before. Silence burst over them like an exploding muffin.

‘Well, thank you all very much for coming up and giving me your ideas. We’ll think along the political line, shall we?’ Scryban said, with more haste than usual. ‘Now I’m sure I’m keeping you all from your coffee. I would just like to say, if I might, that though I disapprove of ERs personally, I find it difficult to understand why all the criticism of them from the culture camp, from people like Betjeman and Clark and Ayrton, has confined itself to aesthetic principles. I find those of you here who have your Registers installed’ – this was said with a deprecatory smile – ‘of an enhanced appearance.’

As they left Scryban’s room, Donald Hortense materialised at Jimmy’s left elbow. He was one of Jimmy’s closest friends, which made him rather less than more endearing at present, Jimmy’s lover’s soul feeling far from chummy.

‘I don’t believe you said one word in there,’ he accused Donald.

‘That takes bags of courage, especially when one has nothing to say. Did you get that portrait for your exhibition off Sir Richard Clunes?’

‘I got the promise of it when we’re ready for it, which is all I wanted,’ Jimmy said. ‘And I went to a cocktail party he gave last night. A business do.’

‘Oh? And what do the Corridors of Power boys think about nun chasers?’ This was Donald’s method of referring to anyone in bureaucratic or scientific circles, however lowly.

They seem on the whole to take to the idea of them a deal more enthusiastically than do we Corridors of Eng. Lit. boys.’

‘Not surprising; we’re a backward-looking lot. Our glories lie behind us, pace Nitkin,’ Donald said, without much interest. ‘Come on down to the café for a chat. There isn’t a blessed thing to do this morning in the library.’

Jimmy agreed, catching a glimpse in his mind’s eye of a pair of faultless breasts thrusting towards him on the road to Walton. The IBA seemed curiously insubstantial this morning.

‘What did you think of the she-wolf washing and ironing her dirty linen in public?’ Donald asked.

‘I thought it was jolly brave of her to speak out to Bloody Trefisick the way she did. I admired her for it.’

‘You’re hopeless, Jimmy. That wasn’t bravery, you ass, it was masochism, if ever I saw it. She’s a masochist and her hubby must be a mash-assistant.’

‘You don’t believe a word you say, Donald,’ Jimmy reproved, but he felt slightly tired of the other’s habit of jokingly imputing perverted values to every conceivable relationship; it was, of course, the result of Donald being what he was, and of the law’s attitude to what he was. ‘When allowances are made, it’s what I’ve always said, It’s only ’uman nature after all,’ Jimmy rhymed to himself. All the same, he would not dream of mentioning Rose to Donald, much as he longed to rhapsodise about her to someone.

In the cafeteria they sat at a corner table, just out of striking distance of a giant American aloe cactus. Donald sat genially with his elbows on the table. Despite the too beautiful tailoring which enveloped him, he looked like a rugger forward just off the field, his hair spikey, his nose slightly flat. He had a healthy look about him; Jimmy already accepted the fact that Donald’s light glowed intermittently in his presence.

‘Had a poem accepted this morning, me boy,’ Donald said. ‘Mandragora took it – the one about the turds, that Tambimuttu turned down.’

‘I remember. Good! Congratulations. It should appear in about three years.’ Jimmy enjoyed none of Donald Hortense’s poems, but he found them oddly memorable – partly because, as a member of the Scribist movement, Donald only composed poems which were seven brief lines long.

‘Of course, I’m going to have to change my entire method of writing poetry,’ Donald said thoughtfully. ‘What a lot of people have not realised is that Norman Lights are going to put a new aspect on everything,’ Donald said. ‘For literature, it’ll be a far more sweeping change than any of the multitude of changes it’s already undergone this century. It’ll mean writers having to learn a new language even more difficult than Shaw’s forty-letter alphabet would have been: the language of changed mores and responses in the external world. Willy nilly, poetry and the novel are dunked back into a realm of exploration.’

‘I suppose so,’ Jimmy agreed. ‘A writer writes most richly of his childhood. Facing the new set-up will be a tax on him. Any novelist not tackling the immediate present will be classed as an historical novelist.’

‘Not only that. The NLs will bring a state of flux which is going to last for years, as all the ramifications seep through every level of society. A synthesis, an analysis, will be a more demanding task than ever – and its value more questionable. Because no sooner do you get the novel or what-have-you written than your specimen is out of date. Have you seen Vogue?’

Jimmy shook his head. He had never seen Vogue; Donald always had. Women’s fashion magazines were irresistible to the librarian; through them he caught glimpses of a vast, busy world with which he had not the slightest connection.

‘There’s an interesting article in it by Grigson,’ Donald said. ‘Versatile type, Grigson; I admire him for it. He’s attempting to predict the effect NLs will have on such womanly wiles as make-up and hats – and hence on the whole conception of female beauty. He thinks that at first hats will be designed to conceal NLs and then, later, to reveal them. As a long-range prediction, he emphasises that we have supplied our bodies with a new sexual focus, which he thinks may supplant some of the others in superficial importance. So that by about the mid-seventies bare breasts may be quite the thing; they just won’t seem anything to be excited about any more.’

‘It’s something to look forward to, anyhow.’

‘Infantile traumas springing up right, left and centre,’ Donald exclaimed, gulping down his coffee in disgust. ‘Well, I must be awa’.’

When Jimmy returned to his little room, he pulled the Haiti folder out of the desk and opened it. On the first sheet of paper, he had written boldly, ‘Books in Haiti since 1804.’ It was going to be a good and unusual exhibition: his exhibition. He ought to write straight away to the faculty of Pisa for photographs of Queen Marie-Louise’s grave; sufficiently enlarged, they would fill the awkward alcove at the far end of the Main Exhibition Hall. He began a rough sketch to indicate the sort of camera angle he required.

In no time, his pencil stopped. Blankly, gently, he gazed into space. The soft and nutritious thought of Rose slid over him. As if silent upon a peak in Darien, he seemed to have discovered a new ocean of truth. He perceived that most of the books in the building, and nearly all the books he had ever read, had lied; that his friends and acquaintances had deceived him; that his parents and teachers had misled him; that few, in fact, except a smattering of sages mislabelled voluptuaries, had ever staggered on his mighty discovery. Physical love was good!

Jimmy recalled St Augustine’s nauseating comments on women; he recalled the diatribes of Puritans and Victorians; he recalled the dirty jokes he had heard and told; and he seethed with anger. It was all a pack of contemptible rubbish, foul, unhealthy lies and illusion! There was no beauty like the indulgence of the flesh, no cleanliness like a woman’s intimate cleanliness.




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