He visited her chamber twice a day and read aloud there, only stopping when he was hoarse. He soon lost count of the times he had read No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Once, to have a different story to tell his patient, he watched a cowboy film in the staff club cinema, but mention of it threw her into a cold violent rage. She only believed in repetitious accounts of brutal men and humiliated women and thought anything else was deliberate mockery. Lanark left her chamber each time with a sore throat and a determination not to return, and had there been anywhere to go but the staff club he might have stayed away. The soft, brightly lit rooms with their warm air and comfortable furniture made him feel oppressively enclosed. The members were polite and friendly but talked as if there was nothing important outside the club, and Lanark was afraid of coming to believe them. At other times he suspected that his own ungraciousness made him dislike gracious people. He spent most of his free time on his bed in the ward. The window was no longer enjoyable for it had begun giving views of small rooms with worried people in them. Once he thought he glimpsed Mrs. Fleck, his old landlady, tucking the children into the kitchen bed. After that he preferred watching the lights move mysteriously between the slats of the half-shut blind and listening idly to the radio. He noticed that the requests for doctors were increasingly varied by a different kind of message.
“Attention, please note! Attention, please note! The expansion committee announces that after the hundred and eightieth all twittering is to be treated as a sign of hopelessness.”
“Attention, please note! Attention, please note! The expansion committee announces that after the hundred and eightieth the sink will take no more softs. All helpless softs will be funnelled into the compression sluices under the main wards.”
But none of this urgency showed in the staff club unless it was displayed through increased jollity at mealtimes. People sat at tables smiling and talking loudly in groups of four. Ozenfant’s booming laughter sounded among them; he was always to be seen there wearing a light suit, talking hard and eating hugely. Only three people sat quiet and alone: himself, Monsignor Noakes, and a big, strikingly sullen girl wearing khaki overalls who ate almost as much as Ozenfant.
One evening Lanark had entered the restaurant and seated himself when Ozenfant sat down beside him saying cheerfully, “Twice today, at breakfast and at lunch, I beckon you to my table and you do not notice. And so”—he passed a hand down the yellow curve of his waistcoat—“the mountain comes to Mahomet. I want to tell you I am pleased, very pleased indeed.”
“Why?”
“I am a busy man, even at mealtimes I am working, so I have only had time to observe closely two of your sessions, but believe me, you do well.”
“You’re wrong, I do badly. She’s freezing, I don’t warm her and everything I talk about increases her pain.”
“Well, of course you are treating an impossible case, a case I would have judged hopeless had you not needed someone to practise on. But you have employed a tact, a tolerance, a patience which I never expected from a novice. So now I want you to withdraw from this case and start on someone more important.”
Lanark leaned forward over the table and said, “You mean those hours of reading that bloody book were for nothing?”
“No, no, no, my dear fellow, they have been very valuable; they have shown me the sort of doctor you are and the kind of patient you should treat. There are layers of stolid endurance in you which make you a perfect buffer for these tragic intelligent females whose imagination exceeds their strength. We have just such a patient in chamber thirty-nine who would, if cured, be a delightful addition to our staff, and her head and limbs are unarmoured. If you still wish to visit chamber one you can do so, but I want you to spend most of your time in chamber thirty-nine.”
“What if my first patient gets well and wants to leave with me? Do I simply abandon the second?”
Ozenfant made an impatient gesture. “Those are the scruples of a novice. Patient one will not get well, and you have no reason to leave. Suppose you did leave, and reached (which is unlikely) a more sunlit continent, how would you earn your bread? By picking up litter in the public parks?”
Lanark said in a low voice, “I shall visit my first patient, and nobody else, until she doesn’t want me.”
Ozenfant drummed his fingers on the tablecloth. His expression was blank. He said, “Dr. Lanark, what will you do when you have failed to reclaim your Eurydice?”
“I am too ignorant to understand your jokes, Professor Ozenfant,” said Lanark, rising and walking away.
He was angry and upset and felt that his patient’s rage against life would be a consolation. Instead of going to bed he entered the lift and said, “Ozenfant’s studio.”
