The Bat that Flits
By
NORMAN COLLINS
NOTE
There is no Government Station for Anti-Bacteriological Warfare at Bodmin. And there are no real-life counterparts of any of the charactersâEnglish, German or American; male or female; Protestant or Catholic; Communist, Labour, Liberal or Conservative. The only person, therefore, who could have any possible excuse for kicking up a bit of trouble for alleged defamation of character is the authorâbut that is a risk that is inevitable with all tales told in the first-person-singular.
The Bat that flits at close of Eve
Has left the Brain that won't Believe
.
WILLIAM
1
To get to the house you go straight up over the moor. And, if you like moors, you could probably search the entire northern temperate zone without finding a better one. There are several families of buzzards; one or two quite interesting moths; a sub-species of mosquito as fierce and almost as large as flying Alsatians; and a half-excavated Early British settlement, complete with the gate-stone still in situ, which is not bad considering that the whole thing is a collector's piece left over from a previous civilisation. Add to that some beautiful sunsets by Turner out of Technicolor, a china-clay pyramid or two, various wandering posses of suspicious and distinctly inedible-looking sheep, and the list of rural charms is just about complete.
It was the elderly, moustached barmaid at the Tremant Arms who said that the moor is at its absolute best in springtime. I wasn't in a good position to judge. When I got to Bodmin the whole of the West Country winter stood in between me and the spring, and I had already decided that I was allergic to moors at any season.
But perhaps I wasn't in the right mood for enthusiasm of any kind. Bodmin is two hundred and fifty-six miles from London, and I had been on the go ever since eight-thirty that morning. The dew had still been on the pavements when I had paid off my landlady in Maida Vale and placed myself, body, digestion and soul into the care of British Railways.
As it happened, body and digestion were all right. The food was a bit better than I had expectedâgrape-fruit, a piece of perfectly recognisable fish, a reasonably ripe Camembertâand a steward who did not seem actually to dislike serving it. It was the soul that was starved, not the body.
And that was entirely my fault. At Paddington, I had bought two American thrillers,
Picture Post
and a copy of
Lilliput
. I usually start with the pictures first, and I had opened
Lilliput
while the train was still drawing out of the platform. Eve Unashamed was the title to one of the illustrations, as though Unashamed were the young lady's family surname, and she reminded me vaguely of someone I'd known up at Cambridge. I began to wonder what had become of her. And that started me off. From then on as far as Exeter I thought about the past. I went over the whole thirty-five years three months of it.
For a start, I am an only child. I have wondered at times if perhaps that has had something to do with itâno proper community spirit fostered in the nursery, and that sort of thing. At my prep, school I was about averagely average. At Harrow, which nearly broke my father in sending me there because clergymen even then couldn't afford that kind of nostalgic luxury any longer, I was a bit more promising. Then came Trinity, where I foxed them all by getting a very middling sort of Second when everybody had predicted something pretty brilliant in the way of a First. And after that I joined the Research side of World Drug Proprietaries Inc.
I had left home by then and moved into digs. Remarkably uncomfortable ones, too. They were in Bloomsbury on the Gray's Inn Road side. The smell of boiled cabbage fairly knocked you back as you came in through the front door,
and you had to sit on the flannel in the bath-tub to avoid being shredded by the chipped enamel.
The War interrupted most people's lives. But not mine. I remained with that bath all through. My work was in Gower Streetâon tropical diseases. And I never got nearer to the tropics than occasional visits to the hotter dance halls in the Tottenham Court Road, in company with miscellaneous probationer nurses from University College Hospital. When the War finally packed up I went back to World Drug Proprietaries Inc. at my old salary of six-fifty. And then came the rowâthe big oneâover scientific integrity versus the Publicity Director. We parted company, World Drug Proprietaries and I, with three months' salary in lieu of notice and an air of mutual relief that was like a reprieve from the Home Secretary. And now there was this Government job at Bodmin.
That's really all about me, except that the full name is James Wendell (after my mother) Hudson, and that I have a scar right down one side of the face from a motor accident when my brakes failed on me.
As I went over this piece of natural history, I felt that sitting there in the train I could have dictated a whole manual, complete with glossary and testimonials, on How to Side-Step Success and Antagonise People. The rest of the reading matter that I had with me was just no good at all. I found I had already seen
Picture Post
; and the two American thrillers were probably written for the English market in some back bed-sitter in Bournemouth or Cheltenham. They were full of cops slugging dames and private investigation agents making love to nymphomaniac oil-heiresses; and by the time the train had reached Oke-hampton I'd had enough of all of them.
There was nothing for it, therefore, but to get my bag down off the rack and start in on some of my homework. It was quite an interesting little volume that I had with me, published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow. The title was
Materials on the Trial of Former Serviceman of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons
. That's my line, you see, bacteriological warfare. And the Government Station at Bodmin was where most of the advanced work was going on.
