A man in some sort of uniform came out of the house. ‘I’ll go and park the cars for you,’ he said, ‘if you will all come straight in.’ So Gatt had to hand the keys over to him. Seff, who knew Gatt’s views on his driving under such circumstances, looked on, amused. Then he assisted Angela out of his somewhat low-slung car.
Ed and June Springle met them all just inside the door. Introductions. And at the end of them no one was the wiser who didn’t know everybody already, because nobody ever is. But Springle spotted that Heatherfield was the man he had been asked to fuss a bit, so he escorted him to the bar and gave him a drink, while a waiter looked after the others.
‘You’re from Kenya?’
Heatherfield nodded. ‘I’m just over here on a job. Probably going back there in a couple of weeks.’
‘You like it?’
‘God’s country.’
‘All we “Africans” think the same about our particular bit.’
‘Are you from the Union?’
Springle played chess with his glass. ‘Yes. Lived in Jo’burg until recently. Then last year we packed up all our furniture and the blue-prints of our bungalow, and put up an identical one here in Esher — I took a job with the Atomic Development Commission.’ He added: ‘The climate’s not as good, but the politics are a lot better.’ Ed sipped a Tom Collins thoughtfully. ‘Of course, you could say that just pulling out — like I have done — is hardly the answer.’
‘I doubt whether you would have achieved much by staying.’
‘Thank you for that! But others are fighting Segregation: they’re burning their fingers, but they’re fighting it. My plea is the same old excuse — I’ve got a wife to think about. Trying to bust myself and my family against a brick wall wouldn’t have helped anybody very much.’ He paused, and the record changed in the hi-fi. After the music had begun again he added: ‘Maybe I’ll go back there one day. But I’ll go on my own. June is too valuable a property to get mixed up in that sort of thing, especially now that Number One offspring is on the way — due any moment, in fact, as you will see! Forgive me if I seem rather unbearably proud of it.’
There came a sudden, concerted laugh from one corner of the room. Seff was at the centre of it. ‘Jack seems to be in good form tonight! I do hope… oh well.’ He brightened up again. ‘Come on, I want you to meet June — while there’s still time! It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if we had to make a hectic exit for the nursing-home before the evening’s out!’
‘Am I allowed to ask questions?’ asked Angela. The pose she had taken up by the mantelpiece was unconscious.
Arlen looked at her slant-wise. ‘It depends on the questions,’ he said. ‘But if you mean how is it going for Jack, the answer is that so far his conduct has been impeccable.’
She looked thoughtfully across the room at her husband, and without looking back at Gatt she said: ‘He certainly seems all right at the moment.’
‘Yes; he seems so very sure that nothing went wrong up at Marsdowne. I wish I was — especially since it is now established that the trouble started just about the time of the Project 3 episode.’
‘His worst patch,’ said Angela quietly.
At the mention of Project 3, Manson, though he was standing a good six feet away, pricked up his ears as if he had a radio permanently tuned to that wavelength. ‘Trust him!’ said Angela under her breath. Manson came over and joined them.
‘It’s funny you should mention Project 3,’ he said, staring hard at his glass. ‘I was just thinking about it.’
‘And what,’ said Gatt without enthusiasm, ‘were your thoughts?’
‘Well, with due respect to Mrs Seff, I was thinking, to be quite honest, that the ill-fated experiment might have had something to do with the present situation.’ He warmed to the theme. ‘You see, I always thought it strange that he got a reaction from it at all, if he really did what he said he did.’
‘Exactly what do you mean?’
Angela said: ‘If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go and join my husband.’
Manson was effusive. ‘Good Lord, please don’t misunderstand me, Mrs Seff. I wasn’t suggesting—’
She tossed some exquisite blonde hair out of her eyes, and stood, poised over him. ‘It’s simply that I’m not much good at technical conversations,’ she explained. And smiling slightly at Gatt for a moment, she turned and left them.
Gatt said: ‘Just what are you suggesting, Alec?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ He looked down at his glass again.
‘You must have meant something by that remark.’
‘Well, if you really want to know, I made a few calculations of my own. You know, don’t you, that I didn’t agree with Seffs design?’
‘I remember your saying something of the sort.’
Manson smiled archly. ‘I always say what I think, you know. Always been my policy.’
‘What was wrong with the design?’
‘The moderator. The way he’d got it the pile was well below critical mass.’
‘Well, in that event,’ said Gatt impatiently, ‘what are you beefing about? If that had been so, the thing would have been dead as a dodo. You could have put a baby inside it: he was only using natural uranium.’
‘Yes,’ said Alec, suddenly looking up from his glass. ‘And yet it blew up. Odd, isn’t it?’
June Springle was attractive in that rare, tranquil way that some young women arc when they are pregnant. She had only to cross the room for you to know, intuitively, what kind of woman she was; for she walked with poise and a complete lack of awkwardness, neither advertising nor concealing the fact that she carried a baby inside her. But even without the advantage of forthcoming motherhood, she was the sort of woman whom other women liked, just as she liked other women. She liked Angela, for that matter; partly because she had nothing to be jealous about, and partly because she had the gift of ignoring both gossip and outward appearances — and both these things applied in Angela’s case. Theoretically, Mrs Seff should have put her back up; in practice, she was a true friend. June looked what she was — a girl who had been brought up where the sun shone.
She saw Ed’s signal and went over to meet Heatherfield. Heatherfield would bore her — she knew that instinctively — but she would never show it, either deliberately or otherwise.
For June Springle, who was way, way down the social list, was a lady.
‘I hope all this din isn’t driving you mad!’ she said, though only raising her voice a few decibels above its normal tone. ‘I’ve never heard a louder record. But it seems to be traditional these days to have the “player” going mercilessly whenever anyone breathes the word “cocktail party”!’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Heatherfield, smiling, ‘hi-fi has even penetrated into darkest Africa. You may have to go half-way into the jungle to make use of the “usual offices”, but inside the wooden shack of a house there is sure to be a twelve-watt amplifier and a reflex speaker cabinet, even if the whole shooting match has to run off a car battery. It’s a sign of the times.’
He was thinking how strange it was that this townified creature was reared in the same continent as he. Would she know, he wondered, the call of the Bell Bird, the hiss of a snake, the bite of the Jigger? Or had she left the chrome civilisation of Jo’burg, on picnic occasions, only to drive in a convertible through the National Park? Still, he thought, when down to something like her normal dimensions she must be quite some piece of woman. Not as alluring, perhaps, as the Seff woman, but still the kind you thought about when you had been on safari for a month with only a couple of would-be hunters and a few tribesmen for company.