There was nothing of shame or regret in the old man's sadness.
--Then I failed? Ah, well, perhaps I was attempting the impossible.
Searle had done what he felt he had to do. A surgeon who operated in good faith could not allow himself to feel guilt when his patient died, even if it turned out that the patient, uncut, might have lived for forty years. There was no need for guilt as long as the surgeon's own work was flawless. Searle believed, still believed, after the long blank years when he was incapable of consecutive thought -- that what he had done to John Fletcher was right, even if the enterprise failed.
--Don't you see, you might have been justified in developing my talent, but you could never be justified in trying to make me fear and shun women, in trying to make me a religious bigot, in shaping me into a solitary, unhappy man?
--I did what I thought was right, Searle replied tranquilly.
Becoming curious about the old man's fanaticism, Fletcher found his bitterness easing a little. For the first time, Fletcher's contact with a diseased mind proved incapable of changing it. True, the dying old man was now for the first time in many years as sane as he had ever been, but no more sane than that. Perhaps a mind that old could not encompass new thoughts. Searle went on:
--Besides, you must remember you were torn from me. I was not allowed to complete your training. I'm no more responsible for what you became than an engineer taken off a job half completed. If you had been left to me . . . What a stupid mistake I made, the one that brought it all to light. Why did I ever take you to the Scott Monument?
--Yes, just how did that happen? Why, after hiding me from the world for four years were you so foolish as to get yourself arrested like the villain in a Victorian melodrama?
--It was becoming terribly difficult to make you exert yourself. You were too good for me. Everything was in my favor except your extraordinary abilities. In a way it was a struggle between us, a middle-aged man and a child, and you won almost every round.
Fletcher said drily:
--Then I used up all the capacity for success that was to last me the rest of my life. Since then, my record has been nothing but failure.
--Failure? Impossible. Not you. The child I knew was not born for failure. I may have failed. Not you. What you have achieved is what you wanted.
About to protest, Fletcher remembered something.
He had always achieved what he expected.
What happened, in the big things at least, was usually what he had resigned himself to. Failure in a job, with a girl, in Baudaker's tests, all came about much as he expected.
Suppose he were to start expecting success?
He had told Baudaker about "minor miracles, hardly worth mentioning." Even minor miracles weren't failures. When he wanted to talk to Anita privately, it was the simplest thing on earth to go to an empty locker room. Of course, that was a triviality, something that scarcely mattered, so it didn't count. Or did it?
His mind reeling at the possibilities, he remembered his reluctance, his fear, his dread of being proved a freak.
Perhaps what he really feared was the extent of the power he might turn out to possess?
Cringing away from his own thoughts, he directed the old, dying man back to the irrelevance which had led to them:
--But why the Scott Monument?
--I was never really practical, I suppose. I saw no particular snags. It seemed simple. You were supposed to force me to draw you back to safety. I wanted you to compel me to do your will, as you did when you were a starving infant. But three young men of whom I had heard and seen nothing, were running up the stairs. They heard you scream, burst out, pulled me back, and took you from me. Of course, I never thought of it until now -- you summoned them. To control me would not have changed your situation. You had done that often enough already. You wanted to change your situation, and you did.
Resolutely Fletcher stuck to minor issues.
--Did you' hypnotize me into fear of heights?
--No, why should I? I had to direct you away from evil, away from pride, power madness, lust. That was my clear duty. But I loved you. You were not only a living miracle, your incredible potential waiting to be developed, you were also the son I never had. I see reflections of different attitudes in your mind . . . times have changed. When I was eighteen months old, my father, a minister of the church, deliberately held my left hand against the bars of the kitchen grate. You can see the scars. Apparently I would not stay away from the fire when I was a baby, and this was done so that I would acquire a healthy fear of fire rather than be burned to death. Such Spartan thinking was common in those days in Scotland. I was not as harsh. What I did, I did to make you spread your wings.
--Thanks very much. You should have left me to die.
The old man remained serene:
--How can you say that? I see in your mind the good you have done, the souls you have saved. And you have scarcely begun.
--I hope, I most sincerely hope, that I am coming to the end.
--Nonsense.
--I want to die. I am ashamed of being a cuckoo in the minds of strangers.
--But you have found some happiness with them, more than you found as a living man.
The old man, who had temporarily gained some strength as well as near-sanity from the arrival of Fletcher, retained the sanity but was losing strength.
