98.4

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Chindale was saying: ‘Did you see him at Elstree? — I mean when you called at the factory a few days ago?’

  So he did know my movements! ‘No. Only Stavely. Group Three is wired off anyway. It’s like quarantine for cholera. If you take their temperature you snap the thermometers in half and forget it.’

  ‘The temperature in Group Three,’ said Chindale, ‘is pretty high. Thorne is now in charge of their experimental reactor. I wouldn’t like him to get too upset.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m sorry he can’t manage his love life but he’s not the first. It takes more than a jilt to upset a reactor and I’d hate to think that every time a man gets the blues he can’t be trusted over his work.’

  I got a hard look in return. ‘Is that right? What about you?’

  The Chevrolet pulled away without drama. This seemed to leave the bus driving fraternity even more frustrated. In ominous slow motion two drivers started climbing down from their cabs. I replied absently: ‘I messed up my job first. Then I messed up my love life.’

  ‘So every time you change your job you change your woman?’

  ‘You make it sound too systematic. Sex is subject to the laws of chance.’

  ‘Okay. You play the tables. And you probably need the uncertainty as a stimulus.’

  ‘What do you do when you need it?’

  ‘I change my golf partner,’ he said. ‘But Thorne isn’t like you; and the reactor isn’t like those stuffy jobs they use at nuclear power stations. Thorne needs to be watched.’

  ‘By me? How?’

  The bus drivers’ war erupted full blast to the accompaniment of furious motor horns. But Chindale didn’t raise his voice as he said: ‘Hadn’t you better try and get into quarantine? Group Three might turn out to be more of a diversion than you think. There’s a girl loose.’

  ‘I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘Oh, come on! Think of your image, Yenn.’

  TWO

  I limped hack to London with a faulty carburettor.

  Chelsea was being terribly Young, that evening. Very thin youths with very wide belts and very tight jeans seemed to experience difficulty in touching the ground, whereas I climbed out of the car with all the muscular co-ordination of a sack of swedes. Girls leapt healthily in and out of late-night boutiques in succulent proof of their elasticity, while the traffic jam in the Kings Road remained locked, apparently just as I’d left it some three weeks before.

  My part of Chelsea was less volatile and even less dignified. I was reasonably certain that the dilapidated remnant of a house next to mine was the only uninhabitable real-estate within three miles. It had a bath on the second floor that was hanging slightly out of the window.

  In mine, the bath tubs were on the inside but the total effect was unhygienic. There were four converted flats inside and mine was the cleanest — as it was also the highest. The vague rumours to do with the installation of a lift, when I had signed the lease, had been spirited away a few days after signature. But there was a service garage in the basement. The man on duty when I arrived accepted my car unenthusiastically for repair and I climbed the long flights of drab stairs towards what had been described in the agency leaflet as the Penthouse. On the way up I detected a mysterious aura of an incipient bottle-party. People were dashing in and out of doors with bits of cheese; and a loud-looking record-player was rushed to the door like an ambulance arriving at an emergency. I recognized one of the elastic girls from the boutique.

  In my flat, traces of Ruth were all over the place, where she had discarded unwanted lipsticks, a Christmas-stocking mouth organ, a crunched pack of Kleenex and innumerable objects that had been of no interest before but now seemed so significant. She’d left one book on spiders for me to treasure. Knowing Ruth this wouldn’t have been deliberate — she wasn’t spiteful despite the fact she would have guessed my reaction had she known she left it behind.

  We’d made the flat modern and comfortable and used more money than the place was worth in the process. We’d kept saying how futile it was, at the time, but we’d still done it. It was that sort of relationship ...

  I’d been right about that record-player. It was deafening from such short range and it would have taken a sleeping pill the size of a pingpong ball to cope.

  I decided not to try. I hadn’t crashed a party for at least two years and I felt challenged by the sheer funpower ranged against me from below. I armed myself with the inevitable Spanish Sauterne and squeezed my way in ...

