As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  AS IF BY MAGIC

  by

  Angus Wilson

  First published by Secker & Warburg 1973

  TVM edition 2015

  SBN 436 57514 0

  FOR NICHOLAS AND PAMELA BROOKE

  Book One

  Departure From Home

  WISPS of fog had collected high up against the ceiling of the hall. You could see them interweaving, swirling like smoke rings, grey and brown, around the electric light bulbs that hung so nakedly over the heads, the something too few heads of the audience.

  The vicar had placed himself in a corner at the end of a row, obscurely as he hoped, so that the audience should not seek to measure its appreciation of the performances by his facial expression; though he would, of course, lead in laughter if required (unlikely? the Absurd? who could say these days? But not the Cruel. He must draw the line at bear-baiting. Where the refined met the primitive was the Devil’s land). He gazed upward, with folded arms, and saw some mysterious fitness in the floats of fog.

  Gas-lighting, he found himself thinking, would have been more appropriate. The Church Hall. The Institute. Good Faces seeking earnestly as the Wonders of the Great World Around Us, God’s Purpose clear whether in desert or jungle, flickered for a moment and then clicked into place on the white-sheet screen. Hands, rough with honest labour, groped after knowledge. Lips formed the letters silently that they had learned so laboriously, yet so lovingly, by oil lamp, after the long day’s work was done. Coming in from a thick pea-souper, a London partickler, with what eager . . .

  He cut the image very short, unfolded his arms and sat up straight. That a few wisps of fog should so carry him away to sentimentalize over a Victorian world of gas-lit institutes and self-improvement, dead and gone long before he had been born! To sentimentalize about fog when the one thing, above all, that the Church today was doing, leading indeed, was in the dispersal of fog in racial questions, in the fight against poverty and hunger and bad housing!

  Magic-lantern Wonders of the World when today everyone saw for him or herself: parishioners who talked of the Seychelles and not Seaford; who delayed him with accounts of hearing their first muezzin; and even he, the poor parish priest, by the invitation of old friends, with a winter fortnight in the Algarve to look forward to! Yet there are few thoughts that do not have some foundation, fulfil some useful purpose in our minds. So, leaving aside any momentary nostalgia for Victorian days—“and ordered their estate”, not to speak of the Singhalese labelled as vile!—perhaps the attraction of the fog did have some meaning.

  These young people, for example, who had just given them all those wild disordered lights—beautiful up to a point, but going on, he was afraid, far too long for this audience—now about to present this mime; wasn’t it a healing, soothing fog or, at least, mist, that they were after? With all this craving for ecstasy, and sheer experience—if the coloured lights had lasted longer perhaps, well just as well not, such of the audience as he knew, the few regular church-goers, would have made embarrassing dervishes! Perhaps the bright light of reason, no, he wouldn’t admit of reason, but, say, of science had shone with too hard clarity for too long. Science that should have been a handmaid. A robot world! Encased in their hideous steel he saw the monsters stumbling blindly forwards. Could it be the age of the Daleks again? “Dr. Who!”, the young Scots voice familiar from the screen sounded in his ear. And then—“THE HUMAN RACE MUST BE DESTROYED. THE HUMAN RACE MUST BE DESTROYED.” He shuddered involuntarily for a world devoid of Christian humanism.

  The Daleks indeed! Nevertheless, the young people had something in their Luddism. How easily one fell into using these modish words!—he who had but the vaguest idea of where or when the Luddites. Without mystery, our faith is nothing. Not by works alone. But true mystery, the great mysteries were never obscurantist, never foggy. The words of Saint John of the Cross burned through the soul with the clear Light of Love. A light that I have never been quite able to face. He flushed at this thought, forcing it with a struggle back into its cage where only at long intervals was its desolate whimper heard to render life waste. He closed his eyes, summoning Keeper Humour and Keeper Self-Mockery to his aid. And as always they exorcised the lean last hungry thought. He laughed at the posh Sunday-paper image he was making of himself: the clergyman wondering whether he could bring the young people in if he donned a loin-cloth. His well-being restored, he opened his eyes as loud thumpings announced the start of the mime.