--I'm dying. For me it is right. My life has perhaps been wasted, since I failed with the one great chance I had . . . or at any rate, you say I failed. Your life, I feel, is just beginning.
He mused for a while, sinking, yet attaining a certain mental clarity at the last.
--In one way I was wrong, he admitted. --Women could and should have helped you. I was wrong to think you had to be a celibate. But perhaps, as I die, I can give you a push in the right direction . . .
Sir Charles Searle died.
CHAPTER 7: ANITA
He was a woman again and this time he didn't mind.
Once more he was conscious in a sleeping mind. The personality, the attitudes, the beliefs of Anita Somerset lay quiescent but available to him.
Acceptance of both the general and the particular situation came easier to him this time, and with acceptance the realization that identification with any woman was impossible anyway, however willing he might be. What little was left of John Fletcher was indelibly male; in a man's mind he could be a partner, but in a girl's mind never more than a stranger. In Judy's mind he had reached the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.
Baudaker would be interested, clinically, in the fact now apparent, that maleness and femaleness were something more than physical, that the disembodied personality was male or female and never the twain could meet.
Fletcher's second realization was that there was little or nothing he could do for Anita. Even as early as this, he was sure from the contact with her sleeping mind that there was nothing he could give her, and he found this disappointing.
True, she was not perfect -- who was?
Though she was content, though she was what she was and perfectly happy about it, she was not complete, and it became clearer to him than ever before what circumstances had to exist before he could enter a mind.
For his part, he had to be ejected from the mind he was in.
In addition to that, the mind he entered had to be in certain ways ready to receive him. Judy, Ross, Baudaker, Gerry, Searle, Anita, all had certain things common. Not one of them had both parents alive, nor had had for many years. Not one of them had a brother or sister (though Gerry for a long time believed he had). All had personality inadequacies. All in some way, consciously or unconsciously, welcomed him and sought his guidance. The blind leading the blind, he thought wryly. He was refusing to give any weight to the strange, grandiose ideas which had stirred in him during his brief contact with Sir Charles Searle. The old man was mad, and had made him mad too.
Anita's inadequacy was the simplest, most normal of all. Almost all of it could be expre
ssed as female need for a strong male, plus maternal need for husband and children. The rest arose naturally from a background of divorced parents constantly fighting over her, and all that that entailed.
She had to trust someone, and she could not trust Ross, even now. She was dreaming mildly erotic dreams in which Ross figured, but his face kept changing.
Looking into Anita's dreams caught Fletcher up in sleep, and he awoke with her when the small alarm clock beside her bed shrilled. Since he made no attempt to conceal his presence, she was in full contact with him at once.
--Well, hello. I suppose this had to happen. I wonder how long it will take you to get around the entire population of the British Isles?
--There's nothing I want less.
--Oh, don't be silly. You get a great kick out of it. I know I would.
--You'd have to die first.
--Well, we all have to go sometime, they say, and I used to believe it before I met you.
--You don't seem to mind my being with you.
--Fat lot of good that would do. I see you've noticed that men and women are different. You ought to take out a patent on that idea. It must be worth millions.
This time, as Anita got up and washed and dressed, the contact was neither shameful nor awkward. Once more Fletcher experienced the sheer joy of physical health which, curiously, had been strongest and purest in Judy and Anita. Perhaps women, particularly young girls, were naturally more sensuous than men and more conscious of their own bodies. There was also the fact that both Ross and Gerry, the two young men of whom he had experience, abused themselves physically in ways which would have seemed quite crazy to Judy or Anita.
Breakfast for Anita was a glass of milk and a poached egg on toast. Again Fletcher noticed that in a curious way the two minds in one body interpreted the stimuli from the body differently. When Ross had drunk whisky, presumably enjoying it, Fletcher hated it as if he were consuming it in his own body. In Anita's body, he would have liked a big platte of ham and eggs for breakfast, washed down by many cups of coffee. But Anita drank her milk, ate her poached egg, and was satisfied. Although they shared the same body, Fletcher remained hungry and Anita was not.
He had not concealed his thoughts.
She retorted --I'm not going to get fat to please you.
--It wouldn't please me. Tell me, to avoid getting fat, do you always have to eat like a bird?
--That's a very stupid simile. Birds eat all the time. They consume their own weight in . . .
--You know what I mean.
--I don't want to stuff myself.
