Читать книгу The Primal Urge - Brian Aldiss - Страница 8

For London it was one of those hot July evenings in which the human mind is engulfed in a preoccupation with the moist palm, the damp brow, the armpit.

Sweating continently, James Solent emerged into the motionless heat of Charlton Square. With a folded newspaper raised to his forehead in an odd defensive gesture, he came down the steps of the grey trailer onto the grass and paused. The door of Number 17, where he lived, beckoned him; but competing with the wish to go and hide himself was a desire to overhear what three men nearby were saying.

‘Such a gross imposition could only be swung onto a politically indifferent electorate,’ one said.

The second, lacking words to express what he thought of this sentiment, guffawed immoderately.

‘Rubbish!’ the third exclaimed. ‘You heard what the Minister of Health said the other day: this is just what’s needed to give Britain back her old sense of direction.’

It was the turn of the first man to burst into mocking laughter. Seeing Jimmy standing nearby, they turned to stare curiously at his forehead.

‘What’s it feel like, mate?’ one of them called.

‘You really don’t feel a thing,’ Jimmy said, and hastened across the square with his newspaper still half-heartedly raised. He let himself into Number 17. From the hall he could hear Mrs Pidney, the landlady, drowsily humming like a drowned top in the kitchen. The rest was silence. Reassured, Jimmy discarded his paper, revealing the disc on his forehead, and went up to the flat he shared with his brother. Fortunately Aubrey Solent was out, working late at the BIL; that undoubtedly saved Jimmy an awkward scene. Aubrey had grown uncommonly touchy of recent weeks.

The flat contained the usual facilities, a kitchen, a living room (with dinerette), Aubrey’s large bedroom and Jimmy’s smaller bedroom. Everything was so tidy that the one glossy-jacketted LP lying in the middle of the carpet looked to be posing. Skirting it, Jimmy hurried into his room and closed the door.

Just for a moment he played a tune on the panelling with his finger tips. Then he crossed to the looking glass and surveyed himself. The suit Harrods had made him before he began his new job in January was daily growing to look better on him, more like him; for the rest he was twenty-five, his brown hair not objectionably curly, his face round but not ugly, his chin neither aggressive nor recessive.

All, in fact, he told himself, sighing, alarmingly ordinary. ‘Oh, ye of the average everything,’ he addressed himself, improvising, as he frequently did, a rhymed oration, ‘Oh, ye of the average height, overtaken by taller folk, undertaken by smaller folk … an average fate one might certainly call a joke.’

One feature only was definitely not, as yet at all events, ordinary; the shining circle, three and a half centimetres in diameter, permanently fixed in the centre of his forehead. Made of a metal resembling stainless steel, its surface was slightly convex, so that it gave a vague and distorted image of the world before it.

It looked by no means ill. It looked, indeed, rather noble, like a blaze on a horse’s brow. It lent a touch of distinction to a plain face.

Jimmy Solent stood for some minutes before the wardrobe mirror, looking at himself and, through himself, into the future. It was a time for wonder: he had taken the plunge at a period when to plunge or not to plunge was the consuming question. He was one of the first to plunge, and the seal of his precipitance was upon him. His preoccupation was gradually banished by the barking of the loudspeaker in the square outside. Slipping off his jacket, Jimmy went over to the window. His outlook here was generally less interesting, being more respectable, than that from his brother Aubrey’s bedroom windows. They looked out on to backs of houses, where people were unbuttoned and being themselves; Jimmy’s window, in the front of the house, stared perpetually out at facades, where people put on closed little public faces.

Now, however, there was life in the square. This week, a big grey trailer, so reassuringly similar to the Mass Radiography units, stood on the seedy grass beneath the plane trees. A queue of men and women, most of them in summer dresses or shirt sleeves, stood patiently waiting their turn to enter the trailer. At five-minute intervals, they emerged singly from the other side of it, generally holding a newspaper, a handkerchief or a hat, to their foreheads, disappearing without looking to left or right. A few spectators idled about, watching the queue; at the beginning of the week there had been cameramen. From the bedroom window – from safety! – it all appeared rather comical: at once unreal and typically English. Jimmy found it hard to realise he had come through that same mill only twenty minutes ago; just as the government had promised, his forehead did not ache at all. Though he prodded it experimentally, his disc neither moved nor ached. The marvels of modern science were indeed marvellous.

The man in charge of the loudspeaker, being hot and bored, was not talking into his microphone properly. Only occasional phrases were intelligible. One bit sounded like ‘We are free to sit here in a fine old state’; he must have been saying something equally preposterous, like ‘freer citizens of a finer state.’

‘… government’s assurance … many eminent doctors agree … nothing but healthful … far from being an affront to national modesty … greatest assets … no expense … only a minor operation …’

The voice mumbled like a cloud of bees, and the minor operation was a major operation taking place all over the country: for the grey trailers were parked by now in the centre of every town and village from Penzance to John o’Groats. The whole population was potential queue-fodder. Jimmy came away from the window.

