“Of course. I read them in the Tube.”
“Then?”
“Well, I’m curious to see what you’ve got and to find out where you want to go.” Marchant looked at me curiously, humorously. He said: “We want to get as real as we can.” Silence. “You mean fundamentally you want to give yourself the illusion of actually controlling reality? How real can one conceive, I mean?” Marchant gave a chuckle. “Felix, Felix” he said reprovingly, putting his hand on my knee. “The old weakness is peeping out. You want to intrude metaphysical considerations into empirical science. It’s no go. You are tapping on a door which does not exist. The wall is solid.”
“It’s quite a consideration if the things you make get up off the operating table and start being MORE real than you? You will surely be forced to reassess your … dirty word … culture?” Marchant shook his head vigorously. “We must move step by step, not in your quanta-like jumps—you can do nothing scientifically if you get the typical clusters; it’s like seizing up your engine by overheating, hence the Paulhaus.” I watched the wonderful socialist country rolling by with all its marvellous advertising. “Ejax makes a man of you.” Why not a woman, I wondered? It damn soon would. Hair down to the waist and a costume from Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Perhaps there was a future for poor Felix in all this?
“Bon” he said, with a growing sense of familiarity. It was not simply the firm—it was the particular smell of self-satisfaction it unleashed. “And Julian?” I said. Once more Marchant gave a small earwig chuckle. “Gambling,” he said “all the time. But now he has started losing and this is not in nature—at least not in his. I love Julian, you know, now that I have really got to know him. He is humility itself—humble as the Pope. Self-effacing. Tender. Felix, what a man!”
“What a man” I echoed piously, and indeed the funny thing was that I felt it; I felt a strange sort of reverence for this … mummy. I don’t know if that is the right word. But to have so much understanding humanity as Julian had and to manage to live apart, to play no direct part in its strange or deformed operations—why really it was something to doff the hat to. “All that Planck stuff is fruitful from a theoretically viable point of view; but from our point of view it is a matter of scale, in our empirical test-tube business the three dimensions are all one can cope with.” He was pursuing the argument like a sort of granny. He cleared his throat while I lit a cigarette. ‘Our only problem down in Toybrook is a simple one, namely does it work ninety-nine times out of a hundred? If it does it is real.” I coughed slightly and scanned off the scenery a bit. We were travelling mighty fast with a chauffeur who, for all I knew, might have been a dummy invented by Marchant. Then I said: “And the hundredth? Is there no room in your system for the miracle? That trifling shift of temperature or wrong mixture of chemical salts … it’s so easy to go wrong. What exactly would be the miracle for you, Marchant?” Chuckle. “Well,” he said “something like Iolanthe. She can for the moment be exactly controlled. Or so we hope. So we hope.”
But reassuringly enough Toybrook was not in the least like Belsen—quite the contrary; despite the two stout brick towers exuding a lick of white smoke from the ovens in the experimental section. Toybrook was laid out with great dignity in two long complexes enfilading a piece of wild woodland, so that there was no laboratory or theatre without its fine green view. Moreover in the woodland there were several families of wild stags which appeared and disappeared dramatically among the trees, mating and battling in full view of the scientists; sometimes even coming shyly down to put a wet muzzle on the plate glass of the aquarium-like laboratories. It was both elegant and very peaceful—the chemists’ studios with their long rows of microscopes glinting, their scales and pulleys and grapnels. A long pendulum hung slowly swinging in the hall. They had everything, these boys, even a wind tunnel and a cyclotron. Marchant was in high good humour as he showed me round, stopping here or there to present me to a colleague. Thence to the elegant theatre where the progress reports were read and recorded audio-visually for whatever posterity a scientist might believe in or hope for.
