They lay together, naked, and they fell asleep. When she woke up it was dark and quiet. She was lying with her face towards the wall. At her back, she could feel King’s body, warm and hard.
When she had stood naked in front of him, his member was like a flaccid fruit. Now she felt him hard and asleep against her back. There was one chemical which said ‘flaccid’; there was another which said ‘erect’. They were like two jars on a shelf in a laboratory. When she stood naked before him, it was the jar marked ‘flaccid’ which was used in the experiment. Now he was asleep, and the other jar had been brought into use. It seemed a matter of chance which one should have been chosen.
She heard him give a heavy, sleep-laden sigh, and he moved his hand onto her hip. She began to feel herself becoming aroused. There was another shelf in the laboratory; two jars marked ‘dry’ and ‘moist’.
When King woke up he turned her towards him and they copulated. He brought her to orgasm, and a tear ran down her cheek. Then he withdrew from her and pulled on her bathrobe which was hanging on the door, and he went out to the bathroom. The bathrobe was ridiculously small for him, and he was glad not to encounter anyone on the landing. He came back in and lit the gas, and began to make the tea they had abandoned earlier. She watched him, in the ill-fitting bathrobe, and she laughed.
Her laughter, and the tear that had run down her cheek, were of course simply further examples of King’s chemical reactions. Feeling him deep inside her, her soul had tightened like a knot. She had seen images she would have preferred not to. She had thought of the risk of getting pregnant if he wasn’t careful enough. And two more chemicals, marked ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’ had been poured over her body. Her orgasm was like a chord pulled tight until it breaks. And a tear welled in her right eye, and trickled down her cheek; as if she had been thinking sad thoughts. And when she saw King standing over her gas ring, in her bathrobe, she laughed. The chord of anxiety was finally snapped. Her orgasm had shown her the possibility of pleasure without reference to anything. When she saw King making tea in her ill-fitting bathrobe, this became a reference point for her amusement. And when she laughed, it was the same tear which welled again in her eye.
He brought two mugs of tea, and when he sat on the bed it creaked beneath him. She sat up and took one of the mugs from him, and held it between her hands, sipping slowly and looking over the top of it at King, who was sitting on the edge of the bed and staring into the middle of the room, still wearing the ridiculous bathrobe. She asked him what was in his mind, and he told her he was thinking about something that had been said in one of the lectures at the conference. She asked him what his work was about, and he told her it concerned the fundamental forces between particles, and that really all interactions were just different versions of the same thing, but that their symmetry had been broken. He continued to look into the middle of the room.
She tried to understand what he was saying about interactions and forces. She imagined the forces of good and evil, of love and hate, of will and desire, and she tried to imagine how really they were all instances of the same thing.
And then she thought again about the orgasm, whose satisfaction she could still dimly feel inside her, and she wondered if in fact there was in her life only a single orgasm which she revisited again and again – a place which she had gone to by so many different routes.
At that moment of her orgasm, King was thinking about what had been said in one of the lectures. The thought had come to him quite involuntarily. He saw a calculation that would be worth trying to do later on. He would begin it on the train back to Cambridge. He thought about it while he lit the gas and made tea, and while he sat on the edge of the bed and gazed into the middle of the small room.
They both dressed. It was still early in the evening. He was hungry, and suggested they go out and find somewhere to eat. She knew a cafe nearby. It was a cheap place where people were sitting singly or in pairs at the fixed tables projecting from the walls.
King ordered egg and chips, Jenny a sandwich, though even this proved too much for her. She had no appetite. Watching the pale runny yoke of the fried egg on King’s plate, she felt a wave of nausea.
Afterwards, he walked her back to her flat, and then he said he ought to go, and that if she liked he would come and see her again next week. This was how his affair with Jenny began.
6
On the way back to Cambridge, Charles King began the calculation which had suggested itself to him while a tear ran down Jenny’s cheek. The problem proved more subtle, more fruitful than he had suspected, and two months later he had finished writing a paper on it. During that time, he had continued to visit Jenny every weekend, to have sex on her creaking bed. For the rest of the week, King would forget about her completely.
He was pleased with his paper. He next had to get it typed before sending it for publication. He could leave it for one of the secretaries to do, but if he waited in line it might take weeks, and King was eager to send a copy of his work to the speaker he had heard at the conference; the one he had thought about while a tear welled in Jenny’s right eye. So he first asked Doreen, with whom he was on good terms. Doreen was willing to put him ahead of the queue, but she had a lot of work to do for Professor Saunders, and she wasn’t prepared to spend every hour of the day typing people’s papers. So then he tried Joanna, who was new. She proved reluctant – perhaps afraid of setting some kind of precedent. Next morning he left on her desk a pair of nylon stockings which he’d bought while at a conference in Paris (he had a large supply for use on such occasions). Joanna angrily told him to wait his turn like everyone else. She didn’t return the stockings.
