He stood there shaking for a few moments. Then he went back to the car.
‘I presume you found the beast?’ said Pauline coldly.
‘It was rather badly messed up. I – I had to kill it.’
‘Did you, indeed! Then, for goodness’ sake don’t touch me until you’ve had a bath … You have to make a production of every damn thing, don’t you, darling?’
He said nothing. He settled himself in the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. After a few minutes he was surprised to notice that he was dawdling along at less than forty miles an hour. But perhaps that was because he was already becoming sober.
Or drowning …
People are traditionally expected to review their lives when drowning. Therefore, concluded Greville, he was drowning. For the memories were coming thick and fast.
Life (was it really life?) began with Pauline. Five years ago when one of her stiletto heels got stuck in a metal grating in the Strand. It was an evening in late autumn. He rescued the shoe and made so bold as to buy her some hot and deliciously aromatic chestnuts. They talked. He took her home to a surprisingly comfortable three-girl flat in Notting Hill Gate.
There were other meetings. Regular meetings. She was in advertising and ambitious. He was in an oil company and frustrated. They both thought he had talent. Greville thought he could write poetry and was even prepared to accept the prostitution of novels. Pauline thought he could write copy. High-class copy for high-class ads. Temptation for Top People.
Before he knew what had happened, he had a job at twice the salary and half the work. The great and glorious mantle of the adman had wrapped itself comfortably round his shoulders. He still thought it was because he had talent. He did not discover until much later – after they were married – that it was because Pauline also had talent.
Hers was more formidable. It consisted of an easy manner with executives and clients, an affinity for bedrooms, a body that seemed somehow to carry a written guarantee, and a mind like a digital computer.
Greville climbed fast. And the funny thing was that for two years he didn’t know who was holding the ladder.
He discovered it in the most conventional of ways – quite by accident when he returned from a Paris conference one night too soon. By that time, Greville and Pauline had a flat in a new block in Holland Park. It was a nice flat, high up, with views over London and two bedrooms.
Greville had arrived at London Airport just after eleven o’clock. He let himself quietly into the flat just before midnight. He had made the stealthy approach in case Pauline was asleep. There were the remains of drinks in the living-room – two glasses – and a blue haze of cigarette smoke.
At first he was glad that Pauline had had company. He thought he must have just missed the visitor. Then Pauline’s voice coming muffled from the bedroom – excited and inarticulate – told him that he had not quite missed the visitor. Logically enough, the second voice belonged to the man who had given him the opportunity of rubbing shoulders with the great at the European Project conference in Paris.
Indecision. Masochism. Cowardice.
Greville listened to the sounds in the bedroom. He sentenced himself to listen, taking a terrible satisfaction in his own humiliation. Then, when all was quiet, he simply went away.
He found himself a hotel at Marble Arch, spent the rest of the night drinking duty-free cognac, and returned to Pauline at the appointed time. He never told her about it, and he never again returned from a trip unexpectedly. But thereafter he kept the score. He let her see that he was keeping the score just so that she would not get too careless. She never did.
Accounts came Greville’s way, all kinds of accounts from steel to lingerie. So did private commissions. And consultancies.
No longer an ordinary account executive – let other people do the work – he concerned himself with policy and strategy. And the money kept on rolling.
Holland Park, Portman Square, Victoria, and now eighteen thousand pounds-worth of status residence in Chelsea. A Picasso and Scandinavian furniture. Success. Success. Success …
‘Darling,’ said Pauline bisecting his reverie with her number one conciliatory voice. ‘I was talking to Wally Heffert while you were laying it on for the Evans girl.’
‘That must have been nice for you.’
‘Oh, well, he’s quite a cheery old stick.’
Dull, divorced and loaded, thought Greville. Wally Heffert, king of Heffert, McCall and Co. Lord High Custodian of three frozen foods, a dozen cigarette brands, Trans-Orient Air Lines and the Junior Joy contraceptive pill. Therefore by definition a ‘cheery old stick’. Pauline’s natural prey.
‘He thinks a lot of your work,’ she went on. ‘He’d like to talk to you about a retainer. Heffert McCall are getting more than they can handle … It would be quite a big slice, I imagine.’
‘How long have you been sleeping with him?’ asked Greville conversationally, keeping his eyes on the road.
‘Please don’t be immature, darling. That stupid cat must have upset you.’
For Pauline, ‘immature’ was a multi-purpose word. It could equal obscene, petulant, idealistic, depraved, old-fashioned, naïve or honest – depending upon the occasion and the context.
In the present instance, it clearly equalled obscene plus petulant.
Greville turned the car towards Chelsea Bridge. The speedometer needle crept high once more. He did not know it, but he had just made a decision.
He turned to Pauline. ‘Do you know, darling, I think I’m actually sober.’
Suddenly, she sensed that something was wrong – badly wrong.
‘What the hell are you talking about, Matthew?’
Chelsea Bridge was before them. A slightly arched ribbon of road. There was nothing else on the road. There was nothing but the sky and the river.
‘Being alive, that’s all. My God, it hurts!’
Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five, eighty …
‘Stop the car! Do you hear? Stop the car!’