“Professor Ozenfant is recording just now. If I were you I wouldn’t disturb him.”
Lanark seemed to recognize the voice. He said, “Is it you, Gloopy?”
The lift said, “No. Only part of me.”
“Which part?”
“The voice and feelings and sense of responsibility. I don’t know what they’ve done with the rest.”
This was said with a stoical dignity which filled Lanark with pity. He laid his hand against the lukewarm wall and said humbly, “I’m sorry!”
“Why? People need me now. I’m never alone and I hear all kinds of interesting things. You’d be amazed at what happens in a lift between floors. Why, yesterday—”
Lanark said quickly, “I’m very glad. Will you take me to Ozenfant’s studio?”
“But he’s recording.”
“He can’t be, I’ve just left him in the restaurant.”
“Don’t you know that heads of departments can feed and work at the same time? And he gets really poisonous when his music’s interrupted.”
“Take me to the studio, Gloopy.”
“All right, but I warned you.”
The door slid open and Lanark heard the complicated squealing of a string quartet playing very badly. He pulled the tapestry aside, went in and struck a hanging microphone with his shoulder. He was confronted by four music stands with people behind them. A gaunt woman in a red velvet gown was grappling a cello. Three men in tailcoats, white waistcoats and bow ties scraped on a viola and fiddles. One of them was Ozenfant.
He silenced the others with a hoarse cry and marched toward Lanark, fiddle under elbow and bow clutched in the right hand like a riding crop. When his face was an inch from Lanark’s he stopped and whispered, “Of course you knew I was recording?”
“Yes.”
Ozenfant began speaking in a quiet voice which grew steadily to a deafening yell: “Dr. Lanark, you have been allowed very special privileges. You use a public ward as a private apartment. You employ my name in lifts and they take you everywhere direct. You ignore my advice, disdain my friendship, sneer at my food and now! Now you deliberately ruin the recording of an immortal harmony which might save the souls of thousands! What other insults do you plan to heap on me?”
Lanark said, “Your anger is misplaced. You have bullied me into trying to cure a difficult patient and now you try to stop me reaching her. If you don’t want to see me you should contact the engineers. Get them to fix that door in my ward so I can go back through it, and we need never meet again.”
Ozenfant’s rage-swollen features relaxed into astonishment. He said faintly, “You want the current of the whole institute thrown into reverse for that?”
He wiped his face with his handkerchief and turned away, saying wearily, “Get out of here.”
Lanark quickly lifted the tapestry and stooped into the corridor.
He crouched in the ignition chamber feeling too discouraged to pick up the book where he had left it. He stared at the slim human arm, noticing silver freckles above the elbow and wondering if they had been there before. He tried to hold the moving hand but it clenched into a fist.
The voice said, “Yes I’m unprotected there. Why not use force?”
“Rima!”
“I’m not your Rima. Go on reading.”
“I’m sick of that book. Couldn’t you talk to me? You must be lonely. I know I am.”
There was no answer. He said, “Tell me about the world before you came here.”
“It was like this.”
“It was not.”
“Take care! You’re afraid of the past. If I told what I know you would go mad.”
“Sinister hints don’t frighten me now. I don’t care about the past and future, I want nothing but some ordinary friendly words.”
“Oh, I know you, Thaw, I know all about you, the hysterical child, the eager adolescent, the mad rapist, the wise old daddy, oh, I’ve suffered all your tricks and know how hollow they are so don’t weep! Don’t dare to weep. Grief is the rottenest trick of all.”
Lanark was too disturbed to feel the tears on his face. He said, “You don’t know me. I’m not called Thaw. I’ve been none of these things. I’m something commonplace that keeps getting hurt.”
“So am I but I have courage, the courage not to care and clutch. Go away! Can’t you see what’s happening?”
From shoulder to wrist her arm was spotted with silver blots and stars. Lanark had a horrible feeling that each of his words had caused one. He whispered, “Dr. Lanark wants out.” The panel swung open and he climbed through.
