The first thing that registered was a definite impression that his gaolers had left him. He shifted slightly in his seat and confirmed that his body came in contact with no watcher. In making these explorations he became aware too that he was sitting in a small low armchair covered in what seemed to be wonderfully soft and warm material. And there was something else.
He worked hard for a little attempting to isolate this decidedly new factor. And at last he got it. Warmth. The air all about him was warm. Warm, dry and comforting.
He allowed himself to lean against the back of the chair and relax. This was perfect ease. He had long ago ceased to feel hunger, though his pappy meals were often long delayed. Food was no longer something missed, but his deprived senses could luxuriate to the full in the warmth which had been absent for so long. Even the shooting pains in his stomach seemed less virulent in this new peaceful atmosphere.
He sat for some time slumped against the yielding back of the soft chair. Then he realized that the light was no longer hitting so hard at the surface of his eyelids. It had become tolerable. It suddenly came to him that if he were to open his eyes he would for the first time for weeks, perhaps months, be able to see clearly. There would be colours to distinguish.
The full sense of what he had been deprived of struck him, it seemed, for the first time. He had lived for a period without having been able to see enough even for half a second to know the colours of his surroundings. The thought of all the vividness that awaited him the moment he chose to open his eyes lay before him like a rich inheritance.
He sat forward a little savouring the prospect. He raised his head slowly. But in this position the light once again began to trouble him. He decided that his first sight of something with colour in it should be of the floor at his feet. With his attention directed to the floor he realized for the first time that his feet were resting on a carpet.
He wriggled his toes and felt the soft fibres. He could feel too the warmth beginning to make his chilled feet tingle. He moved them an inch or two back and forward over the smooth, warm surface.
And now he felt ready. He was going to open his eyes. To see colour.
Black on white. A jazzy pattern. He felt quietly pleased that he had been able to name the two elements. That this sense impression had meant something to his mind. Black and white. He was looking at a white carpet with a black design on it.
For a long time this was enough. It was the limit of his capability of apprehending. Then slowly he became aware of what was bounding the smooth area of warm wool. The two dull greyish areas on either side. His feet. The dead whitish flesh grimed over. One or two red caked places standing out where sores had formed.
The contrast between the colourless grime of the two feet and the rich, clean warmth of the carpet flooded into his mind with an overwhelming sense of pity. He made no attempt to analyse why his feet should have got into such a state or what the smooth carpet, on which they were resting like monsters from an alien world, meant. He simply allowed the contrast to dwell in his mind to the exclusion of everything else.
Heavy tears dropped from his eyes to the floor below. Dark patches on the clean dryness of the white carpet.
And at last peace. A long silence. The unaccountable feeling that the captors had withdrawn. The soothing effect of the warmth.
Roger decided that in a few minutes he would lift up his head and take a slow survey of the whole room. A weighty determination. A new career.
Time passed while he gathered up his resolution. He made one false start, and found that he temporarily lacked the sheer courage necessary to cope with even one new sight. But at last he was completely ready. He lifted up his head and looked steadily straight in front of him.
Sitting in a similar low armchair between three and four feet away, a picture of quiet ease and contented patience, was the Bosun.
Chapter Nineteen
Roger blinked.
He felt a small spurt of anger. The darkness yielding. A compass point in the void. Here at last was the person responsible. The Bosun.
Roger tried to stand up. He found he totally lacked the strength.
He felt pettishly aggrieved.
‘At least you might tell me where I am,’ he said.
The Bosun sat without moving. The inflated figure stuffing out the low armchair. The unbuttoned trouser top. The expression of distant contentment on the blown-up face.
‘Look here,’ Roger said, ‘you kidnap me, you imprison me in a filthy dark cellar, and then you sit there and say nothing when I ask for an explanation. I won’t stand for it. Answer me. Where am I?’
Again he tried to get up and go over to the Bosun. He would squeeze an answer out of him.
And again he found he was incapable of getting to his feet.
‘Where am I? Tell me.’
An ineffective snarl.
The Bosun felt in his pocket. From it he produced a nail file. He began cleaning his nails. The pale pink nails at the end of the puffy fingers.
Roger took a deep breath. Then slowly and carefully he stood up.
He took a step forward. It did not bring him as near the Bosun as he expected.
The crash as he slumped back on to his chair.
A new surge of puling anger.
‘I demand to know how long it is I have been here.’
And his voice sounded much less loud than he had meant it to.
The Bosun shifted in his chair so that he was no longer even looking in Roger’s direction.
‘I want to know what the idea is,’ Roger said.
A tinge of pleading.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘will you please tell me what all this is about?’
Without turning round in the low armchair the Bosun spoke.
‘How many rocket bases have the Russians got?’ he said.
The question descended on Roger like a thick blanket. Suffocating. Oppressive. Defying any effort to get to grips with it.
A sense of complete bafflement.