King decided to do the job himself. He borrowed a typewriter from his friend Robert, then wrote to Jenny to explain why he couldn’t see her that weekend. And he began to type the paper – a tedious job. He had little practice in typing, and had to look at every key he stabbed. For two days he struggled with the machine, correcting countless mistakes. He quickly grew to hate the paper which had so excited him when he was scribbling it all down in longhand, and the calculation which had suggested itself to his imagination during his first visit to Jenny’s flat.
On Friday night the doorbell rang. It was Jenny – she had come to type his paper. He asked how she had known where to find him, and she pointed out that he had put his address at the top of the letter. She had asked for the street when she came out of the station. King was very careful about giving his phone number or his address to a woman. By including it in the letter, he decided, he must really have wanted her to come, like this. Her hair was wet – it was raining outside. He brought her in, took her wet coat and gave her a towel. He felt touched that she should have made this journey for him. He felt almost guilty. He tried to identify the reason why he was not glad to see her.
King’s flat was quite unlike Jenny’s. To her, it seemed luxurious. It was much larger, and she was impressed by the books which were packed onto every shelf. She was struck by the idea that she would like to live in the place where these books belonged. There was an old upright piano – she told him she wanted to hear him play, and he said that he would, tomorrow. And there seemed to be things from all over the world – a Russian samovar, and an absurd model of the Empire State Building, which was some kind of cigarette lighter. When she asked incredulously if he had been to America, he told her quite calmly that yes, he had. He spent three months doing research at Brookhaven, on Long Island. These names sounded to her like magical incantations.
He had got this flat as a prize. He came top in his final exams, and as well as being taken on as a Ph.D. student, he was allowed to rent the flat. And he had stayed here, while he had finished his Ph.D., and then had been appointed as post-doctoral associate, and then as junior lecturer. If he carried on up the scale, he would one day get an even bigger place.
She asked to see his paper, and this seemed like another kind of magic. Not only the mathematical symbols, but also the words were incomprehensible
to her. She slowly read out a sentence:
We begin with the Lagrangian for a free massless fermion.
The words sounded strange on her lips, and for a moment she seemed to King like a little child, just learning to read. She pointed to the strange symbols and asked him how she was supposed to type those. He told her to ignore them, and he would write them in later.
Next day, she typed the paper. When she began, he was impressed by her speed, and accuracy. What had been so difficult for him, she now did easily. She asked him to play the piano while she worked. Anything, she said. He took the volume of Beethoven sonatas from the shelf and opened it at the Waldstein. She said she liked it, especially the slow bits. They spent most of the day like this; she on the typewriter and he on the piano. They were each alone and absorbed in what they were doing. Yet it somehow brought them closer.
It was strange having a woman in his flat for more than a night. She left her toothbrush in the bathroom, and a small washbag. He felt the miniature parody of domesticity spreading onto his territory. He almost expected a vase of flowers to appear.
On Sunday morning, Robert phoned to ask how things were going. King told him it was finished, and he could have his typewriter back. Robert said he’d come and collect it. King would have preferred to have gone to Robert’s, but Robert had insisted; as if he were offering to do King a favour. He appeared at King’s door not long afterwards.
When Robert came inside he was a little surprised to see a strange woman. Jenny shook his hand, and King introduced her as a friend from London.
King offered him a drink, but he said he was busy and he’d better not stay long. In the end, he settled for some coffee. King asked him about Anne, and their little boy. Robert said they were both fine, though Duncan had a bit of a cold. But Robert’s mind seemed to be somewhere else. When he’d finished his coffee, he took the typewriter and left. After he was gone, Jenny asked if he was always so abrupt. Yes, King told her, he usually was.
Later, King took Jenny out for a walk. She asked to see where he worked, but he said it wasn’t possible to go inside at weekends. They went back for dinner, which Jenny cooked, and then she pulled him to the floor where they made love.
Jenny said that she could stay until tomorrow morning if he liked; she could catch an early train and get to London in time for work. But he thought it better if she went back tonight. This upset her, though she didn’t complain.
On the train, she wondered if this experiment was working in the way she would have liked. Perhaps she had been wrong to do all that typing for him. Next time he could bloody well do his own.
After she had left, King phoned Robert:
‘It’s alright, I’m alone now. Do you want to come round?’
Robert appeared at the door soon afterwards. King knew when he saw him earlier that he had wanted to talk, if Jenny hadn’t been there. He brought him inside and took his coat, drew up an armchair for him and poured two glasses of brandy.
‘So what’s up? It’s not Anne is it?’
‘Anne? God no. She’s fine.’ Robert tipped his glass back and swallowed some brandy. Then he got up and went to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked out into the darkness. ‘I can talk to you, Charles, can’t I? It is safe to talk?’
‘Well I don’t think they’ve ever bothered to bug the place, Robert, if that’s what you mean! Look, why don’t you come and sit down and tell me what’s going on?’
Robert went back to his chair. ‘My office has been searched.’
‘Searched? Are you sure?’
‘I went there this morning to get some notes I’d left. I haven’t been in for a few days – it could have happened some time during the week. Someone had been inside; things were moved around. Only slightly, but I could tell.’
‘Did they steal anything?’
