“Soliciting I suppose?”
“That is for you to decide.”
“Why me?”
“Julian seems to think your word is law in these matters. Myself I think he is playing a dangerous game—with your so-called sense of humour. But it’s not my affair. I’m playing my part as best I can. But I realise now that I’m a mere interpreter of other men’s ideas; you are the real scientist.” It sounded pretty strange to me, put that way. I had always believed the direct opposite to be true. “But Julian” I said “is the real brains. None of us would be doing what we are doing had it not been for him.” Marchant agreed, wiped his teeth in a napkin and replaced them tenderly. “We’ve photocopied the daily life of about twenty women to work out the range of situation-responses for Iolanthe. It’s really amazing how monotonous the ordinary range of movements, conversations, stock responses, can be. Even with the total range of thought we can conceivably stock her up with it’s perfectly adequate for most things that happen to most people. Response-provoking through sound and light. She will move about like some huge abstract dolly playing a perfect part in the world of our time.”
“I’m getting to love her already” I said.
“Beware of Julian” said Marchant jokingly. “We’ve built her a set of sexual organs which … but I haven’t done the detailed planning yet. Waiting for you to come in with new ideas. But the site of the temple is all there and the foundations of the thing are all sound.”
“What temple?”
“Temple of pleasure. I’m too much of a puritan, I avert my face a bit from all that; and Julian supplies no sort of guidance as yet. But if we are to get her as perfect as a real person we can’t deprive her entirely of her sexual response, even if it’s battery-driven.”
It was all very well to joke, but inside I felt rather solemn and indeed a little uneasy. Marchant added an afterthought. “You’ll find several old friends down at Toybrook—among them Said, the little one-eyed Christian Arab of your salad days who has been doing the most imaginative and intricate work on the light-sensitisation and the sound. The man who built your ear-trumpet, remember?” Of course I did. An absolutely marvellous artisan in little; the firm was lucky to have such a master craftsman on hand.
“And the corpses will intrigue you, the real ones; it’s funny how things tend to call up other things. Involuntarily, so to speak. Just when we were having the first troubles over anatomy and invoking the aid of the Royal College of Surgeons and so on, Julian was faced with another opening for the firm in Turkey: embalming! I know it sounds strange and of course at first we laughed very much in an exasperated sort of way because really we should have thought of it. It is the most ancient of all cultus ploys and we could have launched it years ago. Now, with the help of the two holy churches, East and West, we got everyone into a huddle and, basing ourselves on a profit-sharing scheme, with Rome and Byzantium we launched the whole thing with éclat. It was of course preceded with a bombardment of clerical propaganda from the pulpit, specially prepared sermons, telling you that it was wicked for you to leave your nearest and dearest to rot when you could embalm them and stick them on the hall hat-stand as we used to stick wild boar or stags or what not. Also a very nice decoration to very old-fashioned pubs might be Mine Host resurrected in this fashion (if ever so slightly glazed).
“Combined with this we got the avant-garde in Paris interested in it as a sort of beatnik curio with fascinating responses from all. They don’t really want to live, the young. They want to be embalmed so that they can impress their friends. Moreover they are prepared to pay for automatic posthumous embalming as one pays for life insurance. The cult went off with a bang; we couldn’t meet the demand. It seems to them, I suppose, the only future guarantee that they had actually been alive. And there’s always the chance of lending out your mummy for that perfect party where everyone was so ‘stoned’. In short we were in business. But … on the technological side we ran into trouble with the quality of the embalming.
“In Turkey they were using methods unchanged for hundreds of years. The result was a very friable effort which, if removed from the dry astringent desert air and moved into a more humid climate, deteriorated dreadfully. In fact rotted. Of course we moved ‘Chemicals A’ over on the job and we are still in the process of wrestling with the formulae for preservatives—it’s more difficult than you can imagine. But while the embalmers were using our brains we were using their dead bodies which can be played about with at will, in order to learn what we needed to know for Iolanthe. So you will find a rather strange Embalming Studio (so called) chez nous. It’s very useful to us for checking; but they are training to conquer the whole Middle and Far East. Nature, beautiful are thy ways!”