He sat in silence.
‘No idea?’ said the Bosun.
The irritating, piping voice.
‘I –’ Roger began.
He felt too tired to go on.
‘Come,’ the Bosun said, ‘you must have some notion. Would you say it was as few as two? As many as two hundred?’
‘Look, I don’t care about Russian rocket bases. I want to know what you’re up to.’
‘I think you ought to care about the Russians, you know. Let us just establish the strength of their rocket armament first, shall we? Now, two bases. Yes or no?’
Roger shook his head.
‘I don’t know. I suppose more than two.’
‘Ah, we’re beginning to establish something. Now, have they got as many as two hundred?’
‘I don’t know. And I don’t care.’
‘Come, of course you know whether they have two hundred rocket bases or not. Do you think they do have two hundred?’
‘No, I don’t.’
The despair of utter fatigue.
‘Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Not as few as two, not as many as two hundred. Let’s take the top figure first. Not two hundred, you say. Do you think they have one hundred?’
‘I tell you I don’t know. I’m not a defence expert. I can’t possibly be expected to know a thing like that.’
The Bosun turned round in his chair. The bloated body moving with unlikely ease.
‘You tell me you are not a defence expert,’ he said. ‘You seek to convince me of that. You won’t get away with it.’
Roger felt a new wave of bewilderment.
‘But you know I’m not a defence expert.’
A bleat.
‘You certainly appear to be trying to conceal even the rudiments of knowledge about defence,’ the Bosun said. ‘Come now, don’t pretend to me that you couldn’t tell me to within two or three bases the exact rocket strengh of the Soviet Union. Come now, a figure if you please.’
‘I do n
ot know.’
‘That won’t do, I’m afraid. You know and I mean to find out just how far your knowledge goes. Now, listen to me. If the West has twenty bases and the Russians have forty, you can see at once, can you not, that we have to even up the balance somehow?’
Roger did not answer.
The Bosun turned away and began working the tip of the nail file round his nails again.
‘Let’s get back to basic figures,’ he said. ‘Now, what would you say was the likely number of rocket bases the Russians have?’
‘Forty.’
‘Ah, splendid. I see you are beginning to show some sense. Forty bases. Of course you knew all the time.’
A sudden onset of stomach cramps.
Roger bent forward in his chair. His sallow face whitening.
His head began to thud.
Forty bases. Had he known? Was that a figure everybody knew? It was so long since he had seen a newspaper. Where had the figure forty come into his mind from?
‘Let us go on to the matter of nuclear bombs,’ the Bosun said. ‘Now, how many test nuclear explosions have there been since 1945?’
‘How can you expect me to know that?’
‘My dear chap, I see no reason why not. This is your subject, isn’t it? I hope you’re not going to try to pretend that nuclear bombs have nothing to do with defence.’
‘I don’t know anything about nuclear bombs.’
The Bosun swung back to face Roger. An expression of fury on his obese face.
‘Pull yourself together,’ he shouted. ‘Just think who you are and who I am. You can’t pretend to me, to me, that you know nothing about defence. You seem to forget: I know you. I know all about you. Now, stop pretending and answer my questions. How many nuclear tests since 1945? Answer up.’
Roger shut his eyes.
He had to think. There was something that had to be worked out. Something that had been said to him had to be dealt with.
The steady thudding in his head. An inability to concentrate.
And a high, piping voice boring at him from outside.
‘How many nuclear tests? How many? Come on, I want the answer. How many nuclear tests since 1945? Come on, you’ve studied defence for years, you must know the answer to a basic question like this. How many? How many tests?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘All right, we’ll have to resort to infant school methods again. As many as a thousand? As few as five?’
‘I just don’t know.’
‘As few as five?’
‘No.’
‘A thousand?’
‘I don’t suppose so.’
‘A thousand? Yes or no?’
‘No, no, no.’
‘Would it surprise you if I suggested the figure of 326?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t even know whether a figure I suggest would surprise you or not? Come, that isn’t good enough. Would it surprise you?’
Roger looked round the room. A blur.
The colour of the walls? Too hard to say. The door, where was it?
Blank despair. Blankness.
‘How many nuclear tests since 1945?’
The snapped question.
‘Three hundred and twenty-six.’
Roger heard his own voice saying the number.
Was it something that the Bosun had said? It was too much of an effort to work out. Perhaps he had read it somewhere.
Or perhaps he knew it. Perhaps he had had a breakdown. Was his life as a linguist simply an imagined existence?
It was possible.
The patch of sweat on the inside of his thighs.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know you. Your name is Bosenwite. You are Professor William Bosenwite. I want you to tell me one thing. What has happened to me? Have I been ill?’
The Bosun looking down at his faultlessly manicured nails.
Roger brought out the ultimate question at last.
In a whisper.
‘Who am I?’
No answer.
