The Meddlers (33 page)

She looked down at him as he came up the worn steps past the rusted lacework of the iron railings and thought suddenly, Suppose he won’t? I’ve made the decision, but he is part of it, after all. Suppose he refuses? But Norma had made it clear in her exposition that such a response was unlikely.

She drew the curtains and looked briefly around the dim room as the bell pealed, and then turned on the table lamp in front of the hissing gas fire, adding its yellow glow to the redness, and collectedly walked to the door and pressed the intercom button.

“Yes? Who is it?” She was pleased with the calmness in her voice.

“Bridges,” came the thin voice through the microphone far below on the front door jamb. “Mike Bridges.”

“Come in. Top floor. The front flat.” And she pressed the button to release the door-opening mechanism.

She was sitting on the sofa beside the fire in the pool of light thrown by the lamp when he came through the door she had left open for him and stood for a moment looking at her after he had closed it behind him.

“Good evening,” she said. “You keep good time. I prepared sandwiches and coffee. Will that be adequate for you?”

“You needn’t have bothered,” he said and shrugged out of his coat. “I had planned to take you out to eat.”

“There’s a hook behind the door. No thank you. I prefer we should stay here. Do you mind?”

“Not in the least. I live on sandwiches and coffee anyway. Is it good coffee, or instant muck?” He smiled at her as he came and sat on the sofa beside her. “I’m a shocking coffee snob.”

“It’s percolated Blue Mountain, a medium grind. I too like my coffee well made. Black or white?”

“Black, please. Thank you. Dear me. Pumpernickel! You have exotic tastes in bread.”

“It was all the shop had,” she said absently, giving him his mug of coffee. “There would appear to be a demand in this district for foreign foods.”

“And for sweet-roasted ham too. Excellent. This is an odd room.”

“Odd? In what way?” she leaned back, cradling her own coffee mug in both hands.

“It’s so… impersonal. No sign of the impact a personality usually makes on a room. Or perhaps you haven’t lived here long?”

“Five years. Ever since I came down from University.”

“Oh? Then you aren’t the sort of woman people call a home-maker, is that it?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps not. I’ve never thought about it. I’ve been too busy working.”

He looked at her with real curiosity. “You’ve always been in research? You must have good grants.”

“No grants. I have a small income left by my father. It’s adequate to my needs.” She smiled thinly. “Were you hoping to paint a pathetic picture of devoted science in a garret? I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“No, not at all. But I’m always curious about people’s money. I’ve only got what I earn, and I know how bloody little of it there is. I’m very impressed. I rarely meet people who live on private means. Quite the aristocratic touch.”

“Seven hundred a year isn’t very aristocratic.”

“But it means a reasonable capital, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t really know. It’s a trust fund, handled by my bank. Why are you so concerned about it?”

“I’m not. I’m just… making conversation, I suppose. May I have some more coffee?”

“There’s no need to make conversation, is there? You have questions to ask. About my views on the ethical aspects of the Briant project? Help yourself to sugar.”

“Yes. But I find myself rather more interested in you, as a person.
Or does saying that alarm you? You accused me this morning of planning to write sentimental claptrap.”

“You’ve changed.”

“What?”

“This morning you were… gay. Flippant. Now you seem to be more—oh, I don’t know. Solemn.”

“That was technique this morning. I needed to get over your suspicions, and the flip approach works best. But if you prefer, I can turn it on again. I keep it on tap.”

“No. I think not. The, er, approach you are using now fits better with my own ideas.”

“Oh?”

Deliberately, she put down her mug and leaned back in her corner, looking in her characteristic way at her hands clasped in her lap.

“You’re interested in my personal response to my part in the project, as well as my views on the ethics of it.”

He too abandoned his coffee mug and leaned back, folding his arms and looking at her bent head. She’s the one who is different, he thought, puzzlement creeping into him. Quite different. Relaxed? No, not that. Far from it. But she even looks different. As though her edges were more clear-cut. This morning there was a sort of fuzziness to her outline.

“Of course I’m interested,” he said. “I said so.”

