Despite himself, Arnold could not help laughing.
“You sound as if you’d just had a hard time with one. I didn’t think that happened with you.”
“It’s all a struggle, lad. But—are you kidding about this—what you just told me?”
“I wish I could kid about it. No, that was gospel.”
“Can’t you just go back there and kick the door down?”
“Heavens, no!”
“Perhaps you’d be better off if you tried to forget it.”
“Could you?”
“Nothing like that ever happened to me.” He drained his beer. “But I suppose not. Drink up, it’s my call.”
He came back with foaming glasses. He drank the top from his before he set it and himself down.
“Well, my old son. I don’t see what you can do. I’m flattered to hell that you came to me with the problem, but what can I say? She’s got this power. If she doesn’t want to share it with you, then—wait a minute, how do you know it’s her?”
“It must be.”
“Did she say so?”
“No-o. As a matter of fact, she denied it. But I somehow felt it.”
“You felt it. It only happened between you two. She denies having the power—and if it shook her as much as you say, that seems to bear her out. It would be a hard thing to live with, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes but—”
“But what? Why shouldn’t it be you?”
“Then why didn’t it happen to me before?”
“Mm-mm. True, but… look, just how do you do it?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Well, have you tried it since with anybody else?”
“No,” Arnold confessed.
Vic jerked his head in exaggerated disgust. “Well, come on then.”
“What? With you.”
“You needn’t be insulting. I do have a mind, you know.”
“Sorry, you took me by surprise. But here?” He looked around. “In a bar?”
“It happened to you at a party, didn’t it?”
“Ye-es. Well, all right.” At least, Vic had suggested something that he had refused to consider seriously, that it could be him, and not Claire at all. He didn’t have much faith in the notion, but—
“I’m concentrating,” Vic said, staring straight at him.
It took Arnold only a few seconds to realize that it was wildly absurd. The bar had filled up around them. People were drinking themselves into forgetfulness or desire, and here he was, sitting in a booth with a broad jester of a man, locking gazes, each trying to read the other’s mind.
And then he was conscious, not mentally but visually, of a change in the other. Those cool eyes widened. And Arnold felt it. It was nothing of the same order as even his first contact with Claire, which was perhaps why Vic felt it before he did. To Vic it was absolutely new. But there was no charge of power. He could feel the presence of people; now he knew that Vic could, too. It was as if he had waved a flag, and on a distant hilltop another flag had semaphored back.
Vic’s eyes blinked back to actuality. His first reaction was to pick up his glass and gulp it dry.
“My God! Hold on.” He charged to the counter and brought back more drinks.
“It was my turn,” Arnold protested, but Vic didn’t hear him. “My God!” he repeated. “Just like that=—”
“What did you feel?” Arnold asked.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know, But I felt your mind. It was just as if I had reached out my hand. Only—” he looked even more puzzled—“I felt your mind touching mine, too. Yet—”
He stopped and, surprisingly, grinned. “How many people in the next booth, the one behind me?No, don’t say. Put your hand under the table. Count off on your fingers. Bring your hand up—now.”
Vic brought his hand up. Three fingers were lifted.
Arnold looked down at his own. Three.
“Coincidence,” Arnold said, humouring him.
“Right, then. The one behind you.”
They each brought up a full hand.
“Impossible,” said Arnold. “There’s only room for four in a booth.” He craned round the partition at the instant that the nearest barman waved admonishingly at the occupants of the booth. They were only kids, barely old enough to be in here. A slim girl slid from the lap of one of the boys.
“Well, crush me,” Vic said. “It is you. I was reading your mind.”
“Wait a minute.” Arnold had a sudden thought. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”
Vic looked at him inquiringly as Arnold got up and left the bar. He walked down High Holborn for a hundred yards, then went back.
“Well?” he asked.
“I see what you mean. I thought I was getting that sense of people straight from your head. But it worked when you weren’t here. Well, not worked; I didn’t have to try. It just happens.”
“Exactly. What does that mean? With the girl it was much more than that, even the first contact. The second time we really communicated. I was left with that sense of people. In some way I seem to have passed that on to you. But I can’t communicate with you as I did with her. That must mean that she is the source surely.”
“Nonsense. It just means that she’s more sensitive than I am. It’s obvious that you’re the one.”
Arnold had to smile inwardly at Vic’s dogmatic confidence. Confronted, touched, by something utterly unknown, he tried to reason it out in his own terms. Which went, Arnold conjectured, something like this: Arnold’s a friend. This woman is giving him trouble. Being a woman, trust her to think she’s doing him a big favour. In fact, he’s doing her a favour and the silly bitch can’t or won’t see it. Well, to hell with her.
Vic’s main energy was devoted to the sex war. His conquests were legend in the raffish circles he moved in in Chelsea and South Kensington. It was as if he feared the whole feminine race and had to be battling with them all the time to prove that he didn’t.
“So I’d say to hell with her,” Vic said, and looked surprised when Arnold burst into laughter. “Why, what did I say?”