  It was just as well that the whiskered young chap had insisted on removing the platform stage, tiresome though the whole business had proved and upset though Mr. Carter had been at what he seemed to feel an insult to his caretaking. At this rate they would have gone through the boards. What a thumping! But then, as one of the young women had told him, the last thing they aimed at was professionalism. There they were—twelve indistinguishable young people in grey cotton tights. One could see now what unisex meant. But perhaps that was part of the point too. “Batteries”. Caponed broilers, no doubt. Well if it was parables they were offering, a parson ought not to miss their meaning. But then his eye caught sight of something grotesque peering in at him through the frost-patterned, fog-shrouded windows—three? four? five? eyes and some white blobs. Visitors from another world they must be, coming out of the yellow horror. Then all but two eyes were gone, and one of those slowly winked. But, against the white blob, the deliberate wink seemed not to mock but to ask for pity. And then all were gone. Children, of course, poor children out there in the bitter cold and fog. Waifs and carols, Barnardo boys, Tiny Tim, collecting-tins—and he with no cast-offs or steaming turkey—“fails my step I know not how, I can go no longer”. But what nonsense! Just well-fed, well-educated boys from the Cooper estate drawn by the mystery of these thumping antics offered by their hippie elders; but not betters, for in ten years’ time the same urchins might be grant-aided students offering whatever the young might offer in ten years’ time. But laughing now no doubt at the loonies much as healthy ten-year-olds had laughed at anything odd or unintelligible in the days of Dickens or of General Booth.

  And, indeed, Paul Latter, Hosein Fawzi and Charlie Webster, pressing their noses flat against the steamy window-panes of the hall, had watched the assemblage of mummers with silent wonder, but had greeted the first movement of the mime with loud, delighted cries—guffaws of pleasure and ridicule, until Mr. Sarson, late arrival and founder member of the Over-Sixties Club, had driven them off with a shout of “Get out of it, you little buggers!” Only Charlie Webster had realized that the mime meant something, that the loonies were poultry. In his delight at this surprising unknown power of interpretation in himself, he winked through the window at the vicar, then ran off triumphantly shouting, “Chicken! Chicken!”

  *

  Five years before, Leslie, driven beyond his endurance, had written on their lavatory wall—“Hamo Langmuir likes chicken.” They had had an almighty row, for Hamo was well aware how Leslie knew that he did not like chicken in the age of that word as used by the world at large (or rather by the relevant part of it). The injustice of the charge, its echo of common and detestable prejudice, goaded him to fury. “Chicken-loving is a monstrosity,” he had cried. And, “Youth-loving, of course, is honourable and Spartan and so on,” Leslie had mocked. But he had kissed him. Reconciled momentarily, they spent half an hour of loving and shared laughter, scrubbing, not wholly successfully, the indelible purple scrawl on the white wall. Yet only a fortnight later they had finally split up and had left the Islington house for good.

  *

  All around London, from the Church Hall in the south-east to the Rapson Institute in the north-west, damp white mist clung to the great stretches of clayey soil where houses lay crumbling or crumbled, where gardens l
ay wasted, and allotments turned to wilderness in order that great office blocks and throughways and car parks might take their places. Large floating clouds and swirls and wisps of this mist danced and dodged about among the motor-cars of those for whom the changes were intended—making it hard to distinguish the way to work from the way to home.

