The Complete Stories (57 page)

  "It's him I've come for."

  And presently the Minister appeared, open-necked as always but without his usual smile; grave to the verge of tears. He spoke for twenty minutes. "... The great experiment must go on ... the martyrs of maladjustment shall not have died in vain ... A greater, new Mountjoy shall rise from the ashes of the old ..." Eventually tears came—real tears for he held an invisible onion—and trickled down his cheeks. So the speech ended.

  "That's all I came for," said Miles, and left Clara to her cocoa-butter and face towel.

  Next day all the organs of public information were still piping the theme of Mountjoy. Two or three patients, already bored with the entertainment, presented themselves for extermination and were happily despatched. Then a message came from the Regional Director, official-in-chief of Satellite City. He required the immediate presence of Miles in his office.

  "I have a move order for you, Mr. Plastic. You are to report to the Ministers of Welfare and Rest and Culture. You will be issued with a Grade A hat, umbrella and briefcase for the journey. My congratulations."

  Equipped with these insignia of sudden, dizzy promotion, Miles travelled to the capital leaving behind a domeful of sub-officials chattering with envy.

  At the terminus an official met him. Together in an official car they drove to Whitehall.

  "Let me carry your briefcase, Mr. Plastic."

  "There's nothing in it."

  Miles's escort laughed obsequiously at this risqué joke.

  At the Ministry the lifts were in working order. It was a new and alarming experience to enter the little cage and rise to the top of the great building.

  "Do they always work here?"

  "Not always, but very very often."

  Miles realized that he was indeed at the heart of things.

  "Wait here. I will call you when the Ministers are ready."

  Miles looked from the waiting-room window at the slow streams of traffic. Just below him stood a strange, purposeless obstruction of stone. A very old man, walking by, removed his hat to it as though saluting an acquaintance. Why? Miles wondered. Then he was summoned to the politicians.

  They were alone in their office save for a gruesome young woman. The Minister of Rest and Culture said: "Ease your feet, lad" and indicated a large leatherette armchair.

  "Not such a happy occasion, alas, as our last meeting," said the Minister of Welfare.

  "Oh, I don't know," said Miles. He was enjoying the outing.

  "The tragedy at Mountjoy Castle was a grievous loss to the cause of penology."

  "But the great work of Rehabilitation will continue," said the gruesome young woman.

  "A greater Mountjoy will arise from the ashes," said the Minister.

  "Those noble criminal lives have not been lost in vain."

  "Their memory will inspire us."

  "Yes," said Miles. "I heard the broadcast."

  "Exactly," said the Minister. "Precisely. Then you appreciate, perhaps, what a change the occurrence makes in your own position. From being, as we hoped, the first of a continuous series of successes, you are our only one. It would not be too much to say that the whole future of penology is in your hands. The destruction of Mountjoy Castle by itself was merely a setback. A sad one, of course, but something which might be described as the growing pains of a great movement. But there is a darker side. I told you, I think, that our great experiment had been made only against considerable opposition. Now—I speak confidentially—that opposition has become vocal and unscrupulous. There is, in fact, a whispering campaign that the fire was no accident but the act of one of the very men whom we were seeking to serve. That campaign must be scotched."

  "They can't do us down as easy as they think," said the Minister of Rest and Culture. "Us old dogs know a trick or two."

  "Exactly. Counter-propaganda. You are our Exhibit A. The irrefutable evidence of the triumph of our system. We are going to send you up and down the country to lecture. My colleagues have already written your speech. You will be accompanied by Miss Flower here, who will show and explain the model of the new Mountjoy. Perhaps you will care to see it yourself. Miss Flower, the model please."

  All the time they were speaking Miles had been aware of a bulky, sheeted object on a table in the window. Miss Flower now unveiled it. Miles gazed in awe.

  The object displayed was a familiar, standard packing case, set on end.

  "A rush job," said the Minister of Welfare. "You will be provided with something more elaborate for your tour."

  Miles gazed at the box.

  It fitted. It fell into place precisely in the void of his mind, satisfying all the needs for which his education had prepared him. The conditioned personality recognized its proper pre-ordained environment. All else was insubstantial; the gardens of Mountjoy, Clara's cracked Crown Derby and her enveloping beard were trophies of a fading dream.

  The Modern Man was home.

