He would call it the right result. Who would know?
As it happened, through the myriad and unfathomable chances of fate, he got it exactly right, though he of course would never know that. He just went up to London and knocked on the appropriate door.
“Oh. I thought you were going to phone me first.”
Arthur gaped in astonishment.
“You can only come in for a few minutes,” said Fenchurch. “I’m just going out.”
Chapter 18
A summer’s day in Islington, full of the mournful wail of antique-restoring machinery.
Fenchurch was unavoidably busy for the afternoon, so Arthur wandered in a blissed-out haze and looked at all the shops, which in Islington are quite a useful bunch, as anyone who regularly needs old woodworking tools, Boer War helmets, drag, office furniture, or fish will readily confirm.
The sun beat down over the roof gardens. It beat on architects and plumbers. It beat on barristers and burglars. It beat on pizzas. It beat on estate agent’s particulars.
It beat on Arthur as he went into a restored furniture shop.
“It’s an interesting building,” said the proprietor cheerfully. “There’s a cellar with a secret passage which connects with a nearby pub. It was built for the Prince Regent apparently, so he could make his escape when he needed to.”
“You mean, in case anybody might catch him buying stripped pine furniture,” said Arthur.
“No,” said the proprietor, “not for that reason.”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” said Arthur, “I’m terribly happy.”
“I see.”
He wandered hazily on and found himself outside the offices of Greenpeace. He remembered the contents of his file marked “Things To Do—Urgent!” which he hadn’t opened again in the meantime. He marched in with a cheery smile and said he’d come to give them some money to help free the dolphins.
“Very funny,” they told him, “go away.”
This wasn’t quite the response he had expected, so he tried again. This time they got quite angry with him, so he just left some money anyway and went back out into the sunshine.
Just after six he returned to Fenchurch’s house in the alleyway, clutching a bottle of champagne.
“Hold this,” she said, shoved a stout rope in his hand, and disappeared inside through the large white wooden doors from which dangled a fat padlock off a black iron bar.
The house was a small converted stable in a light industrial alleyway behind the derelict Royal Agricultural Hall of Islington. As well as its large stable doors it also had a normal-looking front door of smartly glazed paneled wood with a black dolphin door knocker. The one odd thing about this door was its doorstep, which was nine feet high, since the door was set into the upper of the two floors and presumably had been used originally to haul up hay for hungry horses.
An old pulley jutted out of the brickwork above the doorway and it was over this that the rope Arthur was holding was slung. The other end of the rope held a suspended cello.
The door opened above his head.
“Okay,” said Fenchurch, “pull on the rope, steady the cello. Pass it up to me.”
He pulled on the rope, he steadied the cello.
“I can’t pull on the rope again,” he said, “without letting go of the cello.”
Fenchurch leaned down.
“I’m steadying the cello,” she said, “you pull on the rope.”
The cello eased up level with the doorway, swinging slightly, and Fenchurch maneuvered it inside.
“Come on up yourself,” she called down.
Arthur picked up his bag of goodies and went in through the stable doors, tingling.
The bottom room, which he had seen briefly before, was pretty rough and full of junk. A large cast-iron clothes wringer stood there, a surprising number of kitchen sinks were piled in a corner. There was also, Arthur was momentarily alarmed to see, a baby carriage, but it was very old and uncomplicatedly full of books.
The floor was old stained concrete, excitingly cracked. And this was the measure of Arthur’s mood as he started up the rickety wooden steps in the far corner. Even a cracked concrete floor seemed to him an almost unbearably sensual thing.
“An architect friend of mine keeps on telling me how he can do wonderful things with this place,” said Fenchurch chattily as Arthur emerged through the floor. “He keeps on coming round, standing in stunned amazement muttering about space and objects and events and marvelous qualities of light, then says he needs a pencil and disappears for weeks. Wonderful things have therefore so far failed to happen to it.”
In fact, thought Arthur as he looked about, the upper room was at least reasonably wonderful anyway. It was simply decorated, furnished with things made out of cushions and also a stereo set with speakers which would have impressed the guys who put up Stonehenge.
There were flowers which were pale and pictures which were interesting.
There was a sort of gallery structure in the roof space which held a bed and also a bathroom which, Fenchurch explained, you could actually swing a cat in, “But,” she added, “only if it was a reasonably patient cat and didn’t mind a few nasty cracks about the head. So. Here you are.”
“Yes.”
They looked at each other for a moment.
The moment became a longer moment, and suddenly it was a very long moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.
For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone for long enough with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation. He felt on the sudden like a cramped and zoo-born animal who wakes one morning to find the door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savanna stretching gray and pink to the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.
He wondered what the new sounds were as he gazed at her openly wondering face and her eyes that smiled with a shared surprise.