“Don’t mind me. It’s only that I was just thinking that you’d say exactly that.”
“Telepathy again, I suppose,” Vic said, looking slightly disgruntled.
“No, not quite. Believe me, I’m grateful for your advice.”
He was. Vic’s iconoclasm, even if it wasn’t informed by a high I.Q., was just what he had needed. It had prompted, and seemed to prove—at least to Vic’s satisfaction—that the power was his.
“Then let me give you a bit more,” Vic said. “Fish around, you’re sure to find somebody else to hook up to. If you can get the result you did with an ape like me, you should be able to get real results with somebody sensitive—as good results as you got with this girl.”
It made sense.
“What do you mean by sensitive? Some shrinking violet? Claire—” He bit his tongue at giving her name away; hell! it didn’t matter, there were thousands of Claires. “Claire’s no shrinking violet. She’s tough, really.”
“You know what I mean. There are millions of people about whose minds are closed—they’re just centred around grubbing for a living and keeping up status, reading the same best-selling books, watching the same stereos. That kind of mind—if you can call it that—would be useless. But there are just as many independent minds about—well, not so many, but you should be able to find them.”
Independent minds, closed minds. Arnold remembered a book he had read once on people in society, classifying them as inner-directed and other-directed. He had read it with a sort of hostile fascination. Books that labelled people in categories he had always distrusted, the same way he distrusted all systems. At school he had not taken science past the age of fourteen. They still taught in the mass equations of classical science. Then, outside school, he had come across books that dealt with newer scientific theories—books that talked of the ultimate unpredictability of things. The single parti
cle was individual in its behaviour. He had found the idea strangely illuminating, as if the same principle justified the individual human in a mass society.
In mass thinking, only the law of averages had meaning. It was the law of averages that made it probable—but only probable—that his hand gripping this mug of beer did not pass clear through it. Once in a trillion trillion times the interstices of hand and mug might coincide and the impossible happen.
He caught his breath. Was that what had happened between him and Claire? Not because they had any occult power either of them, but simply a long-shot turning up in the lottery of the ages?
But how about the power that was left, the power that enabled him, however rudimentarily, to contact another person’s mind, as he had contacted Vic’s?
He was conscious that Vic was gazing at him steadily. He met his gaze.
“Well?” asked Vic.
“I’m not sure. Claire’s got one of those individual minds—too damn much so. Perhaps individuality is a bar. Besides how can I start it with other people? Pester them to try telepathy tests? You know what happens to characters like that: ‘For heaven’s sake, duck, it’s Arnold Ash. He’s a bit peculiar, you know.’ ”
Vic drained his beer and looked at his wrist. “Well, that’s your Problem Number Two. Me, I’ve got a date with a ghastly Amazon of a female. At least, I think it’s female, but as Nimrod the mighty hunter said, that only lends excitement to the chase.” He rose somewhat unsteadily to his feet. “I don’t think Problem Number Two is quite as bad as Number One, which I trust we have now cleared up. If it turns out to be, just you write to Auntie Vic, dear. Cheers.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Arnold watched Vic’s bulky figure disappear through the doors, relieved that he had had to go. Otherwise he would have had to make his own excuses—and he had the uncomfortable feeling that Vic would have guessed the reason and decried it as a sign of defeat. He drained his glass. Whether or not it was a defeat, he had to see Claire for the last time.
But it wasn’t a defeat, he told himself as he breasted his way out and made for the Tube. It was a break with what had happened. The memory of his experience with her had to be killed before he started with anybody else. More important, he had to tell her that she need no longer fear his intrusion into her life. That the power was his, his the only concern with its implications.
If that were so, why was he worried about her? He wasn’t, he insisted to himself as the train bore him along. Well, perhaps he was, but only to the extent that he could not leave her in the background, a hovering cloud of anxiety on his horizon. She had been frightened of the interruption to her work. Well, the same applied to him now. This was his work. He had to start again with the power, difficult as might be.
He took a taxi from Notting Hill station. It dropped him at the shadowy entrance to Craven Yard and whirred away. He hesitated, then walked over the cobbles and up the stairs of Claire’s building. The stairwell was dimly lit. He reached the top and knocked.
There was no answer. Did she never answer the door? He knocked again. He tried the door. It was locked. He thumped savagely. A door on the floor below opened briefly and an angry voice told him to shut up. It was only then that he forced himself to recognize that Claire was not in. He cursed and leaped down the stairs, three at a time, and knocked at the ground floor door.
The colonel opened up and peered at him in the half-light. He seemed to recognize him. “You want Miss Bergen? I’m afraid she’s gone away.”
“Gone away? You—you don’t mean for good?”
“I shouldn’t think so, young man. She sometimes does go away for months at a time. She’s a quiet girl. I don’t see much of her, but—”
“Do you know where she goes to?” Arnold interrupted.
“I don’t,” the other answered stiffly. “If I did, sir, I’m not sure—”
“Thanks.” Arnold fled his disapproval.
