“If the front door is unlocked, I can get out quicker if I need to, can’t I?”
They stared at each other. Anna dropped her gaze first.
“You aren’t exactly welcoming, are you, father?”
“I said it was good of you to come. I’m pleased to see you. But it’s no good complaining about the way I live directly you get in the house.”
“I’m sorry, father, really. I didn’t mean to nag, of course. Just a motherly instinct—you know what women are!” She put on a smile and moved to embrace him, then clumsily cut off the gesture. “Father, you’re alone far too much. I know what you think about me, but you don’t make it easy—you’ve never made it easy. Even when I was a little girl and I used to run to you . . .”
“You are grown up now, Anna!”
“Oh God, don’t rub it in! You took care of that! What does being grown up mean but being even more isolated than as a child? What made you so inhuman, father? You never really loved me, did you? Why do you still expect me to come all this way up here to visit you, and it’s terribly difficult to get here, just to make fun of me?”
“I don’t expect you to visit me, Anna. You have to come now and then just to reproach me. You know very well that what you say hurts. You have in some way failed to achieve a mature personality and so you blame me for that. Perhaps I am to blame. But what use is blame? Was it worth coming this far just to deliver it?”
“Nothing’s of any use to you, is it?” she said sulkily. “I’ll go and make coffee, if there’s any in the house.”
Her father went back to sit down before his monitor screens. He switched Camera Eight on to the big screen and sat looking at an image of the inner wall of the second bedroom which included part of a wardrobe and, hanging from the picture rail, an engraving of Sir Edward Poynter’s “Faithful Unto Death,” which had belonged to his mother.
In a minute, Anna poked her head round the door.
“Coffee’s ready! Come and have it in the kitchen—it’s a bit fresher in here.”
He went through and took the cup she offered him.
Anna had opened the door to the side-drive. Sunlight lay there in patches between trees.
“I’m pleased to see you have plenty of provisions in the house. At least you keep yourself fed properly. Prices of everything keep going up and up. I don’t know where it will all end.”
“I live very comfortably, Anna. I nourish myself, I exercise myself. I am entirely dedicated to my research and mean to keep myself as healthy as possible in order to pursue it. Did you manage to get that volume on convergence by Krost?”
“No, not yet. Foyle’s had to order specially, and still it hasn’t come through. Sorry. Everything takes so long. How’s the research going?”
“Steadily.”
“I know you aren’t very keen to tell me about it, but you know I’m interested. Perhaps I could be of more help to you if you would tell me a bit more.”
“My dear, I appreciate your interest, but I’ve told you before—the work has to be secret. I don’t want it blabbed about and, in the sphere in which I’m working, you could not possibly be of any help.”
“Ignoring the insulting suggestion that I should blab your secrets everywhere, couldn’t I approach someone—”
“You know what I mean, you might tell one of your boy-friends casually—” He paused, knowing he had said the wrong thing, blinked, and said hastily, “You shall have, perhaps, a small demonstration of what I’m doing. But I must keep it all secret. I’m on the brink of something extraordinary, that I know . . . one of those discoveries—revelations—that can completely overturn the thinking of all men, as Galileo did when he turned his telescope to the sky. There were telescopes, there was sky. But he was the man who had the original thought, he was the man who looked in a new direction. I am doing that. To you—though you may be my daughter—I’m just an old eccentric, spending his days staring at television screens. Aren’t I, admit it?! Well, that’s much what they thought of Galileo . . . The name of Felix Macguire, my child . . . a few more years . . . I can’t tell you . . .”
“Don’t let your coffee get cold, father.”
He turned his back to her and stared out of the door at the unkempt bushes.
“I understand, father. I mean, I understand your aspirations. Everyone has them. I know I have.”
Her pathetic words, intended to contain a charge of reassurance through shared experience, died on her lips. In a more practical voice, she said, “All the same, it’s not good for you to live here alone like this. I don’t like it. It’s a responsibility for me. I want you to come and live near me in Highgate where I can keep an eye on you . . . Or, if you won’t do that, then I want a medical friend of mine to be allowed up here to see you. Robert Stokes-Wallis. He’s a follower of Laing’s. Perhaps you know his name.”
She sniffed and blew her nose. Felix turned and watched her performance.
“I warn you, Anna, I want no interference with my routine. Tell your man to stay away. You think I’m cranky. Maybe I am. It’s a cranky world. Whether I’m mad or not is really a question of no importance beside the magnitude of the questions I am confronting. Now, let’s say no more on that subject.”
“Drink your coffee,” she said pettishly. “And what’s this demonstration you want to give me?”
Felix picked up the mug and sipped. “Are you, in fact, particularly interested?”
Making an effort, she laid a hand on the arm of his sweater. “I’m sure that you understand that I really am interested, father, and always have been, when allowed to be. I am really quite an intelligent and loving creature to my friends. So of course I am keen to see your demonstration.”
“Good, good. You need only say yes—speeches aren’t necessary. Now, I don’t want you to be disappointed by the demonstration, because there is a danger it may seem very flat to you, you understand? Let me explain something about it first.”