  The girl with the big shoulders said: ‘You know what? I can tell a lot about you by the way you hold your head.’

  ‘You’re a painter?’

  ‘A sculptor,’ she said, nodding vigorously. ‘You don’t like your face. Now let me see ...’ She poured some sour wine for us both and slopped it on the cloth. There was a great deal of noise and we could hardly hear ourselves roar. She screamed: ‘Do you know what I think? — You’ve seen other people with faces that you think are rather like yours, and you thought them dull and technological, or something. So rather than be dull and technological you go about having affairs all the time. Aren’t I right?’

  What?’

  ‘Aren’t I right?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ I said. ‘My face is not so much dull and technological. It’s like a shaving advertisement — you know, the large, shining jaw; the dead straight line exactly three-quarters of an inch below the level of the ears, and the slight leer of one who knows he is clean and hygienic.’

  She burst out laughing. ‘That’s you? When did you last have a shave?’

  ‘Just now.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get the job in the ad. You’ve used a badly worn electric razor — not that infallible shaving cream you’re thinking about. And you don’t have a leer, you have an anxious, rather hunted look.’

  She drew back, looked at me from another angle, as if wondering how she would express my problem with the clay on her hands. She nodded, as if she had come to a decision. An even louder record replaced the last. ‘You’re guilt-ridden,’ she yelled, alarmingly. ‘And the guilt must be met. Savoured, until your appetite is fixed up. Then you can run okay for a little while, make some girl forget her similar anxieties maybe, until the drug wears off and the whole thing has to start all over again.’

  ‘Come upstairs and say that!’

  She shot a lightning look. ‘To bed?’ A smile. ‘No; you don’t really think me attractive. I’m okay, I pass, I’m nothing special for you. It’s a reflex for you to invite me to bed. “Take three hundred milligrams of medium-strength girl and sleep fitfully. Repeat with one hundred and fifty milligrams and throw her out.” — You’ve tried that formula, too. And of course you know damn well it doesn’t work.’ She glared at me over the top of the glass as if searching for perspective before risking the chisel. ‘All my own affairs,’ she explained, ‘have to be inherently superficial. You’re not superficial so it wouldn’t work. Your guilt-appetite wouldn’t get fixed up. See what I mean?’

  I did. All too clearly.

  *

  I couldn’t sleep with all that din and remembering we kept prodigious quantities of reference books and dossiers at my former office I decided to run out to Elstree to read up on Stergen. There was always the chance that I might get into Group Three and check up on Thorne while I was about it. So I collected my car from the basement garage and headed north.

  This may sound rash in the circumstances. Yet security work has taught me that on the whole it’s best to go straight to the heart of the thing rather than walk tiptoe around the battlements. If you whisper state secrets in the conspiratorial huddle you look conspicuous; yell them across a crowded elevator and nobody notices.

  My appearance at Elstree wouldn’t arouse much interest. The lugubrious Stavely would delight in my downfall, so provided he was still there — he practically lived there — I felt I’d get in all right, the better for him to gloat.

  I used to believe that the sense of foreboding people get, when they ima
gine they have a sixth sense about something, really stems from their own mood and the atmosphere enveloping it. A house can look haunted when the moon is up and nobody is around; a Cornish bay, wind-swept by a lashing sea-storm, is a dead cert for a murder, for a looming Spanish galleon, for a ghastly scream in the night. Nevertheless there are human instincts without dials; and these can measure signals you don’t have to analyse. They are simply there.

  In this mood I found the signals of disturbance loud and clear as I arrived at Elstree — so much so, that instead of swinging immediately into the driveway leading to the main gate I pulled up on the arterial road and took a good look around.

  To the extent to which a three-lane highway, half-shrouded in a ground-mist and lighted with the harsh flat filter of mercury vapour arcs, can look normal then yes, the scene was normal enough. The road curved round to the left ahead of me; beyond the bend was the next of many roundabouts which blob by blob marked the approach to the M1 Motorway ahead. You could see dimly the blue-lit roadsign obscured by sporadic fog-drifts. The dirtied patches of vapour scrolled over the macadam cloyingly, then settled over the grass verge.