In the darkness Marchant flicked a couple of switches and a bald man appeared on close-circuit image. “That is old Hariot” he said while the celebrated man read haltingly against a blackboard upon which someone had written in violet chalk: “Does perhaps the rate of blood-sedimentation dictate the oxygen intake?” A vexing question, I should have thought. Anyway Hariot went on: “As you know, oxygen pushes carbon dioxide out of the blood and vice versa; as far as the circulation is concerned, about five litres of blood a minute are pumped by the heart of an ordinary resting adult. The distribution is not uniform; I mean that brain and kidneys get disproportionately large amounts compared to their relative size. As far as the brain is concerned, a decrease of ten per cent oxygen will give the first signs of confusion; decrease it by twenty per cent and you get the equivalent of four or five strong cocktails, say; around forty per cent you would expect to get coma. If the total supply is cut you get unconsciousness in a few seconds; and after four to five minutes the damage to the brain may be irreversible.”
I said: “I suppose you had to mug all this stuff up for your dollies?” And Marchant nodded as he faded down on Hariot and came up with an image of rubber hands occupying the whole screen, poking about in the entrails of something or someone. However it was Hariot’s flat voice again which continued the exposition with: “From the umbilical cord of twenty-five newborn children an appropriate test-length was clamped before first cry; blood samples were drawn anaerobically with special all-glass syringes from the umbilical vein and umbilical arteries. Coagulation and glycolysis were inhibited by heparin and potassium oxalate and sodium fluoride….” Marchant chuckled approvingly. “You can call for any damn thing under the sun” he said, consulting a panel of data. Other images wallowed up, once more of rubber fingers moving about in a uterus as if performing some obscure rite of divination. “This particular demonstration monkey was merely anaesthetised, its abdomen opened and copious amounts of Bouin’s fixative solution poured into it, over and around the uterus in situ. At the end of three to seven minutes all uterine ligaments with their contained blood vessels were clamped and the specimen removed ….”
“Ugh” I said. “I think I must be getting home to the wife and kids if this goes on.” He laughed and tried another lucky dip on the dial to produce this time a strange surrealist picture of three men in white coats gathered round a seal which had been lashed firmly to a board and suspended above a water tank. The poor animal was terrified and struggled with all its might, rolling bloodshot eyes and moaning through its long silky moustaches. One of the men was holding a stethoscope to its body and saying something grave about lactic acid levels. Then the pulley swung and down the whole contraption fell out of sight. Crank!
“Enough” said Marchant. “It was only to give you an idea of the data-processing side of the thing.”
In the mathematical section there were a hundred small hanging mobiles gyrating slowly in the sluggish air of the studios; a tiny planetarium, mock-earth, and God only knows what else. To Marchant’s annoyance however the experimental embalmers had taken the day off and locked up the studio. “It’s most vexatious” he said. “They have probably gone up to town for more dead. It isn’t all that easy to get them, and one cannot run a Burke and Hare body-snatching organisation from such a respectable address as this.” Why not, I wondered, surely old Julian could provide? (Cut out the flippancy, Charlock.) At any rate there was nothing for it now but to proceed to business and visit his own section, which would later become mine as well. It had no name as yet, just Experimental Studio B.
He had doubtless been keeping this special treat for the last, deeming it the most exciting, which of course it was. He unlocked two sets of doors and locked them again behind us with a stealthy gesture that reminded me of the Rackstraw ward in the Paulhaus. A high, bright, airy studio almost as tall as a hangar for cub aircraft came to light; white silk curtains mov
ed softly in the breeze. Silence!