There was far more behind that than what she said. Yes, girls were sensuous. She enjoyed her lean, firm body, her lightness, her energy, her beauty. There were double, triple, quadruple standards which he could not fathom, even in her mind. She did not want to be a femme fatale, but she did. She did not want every man she met to desire her, but if they did not, she would be disappointed.
--Well, there's a way in which men are just as mixed up, she retorted. --They all have James Bond fantasies of beautiful girls in diaphanous nighties beckoning from their windows, yet if it really happened, ninety-five out of a hundred would run for their lives.
---Oh, that's ridiculous!
--You'd run for your life.
With restraint he said:
--Possibly, but I'm not typical.
Of course you're not typical. Nobody's typical. But don't fool yourself that you're different. Nobody's different either. Enough of this idle chatter. I have to get to classes.
He managed to talk her into a midmorning snack she didn't usually have, and naturally she pointed out that obsessive hunger was supposed to indicate lack of affection.
--So I've heard, he replied briefly.
She was not prepared to let it go at that.
--Now that you're a sort of ghost you can't expect anyone to love you, John. It may be hard, but that's the truth and you'll just have to face it.
Behind her, Ross said: "Hello, Maiden. Mind if I join you?"
"Yes," she said.
He sat down opposite her. At once she stood up. "So sorry I can't stay," she said politely, "but I hear my master's voice. And the prof. doesn't like to be kept waiting."
As she left the cafeteria, Fletcher said:
--Why did you do that? You're not in any hurry.
For the first time since he joined her, Anita was tense and irritable.
--You live your life and I'll live mine.
Fletcher's contact with Anita was less close than with any previous host. She talked to him easily and casually like a friend she could call on the phone at any time without even needing a phone. She concealed nothing from him; there was nothing in her life she had any particular reason to conceal.
The only area she would have screened off from him -- but she left it too late -- was her lack of sexual experience. Ian Ross was being literally accurate when he called her Maiden or Virgin, as he probably knew. Fletcher, no longer quite the repressed Puritan he had been, was amused to find that Anita was quite as ashamed as he had been of virginity, and put it down to personal inadequacy, as he had done.
Giving up the idea of concealing her virginal state from him, she explained:
--If it were a, moral matter, I'd be highly delighted that I'm still undefiowered, and I'd parade my purity and probably be an unsufferable prig about it. But morals don't come into it. I don't despise girls I knew who sleep with anybody they happen to be with when it gets dark. In fact, I envy them. Look what I'm missing.
--Are you sure you're missing anything?
--Well, I'm missing knowing if I'm missing anything, aren't I? I know what's the matter with me, and I don't need you or anybody else to tell me. I just won't commit myself. I look so long before I leap that I never leap at all. Take Ian . . . before your encounter with him, he was just bloody impossible, and I use the adjective because no other expresses it. He was bloody-minded, just generally bloody.
--I know.
--Now . . . Oh, I don't want to talk about it. Will you kindly shut up, roll yourself into a ball, or talk about baroque music?
Their only other bone of contention was Fletcher's appetite. In Anita's healthy body he was always ravenous, and she couldn't always withstand his demands. When she was about to ask for salad, he would step in and order roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and when she was thinking of something else he induced her to put more potatoes on her plate.
One night about ten days after Fletcher joined her she deliberately took off every stitch of clothing and made him look at her in the long mirror set in the front of the wardrobe in her room.
--Look what you're doing to me, she accused.
He looked with a mixture of reluctance and pleasure. Although there was no awkwardness about being Anita, he always looked the other way, so to speak, when she dressed or took a bath, most conscious at such times that in one body two were a crowd, particularly a man and a girl in the girl's body.
--Charming, he said.
--Are you out of your infinitesimal mind? I used to have a genuine 23 inch waist and couldn't bulge if I tried. Now I've got a pot, after only ten days. Look at it!
She was exaggerating. Her waist was still tiny and there was only the, merest hint of convexity about her smooth abdomen. Still, Fletcher saw her point. He had done Baudaker a lot of good by making him stop smoking (Baudaker had managed to keep it up and probably would never smoke again), but if in a mere ten days he managed to put nine unwanted and unnecessary pounds on Anita, she certainly had a legitimate complaint. As Fletcher he had been able to eat all he wanted and never gain an ounce. This clearly didn't apply to Anita.
Transmigration Page 19