Someone had raised the blind in the ward and he looked out on a dingy plaster wall with brickwork showing through big cracks in it. For a moment he turned giddy and almost fell, then remembered he had left the staff club without eating. It seemed the one comfort he could get was the institute’s nasty, invigorating food, so he returned to the restaurant. It was nearly empty but Ozenfant sat at his usual table talking intensely with two other professors. Lanark went to a table in the farthest corner and was approached by a waitress. He said,
“Have you anything brown, dry and crumbly?”
“No sir, but we’ve something pink, moist and crumbly.”
“I’ll have a quarter of a plateful, please.”
He had begun to eat when a hard, slightly hesitant voice said,“Can I sit here?”
He looked up and saw the big girl in the khaki overalls. She stood with hands in pockets staring at him fiercely. With a sense of relief he said, “Oh, yes.”
She sat opposite. Her face had straight clear handsome lines like a Greek statue, though the chin was heavy and forward-jutting. She did not hold her fine shoulders erect but slumped and hunched them forward. Her brown hair was twisted loosely into a thick plait which hung over her left breast. Her fingers stroked it with short quick movements. She said abruptly, “Do you hate this place too?”
“Yes.”
“What do you hate most?”
Lanark considered. “The manners of the staff. I know they have to be professional to keep things clean and orderly, but even their jokes and smiles seem to have professional reasons.
What do you dislike?”
“The hypocrisy. The way they pretend to care while using the patients up.”
“But they could help nobody if they didn’t use their failures.” The girl bent her head so that he only saw the top of it and muttered, “You don’t hate this place if you can say that.”
“I do hate it. I’m leaving, when I find a companion.”
She looked up.
“I’ll go with you. I want to leave too.”
Lanark was confused. He said, “Well, thank you, but—but—I have a patient, not a very hopeful case, but I can’t leave until I’ve definitely cured her or failed.”
She said disgustedly, “You know nobody is ever cured, that the treatment only keeps the bodies fresh until we need fuel or clothes or food.”
Lanark looked at her, said “Foooo?” and dropped his spoon in the plate.
“Of course! What do you think you’ve been eating? Have you never looked into the sink? Has nobody shown you the drains under the sponge-wards?”
Lanark rubbed his clenched fists into his eye sockets. He wanted to be sick but the pink stuff had nourished him well: he had never felt stronger or more stable. He told himself wildly,
“I’ll never eat here again!”
“Then you’ll leave with me?”
He looked at her blindly, not thinking of her at all. She said, “I frighten you, I frighten most men. But I can be very sweet for short times. Look.”
He looked vaguely round the room for a way out until there was nowhere to look but in front, and the expression on her face made him lean forward to see it clearly. She had a slight, disdainful smile but within her defiant eyes he saw discontent, and beyond that a vast humility and willingness to become, for a while, anything he wanted. Looking into her eyes became like a rapid flight across shifting worlds, all of them sexual, and when he returned from the flight he saw that her fierceness was pleading and the smile timid. He began trembling with feelings of dizzy power. She said anxiously, “I can be very sweet?”
He nodded and whispered, “Where can we go?”
“Come to my room.”
They stood together and she led the way out, Lanark walking awkwardly because of the pressure of his penis against his trousers. As they passed Ozenfant’s table the Professor cried in mock alarm, “Oh, Dr. Lanark, you must not deprive us of our little catalyst!”
In the lift she said, “The specialist apartments.” The lift vibrated. They embraced and the feel of her strongly female body made him mutter, “Let’s stop the lift between floors.”
“That would be silly.”
“Give me that contemptuous smile you’re good at.” She gave it and he kissed her fiercely. She pulled her mouth away and said, “Open your eyes, you must look at me while we kiss.”
“Why?”
“I’ll do anything but you must keep looking.”
