SIXTEEN
A PRETTY GIRL IN A NURSE’S uniform escorted them down a long corridor to a pair of bolted doors at the back of the building.
“Have you permission to bring in the girl, Miss Hunter?” she asked.
“Not yet,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “I suppose you’ll have to telephone Dr. Ferrier and see if it’s all right?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Hunter, but the rules are quite clear regarding visitors, and I couldn’t—”
“Yes, yes,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “I wrote the instructions myself, and I’m well aware you could lose your job for letting anyone in without the proper authorization. Well, get on with it then, why don’t you? We haven’t got all day.”
The girl dithered for a minute, then hurried back the way they’d come.
Great-aunt Tabitha tapped her foot with irritation, then turned to Sophie, who tried to erase the puzzlement from her face. Why were they here, and what was Adam Smith College?
“What are you thinking?” her great-aunt asked her.
“Are—this isn’t IRYLNS, is it?” said Sophie.
“Indeed it is,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, her voice neutral at first but warming into enthusiasm. “IRYLNS represents the fulfillment of the vision of humanity sketched out long ago by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments and brought up-to-date by modern medicine in light of a twentieth-century understanding of the social psychology of the Enlightenment. What a good thing—what a very good thing—that people can now be made incomparably happier and more productive by the rationalization of the emotions!”
Just then the breathless young nurse reappeared, full of apologies, with the doctor’s note and a fistful of forms for Sophie to sign. Not wanting to annoy her great-aunt by taking the time to read through them properly, Sophie scrawled her name at the bottom of each sheet, though it gave her a pain in the pit of her stomach when she caught a glimpse of the phrase Official Secrets Act.
The hallway in which they next found themselves was bright and airy and led to an attractively furnished common room looking out over the garden at the back. Girls not much older than Sophie occupied themselves here with all kinds of activity, several of them knitting stockings and scarves, others winding skeins of wool into balls, and a whole row of girls in blindfolds practicing touch typing, their machines muffled to prevent the noise from disturbing the others. Though the blindfolds added a bizarre touch, the sight of the girls with their bright-colored dresses and glossy bobs was otherwise a pretty one.
Great-aunt Tabitha strode through this hive of activity without stopping, Sophie hurrying to keep up with her, and turned into another hallway. At last they arrived at an office into which Great-aunt Tabitha flew like one of the new aerial assault drones. She barged past the receptionist in the outer room and straight into the big inner office.
The room suffered from not having any windows, but provided one didn’t mind the bunkerlike feel, it was attractively furnished, with clusters of delicately wrought chairs arranged around several small circular tables and a comfortable-looking chaise longue in the corner beside a long narrow table that evidently served as a desk.
Fearing Great-aunt Tabitha’s speed meant something ominous, Sophie relaxed when the elderly woman seated at the desk jumped up and flew into Great-aunt Tabitha’s arms.
“Tabitha, what a delightful surprise! I didn’t like to ask you to take the time on a Saturday—a national holiday—”
“Not another word,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, beaming at her friend. “I’ve brought my niece with me today; Sophie, this is Dr. Susan Ferrier, one of my oldest friends and a very dear colleague.”
“Delighted to meet you, Sophie,” the doctor said, wringing Sophie’s hand with bone-cracking enthusiasm. “I’ve heard so much about you, and it’s a great pleasure to make your acquaintance in person; I had almost begun to feel you must be a figment of Tab’s imagination!”
“No, Sophie’s quite real,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, sounding rather sorry that this should be so. “She’s generally a good girl, but she got into a mess this week and I thought it time for her to get a good look at what we do here. Show her why she’d better keep her nose to the grindstone and earn a place at university….”
Was Sophie here to be taught a lesson?
“Tabitha, Tabitha,” said the doctor, shaking her head. “You know the work we do here has almost invariably positive results. Most girls who go through the program benefit immensely.”
