That evening I was sitting by the fire reading a book when the telephone rang and the quiet voice of Julian sounded—a voice which was perhaps just a shade less languid than usual, yet nevertheless controlled and modulated. He was phoning from Paris, he said, and added: “And particularly to thank you my dear Felix, for thinking up so charming a gesture; you will have guessed how much it meant to me to hear her voice….”
“Whose voice?”
“Why Iolanthe’s” he said in puzzled tones. “It was only a few words, of course. But what a thrill for me after so long. Thank you.”
“But wait,” I said. “She couldn’t possibly have talked to you Julian; the magazines aren’t dated and placed yet. She is still asleep, my dear. Yes, she can say a few words all right but she couldn’t get up or lift the phone as yet. Has Marchant been playing you some recorded stuff to try it out? I wonder.”
“I assure you,” he said, almost pleading “there was no mistake. She said: ‘We have never met, have we Julian? It is as if I had missed a vital part of my real life.’” His voice shook a little. “Then she went on: ‘Now the doctors will remedy that together with a lot of other things, and when I am well I will ask you to come to me.’ It was terrifying in a way, but so very real….”
I was on my feet by now, full of a very real perplexity. “I’ll check back,” I said “and let you know.”
The thing was how, and in which order? I rang Marchant and cleared him from suspicion. He was as mystified as I was. Then, on a sudden impulse, I phoned to the studio itself—though on the face of it this was an absurd thing to do; for I myself had locked up that evening after drawing the covers carefully over Iolanthe. And here was a funny thing. The phone returned an engaged signal, which clearly showed that the receiver was at least off. I listened to the monotonous bleating tone and my thoughts began to race. And then, even as I listened, there came the decisive click and silence which could come only from the replacing of the receiver. Click, followed by the engaged tone again.
“Now what the devil?” I said. Benedicta looked up to see me rushing myself into an overcoat and scarf. “I must just go to the studio and check” I said. “Come with me, only hurry, darling; you can drive me if you wish.”
* * * * *
Light powdery snow drifted across our headlights, a shadowy distracted moon wandered in the sky; B. drove at full tilt, a cigarette burning between her lips. The car had been well christened when the makers chose the name “Spear” for it. I chewed the inside of my lips, chewed my ragged thoughts. I felt an extraordinary despondency arise in me. It was too early for things to start going wrong, before we had even got our model on to its feet. It was partly fear, I think, of finding some mechanical defect in our dolly which might cost us months’ more intricate work—but also: fear of an unknown factor which hinted crudely at a sort of physical autonomy for which we had not yet made room in our minds. How free was the final Iolanthe to be? Freer than a chimp, one supposes … yes, infinitely; but free enough to pick up a phone and charm Julian? “You are looking scared” said Benedicta quietly. “Is it my driving? I’ll slow down.” I shook my head. “No. No. I was debating a little matter of freewill, of conditioned reflexes …. Drive faster in fact. Much faster. One is only scared when something happens which one can’t explain to oneself. She could not, for example, have done what Julian says she did, namely, lift the telephone and talk to him. At this stage, at any rate.”
“I’m dying to see this dummy.”
“You have been very patient, Benedicta; why you have never even asked me, darling. Of course you shall. Now.”
“I knew my voice would shake with jealous rage and you would suddenly look at me in astonished fashion. To be deprived of the female right to be jealous by the logic of things—that is the unkindest thing that could happen to a woman.” She laughed.
“Are we jealous of Iolanthe, then?” I said.
