“Who’s kidding who around here?” Redpath muttered, getting on to the bicycle. He rode with the townward traffic for a couple of hundred yards before turning left into a quieter and mainly residential thoroughfare which would take him most of the way to the Jeavons Institute. The purr of his tyres on the tarmac and the steady rhythm of his legs usually served as aids to thought. He tried to rehearse the resignation speech he was going to make to Henry Nevison, but his mind kept turning towards that other source of the complications which had begun to plague his life.
Leila Mostyn was a mathematician who tor six months had been doing post-graduate work on statistics in the research department where Redpath passed most of the working day. On meeting Redpath, and learning what he did for a living, she had spent some weeks treating him with impersonal kindliness, like a cancer researcher being very correct in her handling of a laboratory animal she would soon have to dissect. For his part, Redpath had been captivated by her white-coated, tweed-skirted, straight-backed, pale-lipped air of sexual abstemiousness.
He had set out to court her, using all his resources of imagination and intellect, and for a full month after they had begun spending occasional nights together he had gone around in a romantic daze. Self-consciousness about his health and poor financial prospects had kept him from proposing marriage, but he had hoped they might gradually be drawn into a formal commitment as the sensual side of Leila’s character continued to develop. That had been a good month. Then had come the discovery that she was not austere by nature—merely discreet and independent. The reason she would spend only one night a week with him on average was that she often preferred to be alone, and in between times felt free to choose any partner from a circle of male friends at whose extent Redpath could only guess.
He had been hurt and angry, the more so because he knew he had been tricked by his own naive egocentricity. Since then he had come to accept the situation, and even to see advantages in it at times, but his attitude was a precarious one. He was well aware that any attempt to monopolise Leila would mean the end of the relationship and yet at least once a day he got a suicidal urge to express his jealousy, to remonstrate with her for not feeling as he did, to start laying down rules for another person’s behaviour. The urges grew stronger each time there was a setback in his daily routine—the implication being that she had carelessly denied him earthly paradise—and he had even reached the stage of holding her responsible for variations in his state of well-being. He knew this was illogical and childish, but he was unable to prevent himself from doing it. It’s all too much, he thought. I’ve got to find a safer place.
The psychophysiology department of the Jeavons Institute was housed separately in a brown sandstone edifice, built in the middle of the 19th century, which looked as though it had originally been the home of a wealthy merchant. It was screened from the granite façade and stainless steel cloisters of the institute proper by a row of Scots pines and some very old rhododendrons which had assumed the height and volume of modest-sized dwellings. Even on a fine summer day it was dank and cool as an underground cave behind the barricades of foliage, and on the lawn there were many areas like permanent brown shadows where grass refused to grow. The gravel of the surrounding paths was always wet underneath, so that footprints and tyre tracks showed up as dark impressions which lingered for a long time, like infra-red images, until the surface stones dried out and lightened.
Redpath cycled on the deep gravel until its sliding shiftiness robbed him of all momentum, then dismounted and wheeled his machine to the department’s front entrance. He propped it against the short stone balustrade at the side of the steps and went into the building. Leila Mostyn was coming out of her office as he entered the hall and she stopped to bid him good morning. She was a tall girl with cropped ash-blonde hair, grey eyes and a quirky fullness to her lips which to Redpath suggested every desirable feminine quality he could think of, from intelligence and humour to warmth and generosity. She was wearing what he thought of as the typical Leila Mostyn ensemble—a transparent blouse and a half-cup brassiere of indisputably sexist design which would have put her figure on blatant display had she not added a countyish tweed skirt and a white lab coat. The coat in particular served as some kind of personal statement because nothing in her work made it necessary and nobody else in the department wore one.
Give a little, keep a lot. Let people know what they’re missing. I wonder how she’d like it if, instead of meekly falling in with her every whim and piddling little plan, I walked into her flat and just took her any time I wanted, any way I wanted, whether she was in the mood or…
“John!” Leila gave him a quizzical smile. “What are you dreaming about?”
“Nothing.” Redpath was startled by the savagery of the vision which had obscured his thoughts. He gave a guilty laugh.
“Did you get enough sleep last night?”
“Plenty,” he said and, giving way to a jealous impulse, added, “How about you?”
The traces of Leila’s smile vanished on the instant, showing there had been near-telepathic communication. “I slept very soundly, thank you.”
This is pure madness, Redpath thought. I’m committing suicide. He grinned and said, “Shame, shame.”
Leila drew the edges of her lab coat together at the front. “What do you mean?”
“The two of you lying there all night and nothing happening. It seems a bit of a waste.”
Leila examined him coldly. “I think I’ll suggest to Henry that he should give you a month off.” She tried to walk away but Redpath caught her arm and was thrilled and taunted by the warmth of her flesh beneath the white cotton.
“Who was he, anyway?” he said, still grinning. “Anybody I know?”
“I’ve told you before, John—you really must try to get over your adolescent sexual hang-ups.”
“That’s what I’m doing. I asked you openly and frankly who you slept with last night, and if you haven’t got any sexual hang-ups yourself you should give me an open and frank reply. Right?”
“Get lost, John.”
“Rejection and hostility.” Redpath released her arm and mimed writing something in a notebook. Leila turned quickly, launching circles of perfume into the air, and hurried away into the complex of partitioned rooms at the rear of the house, her sponge-soled flats making little hissing sounds on the tile floor. Redpath snorted in triumph. Leila was the one who usually used psychological jargon as a quiver of poisoned arrows and she had disliked it intensely when he had got in first. It meant, of course, that in less than a minute he had undermined months of patiently building or preserving a relationship, but he could sense that it was a time for big changes. He could feel it in the air. It was inevitable that his leaving the institute would drive a wedge between them, and it was better that he should take the initiative and break free of her while he still had his pride and dignity, rather than watch helplessly as she gradually rationed out less and less of her time to him, making him less and less of a man.
Pride? Dignity? Next thing it’ll be white-sidewall tyres on the bike. Since when have you been lumbered with junk like pride and dignity?
Redpath shook his head, frowning, sprinted up the stairs and went along the first-floor landing to Nevison’s office. He knocked lightly on the white-painted, panelled door and went in without waiting for a reply. Nevison, who was seated at his desk in the bay window, glanced up in surprise. He was a lean, professorial-looking man in his fifties, with bushy grey hair and a generally athletic appearance which was modified by a certain leaden colouring of his skin and a bluish-redness of the nostrils. His academic standing was very high, but he always made a point of addressing Redpath in ultra-clear, unadorned English. It was a practice for which Redpath had been grateful until he began to suspect that Nevison took pride in his ability to communicate with the common man and saw it as a useful scholarly adjunct.