The Revolt of Aphrodite (59 page)

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 moved 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
é
tat
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
d
é
m
é
nagement
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 flocculent 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:

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.”