Some hefty branches torn from a tree by the wind lay astride the main road and we swerved to a halt, nonplussed for a moment, for there seemed no alternative way forward. Fortunately the wood was not quite so heavy as it looked and I was able to shift it enough to clear a fairway for the car. Panting, I sank back at last beside her, revelling in the warm gushes of air from the heater as we raced on again towards our destination. “Who could have done it then?” she asked. “Could he have imagined it in his sleep?” There was nothing to be said as yet, until I had seen Iolanthe with my own eyes. Of course when she woke such an act would be part of her enormous repertoire of “autonomous” acts. Ring anyone up and say anything, in fact. “Did you say she could not eat or excrete?” I placed another lighted cigarette between her teeth and explained. “She won’t know it. We built her the reflex movement and the functional pattern which go with them; only she doesn’t have to trundle a disagreeable bundle of faecal matter around with her. She will feel the same punctual need as you do, and like you will sit down on the bidet and run the taps. But unlike you she only imagines the act of defecation, though she has all the same enjoyment—why she even gives the little shudder that we men find so endearing. But she is full of labour-saving devices like that. O God, Benedicta, she is marvellous; you will have quite a surprise, truthfully you will. Maybe feel a little scared as well—I confess that at first blush I was quite taken back, awed.”
We swerved at long last into the driveway to find the whole complex of buildings in darkness, which of course was what we would have expected. There was a bright green light in the lodge which housed the two security guards whose duty it was to make two late night patrols through the studios and labs. The tagged keys to our studio hung on a nail behind the grizzled head of Naysmith who lumbered to his flat marine’s feet to welcome me. “Is there anything wrong?” he asked catching, I suppose, a touch of urgency from the expression on my face. “Not exactly. It may be me. But I thought I’d come back and check over my section. There’s a little matter of a phone-call I have not cleared up as yet. By the way, Naysmith, come with me and bring some fingerprint snuff would you? I’d like to see if our inside phone has any prints on it. The last lot should be mine or Marchant’s.”
Benedicta was waiting for us in her lamb furred overcoat and boots; and together we cut across the main pathways and walked the hundred yards or so towards the studios. We entered, turning up the white lights of the theatre of operations as we advanced; I was relieved to find everything as I had left it. Though why I should have imagined or looked for a hypothetical disorder I know not, “That phone over there, Naysmith. Give it the gold dust treatment will you and see what you find?” Obediently the security man dusted his goldish powder over the instrument, puffing it softly from an atomiser. Then he took out a large magnifying glass from his professional kit and ran it over the suspect instrument, grunting as he did so. “There’s nothing at all on the damn thing” he said at last stretching his back straight with relief and turning to me in a mild perplexity. “It’s been wiped clear by someone.” For a moment this too seemed strange, but then I was determined not to invent mysteries where none existed. The air was kept at a specially moist heat to be kind to Iolanthe’s skin, which had been woven from pure Mel, a derivative of nylon. I explained briefly to Naysmith and he seemed satisfied enough with this explanation as indeed I was myself. I could think of no other; an invisible skin of moisture particles formed upon the bakelite receiver and washed out any fingerprints. And Iolanthe? Well, she had not moved at all under her sheet; poor dear, she was still in pieces though nearing the final joining together. There was quite a lot of juice roaming about inside her because we had plugged her in to a low-power induction current to keep her body at a satisfactory temperature. And it was this factor which suddenly presented me with a solution—or the sketch of one. Benedicta stood at the door, looking very pale and extraordinarily youthful all of a sudden. She was afraid of what lay beneath the sheet! I didn’t want to unveil the head until Naysmith had taken himself off—a twinge of proprietorial jealousy I suppose? But this t
he good man did in a few moments and now was my chance to show off my beauty to Benedicta. I took her cold hand in mine and together we crossed the room to the operating table.
“I mustn’t forget to show you the weaver team that made the skin for her; you’d think you were in a Japanese watercolour in their studio—finer than the petals of any flower you might conceive.” I turned back the sheet and we gazed down upon the still serene features of the screen goddess. I could feel that she was terrified, Benedicta. And when, at this juncture, the telephone suddenly shrilled we both nearly jumped out of our skins and into each other’s arms. I picked it up with trembling fingers and was relieved to find that it was only Marchant. “I’ve thought of an explanation” said he. “She’s still on the feeder isn’t she? Well there’s a fairly big build-up of juice, enough to enable her to pass a thought or a phrase along a wire without using the phone. It doesn’t sound very plausible, but I think that must be it.”