  But the white mist lay thick, too, upon the old allotments and fields as yet untouched, thicker, some thought, than upon things to come. It lay heavy even upon the Institute’s trial fields, so that it would have taken any visitor who had come by the outer door into the glasshouses (but no visitor could) some minutes to observe that the boxes upon boxes of cauliflowers before him were not just visual distortions due to the mist. Some had white heads, pinlike, scarcely to be seen in the jungle luxuriance of the gross, fatty leaves; others were vast powdered wigs beneath which only a magnifying glass could have revealed two stubby leaves like little crippled thumbs. And on, into another great glassed house, where box after box of antirrhinums offered now huge lips that threw proportion into limbo as do the artificially extended lips of some negresses in Central Africa; and then, as perhaps only among Venusians or the inhabitants of Andromeda, showed only the overhanging petal and no lips at all, mouthless velvet creatures. In an ever-changing range of colour from deepest red to deathliest white, through apoplexy, blood, blush, pallor and anæmia, pentstemon agate showed her controlled rage, with here and there, specially ticketed, a flower that had exactly divided its petals into deepest red and clearest white. But now, it grew warmer, and in the temperate air Bougainvillæa tumbled its magenta streams as in any respectable Edwardian greenhouse, but the admired, showy, colourful bracts were vestigial, and the modest, usually unnoticed cruciform, cream-coloured flower petals were monstrous and bold—modest housewife and flaunting mistress swopping roles. At last, in a final room, the air was nearly as misty as outside, but lacking the graveyard cold of London’s winter clay—hot and steamy. Here, overhead, nodded great scarlet and apricot hibiscus blooms, as in the Singapore or Peradeniya Botanic Gardens, but their leaves were chequered mosaic from chessboard green and yellow through harlequin and back once more to the boldest jade and the lightest lemon. An endless riotous, profligate chimera world; a Paradise garden of controlled monsters.

  Beyond the glasshouses, but framed in hibiscus vine, stood two men, the very tall one in well-tailored tweeds, the shorter wearing a laboratory white coat. They stood in front of the gleaming white of a super-speed preparative ultracentrifuge of precise temperature control. But their conversation seemed disagreeably overheated.

  “This is ridiculous, Hamo,” Nelson Hart said. He looked up from his stocky sturdiness to the small moustached head at the top of the long, absurdly swaying stalk. “I can well understand your aversion to meeting all these admin people, but to dismiss the value of field observation entirely to fit in with your distaste isn’t good enough. You’ve only to take classic cases. You yourself in your original paper on the photosynthetic properties of ‘Magic’ wrote of the value of those field observations from Java on the relative respiratory activities of Jhona 20 and Jhona 227 during hours of illumination. You called it a moment of break-through.”

  “Hardly.”

  “No, those words were Sir Alec’s in his annual report. I apologise. But take Wilkinson’s work on the carbohydrate properties of small tillers. It was a field report of the effect of a chance preservation of what had been thought parasitic waste . . . Or again, it was only in complex populations that analysis of yield and quantitative traits revealed how additive gene-action predominated. If we’d stuck to hybrids we could only have observed epistatic-type gene-action.”

  “Please spare me any more classic cases, Nelson. I have already told you that I accept the Director’s decision that I am holding up our work on pennisetum typhoides. I think it is allowed that, in the restructuring, I have contributed to a high-fertility crop and an increase in protein content. The poor resistance to fungus disease is, as you rightly say, in the main your concern, as the team’s physiologist. You have felt my presence an increasing hindrance. If I dispute this, I only hinder you further. The Board has been good enough to send me on a world inspection tour both of plant genetic centres and of selected agricultural schemes. A well-intentioned alibi for the failure of a reasonably eminent plant breeder. I am grateful for their courtesy. And I shall, of course, carry out their instructions carefully. But I had thought that our long association, even despite its recent souring, might have allowed me, in talking with you, to dispense with any pretence at liking for this V.I.P. world inspection. And now, may I come to the point for which I sought you out? I had forgotten to give you these tables of variability of protein and lysine content. They appear to be somewhat relevant to mutational manipulation. I should particularly draw your attention to 9066, 9078, 9079, and D.118—the figures for lysine per 100 gram flour against lysine per 100 gram protein. I think them relevant. But that, of course, is your affair.”

  “It is really. But thank you. When do you leave?”

  “I should be gone now.”

  “Well, good-bye, Hamo. And, perhaps, you’ll return to take over from Sir Alec.”

  “I don’t find that funny. I’m not being kicked upstairs, you know. When I have basked in the glories of what I have done for the world of rice, I shall survey the sorghum field and return with propositions for restructuring, over which we shall no doubt again quarrel.”

