Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset (27 page)

The police had taken considerable interest in the ‘accident’, since there had been no other cars on the bridge at the time. They measured the tyre marks, interviewed people who had been at the party in Kingston – including one Walter Heffert of Heffert, McCall and Co. – and took statements from Greville himself. The result of all this activity crystallised into two charges. Manslaughter and Dangerous Driving. Greville collected sentences totalling three years, which he found monstrously unjust. He would have preferred the death penalty.

It was not until the first week in October, about the time that Greville was being transferred to one of the better-class English prisons for better-class English criminals, that the long and utterly glorious summer came to its end. Though there had been enough nocturnal rainfall and light daytime showers to keep the crops healthy, there had been ten weeks of virtually uninterrupted sunshine. It was followed by a month of intermittent rain – and floods.

Some curious facts began to emerge about the summer. There had been roughly three times the average amount of sunshine for the period. There had also been about five times the average number of suicides. This was spectacular enough to make the front pages of most of the newspapers. Prominence was also given to the discovery that new sun-spots had appeared and had been emitting a new type of radiation. The facts that the radiation possessed properties hitherto unknown to science and that the surplus suicides exhibited symptoms hitherto unknown to psychiatry gave rise to considerable speculation.

The name given to the waves (or were they particles?) emitted from the sun-spots was Omega radiation – chiefly because the scientists were baffled and because every fruitful investigation seemed destined to be a long-term project. The name eventually given to the five-fold increase in self-destruction (by a journalist who drowned himself a few weeks later) was the Radiant Suicide.

It was the popular press that had first suggested a ‘statistical relationship’ between Omega radiation and what everyone now called the Radiant Suicide. The idea triggered off a chain reaction among scientists, religious leaders, psychologists and plain cranks.

One so-called scientist ‘borrowed’ two groups of children from a well-meaning if mentally retarded headmaster with a proper respect for Scientific Method. The scientist kept one lot of children in a cellar for long spells while the other lot were compelled to spend most of their time in the open air exposed to sunlight. Not surprisingly, he found that after a day or two of this kind of treatment the open-air group could do sums much faster and more accurately than the cellar group. From this he appeared to conclude (a) that Omega radiation stimulated intellectual activity and could therefore induce nervous exhaustion, and (b) that anybody who wanted to avoid nervous exhaustion and, therefore, suicide would be well advised to live underground. Having the courage of his convictions, he himself took to a subterranean existence – and committed suicide two months later.

The psychologists and psychiatrists were rather more reluctant to link the increase in the suicide rate with Omega radiation – chiefly because radiation was outside their province. They took a more esoteric approach and began to fling about such phrases as ‘thyroidal displacement’, ‘societal emotional
imbalance’, ‘liberation of the collective death-wish’, ‘induced hyper-mysticism’ and ‘cathartic destruction’. The Radiant Suicide, apparently, was quite explicable. In a world in which the idea of war was rapidly becoming absurd, it was modern man’s neurotic simulation of the consequences of tribal conflict. Eventually the psychologists and psychiatrists produced so many plausible explanations of the Radiant Suicide as to convey the impression that they had almost invented it.

However, for the most part the religious fanatics took a simpler view. It was merely an Awful Warning sent by God. We would have to mend our ways or else …

But while the cranks of various persuasions were airing their pet philosophies and producing equally useless panaceas, a few intelligent people were busy collating the facts.

And the facts that emerged were these:

1. Until shortly before the detection of Omega radiation, the suicide rate was approximately normal.

2. The incidence of suicide increased with the incidence of radiation.

3. Cloudy weather tended to slow down the rate of increase perceptibly but not significantly.

4. Though there had been tremendous increases in the suicide rate throughout the world, the increases in the Northern Hemisphere had so far been slightly larger than in the Southern Hemisphere.

5. The types of people affected were those who, under normal conditions, would be considered the least prone to suicidal impulses.