The tip of the file probing at the corner of the podgy pink right thumb.
The long silence.
Roger watching the probing thin silvery file.
‘Now, there’s another aspect of the matter I want to hear from you about.’
Softly the piping voice.
‘The other end of the scale, shall we say? You know that a nuclear explosion can make people go blind?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And that it can cause deafness?’
‘I suppose it can.’
‘That it can cause sterility?’
‘I dare say it does.’
‘And boils?’
‘What’s that to me?’
The sudden prick of boiling anger.
The Bosun began to file his thumbnail. The grating sound of the ridged steel powdering away the nail.
It stopped.
‘And there is a high incidence of deformed children after an explosion?’
‘That’s common knowledge.’
The grating sound began again.
‘About these boils cases, have you any idea how widely spread they are?’
‘No.’
Sharp denial.
The nail filing stopped.
Another series of questions about the effects of nuclear explosions. Water contamination, blast injuries, area of fallout, use of Geiger counters.
Roger’s answers, perfunctory, automatic.
The Bosun began filing the thumb of the left hand.
‘Did you know that the boils produced as an after effect of a nuclear bomb are particularly large?’
‘I know nothing whatsoever about them. Nothing.’
A shout.
‘And that they last a great while?’
‘I tell you I know nothing about them.’
The grating, irritating sound of the file.
It stopped.
More questions about hydrogen bombs. Not difficult to answer. The relief to the nerves of the silence as the file remained suspended above the next finger.
Roger lost count of time. The questioning process went on interminably, harking back again and again to the effects of boils produced by nuclear explosions. And each time the noise of nail filing, plucking at the raw nerves obsessingly.
At last a pause. How many hours had passed?
The Bosun still sat comfortably in his armchair. Opposite him in his similar chair Roger twisted and turned. The material covering the seat seemed impossibly hot and rough.
And the nail file unexpectedly at work again in the silence.
‘Stop that.’
Roger’s scream.
The Bosun stopped.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘we mustn’t waste time. Tell me, please, how you would propose to defend British civilization. Would you be content with what methods we have got, or would you search for anything new?’
Roger’s right hand moving in front of him in a groping gesture.
‘I begin to see it,’ he said. ‘You’re trying to persuade me to come back to that place. I know you now. And I won’t do it.’
‘I take it that means you would favour the minimal use of weapons?’
Silence.
‘Answer yes or no.’
Roger passed his hand across his forehead.
‘There’s some sort of trick in this, but I’m so tired I can’t see it.’
‘Yes or no? More methods of defence or not?’
‘Oh, more I suppose.’
‘More. Right, do you believe the Russians would hesitate to develop any promising method of war?’
‘No.’
Sullen resignation.
‘Do you think we should deliberately lag behind them?’
‘I suppose not. I don’t know.’
‘Should we?’
‘All right. No, we shouldn’t.’
The Bosun drew the nail file slowly along its full length against the nail of his right-hand ring finger.
The turbulence in Roger’s head.
Scampi. Scampi. Something wrong about scampi. His mind chasing the question. Round and round. Tiring and tiring.
‘Do you believe the Russians bar any method of war?’
Roger seized on the question eagerly. A straight path. Relief from the wild circling thoughts and half-thoughts.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t believe they would. Yes, I’m sure of that.’
‘Do you think they would carry through such methods to the end?’
The straightforward way ahead.
‘Yes, I think they probably would.’
‘Probably?’
‘Almost certainly, if you like.’
‘And should we balk at using the same methods?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Aren’t you sure?’
‘No. No, I’m still not sure.’
‘When did you last get your hair cut?’
And again the accompanying scrape, scrape, scrape of the file.
Hair, hair, hair. Roger’s brain toiled after the whirling thought. Something hateful about hair. What is it? Something wrong with hair. The brain flagging in the chase. The impossible request.
He sat upright in the low chair with his legs jutting out in front of him. The knotted muscles of the calves. The hands gripping the thighs. The corded neck.
His eyes were wide and staringly open. His breath coming in faster and faster gasps. A fine sweat sprang out all over his tense frame.
He toppled forward like a statue knocked carelessly from its perch.
Oblivion.
And the balloon figure of the Bosun kneeling at his side. The pudgy fingers feeling for his wrist. The piping voice lowered to a soothing whisper.
‘My dear chap, you’ve had some sort of a collapse. I’m frightfully sorry. I had no idea my arguments were worrying you to such an extent. I can see I must lay off.’
Roger lying askew on the floor looked up at him with slowly blinking eyes.
‘Do you feel a bit better now? I’m afraid you were right out for quite some time. Could you sit up again?’
Roger put out a hand and pressed himself up into a half-sitting position. The Bosun tucked an arm round his shoulders and helped him up. He fell back in the low armchair. Gladly.
The Bosun walked over and sat down in his own chair.
The Dog It Was That Died Page 19