I had just got really interested in a bit about plague-infested fleas being dropped in fragmentation bombs on Russian prisoners tied to stakes driven into the ground, when I heard an ex-G.W.R. stationmaster calling out “Bodmin.” That shook me.
Fleas and all, I nearly got carried on to Truro.
It was as I was getting into the hire-car after my drink that I realised how far Bodmin really is from the centre of things. The car was like something in a Transport exhibition, and the interior was full of blinds and tassels and tortoise-shell handles. There was even a bottle of smelling salts close alongside a cut-glass vase full of artificial flowers. By the time we'd done a hundred yards, I felt like some faded Bodmin beauty having a last bash at the altar before the deep Cornish night finally closed down on her.
I hadn't bothered to ask how far it was. It was consoling enough to find that anybody except the War House and the Min. of S. had ever heard of it. I had been quite prepared to discover that the whole thing was simply a typing error
somewhere in Whitehall. All the same, I was relieved when the car finally lurched to a standstill. And the fact that we had really got there was announced by the appearance of a perfectly convincing-looking commissionaire in a blue uniform and a regulation peaked cap. It was like meeting a traffic-cop in the Sahara.
Because it was our first meeting everything was a bit on the formal side. And this was silly. The commissionaire certainly knew who I was because he said that he had been expecting me. And I might have been presumed to know, too, because I had got there. But he evidently wanted to be quite sure. There was apparently some sort of white Pass, marked “SECRET: VALID FOR ONE VISIT ONLY” that I dimly remembered when he began talking about it. I must have put it into my other suit. And that meant that it was somewhere underneath about half a hundredweight of miscellaneous junk in my suit-case. So, finally, I had to show him the letter of appointment that I still had with me in my pocket. The letter seemed to satisfy him, however. I think that it must have been the first real letter that he had ever been allowed to hold. He even tried to read it right through, including all the bits about salary and compulsory pension fund deductions, before I took it away from him again.
Then with a lot of snorting and clankings, the double gates of Penmawr were swung open and the wedding-hearse from Bodmin passed victoriously through. I learnt later that there were about half a dozen other ways of getting into the grounds without enduring all that chain and padlock business. We had hikers in the paratyphoid block once, and they came straight in past the stables.
I don't think that I can have made a particularly good impression when I got to the house. The letter had told me
to ask straight away for the Director, Dr. Clewes. And when I was shown into what seemed to be the drawing-room I found that Mrs. Clewes had been waiting tea for me. They had hung on, it seemed, until nearly half-past five and had then eaten a lot of leathery toast washed down by some pretty lukewarm tea. They offered to make a fresh pot specially for me. But there was too much of the no-trouble-at-all-it-won't-take-a-minute sort of talk about it, and I said no thank you. But it was evidently a point to note: the ideal new research assistant does not hang about waiting for the pubs to open if his Director's wife is expecting him.
Mrs. Clewes did not seem a bad sort, however. A bit faded and with the air of having expected better things of lifeâit's funny how the wives of most scientists are like thatâshe had a nervous trick of using her handkerchief every other moment as though she had just been crying. But, at any rate, she was better than the other sort, the witty, Gorgon kind: Cambridge in my time had been full of them.
And the Old Man himself was all right. He was elderly and rather short-sighted, with eyebrows that were several sizes too big for his face. It occurred to me then that if they were thinned out and cut back a bit he'd be able to wear his glasses better. And later on when I saw him, all tangled and hairy, trying to look down a microscope I knew that those eyebrows were by way of being a national liability. He was like a prawn trying to do microscopy.
There was one other person there, a young woman. I took a good look at her, and then shied away. That was because I had met her sort before. She was the dark, sleazy-haired, demure type; the kind that look as though they have just drowned the baby, but would rather not talk about it please. She might even have been quite good looking if she had allowed anybody to see her eyes. As it was, she sat there
exactly where she knew that the lamp-light would fall on her hair, and kept her lashes drawn like Venetian blinds.
It was a rather difficult party. For a start, I was two whiskies up on all of them and, in any case, half cold tea probably counts a minus. Then I had rehearsed my own part just a shade too strenuously. I was determined to show myself as someone who was alert, intelligent, well informed. And, in the result, I talked too much. I remember that I put the Director right on social credit, war in Asia, the tsetse fly, the Georgian Group and the Marx brothers. The tsetse fly and the Marx brothers were the only two on which I was really sure of my facts, and on the Marx brothers I was more than knowledgeable: I was brilliant. There was a long pause when I had finished. The Herr Direktor's wife promised that she would make a point of listening next time they were on, and could I remember which wave-length please. We left it at that.