‘There’s someone—,’ Jimmy said, and then stopped, foreseeing an awkward situation. But Guy had also noticed the newcomer; he became tense and his manner underwent a change.
‘Oh, she’s here, is she!’ he muttered, turning his back on that quarter of the room and shuddering as if he had witnessed a breach of etiquette. ‘I say, Solent, here’s a chance for us all to try out your gadget.’
‘Include me out,’ Jimmy said hastily. ‘I don’t like public demonstrations. Besides, I can tell from here that she would have no attraction for me; she doesn’t look as if she could make a firefly glow.’
‘You haven’t met her yet,’ Guy said, with surprising fierceness.
‘You never know what’s in your id,’ Bertie said, appearing again with his pocket flask. ‘Or in hers, Freud save us.’ He crossed himself and nudged Merrick, who did not smile.
The inevitable, as it inevitably does, happened. Guy, with unexpected delicacy, did not go over to the newcomers. Instead, Sir Richard and Lady Clunes ushered them over to Jimmy’s group in a frothy tide of introductions, among which two waiters sported like dolphins, dispensing drink.
‘Martini for me this time,’ Jimmy said and, turning, was introduced to Felix Garside and his niece, the hatchet-faced girl, Rose English.
Seen close to, she was no longer hatchet-faced, though her countenance was long and her features sharply moulded; indeed she could be considered attractive, if we remembered that attraction is also a challenge. As Rose English glanced round the company, she was making no attempt, as most of the others present would have done upon introduction, to conceal the engagement of her mind and feelings in her surroundings. In consequence the unconventional face, less a mask than an instrument, drew to itself the regard of all men and most of the women. Her countenance was at once intelligent and naked; invulnerable perhaps, but highly impressionable.
Her clothes, although good, seemed to fit her badly, for the jacket of her suit, in the new over-elaborate style, did her disservice, making her look to some extent top heavy. She was tall; ‘rangy’ was the word which occurred to Jimmy. She might have been thirty-five, perhaps ten years his senior. Under her cheekbones faint and by no means unattractive hollows showed, ironing themselves out by her mouth, which, together with her eyes, belied the hint of melancholy determination in her attitude.
Her eyes rested momentarily on Jimmy’s brow. She smiled, and the smile was good.
‘Et tu, Brute,’ she said and then turned with a suspicion of haste to talk to Guy, who showed little inclination to talk back; though he remained on the balls of his feet, his poise had deserted him. This at once disappointed and relieved Jimmy, for he discovered he was flushing slightly; Merrick and several of the others were watching his Norman Light with eagerness.
‘It is just turning faintly pink, I think,’ the sandy woman said. ‘It’s rather difficult to tell in this lighting.’
‘The maximum intensity is a burning cerise,’ a clerical-looking man informed them all.
‘Then cerise will be the fashionable colour next season,’ Lady Clunes said. ‘I’m so glad. I’m so tired of black, so very tired of it.’
‘I should have thought it ought to have registered a little more than that,’ Merrick said, with a hint of irritation, staring at Jimmy’s forehead. ‘Between any normal man and woman, there’s a certain sexual flux.’
‘That’s what it’ll be so interesting to find out,’ Lady Clunes said. ‘I am just longing for everyone to get theirs.’
‘Oh yes, it’ll be O.K. for those who’re exempt: a damn good sideshow, I’d say,’ Bertie remarked, precipitating a frosty little silence. The new ER bill just passed through Parliament, which specified that everyone should have a Norman Light fitted by September 1, exempted those under fourteen or over sixty; it was generally agreed that this upper age limit would preserve the status quo for Maude Clunes. Her friends were waiting, hawk-like, to see if she would have a disc installed.
Guy, to fill the gap in the conversation, brought Rose back into it with a general remark. Seizing his chance, Merrick bunched heavy eyebrows over his heavy spectacles and said, ‘Miss English, your having your Norman Light installed so promptly shows you to be a forward-looking young lady. Would you cooperate in a little experiment, a scientific experiment, for the benefit of those of us who have still to, er, see the light?’
‘What do you wish me to do?’ she asked.
He was as direct as she.
‘We would like to observe the amount of sexual attraction between you and Mr Solent,’ he told her.
‘Certainly,’ she said. She looked around at each one of them, then added, ‘This is a particular moment in time when our – my – responses may seem to some of you improper, or immoral, or ‘not the thing’, or whatever phrase you use to cover something you faintly fear. In a few months, I sincerely hope, such moments will be gone for ever. Everyone will register spontaneously an attraction for everyone of the opposite sex and similar age; that I predict, for the ER’s function at gene level. And then the dingy mockery which our forebears, and we, have made of sex will vanish like dew. It will be revealed as something more radical and less of a cynosure than we have held it to be. And our lives will be much more honest on every level in consequence.’
She spoke very simply, very intensely, and then turned to look into Jimmy’s eyes. Listening to her, watching her moving mouth, seeing her tongue once briefly touch her lips, taking in that face a sculptor would have wept at, Jimmy knew his Norman Light was no longer an ambiguous silver. He caught a faint pink reflection from it on the end of his nose. When the rangy girl surveyed him, he saw her disc redden and his own increase output in sympathy. She was so without embarrassment that Jimmy, too, remained at ease, interested in the experiment. Everyone else maintained the surprised, respectful silence her words had created.
‘A rosy light!’ exclaimed the sandy woman and the momentary tension relaxed.
‘Not by Eastern casements only … !’ Jimmy murmured. It surprised him that, although he still glowed brightly, he consciously felt little or no attraction for Rose. That is to say, his fiancée, Penny Tanner-Smith (not to mention Alyson Youngfield), was still clear in his mind, and he felt no insane desire to go to bed with this strange, self-possessed woman.
‘The attraction is there and the ERs detect it,’ Rose said. ‘There lies their great and only virtue: they will force a nation of prudes to recognise an incontrovertible natural law. But, as I say, they work at gene – or what will no doubt be popularly termed ‘subconscious’ – level. This force lies like a chemical bond between Mr Solent and me; but I feel not the slightest desire to go to bed with him.’
Jimmy was amazed at how unpalatable he found this truth, this echo of what he had just been thinking; it was one thing silently to reject her; quite another for her openly to reject him. This absorbed him so completely he hardly listened to the discussion which flowed around him.
Merrick was shaking Rose’s long hand; she was admitting to being a ‘sort of brain specialist’. The wife of the clerical-looking man was squeaking something about ‘like a public erection …’ and urging her husband to take her home. Everyone was talking. Sir Richard and Felix Garside were laughing at a private joke. Bertie was signalling to a young waiter. Drink and olives circulated.
When Sir Richard excused himself to greet someone else, Jimmy also slipped away to another part of the room. He was disturbed and needed time for thought. From where he stood now, he could see Rose’s back, a rangy figure with a handbag swinging from her crooked arm. Then a heated discussion on the effects of colour TV on children rose on his left and broke like a wave over him. Jimmy joined in vigorously, talking automatically. He emerged some while later to find the subject held no interest for him, though he had been as partisan as anybody; muttering a word of excuse, snatching another drink, he went into the corridor to stand by an open window.
Here