Carl was on the phone to a certain Gerald Coustain. This is how their conversation went:
Gerald Coustain said, ‘What you’re telling me is that there is no indication of additional radioactivity from any outside source at either Britnuc A or B?’
Carl May said, ‘That is correct. I would add that this is hardly surprising since our instrumentation is not designed to pick any up.’
There was a short silence from Gerald Coustain, who worked for the Department of Energy.
‘You’re being remarkably frank with me,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ enquired Carl, who was still in what Joanna had learned to call ‘a mood’. Bethany had failed him. It was not his time he feared to waste, so much as his emotion – and what were referred to in a booklet he had recently received through the post on the subject of AIDS as ‘bodily fluids’. He was aggrieved. He had made himself vulnerable. It was dangerous. If, as he felt, the experiences of his childhood energized his present, a fire to be fanned and nurtured back to life, that fire was as like as not to go out altogether under the thwack of cold water delivered by Bethany. There was a lot at stake here. A long time ago! What had that to do with it?
‘I have done everything the inspectorate required,’ said Carl May. ‘I have followed its instructions to the letter, no matter how absurd those instructions were. Nowhere could I find regulations appertaining to the upper limits of instrumentation.’
Again there was a pause.
‘Nuclear power is a new industry,’ said Coustain, his voice receding as if he held the receiver further and yet further away. ‘It is essential that the spirit of the law rather than the letter be followed.’
‘Come off it,’ said Carl May. ‘You don’t want Britnuc A and Β off line every time instrumentation shows a rise in local activity any more than I do. You fellows have your own information-gathering network. Don’t come bleating to me every time the shit hits the fan.’
Coustain, thinking he should perhaps make a virtue out of necessity, asked Carl May if he would make some reassuring statement on TV the next day: along the lines he had sketched out: and so Carl May did, in the programme seen by his ex-wife, Joanna May.