The bed she lay in was a long white surgeon’s operating table with gleaming leverage members in tubular steel. She lay so still, like the experimental aircraft she was, so to speak, (still on the secret list): covered completely in a sheet of soft parachute silk, which stretched down to the floor on both sides. But her silhouette gave the illusion of completeness—a whole, undismembered body of a corpse, woman, doll or whatever. “You said she was still in bits” I said and Marchant tittered with pleasure. “They are not completely joined up as yet for action, but I want to give you the illusion of how she’s going to be by showing her to you bit by bit, so you don’t see the joins. The power isn’t in yet, but I get some traction off another unit which enables us to check the whole flexion patterns of our fine plastic musculature. I plug her into a g-circuit.” He performed some obscure evolutions in the corner, switched on powerful theatre lights above the body, and beckoned me over with a shy grin, lifting as he did so the corner of the silk to reveal the face. It was extraordinary to find myself gazing down upon the dead face of Iolanthe—so truthful a copy of the reality that I started with surprise even though I had been expecting something like this. But what really took me away was the perfection of that fresh and dewy skin. “Feel it” said Marchant. I put my finger to her cheek; “She’s warm.” Marchant laughed; “Of course she is, she’s breathing, look now.” The lips parted softly and a tiny furrow of preoccupation appeared on the serene brow. In her dream some small perplexity had surfaced here. It was skin, though, it was human flesh. Here she was, simply lying anaesthetised upon an operating table. “Iolanthe!” I whispered and the lips parted as if to answer me, but she said nothing. Marchant watched my confused excitement with a happy air of complacence. “Whisper again and she will wake” he said, and in an incoherent uncomprehending sort of way I said: “Darling, wake up, it’s Felix.” For a moment nothing, and then the whole face seemed to draw a waking breath. The lids fluttered and very slowly opened. “Damn” said Marchant. “Said has taken out the eyes again for restitching. I forgot, sorry.” But I was staring entranced through the eyesockets of the model into her skull with its intricate nest of coils and wires in different-coloured threads, finer than the finest cotton. Marchant passed his palm over the eyelids to close them, as one does with the dead; I felt rather sick in an elated sort of way. “The eyes are over there” he said, indicating a small white glass bowl in which the eyes of the goddess floated in some sort of mucus—gum arabic? They lay there like oysters—unrecognisable now as the most famous eyes in the world, simply because they were detached from context.
Ah Osiris, we must gather up the loaves and fishes; O Humpty Dumpty we must put you together again. But Marchant was irritated by this trifling misadventure and drew the sheet back over the face. He went on to a demonstration of the thigh and ankle flexion—a perfect beautiful leg was revealed, of positively Botticellian elegance, and again warm, palpably real, a breathing leg so to speak. “Of course most of the fun has been in playing with the surfaces, the decoration, since we were ordered to reproduce from a known model. But her skin, boy, is just as beautiful as the real stuff and rather longer lasting. I must say that nylon pencil you invented has been a godsend.” So I had invented a nylon pencil—what the devil can that have been? “Once again you’ve forgotten” he said. “It was just a hint you threw out once which we took up. My dear boy, look.” He took a fine scalpel and cut a long incision in the thigh, spreading the wound with a clamp. No blood, of course, nor sawdust as in an oldfashioned gollywog but a beautifully coiled nest of vivid plastic cones and wires, packed tight as caviar. “Now look” he says and takes a thick metal pencil which he draws along the lips of the wound. It closes instantly leaving no trace of the gash in the warm thigh. “For running repairs—what would we have done without it? So swift, so easy. You can open it, her, up anywhere in an instant and reseal the wound. Good old Felix” he added with an incandescent admiration.
“Good old Felix” I echoed. We know not what we do, Bolsover, we know not what we do. I sank into an armchair and began to smoke like Vesuvius. “Mother of God, Marchant, what a treat she is. Will you give me the specifications please?”
“Of course” he said, rubbing his hands. “I don’t think there will be much you don’t understand; most of the data comes from your old scrying board—only of course very much reduced and in finer-web materials.” I shook my head doubtfully. I had never worked on this scale before—through a jeweller’s eyepiece or a microscope, so to speak. I stared into the mental sky of science and muttered “E pur si muove.” That was the damnedest thing of all. Marchant stared at me with schoolboy glee and said: “Yes, you can’t put your telescope to your blind eye on this lot; we are getting as near as dammit to the target objective.”