She looked up and returned his gaze very levelly and then smiled briefly, and it lifted her expression, softening it so that the thin cheeks rounded, blurring the sharp planes of her face.

“You told me you’re a scientist too. And as a scientist, you should be able to accept what I’m going to say to you without too much surprise.”

“I’m already surprised. You’re so different. This morning—”

“This morning I had a problem. Now I am on the way to solving it, with your cooperation.”

“Oh? And here was I thinking you were solving my problem.”

“And what is that?”

“A boss who wants a story about you.”

She shrugged that away. “You must put it in abeyance. I’m not really concerned about it right now.”

“Then why did you agree to see me this evening? Isn’t that the whole purpose of this discussion? Why else am I here?”

“As far as I am concerned, you’re here to help me solve a problem that has become… irritating. It’s interfering with my work, even my health, which has always been excellent. And meeting you this morning was a most fortuitous circumstance, I now realize.”

“Do you always use such pompous language when you’re about to ask favors?”

“Pompous?” She frowned. “And who said anything about favors? As I understand these things, what I want of you will be as much to your benefit as mine.”

“You’re beginning to irritate me. I can carry on circular conversations with the best of them, but usually such talk is only necessary when neither side has anything much to say. If you have got something to say, why not just get on with it? And for God’s sake, try to stop wrapping it up in
New Statesman
journalese.”

“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “Very well. You know that I entered into the Briant project on a short-term basis. That is, my function was to—well, incubate the infant. After the birth I was free to return to my own interests.”

“Yes.”

“Do you find anything… odd in my willingness to do this?”

There was a long pause, and then he said slowly, “In some ways, of course. Who wouldn’t? For a young woman to … to surrender herself to so intense a personal experience while apparently expecting no personal involvement, it is odd in normal terms.”

She nodded. “A fair point of view. At first I was thoroughly annoyed by it, when it was made in newspapers and on television. It had seemed to me a perfectly reasonable thing to do, in scientific terms. I couldn’t see what people were getting at, accusing me of … of unnaturalness. To me, science is as natural as breathing. I simply couldn’t comprehend what place personal feelings had in the matter.”

Again she looked up at him and smiled thinly. “Well, I was wrong. Because of my lack of experience in … in matters of … of feeling, I was basing my attitude on inadequate knowledge. Most unscientific of me—”

“That’s better,” he said softly.

“What is?”

“You’re embarrassed. I still don’t know what it is you’re getting at, but it’s embarrassing you, and I find that refreshing.”

“It isn’t easy for me to talk of feelings. I … I have never cared much for indulgence in emotionalism. It has always seemed to me to be so wasteful and messy, and—” She shrugged. “Well, I have been forced to see that it is impossible to eradicate all emotionalism, however much I might wish to do so.”

“Are you unhappy about the baby?” There was a gentleness in his voice, and she looked at him in puzzlement.

“The baby? No. Why should I be?”

“Why should—for heaven’s sake, girl, women who have babies, no matter under what circumstances, usually feel something for them.”

“The baby is in good hands. Why should I be worried?”

“You don’t feel anything for him at all?”

“Oh, an interest in the information the infant is providing, certainly! If I hadn’t been interested in the project as a project, I would hardly have become involved, would I? There’s no reason why I should feel any emotional rapport with the child, though. I never saw it, and—”

“So Briant was right about that much. Mother love doesn’t arise spontaneously. Certainly not in you. Well, all right. If it isn’t the baby that’s worrying you, what is?”

“My… my own responses.”

“Oh? In what way?”

She spoke in a low voice now, still looking at her hands. “Since the birth I have discovered in myself a need I didn’t know existed. According to a—someone to whom I talked about my changed— the way I have been feeling—it is biologically, er, triggered off.”

She looked up at his face and then slid her eyes away again. “It
seems that for women reproduction and sexual activity are inextricably linked. That experience of one without the other creates problems—”

He laughed suddenly. “Well, of course! It isn’t possible to have one without the other!”

