Sleep and His Brother Page 4

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  While Dr. Silver fretted across the garish carpet, checking distances and angles, Pibble stood halfway up the stairs and studied the tops of the pillars. Many of them appeared to support the ceiling in places where it needed no such help; every capital was different, so that the place looked like a pillarmaker’s showroom—you could imagine silent Victorian families peering worriedly up while Father pointed with his umbrella, and eventually settling for six of the gargoyle pattern.

  Silver peered out of a window, then pranced across and spoke to the doorkeepers—new ones, sitting back to back on the carpet, as Mrs. Dixon-Jones had said. Both heads swung sideways to blink at Pibble; one set of lips moved; he could see the sleepy smiles and feel the tepid wash of sentiment which the cathypnics engendered—they would indeed be formidable on TV.

  What was he to do? Copper come. Lost his hat. Not much to build a career on. No doubt he did still retain elements of the approved police gait, solemn, confident, official. No doubt the cathypnics’ upbringing had made them sensitive to the appearance of their natural enemy—as broiler chickens which have never seen daylight will cower if a hawk-shaped object is held above them. But the policemen they’d have seen would have been in uniform, of which the most striking element is the helmet. How would a child with a vocabulary of three hundred words explain that a policeman was at the door but he was not wearing his uniform? Copper come. Lost his hat. They must have seen him.

  But the money would be useful, thought Pibble as Dr. Silver took a final scratch at his nape and crossed the hall toward the stairs, pausing to reactivate the tape recorder he had switched off. He wondered who Mr. T. was, and whether Mary mightn’t get her Cretan holiday again after all.

  “You got a big family, Mr. Pibble?” said Silver, coming up the stairs two at a time.

  “No. Just a wife. Why?”

  “I asked the dormice about you, and one of ’em said quote lot of kids unquote. Mush. No use, even if you were father of twenty. Too many kids in the building anyway.”

  “Oh,” said Pibble, and then, “I see.”

  No point in mentioning the father with the umbrella—it was unprovable and would make him seem too eager. Anyway, Dr. Silver’s was the better explanation.

  “By the way,” he said as they started up the second flight of stairs, “the children who let me in said that no one else was coming, but Mr. Costain turned up. I’m quite sure that that’s what they meant.”

  Dr. Silver, with his eager pace, was already ahead of him and seemed not to have heard. But when he reached the landing, or gallery, which ran round three sides of the hall, he halted and took up the stance of the president of a banana republic receiving birthday plaudits on the palace balcony.

  “There’s just one comfort about this damned job,” he said. “The kids don’t understand the trick they do, either. If they do it. Let’s keep an open mind on that one. But except for Rue Kelly, the folk who’ve worked here long—and most of ’em stick around once they’ve come—are quite sure they do something. The kids, too, natch. Then you’ve got to remember that cathypnics are dumb, dumber than the dumbest doll in Dublin. They see their trick work once, twice, so they reckon it always will. And you’re making the same mistake. Parapsychic phenomena aren’t made that way. Listen. Say I set up an experiment with my assistant turning over a pack of twenty-five cards—we mostly use special packs, five sets of five symbols shuffled together—while a sensitive sits out of sight and hearing and tries to guess which card has been turned. Normal expectation of correct guesses is just under four for each run of the pack. Odds against eight correct guesses are high enough to be significant. Get frequently into double figures and the odds are astronomical. As-tro-nomical. You just don’t bother with hundred percent correct. It happens. Oh, yes, it happens—but then even I start looking for the way the experiment was rigged. I reckon you could say, Mr. Pibble, that George and Fancy, who let you in, are statistically naïve—and yourself only a mite less.”

  “Then what on earth can you hope to achieve?”

  “Good question. ‘Ram Silver,’ I say, three o’clock in the mornings, ‘what on earth can you hope to achieve?’ Answer: at the lowest level I hope to prove to the meanest-minded sceptic that parapsychic phenomena exist. That’s coming soon, here or somewhere else. Matter of fact, it’s already been proved, several times, best by J. B. Rhine at Duke, but always using statistics. You produce consistent experiments with odds of a million to one turning up for you, and people don’t want to think about it. Even professional scientists.