  Something made me get out of the car — and again, I let this go unquestioned. Perhaps, in retrospect, I sort of identified with the loneliness of the scene. I belonged with it, just then. And like the swarming, silent moths which thrupped audibly against my headlights, only to be stunned by heat and impact, I had tripped myself lately on several counts with the equivalent effect. Morbid, if you like; but if I was indulging myself I think it was mostly because of the growing uneasiness and tension — a kind of preparation for something to follow — which began to make my spine react with prickles, as if the nerves were deliberately tuned for a particular and expected vibration.

  I dismissed all this as ridiculous and got back in the car. The feeling hadn’t passed but I felt this neurotic waiting was inexcusable. Maybe it was; but that was when the first of the two ambulances shot out of the factory gates and came roaring down the feed-road towards the highway.

  Instinctively I switched off my lights and watched the vehicle skid round the corner and head towards London. Two minutes later, another one tore out of the compound and disappeared behind me in hot pursuit of the other.

  And that was that; I was left with the moths again. I smoked a cigarette and decided not to enter the compound too soon. The sculptress would have thought this odd behaviour indeed. I did the right thing, it happens; but I wasn’t to know this at the time.

  Twenty minutes later I drove up to the barrier. Reluctantly the guard put a call through to Stavely and admitted me. Nothing was said about the ambulances, nor of any accident that might have explained it. Stavely was his usual, unbelievably depressing self.

  His large face, poised insecurely on a thin neck, never seemed quite straight — a lop-sided egg gone stale. But this effect had developed during ageing from post-graduate virility — when I’d first known him — to the premature stagnation of chicken-forcing that had led to his now being groomed for Departmental managership. If ever a man had become saturated with knowledge he could not use, Stavely was the archetype. His mental development had followed a wedge-shaped course so that the more he knew the less he thought; and slowly the monumental traffic jam of static information had eroded his appearance.

  The eyes, permanently screwed-up into the ‘please like me’ position, had lost focus for want of any reason for being liked, and from the sheer impossibility of seeing clearly through an ever-narrowing intellectual aperture. The body-muscle had adopted the contours of too many executive chairs, whose comfort had become inversely proportional to his right to sit there. His parents, apparently with malicious foresight, had christened him ‘Prince’ in recognition of his outstanding mediocrity.

  Nevertheless, nothing gives a man of this sort a more effective booster shot than an impressive secret; and whatever had just happened, culminating in the summoning of the two ambulances, was a fact imperiously to be withheld. It amused me that we were both being secretive about the same thing. I felt I could stomach the man’s insufferable patronage with a lower blood pressure in these farcical circumstances.

  So Prince Stavely looked up smiling from his work and asked; ‘What brings you here in the middle of the night, my friend?’

  ‘Your reference library.’

  He didn’t comment on my sudden thirst for knowledge at one a.m. ‘I expect it’s locked; but we could probably get the night porter to open it up.’ With a slow overarm sweep and a twitch of the other hand at his well-greased parting — he still had his hair in the Brylcreem style — he selected a suitable buzzer and raised the phone smoothly from its rest. ‘Macaulay? — We have a ...’ — he glanced, smiling at me — ‘... a visitor with us ...’ pause for interruption and an agreeable ‘yes, that’s right. I wonder if you could provide some tea, despite the hour? Good. Also, do you know where the key to the reference library is? ... Fine. Yes, that’s fine.’ The converse of the phone routine — ‘He’s bringing it up ... I wondered what to do with the things in your desk, Nigel.’

  ‘I could clear them out now.’

  Stavely eased his loose suit out of the chair, sticking to it at the folds. ‘Actually, I have moved them ... I was very careful and I put all your stuff away in this locker.’ The key was there in his hand. It seemed to have emerged at the cuff itself. I could see the cufflink was gold, even though the suit was a shambles. The key was guided and inserted and turned, all in the same integrated movement of exaggerated precision, as if this was the most important task he had had to think about for some time.

