‘Thank you. How have you been feeling since we met before? You said you were going to—’
‘Oh yes. You know, it worked like a charm. The very first lot of pills he tried on me. You can probably see. No more feeling bad. No more wanting to write poems, either. But that’s all right, isn’t it, in the circumstances? But what the pills didn’t take away was this curiosity about whether…’
Somebody knocked on the door and rattled its handle. A worried voice called,
‘Ted? Ted, are you in there?’
‘Hang on, Charles, will you? I’ll be out in just a minute.’ Potter lowered his voice again. ‘He must have used ten-pound notes. Or his intelligence and energy. He’s got plenty of all three.’
‘They might not have read the book, just going by all your previous—’
‘None of them? It’s unlikely.’
‘Or they might have thought this book was no good and not wanted to hurt your feelings, not wanted to stop you getting the award which they might have thought you’d earned with your previous work.’
‘All of them? All saying how it continued the great Potter tradition? Holding a secret mass meeting to agree on a Potter policy? Sir Robert for one would never dream of stooping to anything like that. He’s got far too much integrity. What he hasn’t got is the ability to tell the difference between a good poem and a bad one. Or even between one kind of bad poem and another. I don’t know, perhaps that’s harder. Yes. I think in my heart of hearts I must have known I was no good. Otherwise why wouldn’t I read my poems when I’d finished them? I’d have read them over and over again very carefully, to try and decide. And of course, I’d decided on the title and dedication of this lot before anybody else had ever seen it.’
‘You’ll feel differently about this tomorrow. You’ve given yourself a shock by this test thing of yours.’
They got to their feet as she spoke. Without drawing close to her he rested his hand on her shoulder, having to reach up slightly to do so.
‘Do I look shocked? Tonight was just setting the seal on it. I’ve known the result of the test for weeks now. Don’t worry about me, Mrs Macnamara. As I told you, I never feel bad about anything. Not any more.’
III
‘Why did he do it, do you reckon?’ asked Pat Bowes.
‘I don’t know. Are we going to make this plane?’
‘On our heads. Quit fussing, Macnamara.’
‘There’s all this stuff of yours…’
‘So there’s all this stuff of mine. Somebody’ll have to help me with it. There are men at the airport who earn their livings helping people with stuff.’
Bowes’s car, which had a certain amount of Sue’s stuff in it as well as a lot of his, hurried westwards down Cromwell Road.
‘You’re not going to get me off Potter, love. You were one of the last two or three people to talk to him. He must have said something. Or would you rather not talk about it? In which case tell me to shut my jumbo trap.’
‘No, I don’t mind. I’d have thought it was obvious enough anyway. He felt he’d found out he was no good.’
‘That wouldn’t make me knock myself off. I know, I’m an insensitive bastard, but there must have been more to it than that.’
‘I don’t think so. He’d made one gesture, telling his public to go and screw themselves, but that wasn’t enough. He wanted to apologize.’
‘Apologize? For being just a wee bit offensive to a lot of stuffed shirts who aren’t even—’
‘No, for being a bad poet, for having spent most of his life doing nothing but write bad poetry, or poetry he thought he’d proved was bad, and wasting everybody’s time. He wanted to show he minded. More than about anything else, more than about his wife, which was why he did it in a way that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for an accident.’
‘Bit rough on the old girl, that part of it.’
‘Very. It’s the only part of it I don’t sympathize with him about, but I can understand. Bad poets mind about poetry just as much as good poets. At least as much.’
‘I don’t see why it should be at least as much, but you’d know, I suppose. Well, it was a nasty shock. I thought he was a nice old buffer. It’s a shame being nice doesn’t mean you’re good. When I think of some of the talented sons of bitches I’ve run into…’
‘I know.’
‘You seem to have got on to a lot about him nobody else has. I reckon I read pretty well every word the papers had to say, and there was nothing anywhere near this apologizing stuff of yours, or minding about poetry. You ought to write it up some time.’
Immediately on getting home on the night of the award, Sue had written out everything she remembered — a very large proportion — of her last conversation with Potter. The account was now locked up in her keepsake drawer, with the manuscript of ‘Unborn’ clipped to it. Certainly she ought to write it up some time; not yet, not until after Mrs Potter was dead. By then, perhaps, it might be possible to see how to write it up, or write it: how best to serve Potter’s memory, how to interpret his intention in telling her what he had told her that night. For the present, she felt like somebody ineptly clutching a token of quite obscure significance, a gift with no recipient.
Sue and Bowes continued on their journey in the direction of Peduzzi, who at that moment, it being evening in Ceylon, was sitting in a hut drinking a sort of beer and congratulating himself on the (in fact both pretentious and technically incompetent) piece of film he had shot that day.
SOMETHING STRANGE
Something strange happened every day. It might happen during the morning, while the two men were taking their readings and observations and the two women busy with the domestic routine: the big faces had come during the morning. Or, as with the little faces and the coloured fires, the strange thing would happen in the afternoon, in the middle of Bruno’s maintenance programme and Clovis’s transmission to Base, Lia’s rounds of the garden and Myri’s work on her story. The evening was often undisturbed, the night less often.
They all understood that ordinary temporal expressions had no meaning for people confined indefinitely, as they were, to a motionless steel sphere hanging in a region of space so empty that the light of the nearest star took some hundreds of years to reach them. The Standing Orders devised by Base, however, recommended that they adopt a twenty-four-hour unit of time, as was the rule on the Earth they had not seen for many months. The arrangement suited them welclass="underline" their work, recreation and rest seemed to fall naturally into the periods provided. It was only the prospect of year after year of the same routine, stretching farther into the future than they could see, that was a source of strain.
Bruno commented on this to Clovis after a morning spent repairing a fault in the spectrum analyser they used for investigating and classifying the nearer stars. They were sitting at the main observation port in the lounge, drinking the midday cocktail and waiting for the women to join them.
‘I’d say we stood up to it extremely well,’ Clovis said in answer to Bruno. ‘Perhaps too well.’
Bruno hunched his fat figure upright. ‘How do you mean?’
‘We may be hindering our chances of being relieved.’
‘Base has never said a word about our relief.’
‘Exactly. With half a million stations to staff, it’ll be a long time before they get round to one like this, where everything runs smoothly. You and I are a perfect team, and you have Lia and I have Myri, and they’re all right together — no real conflict at all. Hence no reason for a relief.’
Myri had heard all this as she laid the table in the alcove. She wondered how Clovis could not know that Bruno wanted to have her instead of Lia, or perhaps as well as Lia. If Clovis did know, and was teasing Bruno, then that would be a silly thing to do, because Bruno was not a pleasant man. With his thick neck and pale fat face he would not be pleasant to be had by, either, quite unlike Clovis, who was no taller but whose straight, hard body and soft skin were always pleasant. He could not think as well as Bruno, but on the other hand many of the things Bruno thought were not pleasant. She poured herself a drink and went over to them.