Chain Reaction

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  ‘Stripe me pink!’ exclaimed Sydney Spigett. ‘How did that thing get up there?’

  ‘Director’s orders,’ said Gatt.

  ‘Was it there before lunch?’

  ‘No; they must have just finished installing it.’

  ‘Well, thank God for that! For a moment it had me worried. What’s it for, anyway? Has someone forecast a heat-wave?’

  ‘It’s for blowing tobacco smoke round and round the room, instead of leaving it where it is.’

  Spigett’s face only showed intense interest. ‘Is that good? Is it scientific?’

  Gatt said: ‘No; it isn’t good, and it isn’t in the least scientific. Everybody has an idiosyncrasy; this is Sir Robert’s little bit of fun.’

  Spigett had found the control on the wall by means of which you could speed up the fan or slow it down. He played with it for a while, until he had it fairly whizzing round. ‘It’s good, this fan,’ said Spigett, ‘I like it. Everybody should have one.’ He turned the switch back to normal again.

  ‘You won’t think so after a while,’ said Gatt. ‘When we’ve been at it a few days —’

  ‘A few days? You don’t mean to say that this is going to go on for days, do you?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. This fact-finding is a long process.’

  ‘I should bloody well think it is! So what’s wrong with the fan?’

  ‘It squeaks.’

  Spigett listened intently for a few moments, then smiled triumphantly. ‘So it does!’ he exclaimed. Then the smile disappeared again, as if it had never been there. What of it?’

  The effect of Spigett’s fleeting change of expression, thought Gatt, was disconcerting. It suggested, perhaps, that his bonhomie was a veneer, concealing a very different type of person underneath. Something to note and watch out for. Gatt wandered over to his place at the table and sat down. He said: ‘Just a source of maddening irritation, Spigett. Like many other things — including the little mannerisms of our opposite numbers — it will get on everyone’s nerves. You’ll begin to hate this room, with everything and everyone in it. Because when people begin to get jumpy, it is the little things that are thrown up in relief.’ And, he thought to himself, when people’s nerves get on edge, the truth will begin to emerge. The others were starting to drift into the room now. It amused Gatt to see them react to the newly installed fan. Seff looked up at it cynically, as if it represented something ridiculous. He stood for a moment, his feet together, leaning on his heels so that his slim, wiry frame was arched slightly backwards. Then he seemed to give a tiny, inward laugh, shrugging his shoulders almost imperceptibly as he did so, and walked to his place. Alec Manson came next, followed by Sir Robert. Manson saw the fan, and turned round as if he were about to say something to the Director. Then he thought better of it — perhaps remembering that he had been the only one who had laughed so conspicuously at the Director’s feeble joke.

  Frank Gresham said: ‘Ah, Simmel, I see you’ve done your stuff with the doings. Just like old times — we used to have one like that at the club in Delhi. It was hot there though!’ He spotted Gatt and went over to him. ‘I don’t think I’ll go to the Springles’ party tonight, Arlen. I’m a bit past that sort of thing.’

  Gatt looked relaxed when he smiled. ‘It’s somewhat below my age-group, too,’ he conceded, ‘but I’ve got to go. Jack made me promise over lunch.’

  Seff spoke from across the table. ‘For God’s sake, do come, Arlen. I’m no good at that sort of thing, and if you don’t show up I’ll have no one to talk to.’ That danger note crept into his voice. ‘And nor will Angela.’

  Gresham said: ‘Well, I’ve got out of it pretty neatly. I’m sending young Simmel along with that nice secretary. It’s Dick’s job to look after Heatherfield, so they’ll have my car.’

  Heatherfield, who had just entered, heard this remark. ‘I hope I don’t cramp their style!’ he said. ‘Three in a car is sometimes a crowd.’

  Frank replied with a twinkle. ‘They can always drop you home first!’ Dick shuffled noisily with papers, pretended not to hear. The remark embarrassed him, and he didn’t know why.

  Mr Rupert, as before, was the last to arrive. He took one look at the fan and said ‘Great Heavens!’ — then sat down in front of his machine.

