Dr. Slink listened to his ramblings with a growing sense of wonder. Even exhilaration.
There was a pattern — a divine pattern in it all. There had been purpose even in Dr. Perrywit’s dismissal of Professor Greylaw. There had been purpose in Dr. Slink’s chance encounter with Peter Karamazov in the park (she still did not know it had been Ilyich). There had been purpose also in Dr. Perrywit’s sexual attack, and even in the ignominious dismissal from MicroWar. There was purpose in the never to be forgotten ecstasy she had experienced with Gabriel. There was purpose in everything. Suddenly she felt radiant with knowledge and wisdom and divine truth.
She stroked Gabriel’s hair and pressed his face to her breast. And her eyes shone.
“Gabriel,” she said softly, “you have told me terrible and horrible and wonderful things.
You and Brother Peter have shown me how our lives — how all our lives — are bound together.
And now, despite all these frightening events, the world is being conquered at last by peace and by love. The age of miracles is not past. God moves in mysterious ways.”
Gabriel hiccupped and clumsily caressed her nipple without any enthusiasm at all. “God,”
he announced heavily, “is a Supergitt. God is a cosmic fart.”
“God is Love,” said Dr. Slink serenely.
“Crap!” retorted Gabriel, slopping more whisky down his chin and Dr. Slink’s breast. “God is a noise in your head and a bug in your vagina… All I know is that when I found something to love, it had to be taken away… God’s balls! Camilla is dead, you big bitch! Camilla is dead!
Stopped, smashed, finished, kaput, gone!” He clutched Dr. Slink convulsively and began to sob. Her breast and half her body became drenched in tears and whisky. Presently, Gabriel slipped into unconsciousness.
But Dr. Slink did not call the meds. She had found compassion. With deadly dedication, with ruthless patience and with Perfect Universal Love, she set about nursing Gabriel back to health.
For three days he was too weak to resist. Then, on the fourth day, while Dr. Slink was out purchasing good, wholesome health foods, he crept out of her apartment, out of Margot Fonteyn House, and out of her life for ever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Gabriel did not know why he had returned to 1735, Babscastle Boulevard. Gabriel did not know anything. Perhaps it was a sentimental journey. Perhaps he was chasing ghosts. Perhaps he was simply looking for tangible souvenirs of his lost love. Perhaps he was hoping that Supergitt would play another funny trick and turn back the clock, take the mainspring out of time, so that he could hold Camilla in his arms once more.
The house was deserted. The garden, where a squirrel, a lamb and a fat white rabbit had once frolicked with the big cats at night, was an overgrown desolation. Gabriel could not open the main door to the house, but he did not need to. Practically every window had been smashed — no doubt as the result of the tender attentions of prepubes or students.
Gabriel, carefully nursing a precious bottle of vodka, got in through one of the ground-floor windows, cutting himself slightly in the process. He went into the lounge. Surprisingly, it had not changed greatly since he had last seen it — was it months ago, years ago? Anyway, in another kind of time.
Something other than animals had knocked the grand piano about a bit, and curtains had been torn down from their hangings. But there were still rabbit and sheep droppings on what was left of the Indian carpet, there were still claw and tooth marks on the cocktail cabinet and the piano; and the settee looked as if it had wrestled with a panther or a lion yesterday.
However, spiders had taken over. Presumably they had invaded from the garden; and now almost everywhere there was the fine tracery of webs that somehow locked everything in a lost pocket of time.
Gabriel did a quick tour of the house. It was a mistake to visit the bedroom where he and Camilla had first blissfully exhausted each other. The bed and wardrobe had been smashed, ransacked drawers pulled hastily from chests had been flung in all directions. Remnants of Camilla’s clothing lay in absurd places, oddly mocking him.
It was a mistake also to visit the bathroom, where Gabriel had compulsively made love to Camilla on the floor before taking her away to escape the real or imagined attentions of the Security boyos. For a moment, as he surveyed the bathroom, Gabriel imagined he saw the two wet marks left by two wet bodies on the carpet. But when he inspected more closely, the marks were broad stains — possibly of blood. And quite possibly the result of some bizarre student caper.
He went downstairs once more into the lounge, and sat on the settee to drink vodka and wait a while for a ghost that would never come. After two deep swigs of vodka, he put the cork in the bottle and stretched arms that had been aching with sheer tension.
By chance, as he stretched, one of his hands slipped between the torn back of the settee and the tattered seat cushion. By chance, his hand encountered something thin and smooth.
Automatically his fingers closed on it. He pulled it out. Gabriel had found an unposted letter.
It was addressed to Camilla.
With suddenly shaking fingers, Gabriel opened the letter and began to read it.
“My darling wife,” he read. “I am writing here what I lack the courage to say to you, and I shall arrange for this letter to be delivered when I am not at home. I am, as you know, a devout and professional coward; and I want you to have expended whatever emotion you may find it necessary to expend and reached whatever decisions you need to reach before I get back.
“You no doubt wonder why I intend to continue my work even though MicroWar has given me the push. And I am sure that now you are sober (yes, I did fix the drinks) you are wondering why I insisted on injecting you with P 939.
“Dearest, despite all my glib explanations on that intense and somewhat alcoholic evening, I did not inject you with P 939 either for the advancement of science or so that I could measure phase development in a human being. All that was gobbledegook.
“I injected you so that I could exert a very simple but, I hope, effective form of blackmail.
“You see, the trouble is that I love you very dearly. I know you do not love me and that I am no good at sex. But that does not matter. I am content to be with you, to know that I can watch Marilyn Monroe, that sad, gay child enchantress, and know that I, too, can hold her -
you — in my arms with tenderness and sometimes even with passion.
“I know you do not love me, and that does not matter. What does matter is that I also know that you do not intend to renew our marriage contract, and that you will hold me to the agreement, take the money and just disappear.
“I could not bear to lose you. That is why I injected you (how I wish I could have done it the other way!) with P 939. Because now, my love, you need me as I need you.
“You see, until I have found an answer — and believe me, I am not very far off — the longterm effects of P 939 are disastrous, if not devastating.
“I first noticed what I call the cumulative eruption effect when I had a second generation rabbit living harmoniously with an infected fox at the zoo. One day I discovered that the rabbit (then mature after receiving P 939 in late adolescence) had kicked the fox to death. It was a great shock to me.
“I began to investigate — with mice, next time. I used mice because the mouse metabolism and life-cycle is comparatively fast, and I wanted quick results. I put a stray cat through to phase three, then I allowed it to live at the zoo with half a dozen infected white mice. I had done my arithmetic; and sure enough, within six hours of the predicted time, the mice attacked the cat. I checked the experiment, of course, and repeated it with other short-living, fastbreeding animals and was able to determine the operative cycle of P 939. I could not have done this with large animals, you understand, because it would all have taken too long. I was up against time — the time when you would take your money and go.