  "There is one further point," continued the Minister of Welfare. "A domestic one but not as irrelevant as it may seem. Have you by any chance formed an attachment in Satellite City? Your dossier suggests that you have."

  "Any woman trouble?" explained the Minister of Rest and Culture.

  "Oh, yes," said Miles. "Great trouble. But that is over."

  "You see, perfect rehabilitation, complete citizenship should include marriage."

  "It has not," said Miles.

  "That should be rectified."

  "Folks like a bloke to be spliced," said the Minister of Rest and Culture. "With a couple of kids."

  "There is hardly time for them," said the Minister of Welfare. "But we think that psychologically you will have more appeal if you have a wife by your side. Miss Flower here has every qualification."

  "Looks are only skin deep, lad," said the Minister of Rest and Culture.

  "So if you have no preferable alternative to offer.....?"

  "None," said Miles.

  "Spoken like an Orphan. I see a splendid career ahead of the pair of you."

  "When can we get divorced?"

  "Come, come, Plastic. You mustn't look too far ahead. First things first. You have already obtained the necessary leave from your Director, Miss Flower?"

  "Yes, Minister."

  "Then off you both go. And State be with you."

  In perfect peace of heart Miles followed Miss Flower to the Registrar's office.

  Then the mood veered.

  Miles felt ill at ease during the ceremony and fidgeted with something small and hard which he found in his pocket. It proved to be his cigarette lighter, a most uncertain apparatus. He pressed the catch and instantly, surprisingly, there burst out a tiny flame—gemlike, hymeneal, auspicious.

  BASIL SEAL RIDES AGAIN

or THE RAKE'S REGRESS

  I

  "Yes."

  "What d'you mean: ‘Yes'?"

  "I didn't hear what you said."

  "I said he made off with all my shirts."

  "It's not that I'm the least deaf. It's simply that I can't concentrate when a lot of fellows are making a row."

  "There's a row now."

  "Some sort of speech."

  "And a lot of fellows saying: ‘Shush.'"

  "Exactly. I can't concentrate. What did you say?"

  "This fellow made off with all my shirts."

  "Fellow making the speech?"

  "No, no. Quite another fellow—called Albright."

  "I don't think so. I heard he was dead."

  "This one isn't. You can't say he stole them exactly. My daughter gave them to him."

  "All?"

  "Practically all. I had a few in London and there were a few at the wash. Couldn't believe it when my man told me. Went through all the drawers myself. Nothing there."

  "Bloody thing to happen. My daughter wouldn't do a thing like that."

  Protests from neighbouring diners rose in volume.

  "They can't want to hear this speech. It's the most awful rot."

  "We seem to be getting unpopular."

  "Don't know who all these fellows are. Never saw anyone before except old Ambrose. Thought I ought to turn out and support him."

  Peter Pastmaster and Basil Seal seldom attended public banquets. They sat at the end of a long table under chandeliers and pier-glasses, looking, for all the traditional brightness of the hotel, too bright and too private for their surroundings. Peter was a year or two the younger but he, like Basil, had scorned to order his life with a view of longevity or spurious youth. They were two stout, rubicund, richly dressed old buffers who might have passed as exact contemporaries.

  The frowning faces that were turned towards them were of all ages from those of a moribund Celtic bard to the cross adolescent critic's for whose dinner Mr. Bentley, the organizer, was paying. Mr. Bentley had, as he expressed it, cast his net wide. There were politicians and publicists there, dons and cultural attachés, Fulbright scholars, representatives of the Pen Club, editors; Mr. Bentley, homesick for the belle époque of the American slump, when in England the worlds of art and fashion and action harmoniously mingled, had solicited the attendance of a few of the early friends of the guest of honour and Peter and Basil, meeting casually a few weeks before, had decided to go together. They were celebrating the almost coincident events of Ambrose Silk's sixtieth birthday and his investiture with the Order of Merit.

  Ambrose, white-haired, pallid, emaciated, sat between Dr. Parsnip, Professor of Dramatic Poetry at Minneapolis, and Dr. Pimpernell, Professor of Poetic Drama at St. Paul. These distinguished expatriates had flown to London for the occasion. It was not the sort of party at which decorations are worn but as Ambrose delicately inclined in deprecation of the honeyed words that dripped around him, no one could doubt his effortless distinction. It was Parsnip who was now on his feet attempting to make himself heard.