6. Many people who had either failed in their attempts to commit suicide or had been rescued by others reported that, shortly before the urge to self-destruction, they had experienced tremendous sensations of peacefulness and of identification with something greater than self. A common element of their reports was the widespread conviction that death would render the experience absolute or permanent.

7. The intensity of the Omega radiation was still increasing, and many astronomers expressed the view that the new sun-spots could be expected to remain ‘active’ for a considerable period of time.

These were the facts. And they were responsible for sending the sales of sedatives, tranquillisers, alcoholic drinks and Bibles soaring to unprecedented heights.

By the end of 1971, thirty-four thousand people in the United Kingdom had taken their own lives – yet the statistical expectation was only six thousand five hundred. The Home Secretary, woolly-minded as ever, recommended that suicide be treated as a criminal offence once more. It was anti-social, he said, and definitely bad for the country’s economy. So a bill was rapidly pushed through Parliament. It came to be briefly immortalised
as the ‘Do Yourself In Deterrent’. For one of its provisions was that one-third of the estate of any suicide (after death duty)
could
be claimed in forfeit by the State. Another provision was that attempted suicide
could
be punished by a maximum of ten years’ imprisonment. The bill, needless to say, was totally ineffective – but it contributed somewhat to the government being overthrown six months later.

Meanwhile Matthew Greville was adapting himself to the routines of prison life. It was far more comfortable than he had imagined; and this, in itself, proved a major frustration because he believed that he ought to be made to suffer – not only for Pauline, but for the very uselessness and pointlessness of his life. For all the minor deceits he had ever practised, for all the little vanities he had ever developed, for the talent he had wasted, the ideals he had abandoned, and for every cliché-ridden perverted ethic he had ever subscribed to in admanland. Suicide would appear to have been the perfect answer – perhaps it might have been on 7 July 1971. But he had spent months trying to analyse his intentions and motives, and he was no wiser. Did he really intend to kill himself on Chelsea Bridge? Or Pauline, or both of them? Or was he only indulging in a melodramatic gesture that got out of control?

If he hadn’t killed the cat … If Pauline hadn’t grabbed at the wheel … If … If … If …

There was no satisfactory solution – not even suicide. For that was now only a sort of luxury. He wanted to be punished, he wanted to be hurt, he wanted to feel again the strange anguish of being alive …

During his entire stay in prison seven warders and fifty-four prisoners committed suicide. As a penance for existing and a reward for not killing himself, Greville became the self-appointed gravedigger-in-chief.

Throughout the short and fairly dry winter of 1972, the Omega radiation intensified. So did the Radiant Suicide. And the pessimists were already predicting a warm dry summer.

Science and human ingenuity came up with a remarkable number of solutions – none of them satisfactory and some of them dangerous. One of the many new ‘tranquil stimulants’ coming out of the laboratories of the manufacturing chemists in hysterical haste (this particular drug was marketed as Positive Pep) was responsible for more than a hundred thousand miscarriages or premature births, and therefore contributed quite significantly to the increase in the suicide rate. Another one was more effective in preventing suicide – but one of its side effects was to produce delusions of grandeur. A third was equally effective in preventing people from killing themselves: the problem was that it tended to create addiction, and addiction overloaded the heart.

Thousands of ‘mental hygiene’ groups were formed, an organisation called Death-Wish Anonymous sprang into existence, dozens of different sects,
disciplines and esoteric societies mushroomed. And religious revival became a major industry.

But, despite everything, by the end of 1972 (again there had been an utterly glorious summer) more than a hundred and twenty thousand people in the United Kingdom alone had taken their own lives. The proportional increase was similar in most other countries.

Meanwile, the Omega radiation – the most elusive and enigmatic form of radiant energy ever discovered – intensified. And while researchers into its nature remained baffled, researchers into its effects came up with more interesting data.

It had been discovered that Omega-proof shields could be devised. All you needed was a wall of lead sixteen feet thick, or a thicker wall of less dense material. But even this was no good unless the people to be shielded by it remained permanently shielded. Anyone prone to what was abbreviated to Radiant-S, or simply R.S., needed only a few minutes exposure to trigger off the reaction. The only variable was the time factor. It could be months before the R.S. impulse manifested itself, or merely a matter of hours.