Great-aunt Tabitha sniffed. It sounded as though they must have had this argument before.
The doctor turned to Sophie. “You wouldn’t turn up your nose at working for a cabinet minister, a brigadier general, a museum director, or the rector of a university, would you?”
Then, when Sophie said nothing: “Would you?”
“I didn’t know it was the kind of question that wanted answering,” Sophie said, not sure why the doctor sounded so angry. She was starting to get a bad feeling about IRYLNS. What weren’t they saying? “Of course I wouldn’t turn up my nose at a job like that!”
“Almost all the young women in the civil service have passed through our doors at one time or another,” the doctor said huffily. “Last year we sent half a dozen girls to the office of the prime minister himself!”
“Is that the kind of thing most girls do when they leave IRYLNS?” Sophie asked in her most polite voice, the one she didn’t usually use because it made her feel so smarmy and Harriet Jeffries–like.
“Yes, indeed, and it’s very naughty of Tab to suggest you’d be better off at university.”
“If you or I had been trained somewhere like this rather than at university,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, not bothering to hide her impatience, “neither of us would have been able to contribute an iota to IRYLNS.”
“True, true, but who’s to say that would have been for the worse?” said Dr. Ferrier, her mood sunny again. “Someone else would have made the contributions and got the credit—but they also serve who only stand and wait, as the poet says. Besides, neither one of us was pretty enough to be a top-notch candidate for IRYLNS!”
Though Great-aunt Tabitha greeted this remark with hearty laughter, Sophie couldn’t see what the two things had to do with each other. People said sometimes that someone wasn’t pretty enough to get married, though one met some very plain married women and some very pretty unmarried ones. But what did prettiness have to do with being a good secretary, which was presumably the main point of the training one received at IRYLNS?
The doctor ushered them over to one of the little tables and used the speaking panel on the wall to order tea from the receptionist.
“Sophie, do you know much about the work we do here?” she asked.
Sophie confessed her ignorance.
“The name Adam Smith College isn’t just a cover story, a red herring, or a silly joke,” said the doctor. “Adam Smith was the first person in Scotland to come out and say explicitly that human emotions and passions—those things that gave the ancient Greeks so much trouble—should be redirected for the good of the community. His ideas lie at the heart of the philosophy of the Communitarian Party, which operates on the belief that individuals have a moral obligation to put aside selfish desires to promote the good of the group. Thanks to modern medicine, we’ve been able to take the concept several steps further. The crucial insight—”
“Susan’s crucial insight,” Sophie’s great-aunt interjected.
“Your great-aunt’s name joins mine on most of the patents,” the doctor told Sophie, affecting a not-very-convincing modesty. “Tabitha’s downplaying her own role in all of this.”
Patents? What on earth could they be doing here? Feeling equal parts confusion and alarm, Sophie paid close attention to the woman’s next words, though they did not much clarify things.
“It’s long been said,” said Dr. Ferrier, “that behind every successful man stands a good woman. When people say that, they’re usually thinking of his wife or his mother, but
in truth it’s more often a secretary or a head nurse or a really excellent administrator who makes sure everything runs smoothly in a man’s personal and professional life. The ideal assistant must be cheerful, flexible, reliable, patient, and thoughtful of others. She must also be willing to toil without recognition, often without getting even the most cursory thanks; Tabitha always jokes that we should institute a supplemental training scheme to teach men how to treat our young women properly.”
“Important men don’t usually know what to do with their negative emotions,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, “other than to bluster at people and browbeat them and generally make everyone miserable, including themselves. They also tend to be selfish and inattentive to the needs of others. The real problem is that the women who marry them or work for them have needs too, and when those needs go unsatisfied, everything stops functioning.”
It sounded like the men were the real problem, not the women. Why didn’t Dr. Ferrier and Great-aunt Tabitha develop a scheme to make men less selfish and angry, and leave the young women alone? Sophie’s stomach growled. It must be almost lunchtime.