  ‘Right!’ said Hargreaves. ‘Let’s get on with it.’ Gresham muttered a few more words to Gatt, then walked round behind the Director and resumed his seat.

  ‘I now have before me,’ said the Director, ‘some dates and details concerning various batches and consignments of the tinned food. From this — with Mr Spigett’s help — we will, I hope, be able to work out where the contaminated cans have been sent.’ He paused and looked round the table. ‘The dates I have been furnished with do, I am afraid, confirm some of our worst fears. It seems that the particular batch concerned was canned in the summer of 1957. Therefore we are up against a serious cumulative effect; for the beans in question have been on the market for nearly eighteen months.’

  ‘God!’ said Seff under his breath. Then: ‘How many tins in the batch?’

  Spigett answered this himself. ‘About two hundred thousand,’ he said.

  No one spoke for a moment. The Director cleared his throat. ‘Of course, we do not know for certain that the entire batch is contaminated.’

  ‘Have we any reason,’ said Gatt, ‘for supposing it is not?’

  ‘The only way I can answer your question,’ answered Hargreaves, ‘is to say that we must assume that it is until we find out to the contrary. But I can say that it is hard to visualise how an accident could have occurred that would render such a large number of cans radioactive to a dangerous level.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Gatt thoughtfully, ‘if some of them are and some are not, how will the public know the difference between them?’

  *

  ‘Golly!’ said Kate, as the car whooshed up to the front door, ‘what a set-up!’

  Before them lay a large concrete bungalow, with enormous frameless windows emitting bright columns of light on to the gravel drive, and beyond it to the small well-laid-out garden that flanked the by-pass. A hi-fi record player was giving forth some cool piano-playing (Oscar Peterson, Simmel noted with approval), and there was a general babble of cocktail conversation. Simmel switched off the ignition and climbed out, opened the door for Heatherfield. The Seffs’ car pulled up immediately behind them. Gatt was driving, and Simmel knew why. If Jack had too much to drink during the evening it would seem less pointed for Gatt to drive them home if the car key was in his possession.

  A man in some sort of uniform came out of the house. ‘I’ll go and park the cars for you,’ he said, ‘if you will all come straight in.’ So Gatt had to hand the keys over to him. Seff, who knew Gatt’s views on his driving under such circumstances, looked on, amused. Then he assisted Angela out of his somewhat low-slung car.

  Ed and June Springle met them all just inside the door. Introductions. And at the end of them no one was the wiser who didn’t know everybody already, because nobody ever is. But Springle spotted that Heatherfield was the man he had been asked to fuss a bit, so he escorted him to the bar and gave him a drink, while a waiter looked after the others.

  ‘You’re from Kenya?’

  Heatherfield nodded. ‘I’m just over here on a job. Probably going back there in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘God’s country.’

  ‘All we “Africans” think the same about our particular bit.’

  ‘Are you from the Union?’

  Springle played chess with his glass. ‘Yes. Lived in Jo’burg until recently. Then last year we packed up all our furniture and the blue-prints of our bungalow, and put up an identical one here in Esher — I took a job with the Atomic Development Commission.’ He added: ‘The climate’s not as good, but the politics are a lot better.’ Ed sipped a Tom Collins thoughtfully. ‘Of course, you could say that just pulling out — like I have done — is hardly the answer.�
�

  ‘I doubt whether you would have achieved much by staying.’

  ‘Thank you for that! But others are fighting Segregation: they’re burning their fingers, but they’re fighting it. My plea is the same old excuse — I’ve got a wife to think about. Trying to bust myself and my family against a brick wall wouldn’t have helped anybody very much.’ He paused, and the record changed in the hi-fi. After the music had begun again he added: ‘Maybe I’ll go back there one day. But I’ll go on my own. June is too valuable a property to get mixed up in that sort of thing, especially now that Number One offspring is on the way — due any moment, in fact, as you will see! Forgive me if I seem rather unbearably proud of it.’