  “A bloody cheerful cyclical view of history.”

  “I have never pretended to optimism. That’s why your fears that I shall be shocked by the social conditions of Asia seemed to me so peculiarly unpenetrating.”

  “I was giving you credit for humanity.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t do that. However, I am optimistic enough to hope that I may return to find Sir Alec retired, though not to take his place.”

  “If that famous ‘soccer knee’ plays him up any further, we may be lucky enough . . .”

  “Ah, Langmuir. There you are.” The hearty Scots accents of their Director startled them both. Nelson Hart looked grimly social; Hamo Langmuir coldly polite. “I’m interrupting a fond farewell.”

  “We were talking of your old ‘soccer knee’,” said Nelson with only a pretence of commiseration.

  “Oh, really? You’re neither of you great games players, I believe,” Sir Alec commented.

  And Hamo said, “I think not.”

  “You forgot these letters, Langmuir. For Professor Hakadura at the Tokyo Institute. There’s a strange little chap for you, but a brilliant man. Oh, you’ll like the sheer cleverness of the Japanese. For the rice people at Los Baños, you’ll get the letters in San Francisco. It’ll be, in the main, Americans there. I believe Fuggersheim’s working now on a derivative of 188. Give him my regards. Intellectually an American’s impressive, and a Jew’s outstanding, but an American Jew’s the salt of the earth. Here’s your letter for Darwin. I envy you your visit there. It’s a wide-open space and an outdoor life. And all the chances in the world open to you. If I had a young man with a real turn of genius, say you Hart, as you seemed when you first came to us, I’d give him the chance of Australia. Now here’s a letter for Doctor Fung in K.L. His best work’s done, but it was fine work. He’ll talk a lot against his Malayan colleagues to you, but don’t take too much notice. Of course the Chinese are ahead intellectually—a wonderful race—but the Malays are coming along, coming along. Two letters for Ceylon: Subramanian’s a Tamil, a fine, courteous, accomplished cytogeneticist of the old school; Abbegurewadena’s a young chap, and like all Singhalese a bit happy-go-lucky, but with a streak of real brilliance. They’ll talk agin each other, but it’s more talk than do, you’ll find in these countries. Your Indian contacts, of course, you have, but don’t be too ready to believe all these stories about the educated Indian mind. You know the babu stories.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “No? Oh, well, they’re told. But it’s a canard as the French say. The best India
n mind, for all its generalizing, has a remarkable grasp of detail. For Karachi . . . but that’s the second leg of your journey, your sorghum research begins there. I’ll send all the letters for Pakistan and Africa to reach you in Delhi. You’ll be a seasoned traveller by then. I hope what I say appeals to you?”

  “You have a rosy view of foreign parts certainly.”

  “Oh, you’ll like the red carpets they lay out for you well enough when the time comes.”

  “You mustn’t forget my humble position. You speak from your experience as Director of the Institute, a Fellow of the Royal Society and so on.”

  “What? Langmuir, the leader of the team who gave the wheat-lands ‘Glorious’. Langmuir, who modified the Mendel-Osborne method. Langmuir, who produced the fractination that led directly to the great rice break-through. Langmuir, the ‘Magic’ man. Good God, man, you’re a hero in every zone. You’ve let this year’s little set-back get you down. You’ve given millet a high fertility, you’ve increased its protein content. That’s enough for one man. Let Hart here and the biochemists solve these fungus problems. It’ll do you good to get away. Have a look at bigger things. The I.W.P. for example. You specialists despise these world plans. But the little anecdote here, the sudden glimpse of things on the spot there, will throw it all into perspective for you. And then you’ll prepare us for the biggest revolution of all. The restructuring of sorghum. It’s the rice of Africa as you’ll see when you get there.”

  “I doubt if I have such a generalizing capacity, Sir Alec, as you have reason to know. ‘In general, the new handbook under Sir Alec Jardine’s editorship can be highly recommended. It is unfortunate that an earlier chapter (Langmuir) should be well below the level of the others.’ ”