he stared at the featureless white outside, as at a screen on which his past life could be projected. A village youth, he’d courted Merriam, from the prefabs. She’d caught the same bus to school. As it jolted towards Aylesbury Grammar, she’d seemed so perfect, two rows in front, half-obscured by the rail at the back of her seat. Her sleeve, her shoulder, the line of her neck, the clusters of her auburn hair – he’d been struck to the quick when she’d turned round to look at him.
One day, he’d encountered her, and there was nothing for it but to ask her out. They’d been to the Gaumont matinee, and for cycle rides together. They’d lain in the long grass at the edge of Lodge Hill and he’d kissed her romantically. So far, so good. But the lips of an unknown girl he kissed at a party game suddenly tasted far sweeter, and filled his sexual imagination to bursting for more than a week. He was flummoxed. Shortly afterwards, the illusion collapsed and he hadn’t loved Merriam at all.
A similar disenchantment happened a year later. He was left thinking he’d misunderstood the whole business, and this was exactly when his intellectual engagement had been caught by the inspired science master. Science was manly, and above all hectic fictions of his heart. He’d met Louisa while they were both students in London, and married her, on the basis that what he’d felt before was infatuation, not love at all. He loved Louisa.
IT WAS CYNTHIA who woke those first feelings again, still stranger and more knowing. She focused him, as if one of the electromagnetic lenses he worked with had been switched on. Her skin, her eyes, the colours she wore, the weave of her clothes, things she’d touched assumed a special quality – but he couldn’t imagine sleeping with her as he slept with Louisa. Neither could he fancy her privately, as he fancied any number of women rather more than his wife.
This time, however, he knew what was happening. He’d read of Huxley’s experiments with mescalin. Vision was chemical; the lucid phenomenon of the girl at work was some brainstorm of illusion. The mind was a frontier, and there was a secret gambler in him. He’d elected to observe himself ‘falling in love’.
He was paying a price, of sorts. Now the lab had its own alteration. Its metallic surfaces, lit oddly from the whiteness outside, were too smooth, too grey, their edges too hard. It was suddenly a barren place. Nor could he lose himself in the work. Dr Gill was being cryptic, full of nods and winks, but seemingly producing nothing for his attention. Geoffrey could only attend to a backlog of routine tasks: on the microscope, he checked supply voltages, performed unnecessary recalibrations. He couldn’t run the electron beam itself because he lacked any detailed brief.
Lance took him to a pub in the cattle market for lunch. They sat by the fire with beer and sandwiches, surrounded by the smoke and backchat of stockmen. ‘Things all right, Geoff? You were looking a bit down in the mouth this morning.’
‘Was I? Yes. Fine, thanks.’
‘Not your normal chatty self.’
‘Haven’t been sleeping too well. Maybe it’s a bug. There’s one going around, isn’t there? Louie’s been a bit off colour this last week or so.’
‘Oh, well, that explains it. Not getting enough. That’s your problem, old son.’
‘It’s nothing like that.’ Geoffrey laughed uncomfortably.
In the afternoon, morbid thoughts of Cynthia crowded in on him: she’d left the firm; she was seriously ill; some Brylcreemed boyfriend with a car had smashed her up in an accident on the ice, her legs, her spine, her face; some thug in leather and jeans had lured her on to his motorbike.
There came a point where he managed to tell himself these imaginings were false, and that, as a true researcher, he should be taking note of them. He reached for a pad. But pen on paper would leave a trail of evidence. With Butterfield’s memo still in his mind, he paused, biro unclicked. Again, it was as though his thoughts were on display, as though his skull had been can-openered and the brain laid bare.
At last, with darkness beginning to fall, the frenzy seemed to drain away. Cynthia Somers was just a nice girl, nothing more – maybe not even a nice girl. Perhaps he really had been fighting off a bug of some kind. Maybe it was something he’d eaten.
With great relief he worked on for two hours, setting up a control programme of silica-film deposit tests for the following week. And he felt reconciled to the firm. Government patronage needn’t just be military. In any case, someone had to invest in initial research. Great benefits had come out of the hectic experimentation of the war years – nuclear power, for one. Lionel Rae hadn’t necessarily been hired to steer the firm into dark waters, no matter what Lance believed. Rae was all right, he thought. Rae would look after him. On his way home, he’d stop and buy Louie something nice.
Lance looked up at him. ‘That’s more like it, Geoff,’ he said.
There was permission to leave early. Geoffrey quit the building at four thirty, and the freezing crust in the car park crunched under his feet. But the Mini started first time. He set the electric heater, and the demisters, and turned on the lights. Gloved and scarfed, he nudged his way out of the gates and crept along the skirt of town. There was the frailest early sunset: strips of pale yellow were brushed on the cloud cover just above the horizon. He crossed the Verulam Road, where slush churned up by the day’s traffic had frozen into brown heaps. The car struck one of them. It made a dull sound against the bodywork.
Then, at the bus-stop on Bluehouse Hill, just beside the tract of ground that covered the Roman town and the site of the martyrdom, he saw Cynthia in the queue. He was sure he did. She was wearing calf-length boots, black, quite breathtaking. He braked involuntarily, and the wheels locked. The car slithered to a halt five yards past the stop, stalling the engine as his foot slipped off the clutch. In the mirror, he saw the six or so people in the queue staring at him.
PLATITUDES SPILLED FROM his mouth as he stepped through the foot-deep kerbside snow towards her: ‘Thought I recognised you … too cold to be hanging about for a bus that might never come … wondered whether I was going your way.’ He felt they would do, in front of the onlookers. She had that smile on her face.
Now she was next to him in the car, and they were heading off along the Hempstead road. He drove in silence, horrified at himself, and intrigued. He could see out of the corner of his eye the tight grey pencil skirt that folded over her knees, the tops of her boots.
She seemed to read his mind. ‘Kinky boots,’ she said. She lifted the right one as far as the skirt would allow and angled it towards him.
He pretended to take his first look. The boots were soft leather that hugged her calves, wrinkled at the ankle and stretched smoothly, sexily, over a high heel. ‘They’re lovely.’ He looked back at the road.
‘When the bus didn’t turn up yesterday, I took the day off and bought them with my Christmas money.’ She seemed completely natural. ‘Aren’t they fabulous? They’ve just come in. Everyone wants a pair.’
‘I didn’t know they were allowed,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘Oh, yes.’ She was delightful.
‘So yesterday the bus didn’t show up?’
‘I nearly froze to death waiting.’
‘But today?’
She seemed once again to know what prompted his questions. ‘Oh, today Butterfield’s Doreen was off and they couldn’t