He turned and smiled at her. There was affection in his voice. Even compassion. Because at last he felt that he could afford to forgive.
‘Dear Pauline,’ he said. ‘It’s no good only one of us being sober. Why don’t we stop the world?’
They both tore at the wheel. The car skipped crazily against the steelwork of the bridge. Then it somersaulted twice and landed on its side.
Greville, still alive, found that he was lying almost on top of Pauline. Her eyes were open, reminding him of the cat. But this time there was no problem … She still looked beautiful; and, for a moment, he was sure he could smell roasting chestnuts …
Then he tried to move. And the tears in his eyes mingled with his own blood.
A few minutes later, another car began to cross Chelsea Bridge. And a little after that an ambulance and a police car came.
TWO
Until early July the summer had been a typically English summer – that is to say, despite manned weather satellites and computer-based long-range forecasts, it had remained as unpredictable as ever, confounding scientists, prophets, farmers and tourists alike. One day the sky would be clear and the sun hot; and the next day torrential downpours would reduce the temperature to a level plainly indicating warmer underwear.
But by the middle of July it began to look as if the summer might possibly settle down into one of those vintage seasons that everybody remembers from childhood, though nobody can actually pin down the year. Each day, after early mists, the sky became abnormally clear. The heat was not too intense, and light breezes made life pleasant enough for those who still had to go to work.
July passed, August came – and still the good weather persisted. It was not confined to the British Isles or even to Europe. Most of the countries in the Northern Hemisphere basked in what was truly a golden season. Later, it would be the turn of the Southern Hemisphere to enjoy the fantastic run of weather. But no one was yet to know that, for the next ten years throughout the wor
ld, summertime was going to break all known records.
Matthew Greville, however, was among the minority who remained quite uninterested in the weather; and, in fact, he was largely unaffected by it during the next three years. The crash that killed Pauline merely dealt him multiple head injuries. He remained in hospital until September, while the surgeons made a thoroughly efficient job of saving the sight of his left eye and restoring muscular control of the left side of his body. At the same time, the psychiatrists were busy persuading him that life could still be worth living. As it turned out, their task was rather more difficult than that of the surgeons. But eventually they at least got him to a state in which he was fit to plead.
The police had taken considerable interest in the ‘accident’, since there had been no other cars on the bridge at the time. They measured the tyre marks, interviewed people who had been at the party in Kingston – including one Walter Heffert of Heffert, McCall and Co. – and took statements from Greville himself. The result of all this activity crystallised into two charges. Manslaughter and Dangerous Driving. Greville collected sentences totalling three years, which he found monstrously unjust. He would have preferred the death penalty.
It was not until the first week in October, about the time that Greville was being transferred to one of the better-class English prisons for better-class English criminals, that the long and utterly glorious summer came to its end. Though there had been enough nocturnal rainfall and light daytime showers to keep the crops healthy, there had been ten weeks of virtually uninterrupted sunshine. It was followed by a month of intermittent rain – and floods.
Some curious facts began to emerge about the summer. There had been roughly three times the average amount of sunshine for the period. There had also been about five times the average number of suicides. This was spectacular enough to make the front pages of most of the newspapers. Prominence was also given to the discovery that new sun-spots had appeared and had been emitting a new type of radiation. The facts that the radiation possessed properties hitherto unknown to science and that the surplus suicides exhibited symptoms hitherto unknown to psychiatry gave rise to considerable speculation.
The name given to the waves (or were they particles?) emitted from the sun-spots was Omega radiation – chiefly because the scientists were baffled and because every fruitful investigation seemed destined to be a long-term project. The name eventually given to the five-fold increase in self-destruction (by a journalist who drowned himself a few weeks later) was the Radiant Suicide.
It was the popular press that had first suggested a ‘statistical relationship’ between Omega radiation and what everyone now called the Radiant Suicide. The idea triggered off a chain reaction among scientists, religious leaders, psychologists and plain cranks.
One so-called scientist ‘borrowed’ two groups of children from a well-meaning if mentally retarded headmaster with a proper respect for Scientific Method. The scientist kept one lot of children in a cellar for long spells while the other lot were compelled to spend most of their time in the open air exposed to sunlight. Not surprisingly, he found that after a day or two of this kind of treatment the open-air group could do sums much faster and more accurately than the cellar group. From this he appeared to conclude (a) that Omega radiation stimulated intellectual activity and could therefore induce nervous exhaustion, and (b) that anybody who wanted to avoid nervous exhaustion and, therefore, suicide would be well advised to live underground. Having the courage of his convictions, he himself took to a subterranean existence – and committed suicide two months later.
The psychologists and psychiatrists were rather more reluctant to link the increase in the suicide rate with Omega radiation – chiefly because radiation was outside their province. They took a more esoteric approach and began to fling about such phrases as ‘thyroidal displacement’, ‘societal emotional imbalance’, ‘liberation of the collective death-wish’, ‘induced hyper-mysticism’ and ‘cathartic destruction’. The Radiant Suicide, apparently, was quite explicable. In a world in which the idea of war was rapidly becoming absurd, it was modern man’s neurotic simulation of the consequences of tribal conflict. Eventually the psychologists and psychiatrists produced so many plausible explanations of the Radiant Suicide as to convey the impression that they had almost invented it.
