The Meddlers (37 page)

Isobel felt the warmth of her behind her back, and then felt Barbara’s body come closer, lean over her, reaching for the buttons of her blouse, and she raised her shoulder sharply.

“Let’s start, shall we? That’s right.”

Slowly, Isobel began to fumble at the buttons, feeling her fingers cold and clumsy, as though they were inanimate, like the buttons themselves, never taking her eyes from the baby’s face.

His gaze shifted, moved downward, and then it started. His mouth opened and closed, and his eyes got smaller as his face
crumpled up with eagerness, and he was trying to lift his head toward her as her breasts were exposed.

And the crying came again, as sharp as a needle, cutting into her ears with hot pain, and he was squirming, trying to get closer to her, and Dr. Briant’s voice rose above the noise, exhorting her, loudly and insistently. “That’s right. No,
don’t
lift him, don’t lift him. Let him cry. That’s right, hold it till he’s had a full minute of it—a full minute. Vernon, you signal it. Hold it, Miss Quinn. Well done, Barbara…”

She had tried to slide her hand under his body, tried to help him so that he could reach the nipple he was screaming for so piteously, but Barbara’s hand was strong and heavy on her elbow, holding her back, and she could only sit in anguish staring at him as he lay on her lap rigid with fury and misery and the need of her.

“Fifty seconds, fifty-five, sixty…” Vernon said.

And George called sharply, “Right! Now, Miss Quinn, now, do you hear? Just a tap, that’s all.”

Barbara’s hand on her elbow tightened, and Isobel felt her arm rise, the hand feeling dead and lumpy at the end of it, and then they were all calling at her above the noise of his screaming: “Now, now! Just a tap!” And she had to, because she couldn’t fight them any more, and with her left hand she held up his feet so that his bare bottom was clear of her lap, and she let Barbara swing her arm back for her, and then felt the contact between her palm and his skin, as sharp and ugly as the wailing, squalling noise that was filling her whole body with pain and misery.

And then he screamed louder, and his face, already so red, seemed to darken, becoming bluish white around the gaping blackness that was his mouth, and then there was a thick sickening silence as he fought to catch his breath again before screaming even more furiously.

It seemed to Isobel that she was sitting in a deep tunnel, with a tiny gap of light far above her, inside which she could see it all happening. It was as though she were an outside observer sitting helplessly watching the misery of the woman and baby far above her in that tiny square that was the top of the pit in which she was
buried, useless and helpless and hating and hopeless. And it happened again, twice more, the baby’s attempts to reach the breast, the other Isobel, the one she was watching, holding her shoulders rigid and letting herself be forced into smacking at the narrow little buttocks. And then it ceased, and they let her lift him, just as she had that first time, let him see the breast, and then she was arching her back, the Isobel in the gap at the top of the tunnel, and it was as though she were moving now, coming up toward the top of the darkness. And the square she was watching grew, expanding slowly until she was there again, reunited with herself, and the baby was at her breast suckling and pulling at her in enraged hunger, and the sound of his crying was only an echo in her head, rolling around and around and hitting at her ears and eyes with pain.

“Good girl, good girl. You did that splendidly. Didn’t she, George? Splendidly, and I know it was difficult for you. Well done, Miss Quinn.”

“Yes, indeed, Miss Quinn, well done. That really was a most dramatic series of responses—most valuable. And you can see, can’t you, how quickly he’s adapted? No breast refusal this time, once it became available. Excellent.”

She let them talk on, hearing their voices rising and falling about her, keeping a curious rhythm with the rise and fall inside herself as she thought about it, thought painfully, for the words wouldn’t come into her mind as they usually did, only pictures.

