I went into the other room to find Benedicta on her knees with half-open trunks all around. “What the hell are you doing?” She said: “Packing.” Well, on the one hand it might seem logical enough. “Why?”
Benedicta said: “Nash rang me. You are released, we are both released. Free. Julian is coming to get you tomorrow and drive you back. I’m going by air. Where do you want to live? Mount Street is always there, and also that monster you hate in the country.”
“Let me find out a little bit where and how I am working—and at what. Let’s go to a hotel first, let’s go to Claridge’s where the people are so insensitive, shall we?”
“All right I’ll book.”
* Koro is a real mass neurosis and not an invention of the author’s. For a full account of it see British Medical Journal, 9 March 1968.
III
But you’d have thought that Hitler himself had sent for me if you’d seen the four huge black limousines coming to a halt in the drive of the Paulhaus; Julian travelled like a Black Prince with numerous secretaries, perhaps even gunmen for all I knew. He himself was in the back of the leading car holding the door open for me. He wore an immaculate dark suit and soft black hat turned well down over his eyes—and, of course, characteristically enough, dark glasses. Chauffeurs bustled about with my luggage. “Come into my floating office and admire it” he said indicating a shallow panel full of switches. With childish pride he showed me the radio and telex arrangements, a secretary’s folding desk; and there was even a telephone which worked externally. A cocktail cabinet. Everything in fact except a lavatory and a chapel to worship Mammon in. “What splendour” I said to humour him. “Could we call London and given them Benedicta’s flight number?” He was delighted to show his mysteries off and in next to no time was talking to Baum over the water. Then he sat back in the comfortable seat of the mammoth and lit a cigar. I watched him with curiosity, still consumed by a feeling of unreality; as much as I could see of him, that is, for the glasses shielded his eyes. “Always the passion for disguise, Julian” I said, somewhat rudely I suppose. “It has always puzzled me.” He looked round at me and quickly looked away again. “It shouldn’t really” he said. “I have always been terribly … shy; but apart from that I have a thing, I suppose Nash would regard it as a complex, about faces. They seem to me quite private things. I do not see why we have to walk about with them sticking out of a hole in the top of our clothes, simply because convention decrees it. I have perhaps overcompensated in one direction; you know that I have had my face made over twice by plastic surgery in order to get it the way I wanted it. It’s better than it was but I’m still not completely happy.It is very boring, for example, always to have the same face—and nowadays thank goodness it’s no longer necessary. Here, I shall be quite honest with you and show you my dossier.” He groped in a shallow leather wallet and produced some passport photographs which he handed to me one by one, saying “That is how nature made me, this is where art stepped in, and this is the way I look now.” I gasped and stared incredulously at him. “But it’s three quite different men” I said. “Not really. Look more closely. There is much that cannot be changed.” Yes, he was there in each if one peered into the eyes, but in each case the change had been accompanied by a different hair-style. But the differences were more marked than the resemblances. “But of course” he said coolly “this may not be the end of the affair if I begin to get bored with the way I look at present. It’s a marvellous feeling of liberty to know that you can change when you wish, even though very superficially.”
He put the photographs away carefully and pocketed the wallet. “Now you know all” he said, and lapsed into an indifferent silence as he watched the countryside rolling past us. His hands seemed fatter and coarser than I remembered them to be, and he wore a seal ring. But having disposed of the subject of his disguises he seemed to have nothing more to say. In fact he seemed to doze off, to hibernate inside the dark wings of his overcoat.
We lunched in high mountains on smoked salmon and white wine; Julian had a long talk on his pet telephone to a branch in Holland which manufactured paperclips. “We have two lazy men there I shall have to deal with; one sits all day in a bubble bath of self-esteem, and the other is too scared to move: Jaeger, you perhaps know? A Jewish banker like a very very old very sharp scythe.”
