‘What’s all this about, Dad?’ asked Nick.
‘Well, it’s … part of a letter or something, I suppose. I found it.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh, I was turning out an old cupboard and this had got sort of shoved underneath a lot of stuff.’
‘How could it have been written in fresh ink, then?’
‘I don’t know. I just thought it looked like that.’
‘What does it mean, this friend of silver thing, and this discovery?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve no idea.’
‘Well, why all the excitement? You were—’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
A car I recognized was turning in at the main entrance to the house, a green Mini-Cooper belonging to the Mayburys. For a moment I thought I was going to have Jack on my hands, with more pills and unwelcome advice; then I saw Diana in the driving-seat, and remembered.
‘Never mind, Nick,’ I said, recovering the paper. ‘Sorry to have bothered you. Forget it.’
I went back to the house, put the papers together, half dropping them in my impatience, and locked them up again. By the time I re-emerged from the office, Diana was coming in by the front door and Joyce descending the stairs into the hall. Both had changed their clothes since lunch—Diana into a tan shirt and green trousers, Joyce into a short red dress of some faintly glossy material—and both were groomed and earringed and necklaced as if for a garden party. When, with precision no rehearsal could have improved, we had converged in mid-floor, neither girl made any move to kiss the other as they usually did on meeting, an odd omission in the circumstances. Joyce seemed as tranquil as ever, if not more so, Diana nervous or nervy, her eyes widened and blinking a lot. There was a brief silence.
‘Well,’ I said bluffly, ‘no point in hanging about here, is there? Let’s go. I’ll lead the way.’
I did so. We crossed the empty sunlit yard to the annexe and went upstairs and along a passage hung with my second-best prints. Number eight was at the end; I unlocked it and bolted the door after us. The bed was turned down, but without any personal belongings to be seen the room looked official and public—I remembered waking up in that same bed one afternoon the previous summer and thinking that it felt like lying about in a model room at a department store. I drew the curtains. Outside there was sun and sky and the tops of trees, everything quite motionless. I was feeling not so much excited as grateful, even slightly incredulous, that nothing had come up to prevent our getting this far.
The two girls looked communicatively at each other and then at me in the same way as they had done in the bar before lunch, preparatory to accusing me of interrupting their chat. I smiled at each of them while I tried to sort out priorities in my mind.
‘What do you want us to do?’ asked Diana, with just a hint of impatience in her voice and demeanour.
‘Let’s all take everything off for a start,’ I said.
A woman can always beat a man to the state of nudity if she puts her mind to it, and here were two women evidently doing so. Despite earrings and necklaces, Joyce and Diana were embracing naked beside the bed while I was still working urgently on my second shoe. By the time I was ready to join them, they had thrown the covers back and were lying side by side in an even closer embrace. I climbed in behind Diana and started kissing her shoulders and available ear and the back of her neck, none of which seemed to make much special difference to anybody. I found it difficult to slide my arm round under her arm, because Joyce’s arm was thereabouts too, and impossible to touch more than the outer side of Diana’s breast, because Joyce’s breast was against the remainder of it. When I tried the same sort of thing at a lower level, I came across the top of Joyce’s thigh. After that, I tried to alter the girls’ positions with a view to setting up one of the triads of lovemaking Joyce had mentioned the previous evening in her unvarnished way. That meant her thigh would positively have to shift, but it stayed where it was. To get Diana on to her back was not even worth attempting, with her inner thigh between both of Joyce’s. It is never easy to move people about bodily unless they co-operate a bit, and neither of these was doing so at all.
What were they doing? Kissing repeatedly, in fact almost continuously, pressing themselves against each other, breathing deeply, though not particularly fast. What more? I had a totally obstructed view from where I was, but both Joyce’s hands were in sight, one behind Diana’s head, the other at the small of her back, and anyway their embrace had been so tight from the beginning that neither could have been caressing the other in any way; they would have had to draw a little apart for that, which would have afforded me an opportunity, but I doubted very much whether either of them had bothered to think of much a point. I told myself I was not going to give up, said so aloud, said a lot more things, managing to stay just this side of whining and abuse, moved round the bed to behind Joyce, and got no change there either.