  “Second, I hope to discover how parapsychic phenomena work. That’s further off. It’ll take a real breakthrough. But that’s what Mr. T.’s paying me for. Once we know how, we’ll be getting our hundred percents whenever we want them. We’re like the Wright brothers, or maybe someone even further back—one of those guys who jumped off towers dolled up like a bat. We spend years, we spend fortunes, putting our machine together and it makes a noise and it stinks and then it trundles across the grass like a lead bird. And then, maybe, it gives a little hop. In that hop, in those eight yards when you can see daylight under the skids, lie supersonic airliners and the dominion of the skies. Only we don’t know how yet. But perhaps you are that kind of hop, Mr. Pibble. Come and look at my lab.”

  He led the way along a passage immediately above the one to Mrs. Dixon-Jones’s room, turned right at the crossing, and at last opened a door some distance down the even longer passage.

  The room whirred and clicked. It muttered to itself its bright inanities, the lingo of machines.

  “Like to listen?” said Dr. Silver. He fiddled with a tape recorder and a slow, light voice spoke from it.

  “Tain’t fair,” it said.

  Pibble looked at the machine and saw the tape whirling at rewind speed. All at once it slowed.

  “Turned out nice,” it drawled.

  “Lovely.”

  The tape spun faster again.

  “That’s cunning,” said Pibble. “I wondered how you came to be listening to my entry so soon after. How’s it done?”

  “Easy,” said Dr. Silver. “Double pickup. The first discriminates between silence and noise and slows the tape down for the second head to rerecord onto a master tape. We’ve got twenty machines here, all running sixteen hours a day, but the sounds on them can usually be got onto one tape which my girl transcribes every day.”

  “Green,” drawled the tape.

  “Lovely,” it answered itself.

  “Hiya, dormice,” it called. “You can’t go sleep there. You’ll be run over by my cart.”

  “The exercise will do you good,” it whined.

  It whirled again, and slowed.

  “’ot,” it complained.

  “No, darling, it isn’t,” it cooed. “It’s just right. But I’ll take one of your sweaters off if you’re quite sure.”

  “I’m frightened.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of, darling. You come with Posey. You aren’t hot, really you aren’t. I can feel.”

  “Cold ’and, warm ’eart.”

  The next whirl was very short.

  “Now for heaven’s sake, Posey,” said the machine in the clipped, aggressive accent Pibble knew so well.

  “But I can’t just leave it like that.”

  “Of course you can. Whether you’re right or wrong it comes to the same—”

  Dr. Silver pressed a button and the machine renounced vocables for its former clicks and whirs.

  “I keep telling ’em,” he said angrily. “But will they stop filling my tapes with mush? Will they hell! That applies to you, too, Mr. Pibble. If you want to talk to anyone except one of the dormice, you make damned sure either that you’re out of range of the mikes or that you switch off. And switch on when you’ve done.”

  “I’ll try to remember. Mrs. Dixon-Jones told me that cathypnics are
very difficult to upset, but just now one of them said he was frightened. Or was it a girl?”

  “Marilyn Goddard,” said Dr. Silver absently. “She dreams nightmares. She’s aberrant. Mother was a clinging, sloppy, man-hungry moron—unmarried, of course. The guy she took up with when Marilyn was two was the one who did the Paperham jobs. He settled in with them, though you wouldn’t have reckoned he was the type. There for three years, till he was copped.”

  “Crippen!” said Pibble. His scalp had twitched involuntarily at the name of Paperham, as though horror for the dead women could be communicated directly to nerve and flesh without having to pass the censorship of thought.

  “Do the other children say ‘Lovely’ to her?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but at a lower ratio than they say it to each other. I forget the figures. I’ve got them on file. ‘Lovely’ doesn’t mean a thing—it’s an all-purpose reaction. Our dormice are damned efficiently insulated from the cold world. Now let’s get this experience of yours down on tape. Come into my den.”

