The Primal Urge. Brian Aldiss
Hanahan was away being ill in Boston, relished its privacy – especially this morning.
He was in a golden daze. He wanted only to sit quietly and think of the raptures of last night, with Rose alive in his arms. His room was almost bare; even the inevitable bookcase contained little more than Webster’s Dictionary and a pile of IBA pamphlets on people like Svevo. A Ben Nicholson relief on one wall only added to the austerity. That suited Jimmy well; the fewer external distractions the better.
The intercom on his desk buzzed.
‘And now a word from our sponsor,’ Jimmy groaned.
He depressed one of the ivory keys and said ‘Solent’ in a suitably crisp tone.
‘Scryban here, Jimmy. We’re having an informal discussion on next month’s activities, just pooling a few ideas. You’d better be in on it from the exhibition angle, I think. Would you kindly come up, please?’
‘Certainly.’ That was a blind. Jimmy felt perfectly fit, except for a dry mouth, but he just did not want to face people this morning. However, Scryban was Scryban and business was business … In Jimmy’s drawer lay a manila folder labelled ‘Haiti Exhibition’; he debated taking it up with him to Scryban’s room but, as that exhibition would not be held until September, decided it would look irrelevant or self-important or something equally horrid. Instead, he took the lift up to Scryban’s room.
‘Literature is a jealous god: serve it in deeds and words,’ adjured Clyde H. Nitkin from eye level.
Four people were already closeted with Scryban. Donald Hortense, the IBA librarian, a science-fiction magazine tucked in his pocket, winked at Jimmy. He was the only one here Jimmy could really say he knew. Mrs Wolf, a little, lipsticked woman with a big, difficult husband, smiled at him: Jimmy smiled back, for Mrs Wolf was always very sweet to him. Paul de Perkin, whose office door bore the enticing word ‘Social’, acted up to his label, indicating a chair for Jimmy and offering him a cigarette. The only person to ignore Jimmy’s entrance was standing looking out of the window; this was Martin ‘Bloody’ Trefisick, who called himself a Cornishman, though his detractors claimed he came from Devon. He was the declared enemy of Mrs Wolf, and his office door bore the oblique message ‘House Organ’.
Sitting sideways behind his desk, his neat knees crossed, was Conrad Scryban, the Managing Director of IBA. Jimmy had quietly admired this man from their first meeting; so effectively and unassumingly was he the English literary man, that Jimmy felt sure there must be fraud in the fellow somewhere. It made him roughly ten times as interesting as any of the other solid but transparent characters in the room.
Apart from Scryban and Trefisick, everyone in the room already bore a Norman Light on his forehead. It lent an air of strangeness and newness, like a paperback found among Roman relics.
‘Splendid,’ Scryban said vaguely, as Jimmy sat down between de Perkin and Mrs Wolf. Scryban’s baldness, like a tonsure, gave him a monastic look which his clothes quietly refuted. ‘We were saying before you joined us, Jimmy, that next month, being August, is rather a dog month generally. Anyone who is anyone will be no nearer Bedford Square than Tenerife. Nevertheless, we are duty bound to offer some sort of diversion to such of the general public as wander through our doors … Have you, I wonder, any suggestions? I hasten to add that none of the rest of us have.’
‘Actually, I believe the centenary of the publication of The Cloister and the Hearth falls some time next month,’ Mrs Wolf said cautiously.
A hush settled over them. ‘I ought to suggest something,’ Jimmy told himself, as gradually the dread of being laughed at by Trefisick was dwarfed by the dread of being considered unimaginative by Scryban. He cleared his throat.
‘How about some sort of tie-in with politics?’ he asked the company generally, following up with a brilliant improvisation: ‘I’ve been thinking about the Nitkin pearl that every poem is a pincer movement. Couldn’t we drag out some contemporary examples of that?’
‘I can see the implications,’ said Scryban, appearing actually to view them in a far corner, ‘but how exactly do you visualize … I mean, what I don’t see …’
He was too gentle to name what he did not see, but Jimmy suspected it must be the same thing he himself did not see: just what the deuce he was suggesting. He tried a countermove.
‘Well, how do you feel about the present political situation?’ he asked.
Scryban did not immediately answer. Instead Paul de Perkin leant forward, his face gleaming with interest, and said, ‘I think you have something promising there, old boy. Do you mean the international situation?’
‘Heavens, is he really fool enough to think I’ve got something?’ Jimmy asked himself drearily, and then decided that de Perkin, also unsure of himself, was also trying to appear bright.
‘Yes, the international situation,’ he said at random.
‘Ah now, let me see,’ said Scryban, conscientiously. ‘We have the Western bloc on one side and the Soviet bloc on the other, have we not? And the Middle East shuttling tediously about in between. That is how matters have been, internationally, for some years, I believe, and I confess I find it an uninspring situation: an unfruitful situation.’
‘We are all in a perpetual state of non-combatancy,’ Mrs Wolf said. Jimmy liked the remark and laughed; she smiled at him and laughed herself.
‘All very trying for everyone,’ Scryban agreed. ‘One may, in fact, quote the words Donne employed in a somewhat different context: “The foe oft-times having the foe in sight. Is tired of standing though he never fight.”’
‘We shall see a change now,’ Trefisick said, wrestling to fit his broad shoulders into the window frame. ‘These ERs completely topple the status quo at home; they are bound to have repercussions abroad. Without being in any way a prophet, I’d say that chaos will come again. Britain is already the laughing stock of Europe.’
‘That just isn’t so! The Guardian says Scandinavia is green with envy,’ Jimmy said hotly, venturing for the first time to contradict Trefisick.
‘Really? In those very words?’ asked Scryban, interested at last.
‘I see the New Statesman is less outspoken about Tory intrigues than it was last week,’ de Perkin observed. ‘And certainly the Commonwealth seems to commend us … Especially Australia; I always think Australia’s very forward looking …’
‘There was a paragraph in the Telegraph,’ Mrs Wolf said, looking round as she whipped out her paper. They had all brightened considerably under the new topic of conversation. ‘Here we are. It points out that we have inaugurated a social invention whose power potential is far greater than that of the hydrogen bomb.’
‘And we go and use it on ourselves!’ Trefisick exclaimed bitterly. ‘My God, but I never saw such bloody folly. You’ll never catch me wearing one of the beastly things, I can assure you of that!’
‘Life has grown too complicated, Martin,’ said Scryban gently. ‘We have said that so often in past years that it has become a platitude. Now that something has come along which, it is claimed, will simplify things for us, surely we are morally obliged not to look our gift horse in the mouth – especially when they are free on the National Health Scheme?’
‘But will these damned gadgets simplify life, that’s what I want to know?’ Trefisick said pugnaciously, squaring his shoulders by inserting his thumbs in the top of his trousers. ‘Have they simplified your sex life, Solent? What about yours, de Perkin? Find things easier for having a tin medal over your nose?’
‘I’ve only had mine a day,’ Jimmy said, simultaneously feeling his cheeks redden and cursing himself for not standing up to this man.
‘You’d better ask all my mistresses about that, Trefisick,’ de Perkin laughed feebly, and Jimmy cursed him for being another time server.
Mrs Wolf rolled up her Telegraph pugnaciously.