Somebody was moving about in the living room. Jimmy straightened his tie. It was unlikely to be Aubrey, but Jimmy called out, ‘Is that you, Aubrey?’ and went to see.

It was not Aubrey. It was Aubrey’s girl, Alyson Youngfield, if the noun ‘girl’ may be used here ambiguously. She had discarded her summer gloves and was fanning herself with the discarded LP sleeve. Jimmy’s face lit at the sight of her.

‘He’ll be late this evening. Alyson,’ he told this charming creature settling herself on the divan with the elegance of a puma. Her fairness took on a special quality with the July weather; under the neat blonde hair, her skin seemed to ripen like wheat.

‘Not to worry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really expect to find Aubrey at home, but it’s cooler here than in my bed-sitter. It gets like an oven just under the roof. Let’s have a little hi-fi to combat the heat, shall we?’

In that instant Jimmy saw she was looking at his forehead. It caused him none of the embarrassment anyone else’s regard would have done; with pleasure, he wondered whether an acquired tactfulness or natural kindness caused her, when she saw his glance, to say matter-of-factly, ‘Oh, you’ve got yours. I must get mine tomorrow.’

With gratitude, to draw her into a conspiracy, Jimmy answered incautiously, ‘Are you really? Aubrey won’t like that.’

He knew at once he had said the wrong thing.

‘Aubrey will eventually be wearing one himself; you’ll see. It’ll come to us all in time,’ Alyson said. But she said it stiffly, turning her fair head with its most immaculate locks to gaze at the window. As always, Jimmy found himself reflecting how hard it was to gauge the precise relationship between her and Aubrey. A serious quality in Alyson and an evasive one in Aubrey made them both not entirely easy people to estimate.

‘I’m going to a party this evening,’ he told her, to change the subject. ‘At the BIL, Aubrey’s HQ; I’m sorry you’re not coming. I shall have to be getting ready soon.’

‘I don’t envy you,’ Alyson said. Nevertheless she watched him keenly as he walked into the kitchen. He there assembled a carraway roll (Jimmy did not so much enjoy carraway rolls as endure them under the impression they were fashionable), a slice of Camem-bert cheese, a spoonful of cream cheese, a wedge of butter and pickings from the garlic-flavoured salad which reposed in the refrigerator. Hesitating a moment, he poured himself a glass of dry Montrachet; it was not quite the thing with the cheese, he realised, but he liked it.

‘Come over here, Jimmy,’ Alyson said, when he appeared in the living room with his tray.

He went over at once to where she was sitting on the divan. She was wearing the green suit with the citron lining that Aubrey had bought her at Dickens and Jones. Underneath it, she wore a citron blouse, and underneath that could have been very little; all the same, Alyson looked warm. And, ah, undeniably, warming.

Changing her mind about whatever she was going to say, Alyson remarked, ‘You are too obedient, Jimmy. You must not come when just anyone calls you.’

‘You’re not just anyone, Alyson,’ he said, but missed the required lightness of tone such an obvious remark demanded. He took his tray sadly into the dinerette, from where he could still see her ankles and calves, curved like a symbol against the plum background of the divan. They looked, indeed, very beautiful; as if he were having his first glimpse of the Himalayas, Jimmy felt humbled by them. Then a hint of colour made him hold one hand up before his face; a pink radiance covered it. The disc on his forehead was doing its stuff.

Feeling both shattered and pleased, Jimmy lingered over his meal. The Montrachet was very good. He sipped it, listening to the music from the record player. A band featuring an overharsh trumpet flipped through the current trifle called ‘You Make Me Glow’; that tune had been lucky; the show in which it was sung had been running for some weeks before the Prime Minister made his sensational announcement. Yet it might almost have been written for the occasion and brought unexpected fortune for the songwriter, who found himself overnight the author of a hit and able to afford the enemies he had always dreamed of.

‘Fate decreed

Your effect upon me should be so:

You not only make me knock-kneed,

You make me glow.

Presently,

Or when all other lights are down low.

Your touch will kindle me, you see

You make me glow.’

Alyson switched it off.

‘What I was going to say, Jimmy,’ she exclaimed, speaking with an effort, ‘is that I feel rather appallingly glum just now. It’s the sight of all those people queueing out there – and all over London – I suppose. They’re so patient! Nobody seems quite to have grasped how epochbreaking these ERs, these Norman Lights as they call them, really are; not even people who are against them, like this politician, what’s his name, Bourgoyne.’

‘Let’s not get onto politics,’ Jimmy said. ‘You know how we always argue. Stay as sweet as you are.’

Although he expected her to take him up on that, she said nothing, moving her legs restlessly. She began to hum, ‘You Make Me Glow’, but broke off as if realising the idiocy of the tune.

‘I sometimes think the opposite of amusement is not boredom but peace,’ she said. She was deliberately misquoting a current poster, and Jimmy laughed.

‘I’m not sure sometimes that boredom and peace aren’t the same thing,’ he said and, having said it, thought it silly. Alyson evidently did not.