He pulled a book off the top of the refrigerator.
“Milton’s poems. ‘Paradise Lost.’ I read it sometimes when I’m not working. A marvellous poem, although it contains a view of reality as a theological drama to which we no longer subscribe. When Milton was in Italy, he visited Galileo Galilei, and something of the astronomer’s involvement with the heavens has got into the poem. Galileo is the greater man, because the scientist must take precedence over the poet; but either must have a measure of the other for real greatness.”
“Father, you forget that you read me most of Book IV of ‘Paradise Lost’ last time I came up here. It is not my favourite poem.”
“ ‘What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?’ Let me come to the point, which is not exactly Milton. We are talking about views of reality to which we no longer subscribe. The geocentric view of the universe prevailed for over a thousand years—needlessly, since a heliocentric view had been advanced before that. How can anything be correctly understood when such a great thing is misunderstood? It was not just a minor astronomical error—it was grounded in Man’s erroneous view of his own importance in the universe.
“Nobody believes in the Ptolemaic geocentric view nowadays, and yet nevertheless thousands—millions of people have found a way of clinging to that ancient error by maintaining a belief in astrology: that the movements of remote suns can control a human destiny, or that, vice versa, human behavior can provoke eclipses or similar signs of heavenly displeasure. Clear views of reality are at a premium. Indeed, I’ve come to believe something always distorts our vision. Bacon comes very close to the same conclusions in his ‘Novum Organum.’
“Take mankind’s idea of its own nature. In the west, the view prevailed until the Nineteenth Century that we were God’s creatures, especially made to act in some obscure drama of His making. Your grandmother believed in the tale of Adam and Eve, and in every word of Genesis. She preferred that version of reality to Darwin’s. Darwin showed that we were different from the animals only in degree and not in kind. But
the opposite view had prevailed practically unchallenged for centuries, and men still prefer to behave as if they were apart from Nature. Not only is the truth hard to come by—it’s often refused when available.”
“I see that but, surely, in this century we have had our noses rubbed in reality uncomfortably enough.”
“I don’t think so, Anna. I believe we have escaped again. Look at the way in which the so-called side-effects of technology are universally deplored. Everyone who pretends to any degree of civilization agrees to condemn nuclear warfare, the pollution of air, sea, and land, the iort of dreadful fate that has overtaken Crackmore, the hideous tide of automobiles which chokes our cities. Yet all these things are brought about by us. We have power over technological and legislative processes to end all such abuses tomorrow if we wished. Instead, we continue to stock-pile nuclear weapons, we go on making thousands of automobiles per day, we continue to destroy every accessible environment. Why? Why? Because we wish it. Because we like it that way, because we crave disaster. That is the truth—that we think we feel otherwise is yet another proof of how incapable mankind is of coping with reality.”
“Oh, but to argue like that—that’s silly, father! After all, growing numbers of people—”
“I know what you are going to say—”
“Oh, no, you don’t—”
“I know what you are going to say. You are going to say that there are increasing numbers of people who are showing by action that they hate what technology is doing to us. Perhaps. I do not suggest all men feel the same. Indeed, part of my thesis is that man is divided. But by and large there is a mass wish for catastrophe, hidden under mass delusion. So a considerable amount of my time here is devoted to bringing reality under better control.”
She shook her head. “Father, honestly, you just can’t—”
He shut the door to the drive. “We must bring reality under control. The technology we turn against ourselves can be turned to fortify that weak link in our brains which always seeks to deceive us about our own natures! I’ll show you how. You’ve had the lecture—now the demonstration. Go and sit in the other room at my chair and watch Number Five monitor screen.”
Putting his hands on her shoulders, he guided her from the kitchen. He noticed how stiff and lifeless her body felt, and hurriedly removed his hands. In time to catch the expression on his face, Anna turned and said, “Father, I do want to be of help to you—desperately! It’s awful how people in families get all tangled up with their relationships, but I do want to be more of a dau—”
“Demonstration first!” he said, briskly, pushing her forward. “Get in there and sit patiently watching Monitor Five. That’s all you have to do.”
Sighing, she went through into the living room.
Most of its original furniture had been pushed back into one corner. An old sofa covered the unused fireplace. There were cushions, occasional tables, a magazine-rack, and an old box piled on top of the sofa. The room had been further reduced in meaning by the partition across it, with the television screen burning on it. Past the side of the partition, she could see through the other door of the room and out through the discomfort of the hall, the eye perforce following the intertwined snakes of black cable, into the garage, with its empty crates and wall of breeze-blocks.
She sat at the console, took a tissue out of her handbag, and blew her nose. The headache was there in full force, despite two aspirins she had swallowed with her coffee. The atmosphere was leaden.
On the large screen burned an image which she recognized as one of the bedrooms, although it was years since she had been upstairs. Despite herself, she was interested and, as she scrutinized the picture, tried to reason why she should be. She could see through an open door to a landing across which light and ill-defined shadows of bannisters lay, to a corner of wall; the continuation of landing had to be deduced from the chiaroscuro eclipsed by the bedroom doorpost. From this glimpse, Anna deduced she was seeing a view from the spare bedroom at the top of the stairs.
