The Star (14 page)

‘Just to show who was now the boss, Osbert left the apparatus switched on; he had always wondered if Ermintrude talked to herself as a purely automatic reflex even when there was no one around to hear what she was saying. He had, by the way, thoughtfully taken the precaution of putting a lock on the Counter so that his wife couldn’t turn it off while he was out.

‘He was a little disappointed to find that the figures were quite unaltered when he came home that evening, but thereafter the score soon started to mount again. It became a kind of game—though a deadly serious one—with each of the protagonists keeping one eye on the machine whenever either of them said a word. Ermintrude was clearly discomfited: ever and again she would suffer a verbal relapse and increase her score by a couple of hundred before she brought herself to a halt by a supreme effort of self-control. Osbert, who still had such a lead that he could afford to be garrulous, amused himself by making occasional sardonic comments which were well worth the expenditure of a few-score points.

‘Although a measure of equality had been restored in the Inch household, the Word Counter had, if anything, increased the state of dissension. Presently Ermintrude, who had a certain natural intelligence which some people might have called craftiness, made an appeal to her husband’s better nature. She pointed out that neither of them was really behaving naturally while every word was being monitored and counted; Osbert had unfairly let her get ahead and was now being taciturn in a way that he would never have been had he not got that warning score continuously before his eyes. Though Osbert gagged at the sheer effrontery of this charge, he had to admit that the objection did contain an element of truth. The test would be fairer and more conclusive if neither of them could see the accumulating score—if, indeed, they forgot all about the presence of the machine and so behaved perfectly naturally, or at least as naturally as they could in the circumstances.

‘After much argument they came to a compromise. Very sportingly, in his opinion, Osbert reset the dials to zero and sealed up the Counter windows so that no one could take a peek at the scores. They agreed to break the wax seals—on which they had both impressed their fingerprints—at the end of the week, and to abide by the decision. Concealing the microphone under a table, Osbert moved the Counter equipment itself into his little workshop, so that the living room now bore no sign of the implacable electronic watchdog that was controlling the destiny of the Inches.

‘Thereafter, things slowly returned to normal. Ermintrude became as talkative as ever, but now Osbert didn’t mind in the least because he knew that every word she uttered was being patiently noted to be used as evidence against her. At the end of the week, his triumph would be complete. He could afford to allow himself the luxury of a couple of hundred words a day, knowing that Ermintrude used up this allowance in five minutes.

‘The breaking of the seals was performed ceremonially at the end of an unusually talkative day, when Ermintrude had repeated verbatim three telephone conversations of excruciating banality which, it seemed, had occupied most of her afternoon. Osbert had merely smiled and said “Yes, dear” at ten-minute intervals, meanwhile trying to imagine what excuse his wife would put forward when confronted by the damning evidence.

‘Imagine, therefore, his feelings when the seals were removed to disclose the week’s total:

‘Osbert stared at the incredible figures with stunned disbelief.
Something
had gone wrong—but where? There must, he decided, have been a fault in the apparatus. It was annoying, very annoying, for he knew perfectly well that Ermintrude would never let him live it down, even if he proved conclusively that the Counter had gone haywire.

‘Ermintrude was still crowing victoriously when Osbert pushed her out of the room and started to dismantle his errant equipment. He was halfway through the job when he noticed something in his wastepaper basket which he was sure he hadn’t put there. It was a closed loop of tape, a couple of feet long, and he was quite unable to account for its presence as he had not used the tape recorder for several days. He picked it up, and as he did so suspicion exploded into certainty.

‘He glanced at the recorder; the switches, he was quite sure, were not as he had left them. Ermintrude was crafty, but she was also careless. Osbert had often complained that she never did a job properly, and here was the final proof.

‘His den was littered with old tapes carrying unerased test passages he had recorded; it had been no trouble at all for Ermintrude to locate one, snip off a few words, stick the ends together, switch to “Playback” and leave the machine running hour after hour in front of the microphone. Osbert was furious with himself for not having thought of so simple a ruse; if the tape had been strong enough, he would probably have strangled Ermintrude with it.