He was acclimatised, I could see; but despite all he had told me about the project I found this experience to be quite a shock. Nor was it all. “Come and look” he said “at the vagina, the real treasure.” He made some artful disposition of the shroud and revealed the downy sex of Iolanthe. “Stick your finger in there and feel—a self-lubricating mucous surface imitated to the life.” I felt an awful cringe of misgiving as I did so, albeit reluctantly. He cackled happily and slapped my back. “You don’t like it, do you? It seems an intolerable affront to her privacy and her beauty? I know, I know. I couldn’t do it for weeks, she had become so real to me. But I had to. I had to take myself in hand and remind myself that I was a scientist after all—a man rather than a mouse.” I felt shaken by a sort of remorse; it was silly to feel like this about the private parts of a dummy. Yet, so deeply buried are these motor complexes derived from the education of the tribe, that they come to the surface in quite involuntary fashion. Poor Iolanthe, lying there asleep and in pieces, to be fingered over by mousemen! I felt as if I had insulted her dignity. Marchant knew perfectly well the feeling. He had already felt that way himself, and steeled himself against it. I mopped my brow and thanked him. “But why does Julian want this sort of thing copied?” I asked in an outraged and aggrieved fashion. “Does he expect them to reproduce?” Marchant shrugged. “I don’t know; they won’t ever be anything but simulacra of fertility. Not only that, they can neither eat nor excrete. But he won’t say what he has in mind. What will she do for an état civil my lad? No good asking me.” He burst into a small cackle of helpless laughter and sat down in a chair to wipe his spectacles. “Phew!” I said.
The dossier on the figure was almost as thick as the Bible, though rather more intelligible for someone of my outlook. I riffled it and put it in my briefcase abruptly. I had a sudden feeling that I wanted to go away and be alone with myself, with my brief, with my dossier—and singularly enough with Benedicta. Marchant seemed a little disappointed that I had nothing much more to say at this stage. He eyed me keenly and said, “You are in on this thing Felix, aren’t you?” I smiled and nodded. “You aren’t” he went on “going to let theoretical considerations intrude on the work, are you?” It was as if he were pleading for Iolanthe’s life—the life of that marvellous mummy lying so silently under her silken shroud of grey. “No” I said. “I’m in it all right.”
He heaved a sigh of relief, as we went out to the car. I was to be driven home and dropped—the great déménagement to the cottage from Claridge’s was only a day or so old. But I was glad when the chauffeur produced an afternoon paper for Marchant as it kept him busy, inveterate punter that he was. A headline said MOBS SOB AS DALI LAYS EGG. Good. Good. “I want to watch when you replace the eyes, remember.” But I was thinking to myself about memory—is everything recorded in it from the first birth-cry to the death-rattle? Why not? Or does it simply wear out like an old disc? In Abel’s system the sound unit, the gave you a clue to the basic predispositions of character which was then modified by experiences, environment etc…. Yes, that side of the thing was all right. “My God, it’s begun to snow” said Marchant, and so it had; the sky fell out of its frame, turned into a great flocculen
t pane of melting confetti and came down over us locking up visibility; we nosed down the country roads between spectral hedges and sculptured gateposts—griffins in wigs on the front gates of Drue Manor. Plastic elves in white cauls on the lawns of suburban houses. Ah to be a quiet man, living sagely with a little plastic wife, following out the serpentine meanderings of my inner self … why hasn’t God made me a quietist? Nigaud, va.
I made them keep the headlights on to enable me to grope my way across the meadow and skirt the disappeared lake; it was all crackly underfoot. When I looked round the snow had swallowed them up. Like a blind man I clutched my way up the steps of the chalet and at last found the latch. Ah, the warmth inside, the blazing fire of thorn and oak, the smells, and Benedicta pyjama-clad asleep before the fire with Osmosis the cat on her stomach. “One side of your face is all burning, bottom as well” I said. “Better turn over.” But she preferred to wake. “Caradoc has been ringing you this afternoon. He seemed to be rather drunk. I told him to record himself and go to hell, which he duly did.” But either he had been more than just drunk or else his sound track had got itself mixed with other stuff for it was a mighty incoherent display of temperament beginning with a poem of which I could only make out the lines:
Fornication’s pedalled jam
Which has brought me where I am
and ending with a request for a Christmas Box of fifty pounds. “I am at the Metrofat Hotel in Brighton with a young lady who is all warm breast of Christmas Turkey; greetings of the season to one and all. Did you see my little thing in The Times? ‘Grand génie, légèrement bombé mais valide, cherche organiste.’ Had no replies yet.”