“Do you mean to tell me you have been poking about in corpses with a notebook in one hand, Marchant?” By this time he was extremely drunk but not at all shaky; I mean one would have had to know him quite well to divine that he wasn’t sober. Also he gave me a funny feeling of being a bit scared. Anyway he gave a great earwig chirp of laughter and said: “My dear chap, all that I know of the human anatomy is based on the dead. I could not play around with the living, and I’m no surgeon, as you know. But the dead have been of enormous help, specially while they are still fresh, while the motor responses are still working. The rigor mortis buggers them up from my point of view—at least on the suppleness and response factor. But it is most instructive and delightful to see them taken apart as clockwork is, bit by bit, and then pieced together into the sort of doll we are contemplating.
“In fact one has to stop and ask oneself from time to time ‘Who is doing what, exactly?’ I’m damned if I know. But anyway right next to us we have this vast embalming studio run by the Americans which provides us with models galore. Of course the American market was already very advanced when all this happened; Europe is terribly backward in some ways.” We both cackled with the old-fashioned laughter which nowadays would merit a pistol fired through the skull. “But the Middle East” he said “is going in for this with a vengeance, and Julian has already financed a couple of films based on the subject to orient public opinion towards the notion.” He paused. “Always Julian” I said.
“I must go” he said, but he still sat on for a while cupping his brandy in a warming hand and staring at me. Then he continued with remorse, “My God, I’ve done nothing but talk; I haven’t asked you a thing, how you feel, how you are, whether you are keen to take this business on or not…. Forgive.”
“I’m glad. I would have been incapable of answering any of your questions. I’m newly convalescent and very newly wed, if I dare to believe it, to a re-upholstered ghost called Benedicta. I am just feeling my feet, as they say, but very uncertainly. But whatever the state of things I’ll come to Toybrook and look over the set-up with you. Would you like Monday? I’ll be there betimes if you think that it would suit?”
Marchant drank off his glass and rose. “Yes” he said. “Monday. I must let you hear a lecture by the top embalmer. You will hardly credit your senses. All good sense mind you. Ahem!”
I took the Tube back, crushed in among my fellow-countrymen who looked on the whole rather nice, after such a long absence from them. But it was like travelling in a parrot’s cage, I was all but deafened when I finally crawled up the steps of Claridge’s. I walked into the room and said: “Mark, Benedicta, Mark!” She jumped up, radiant. “Thank goodness you said that; I was thinking it. It’s the sorest place of our many. So many thorns to be taken out of each other’s paws, but Mark…” I sat down: “What brought it on was the discovery that the place where I am working is very near….”
“Yes. I see.”
She lit a cigarette and marched up and down for a moment. “We must try and incorporate him, relive him a little bit inside ourselves. It’s very selfish in a way, but I fear that if he goes on inside us like a suppurating thing, the memory of a bad act, then things will not grow right between us as they might. Mark still stands at the cross-roads bet
ween you and me.” She sat down thump in a chair and still smoking furiously gave a gulp which was as much rage and frustration as just tears of regret. I, too, could have beaten my head against a wall and yelled, but not being of that sort of minting I did damn all. I tried as hard as I could to yawn, look natural, that sort of thing. Tried to light a cigarette, burnt my finger, got a fit of coughing. Went off to the lavatory to do a pee and swear quietly at the way things are arranged.
When I came back she was standing in the centre of the room, very composed and with a fine haughty kind of determination in her eye. “We must go back to every place where we have been hurt, or where we have inflicted hurt on each other, and systematically exorcise the memory—what do you think of that?” I jumped at it. “But now” I said. “This very night.” And she nodded. “Otherwise it will be no good.”