She saw the drawer in her bedside table with its neat parcels of leftover food, the little heap of clothes she had made for him, all tidily arranged alongside her vests and stockings. She saw herself holding Georgie in her arms, moving slowly along a dark tunnel, just like the awful tunnel she had been sitting in this afternoon, but this tunnel was a good one, not a frightening one, for it wasn’t deep down, but ran straight forward…

“… allowing an hour to process this film, and time to set up reruns of the first session, will that be possible? All of you, then, in an hour. All right Barbara? And, er, Miss Quinn.” Briant turned and looked down at her as she sat in her usual heavy posture, the baby held closely in the crook of her left arm, her other hand cradling his head. “Now you’ve seen the method, I’m sure next time
you’ll be able to manage it without Miss Hervey’s help, don’t you think so?”

“Yes, sir, thank you,” she said, but she didn’t look up, keeping her head bent over Georgie’s intent face. But now words were forming in her head, making a soothing rhythm that seemed to fit the sounds of their footsteps as they went away and the door closed behind them.

No more, my lovely one. No more. God’s on your side, our side, Georgie, my little lovely, and I’m all ready. In an hour, when you’re fed, and they’re watching it again. Just an hour, my pretty one, my lovely one…

  There was exhilaration in him, a refreshing sense of deep satisfaction, as he leaned back in his chair and looked across the desk at them, apparently quite unaware of the weariness, the longing to get away, that filled all four of them.

“A most constructive afternoon’s work, most valuable indeed. It has helped me decide on the date of a preliminary paper. I hadn’t planned to report on the conception and its selection, or on the birth, until I had some certainty that our first extrapolations were being supported by demonstrable results. Now, what would you say? Would you regard publication of a preliminary report as at all premature?”

“It might get the popular press going again,” Isaacs said. “I imagine they’re watching
Nature
like hawks. It might stir them up all over again, and we all know how you would feel about that.”

Vernon looked irritably at him and then sideways at George. “Dr. Briant can handle them, though, can’t you, sir? And whenever it’s published, there’ll be a response of that sort. So you might as well—”

“George.” Barbara’s voice had a sharp edge to it and George turned his head and looked at her, sitting very erect in the chair beside his own.

She was staring across the room at the monitor screen that showed the nursery, her forehead creased with puzzlement.

“How long since anyone looked at the nursery monitor?” And the other four people facing her over the desk turned and looked
over their shoulders, moving in a ragged chorus line, and George said, “I haven’t been noticing for—what’s the matter?”

Barbara moved swiftly, leaning across the desk to reach the row of buttons that changed the image showing on the monitor from one to the other of the four cameras in the nursery, and they all watched as the picture rolled and then changed. The cot was empty, as they had seen when she had first made them all look at the small screen. The chair beside the bathing table was empty, and so was the feeding area, and so was the entire room view that camera four showed from its vantage point high on the ceiling.

“Christ!” Isaacs said and pushed his chair back so that it fell over, and then they were all moving, plunging past one another, crowding the doorway, and pounding up the stairs, swept by a corporate sense of incredulity.

Isaacs stood back at the top, pushing Vernon to one side as he came up to his level, and the others stopped too, so that it was George who moved forward and pushed open the nursery door and went in first.

They stood clustered in the center of the silent room, staring at the blank furniture, the blind black eyes of the cameras, the empty cot with its gently pulsing mattress and the blue coverlet crumpled at its foot, and there was a silence wrapped about them, a stillness highlighted by the lazy twistings of the mobile over the cot.

George moved then, back out of the door to the corridor, with the five of them trailing after him, their faces blank with disbelief, and again they crowded around him at the door of Isobel’s room, seeming to find it necessary to be close together.

The room was neat and empty, the bed smoothly blank, the small dressing table with its crocheted beige mats tidily centered on the polished wood, the cheap alarm clock ticking loudly on the bedside table.

It was Barbara who saw it, and she pushed past George to cross the room and pick it up from its place under the clock. A piece of yellow paper, with one edge torn, and she looked at it and then gave it to George, who took it mutely and turned it to read the big round letters that marched across the crumpled surface.