Inside the room, she could see the foot of a bed, part of a wardrobe, and a picture hanging against a patterned wallpaper. She leaned forward instinctively, interested to see if the bed were made up. It appeared not to be. She also stared at the picture on the wall. A man, perhaps a soldier, was holding a pike or a spear and gazing fearfully upwards at the entrance to a forbidding alley; behind him, something awful was going on; but she could make little of it.
All, on the surface, was dull and without any power to enchant; yet she felt herself enchanted.
The colours were of high quality, conveying an impression that they were true to reality but perhaps enhanced it slightly. For instance, the landing carpet: mauve: but did it actually present those tender lavender contrasts between shadowed and unshadowed strips? Or was it that the colours on the screen were true and one merely paid them a more attentive respect because they were images of the real thing? Was there an art about the reproduction that the reality lacked?
She noted belatedly that the sound was on, so that she was actually listening to this silent vista as well as watching it. And she noted something else: that the viewpoint was low, as if the camera was fixed just above the skirting. So one was forced into the viewpoint more of a child than an adult. That might explain why the shadows radiating from the wardrobe seemed both somewhat emphatic and somewhat menacing, as well as accounting for some of the fascination of the picture as a whole.
But was it a live picture or a still? Anna was convinced it was no still. Some quality about it suggested a second-by-second congruence with her own life. Yet how to be sure? Of course, a long enough vigil would reveal movement in the shadows, or a diminution in light towards evenings; but she found herself looking for a spider crossing her field of vision, perhaps a fly trapped in the room, circling vaguely under overhead lampshade. Nothing moved.
With an involuntary shiver, she thought, “That room’s as lifeless as the top of Everest! It’s not a real room any more—it’s just a fossil!” Her attraction changed to revulsion and she looked down at the row of monitor screens to obey her father’s directions.
Eight of the nine small screens were lit. All show d static views of rooms and, in the eighth, she saw duplicated—in miniature and in black-and-white—the view projected on the big screen. Its smallness gave it an even more hypnotic quality. It frightened her. As she averted her eyes, she caught sight of her father in the fifth screen, moving purposefully across it. Almost as soon as he was lost to sight on that screen, he was caught advancing in Number One screen, coming from a shadowy passage, and then he materialised in the room in person.
“Did you watch closely? What did you make of the demonstration?” he asked.
She stood up, vexed with herself.
“I was so fascinated with the view on the big screen . . . I was only just about to watch Number Five monitor.”
Felix frowned and shook his head. “Such a simple thing I asked you to do . . .”
“Do the demonstration again, father. I will watch this time, honestly! I’m sorry!”
“No, no, it was just a small thing, as I warned you. To do it after this fuss would make it meaningless.”
“Oh, no, that can’t be so, surely. I wasn’t making a fuss. I won’t find it meaningless. You didn’t give me enough time. You didn’t give me a proper chance . . .” To her own dismay, she began to cry. Angrily, she turned her back on him, fumbling in her bag for a tissue.
“Always these over-heated personal nonsenses!” Felix shouted. “Isn’t it enough that you should have been stupid without compounding it by bursting into tears? Dry your eyes, woman!—You’re as bad as your mother!”
At that, she cried the louder.
When she turned round at length, he had left the room.
She stood there in a melancholy containment, with the unwinking monitors by her right hand. Should she leave, despite her headache, so much worse after the fit of weeping? Did he expect her to leave? And how much did his exp
ectations influence whether she would actually leave or not?
In any case, it was past lunch time. She could either rustle up something from the kitchen, where she had found a surprisingly well-maintained range of food, or she could go down to the pub in Crackmore. She had meant to take him along to the pub, but his insufferable behaviour put a different aspect on things.
She glanced at the screens to see if she could catch sight of him. The view on Number Seven monitor was moving slowly; she looked and realized that the movement of the camera was automatic. The screen showed another bedroom, evidently her father’s from its state of occupation. There was a cupboard, one door half-open to reveal suits within, and an untidy pile of clothes on a chair. She supposed the laundry man still called every week. The bed was unmade. The viewpoint was moving beyond it in a slow arc, taking in blank wall, an angle between walls complex with diffused shadow, then a window—seen obliquely, but revealing the tops of unkempt trees in the drive by the front gate—then the wall between windows, then the next window, rolling gently into view . . . No father there.
He had built neat switchboards; she realized that everything could be controlled from here. If she could set all the cameras tracking, then presumably she would detect him in one of the rooms. Tentatively, she pressed one of the piano-keys nearest to her.
His voice came out at her. “—st lot of tinned meat gave me diarrhea . . . My evolutionary discovery is greater than Charles Darwin’s or his grandfather’s. . . greater and far more world-shaking. Darwin revealed only part of the truth—”
She switched him off.
He was mad. No doubt of it. Madness suited him—there had always been a madness in the distance he had kept between himself and everyone else.
He was probably dangerous too. Men with monomania were generally violent when opposed. She’d better be careful. But she’d always been careful. And really—she told herself in the thick ticking room—she had hated him since childhood.
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