“Fortunately the central procedure we perform here—the J and H procedure, we call it—makes that fact about human nature completely irrelevant,” continued the doctor. “After they undergo a modest amount of surgery and a battery of hormonal and behavioral therapies, our girls are no longer capable of having needs. They can’t be offended by some imagined slight or by a pattern of overwork, neglect, and verbal abuse. They’re happy, well-adjusted workers with all their intellect intact, and yet with none of the temperamental disadvantages—self-absorption, irritability, laziness, a tendency to feel hard done by—that limit the utility of the common secretary. Indeed, in the cases where we see the best outcomes, these young women are even able to become repositories for the anger and desire of the men they work for, rather like human lightning rods.”
Human lightning rods? It wasn’t a very reassuring comparison. Nicko Mood was very devoted to the minister’s interests, but he didn’t seem to serve as a repository in this way—it must only work for male employers and female assistants. Sophie couldn’t quite follow the underlying principles, although she thought as long as Great-aunt Tabitha was involved, it couldn’t be too bad. Sophie’s great-aunt might sanction girls undergoing a rather difficult and painful training scheme, but she wouldn’t put people into actual danger. Would she?
Suddenly this pleasant room felt almost as dangerous as the vaults beneath the Castle.
“Do you have any questions?” said the doctor.
“What do the letters J and H stand for?” Sophie asked almost at random, not daring to ask about anything of substance.
The way they responded told her she’d blundered. The two women looked at each other, then both spoke at once.
“No, you first,” Dr. Ferrier said.
“The letters J and H,” said Great-aunt Tabitha with a sly look at her friend, “stand for Joy and Happiness.”
There was an embarrassing sound to the words that made Sophie feel as she had the year before when Miss Hopkins lectured them on the birds and the bees.
“And how does the procedure work?” she ventured.
“Oh, you wouldn’t be interested in the technical details,” said Dr. Ferrier.
There was something ominous about the doctor’s obvious reluctance to specify, but they were interrupted at this point by the receptionist’s arrival with tea and biscuits. Though she felt like the condemned man eating a hearty meal, Sophie had three biscuits and a piece of cake.
As they finished their tea, Great-aunt Tabitha looked at her enameled watch. “We must get down to business, Susan,” she said. “I’ve worked through the numbers on the last several rounds of graduates, and a few ideas come to mind for improving the next set of statistics. Have you got anybody who can take Sophie around while we work? It’s a pity for her not to see the rest of the place while she’s here.”
The words sounded almost menacing.
The doctor thought for a minute.
“Yes,” she said, “that won’t be a problem—Alison can take half an hour to show Sophie the sights, then park her in the garden until we’ve finished.”
Having disposed of Sophie, they turned to a stack of files and were at once immersed.
SEVENTEEN
SOPHIE LOITERED OUTSIDE the office under the receptionist’s supervision until her guide showed up. A short stocky woman with a lazy eye, Alison Mackay introduced herself and asked Sophie what she would like to see.
“I don’t know,” said Sophie. What she really wanted was to be allowed to wait for her great-aunt in the street outside.
But she hadn’t any choice in the matter, and she supposed she might as well get a look at what went on here while she had the chance. It would be worse not knowing. “That is, I’m interested in anything—everything.”
“Well, why don’t I show you the treatment rooms and tell you a bit more about what we do here? Then we’ll look in on one of the occupational therapy classes, and after that you can play in the garden while you wait for Miss Hunter and Dr. Ferrier to finish.”
Play! A brief surge of contempt took the edge off Sophie’s panic, and she mentally labeled Miss Mackay another one of those grown-ups who couldn’t tell the difference between a person who was fifteen and one who was five.