‘A lot of people feel like that,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps otherwise they would never have consented to have their foreheads tampered with; they’re eager for anything that makes a change. It’s understandable enough.’ She sighed luxuriously and added, deliberately guying the pathos of what she said, ‘We’re the generation what missed the war, lovie. Remember?’

Jimmy liked her saying that. It put them on an equal footing, for although Alyson happened to be his brother’s mistress, she was Jimmy’s age to within a month; Aubrey, six years older than Jimmy, had been born in 1930, thereby missing the war too, but he had been excluded from Alyson’s remark. Alyson was perceptive; she seemed to know exactly how and when Jimmy felt uncomfortable.

‘Don’t be glum any more,’ he advised. ‘It makes you look so huggable that no one could be expected to have any sympathy for you.’

Alyson gave no answer. Contentedly, Jimmy finished his meal and went to take a shower.

Thirty seconds under the hard, cold spray was enough. He towelled himself, applied Odo-ro-no, sucked an Amplex tablet to remove any anti-social traces of garlic, and dressed for the party. As he did so, he looked out of his window again. The queue outside the grey trailer was no shorter; the shadows in the square were longer.

These ER Installation Centres, to give the trailers their proper name, had dispersed themselves over a bewildered Britain on the previous Monday morning. It was now only Thursday evening, and already some 750,000 people up and down the country, had the Register painlessly – and perpetually – embedded in their brows.

The great conversion, in fact, had begun with many of the omens of success. Although much of this was due to the careful government campaigning which had preceded the conversion drive, the personal appearance of the Prime Minister on TV, wearing his ER, on the evening before the grey trailers opened their doors, had undoubtedly won over thousands of doubters to the cause he favoured. Even the Opposition conceded his speech had been powerful.

His disc gleaming interestingly but unobtrusively below his shock of silver hair, Herbert Gascadder had said to the watching millions: ‘I beg each one of you to realise that only a superficial view can hold that the ER is a menace to society. If you think more deeply, you will see the ER as I do, as a badge of liberty. We have, as a nation, always been diffident about expressing ourselves; that, perhaps, is why some sociologists have called loneliness one of the great curses of our age. The ER is going to break down that barrier, as well as many others.

‘The ER is the first invention ever to bring man closer to his fellow men. Even television, that great institution by whose medium I am able to speak to you in your homes tonight, has proved a not unmixed blessing – in fact, often a disruption – to family life. Over the ages, since we ceased to huddle together in caves, we have inevitably drawn further apart from one another. Now, I sincerely believe, we shall find ourselves drawn nearer again, united by those common impulses which the ER makes apparent.

‘Yet I would not have you think of the ER as something fantastic or crack-brained, a mere aberration of science. It will, in fact, have the same effect as any other invention, once we are accustomed to it; that is, to make a slight but inevitable modification to man’s daily life. We can only continue to exist by a policy of change in this highly competitive world. Let us thank God that the ER is a British invention. More, let us show our thankfulness by getting our ERs installed as soon as we can, so that by simplifying our private lives we can all pull together and make this nation, once more, a land of opportunity.’

‘How Gascadder would love me now,’ Jimmy thought, glancing again at his brow in the mirror while he adjusted his tie. His ER was still there, slightly larger than a penny, a symbol of patriotism and of hope.

‘Be a good boy and don’t drink too much,’ Alyson advised, as he finally appeared, ready to leave the flat.

‘Don’t be so motherly!’ Jimmy said. ‘We are meant to be Unlovable Young People.’

‘Good God!’ she exclaimed. ‘That! It’s hard enough being People!’

For a moment he shuffled by the door, looking at her. The rest of the room was nothing; she, sitting there in her Dickens and Jones suit, had an extra dimension, a special reality, a future in the balance. ‘Goodbye, Alyson,’ he said, and went out to the most momentous party of his life.

Jimmy was usually unassuming; yet the feeling had grown on him lately that there was some sort of help he could give Alyson. What help, he did not know; Alyson made no deliberate appeals and, aware of their potentially awkward position in Aubrey’s flat, they both confined their conversations to light chit-chat. Yet the something which remained unsaid had been growing stronger ever since Jimmy arrived at the flat. One day soon it would emerge from its hidden room into the light.

What convinced Jimmy that this was no illusion of his romantic imagination was the contrast between Alyson’s and Aubrey’s natures and their relationship with each other. Alyson was both intelligent and tolerant – but her comings and goings at the flat had a casual quality which implied little passion for Aubrey. Aubrey was a withdrawn young man; the streak which in his brother appeared as diffidence had been transmuted in him into aloofness. He was ‘correct’, in manner, dress and choice of church, food and book. He was a conformist with a career. In short, he was hardly the type to take a mistress; Alyson was hardly the type to become his mistress. They ought to be either husband and wife or strangers, and that was the crux of the matter.

A smell of sausages coiled juicily about the landing. As he descended the stairs, Jimmy could hear them frying.