  An unholy mess inside the locker contrasted with the impeccable act. Stavely made a business out of not commenting on the difference. It was to be understood that anything of mine would predictably be chaotic. Good manners and seniority dictated that my insanitary disposition be tactfully disregarded — and no device could have drawn more attention to the muckheap. British understatement of this sort booms louder than the twenty-one gun salute.

  The night man, bringing with him some unpleasant tea in thick cups, exchanged some sort of half-mumbled comment with Stavely about my presence. During this, Stavely flicked a thoughtful look my way and I suddenly realized that he was withholding more than just the detail of whatever accident it was that had led to the arrival of the ambulances.

  I sat there sipping the horrible tea while these two muttered to each other; and my mind was already on some curious factors of the sequence of events up to date. The circuit was completed — so to speak — at the moment when I glanced down at the blotter where the night man had plonked my tea.

  I suppose it’s inevitable that some joker or other was bound to compose a limerick about the embarrassing way that Stergen’s name rhymed with that of his profession; but there was no reason to expect the full text of this dubious bit of verse to appear, as if by magic, literally right in front of my nose. But there it was, in an untidy scrawl, only slightly tarnished by the slop of tea that had dribbled down the mug. It went:

  *

  A forgetful but resolute surgeon

  Once cut up a bashful young virgin;

  He left all her brains

  On the slab — which explains

  The smile on the face of the sturgeon.

  *

  Admittedly it’s hard to pack much useful information into a limerick; but this one seemed to go out of its way to baffle — as well as simply something pretty weird about the man into the bargain.

  The night man had left the key to the library on Stavely’s desk; but Stavely didn’t offer it to me yet. Instead, he creaked into conversation, presumably with the idea of interrogating me. ‘What,’ he demanded, ‘are you going to do? — I mean, now you’ve left here?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘You must have some idea.’ Now came the first probe. ‘What do you want with the reference library? — Or are you just hoping for ideas to emerge?’

  I had no intention of telling him w
hat I wanted with the reference library. ‘I’m bring myself up to date,’ I lied, ‘on the reactor.’

  I’d scored a direct hit on a nerve by mistake. Stavely sat there with his mouth open, then took a hold of himself and said very carefully: ‘Ours, you mean?’

  I thought instantly of those two ambulances but I gave away a lot less than he did. ‘Yes, why not? ... I’m doing an article on technology and I think I’ve earned the right to use my experience and knowledge here.’

  But why tonight?’

  ‘I have to meet a deadline.’

  He tapped his fingers three times on the desk. ‘It’ll be the first deadline you’ve met for a good many months. Isn’t it a little late to brief yourself — at last — on that?’

  ‘It wasn’t really my job. You must know I didn’t have access to Group Three across the way.’

  He nodded with resigned acceptance of my idleness. ‘Wasn’t really your job,’ he echoed. ‘This place used to be full of people who decided that various things weren’t really their job.’ He meant he’d got rid of a few of them by now. ‘Still, you won’t find much about that in the library, I’m afraid. Much of it is classified material and you won’t be surprised to know that I can’t make it available to you in the circumstances.’ He opened a drawer. ‘You can read the technical handouts, if you like. We did these for the universities but they won’t tell you very much you don’t know.’

  ‘No; I can do without them,’ I said.

  He shrugged and put them back again. As he did this I noticed that some of the perimeter lights suddenly went out in the forecourt below. I wondered if they’d fused, or something ... It was a rule that the lights were kept on permanently as part of the security arrangements. Evidently Stavely didn’t notice anything. He went on: ‘I suppose you could ask over at Group Three in the morning.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said absently. More lights went out. Still Stavely didn’t notice. I wondered how many devious routes the impulses from his eyes would have to take through his suburban brain before they finally reached the cortex. I went on: ‘I’ll phone Thorne tomorrow.’