However, for the most part the religious fanatics took a simpler view. It was merely an Awful Warning sent by God. We would have to mend our ways or else …
But while the cranks of various persuasions were airing their pet philosophies and producing equally useless panaceas, a few intelligent people were busy collating the facts.
And the facts that emerged were these:
1. Until shortly before the detection of Omega radiation, the suicide rate was approximately normal.
2. The incidence of suicide increased with the incidence of radiation.
3. Cloudy weather tended to slow down the rate of increase perceptibly but not significantly.
4. Though there had been tremendous increases in the suicide rate throughout the world, the increases in the Northern Hemisphere had so far been slightly larger than in the Southern Hemisphere.
5. The types of people affected were those who, under normal conditions, would be considered the least prone to suicidal impulses.
6. Many people who had either failed in their attempts to commit suicide or had been rescued by others reported that, shortly before the urge to self-destruction, they had experienced tremendous sensations of peacefulness and of identification with something greater than self. A common element of their reports was the widespread conviction that death would render the experience absolute or permanent.
7. The intensity of the Omega radiation was still increasing, and many astronomers expressed the view that the new sun-spots could be expected to remain ‘active’ for a considerable period of time.
These were the facts. And they were responsible for sending the sales of sedatives, tranquillisers, alcoholic drinks and Bibles soaring to unprecedented heights.
By the end of 1971, thirty-four thousand people in the United Kingdom had taken their own lives – yet the statistical expectation was only six thousand five hundred. The Home Secretary, woolly-minded as ever, recommended that suicide be treated as a criminal offence once more. It was anti-social, he said, and definitely bad for the country’s economy. So a bill was rapidly pushed through Parliament. It came to be briefly immortalised as the ‘Do Yourself In Deterrent’. For one of its provisions was that one-third of the estate of any suicide (after death duty) could be claimed in forfeit by the State. Another provision was that attempted suicide could be punished by a maximum of ten years’ imprisonment. The bill, needless to say, was totally ineffective – but it contributed somewhat to the government being overthrown six months later.
Meanwhile Matthew Greville was adapting himself to the routines of prison life. It was far more comfortable than he had imagined; and this, in itself, proved a major frustration because he believed that he ought to be made to suffer – not only for Pauline, but for the very uselessness and pointlessness of his life. For all the minor deceits he had ever practised, for all the little vanities he had ever developed, for the talent he had wasted, the ideals he had abandoned, and for every cliché-ridden perverted ethic he had ever subscribed to in admanland. Suicide would appear to have been the perfect answer – perhaps it might have been on 7 July 1971. But he had spent months trying to analyse his intentions and motives, and he was no wiser. Did he really intend to kill himself on Chelsea Bridge? Or Pauline, or both of them? Or was he only indulging in a melodramatic gesture that got out of control?
If he hadn’t killed the cat … If Pauline hadn’t grabbed at the wheel … If … If … If …
There was no satisfactory solution – not even suicide. For that was now only a sort of luxury. He wanted to be punished, he wanted to be hurt, he wanted to feel again the strange anguish of being alive …
During his entire stay in pris
on seven warders and fifty-four prisoners committed suicide. As a penance for existing and a reward for not killing himself, Greville became the self-appointed gravedigger-in-chief.
Throughout the short and fairly dry winter of 1972, the Omega radiation intensified. So did the Radiant Suicide. And the pessimists were already predicting a warm dry summer.
Science and human ingenuity came up with a remarkable number of solutions – none of them satisfactory and some of them dangerous. One of the many new ‘tranquil stimulants’ coming out of the laboratories of the manufacturing chemists in hysterical haste (this particular drug was marketed as Positive Pep) was responsible for more than a hundred thousand miscarriages or premature births, and therefore contributed quite significantly to the increase in the suicide rate. Another one was more effective in preventing suicide – but one of its side effects was to produce delusions of grandeur. A third was equally effective in preventing people from killing themselves: the problem was that it tended to create addiction, and addiction overloaded the heart.
Thousands of ‘mental hygiene’ groups were formed, an organisation called Death-Wish Anonymous sprang into existence, dozens of different sects, disciplines and esoteric societies mushroomed. And religious revival became a major industry.
But, despite everything, by the end of 1972 (again there had been an utterly glorious summer) more than a hundred and twenty thousand people in the United Kingdom alone had taken their own lives. The proportional increase was similar in most other countries.
Meanwile, the Omega radiation – the most elusive and enigmatic form of radiant energy ever discovered – intensified. And while researchers into its nature remained baffled, researchers into its effects came up with more interesting data.
It had been discovered that Omega-proof shields could be devised. All you needed was a wall of lead sixteen feet thick, or a thicker wall of less dense material. But even this was no good unless the people to be shielded by it remained permanently shielded. Anyone prone to what was abbreviated to Radiant-S, or simply R.S., needed only a few minutes exposure to trigger off the reaction. The only variable was the time factor. It could be months before the R.S. impulse manifested itself, or merely a matter of hours.
Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset Page 21