The kitchen door, as usual, was open. Hilda Pidney spotted Jimmy as he reached the hall and came out, as she always did unless one was moving very rapidly, to exchange a few words. She was stocky and fifty, with the face, as Alyson once remarked, of one crying in a wilderness of hair. Despite her miserable expression, she was a cheerful soul; her first words now struck exactly the right note with Jimmy.

‘Why it suits you a treat, Mr Solent!’

‘I’m so glad you think so, Mrs Pidney,’ he said, putting his hand up self-consciously. ‘I see you’ve got yours.’

He had, in truth, the merest glimpse of it through her mop of hair.

‘Yes, I went straightaway at nine o’clock this morning,’ she told him. ‘I got there just before the trailers opened. I was second in the queue, I was. And it didn’t hurt a bit, did it, just like what they said?’

‘Not a bit, no.’

‘And I mean it is free, isn’t it!’ She laughed. ‘Henry’s been trying to make it work already. I ask you, at my age, Mr Solent. I can see I’m in for something now!’

He laughed with her without reservation.

‘I think these Emotion Registers are going to give a lot of people a new lease of life,’ he said.

‘You know what people are calling them,’ she said, grinning. ‘Nun Chasers or Normal Lights. Funny how these nicknames get round, isn’t it? I’d better get back to me sausages, quickish-like. Cheerio.’

As Jimmy let himself out of the front door, he thought, ‘She wasn’t coy. She has accepted it in the proper spirit. Three cheers for Mrs Pidney and the millions like her. They are the backbone, the backbone of England; such vertebrae, one dirty day, will rise and slay the pervertebrae.’

He strolled gently towards Park Lane, where he intended to capture a taxi, making himself enjoy the heat by contrasting it favourably with the cold, rain-bearing wind which had been blowing only a few days before. Everyone behaved much as usual in the streets. Considering that the grey trailers had been hard at work everywhere for four days, surprisingly few people had additions to their foreheads, but those few were attracting no interest. The man and woman in the bright red Austin-Healey, the cadaverous commissionaire, the two squaddies sunning themselves on the corner of South Audley Street, all wore their Emotion Registers as to the manner born. The cabby who answered Jimmy’s raised hand also bore the new token. Into every class, the ERs were finding their way.

The party to which Jimmy was going, Sir Richard Clunes’ party, was being held in one of the formidable blocks, Kensington way, which had been built at the end of the last decade. It was – with a few exceptions like Jimmy himself – a British Industrial Liasons party for BIL personnel, and therefore more in Aubrey Solent’s line than Jimmy’s, for Aubrey was a BIL man; Jimmy was entangled in literature. But Sir Richard, while promising to lend Jimmy a portrait for an exhibition he was organising, had genially invited him to the party at the same time, on the principle that younger brothers of promising executive material were worth suborning in this way, particularly as party material was always scarce at this season of year.

It was a small party: Jimmy could see that as soon as he arrived – much smarter than the literary parties to which he was more accustomed, which were generally toned down by provincial novelists with no style or reviewers with no figure. These were London people; more, BIL people! – BIL people living useful days and efficient nights. ‘They’re already at their primes, I’m sure they read The Times at breakfast,’ Jimmy told himself, glancing round as he shook hands with a beaming Sir Richard and Lady Clunes. Sir Richard had mobile eyebrows and a chin the shape of a goatee. His manner flowed with milk and honey, and he engaged Jimmy in pleasant talk for two minutes precisely.

‘Now let me see who you’ll know here, Solent,’ Sir Richard said, as that halcyon period drew to its scheduled close. ‘Ah, there’s Guy Leighton, one of our most promising young men. You’ll know him, of course – he has been working on the K. R. Shalu business with your brother. Guy! Can you spare us a moment, my dear boy?’

A dark young man who balanced perpetually on the balls of his feet was expertly prised from a nearby group and made to confront Jimmy. They bowed sadly to each other over their champagne glasses, with the polite dislike one partygoer so often feels for another. Guy and Jimmy were no more than acquaintances; their orbits only intersected when their invitation cards coincided.

‘Shall we dance?’ Jimmy said, and then, very seriously to counteract this facetiousness, ‘This looks a worthy gathering, Guy.’

‘Worthy of or for what, Solent?’ the dark young man parried. He could have been no more than four years older than Jimmy, but his habit of using surnames seemed to give him a good decade’s start. ‘The usual set of time-servers one finds at these bunfights: no more worthy than the next man, surely?’

‘Looking more worthy,’ Jimmy insisted. It was not a point he cared to labour, but he could think of nothing else to talk about. Gratefully, he accepted more champagne in his glass.

‘You, if I may say so,’ Guy said, cocking a sardonic eyebrow at Jimmy’s forehead, ‘look positively futuristic.’

‘Oh … the ER. Everyone’ll be wearing them in time, Laddie, yew mark moi words,’ Jimmy said, with that abrupt descent into dialect with which some of us cover our inadequacies.

