Complete Stories of Eveyln, Page 47

  Among these pilgrims of the dusk, in the weeks that followed his discharge from Mountjoy, moved the exiled Miles Plastic.

  He was in a key department.

  Euthanasia had not been part of the original 1945 Health Service; it was a Tory measure designed to attract votes from the aged and the mortally sick. Under the Bevan-Eden Coalition the service came into general use and won instant popularity. The Union of Teachers was pressing for its application to difficult children. Foreigners came in such numbers to take advantage of the service that immigration authorities now turned back the bearers of single tickets.

  Miles recognized the importance of his appointment even before he began work. On his first evening in the hostel his fellow sub-officials gathered round to question him.

  “Euthanasia? I say, you’re in luck. They work you jolly hard, of course, but it’s the one department that’s expanding.”

  “You’ll get promoted before you know your way about.”

  “Great State! You must have pull. Only the very bright boys get posted to Euthanasia.”

  “I’ve been in Contraception for five years. It’s a blind alley.”

  “They say that in a year or two Euthanasia will have taken over Pensions.”

  “You must be an Orphan.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “That accounts for it. Orphans get all the plums. I had a Full Family Life, State help me.”

  It was gratifying, of course, this respect and envy. It was well to have fine prospects; but for the time being Miles’s duties were humble enough.

  He was junior sub-official in a staff of half a dozen. The Director was an elderly man called Dr. Beamish, a man whose character had been formed in the nervous ’30s, now much embittered, like many of his contemporaries, by the fulfilment of his early hopes. He had signed manifestos in his hot youth, had raised his fist in Barcelona and had painted abstractedly for Horizon; he had stood beside Spender at great concourses of Youth, and written “publicity” for the Last Viceroy. Now his reward had come to him. He held the most envied post in Satellite City and, sardonically, he was making the worst of it. Dr. Beamish rejoiced in every attenuation of official difficulties.

  Satellite City was said to be the worst served Euthanasia Centre in the State. Dr. Beamish’s patients were kept waiting so long that often they died natural deaths before he found it convenient to poison them.

  His small staff respected Dr. Beamish. They were all of the official class, for it was part of the grim little game which Dr. Beamish played with the higher authorities to economize extravagantly. His department, he maintained, could not, on its present allotment, afford workers. Even the furnace-man and the girl who despatched unwanted false teeth to the Dental Redistribution Centre were sub-officials.

  Sub-officials were cheap and plentiful. The Universities turned them out in thousands every year. Indeed, ever since the Incitement to Industry Act of 1955, which exempted workers from taxation—that great and popular measure of reform which had consolidated the now permanent Coalition Government—there had been a nefarious one-way traffic of expensively State-educated officials “passing,” as it was called, into the ranks of the workers.

  Miles’s duties required no special skill. Daily at ten the service opened its doors to welfare-weary citizens. Miles was the man who opened them, stemmed the too eager rush and admitted the first half-dozen; then he closed the doors on the waiting multitude until a Higher Official gave the signal for the admission of another batch.

  Once inside they came briefly under his charge; he set them in order, saw that they did not press ahead of their turn, and adjusted the television set for their amusement. A Higher Official interviewed them, checked their papers and arranged for the confiscation of their property. Miles never passed the door through which they were finally one by one conducted. A faint whiff of cyanide sometimes gave a hint of the mysteries beyond. Meanwhile he swept the waiting room, emptied the wastepaper basket and brewed tea—a worker’s job, for which the refinements of Mountjoy proved a too rich apprenticeship.

  In his hostel the same reproductions of Léger and Picasso as had haunted his childhood still stared down on him. At the cinema, to which he could afford, at the best, a weekly visit, the same films as he had seen free at Orphanage, Air Force station and prison, flickered and drawled before him. He was a child of Welfare, strictly schooled to a life of boredom, but he had known better than this. He had known the tranquil melancholy of the gardens at Mountjoy. He had known ecstasy when the Air Force Training School had whirled to the stars in a typhoon of flame. And as he moved sluggishly between Dome and hostel there rang in his ears the words of the old lag: “You didn’t give enough trouble.”

  Then one day, in the least expected quarter, in his own drab department, hope appeared.

  Miles later remembered every detail of that morning. It had started in the normal way; rather below normal indeed, for they were reopening after a week’s enforced idleness. There had been a strike among the coal-miners and Euthanasia had been at a standstill. Now the necessary capitulations had been signed, the ovens glowed again, and the queue at the patients’ entrance stretched halfway round the Dome. Dr. Beamish squinted at the waiting crowd through the periscope and said with some satisfaction: “It will take months to catch up on the waiting list now. We shall have to start making a charge for the service. It’s the only way to keep down the demand.”

  “The Ministry will never agree to that, surely, sir?”

  “Damned sentimentalists. My father and mother hanged themselves in their own backyard with their own clothesline. Now no one will lift a finger to help himself. There’s something wrong in the system, Plastic. There are still rivers to drown in, trains—every now and then—to put your head under; gas-fires in some of the huts. The country is full of the natural resources of death, but everyone has to come to us.”

