The day they went down to the river, Carl May returned to the subject of his ex-wife, and his secret knowledge. He and Bethany sat side by side in the back of the limousine. Perhaps he thought she was too confident: he liked to have her a little frightened. He knew how to frighten her. It’s always pleasant to do what you’re good at doing: hard to refrain from doing it. Anyway, Carl May had said, ‘You could always give birth to one of my clones. I could use your womb to implant me.’
‘What a lovely idea!’ said Bethany, in her best and politest voice. ‘They can’t really do that, can they?’
‘Oh yes they can,’ said Carl May. ‘I’ll take you down to my friend Holly. There’s an advance on freezing now: the rage is all for drying: keeps the nuclei intact. It used to be just frogs and below: now it’s sows and upwards. Shall I take you down to Holly? Prickly Holly?’ He pinched the tip of her little finger, and they watched it turn blue between the bloodless nails of his thumb and third finger.
‘He must be rather old by now,’ said Bethany, and wished she hadn’t.
‘No older than me,’ said Carl May, but added kindly, ‘Lost his nerve, lost his bottle, you’re quite right,’ and he let her finger go. She sucked it. He liked that.
‘One of you,’ said Bethany, ‘is more than enough for me. I’d be exhausted. I want you, not your clone. What would be the point of a clone?’
He nipped her neck. She was covered with little bruises in tender places: mementoes of Carl, he called them. She loved them.
‘It would come in handy,’ he said. ‘It could stand in for me here and there – at banquets, for example, when all anyone needs is my presence; when my opinion counts for nothing. It would save my digestion.’
‘But what would you do while you stayed home?’ asked Bethany, whose idea of pleasure it was to be out, not in.
‘Learn not to need to win,’ he said and, as if to make up for a lifetime of over-controlled Joanna May, flung himself upon Bethany, digging his teeth vampire-like into her neck, tearing her blouse, his hand approaching her crotch from the top, not the bottom, down between her clothing and her skin, forcing her belt to give and break, without any thought at all for the presence of Philip the chauffeur in the front seat. Philip was indeed embarrassed by their moans and groans, but Carl May paid well: it was a privilege to work for such an employer, who had led a lonely and prudent life far too long, and the girl was not reluctant, on the contrary, so he put up with the embarrassment easily enough. He had faced worse in the course of his job – the poisoning of Joanna’s dogs for one thing, the backing his car into and over Joanna’s lover Isaac for another, as required of him by Carl May. Who was he to object to anything? What kind of moral stance could he take? What outrage would now be justified? Once a servant, an employee, has decided that loyalty to the one who pays him supersedes all other moral obligations, and has acted upon that decision, to change the mind becomes impractical, not to say dangerous. Reason and self-interest must be called upon to counteract the pangs of sensibility.
Philip kept his eyes on the road and drove slowly beside razed warehouses, over broken tarmac, where the weeds kept bursting through.
‘You know far more about me than you should,’ said Carl to Bethany, after his final climactic gasp.
‘It was all just a story anyway,’ said Bethany prudently. ‘All that about clones. Just to frighten me.’
‘Of course,’ he said. Then he added, ‘But just think, if there were more of me, and more of you, how much pleasure we would bring into the world!’ and he actually smiled, and she remembered that she loved him and was pleased to give him pleasure.
He slept a little. Bethany stared out of the window on to a broken landscape. Philip parked the car. His employer woke up with an old man’s start: a shiver: where was he? The river air was in his nostrils: the air of his childhood: a flowing tide of soot and despair mixed: there in his mind for ever, lying low but always there. He got out of the car. Bethany followed. The sun went in and a cold wind blew across the river.
‘I brought you down here,’ said Carl to Bethany, ‘so you could see for yourself how I began. Of course it’s all gone now – but where we stand used to be the corner of Jubilee Road and Bosnia Street. This is where the brass plaque is to be.’
And Bethany said, ‘If it was all so nasty, why do you want to come back? Or is it like a loose tooth? You want to jiggle it even though it hurts?’
And Carl knew he had been deceived in her: she was not after all what he hoped. He was disappointed in her, hurt; he had forgotten what it was to be disappointed, hurt. Bethany did not begin to understand the significance of his achievement. She belonged to the TV age: nothing surprised, nothing impressed: real life rolled off a scriptwriter’s pen. To have started here, yet come to this! Magnificent, but she could not see it.
The chauffeur buttoned his coat and straightened his cap, feeling the alteration in his master’s mood: though if you’d asked him he’d have said, ‘Just something in the air, that’s all: just something in the air that chilled me, reminded me of this and that. I wouldn’t work for anyone else: not for twice the wages and half the hours. It’s an honour.’ He’d been in tanks in the war and killed men for less reason than he killed for Carl, which was from loyalty, obedience and self-interest mixed.