He hadn’t realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones until it now said something it had never said to him before, which was “yes.”
Fenchurch dropped her eyes away at last, with a tiny shake of her head.
“I know,” she said. “I shall have to remember,” she added, “that you are the sort of person who cannot hold on to a simple piece of paper for two minutes without winning a raffle with it.”
She turned away.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said quickly. “Hyde Park. I’ll change into something less suitable.”
She was dressed in a rather severe dark dress, not a particularly shapely one, and it didn’t really suit her.
“I wear it specially for my cello teacher,” she said. “He’s a nice old boy, but I sometimes think all that bowing gets him a bit excited. I’ll be down in a moment.”
She ran lightly up the steps to the gallery above, and called down, “Put the bottle in the fridge for later.”
He noticed as he slipped the champagne bottle into the door that it had an identical twin to sit next to.
He walked over to the window and looked out. He turned and started to look at her records. From above he heard the rustle of her dress fall to the ground. He talked to himself about the sort of person he was. He told himself very firmly that for this moment at least he would keep his eyes very firmly and steadfastly locked on to the spines of her records, read the titles, nod appreciatively, count the blasted things if he had to. He would keep his head down.
This he completely, utterly, and abjectly failed to do.
She was staring down at him with such intensity that she seemed hardly to notice that he was looking up at her. Then suddenly she shook her head, dropped the light sundress down over herself and disappeared quickly into the bathroom.
She emerged a moment later, all smiles and with a sun hat, and came tripping down the steps with extraordinary lightness
. It was a strange kind of dancing motion she had. She saw that he noticed it and put her head slightly on one side.
“Like it?” she said.
“You look gorgeous,” he said simply, because she did.
“Hmmm,” she said, as if he hadn’t really answered her question.
She closed the upstairs front door which had stood open all this time, and looked around the little room to see that it was all in a fit state to be left on its own for a while. Arthur’s eyes followed hers around, and while he was looking in the other direction she slipped something out of a drawer and into the canvas bag she was carrying.
Arthur looked back at her.
“Ready?”
“Did you know,” she said with a slightly puzzled smile, “that there’s something wrong with me?”
Her directness caught Arthur unprepared.
“Well,” he said, “I’d heard some vague sort of—”
“I wonder how much you do know about me,” she said. “If you heard from where I think you heard then that’s not it. Russell just sort of makes stuff up, because he can’t deal with what it really is.”
A pang of worry went through Arthur.
“Then what is it,” he said, “can you tell me?”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s nothing bad at all. Just unusual. Very very unusual.”
She touched his hand, and then leaned forward and kissed him briefly.
“I shall be very interested to know,” she said, “if you manage to work out what it is this evening.”
Arthur felt that if someone tapped him at that point he would have chimed, like the deep sustained rolling chime his gray fishbowl made when he flicked it with his thumbnail.
Chapter 19
Ford Prefect was irritated to be continually awakened by the sound of gunfire.
He slid himself out of the maintenance hatchway which he had fashioned into a bunk for himself by disabling some of the noisier machinery in its vicinity and padding it with towels. He slung himself down the access ladder and prowled the corridors moodily. They were claustrophobic and ill-lit, and what light there was continually flickering and dimming as power surged this way and that through the ship, causing heavy vibrations and rasping humming noises.
That wasn’t it, though.
He paused and leaned back against the wall as something that looked like a small silver power drill flew down the dim corridor past him, with a nasty searing screech.
That wasn’t it either.
He clambered listlessly through a bulkhead door and found himself in a larger corridor, though still ill-lit.
The ship lurched. It had been doing this a fair bit, but this was heavier. A small platoon of robots went by making a terrible clattering.
Still not it, though.
Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end of the corridor, so he walked along it in the other direction.
He passed a series of observation monitors built into the walls behind plates of toughened but still badly scratched Plexiglas.
One of them showed some horrible green scaly reptilian figure ranting and raving about the Single Transferable Vote system. It was hard to tell whether he was for or against it, but he clearly felt very strongly about it. Ford turned the sound down.
That wasn’t it, though.
He passed another monitor. It was showing a commercial for some brand of toothpaste that would apparently make you feel free if you used it. There was nasty blaring music with it, too.
That wasn’t it.
He came upon another, much larger three-dimensional screen that was monitoring the outside of the vast silver Xaxisian ship.
As he watched, a thousand horribly beweaponed Zirzla robot star cruisers came searing round the dark shadow of a moon, silhouetted against the blinding disk of the star Xaxis, and the ship simultaneously unleashed a vicious blaze of hideously incomprehensible forces from all its orifices against them.
That was it.
Ford shook his head irritably and rubbed his eyes. He slumped on the wrecked body of a dull silver robot which clearly had been burning earlier on but had now cooled down enough to sit on.