  It would be hard, Pibble thought, to design anything less like a den. The avocado tree looked as though it had been loaned from a stand at the Ideal Home Exhibition, and the rest of the furniture—filing cabinets, half-acre desk, shin-level tables, black-leather-and-steel chairs—failed to declare any characteristic of the man who had chosen them beyond extravagance. Even the one touch of art—a bronze and bulbous paperweight, vaguely post-Brancusi—had the look of one of a large issue of multiples. Pibble found himself sweating with absurd nerves as the doctor leaned forward and made passes at him with the microphone. His voice emerged strained and textureless, as though he were lying, but Silver seemed not to mind; he twitched the microphone back to his own chin to ask the exact question needed to unravel a wooliness in Pibble’s tale. He insisted on recording every drab and tiny detail, often repetitiously, but steadily clarifying the absurd incident until, by the time he clicked the recorder off, it contained a total account of two minutes in the life of James Willoughby Pibble, unique, unconfusable with anything else that had happened, or might have happened, to him, or anyone else, anywhere. He’d have made a good if tiresome lawyer, Pibble thought. But then he’d have made a good priest, a good mayor, a good surgeon. He possessed a kind of moral omnicompetence which persisted through his rapidly changing roles—and perhaps that was the reason for this neutral room: more character-defining furniture would have been grit in the smooth gear changes. Now it was the executive of a world-tentacled combine who spoke into a flashy intercom gadget on the desk.

  “Doll,” he snapped.

  “Yes, Doctor Silver.”

  “I’ve got a tape here for you. I want it on paper, fast.”

  “I’ll come in.”

  As the door opened, Pibble stood up. This was a happy surprise.

  “You won’t remember me, I expect,” he said.

  Her yellow-brown eyes looked at him, puzzled.

  “You know our honourable Doll?” said Dr. Silver. He sounded as though he disapproved of the acquaintanceship.

  “We met in the Black Boot about a month ago,” said Pibble.

  “Of course!” said the girl. “You’re Rue’s policeman friend.”

  “Ex-,” said Pibble.

  A curious silence engulfed the room, as though each were waiting for one of the others to make a betraying move. Wild Rue Kelly was the only subject they had in common, and Pibble was unsure of the girl’s relationship with him. He could hear the rasp of those olive fingers raking at the stubble.

  “Well,” said the girl at last, “I’d better—”

  The telephone rang, and she picked it up.

  “Doctor Silver’s secretary.”

  She listened, then put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Mister Thanatos wants to talk to you. I didn’t know he was back.”

  “Nor did I,” said Dr. Silver.

  “There’s a piece about him in the Guardian this morning,” said Pibble. “He’s come to give evidence about this South Bank hotel site.”

  So that’s who Mr. T. was. No wonder.

  “Fine, fine,” said Dr. Silver. “I’ve got a lot of news for him. Forget the tape, Doll. Just take Mr. Pibble and show him round.”

  His hand was twitching for the telephone. Pibble followed the girl out, enjoying once again the strangely seductive way in which she held herself; her figure looked as if, from hemline to neckline of her plain orange dress, it was swathed in a single ultra-fine bandage, which held her taut, contained her, prevented her from flopping with luscious abandon into the nearest arms. Her manner and walk were prim and neat, but somehow implied the opposite.

  “I thought you worked for Reuben,” said Pibble as he walked back toward the hall with her.

  “I worked with him, for nothing, but he traded me to Ram, the bastard.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “I don’t know, but I get a salary now.”

  “Are you taking me to see him?”

  “Any excuse is better than none.”

  Her wide mouth smiled with the shared secret. One day she would have jowls, but now her soft, flattish face seemed simple and scrumptious, like Elysian marshmallow.