There it was, then. I stood and looked at them while they went on exactly as before, neither speeding up nor slowing down, like people unable to foresee ever doing anything else, even of the same general sort. How well I could remember that feeling! Just then Diana’s hazel eye opened, moved across the drawn curtains and me and more of the curtains without the least self-consciousness in paying the same attention to me as to the curtains, and shut again. The thought of two women making love can be an exciting one, but let me tell you that, when they are as totally absorbed in each other as these two were, the actuality is sedative. Indeed, for the moment I felt calmer than at any time during the past few days. I blew them a kiss, rejecting the idea of kissing each of them on the shoulder or somewhere as more trouble and no more likely to be noticed, picked up my clothes at leisure and carried them into the bathroom.
When I emerged dressed, Joyce was holding Diana’s head against her bosom, but everything else was unchanged. I found the DO NOT DISTURB notice hanging on a hook on the door and left it on the outside doorknob. When I arrived back in the main building, it was deserted. I went into the office and stood there for a time without being able to think of anything I wanted to do or would ever want to do. Then I went upstairs to the dining-room and stood looking at the titles of my books, wondering what the hell had ever possessed me to buy any of them. Poetry, any poetry, seemed then as poignant and meaningful as a completed crossword puzzle or Holy Writ. Books or architecture or sculpture were books on mindless lumber, large or small. I could not imagine feeling differently about these matters. I turned my back and reviewed my own pieces of statuary. There was lumber all right, and in the round. I would chuck them all out the following morning.
The house was quiet, apart from the affected chattering of Amy’s TV set, which was bringing her news and views of today’s sport, perhaps even highlights there from, before getting to grips with space monsters or the yelling of pop idols and their idolaters. The curtains were drawn back; the sunlight from outside seemed unusually harsh and yet almost without colour. Through the side window I could see and hear a tractor, with some red-and-green painted piece of farm equipment in tow, approaching from the village, surrounded by a thin cloud of the dust and small soil that had drifted across the road, together with plenty of smoke. It passed out of view below my line of sight. As it did so, the noise it made, while still growing louder, started slowly descending in pitch. No doubt the driver was planning to halt directly outside my house and tinker with his engine while he raised more noise and smoke. But something odd was happening simultaneously to the television voice from along the passage: it too was falling in pitch, and it was slowing down in the same ratio. This sort of thing could happen with a gramophone whose motor had been switched off, and with a tape-recorder; I did not think it could happen with a TV set. I stood still and attended to the action of my heart while tractor and voice, in exact step with each other, disappeared below the threshold of audibility and a total silence supervened. I walked slowly to the front window.
The tractor and its tow had come to rest just about
where I had predicted, almost immediately opposite me. The driver, however, had not dismounted, nor had he made any other significant move. He had one hand on the wheel and the other was passing a coloured handkerchief across his forehead, or rather had stopped in the act of doing so. Round him and the vehicles there hung stationary veils of smoke and dust, with individual motes shining minutely and steadily in the sun. I went to the side window. Down to the left, forty or fifty yards away across the grass, a couple of waxworks cast their shadows, the seated one with a hand stuck out in the direction of something, probably a cup of tea, that the standing one was offering it, and were Lucy and Nick. This time, the view from both windows had the exact quality of a very good photograph, frozen hard but also full of potential motion. This time was going to be different from last time in other ways too, because I was not going to stay here and just watch whatever it was I had been intended to watch.