  It was not often he spoke so frankly before his subordinates. He had overspent during the week’s holiday, drunk too much at his hostel with other unemployed colleagues. Always after a strike the senior officials returned to work in low spirits.

  “Shall I let the first batch in, sir?”

  “Not for the moment,” said Dr. Beamish. “There’s a priority case to see first, sent over with a pink chit from Drama. She’s in the private waiting room now. Fetch her in.”

  Miles went to the room reserved for patients of importance. All one wall was of glass. Pressed to it a girl was standing, turned away from him, looking out at the glum queue below. Miles stood, the light in his eyes, conscious only of a shadow which stirred at the sound of the latch and turned, still a shadow merely but of exquisite grace, to meet him. He stood at the door, momentarily struck silent at this blind glance of beauty. Then he said: “We’re quite ready for you now, miss.”

  The girl came nearer. Miles’s eyes adjusted themselves to the light. The shadow took form. The full vision was all that the first glance had hinted; more than all, for every slight movement revealed perfection. One feature only broke the canon of pure beauty; a long, silken, corn-gold beard.

  She said, with a deep, sweet tone, all unlike the flat conventional accent of the age: “Let it be quite understood that I don’t want anything done to me. I consented to come here. The Director of Drama and the Director of Health were so pathetic about it all that I thought it was the least I could do. I said I was quite willing to hear about your service, but I do not want anything done.”

  “Better tell him inside,” said Miles.

  He led her to Dr. Beamish’s room.

  “Great State!” said Dr. Beamish, with eyes for the beard alone.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is a shock, isn’t it? I’ve got used to it by now but I can understand how people feel seeing it for the first time.”

  “Is it real?”

  “Pull.”

  “It is strong. Can’t they do anything about it?”

  “Oh they’ve tried everything.”

  Dr. Beamish was so deeply
interested that he forgot Miles’s presence. “Klugmann’s Operation, I suppose?”

  “Yes.”

  “It does go wrong like that every now and then. They had two or three cases at Cambridge.”

  “I never wanted it done. I never want anything done. It was the Head of the Ballet. He insists on all the girls being sterilized. Apparently you can never dance really well again after you’ve had a baby. And I did want to dance really well. Now this is what’s happened.”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Beamish. “Yes. They’re far too slap-dash. They had to put down those girls at Cambridge, too. There was no cure. Well, we’ll attend to you, young lady. Have you any arrangements to make or shall I take you straight away?”

  “But I don’t want to be put down. I told your assistant here, I’ve simply consented to come at all, because the Director of Drama cried so, and he’s rather a darling. I’ve not the smallest intention of letting you kill me.”

  While she spoke, Dr. Beamish’s geniality froze. He looked at her with hatred, not speaking. Then he picked up the pink form. “Then this no longer applies?”

  “No.”

  “Then for State’s sake,” said Dr. Beamish, very angry, “what are you wasting my time for? I’ve got more than a hundred urgent cases waiting outside and you come in here to tell me that the Director of Drama is a darling. I know the Director of Drama. We live side by side in the same ghastly hostel. He’s a pest. And I’m going to write a report to the Ministry about this tomfoolery which will make him and the lunatic who thinks he can perform a Klugmann, come round to me begging for extermination. And then I’ll put them at the bottom of the queue. Get her out of here, Plastic, and let some sane people in.”

  Miles led her into the public waiting room. “What an old beast,” she said. “What a perfect beast. I’ve never been spoken to like that before even in the ballet school. He seemed so nice at first.”

  “It’s his professional feeling,” said Miles. “He was naturally put out at losing such an attractive patient.”

  She smiled. Her beard was not so thick as quite to obscure her delicate ovoid of cheek and chin. She might have been peeping at him over ripe heads of barley.

  Her smile started in her wide grey eyes. Her lips under her golden moustachios were unpainted, tactile. A line of pale down sprang below them and ran through the centre of the chin, spreading and thickening and growing richer in colour till it met the full flow of the whiskers, but leaving on either side, clear and tender, two symmetrical zones, naked and provocative. So might have smiled some carefree deacon in the colonnaded schools of fifth-century Alexandria and struck dumb the heresiarchs.

  “I think your beard is beautiful.”

  “Do you really? I can’t help liking it too. I can’t help liking anything about myself, can you?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “That’s not natural.”

  Clamour at the outer door interrupted the talk. Like gulls round a lighthouse the impatient victims kept up an irregular flap and slap on the panels.

  “We’re all ready, Plastic,” said a senior official. “What’s going on this morning?”

  What was going on? Miles could not answer. Turbulent sea birds seemed to be dashing themselves against the light in his own heart.

  “Don’t go,” he said to the girl. “Please, I shan’t be a minute.”

  “Oh, I’ve nothing to take me away. My department all think I’m half dead by now.”

  Miles opened the door and admitted an indignant half-dozen. He directed them to their chairs, to the registry. Then he went back to the girl who had turned away slightly from the crowd and drawn a scarf peasantwise round her head, hiding her beard.

  “I still don’t quite like people staring,” she said.

  “Our patients are far too busy with their own affairs to notice anyone else,” said Miles. “Besides you’d have been stared at all right if you’d stayed on in ballet.”