The door slid open and she led him by the hand into one of the halls. It was circular and gigantic like the others but seemed deserted and silent until Lanark recognized the silence listening makes. A number of men and women in overalls stood against the walls gazing upward. Lanark looked up and saw the perspective of gold and orange rings sliding toward him, and in the centre a black triangular shape swaying and growing bigger. It seemed to be the base of a piece of machinery lowered from above. It was only slightly narrower than the shaft, for a grinding hum came briefly from the walls as if a metallic corner had scraped them, but it must have been more than a mile overhead for it looked very small. He squeezed the girl’s hand.
“What is that?”
“A suction delver. The creature’s lending some to the expansion project.”
They were speaking in whispers. Lanark said, “Where do you get power to drive things like that?”
“From the current, of course.”
“What drives the current?”
“Please don’t be technical. Come to my room. You’ll like it, I decorated it myself.”
As she led him over the floor he tried not to picture what would happen if the immense machine fell. No corridors led out of this hall. The lift doors had smaller doors between them, and she whispered to one of these, “I’m home,” and it opened inward.
The room was a cube and walls, ceiling and floor were sheets of pure mirror. A low double bed in the centre was covered with velvet cushions, a spot lamp on one wall cast a beam of light on it, and that was all the furniture. Lanark stood stupefied; he seemed to be standing among a hundred gleaming glass boxes, each holding a bed, girl and himself. Looking down he saw his feet resting on the soles of a dangling self looking up. He stepped to the bed making figures advance on each side of him toward a row approaching in front. He knelt on the quilt and tried to see only the girl, who lay against a bank of pillows, watching. She said shyly, “Do you like it?”
He shook his head.
“Then you think I’m hard and brazen?”
He thought of the silver dragon and felt a gush of affection for this girl who had nothing to protect her but abrupt manners and a few defiant expressions. He said, “I know you aren’t.
Tell me your name.”
“Let’s not be personal until afterward.”
He undressed quickly. Sympathy for the girl, and the many movements his actions caused all round, made his lust less greedy. He gently opened her overalls and drew them down to her hips. She whispered, “How should I look?”
“Smile as if you were seeing me after waiting a long time.” She smiled so sweetly that he leaned forward to kiss her shoulders. With her thumbs she pulled his eyes open, saying, “You must look at me, I go blank when I’m not watched.”
A radio sounded: plin-plong, plin-plong, plin-plong, plin-plong! She murmured, “Ignore it.”
“Let me turn it off.”
“You can’t, you can only turn it on.”
The musical braying continued until he stretched and grabbed the radio from his coat pocket. He turned the switch and Ozenfant said cheerfully, “Forgive if I interrupt but I thought you would like to hear that your patient is about to go salamander.” “What?”
“There is nothing to be done, of course, but hurry along if you wish to enjoy the spectacle. Bring your friend.”
Lanark dropped the radio and sat biting his thumb, then stood up and started automatically dressing. The girl stared from the bed. She moaned, “You’re leaving me to watch that?”
“Watch what?” He glanced at her hauntedly and added “I’m sorry” and pulled the shirt over his head. He hurriedly finished dressing, muttering at intervals, “I’m really sorry.” He grabbed the radio from the bed and looked about for the door, but the gleaming glass was perfectly smooth. He said, “Dr. Lanark wants to leave.”
Nothing happened so he shouted it. She said, “This is my home.”
“Please let me out.”
She stared at him stonily. He knelt on the bed, gripped her shoulders and said pleadingly, “You see a friend is—is—is going to burn up; you must let me go.”
She hit him hard on the side of the face. He shook his head impatiently and said, “Yes, yes, that’s all right, but you must let me go.”
She cried out, “Oh, open for him! And slam behind him as hard as you can!”
A door opened and he ran out shouting, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
If the exit slammed behind he did not hear for the noise outside was too great. This hall had a pit in the centre and two vast cables running into it from above and vibrating thunderously. Lanark rushed round the walls looking for a lift, but all the doors had OUT OF ORDER signs on them. At last he found a little tunnel with pulses of warmth and brightness flowing out and forced his way in against the current. This was almost impossible until he lay on the floor and drove forward by shoving with hands and feet against the narrow walls. After several minutes of struggling he advanced about three yards. “Oh, Rima!” he cried and had begun banging his head on the floor and weeping with frustration when the pressure against him stopped. He sat up. Before and behind the tunnel had gone a dim orange which suddenly went completely black. It was cold, and the noise had stopped, though there was a distant twittering and occasional voices called forlornly:
“Dloc ma I ho.”