‘Whether he tried to do anything of the sort is still uncertain. All we know is that she went out of the apartment window, and of course it could have been an accident—but there was no way of asking her, as the Inches lived four storeys up.

‘I know that defenestration is usually deliberate, and the Coroner had some pointed words to say on the subject. But nobody could prove that Osbert pushed her, and the whole thing soon blew over. About a year later he married a charming little deaf-and-dumb girl, and they’re one of the happiest couples I know.’

There was a long pause when Harry had finished, whether out of disbelief or out of respect for the late Mrs Inch it would be hard to say. But before anyone could make a suitable comment, the door was thrown open and a formidable blonde advanced into the private bar of the ‘White Hart’.

It is seldom indeed that life arranges its climaxes as neatly as this. Harry Purvis turned very pale and tried, in vain, to hide himself in the crowd. He was instantly spotted and pinned down beneath a barrage of invective.

‘So
this
,’ we heard with interest, ‘is where you’ve been giving your Wednesday evening lectures on quantum mechanics! I should have checked up with the University years ago! Harry Purvis, you’re a liar, and I don’t mind if everybody knows it. And as for your friends’—she gave us all a scathing look—‘it’s a long time since I’ve seen such a scruffy lot of tipplers.’

‘Hey, just a minute!’ protested Drew from the other side of the counter. She quelled him with a glance, then turned upon poor Harry again.

‘Come along,’ she said, ‘you’re going home. No, you needn’t finish that drink! I’m sure you’ve already had more than enough.’

Obediently, Harry Purvis picked up his briefcase and coat.

‘Very well, Ermintrude,’ he said meekly.

I will not bore you with the long and still unsettled arguments as to whether Mrs Purvis really was called Ermintrude, or whether Harry was so dazed that he automatically applied the name to her. We all have our theories about that, as indeed we have about everything concerning Harry. All that matters now is the sad and indisputable fact that no one has ever seen him since that evening.

It is just possible that he doesn’t know where we meet nowadays, for a few months later the ‘White Hart’ was taken over by a new management and we all followed Drew lock, stock and barrel—particularly barrel—to his new establishment. Our weekly sessions now take place at the ‘Sphere’, and for a long time many of us used to look up hopefully when the door opened to see if Harry had managed to escape and find his way back to us. It is, indeed, partly in the hope that he will see this book and hence discover our new location that I have gathered these tales together.

Even those who never believed a word you spoke miss you, Harry. If you have to defenestrate Ermintrude to regain your freedom, do it on a Wednesday evening between six and eleven, and there’ll be forty people in the ‘Sphere’ who’ll provide you with an alibi. But get back
somehow
; things have never been quite the same since you went.

The Ultimate Melody

First published in
If
, February 1957

Collected in
Tales from the White Hart

Have you ever noticed that, when there are twenty or thirty people talking together in a room, there are occasional moments when everyone becomes suddenly silent, so that for a second there’s a sudden, vibrating emptiness that seems to swallow up all sound? I don’t know how it affects other people, but when it happens it makes me feel cold all over. Of course, the whole thing’s merely caused by the laws of probability, but somehow it seems more than a mere coinciding of conversational pauses. It’s almost as if everybody is listening for something—they don’t know what. At such moments I say to myself:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near…

That’s how
I
feel about it, however cheerful the company in which it happens. Yes, even if it’s in the ‘White Hart’.

It was like that one Wednesday evening when the place wasn’t quite as crowded as usual. The silence came, as unexpectedly as it always does. Then, probably in a deliberate attempt to break that unsettling feeling of suspense, Charlie Willis started whistling the latest hit tune. I don’t even remember what it was. I only remember that it triggered off one of Harry Purvis’s most disturbing stories.

‘Charlie,’ he began, quietly enough, ‘that darn tune’s driving me mad. I’ve heard it every time I’ve switched on the radio for the last week.’

There was a sniff from John Christopher.

‘You ought to stay tuned to the Third Programme. Then you’d be safe.’