He lingered at the exit from the yard, feeling a sense of loss invading him. He fought against it. Claire had evidently done for them both what he had come here to do—made a clean break of it. So what kick did he have? Shouldn’t he celebrate the fact?
Yes, celebrate—though he wasn’t sure that it was that impulse that steered him across the road and up the hill to the pub on the corner.
It was a lounge bar, with tables and a white-coated waiter. Arnold ordered a large whisky. He ordered another, and another. Service was quick. It was midweek and the bar was only sparsely populated.
After three drinks in half an hour he felt somewhat better. He looked around him. There was one girl sitting on her own. She was dumb-looking, and perhaps she was waiting for a boy friend, but what the hell? He had to make a fresh start. He went over to her.
“May I buy you a drink?”
She smiled assent, her face empty in a frame of white-blonde hair. He sat down with her. She agreed that she would like a martini. Yes, sweet. “Sweet for the sweet,” he said cornily, but she lapped it up. That and the drink. He ordered another, and another whisky for himself.
Her name was Sylvia. She was a projectionist in a stereo theatre. Interesting work, he commented. Interesting? It was boring, she said, you just had to make sure you fed in the tapes at the right time and in the right order. No tape-feeding tonight? My day off, she explained. Did she often come here? She used to with her old boy friend. He was a projectionist too, at another theatre. But she got fed up with him, always wanting—you know. “So I went to work at the same place as him, on the other shift. That way I hardly see him. Can you beat that?”
You certainly couldn’t, Arnold told her, laughing too loudly. “If you can’t lose ’em, join ’em.”
She laughed as if that was the funniest thing she had ever heard. And what did he do?
He told her, and she thought advertising was the cutest thing, and they had more drinks and talked more small-talk until by half-past ten he was rather less than sober. He was beginning, unless he made a deliberate effort, to see double. Only behind the image of this vapid face and bone-blonde hair the second image was of a small serious face with short black hair and big eyes. He screwed up his eyes and blinked them. The image disappeared.
“What’s the matter, honey?” his companion asked him.
“Nothing. Only cigarette smoke in my eyes.”
“Better now?” She smiled affectionately at him. She was really quite pleasant, he told himself. It had crossed his mind to repeat with her the experiment that he’d tried with Vic, but he had rejected the notion. It was too early yet to start again. And, tipsy as he was, he felt that he wouldn’t be able to achieve much with this girl. In that direction, anyway. Hell! Was this to be another complicating factor? Couldn’t he accept a woman for what she was? As a woman, a companion in pleasure?
“Where do you live?” he asked her.
“Shepherds Bush. But I’ve only got a room. You know—”
“I know. I’ve got a flat not far from here. Just one room and kitchen and usual offices, but it’s mine. You know—”
“It must be nice to have a place on your own like that. Where you can do what you like, have who you like in. I mean—”
He knew what she meant. The invitation had been proffered and accepted. But on his part by only a few cells on the surface of his mind. The rest had been seized by something much more important.
A place of your own… sanctuary. The memory came back to him of that region in Claire’s mind that he had seen, without being able to define. In the urgency of the experience, even in the many times since that he had tried to identify it, he had somehow assumed that it was a mental image, a purely symbolical haven. A comforting philosophy perhaps, an idealized memory of childhood, or—going right back—an image of the womb. But it could be a physical, present reality—a place. “She sometimes goes away for months at a time.” Wasn’t that what the colonel had said?
Why was it coming back now—the experience of approaching that place? He had never seen it. It had onl
y been a mental approach to a symbol. But the mind had direction and purpose. Within its own geography it carried the geography of the world outside. But why—how—was it coming back now? Could it be that…?
On a sudden impulse he called to the waiter to bring more drinks. And more. At the second call the waiter craned over him dubiously. “Don’t you think you’re rather overdoing it?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
Arnold’s purpose lent a frigid exactness to his voice. “I think I’m best qualified to judge that, don’t you?” The waiter went off, defeated, and came back with the order.
The girl giggled and pressed herself against Arnold on the overstuffed settee. “You can certainly drink,” she said admiringly.
“The uncrowned champion of Bayswater South,” he responded automatically. He was thinking—no, trying not to think, but to open his mind. That was the impulse behind this frantic drinking, to deaden his conscious control. His knowledge of that sanctuary, whatever knowledge he had or could reach of it, had been taken in at a basic level, far below the conscious. A forgotten quotation from Sir Thomas Browne danced in his brain: “Many things are known as some are seen, that is by Paralaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper being.”
“At some distance from their true and proper being,” he mumbled to himself.
“What was that, dear?” he heard the girl saying. After that things became hazy. He could remember waving his arms like a mad semaphorist, more drinks arriving, the flashing of lights off-on-off at closing time. Then going out into the cool evening, standing on the pavement, teetering, the girl hanging round his neck and wailing.
“The place of peace,” he yelled. “I’ve got to find it.”
“Home, Arnold,” the girl pleaded. “I’ll take you home.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I do, honey. You’re drunk.”
The Silent Speakers Page 4