Jimmy was usually unassuming; yet the feeling had grown on him lately that there was some sort of help he could give Alyson. What help, he did not know; Alyson made no deliberate appeals and, aware of their potentially awkward position in Aubrey’s flat, they both confined their conversations to light chit-chat. Yet the something which remained unsaid had been growing stronger ever since Jimmy arrived at the flat. One day soon it would emerge from its hidden room into the light.
What convinced Jimmy that this was no illusion of his romantic imagination was the contrast between Alyson’s and Aubrey’s natures and their relationship with each other. Alyson was both intelligent and tolerant – but her comings and goings at the flat had a casual quality which implied little passion for Aubrey. Aubrey was a withdrawn young man; the streak which in his brother appeared as diffidence had been transmuted in him into aloofness. He was ‘correct’, in manner, dress and choice of church, food and book. He was a conformist with a career. In short, he was hardly the type to take a mistress; Alyson was hardly the type to become his mistress. They ought to be either husband and wife or strangers, and that was the crux of the matter.
A smell of sausages coiled juicily about the landing. As he descended the stairs, Jimmy could hear them frying.
The kitchen door, as usual, was open. Hilda Pidney spotted Jimmy as he reached the hall and came out, as she always did unless one was moving very rapidly, to exchange a few words. She was stocky and fifty, with the face, as Alyson once remarked, of one crying in a wilderness of hair. Despite her miserable expression, she was a cheerful soul; her first words now struck exactly the right note with Jimmy.
‘Why it suits you a treat, Mr Solent!’
‘I’m so glad you think so, Mrs Pidney,’ he said, putting his hand up self-consciously. ‘I see you’ve got yours.’
He had, in truth, the merest glimpse of it through her mop of hair.
‘Yes, I went straightaway at nine o’clock this morning,’ she told him. ‘I got there just before the trailers opened. I was second in the queue, I was. And it didn’t hurt a bit, did it, just like what they said?’
‘Not a bit, no.’
‘And I mean it is free, isn’t it!’ She laughed. ‘Henry’s been trying to make it work already. I ask you, at my age, Mr Solent. I can see I’m in for something now!’
He laughed with her without reservation.
‘I think these Emotion Registers are going to give a lot of people a new lease of life,’ he said.
‘You know what people are calling them,’ she said, grinning. ‘Nun Chasers or Normal Lights. Funny how these nicknames get round, isn’t it? I’d better get back to me sausages, quickish-like. Cheerio.’
As Jimmy let himself out of the front door, he thought, ‘She wasn’t coy. She has accepted it in the proper spirit. Three cheers for Mrs Pidney and the millions like her. They are the backbone, the backbone of England; such vertebrae, one dirty day, will rise and slay the pervertebrae.’
He strolled gently towards Park Lane, where he intended to capture a taxi, making himself enjoy the heat by contrasting it favourably with the cold, rain-bearing wind which had been blowing only a few days before. Everyone behaved much as usual in the streets. Considering that the grey trailers had been hard at work everywhere for four days, surprisingly few people had additions to their foreheads, but those few were attracting no interest. The man and woman in the bright red Austin-Healey, the cadaverous commissionaire, the two squaddies sunning themselves on the corner of South Audley Street, all wore their Emotion Registers as to the manner born. The cabby who answered Jimmy’s raised hand also bore the new token. Into every class, the ERs were finding their way.
The party to which Jimmy was going, Sir Richard Clunes’ party, was being held in one of the formidable blocks, Kensington way, which had been built at the end of the last decade. It was – with a few exceptions like Jimmy himself – a British Industrial Liasons party for BIL personnel, and therefore more in Aubrey Solent’s line than Jimmy’s, for Aubrey was a BIL man; Jimmy was entangled in literature. But Sir Richard, while promising to lend Jimmy a portrait for an exhibition he was organising, had genially invited him to the party at the same time, on the principle that younger brothers of promising executive material were worth suborning in this way, particularly as party material was always scarce at this season of year.
It was a small party: Jimmy could see that as soon as he arrived – much smarter than the literary parties to which he was more accustomed, which were generally toned down by provincial novelists with no style or reviewers with no figure. These were London people; more, BIL people! – BIL people living useful days and efficient nights. ‘They’re already at their primes, I’m sure they read The Times at breakfast,’ Jimmy told himself, glancing round as he shook hands with a beaming Sir Richard and Lady Clunes. Sir Richard had mobile eyebrows and a chin the shape of a goatee. His manner flowed with milk and honey, and he engaged Jimmy in pleasant talk for two minutes precisely.
‘Now let me see who you’ll know here, Solent,’ Sir Richard said, as that halcyon period drew to its scheduled close. ‘Ah, there’s Guy Leighton, one of our most promising young men. You’ll know him, of course – he has been working on the K. R. Shalu business with your brother. Guy! Can you spare us a moment, my dear boy?’
A dark young man who balanced perpetually on the balls of his feet was expertly prised from a nearby group and made to confront Jimmy. They bowed sadly to each other over their champagne glasses, with the polite dislike one partygoer so often feels for another. Guy and Jimmy were no more than acquaintances; their orbits only intersected when their invitation cards coincided.
‘Shall we dance?’ Jimmy said, and then, very seriously to counteract this facetiousness, ‘This looks a worthy gathering, Guy.’
‘Worthy of or for what, Solent?’ the dark young man parried. He could have been no more than four years older than Jimmy, but his habit of using surnames seemed to give him a good decade’s start. ‘The usual set of time-servers one finds at these bunfights: no more worthy than the next man, surely?’
‘Looking more worthy,’ Jimmy insisted. It was not a point he cared to labour, but he could think of nothing else to talk about. Gratefully, he accepted more champagne in his glass.
‘You, if I may say so,’ Guy said, cocking a sardonic eyebrow at Jimmy’s forehead, ‘look positively futuristic.’
‘Oh … the ER. Everyone’ll be wearing them in time, Laddie, yew mark moi words,’ Jimmy said, with that abrupt descent into dialect with which some of us cover our inadequacies.
‘Possibly,’ Guy said darkly. ‘Some of us have other ideas; some of us, I don’t mind telling you confidentially, are waiting to see which way the cat will jump. You realise, don’t you, you are the only person here wearing one of the ghastly things.’
He could not, announcing Armageddon, have shattered Jimmy more thoroughly.
‘You’re all living in the past, you scientific fellows. These are the nineteen sixties, the Era of the ER,’ he replied, but he was already looking round the large room to check on Guy’s statement. Every brow, high or low – some of them were the really interestingly low brows of genius – was unimproved by science. The wish to conform hit Jimmy so hard that he scarcely heard Guy’s remark about oppressed minorities.
‘The Solent pioneering spirit …’ he said.
‘And another thing I ought to tell you,’ Guy said. ‘I’m sure you will not mind my mentioning it. People in the swim refer to these discs as Norman Lights; after the firm of Norman which invented them, you know. I rather think it’s only the lesser breeds without the law who refer to them as ERs – or nun chasers, which being pure music hall might just possibly catch on. Of course it’s too early for any convention to have crystallised yet, but take it from me that’s the way the wind’s blowing at the BIL.’
‘I’ll be terribly careful about it,’ Jimmy said earnestly.