‘Possibly,’ Guy said darkly. ‘Some of us have other ideas; some of us, I don’t mind telling you confidentially, are waiting to see which way the cat will jump. You realise, don’t you, you are the only person here wearing one of the ghastly things.’

He could not, announcing Armageddon, have shattered Jimmy more thoroughly.

‘You’re all living in the past, you scientific fellows. These are the nineteen sixties, the Era of the ER,’ he replied, but he was already looking round the large room to check on Guy’s statement. Every brow, high or low – some of them were the really interestingly low brows of genius – was unimproved by science. The wish to conform hit Jimmy so hard that he scarcely heard Guy’s remark about oppressed minorities.

‘The Solent pioneering spirit …’ he said.

‘And another thing I ought to tell you,’ Guy said. ‘I’m sure you will not mind my mentioning it. People in the swim refer to these discs as Norman Lights; after the firm of Norman which invented them, you know. I rather think it’s only the lesser breeds without the law who refer to them as ERs – or nun chasers, which being pure music hall might just possibly catch on. Of course it’s too early for any convention to have crystallised yet, but take it from me that’s the way the wind’s blowing at the BIL.’

‘I’ll be terribly careful about it,’ Jimmy said earnestly. He concealed his earnestness by a parody of earnestness; Guy, the born Insider, had just the sort of information one listened to if one hoped to get Inside oneself.

And then the group of men and women from which Guy had been separated flowed about the two young men, and a welter of introductions followed. Everybody looked well, cheerful and in good humour; that they were also interested in Jimmy lessened his interest in them. As if they had been waiting for a signal, they began talking about the registers; they were the topic of conversation at present. After a long burst of animation, a pause set in, during which all eyes turned on Jimmy, awaiting, as it were, a sign from the fountainhead.

‘As the only fox with a tail,’ he said, ‘I feel I ought not to give away any secrets.’

‘Has it lit up yet, that’s what I want to know?’ a commanding man in heavy glasses said, amid laughter.

‘Only once, so far,’ Jimmy said, ‘but I haven’t had it more than three hours.’

More laughter, during which someone made a crushing remark about fancy dress parties, and a sandy woman said, ‘It really is appalling to think that everyone will know what we’re thinking when we have ours installed.’

A man, evidently her husband by the laboured courtesy with which he addressed her, took her up instantly on this remark. ‘My dear Bridget, will you not remember that these Norman Lights go deeper than the thought centres. They register purely on the sensation level. They represent, in fact, the spontaneous as against the calculated. Therein lies the whole beauty of them.’

‘I absolutely couldn’t agree more,’ the heavy glasses said. ‘The whole notion of submitting ourselves to this process would be intolerable were it not that it gives us back a precious spontaneity, a freedom, lost for generations. It is analogous to the inconvenience of contraceptives: submit to a minor irk and you inherit a major liberty.’

‘But don’t you see, Merrick,’ Guy said, perching himself on tiptoe to address the heavy glasses, ‘—goodness knows how often I’ve pointed this out to people – the Norman Lights don’t solve anything. Such an infringement of personal dignity is only justifiable if it solves something.’

‘Personal dignity is an antique imperialist slogan, Leighton,’ a smart grey woman said, giving Guy some of his own medicine.

‘And what do you expect them to solve?’ Merrick of the heavy glasses asked, addressing the whole group.

‘Abolishing the death penalty entirely last year didn’t solve the problem of crime, any more than contraceptives have done away with bastards, but at least we are taking another step in the right direction. You must realise there are no solutions in life – life is not a Euclidean problem – only arrangements.’

The smart grey woman laughed briefly. ‘Come, Merrick,’ she said, ‘We can’t let you get away with that; there are no “directions” in the socio-ethical meaning you attribute to right.’

‘Oh, yes, there are, Susan,’ Merrick contradicted imperturbably. ‘Don’t reactivate that old nihilist mousetrap. There are evolutionary directions, and in relation to them the Normal Lights are an advance. Why are they an advance? Because they enable the id for the first time to communicate direct, without the intervention of the ego. The human ego for generations has been growing swollen at the expense of the id, from which all true drives spring; now—’

‘Then surely these Norman Lights are causing a reversion,’ Bridget interrupted. ‘A return to the primitive—’

‘Not primitive: primal. You see, you’ve got to differentiate between two entirely separate but quite similar—’

‘I can’t help thinking Merrick’s right off the beam. However it comes wrapped, an increased subservience to the machine is something to reject out of hand. I mean, in the future—’

‘No, wait a moment, though, Norman Lights aren’t machines; that is to say, they aren’t instruments for the conversion of motion, but for the conversion of emotion. They’re merely registers – like a raised eyebrow.’

‘Well, I’m still capable of raising my own eyebrows.’

‘And other people’s, I hope.’

‘Anyhow, that’s not the point. The point is—’

‘Surely a return to the primitive—’

‘The point is, to wear them voluntarily is one thing; to have this law passed by our so-called government is quite—

‘And who elected this government, Susan? You, Susan.’