I hurried over to the door and opened it and was about to make off down the passage when something made me halt abruptly—a subliminal sound-effect or air-movement. I put my hand forward and the finger-tips touched an invisible barrier, hard and totally smooth, like plate-glass but without any trace of reflection. It filled the doorway. Uncertain what to do next, I turned aside, looked up and saw that somebody was sitting in the armchair on the far side of the fireplace. This person, a young man with silky fair hair and a pale face, could not (of course) have come into the room without my knowing it.
‘Very good,’ said the young man heartily. He was watching me with a faint down-turned smile. ‘A lot of people, you know, would have gone walking straight into that thing. Shows you’ve got good reflexes and all that. Now, if you’d like to sit down there, we can have a bit of a talk. Nothing too serious, I assure you.’
At the outset I had let out a girlish shriek of alarm. The alarm was sincere enough, but it immediately passed, to be replaced by an intensification of the charged-up feeling I had had the previous morning before setting off for Cambridge: nervous energy with nervousness but without nerves. Perhaps my visitor had brought this about. I came forward and seated myself in the opposite chair, looking him over. He was, or appeared to be, about twenty-eight years old, with a squarish, clean-shaven, humorous, not very trustworthy face, unabundant eyebrows and eyelashes, and good teeth. He wore a dark suit of conventional cut, silver-grey shirt, black knitted silk tie, dark-grey socks and black shoes, well polished. His speech was very fully modulated, like that of a man interested in discourse, and his accent educated, without affectations. Altogether he seemed prosperous, assured and in good physical shape, apart from his pallor.
‘Are you a messenger?’ I asked.
‘No. I decided to come, uh … in person.’
‘I see. Can I offer you a drink?’
‘Yes, thank you, I’m fully corporeal. I was going to warn you against making the mistake of supposing that I come from inside your mind, but you’ve saved me that trouble. I’ll join you in a little Scotch, if I may.’
I got out the glasses. ‘I suppose I couldn’t get into the passage because all molecular motion outside this room has stopped?’
‘Correct. We’re not subject to ordinary time in here. Makes us pretty safe from interruption.’
‘And all radiation has likewise ceased, outside?’
‘Of course. You must have noticed the way the sound packed up.’
‘Yes, I did. But in that case, why hasn’t the light packed up too, outside? And in here as well, for that matter? If all wavelengths are affected, I can’t see how the sun can get to us, any more than the sound of the tractor can. Everything would be dark.’
‘Excellent, Maurice.’ The young man laughed in what was clearly meant to be a relaxed, jovial. way, but I thought I could hear vexation in it. ‘Do you know, you’re almost the first non-scientist to spot that one? I’d forgotten you were such a man of education. Well, I thought things in general would just look better if I arranged them like this.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I said, holding up glass and water-jug and starting to pour. ‘Is this a test of some sort?’
‘Thank you, that’s fine … No, it isn’t a test. How could it be? What do you suppose would happen to you if you passed a test I’d set for you? Or failed it? You of all people know I don’t work that way.’
I moved back with the drinks and held one out. The hand that came up and took it, and the wrist and lower forearm that disappeared into the silver-grey shirt-cuff, were by no means complete, so that the fingers clicked against the glass, and at the same time I caught a whiff of that worst odour in the world, which I had not smelt since accompanying a party of Free French through the Falaise Gap in 1944. In a moment it was gone, and fingers, hand and everything else were as they had been before.
‘That was unnecessary,’ I said, sitting down again.
‘Don’t you believe it, old boy. Puts things on the right footing between us. This isn’t just a social call, you know. Cheers.’
I did not drink. ‘What is it, then?’
‘More than one thing, of course. Anyway, I like to make these trips every so often, as you’re well aware.’
‘Keeping in touch?’
‘Don’t fool about with me, Maurice,’ said the young man, with his downward smile. His eyes were a very light brown, almost the colour of his hair and his thin eyebrows. ‘You know I know everything everybody thinks.’
‘So you haven’t come because you’re particularly interested in me.’
‘No. But slightly because you’re particularly interested in me. In all my aspects. You’d agree, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’d have thought only in the one you demonstrated to me a moment ago,’ I said, drinking now.