  Miles adjusted the television but few eyes in the waiting-room glanced towards it; all were fixed on the registrar’s table and the doors beyond.

  “Think of them all coming here,” said the bearded girl.

  “We give them the best service we can,” said Miles.

  “Yes, of course, I know you do. Please don’t think I was finding fault. I only meant, fancy wanting to die.”

  “One or two have good reasons.”

  “I suppose you would say that I had. Everyone has been trying to persuade me, since my operation. The medical officials were the worst. They’re afraid they may get into trouble for doing it wrong. And then the ballet people were almost as bad. They are so keen on Art that they say: ‘You were the best of your class. You can never dance again. How can life be worth living?’ What I try to explain is that it’s just because I could dance that I know life is worth living. That’s what Art means to me. Does that sound very silly?”

  “It sounds unorthodox.”

  “Ah, but you’re not an artist.”

  “Oh, I’ve danced all right. Twice a week all through my time at the Orphanage.”

  “Therapeutic dancing?”

  “That’s what they called it.”

  “But, you see, that’s quite different from Art.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh,” she said with a sudden full intimacy, with fondness. “Oh what a lot you don’t know.”

  The dancer’s name was Clara.

  III

  Courtship was free and easy in this epoch but Miles was Clara’s first lover. The strenuous exercises of her training, the austere standards of the corps-de-ballet and her devotion to her art had kept her body and soul unencumbered.

  For Miles, child of the State, Sex had been part of the curriculum at every stage of his education; first in diagrams, then in demonstrations, then in application, he had mastered all the antics of procreation. Love was a word seldom used except by politicians and by them only in moments of pure fatuity. Nothing that he had been taught prepared him for Clara.

  Once in drama, always in drama. Clara now spent her days mending ballet shoes and helping neophytes on the wall bars. She had a cubicle in a Nissen hut and it was there that she and Miles spent most of their evenings. It was unlike anyone else’s quarters in Satellite City.

  Two little paintings hung on the walls, unlike any paintings Miles had seen before, unlike anything approved by the Ministry of Art. One represented a goddess of antiquity, naked and rosy, fondling a peacock on a bank of flowers; the other a vast, tree-fringed lake and a party in spreading silken clothes embarking in a pleasure boat under a broken arch. The gilt frames were much chipped but what remained of them was elaborately foliated.

  “They’re French,” said Clara. “More than two hundred years old. My mother left them to me.”

  All her possessions had come from her mother, nearly enough of them to furnish the little room—a looking glass framed in porcelain flowers, a gilt, irregular clock. She and Miles drank their sad, officially compounded coffee out of brilliant, riveted cups.

  “It reminds me of prison,” said Miles when he was first admitted there.

  It was the highest praise he knew.

  On the first evening among this delicate bric-a-brac his lips found the bare twin spaces of her chin.

  “I knew it would be a mistake to let the beastly doctor poison me,” said Clara complacently.

  Full summer came. Another moon waxed over these rare lovers. Once they sought coolness and secrecy among the high cow-parsley and willow-herb of the waste building sites. Clara’s beard was all silvered like a patriarch’s in the midnight radiance.

  “On such a night as this,” said Miles, supine, gazing into the face of the moon, “on such a night as this I burned an Air Force Station and half its occupants.”

  Clara sat up and began lazily smoothing her whiskers, then more vigorously tugged the comb through the thicker, tangled growth of her head, dragging it from her forehead; re-ordered the clothing which their embraces had loosed. She was full of wo
manly content and ready to go home. But Miles, all male, post coitum tristis, was struck by a chill sense of loss. No demonstration or exercise had prepared him for this strange new experience of the sudden loneliness that follows requited love.

  Walking home they talked casually and rather crossly.

  “You never go to the ballet now.”

  “No.”

  “Won’t they give you seats?”

  “I suppose they would.”

  “Then why don’t you go?”

  “I don’t think I should like it. I see them often rehearsing. I don’t like it.”

  “But you lived for it.”

  “Other interests now.”

  “Me?”

  “Of course.”

  “You love me more than the ballet?”

  “I am very happy.”

  “Happier than if you were dancing?”

  “I can’t tell, can I? You’re all I’ve got now.”

  “But if you could change?”

  “I can’t.”

  “If?”

  “There’s no ‘if.’”

  “Damn.”

  “Don’t fret, darling. It’s only the moon.”

  And they parted in silence.

  November came, a season of strikes; leisure for Miles, unsought and unvalued; lonely periods when the ballet school worked on and the death house stood cold and empty.

  Clara began to complain of ill health. She was growing stout.

  “Just contentment,” she said at first, but the change worried her. “Can it be that beastly operation?” she asked. “I heard the reason they put down one of the Cambridge girls was that she kept growing fatter and fatter.”

  “She weighed nineteen stone,” said Miles. “I know because Dr. Beamish mentioned it. He has strong professional objections to the Klugmann operation.”

  “I’m going to see the Director of Medicine. There’s a new one now.”

  When she returned from her appointment, Miles, still left idle by the strikers, was waiting for her among her pictures and china. She sat beside him on the bed.