‘Don’t let’s go into all that again!’

‘After all, why drag evolution into this? How can a mere mechanical—’

‘My dear man, mechanisation is a natural step – natural, mark you – in man’s evolution. Really, some people’s world pictures are so antiquated. Darwin might as well never have sailed in the Beagle at all!’

‘I cannot honestly see how anyone could expect anybody—’

‘All I’m trying to say is—’

‘—in the nation’s best interests. Everyone bogged down by inhibition, and then like a clean slash of a scalpel—’

‘If you’ve ever observed an operation in progress, Merrick, you will know surgeons do not slash.’

‘—comes this glorious invention to set us free from all the accumulation of five thousand years of petty convention. Here at last is hope handed to us on a plate, and you worry—’

‘Last week he was attacking and I was defending.’

It was at this point in the argument spluttering around him that Jimmy, listening in interested silence, found that a man he had heard addressed as Bertie was tipping rum into his – Jimmy’s – champagne from a pocket flask.

‘Give it a bit of body,’ Bertie said, winking conspiratorially and gripping Jimmy’s arm.

‘Thanks. No more,’ Jimmy said.

‘Pleasure,’ Bertie said. ‘All intellectuals here. I’m a cyberneticist myself. What are you?’

‘I sort of give exhibitions.’

‘You do? Before invited audiences? You’d better count me in on that. I tell you, when I get my red light, it’s going to wink in some funny places.’ He laughed joyously.

‘I’m afraid these are only book exhibitions,’ Jimmy said, adding, for safety, ‘Clean books.’

‘Who’s talking about books? They’re full of antique imperialist slogans,’ Guy said, butting in and making a face at Susan. ‘Don’t change the subject, Jimmy. There’s only one subject in England at the moment – it’s even ousted the weather. You, presumably, are more pro NLs than anyone else here. Why are you pro?’

‘For practical reasons,’ Jimmy said airily. The champagne was already making him feel a little detached from the group; they were only talkers – he was a pioneer. ‘You see, entirely through my own stupidity, Penny Tanner-Smith, my fiancée, broke off our engagement last week. I hoped that if she could see how steadily my ER glowed for her, she would agree to begin again.’

There was much sympathetic laughter at this. Susan said, ‘What a horribly trite reason!’ But Merrick said ‘Bloody good. Excellent. That’s what I mean – cuts through formality and misunderstanding. Our friend here has inherited a major liberty: the ability to prove to his fiancée exactly how he feels about her; try and estimate what that is worth in terms of mental security. I’m going to get my Norman Light stuck on tomorrow.’

‘Then you disappoint me, Merrick,’ Guy Leighton said.

‘I cannot wait on fashion, Guy; I have an aim in life as well as a role in society,’ Merrick said amiably. It sounded as if he knew Guy fairly closely.

Gazing beyond them, Jimmy could see Sir Richard still welcoming an occasional late arrival, his eyebrows astir with hospitality. A tall, silver man had just come in escorting a tall girl with a hatchet face who, in her survey of the company, seemed to ‘unsee the traffic with mid-ocean eye’, to borrow a phrase from a contemporary poet Jimmy disliked. The man smiled and smiled; the girl seemed barely to raise a grin. She wore the silver disc on her brow.

‘There’s someone—,’ Jimmy said, and then stopped, foreseeing an awkward situation. But Guy had also noticed the newcomer; he became tense and his manner underwent a change.

‘Oh, she’s here, is she!’ he muttered, turning his back on that quarter of the room and shuddering as if he had witnessed a breach of etiquette. ‘I say, Solent, here’s a chance for us all to try out your gadget.’

‘Include me out,’ Jimmy said hastily. ‘I don’t like public demonstrations. Besides, I can tell from here that she would have no attraction for me; she doesn’t look as if she could make a firefly glow.’

‘You haven’t met her yet,’ Guy said, with surprising fierceness.

‘You never know what’s in your id,’ Bertie said, appearing again with his pocket flask. ‘Or in hers, Freud save us.’ He crossed himself and nudged Merrick, who did not smile.

The inevitable, as it inevitably does, happened. Guy, with unexpected delicacy, did not go over to the newcomers. Instead, Sir Richard and Lady Clunes ushered them over to Jimmy’s group in a frothy tide of introductions, among which two waiters sported like dolphins, dispensing drink.

‘Martini for me this time,’ Jimmy said and, turning, was introduced to Felix Garside and his niece, the hatchet-faced girl, Rose English.

Seen close to, she was no longer hatchet-faced, though her countenance was long and her features sharply moulded; indeed she could be considered attractive, if we remembered that attraction is also a challenge. As Rose English glanced round the company, she was making no attempt, as most of the others present would have done upon introduction, to conceal the engagement of her mind and feelings in her surroundings. In consequence the unconventional face, less a mask than an instrument, drew to itself the regard of all men and most of the women. Her countenance was at once intelligent and naked; invulnerable perhaps, but highly impressionable.