I had expected him to make some reference to the sort of work he was expecting of me but he said nothing at all about the Iron Maide, so I contented myself with dipping into unreality again—reading a newspaper I mean. Dear old London! At it again. A new labour party pamphlet which would offer wholesome sex instruction to the under-fours and most probably begin: “Children, did you know that mummy was full of eggs and that daddy had to hatch them, and that is how you are here?” Life, as Koepgen never tired of reminding us, is only being let out on parole for a brief while. Tous les excès sont bons. Well, let Julian sleep. But I myself was half asleep when late that night we slanted into Paris in a foul grey rain. “I want” said Julian “to go first to the café where you met her, then to the hotel. I want to see the room you took her to.” I protested feebly, but there was nothing for it; a note of such passionate urgency and hunger came into his voice that out of sheer sympathy I felt I had to give in. Sordid rum-whiffing terrasse where we sat for a while at the chipped table; strong local colour was supplied by a little whore, a veritable midget, who uncrossed her legs and let loose an effluvium which could be smelt tables away, stables away, could almost be heard…. Then to that room where she had told me this and that, and her breasts and so on. Then Henniker with her face flushed with rage, all red and bruised from the crying, protesting about Graphos and the whip. “He taught her to enjoy it, but he couldn’t make her love him. No, if she loved anyone sexually it was me. ME. I seduced her, I calmed her, I loved her and was faithful right to the end.” What pitiful wounded stuff we carry around inside us; wounds that gush blood at the slightest touch of memory’s lancet. He sat in a chair looking dazed, like some very old tame monkey, gazing round him and yawning; but when I told him about the breasts he put his face in his hands and went very still for a moment. Then he cleared his throat softly and said: “About death there is something curious—a sort of shrinking; if you copy the exact dimensions the effect of your statue or dummy always looks smaller than the remembered original. In the waxworks, for example, everyone seems to have become reduced in size. Just over life size is the best recipe for copies. Let us go, I have heard enough.”
He did not appear for dinner that night and I amused myself by reading Koepgen, ringing up Benedicta and leafing through Figaro. Much literary prize-giving and distribution of honorary titles; why don’t we? The Epicurus of Letchworth, the great Aubergine of Clermont-Ferrand. Hum!
Next morning Julian decided that he must go to Holland and as I was impatient to see this new-old wife of mine I took a plane, full of a vertiginous excitement and shyness. My impatience led to indiscreet arguments with everyone, officials, porters and lastly with an insolent cabby who had clearly never seen a man in love before, and made no allowances for this desperate illness. (One should be put in an ambulance with a bell; or someone should walk in front of one with a red flag crying: “Enceinte. Enceinte.”) But at last I arrived to find Benedicta in bed with a cold, so pretty and so woeful that I was tempted to ring up the whole of Harley Street. “You see what happens now when you leave me? I get ill.”
“O thank you, thank you.”
* * * * *
But nevertheless, in spite of the infantile euphoria, I had the most dreadful dreams. “Dreams are but the prose of quotidian life with the poetic quantum added.” All right. All right. Cut it out now. They were horrible, and of course they made me wonder if perhaps I had been seduced once more upon the bitter path of…. I interrogated her silent form, sleeping so calmly beside me, one hand on her breast: the rise and fall so reassuring, like the spring swell of a marvellous free sea—a Greek sea. And I felt suddenly terribly old and went into th
e bathroom to examine my old carcase with attention all over again. Bits were falling out—a tooth would have to go: O not another! The hair was coming back quite strong. But an extra magnification of the bloody glasses.
It was amazing that my balls hadn’t dropped off after all I’d been through—like Vibart’s champion novelist. It seemed to me that I had a very false cringing sort of smile, so I decided to change it all along and because of…. But smiling from left to right instead of right to left set the wrong groups of muscles moving. Also the old knowing friendly kindly expression in the eyes looked just bleary to me. What despair! I knew exactly how I should look in order to rivet her attention forever. But suppose it got stuck, that smile, from being artificial? Suppose nobody could move it? I would have to go every morning to Harley Street and accept facial massage from some torpid Japanese. Perhaps acupuncture in the dorsal region, huge coloured pins being driven into my inventor’s dogged bum? O hell, please not that.