‘I’ll be the judge of that. Whether you like it or not, and whether you’re aware of it or not, being interested in one means being interested in them all. You’re in quite a common situation, actually.’
‘Then why pick on me? What have I done?’
‘Done?’ He laughed, altogether genially this time. ‘You’re a human being, aren’t you?…Born into this world, and so forth. And what’s so terrible about my popping in to see you like this? Worse troubles at sea, you know. No, I picked on you, as you rather ungraciously put it, partly because you’re, uh …‘ He paused and rotated the ice in his drink, then went on as if starting a new sentence, in the way he had. ‘A good security risk.’
‘Drunk and seeing ghosts and half off my head. Yes.’
‘And not what anybody in their senses would take for a saint or a mystic or anything. That’s it. I have to be careful, you see.’
‘Careful? You make the rules, don’t you? You can do anything you like.’
‘Oh, you don’t understand, my dear fellow. As one might expect. It’s precisely because I make the rules that I can’t do anything I like. But let’s leave that for now. I want to talk for a moment, if I may, about this chap Underhill. Things have been getting a bit out of hand there. I want you to be very careful with him, Maurice. Very careful indeed.’
‘Steer clear of him, you mean?’
‘Certainly not,’ he said, with emphasis and, it seemed, in complete earnest. ‘Quite the contrary. He’s a dangerous man, old Underhill. Well, in a mild way. A minor threat to security. If he’s left to himself, it’ll be just that much more difficult to keep going the general impression that human life ends with the grave. A very basic rule of mine says I have to maintain that impression. Almost as basic as the one about everything having to seem as if it comes about by chance.’
‘I see that one, but you must admit that impression about the grave is comparatively recent.’
‘Nonsense. You only know what people said they believed. There’s never been any real difficulty from that direction. Now then, I want you to stand up to Underhill and, uh … Put paid to him.’
‘How?’
‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. Sorry to be a bore, but I’ll have to leave the whole thing to you. I hope you make it.’
‘Surely you know? Whether I will or not?’
The young man sighed, swallowed audibly and smoothed his fair hair. ‘No. I don’t know. I only wish I did. People think I have foreknowledge, which is a useful thing for them to think in a way, but the whole idea’s nonsense logically unless you rule out free will, and I can’t do that. They were just trying to make me out to be grander than I could possibly be, for very nice motives a lot of the time.’
‘No doubt. Anyway, I don’t much care for doing what you want. Your record doesn’t impress me.’
‘I dare say it doesn’t, in your sense of impress. But all sorts of chaps have noticed that I can be very hard on those who don’t behave as I feel they should. That ought to weigh with you.’
‘It doesn’t much, when I think of how hard you can be on people who couldn’t possibly have done anything to offend you.’
‘I know, children and such. But do stop talking like a sort of anti-parson, old man. It’s nothing to do with offending or punishing or any of that father-figure stuff; it’s purely and simply the run of the play. No malice in the world. Well, I think you’ll take notice of what I’ve said when you turn it over in your mind afterwards.’
I could hear my watch ticking in the silence, and thought interestedly to myself that it was the only one on the planet still going. ‘The run of the play can’t be going all that well for you if you have to keep taking these trips of yours.’
‘The play is all right, thank you. In fact, I’ve been able to cut the trips down a good deal in the last hundred or two hundred years. It’s still patchy, mind you. Nothing for nearly three months, and now today, besides you, in fact at this very moment, if I can use the expression, I’m dropping in on a woman in California who’s got the wrong idea about something. Just —how shall I put it?—saving myself a bit of sweat. Oh, and don’t waste your time trying to get in touch with her, because she won’t remember anything about it.’
‘Shall I remember?’
‘I don’t see why not. I’ve been assuming so, but it’s really up to you. We can leave it until just before I go, can’t we? See how you feel.’