Her clothes, although good, seemed to fit her badly, for the jacket of her suit, in the new over-elaborate style, did her disservice, making her look to some extent top heavy. She was tall; ‘rangy’ was the word which occurred to Jimmy. She might have been thirty-five, perhaps ten years his senior. Under her cheekbones faint and by no means unattractive hollows showed, ironing themselves out by her mouth, which, together with her eyes, belied the hint of melancholy determination in her attitude.

Her eyes rested momentarily on Jimmy’s brow. She smiled, and the smile was good.

‘Et tu, Brute,’ she said and then turned with a suspicion of haste to talk to Guy, who showed little inclination to talk back; though he remained on the balls of his feet, his poise had deserted him. This at once disappointed and relieved Jimmy, for he discovered he was flushing slightly; Merrick and several of the others were watching his Norman Light with eagerness.

‘It is just turning faintly pink, I think,’ the sandy woman said. ‘It’s rather difficult to tell in this lighting.’

‘The maximum intensity is a burning cerise,’ a clerical-looking man informed them all.

‘Then cerise will be the fashionable colour next season,’ Lady Clunes said. ‘I’m so glad. I’m so tired of black, so very tired of it.’

‘I should have thought it ought to have registered a little more than that,’ Merrick said, with a hint of irritation, staring at Jimmy’s forehead. ‘Between any normal man and woman, there’s a certain sexual flux.’

‘That’s what it’ll be so interesting to find out,’ Lady Clunes said. ‘I am just longing for everyone to get theirs.’

‘Oh yes, it’ll be O.K. for those who’re exempt: a damn good sideshow, I’d say,’ Bertie remarked, precipitating a frosty little silence. The new ER bill just passed through Parliament, which specified that everyone should have a Norman Light fitted by September 1, exempted those under fourteen or over sixty; it was generally agreed that this upper age limit would preserve the status quo for Maude Clunes. Her friends were waiting, hawk-like, to see if she would have a disc installed.

Guy, to fill the gap in the conversation, brought Rose back into it with a general remark. Seizing his chance, Merrick bunched heavy eyebrows over his heavy spectacles and said, ‘Miss English, your having your Norman Light installed so promptly shows you to be a forward-looking young lady. Would you cooperate in a little experiment, a scientific experiment, for the benefit of those of us who have still to, er, see the light?’

‘What do you wish me to do?’ she asked.

He was as direct as she.

‘We would like to observe the amount of sexual attraction between you and Mr Solent,’ he told her.

‘Certainly,’ she said. She looked around at each one of them, then added, ‘This is a particular moment in time when our – my – responses may seem to some of you improper, or immoral, or ‘not the thing’, or whatever phrase you use to cover something you faintly fear. In a few months, I sincerely hope, such moments will be gone for ever. Everyone will register spontaneously an attraction for everyone of the opposite sex and similar age; that I predict, for the ER’s function at gene level. And then the dingy mockery which our forebears, and we, have made of sex will vanish like dew. It will be revealed as something more radical and less of a cynosure than we have held it to be. And our lives will be much more honest on every level in consequence.’

She spoke very simply, very intensely, and then turned to look into Jimmy’s eyes. Listening to her, watching her moving mouth, seeing her tongue once briefly touch her lips, taking in that face a sculptor would have wept at, Jimmy knew his Norman Light was no longer an ambiguous silver. He caught a faint pink reflection from it on the end of his nose. When the rangy girl surveyed him, he saw her disc redden and his own increase output in sympathy. She was so without embarrassment that Jimmy, too, remained at ease, interested in the experiment. Everyone else maintained the surprised, respectful silence her words had created.

‘A rosy light!’ exclaimed the sandy woman and the momentary tension relaxed.

‘Not by Eastern casements only … !’ Jimmy murmured. It surprised him that, although he still glowed brightly, he consciously felt little or no attraction for Rose. That is to say, his fiancée, Penny Tanner-Smith (not to mention Alyson Youngfield), was still clear in his mind, and he felt no insane desire to go to bed with this strange, self-possessed woman.

‘The attraction is there and the ERs detect it,’ Rose said. ‘There lies their great and only virtue: they will force a nation of prudes to recognise an incontrovertible natural law. But, as I say, they work at gene – or what will no doubt be popularly termed ‘subconscious’ – level. This force lies like a chemical bond between Mr Solent and me; but I feel not the slightest desire to go to bed with him.’

Jimmy was amazed at how unpalatable he found this truth, this echo of what he had just been thinking; it was one thing silently to reject her; quite another for her openly to reject him. This absorbed him so completely he hardly listened to the discussion which flowed around him.

Merrick was shaking Rose’s long hand; she was admitting to being a ‘sort of brain specialist’. The wife of the clerical-looking man was squeaking something about ‘like a public erection …’ and urging her husband to take her home. Everyone was talking. Sir Richard and Felix Garside were laughing at a private joke. Bertie was signalling to a young waiter. Drink and olives circulated.