It did not take long to raise a car and alert the housekeeper—nor truth to tell to drive down through the roads which were horribly empuddled and the countryside looking devilish sad. We didn’t exchange a single word. I had organised a thermos of coffee and some repellent ham sandwiches. The night was cold. It blew. I suppose the same sort of thing was going on in her—I mean for my part I was rehearsing the whole past of this period in that horrid garish mansion; it was less like a bad dream than an old abandoned tunnel into which one had fallen and been rescued. But now one had to go back and clear it of fallen debris. I thought too with a pang of Iolanthe’s island cottage. Ghosts, they need meat too!
Benedicta drove while I fed her with cigarettes; drove in her brilliant fast vein as if anxious to reach the end of the journey as soon as possible. Long white headlight-ribbons winding away over the hills, melting down long avenues littered with a detritus of autumn. Beauty and melancholy of the night country softening away towards winter and the white transforming snow. At last we came slowly cracking down the long winding drive up to the house with its steely lake and horrid toffee-rose towers. O Coleridge where wert thou? A little bit slowed down perhaps by a temporary misgiving; every thing hereabouts spelt Mark, spelt sickness, hag-drawn nights of sleeplessness, Nash, Julian, Abel, Bang…. I put my hand inside her velvet coat and touched her breast. “So,” she said “here we are, gentlemen of the jury, here we are.”
I hammered on the door and rang the interminable bloody bell-rope, while she turned the car and backed it up for shelter under an eave. For a long time nobody. Then the little old gnomish housekeeper came tottering down and tuttering about unaired beds and blown fuses. There was no electric light in the place, and despite all her telephoning she had not been able to get a man in to do the repair. Candles, then, a couple of big silver branches on the great marble table; perhaps more suitable in a way for visiting this great mausoleum of wasted hopes—in the sense of atrophy, I mean. Attrition. I saw her face rosy in the rosy light, so very grave and precious. (Julian had said: “Open your legs, I am going to kiss you,” but instead he had shaken the candlesticks and the burning wax sprayed her unmercifully.)
The long desolate galleries grew awake and attentive as they watched us come walk, walking in this warm bubble of candleshine; watched us pass and then slipped back into the anonymity of darkness behind us. We went solemnly and without speaking, spending a moment at each of the stations of the cross in meditation. Like visiting the picture gallery of a lost life. Here we had married, here lain down in each other’s arms in helpless silence, here quarrelled, here shouted deafly at each other, here smoked and mused. Mark had slept here, woken there, played further on. This death newly felt and revived vibrated on the heart like the concussion of some fearful drum.
Abel had gone—there was just a gaping hole in the musician’s gallery; my toy of a pet of a monster of a brainstorm of a Thing. I was glad; it had integrated itself elsewhere, been melted down. Here for some reason she kissed me and wept a small tear. And so on through the tower bedrooms and thence down the great staircase to the larger of the two ballrooms. The mirrors had not been replaced though the gunshot-splashed glass had been picked out to leave just the far gilded frames like so many reproaching frowns. Here the silence was immensely real silence, the air stagnant; there was no other resonance except ours in this place. Nobody had ever had a ball here, for a wedding or a birthday. Just she and I and a shot gun and the Lord’s Prayer written on the mirrors with number three shot. The gun-room too was now empty except for a few twelves such as cottagers might need to chase rooks out of a tree. But in the little fridge in the buttery the thoughtful gnome had placed a bottle of champagne and two goblets as green as Venice. This too was appropriate.
We took it, tray and all, into the fake library with its tapestry of empty bookcovers; there was a fire laid in the grate which took no time at all to burst into bristling flame. I scouted out cushions from everywhere I could and built a huge oriental divan reminiscent of Turkey in front of it. Here we sat, thinking each other’s thoughts and sipping the green champagne while the logs carved out their strange figures and stranger faces. Then of a sudden the telephone rang, which gave us both a tremendous start. We looked at each other in curiosity touched with a certain consternation. Who knew we were there? Julian was in Divonne, gambling. It rang, and rang, beseeching and beseeching. I rose swearing, but she took my arm and said: “No. Just for once let it ring. Don’t answer it Felix, I implore you.” I said: “Don’t be superstitious B.” But she was adamant. “I just know we must not answer it.” On it rang and on; I sat down again. We couldn’t talk or think any more for the noise of the damned instrument. Then it choked off. “Now we shall never know what it was, or who it was” I said with regret. But she sighed a great sigh of relief and said: “Thank Goodness no. Yet that one conversation might have made us change direction all over again—have put us back on a fatal course.”