Another interesting discovery was that all children were ‘R.S.-proof’ until the age of puberty. And, in fact, from puberty until about the age of twenty-five (the presumed end of growth and adolescence) the risk of R.S. was only about half as great as for the rest of the population.

But, most curious of all, was the emerging classification of R.S. types. During the first two years the information gathered from more than a hundred and fifty thousand victims indicated that, in terms of professions and vocations, the most susceptible types were bank clerks, accountants, scientists, executives and managers of all kinds, shopkeepers, typists, dons (but not teachers!), pilots, sea captains, bus drivers, engine drivers, mathematicians, professional gamblers and bookmakers,
minor
politicians, watchmakers and civil servants. Spinsters, or – more accurately – virgins over the age of twenty-five were a very heavy risk: so were bachelors similarly.

The least likely R.S. subjects were creative artists of all kinds, lunatics, political and religious fanatics, actors, dancers and entertainers, cranks, homosexuals, prostitutes, eccentrics, doctors and nurses, teachers, sportsmen, sadists, masochists and pathological animal lovers.

Clearly, it was now a case of, ‘
Do
send your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.’ But stratagems of this kind were not much good if the person concerned happened to have a repressed flair for, say, mathematics.

1973 came. And went – after another brilliant summer. The final reckoning in Britain was just under half a million R.S. victims. Added to which a secondary reaction was now apparent. The birth rate was falling, for obvious reasons; and the natural death rate was rising, for equally obvious reasons. People were beginning to be afraid to have children and, ironically, they were
also indirectly killing themselves with worry. Towards the end of the year Parliament reintroduced conscription – which had been out of favour for more than a decade. However, the need this time was not for soldiers but for burial squads, bus drivers and clerical workers.

In the autumn of 1974, having served his full term after contriving to avoid remission for good conduct by deliberately assaulting a prison officer, Matthew Greville was released from prison. He was given a rail ticket to London and the sum of eighteen pounds nine shillings and sixpence, which he had earned in his capacity as gravedigger.

He had no home to go to, since he had long ago instructed his solicitor to sell the Chelsea residence and all it contained. There had been quite a large mortgage to pay off. Nevertheless, when all assets (including the Picasso) had been realised, the solicitor was able to deposit just over eleven thousand pounds in Greville’s account. Greville had promptly disposed of the entire amount to various charities.

When he arrived in London, he hired a taxi and toured the city, savouring its richness and its bustle (for despite the Radiant Suicide London still managed to put on a brave face), noting the changes, the new skyscraper blocks that were still going up – and the new churches that were being built. Then he told the taxi driver to take him to Chelsea Bridge, where he got out, paid off the taxi and began to walk across.

The dents were still there in the steelwork. He had to look carefully for them, but they were still there. They had been painted over, and two or three badly twisted metal sections had been renewed, but the hidden hieroglyphs still proclaimed the final result of life with Pauline – and, perhaps the result also of an encounter with an unknown cat.

He stared for a while at the message that none but he could decipher. The sky was misty blue, and the sun covered all of England with the gold and ripening light of autumn. It was a perfect day. But the weather was entirely lost upon Greville. After reliving yet again the strange drive from Kingston (only three years ago, but in another kind of time) he headed for the nearest bar and proceeded to get drunk.

He stayed drunk for three days, at the end of which time he woke up early in the morning in Hyde Park – shaking with the effects of drink and nervous tension, and remembering little of what had passed since his visit to the bridge.

He pulled himself together and inquired the way to the nearest army recruitment centre. He had to wait an hour for it to open. The military gentlemen in charge were not filled with joy at the prospect of enlisting a jailbird and an obvious tramp. However, after some deliberation they magnanimously allowed him to volunteer for the Emergency Burial Corps. He was pathetically grateful. This was the kind of work he wanted – just as in prison. It was a public service.