When Sir Richard excused himself to greet someone else, Jimmy also slipped away to another part of the room. He was disturbed and needed time for thought. From where he stood now, he could see Rose’s back, a rangy figure with a handbag swinging from her crooked arm. Then a heated discussion on the effects of colour TV on children rose on his left and broke like a wave over him. Jimmy joined in vigorously, talking automatically. He emerged some while later to find the subject held no interest for him, though he had been as partisan as anybody; muttering a word of excuse, snatching another drink, he went into the corridor to stand by an open window.

Here it was distinctly cooler and quieter. Jimmy leant out, looking down four stories to the untidy bottom of the building’s well. He lapsed into one of the untidy reveries which often overcame him when he was alone. His thoughts went back to Rose English, the woman with the unlikely name, and then faded from her again. Euphoria flooded over him. A waiter brought him a drink. He groaned at his own contentment. The world was in a hell of a state: the political tension in the Middle East was high, with war threatening; the United States was facing a worse recession than in 1958; the British political parties were bickering over a proposal to build a tunnel under the Severn; gold reserves were down; the whole unstable economic edifice of the country, if one believed the newspapers – but who did? – tottered on the brink of collapse; and of course the ERs would deliver a rabbit punch to the good old status quo of society.

But it was summer. It was summer in England, hot and sweet and sticky. Everyone was stripping off to mow a lawn or hold a picnic or dive into the nearest dirty stretch of river. Nobody gave a sod. Euphoria had its high tide willynilly, come death, come danger. The unexpected heat made morons of us all, quite as effectively as did the interminable wretchedness of winter.

He sighed and breathed the warm air, full of discontent and indifference, those hallmarks of the true-born Englishman. As Jimmy withdrew his head from the window, Rose English was approaching, coming self-assuredly down the corridor.

‘Hello,’ she said, without noticeably smiling. ‘I wanted some cool air too. People should not give parties on nights like this.’

‘No,’ Jimmy replied, rather glumly. Yes, she had something about her.

‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you in there, Mr Solent.’

‘Jimmy, please. I’ve got such a wet surname.’ He had trained himself not to wait for laughter after making that modest joke. ‘You didn’t embarrass me; as you say, everyone’ll soon be in the same boat.’

‘No, I didn’t mean that. I mean, I hope I said nothing to hurt you.’

‘Of course not.’ His Norman Light was glowing; without looking directly, he could see hers was too. To change the subject, he said, ‘I could do with a swim now.’

‘Same here.’ He thought it was a schoolgirlish phrase for somebody of her seriousness to use and wondered if she was in some way trying to play down to him.

‘I know a fellow – he was at Oxford with me – who’s got a private swimming pool. Would you care to come for a bathe with me?’

‘Thank you. I should really prefer dinner,’ she said. He knew by her tone she thought he had tried to trap her into that; how could she believe him so subtle? He took one of her hands, thinking at the same time he must be a little tight to dare to do so. A lunatic notion blossomed in his brain, swelling like a blown balloon.

‘I’ve just thought of the idea!’ he said. ‘Quite spontaneous – there’s no catch. An evening like this is wasted in a place like this; it’ll probably pour with rain tomorrow! We could go out and have a swim with them – Hurn, their name is – and then we’ll still have time for a meal afterwards. Honestly! I mean how about it? It’s a genuine offer. It would be great fun.’

‘Perhaps it really would be great fun,’ she said pensively. A waiter, watching them interestedly, gave them gin-and-its. And all the while a drowning Jimmy-inside was telling him, ‘She’s not your kind, kid. You don’t like the cool and stately type. She’s nearly as big as you are. She’s too experienced: she could blow you into bubbles. She’s too old for you – she must be thirty-five if she’s a day. I warn you, Solent, you’ll make the biggest gaffe of your life if you persist in this bit of foolishness.’

‘You can ditch Uncle Felix, can’t you?’ he implored her, grinning ingratiatingly, and swallowing the gin-and-it.

‘Uncle’s no obstacle,’ she said. ‘He’s staying afterwards to talk to thingme – Clunes.’

‘Come on, Rangy!’ He said, taking her hand again. ‘Nothing’s stopping us. Nobody’ll miss us. Down that drink and let’s go while the going’s good.’

Jimmy-inside noted with disgust the lapse into basic American and the abuse of adverbial ‘down’ as a verb. He also noticed that this large, handsome girl was about to surrender herself to Jimmy’s care. ‘She’s a wonderful creature! Just be careful, that’s all I can say,’ Jimmy-inside sighed, and went off for the night.

They put their glasses on the window sill: superstitiously Jimmy slid his over till it touched Rose’s. Then he took her arm and hurried her down the carpeted stairs. The unending roar of the BIL party died behind them.

‘You’re telling the truth about this swimming pool, Jimmy?’ she asked.

‘Wait till you see it, Rangy!’

From then on she seemed to banish entirely any qualms she might have had. It was almost as if the idea had been hers rather than Jimmy’s.