“Isn’t it?” She sounded suddenly angry. “Don’t be so stupid! Of course it is! Even with the… with the sexually sheltered life I’ve led, I’ve heard about contraception! It is certainly possible to divorce sexual experience from reproduction, and from some of the reading I’ve been doing lately, it seems to me that some of the social malaise of which we hear so much derives from it. And”— she spoke with a sharp bitterness in her voice—“and look at me! I’ve done something really different. I’ve divorced reproduction from sex! Haven’t I? The whole bloody world knows it, including you! George was hardly secretive about the fact that I was an unsullied virgin, was he?”

She stood up suddenly and moved to stand in front of the fire, leaning her arms on the mantel shelf above it and looking down at the hissing red-blue jets. He looked at her back, so vulnerable in its rigid control, and wanted to touch her, to make her relax. She ought to cry, he thought. Which was an odd idea for him, for he disliked seeing a woman weep.

“And Norma told me that was the root of my problem. She said—”

“Norma?”

“Oh, Norma Gould, a GP I know. I … I went to see her about the way I was feeling, and she said—oh, not in so many words, but she made it clear, and it makes sense.”

She turned now and looked at him very directly. “My trouble is that I need to complete a physiological cycle. Normally, a woman has sexual experience and thereafter produces an infant. This total activity releases her, relieves her of a biological need. Until I entered the project, I was quite unaware of the existence of this need in me, as an individual. But having the child seems to … to have triggered off the mechanism. And I now know that until I … until I close the circuit, as it were, I will feel as I do now.”

He was sitting up very straight now and staring at her. “I am not certain that I understand just what it is—look, I don’t want to jump to a conclusion, but are you trying to tell me, are you asking me to—” He stopped and shook his head in frank bewilderment. “I must have misunderstood you.”

“I’m asking you to provide the sexual experience I have never had,” she said in a level voice, still looking at him very directly. “To complete the pattern for me.”

“But why me?” he said stupidly.

She moved then to cross the room and stand beside the desk in front of the curtained window, her back to him.

“There isn’t anyone else I could ask.”

“But—”

“Oh, think it out for yourself!” She turned and looked at him again, and there was irritation in her voice. “If I were the sort of person who… who had people on tap to provide this experience, I would hardly have reached the age of twenty-six without having had it, would I? The very thing that made me suitable for the project—well, one of them—was my bloody virginity! I think I realized—oh, it was three weeks ago—what it was I needed, but what could I do? March out into the street and pick up the first man who walked along and say, ‘Please, sir…’ Do be logical!”

“So as soon as you met me this morning, you decided in cold blood to—”

“No, I didn’t. It wasn’t until I talked to you in the café that it occurred to me.”

“Do you like me?” he asked abruptly.

“Like you? I haven’t thought about it.”

“Look, if you said to me you fancied me, that you took a look this morning and thought you’d like to go to bed with me, it’d make sense, in my language. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. Times have changed, and plenty of girls these days”—he shrugged slightly—“put it on a plate, to be crude. But this, to suggest I should oblige you like some—oh, I don’t know. You make me feel like a stud bull, for Christ’s sake! What sort of man do you take me for?”

“But men don’t have to be involved with the women they have sex with.” She sounded genuinely puzzled.

“Who told you that?”

“Norma. She said men operate in a different way. And she should know. She’s always been very interested in—”

“It may be true of some men. And if I were honest, I’d admit there have been plenty of times I’ve been involved—sexually involved—with girls I didn’t particularly care about. But I’ve got to fancy them, for Christ’s sake! There’s got to be something, some sort of spark.”

Her face was expressionless. “And you don’t find me—you don’t feel you want to help me. I provide no spark.”

“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with you! You’re a good-looking girl, and—oh, my God! You make me feel so—I don’t know.” He stood up too and began to move restlessly about the room, rubbing the back of his head so that his hair ruffled absurdly. She watched him silently.

“I don’t know,” he said again. It was quite extraordinary, the confusion he felt. He should have been repelled by her cool invitation, or angry because of her apparent lack of interest in him as a person, yet there was no sense of repulsion, no anger in him. There was, rather, a thickening nervous excitement, a feeling of being painfully young and helpless mixed up with a sense of inevitability, of
déjà vu
.