* * * * *
Marchant rang me the following day and at last I began to think that things were moving along as planned. He asked me to meet him at Poggio’s which I duly did, enchanted to see my old stablemate again. But he had changed a good deal; his hair had gone very fine and quite silver and you could see pink scalp through it. He sported a set of new false teeth of fantastic brilliance. His clothes were much the same—the stage uniform of the absentminded professor: baggy grey trousers and a torn tweed coat (acid-stained here and there) with leather patches on the elbows. And a huge college scarf of garish design, bearing his college colours I don’t doubt. But he was full of energy and excitement, gesticulating and twitching his face as he spoke like a lively earwig. And yet somehow tired and highly strung; and I noticed that he was drinking rather heavily for such an abstemious man. Anyway “How” he said, giving me the benefit of a Red Indian salute. “How” I replied gravely.
“I had all your news from Julian. Imagine my delight. To hear you were coming to work at Toybrook with me. I have been bored stiff among all those corpses.”
“Wait a minute” I said. “First Toybrook. Isn’t that a hush-hush plant of some sort?” Marchant nodded and said: “It’s where we work on anything which might be on a secret list for the forces; it’s a security A factory. I brought you a pass, all neatly made out for you. When will you begin? It’s only a very few miles from the country house, if you have your car. You could drive over every day. Why the grimace, Felix?” I sighed. “Bad memories, painful memories. I wonder. I’ll ask Benedicta.”
“Do. It would be convenient.”
“Now what about corpses?”
“A literal fact; working on these models which I must say are beginning to look quite frighteningly like the real thine, we found we knew next to nothing about anatomy. We could have called in great surgeons and all that, but they work on living bodies; we were only imitating and where possible simplifying in glass wool, nylon, jute and so on. In other words the inside of the Iron Maide did not have to be copied provided we mocked out a musculature and a nervous system and allowed her to imitate human behaviour, speech, gesture, mnemonic response. Of course Abel has been invaluable with his memory bank which we have now reduced spectroscopically to the size of a pea virtually—talk about writing the Lord’s Prayer on the point of a pin! It’s only a matter of detail. She’ll have twice the vocabulary of Shakespeare, and all the souplesse of a mummy trained for a ballet. Gosh, it is really amazing. Julian is incredible. Do you know when they moved a model of her into Madame Tussaud’s he used to go there day after day to watch the crowds filing by her. One day I saw in the paper that this wax model had been damaged and I wondered if he had … well, I don’t know … started kissing it or doing something even more drastic. He hasn’t dared as yet to see what they’ve got. He says he will only come when you authorise him to. You know he is scared, Felix, very scared by this nylon Iolanthe; and she is coming along so well that I’m rather scared too. Suppose we get within three decimal places of a perfect copy? What are we going to do with her? Could she live an independent life as a free dummy, in a three-dimensional world? Eh?”
“What about the sexual stuff—is she designed to poke the other one? Will they be monogamous?”
“All that is feasible; but they will never be able to produce—the whole pelvic oracle is sketched in I’m afraid. But the vagina will please you. And incidentally, another chance remark of yours has borne fruit in a marvellous way. You’ve probably forgotten. Ejax!”
“Ejax?” I said vaguely. It meant nothing to me. Marchant chuckled and said: “One day when you were drunk you said that for real sexual pleasure the quantity of sperm was important. The heavier the discharge the greater the excitement of the female.”
“I said that?”
“Yes, you did.”
“Good god! Is it true?”
“Our new sperm-thickening pill called Ejax is having a wild success—surely you’ve seen the advertising in all the Tube stations? No? ‘Have you taken your Ejax today? If not what will the wifey say?’ It’s swept the board. And it was so easy chemically to work it out. A very slight provocation of the prostate with an irritant does the trick. So far no side-effects, but by the time these come along we’ll have a counterblast to them.”
“Marchant,” I said “are you happy?” I don’t suppose it was the question to put at this time and place. He stared at me angrily for a long moment and then said indignantly:
“Yes.”