‘But it’s all such a long time ago,’ said Bethany, compounding her error. She felt the cold wind in her hair and round her chin and cutting down against the white and tender skin of her still partly unbuttoned bosom; harsh against the grazed skin where he had sucked and bitten her neck. Had he told her where they were going she would have worn boots and brought a scarf. With almost every step over the uneven ground she caught the leather on her high heels; they would be badly snagged: she would have to have them rewrapped. He was thoughtless.
‘If you’re not interested we can go home,’ said Carl. She understood then, too late, too late, that the cold wind was somehow his doing, and said, ‘Of course I’m interested,’ and then, ‘They say one’s childhood is never over. Do you think that’s true?’ But it was no use: the cold wind whipped and zapped through her red hair, and that was the only answer she got.
‘You are not sufficiently interested,’ Carl May said, ‘for me to waste any more of my day on you.’
They rode home in silence, to the big boring house at 20 Eton Square, Belgravia, where the May collection of Egyptian art and artefacts was housed in what used to be the stable block, open to the public on the first Wednesday of every month. Very few of the public in fact took the trouble to attend. The windows had been blocked up to save specimens from the dangers of direct natural light; the ceiling rose to a central peak: the single door was arched: the room, though vast, was for all the world like a kennel. It was a dismal place. But Carl liked it, which was all that mattered.
As the chauffeur pulled up outside 20 Eton Square, a small group of reporters rushed to meet the car. Microphones were pushed under Carl’s nose and flashbulbs popped. News was coming through that the power station at Chernobyl had blown, and in the light of the fact that two of Britnuc’s plants, like Chernobyl, were WCRs, water-cooled reactors, could he make a statement? Was the public in any danger?
‘Making electricity is not like making a sponge cake,’ he said kindly in his soft gravelly voice. ‘It is dangerous and things go wrong. When I know exactly what has happened at Chernobyl, if anything, I will be in a position to make a statement. Not before.’
‘But, Mr May, the public is worried.’
‘The public is right to be worried,’ he said, smiling, and closed the front door, swiftly, and upon Bethany’s right foot. The picture of the snagged and torn leather upon the six-inch heel of her shoe was upon the front cover of a tabloid newspaper the next day. ‘May Faces Snags,’ it said, going on to speak of the unseen killer which now stalked Eastern Europe. Other newspapers relegated the item to the middle pages. It was one of those stories which was to grow and grow, as wind patterns in the upper atmosphere made nonsense of national boundaries.
Carl went straight to his study to make telephone calls, his face still set cold against Bethany.
Bethany was a practical young woman. She dumped her shoes in the bin, feeling that since they brought her no luck they might as well be discarded, changed into more restrained clothes, dabbed ointment on her neck and, in the cold light of the bathroom, brought her hair under better control. She did not like the bathroom. It was too large, too full of marble, too brightly lit, and the washbasins were antique and their porcelain, being finely crazed, never looked quite clean. She did not like the house; Joanna’s house. She did not like the servants; Joanna’s servants – who did not like her, with her tiny knickers left everywhere and her strewn junk jewellery and hairpins, and her waterproof make-up smeared on sheets and cushions: but that was her role; how Carl liked it; they would just have to get used to it. In fact Bethany came to the conclusion she did not like Joanna, whose ladylike presence in the house was still too clearly felt for comfort.
The woman had no natural taste, that was apparent. She had re-created her father’s consulting rooms in her husband’s house: dark, highly polished mahogany furniture, dusty pale-green velvet curtains, over-plump greeny chintzy sofas and blue-and-white encrusted Chinese jars of arguable value standing on every available ledge. Twice a week the housekeeper would arrange fresh flowers – unnaturally large blooms – in the bleak white fluted floor-standing Italian vases which stood boringly in each corner of the room.
Bethany assumed, and rightly, that the twice weekly arrival of the peculiar flowers was an expression of gratitude from whatever container-gardener firm had been granted the contract to supply the Thameside Garden Park – a gift, of course, not a bribe. Bethany well understood the difference. Many a gift had she received in her life, before or after a favour. But she could not be bribed – that would be an indignity.
Bethany bent to smell the flowers, which seemed to occupy some point between gladioli and chrysanthemum and withdrew her face at once. They had been sprayed with a strong flower perfume somewhere between violet and rose. It was not her place to comment or improve. She thought longingly of her parents’ suburban garden, filled with nothing more exotic than pansies and roses, and settled down to read The Layman’s Guide to Nuclear Power. It was one thing to appear ignorant; quite another to be so.