“Sthgil! Teah dna sthgil!”
“Redloc ylnellus worg I won.”
He got up and ran gladly forward through the dark until prevented by a surface which rumbled at the impact of his body. It was one of the curtains. He drew back to fling himself on it again when it opened and out poured a deafening noise like many flocks of starlings crashing through plate-glass windows. In the door’s bright circle he saw three white-faced men staring at him, two in overalls and one a doctor. They shouted,
“You were going against the current!”
Lanark said, “There was no other way through.”
“But you’ve blacked out the staff clubs! You’ve jammed the suction delvers!”
The doctor said, “I don’t give a damn about those but you’ve caused an epidemic of twittering and God knows how many fractures. If it had happened after the hundred and eightieth you’d have been a murderer! A mass murderer!”
“I’m sorry, but I have to reach Ozenfant’s studio.”
The men in overalls glanced at each other. The doctor said, “Ozenfant may be a big man but if he starts letting his staff block the current he’s in trouble.”
The doctor turned and walked away and Lanark was about to follow when one of the men put a hand on his sleeve and said, “No, no, Mac, you’ve done enough damage. We’ll go the way you came.”
The normal movements of light and air resumed in the tunnel as they went down it, one of the men in front of Lanark, the other behind. When they reached the hall even the noise was normal. The leader opened one of the lifts with a key, led them inside and said, “Professor Ozenfant’s place, then the sink.” He looked accusingly at Lanark and said, “The sink is iced over.”
“I’m sorry.”
The door opened. Lanark was pushed into the studio but the men did not follow.
The quartet sat on chairs before the observation lens chatting and sipping from glasses. Ozenfant looked round smiling and cried, “Aha, so you are in time! There was a temporary power cut which we feared might delay you. But my dear fellow, your brow is bleeding!”
A silver figure glowed in the lens, air faintly trembling above the gaping beak. Looking back from it to the cosy social group, Lanark was gripped by rage. He quickly crossed the studio, passed between Ozenfant and the lady cellist, raised his right leg and struck his heel into the centre of the lens. It cracked and went black. The room was completely silent as he crossed to the wall, lifted the tapestry and entered the tunnel behind.
He leaned into the chamber through the open panel. All her limbs were metal now and she was bigger, head pressing the wall on one side and hooves on the other, the wings spread so that the tips of the plumes touched the walls all round and not an inch of floor was visible. The air was chokingly hot and a white line like cigarette smoke rose from the beak. He said, “Rima.”
The voice answered with a throb of delight. “Is that you, little Thaw? Have you come to say goodbye? I’m not cold now, Thaw, I’m warm and soon I’ll be shining.”
“I am not little and I have not come to say goodbye.”
He climbed in, crawled across the rigidly quivering copper wings, sat astride the silver thorax and gasped breathlessly. The chamber was getting dim with whirling steam. She laughed exultingly and said, “Are you still there? I’m glad you came. I like you now I’m leaving but you mustn’t stay any longer.”
“Listen! listen to me!” he shouted and could think of nothing to add. He lay flat and shoved his head desperately into her jaws. The heat scorched his face and made his hair stream upward. There was a crackling sound and Ozenfant’s voice said sharply, “You have ten seconds to leave, the dome must soon be sealed, it should have been sealed already, you have seven seconds to leave.”
She laughed again and her voice rang directly in his ears. “Are you angry that you’ll have nobody to read to, Thaw? But I’ve spread my wings, I’ll fly everywhere and you can’t come, I will rise with my flaming hair and eat men like air.”
“Soon her jaws will shut,” said Ozenfant. “Listen, you dislike me but I give you five more seconds, five unofficial seconds to leave starting now.”
A moment later there was a faint hiss and such a blast of steam from the mouth that Lanark jerked his head back with a yell. She said, “You’re not here?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“But I’ll kill you.”