  "I hear the cry of ‘silence,'" he said with sharp spontaneity. His voice had assumed something of the accent of his place of exile but his diction was orthodox—august even; he had quite discarded the patiently acquired proletarian colloquialisms of thirty years earlier. "It is apt, for, surely?, the object of our homage tonight is epitomized in that golden word. The voice which once clearly spoke the message of what I for one, and many of us here, will always regard as the most glorious decade of English letters, the nineteen-thirties," (growls of dissent from the youthful critic) "that voice tardily perhaps, but at long last so illustriously honoured by official recognition, has been silent for a quarter of a century. Silent in Ireland, silent in Tangier, in Tel Aviv and Ischia and Portugal, now silent in his native London, our guest of honour has stood for us as a stern rebuke, a recall to artistic reticence and integrity. The books roll out from the presses, none by Ambrose Silk. Not for Ambrose Silk the rostrum, the television screen; for him the enigmatic and monumental silence of genius....."

  "I've got to pee," said Basil.

  "I always want to nowadays."

  "Come on then."

  Slowly and stiffly they left the hotel dining room.

  As they stood side by side in the lavatory Basil said: "I'm glad Ambrose has got a gong. D'you think the fellow making the speech was pulling his leg?"

  "Must have been. Stands to reason."

  "You were going to tell me something about some shirts."

  "I did tell you."

  "What was the name of the chap who got them?"

  "Albright."

  "Yes, I remember; a fellow called Clarence Albright. Rather an awful chap. Got himself killed in the war."

  "No one that I knew got killed in the war except Alastair Trumpington."

  "And Cedric Lyne."

  "Yes, there was Cedric."

  "And Freddy Sothill."

  "I never really considered I knew him," said Basil.

  "This Albright married someone—Molly Meadows, perhaps?"

  "I married Molly Meadows."

  "So you did. I was there. Well, someone like that. One of those girls who were going round at the time—John Flintshire's sister, Sally perhaps. I expect your Albright is her son."

  "He doesn't look like anyone's son."

  "People always are," said Basil, "sons or daughters of people."

  This truism had a secondary, antiquated and, to Peter, an obvious meaning, which was significant of the extent by which Basil had changed from enfant terrible to "old Pobble," the name by which he was known to his daughter's friends.

  The change had been rapid. In 1939 Basil's mother, his sister, Barbara Sothill, and his mistress, Angela Lyne, had seen the war as the opportunity for his redemption. His embattled country, they supposed, would find honourable use for those deplorable energies which had so often brought him almost into the shadows of prison. At the worst he would fill a soldier's grave; at the best he would emerge as a second Lawrence of Arabia. His fate was otherwise.

  Early in his military career, he lamed himself, blowing away the toes of one foot while demonstrating to his commando section a method of his own device for demolishing railway bridges, and was discharged from the army. From this disaster was derived at a later date the sobriquet "Pobble." Then, hobbling from his hospital bed to the registry office, he married the widowed Angela Lyne. Hers was one of those few, huge, astutely dispersed fortunes which neither international calamities nor local experiments with socialism could seriously diminish. Basil accepted wealth as he accepted the loss of his toes. He forgot he had ever walked without a stick and a limp, had ever been lean and active, had ever been put to desperate shifts for quite small sums. If he ever recalled that decade of adventure it was as something remote and unrelated to man's estate, like an end-of-term shortness of pocket money at school.

  For the rest of the war and for the first drab years of peace he had appeared on the national register as "farmer"; that is to say, he lived in the country in ease and plenty. Two dead men, Freddy Sothill and Cedric Lyne, had left ample cellars. Basil drained them. He had once expressed the wish to become one of the "hard-faced men who had done well out of the war." Basil's face, once very hard, softened and rounded. His scar became almost invisible in rosy suffusion. None of his few clothes, he found, now buttoned comfortably and when, in that time of European scarcity, he and Angela went to New York, where such things could then still be procured by the well-informed, he bought suits and shirts and shoes by the dozen and a whole treasury of watches, tie-pins, cuff-links and chains so that on his return, having scrupulously declared them and paid full duty at the customs—a thing he had never in his life done before—he remarked of his elder brother, who, after a tediously successful diplomatic career spent in gold-lace or starched linen allowed himself in retirement (and reduced circumstances) some laxity in dress: "Poor Tony goes about looking like a scarecrow."