So we lay down at last and fell asleep by the warm fire, like hibernating squirrels, too drowsy to make love even. It must have been nearly dawn when I woke in the chill to revamp the fire and to scout out our coffee and sandwiches. Benedicta was yawning and combing her hair, quite refreshed. I went to test the water in a nearby bathroom but found no hot; boilers unstoked for ages, I suppose. Benedicta was saying: “There’s that old cottage in the grounds which was revamped, do you recall? Why couldn’t we live there for a while and acclimatise? I would like to live more alone with you. We could have a little boat on the lake. Felix, answer.” But I was struck dumb by the brilliance of the idea. It was a very pleasant little wooden chalet, not too small; I had once started to build a studio in it. It had originally been built to keep a housekeeper in, but proved too far from the house. So there it was, yet another place lying empty. “If I remember right the sanitation and kitchen were done over.”
“Brilliant. Let’s go and see it.”
This we did cutting swathes of dew across the meadows. A tiny brook, a meadow, an abandoned mill. A small jetty for a boat…. How the devil had I never thought of it before? “Darling, you are speaking directly to the romantic bourgeois in my soul. The secret of a happy life is to reduce the scale of things, circumscribe them; a girl doesn’t need to fill up more than the circumference of one’s arms. I have never liked big women anyway.” Yes, it was there, the cottage, but I had to force a kitchen window to get in. It was quite dry and warm because of all the timber I suppose, and spotlessly clean. A pleasant studio looking out through a weeping willow on to the misty waters of the lake. “It’s ideal.” Was it too much to hope for a few happy years here without the nagging frontal brain intervening to muck everything up with its bloody hysterias? One hardly dared to formulate the sort of hopes it offered, this queer scroggy chalet, looking in a vague sort of way as if it had been influenced by Caradoc’s Parthenon of Celebes.
“Don’t you feel we should at least try here?” she said. “It hasn’t the terrible gloom of the big house with all its memories—the horrid backlash of the past. But it’s only across the meadow—we could go there from time to time like one goes to visit a friend in the cemetery.” I said “Yes
.”
With a certain amount of awe, though. What had poor Felix done to deserve all this? Invent Ejax by mistake?
“Yes. Agreed!”
* * * * *
“You say you’ve never been to Toybrook” said Marchant with a certain happy condescension. “I can hardly believe it.” No, I was sure I hadn’t. “They were working upon an obscure nerve-gas and documented me once when I was doing Abel, but that is all I know. Central nervous system.” He chuckled in a specious professorial way, like a don who is delighted to take you to lunch at the Athenaeum because you aren’t a member. He settled the car rug round him and fiddled with the heating—I detected indications of old age and badly lagged pipes. The afternoon was mild and clammy. “As a matter of fact,” he said “I opened this morning’s paper and got quite a start. I thought I was looking at Toybrook but in fact what I was looking at….” He fumbled among his cases and bundles and produced a paper which he opened and spread before me, stabbing with a lean nicotined finger. The caption was one word, a familiar one: Belsen! We laughed very heartily about this—a long terrain of old-fashioned potting sheds with the two funnels, like a liner or a soap-factory. All indistinct and furry.
“Come,” I said “didn’t Caradoc build it? It can’t be less than a Parthenon of some sort in that case.”
“It’s very beautiful,” he admitted sitting back and settling the rug around him “really very beautiful. And also marvellous from our own point of view. There are no labs like it in Europe, nowhere. The nearest comparison is Germany, but even then I think we have the edge of them. No, Toybrook is quite something. Sound like an invention of Enid Blyton doesn’t it? Do you know those children’s books of hers?”