He yawned and dug his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy out of his satchel. He activated the screen, and flickered idly through some level-three entries and some level-four entries. He was looking for some good insomnia cures. He found REST, which was what he reckoned he needed. He found REST AND RECUPERATION and was about to pass on when he suddenly had a better idea. He looked up at the monitor screen. The battle was raging more fiercely every second and the noise was appalling. The ship juddered, screamed, and lurched as each new bolt of stunning energy was delivered or received.
He looked back down at the Guide again and flipped through a few likely locations. He suddenly laughed, and then rummaged in his satchel again.
He pulled out a small memory dump module, wiped off the fluff and biscuit crumbs, and plugged it into an interface on the back of the Guide.
When all the information that he could think was relevant had been dumped into the module, he unplugged it again, tossed it lightly in the palm of his hand, put the Guide away in his satchel, smirked, and went in search of the ship’s computer data banks.
Chapter 20
The purpose of having the sun go low in the evenings, in the summer, especially in parks,” said the voice earnestly, “is to make girls’ breasts bob up and down more clearly to the eye. I am convinced that this is the case.” Arthur and Fenchurch giggled about this to each other as they passed. She hugged him more tightly for a moment.
“And I am certain,” said the frizzy ginger-haired youth with the long thin nose who was expostulating from his deck chair by the side of the Serpentine, “that if one worked the argument through, one would find that it flowed with perfect naturalness and logic from everything,” he insisted to his thin dark-haired companion who was slumped in the next-door deck chair feeling dejected about his spots, “that Darwin was going on about. This is certain. This is indisputable. And,” he added, “I love it.”
He turned sharply and squinted through his spectacles at Fenchurch. Arthur steered her away.
“Next guess,” she said, when she had stopped giggling, “come on.”
“All right,” he said, “your elbow. Your left elbow. There’s something wrong with your left elbow.”
“Wrong again,” she said, “completely wrong. You’re on completely the wrong track.”
The summer sun was sinking through the trees in the park, looking as if—let’s not mince words. Hyde Park is stunning. Everything about it is stunning except for the rubbish on Monday mornings. Even the ducks are stunning. Anyone who can go through Hyde Park on a summer’s evening and not feel moved by it is probably going through in an ambulance with the sheet pulled up over his face.
It is a park in which people do more extraordinary things than they do elsewhere. Arthur and Fenchurch found a man in shorts practicing the bagpipes to himself under a tree. The piper paused to chase off an American couple who had tried, timidly, to put some coins on the box his bagpipes came in.
“No!” he shouted at them; “go away! I’m only practicing.”
He started resolutely to reinflate his bag, but even the noise this made could not disfigure their mood.
Arthur put his arms around her and moved them slowly downward.
“I don’t think it can be your bottom,” he said after a while. “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that at all.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my bottom.”
They kissed for so long that eventually the piper went and practiced on the other side of the tree.
“I’ll tell you a story,” said Arthur.
“Good.”
They found a patch of grass which was relatively free of couples actually lying on top of each other and sat and watched the stunning ducks and the low sunlight rippling on the water which ran beneath the stunning ducks.
&nb
sp; “A story,” said Fenchurch, cuddling his arm to her.
“Which will tell something of the sort of things that happen to me. It’s absolutely true.”
“True story.”
“You know sometimes people tell you stories that are supposed to be something that happened to their wife’s cousin’s best friend, but actually probably got made up somewhere along the line.
“Well, it’s like one of those stories, except that it actually happened, and I know it actually happened, because the person it actually happened to was me.”
“Like the raffle ticket.”
Arthur laughed. “Yes. I had a train to catch. I arrived at the station—”
“Did I ever tell you,” interrupted Fenchurch, “what happened to my parents in a station?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “you did.”
“Just checking.”
Arthur glanced at his watch. “I suppose we could think of getting back,” he said.
“Tell me the story,” said Fenchurch firmly. “You arrived at the station.”
“I was about twenty minutes early. I’d got the time of the train wrong. I suppose it is at least equally possible,” he added after a moment’s reflection, “that British Rail had got the time of the train wrong. Hadn’t occurred to me before.”
“Get on with it.” Fenchurch laughed.
“So I bought a newspaper, to do the crossword, and went to the buffet to get a cup of coffee.”
“You do the crossword?”
“Yes.”
“Which one?”
“The Guardian usually.”
“I think it tries to be too cute. I prefer The Times. Did you solve it?”
“What?”
“The crossword in The Guardian.”
“I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet,” said Arthur. “I’m still trying to buy the coffee.”
“All right then. Buy the coffee.”
“I’m buying it. I am also,” said Arthur, “buying some biscuits.”
“What sort?”
“Rich Tea.”
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Page 60