“It will have to be” I said. “There isn’t any other solution.” Marchant sucked his teeth cheerfully and went on. “If you switch on and pin her on to feedback she might even answer the question herself.” But I wasn’t keen to start fooling round at this time of night. “It’ll keep” I said. “Until she walks in beauty like the night.” There was a gasp and stirring sound; I turned to see Benedicta gazing fixedly at the face which had suddenly altered its expression. And then, even as we looked, the two sapphire bright eyes opened and gazed fixedly, unwinkingly at Benedicta. B. moved back a few paces with obvious fear. “It wants to speak” she whispered. “Poor thing. Poor thing.” She was about to faint but I caught her. In the little lavatory next door she was violently sick.
“Leave me a moment” she said, between spasms of nausea. “She wants to tell you something. Please go back.” But I waited until she could accompany me back; I wanted her to get over her shock and come to accept Iolanthe for what she was—a modest enough copy of reality, not a creation. I hung about obstinately, not saying a word, until she shook herself at last and said: “There! It’s done with.” She washed her face and dried it on the little white napkin behind the door; then slipped her arm through mine. “What an experience!”
Iolanthe’s head had hardly moved, but her features tenderly sketched in a shoal of transient feelings, impulses bathed in memory or desire, which flowed through the magazine of the coded mind on the wings of electricity. For such low-voltage feeding it was remarkable to find her “live” at all. Yet she was. Her blue eyes gazed into the white glare of the theatre lamps with a sort of abstract curiosity; then, attracted perhaps by the glimpse of our shadows moving upon the general whiteness, lowered their gaze and came to rest at last, in troubled and loving confusion, upon my own face. You could have sworn she recognised it—the little mischievous pucker of the mouth came, as if she were about to utter her sardonic greeting in Greek, “Xāire Felix mou”. And yet also timid, abashed, a gamine who fears she may be reproached. But of course with a current so far below optimum the threads had got jumbled as they do in an ordinary delirium—in high fever for example—and what she said she uttered in the back of her throat and not too clearly at that. The tone of course was low contralto, not very like her ordinary one because of the fallen levels. “The deep inside wish to be level with the grave, Julian; you are worn out with the sin of wishing you had died in childbirth—how well we understand! Now that I have come back from this great illness I shall bring you some comfort, you will see.”
“Christ!” Benedicta vibrated with a mixture of fascination and horror. “She’s jumbling” I said; and I ran my hand softly and tenderly through the hair of Iolanthe in a gesture which I knew would elicit the response she must have so often made in life. She arched her head slowly, flexing it on the lovely stem of her neck, and breathed in deeply, voluptuously; then she expelled her breath slowly, uxoriously through her mouth and gave me a sleepy smile. “Kiss. Kiss” she said. “Felix.” And pursed her red smiling mouth for a kiss which I gave her while Benedicta looked on in a kind of scandalised amusement mixed with loathing.
We kissed and she brushed my ear with her lips murmuring: “Precious. But life could have been full of so much hope, only we’re cripples, cripples. I spoke to Julian.” Well, if there was enough juice for all this there might be enough for her to get back on to the mnemonic register without an additional charge, and actually answer a “real” question. “How did you do it?” I asked. She closed her eyes, appearing not to have heard, not to have understood; then she opened them again and the tiny dimple appeared in her cheek. “The Arab doctor is kind; he got me Julian. Just for a minute. It’s so tiring.” So that was the answer! Said had obtained the call and placed the receiver to her ear and mouth. Switched on the power. Ah, my schizoid goddess, you are falling asleep again. She couldn’t help it; her long lashes declined softly and she subsided quietly once more into nescience pillowed on the sea-rhythms of the current. Receding, receding into the tideless sleep of scientific time; her bloodstream was a wavelength only in her tissues, its force measured now upon a small dial with a face no larger than a lady’s wrist-watch. A little nodding blue bulb of pilot-flame winked on all through the night. Such silence and such beauty!