We went on looking at each other, critically and carefully. “Yes” he said, and again, “Yes, Felix.” But it was stagy; he didn’t want to be probed on this topic and I realised with a pang of regret the full measure of my tactlessness. Whose happiness is whose business after all? It was also a bit alarming to find that so much of my own was intimately bound up with Benedicta—surely this was a fearful weakness?
“Go on,” I said “go on, Marchant boy, and stop me from thinking. I have never heard of such a beautiful project with all the problems it raises. Why it’s like having a baby!”
“Exactly” he said, resuming the flush of enthusiasm which I had cut short by my ill-judged intervention. “While society is happily creating a slave-class of analphabetics, ‘les visuels’, who have forgotten how to read and who depend on a set of Pavlovian signals for their daily bread and other psychic needs—surely we have the right to build a model which will be at least as ‘human’ as these so-called human beings? Eh? Whether her limitations of freedom in action will have to be circumscribed for her I cannot get Julian to discuss. He turns a blind eye to the whole matter.
“But if we get what we might—why, we could turn Iolanthe loose one day, kiss her warmly, and say, now you are free—just as if she were being released from Holloway. There is no reason that I can see why she shouldn’t hold her own in the world as it is today. Just release her, as a soap-bubble is flicked off a child’s soap-pipe. ‘Go, my child.’ It’s not an unfair analogy—babies are born this way; but they arrive helpless and have to be passed through the cultural mincer. Suppose ours arrived at the age of thirty—mentally mature; with all her experience digested? What is to prevent her taking her place with all the other dummies and pushing a lever for her living, her Pavlovian living? A trap door opens and the soup comes in.” He was very drunk indeed in a cold and rational sort of way. His cheeks had a hectic flush. But he wasn’t slurring and when he got up to go to the lavatory his walk was quite steady. “Will she have opinions?” I asked and he replied, “That is up to us; we are building the library of her conditioned responses upon the old graph you drew for Abel. Yes, she will feel certain things. But it’s for us to decide to a certain extent.” He absented himself and I reflected upon this weird assignment with a certain lustful satisfaction. Iolanthe!
“Faustus!”
Marchant, reappearing, said: “On the one hand it might seem complicated, but in fact it’s only terribly detailed and intricate. Our responses are not infinite, from a muscular point of view, though of course they are
various and numerous. Speech and so on—again it’s not infinite; your sound analysis was most useful and adapts perfectly in the new materials. The voice is particularly successful in my view; here, I will play you a test strip.” He crossed to where his coat hung and eased out a small tape-recorder with a set of fine earphones. Through them, and clear above the breathing silence of the machine, I heard the real voice of Iolanthe saying softly, dreamily: “Worlds of memory, worlds of desire, echo will set them both on fire. Three two four, three two four. Answer me. Is there anyone in the room who has seen my, has anyone seen my, seen my …? Darling it could only have happened to us.” It was a little unnerving—no, I’ll go further. The reproduction was so beautiful that I was a bit bloodcurdled by it. On the one hand it was all so remote, Athens, the Nube and all that. But I suddenly felt the wild pang of the Acropolis at dawn with that warm scented little body lying tangled in mine in a sort of holy shipwreck; tasted those pious kisses. “Iolanthe”!
“Isn’t it her to the life?”
“It’s a funny way to put it, but it’s true. I suppose you built up the vocal thing direct from Abel—I had quite a lot to work on.”
“Yes, and her films, for example.”
“The damnedest thing” I said and for no known reason felt a disposition to laugh out loud. “Muscles powered by tiny photoelectric mnemonic cells.”
“That’s it, my boy.” Marchant produced sheaves of boring-looking paper and drew out the circuits in very rough specification. “She has five zones of response; her power storage is a new kind of dry cell with a longish life, and is replaceable. We are weaving her from a selection of guts and nylons finer than any fisherman dreamed of, or any violinist for that matter. The hands are extraordinary—utterly beautiful; probably more so than the originals. She travels by the power of light, boyo, light-sensitised cells; becomes a trifle languid at twilight; and fades into sleep at any time you care to name. But of course she isn’t done. It’ll be weeks before it’s all sewed into place and ready to walk down Regent Street.”