  “It’s funny to think of Rue working in a place like this,” said Pibble with a gesture as they passed the grove of pillars. “You know, it took me several weeks to discover he was a doctor. Before that I thought he sold things.”

  “He’s got very strict rules against talking about doctoring to laymen. Or laywomen. What sort of things did you think he sold?”

  “Fast cars, probably.”

  She laughed. She seemed to have the secret of perpetual animation. Moses had struck the rock and high spirits welled out unstinted.

  “He never told me you were an honourable, either,” he said. “Are you, in fact?”

  “Last of the line,” she said smugly. “Rue says I’m England’s most dishonourable hon. My grandfather bought the barony from Maundy Gregory, and my father died of drink when I was twelve, and that was the lot of us, not counting Granny.”

  “Lady Sospice?” guessed Pibble, extrapolating from the scandal of the drunkard son.

  “She’s nicer than she looks.”

  “I’m sure she is. I haven’t met her, but my wife has once or twice.”

  “Oh, she hates women. So do I.”

  Pibble laughed.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “When I get old I’m going to buy a house on Capri or somewhere and fill it with gigolos. Granny can’t, poor old cat, because she was brought up wrong to enjoy that sort of thing.”

  “But I expect this Preservation Society has some dashing young architects in it.”

  “No such luck. I think they’re a lot of ignorant stuffpots who don’t like things for what they are but because they want to keep the world just as it always was. Granny brought them in to tease poor Posey, but now they’ve run amok. She hates Posey more than anyone. This was our house, you see, and now Posey runs it. If you like I’ll show you the room I would have been born in if we’d still been living here.”

  She stopped at the far end of the gallery and gestured to the right.

  “Rather a remote sort of fame,” said Pibble.

  “Nonsense. I can get much remoter than that. The room above Posey’s is called King Charles’s Room because it once contained a bed in which King Charles was said to have slept in a different house. But I’ll take you to Rue. He uses what we called the Picture Saloon, but it never had any pictures in it because Alma-Tadema refused to give Great-Granddad a reduction for quantity. Isn’t it funny to think of all this once smelling of potpourri and furniture polish and eau de cologne?”

  It smelled of hospitals now. She had stopped to finish her sentence outside a big pair of doors, mightily carved with swags of fruit, which stood where there should have been a long passage running to the back of the buil
ding if the plan had been totally symmetrical. The doors had been painted cream, and somebody had nailed a piece of packing case to one of the panels and stencilled it with the words KELLY’S KINGDOM. Mr. Costain would have cause to hoot if he came up here, Pibble thought.

  One of the doors opened and a uniformed nurse glided out, weeping quietly. Doll made a face and bit her lip, then led the way in.

  “I’ve brought a friend to see you, Rue,” she said.

  Of course it had been built as a picture gallery, once you knew, but it would have needed several regiments of odalisques and vestal virgins to fill the vacant walls. It was a vast room, stretching the full width of this wing and nearly half its length, and here, too, nails had been driven callously into the panelling; from each dangled graphs and records, below which stood a white iron bedstead. There must have been over twenty beds in all, but a few were empty. Rue Kelly was bending over one of the patients. He had lifted the child’s eyelid and was peering into the pupil through an ophthalmoscope. At length he stood up, rubbing his long chin. His green eyes glanced rapidly at Pibble, then flickered round the room before coming back to him.

  “Be with you in a minute,” he said genially, speaking in a normal voice as though there were no danger of waking the sleepers. He bent to the other eyelid.

  The outer windows were half obscured by scaffolding and hoists, though a great swathe of London rooftops could be glimpsed below the planks; so Pibble went and peered out over the courtyard. From here he could see how simple the design of the house was, beneath all its frills and flounces. A rectangle, two stories high, surrounded a cobbled courtyard; an arch led out at the back, flanked by round-topped coach house doors—so the ground-floor rooms must maintain their pompous height the whole way round. Yes, the passage on the other side had run to the back with no sign of stairs; presumably it continued from there over the coach house and the arch and joined up with the back of Kelly’s Kingdom.