“Well, we’ve solved the mystery” I said. “Let’s go home. I am beginning to feel tired.”
“Kiss me just once” said Benedicta. “I want to feel how it must have felt to her … to it. No, you don’t kiss very well. Inattentive. Your mind’s always elsewhere, you are woolgathering. You should plunge it in like a spear.” But I was tucking back the white sheets round my dolly, drawing the transparent curtains once more. It was very late, and for some reason I felt very excited and nervous—a relief-reaction I suppose to find everything as it should be. Naysmith had left an evening paper and in this mood of slight disorientation, anxiety-powered I suppose, the most banal headlines took on a tinge of almost sinister ambiguity. “Attendants steal fittings” “Birds lodge in soil” “Work-providers for landless”. Amen. Amen. I locked up with method, whistling under my breath. Then with a sigh I clicked the studio door behind me. “Now,” I said “when I tell you I am working late at the office, you’ll know who I am kissing. Would it be possible to become jealous of a model? I suppose so; one can about a child or a dog, and in cases of great mental cruelty brought before the Californian courts you even find inanimate objects playing a perfectly satisfactory role. A man who went to bed with his golf clubs for example. Extreme mental cruelty. Benedicta when you read cases like that and then think of me don’t use bad language, will you promise?” But Benedicta would not rise to my nervous banter; she remained pale and abstracted, her hand clasped hard in mine as we found our way across the grass to the asphalt carpark. She sensed that it was mere diversionary babble, that all of a sudden this trifling incident had upset me, had made me feel hesitant, unsure of myself. Yet I could not formulate any special reason why. There was nothing really wrong, nothing at all.
She drove slowly on the way back, and indeed took a longer way round, through Croley, Addhead and Byre, which must have added some forty miles on the clock. I wondered why for a while. Of course. Then I remembered the road all but blocked with fallen branches. I was glad anyway of the long detour; I always think better out of doors than in, and best of all when I am travelling as a passenger in a fast car. But it was mighty late when at last we came back to the cottage, sharing the last puffs of the last cigarette. It had stopped snowing. A large limousine lay at the stile across the fields with its headlights blazing. It was the office Rolls that Julian always used. Indeed his chauffeur sat inside at the wheel. We pulled in alongside him and he saluted when he recognised us. “He is waiting up for you, sir. Mr. Baynes let him in and made him a snack to eat. I am to pick him up within the next hour or so, so I’m keeping the car warmed up to run him down to Southampton.”
We docked the little Spear and cut a glittering path across the field to where the cottage stood, with its one warmly-lit window. The latch was off the door and i
t opened with a slight touch to reveal a blazing fire and the figure of Julian sitting in a high-backed chair holding a dossier on his knee; the little silver pencil raised in his small neat hand was poised over some abstruse calculation. He looked completely different once more—perhaps it was the clothes, for this time he was dressed in morning dress with a high stock, for all the world as if he had just come from a wedding or Ascot. A grey topper and gloves lay in the window sill, together with a copy of the Finance World. The man appeared to be eternally surprising, unpredictable.
He had chosen, too, a highly dramatic point of vantage in the room—over against the old fireplace and directly under a brilliant lamp with a dull blood-coloured vellum shade. The result was bright light upon the crown of his head and on his knee, but a subdued swarthy reflection upon the skin of his face making it seem deeply sunburnt. With this great contrast of tone one could not but find his hair very white, or at least much whiter than usual. Yet the warm tone shed by the vellum’d light gave him all the benefit of a whole skiwinter of snowburn. “Ah,” he said, and recrossed his legs in their polished shoes “I took the liberty of calling in on my way to Jamaica. I hope it is all right? Baynes has looked after me like a child.” He indicated with his chin a tray with sandwiches and some champagne in a pail. But he did not stand up. Benedicta slipped across the room to embrace him in perfunctory fashion while I busied myself in pulling off my stormcoat and slipping my feet back into my lined slippers.