  There came a sudden, concerted laugh from one corner of the room. Seff was at the centre of it. ‘Jack seems to be in good form tonight! I do hope … oh well.’ He brightened up again. ‘Come on, I want you to meet June — while there’s still time! It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if we had to make a hectic exit for the nursing-home before the evening’s out!’

  *

  ‘Am I allowed to ask questions?’ asked Angela. The pose she had taken up by the mantelpiece was unconscious.

  Arlen looked at her slant-wise. ‘It depends on the questions,’ he said. ‘But if you mean how is it going for Jack, the answer is that so far his conduct has been impeccable.’

  She looked thoughtfully across the room at her husband, and without looking back at Gatt she said: ‘He certainly seems all right at the moment.’

  ‘Yes; he seems so very sure that nothing went wrong up at Marsdowne. I wish I was — especially since it is now established that the trouble started just about the time of the Project 3 episode.’

  ‘His worst patch,’ said Angela quietly.

  At the mention of Project 3, Manson, though he was standing a good six feet away, pricked up his ears as if he had a radio permanently tuned to that wavelength. ‘Trust him!’ said Angela under her breath. Manson came over and joined them.

  ‘It’s funny you should mention Project 3,’ he said, staring hard at his glass. ‘I was just thinking about it.’

  ‘And what,’ said Gatt without enthusiasm, ‘were your thoughts?’

  ‘Well, with due respect to Mrs Seff, I was thinking, to be quite honest, that the ill-fated experiment might have had something to do with the present situation.’ He warmed to the theme. ‘You see, I always thought it strange that he got a reaction from it at all, if he really did what he said he did.’

  ‘Exactly what do you mean?’

  Angela said: ‘If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go and join my husband.’

  Manson was effusive. ‘Good Lord, please don’t misunderstand me, Mrs Seff. I wasn’t suggesting —’

  She tossed some exquisite blonde hair out of her eyes, and stood, poised over him. ‘It’s simply that I’m not much good at technical conversations,’ she explained. And smiling slightly at Gatt for a moment, she turned and left them.

  Gatt said: ‘Just what are you suggesting, Alec?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ He looked down at his glass again.

  ‘You must have meant something by that remark.’

  ‘Well, if you really want to know, I made a few calculations of my own. You know, don’t you, that I didn’t agree with Seffs design?’

  ‘I remember your saying something of the sort.’

  Manson smiled archly. ‘I always say what I think, you know. Always been my policy.’

  ‘What was wrong with the design?’

  ‘The moderator. The way he’d got it the pile was well below critical mass.’

  ‘Well, in that event,’ said Gatt impatiently, ‘what are you beefing about? If that had been so, the thing would have been dead as a dodo. You could have put a baby inside it: he was only using natural uranium.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alec, suddenly looking up from his glass. ‘And yet it blew up. Odd, isn’t it?’

  *

  June Springle was attractive in that rare, tranquil way that some young women arc when they are pregnant. She had only to cross the room for you to know, intuitively, what kind of woman she was; for she walked with poise and a complete lack of awkwardness, neither advertising nor concealing the fact that she carried a baby inside her. But even without the advantage of forthcoming motherhood, she was the sort of woman whom other women liked, just as she liked other women. She liked Angela, for that matter; partly because she had nothing to be jealous about, and partly because she had the gift of ignoring both gossip and outward appearances — and both these things applied in Angela’s case. Theoretically, Mrs Seff should have put her back up; in practice, she was a true friend. June looked what she was — a girl who had been brought up where the sun shone.

  She saw Ed’s signal and went over to meet Heatherfield. Heatherfield would bore her — she knew that instinctively — but she would never show it, either deliberately or otherwise.

  For June Springle, who was way, way down the social list, was a lady.

  ‘I hope all this din isn’t driving you mad!’ she said, though only raising her voice a few decibels above its normal tone. ‘I’ve never heard a louder record. But it seems to be traditional these days to have the “player” going mercilessly whenever anyone breathes the word “cocktail party”!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Heatherfield, smiling, ‘hi-fi has even penetrated into darkest Africa. You may have to go half-way into the jungle to make use of the “usual offices”, but inside the wooden shack of a house there is sure to be a twelve-watt amplifier and a reflex speaker cabinet, even if the whole shooting match has to run off a car battery. It’s a sign of the times.’