‘No, there was some money in a drawer and they hadn’t touched that.’
‘What were they after, then?’
‘I don’t know.’ He emptied his glass. ‘How about another drop, Charles, there’s a good chap?’
‘Steady on there.’ King passed him the bottle. ‘It could all be perfectly harmless, of course. People walk in and out of my office all day as if it was St. Pancras Station. Are you sure it wasn’t simply someone looking for a book?’
‘No, Charles, they’d been in the drawers and filing cabinets.’
‘In that case, I suppose the University authorities or the departmental spy decided to pay you a visit to keep a check on things – it’s not so unusual. There was nothing for them to find, was there?’
‘But it’s frightening, Charles. If you’re suspected of something it’s halfway to being found guilty; you know that.’
‘Even so, there was nothing they could actually get on you, was there?’
‘I don’t know.’ Robert took another large sip of brandy, and got to his feet. He walked slowly to the window, deep in thought. Then he turned round and looked at Charles. ‘This is strictly between you and me.’
‘Of course.’
‘A couple of months ago I was nominated to do the research for a book – history of revolution. It’ll be an official text.’
‘Then congratulations – I never knew you’d become an “official” historian.’
‘The point is, Charles, it’s a pretty sensitive job – I shouldn’t be telling you about it. There’ll be all sorts of archive material to go through – classified documents and so on. So I realized there would be a certain amount of vetting.’
‘Should think so too. Don’t want any damn progressives on this one, do they?’
‘But I didn’t think they’d do things like break into my office.’
‘Well, maybe you’ll just have to get used to it if you really want this job so much. Anyway, Robert, I’m sure they’ve already got a file on you as long as your arm. Discipline like yours is prime territory for subversives. But they’ve never given you any trouble before.’
‘I know, Charles, I know. Why do you think I’ve always been so careful?’ Robert returned to his seat.
‘If you don’t like being in the limelight, then maybe this book isn’t the thing for you.’
‘It’s not as simple as that, Charles. The book is a really big project. It could be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It’ll put me right at the top. And if I say no then I can forget about promotion or research grants. They don’t like it when you turn down an offer you’re not supposed to refuse.’
‘But you could say that work pressure is already too great – I don’t know – it can’t be so hard to think up a valid excuse.’
‘But Charles, the point is I want this job. You don’t know how much I want it. Really. The trouble is, I also don’t want them digging around in my life.’
‘It’s only the odd poke, though, by the sound of it. And what is there for them to dig up? You’re always so discreet.’
‘What if they find out about Flood?’
‘Flood?’ Charles laughed. ‘Come on Robert, that was a long time ago. Must be five years at least.’
‘It could still be very awkward.’
‘Oh Robert, really. A little youthful indiscretion.’
‘You may call it that, Charles, but it’s a bit harder for me.’
‘It was all so tame, Robert. I’m sure it only ever got read by half a dozen people. And in any case, even if they were to come up with a copy, if one still exists – how are they supposed to know it was you who wrote that stuff?’
‘Yes, yes, I know. But Charles, I’ve been thinking. They’ll probably interview people; family, friends, colleagues. They might want to talk to you.’
‘Fine. I’ll tell them what a splendid Communist you are.’
‘Look, I know I can trust you Charles. It was just if they asked things like how long you’d known me, and how we met and so on.’
‘Robert, I’m not stupid. I’m hardly likely to tell them about Flood. Anything that might implicate you would look just as bad for me.�
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‘Of course. My point is – it would be easy … You might say something about me that could compromise me in some way; it might not sound good.’
‘Do you think I’m going to tell them you’re a homo-sexual?’
‘No, but they’ll ask questions, and they’ll make inferences. And you’re the one person they’re likely to interview who would be in a position to let something slip.’
‘Well, rest assured, I won’t be letting anything “slip”. Is this why you’re so worried about them breaking into your office?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it all day, Charles. You were the only one I could talk to. I’ve been trying to remember if there was anything – a telephone number, or a note in a drawer. It’s so easy to forget things like that.’
‘But even if they did find out; would it be so terrible? Half of Cambridge is queer, and nobody gives a damn.’
‘This is a Government job, Charles, classified. They don’t want any security risks. And losing the contract would be bad enough, but suppose they decided to give me a hard time? You know, set an example – keep up morale and all that. I could find myself facing five years for immorality. I could lose my marriage, my career, everything.’
‘Is this job really worth all the risk if there’s so much at stake?’
‘It’s too late now to do much about it. They’ve already started digging around. If everything works then it’s the best thing ever, really. I’ve only got to make sure that nothing goes wrong. The chances are very slim, but I had to see you, Charles. And when they talk to you …’
‘Of course. And as for searching your office; even if they got hold of a phone number, he’d simply say he was a friend, wouldn’t he? He’d have his own skin to look after. Look, Robert, relax – you should be celebrating. Big honour like this. Somebody on high must like you. Why don’t we have some more of this cognac; good stuff, isn’t it? I brought it back from my last trip to Paris.’ King refilled their two glasses. The alcohol was making Robert calmer.
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