“I don’t—it isn’t
possible
,” Barbara said stupidly. “It isn’t
possible
. She can’t have—how did she get out? How—”

Isaacs, who had taken the piece of yellow paper from George’s lax grasp to read it, passed it to Vernon beside him and said defensively, “We were talking, going over the data—”

“We couldn’t have watched,” Vernon said swiftly. “Could we? We had our backs to the screen the whole time. Only you and Dr. Briant could have seen—”

“It just never seemed—we always watch the reruns, select what we want. Who thought to watch in case of something like this? I don’t
believe
it,” Barbara said piteously. “George, for God’s sake, what are we to do? It’s so
incredible
.”

George was standing very still, staring across the room at the bedside table, his face expressionless, and Vernon said tentatively, “A search? Where do we look? How long since she went? She could be anywhere.”

“We were sitting talking for two hours.” Peter Amato spoke for the first time and looked at the girl behind him, standing next to Ralph Davis and Vernon. “Do you remember, Elsa? I showed you my watch, because we were supposed to be going to a…”

His voice trailed away as he looked at George’s unresponsive back, and he flushed and moved closer to the girl standing silently behind him.

“The film ran for twenty-three and a half minutes,” Davis cut in eagerly. “I noticed that because I wanted to match it with tomorrow’s—the timing, I mean, I thought I’d—well, it was twenty-three and a half minutes, so she could have gone any time this past two and a half hours…”

And his voice too trailed away as he looked at George, still standing silently in the doorway of the small room.

“George!” Barbara’s voice was rough with anxiety. “What do you want us to
do
? We’ve got to do something.”

“She warned me.” George’s voice was almost unrecognizable in its flatness. “She warned me, Marjorie warned me, and I ignored it. If I’d listened—two years or more it’s taken, and, oh, my God!” And he took a deep breath and closed his eyes, and Barbara put out her hand and touched his shoulder, her face so twisted by distress that she looked like a caricature of herself.

“Oh, my dear, please,” she said, and he snapped his eyes open and turned and pushed past them toward the stairs, and they followed him like a flock of overgrown nervous hens.

“We’ll have to get the police after her right away,” Vernon said breathlessly as they reached the ground floor. “Sir? Shall I—”

“No! Let me think. Barbara, come into the office. You four—for Christ’s sake, keep out of the way, will you! I’ll tell you in a minute what—Barbara, come here.” And George flung himself at the door of his office, Barbara scuttling behind him.

“If we call the police, we’ll have the whole story all over the place—and what will that do?” He paced the room, uncoordinated movements making him seem stiff and clumsy. “Christ, how could I have been so
stupid
! How could I have let such a thing happen? It’s mad, mad not to have realized she might—I was so sure the woman was incapable of— Barbara, what the hell shall I do?”

He looked at her, his face anguished, and she put out her hands toward him and then dropped them to her sides, a sense of inadequacy swamping her. She shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know, George, I don’t
know
. We’ve got to get him back. But even if we do, after this, how can we go on? She’s… she’s broken the schedule, completely broken it. Even when we get him back, how can we find out what effects—could we? I mean, supposing we can get him back within twenty-four hours? Wouldn’t that be all right? We could do a complete rundown on everything, and with all the data we’ve got we could run a complete comparison, isolate the possible effects of this, allow for them—George? It’s not perhaps as bad as we thought—if we get him back quickly?”

Her gradually developing hopefulness seemed to communicate itself to him, and he stood still and took a deep breath and looked at her for a long moment, his eyes considering. Then he nodded with some of his normal briskness.

“Yes, yes, you’re absolutely right. It isn’t irremediable. I was so shocked for a moment I couldn’t think clearly. But—look, how do we start? Assuming the longest time she’s had—what was it Davis said? Two and a half hours”—he looked at his watch—“and it’s now almost eight. We discovered his loss at—what was it? Just after seven-thirty? She must have gone some time after five, at the start of the rush hour.”

“Which would delay her, surely?”

“… and there can’t be that many women with babies in arms using rush hour travel. She may have been noticed. It should be possible to find a lead.”