‘Some of us,’ retorted Harry, ‘don’t care for an exclusive diet of Elizabethan madrigals. But don’t let’s quarrel about
that
, for heaven’s sake. Has it ever occurred to you that there’s something rather—fundamental—about hit tunes?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, they come along out of nowhere, and then for weeks everybody’s humming them, just as Charlie did then. The good ones grab hold of you so thoroughly that you just can’t get them out of your head—they go round and round for days. And then, suddenly, they’ve vanished again.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Art Vincent. ‘There are some melodies that you can take or leave, but others stick like treacle, whether you want them or not.’

‘Precisely. I got saddled that way for a whole week with the big theme from the finale of Sibelius Two—even went to sleep with it running round inside my head. Then there’s that “Third Man” piece—da di da di
daa
dida di
daa
… look what
that
did to everybody.’

Harry had to pause for a moment until his audience had stopped zithering. When the last ‘Plonk!’ had died away he continued:

‘Precisely! You all felt the same way. Now what
is
there about these tunes that has this effect? Some of them are great music, other just banal—but they’ve obviously got
something
in common.’

‘Go on,’ said Charlie. ‘We’re waiting.’

‘I don’t know what the answer is,’ replied Harry. ‘And what’s more, I don’t want to. For I know a man who found out.’

Automatically, someone handed him a beer, so that the tenor of his tale would not be disturbed. It always annoyed a lot of people when he had to stop in mid-flight for a refill.

‘I don’t know why it is,’ said Harry Purvis, ‘that most scientists are interested in music, but it’s an undeniable fact. I’ve known several large labs that had their own amateur symphony orchestras—some of them quite good, too. As far as the mathematicians are concerned, one can think of obvious reasons for this fondness: music, particularly classical music, has a form which is almost mathematical. And then, of course, there’s the underlying theory—harmonic relations, wave analysis, frequency distribution, and so on. It’s a fascinating study in itself, and one that appeals strongly to the scientific mind. Moreover, it doesn’t—as some people might think—preclude a purely aesthetic appreciation of music for its own sake.

‘However, I must confess that Gilbert Lister’s interest in music was purely cerebral. He was, primarily, a physiologist, specialising in the study of the brain. So when I said that his interest was cerebral, I meant it quite literally. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and the Choral Symphony were all the same to him. He wasn’t concerned with the sounds themselves, but only what happened when they got past the ears and started doing things to the brain.

‘In an audience as well educated as this,’ said Harry, with an emphasis that made it sound positively insulting, ‘there will be no one who’s unaware of the fact that much of the brain’s activity is electrical. There are, in fact, steady pulsing rhythms going on all the time, and they can be detected and analysed by modern instruments. This was Gilbert Lister’s line of territory. He could stick electrodes on your scalp and his amplifiers would draw your brain waves on yards of tape. Then he could examine them and tell you all sorts of interesting things about yourself. Ultimately, he claimed, it would be possible to identify anyone from their encephalogram—to use the correct term—more positively than by fingerprints. A man might get a surgeon to change his skin, but if we ever got to the stage when surgery could change your brain—well, you’d have turned into somebody else, anyway, so the system still wouldn’t have failed.

‘It was while he was studying the alpha, beta and other rhythms in the brain that Gilbert got interested in music. He was sure that there must be some connection between musical and mental rhythms. He’d play music at various tempos to his subjects and see what effect it had on their normal brain frequencies. As you might expect, it had a lot, and the discoveries he made led Gilbert on into more philosophical fields.

‘I only had one good talk with him about his theories. It was not that he was at all secretive—I’ve never met a scientist who was, come to think of it—but he didn’t like to talk about his work until he knew where it was leading. However, what he told me was enough to prove that he’d opened up a very interesting line of territory, and thereafter I made rather a point of cultivating him. My firm supplied some of his equipment, but I wasn’t averse to picking up a little profit on the side. It occurred to me that
if
Gilbert’s ideas worked out, he’d need a business manager before you could whistle the opening bar of the Fifth Symphony….