  He was thinking how strange it was that this townified creature was reared in the same continent as he. Would she know, he wondered, the call of the Bell Bird, the hiss of a snake, the bite of the Jigger? Or had she left the chrome civilisation of Jo’burg, on picnic occasions, only to drive in a convertible through the National Park? Still, he thought, when down to something like her normal dimensions she must be quite some piece of woman. Not as alluring, perhaps, as the Seff woman, but still the kind you thought about when you had been on safari for a month with only a couple of would-be hunters and a few tribesmen for company.

  The fact that the Springles were obviously carrying out someone’s specific request to make a fuss of him did not irritate him; he recognised it for what it was — kindness and hospitality, to be faced with humility and tolerance. The fact that he would far rather have been left to his own devices was beside the point; he would have done exactly the same thing if he had been in their shoes.

  ‘I find it fascinating,’ he said, ‘that you uprooted everything from one continent and transplanted it to another.’

  June smiled. ‘It’s hard to realise,’ she said, ‘that this is not the same house. It is, of course, an exact replica of our bungalow in the Union. It’s funny to think that the original one is still there, being lived in by complete strangers. It probably looks quite different now — the furniture will be someone else’s, the walls will be different colours, their favourite flowers will have given the place a different scent.’ She saw his expression. ‘You must think us a bit silly, I think! Perhaps a little pretentious, too. But when you get used to a place, and you like it, and you’re happy in it — well, you cling to those things. We loved Africa, you see; and I confess that England means much less to us than it should — after all, we should be grateful to the English because they believe in the things we believe in, and have allowed us to go on living our life as we like to live it. But I doubt if they would blame us for trying to bring a little bit of Africa with us!’

  ‘I understand,’ said Heatherfield. But she knew that he did not. She knew he was thinking ‘these people have money: how happy would they be together without it?’ She knew this, but she forgave it; because Mr Heatherfield was a rather conventional person and that was the conventional point of view.

  *

  ‘This is about the swellest party I�
�ve ever been to!’ said Kate. ‘It makes me feel rather a mouse. Everybody else conveys the impression of just having stepped off a plane.’

  ‘Most of them have,’ said Dick. ‘You’re quite right; we’re both mouses. Don’t you realise how wonderful it is to be supremely unimportant? Let’s dance: I like this record — it’s Dave Brubeck.’

  She continued the conversation without a pause; as if they were still sitting down. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing arrogantly top-drawer about most of the people here, yet they make me feel what people used to call bourgeois. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean. You’ve had too much Chelsea, my girl. All those parties with gin in cracked cups. Now you think you’re still sipping from the same thick kitchenware, whereas everybody else is using elegant crystal glass.’

  ‘That’s exactly it!’ she exclaimed. ‘What’s the cure?’

  ‘The cure,’ he said, ‘is to have another gin — and out of a proper glass, too. Add the ice and the sliver of lemon, and you’re one of them. It’s quite simple, really; like the conjurer who keeps talking so that you don’t see what he’s got up his sleeve.’

  ‘It’s not,’ she said definitely. In brackets she thought: Dick does dance well. ‘It’s not the answer; the people here aren’t playing a part. Take the Springles — they’re as natural as boy-meets-girl. Or Anglea Seff; she doesn’t have to hear the tinkle of ice-cubes to help her fit into the scenery. Or Poor George.’

  He grinned at her. ‘How do you know Poor George?’

  ‘Because I’m always having to fix appointments with him. Half the Department seems to be on his books.’

  ‘Where did he get his nickname? He’s certainly not poor financially — he’s one of the most expensive dentists who ever pulled a tooth.’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ said Kate. ‘He’s called Poor George because he’s been in love with June Springle since the year dot. He knew them in South Africa, and like an obedient spaniel he followed them here. And you see? There he sits following June about the room with his eyes — baby and all! But he’s quite natural, you see, and he fits. He’s the man at the party who’s in love with his hostess.’