“I don’t care.”
“I don’t want to kill you.”
He felt a wave of heat go through the cool metal under him then the beak shut with a crack like a gunshot. There was a second crack then a clang. The clouds of steam began clearing, yet he was unable for a moment to see the great beak, for the head had fallen off. There was a black hole between the shoulders from which poured a pale shining stream. It was hair. There was another clang as the thorax split. He fell sideways onto a wing and lay listening to sounds like buckets and kettles falling downstairs. The silver body and limbs cracked and fell apart until they covered the floor like ornate scrap metal.
A naked girl crouched weeping in the middle, rubbing her cheeks with her hands. She was blond and tall but she was Rima for she shook her head at him and said, “You should have taken that coat. I didn’t want you to be cold.”
There was a crackling and Ozenfant said, “What is happening?
What is happening? I can see nothing without the screen.”
Lanark was too stunned to think or feel but he could not stop gazing at her with open mouth and eyes. Her skin looked drenched and she curled her knees up and hugged them, trembling. Lanark took his coat and jersey off, pushed away some cracked armour and crawled to her side saying, “You’d better put these on.”
“Lay them round me please.”
Ozenfant said, “Stop whispering! I demand to know what has happened!”
Lanark said, “I think we’re all right.”
After a moment Ozenfant said, without expression, “I wash my hands of the pair of you.”
Lanark put the clothes round her shoulders and sat by her side with his arm about her waist. She leaned her head on him and said drowsily, “You look as if you’ve been in a fight, Lanark.”
“I’ll be better soon.”
“I wonder if I can forgive you for breaking my wings. It’s nice to be human again but they were beautiful wings.” She seemed to fall asleep and he passed into a kind of stupor.
Later she kissed his ear and murmured, “Should we try to leave?”
He roused himself and said, “Dr. Lanark is ready to leave.” The ignition chamber said sternly, “You are allowed to leave but you are no longer a doctor.”
A line appeared dividing the milky dome in two and each half sunk into the floor and left them squatting in a small room with an entrance on each side. Down the low tunnel from the studio ran, stooping, a nurse with a broom, followed by a stretcher pushed by another nurse. The first swept the metal shards to one side while the second brought a plain white nightshirt to Rima and helped her on with it, and all the time they laughed and chattered excitedly.
“Poor Bushy brows looks stunned.”
“He’s found a girlfriend but he needs a wash.”
“Can you stand up, dear? Lie on the stretcher and we’ll take you gently to a lovely, lonely ward together.”
“The Professor is cross with you, Bushybrows. He says you’ve been sabotaging the expansion project.”
They wheeled Rima down the corridor to the ward and Lanark followed. The blind was raised. There was a deep green sky outside with a couple of stars in it and some feathery bloody clouds. The nurses fetched towels and basins and washed Rima in bed. Lanark took his dressing gown and undressed and bathed in the ward lavatory. When he returned the nurses were putting screens round the bed. He said, “Leave an opening so that we can see the window, please.”
They did that, then one patted his cheek, the other said, “Have fun, Bushybrows,” and both pressed fingers to their lips and tiptoed out with exaggerated stealth. Lanark went to the bed. Rima seemed to be sleeping. He slid gently in beside her and fell asleep himself.
Someone seemed to be shining a torch on his eyes so he opened them. The ward was dark but the window through the arches was filled with stars. A nearly full moon had risen, and its clear wan light shone upon the bed and Rima, who leaned on an elbow watching him with a grave small smile, nibbling the tip of a lock of silvery-gold hair. She said, “Were you the only one who could help me, Lanark? Nobody special? Nobody splendid?”
“Have you known many special men?”
“None who weren’t pretenders. But I used to have fantastic dreams.”
“I can imagine nobody more splendid than you.”
“Take care, that makes me stronger. I may not find a better man but I’ll always be able to imagine one.”
“But that makes me stronger.”
“Don’t talk.”
They did not sleep again until he had explored with his body all the sweet crevices of her body.