But Miss Mackay’s cheerful tones only underlined the horror of what she revealed to Sophie. Spotlessly clean, the first treatment room held an examining table, a glass drug cabinet, and an electrical apparatus that looked like a cross between a medieval torture device and the equipment the comic-book scientist Dr. Maniac used to convert innocent chimpanzees into killing machines of preternatural strength and intelligence. Just such an imagination might have conceived the set of electrodes where the head would go, the metal bands to hold down the torso, the stainless steel cuffs for wrists and ankles. Sophie’s own wrists tingled in sympathy.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to show you the operating theater on the other side of the premises,” said Miss Mackay. “Visitors aren’t allowed. We have several other rooms like this one, of course, which we use to administer significant electric shocks and recondition the synapses of the brain. Dr. Pavlov’s work in Russia has been most useful here as a precedent, as well as the contributions of Dr. James in America.”
She held up a chunk of solid rubber.
“Each girl has one of these in her mouth to stop her from biting her tongue off.” She uttered the phrase with relish, caressing the hideous three-dimensional gag before she replaced it on a shelf with others graded according to size.
Sophie’s head was pounding now and her stomach churned. She swallowed a few times in hasty gulps, then took a deep breath. She had to calm down. Great-aunt Tabitha wasn’t an angel, but she wouldn’t let people be treated like this if it were anywhere near as bad as it looked.
“Many different doctors and researchers have contributed to make the treatment as effective and comfortable as possible,” Miss Mackay continued, oblivious to Sophie’s physical distress. “Located so near to a university, we are in a wonderful position to incorporate the very latest developments in the science of the mind.”
They passed by the next few rooms, which Miss Mackay said were identical to the first, and turned right at the end of the hallway.
“On our left,” said Miss Mackay, “the pharmacy, where we keep our hormones, amphetamines, and tranquilizing agents. Shall we just look in briefly?”
She unlocked the door and showed Sophie: stoppered glass tubes of tablets in attractive pastels, vials of gleaming pink and blue capsules, ampoules filled with honey-colored liquid, and hypodermic needles in all different sizes, sinister and beautiful as a vampire’s fangs.
“The Duke of Wellington himself,” said Miss Mackay, “once responded to a friend’s suggestion that habit was a second nature by saying, ‘Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times nature.’ Here we use electrobiology and human chemistry to la
y down new patterns in the brain, then confirm and reinforce those patterns by behavioral conditioning. Why don’t we pop down the hall to the training center and see if we might catch the tail end of a therapy session?”
She let them into a private observation area, a small, dark booth at the back of a bright, sunny classroom.
“On the other side of the window is a one-way mirror,” said Miss Mackay. “In other words, we are fully concealed.”
The room held three long tables, each one seating four girls. Every girl had a small mirror on a stand in front of her. Sophie homed in right away on the middle table, second girl from the left. It took her a minute to remember the girl’s name: Hannah Jacobs, that was it. She’d taken awards in music and maths on Prize Day the summer before.
In Sophie’s memory, Hannah had an unusually expressive face, a face that spoke so vividly as to make words almost unnecessary. As Falstaff in a school production of Henry IV, Hannah had brought the house down.
Now Sophie watched as Hannah’s facial muscles worked in perfect synchronicity with the others’. The identical movements were uncanny. The girls were physically alike only in age and general prettiness, but their smiles could have come off a factory production line.
“Smile,” said the instructor. “There. Look at your reflection. Smile in response to your own smile. Good. By moving the muscles of your face, you release a flood of neurotransmitters to tell your brain you are happier than before. And again. Wider, please, and be sure to involve the eyes.”
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” said Miss Mackay, sounding like a proud parent. “These girls have been here scarcely six months, and look at them now. Quite different from when they arrived. Why, a couple of them cried themselves to sleep the first few nights out of homesickness! They’re treated to every luxury while they’re here; they’re not allowed out unaccompanied until the training is complete, of course, but we arrange special excursions to boutiques and beauty salons so that they have all the nice things they’ll need once they leave. And they receive lessons in how to make themselves up, dress attractively, and so on.”
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