the extra three inches that would have allowed Eleanor in. She was stuck, then, slightly behind the two, not quite in the circle and not quite out, which was destined to be Eleanor’s relation to this crowd for the indefinite future.
Malthus gargoyled on Calvin’s shoulder, daring Eleanor to tickle his chin. Nothing would make Malthus happier than to take off her middle finger to the second knuckle.
The woman’s name, incredibly, was Bunny.
“The whole race is lemming off the cliff,” she despaired, “while demographers fuddle over fertility in Popua in 1762.”
“Lemmings,” Eleanor intruded bravely, “did you know they throw themselves off a precipice in response to population pressure? They crowd off cliffs. When Walt Disney filmed the rodents, the crew trapped hundreds and then had to drive them over the edge, beating sticks.”
“It must be terribly frustrating if subjects won’t obligingly commit suicide when your camera is rolling.”
That was Wallace, passing comment on his way for more tea. Only Wallace heard Eleanor at all. It was a perfectly serviceable party anecdote, but when Eleanor told stories that worked for everyone else they dropped, lemming-like, to sea.
Eleanor took being ignored as an opportunity to study the round-table. Bunny showed all the signs of having once been quite an item, and would still qualify as well kept—thin and stylishly coiffed, with unpersuasive blonde hair tightly drawn from a face once striking, now sharp. But she had retained the mannerisms of beauty. Sitting at an angle with her cigarette coiling from an extended arm, she spread a calf on her other knee as if posed perpetually for a shutter she had failed to hear click twenty years ago. Such miracles of taxidermy might have cautioned Eleanor to age with more grace, but she herself had never felt dazzling, and perhaps this was the compensation: that in later years, at least she would not delude herself she had retained powers she never thought she wielded in the first place.
Eleanor conceived few dislikes, being more inclined to give strangers a break, and another after that, as if beginning a set of tennis with first serve in. When company repeatedly made remarks that were out of bounds, she would promptly provide them with incestuous childhoods, crippling racial discrimination or tragic falls down the stairs to explain the viper, the thief, the moron. But Eleanor’s distaste for Bunny was instantaneous. British, the woman only turned to Eleanor once, to translate that “nick” meant steal. Eleanor suggested, “Be sure to tell Calvin. He’s American, too, you know.”
“Only half,” said Bunny coolly.
Bunny was loud and over-animated, but Eleanor was convinced that as soon as Bunny strode out of earshot of Calvin Piper all that environmental indignation would fall by the wayside like paper wrapping.
The rigid man to Calvin’s right was the only guest in a suit and tie. Every once in a while his mouth would quirk with annoyance. He gave the impression that he disapproved of their contingent’s retirement to some petty Nairobi social fritter; he’d have preferred to continue meeting. His surface was metallic. His name was Grant. Tall, grave and grey, he was one of those people, she supposed, who had been told the fate of the world rested on his shoulders and actually believed it. He reminded her of the men you found in Washington shuttle lounges, furrowed over computers, using their oh-so-precious five minutes before take-off to write that crucial report on sales of soap. You would never catch them out with a mere magazine, though Eleanor was always convinced that behind their PCs they were secretly weaving sexual fantasies and the screen was blank.
On the other side of the table, a small, nervous Pakistani and a corpulent Kikuyu were exchanging stories about murderous eight-year-olds in Natal. The Pakistani, Basengi, could not sit back in his chair or keep his hands still. He would pick up his glass and put it down again without taking a sip, and his place was rubbled with a shrapnel of potato crisps. His eyes worried about the room as if, should his glance not pin every object down to its appointed place, all of their host’s possessions would run away. He perpetually wiped his palms on his trousers. “Louis, you hear so often ‘innocent children’,” he said. “I never meet innocent children. They are like us. They are little barbarians.”
“A woman’s view, Eleanor?” asked Louis. “Do you believe we are all born saints? Do we only learn to slit throats from watching grown-ups butcher each other first or does the idea pop up of its own accord?”
“I suppose it’s some of both,” Eleanor stuttered, flattered to be brought in finally. “Of course I’ve seen malicious children. Horrid children. But I’ve also seen children that, yes, were pure. Generous, affectionate and utterly without guile. Some children are innocent. Then, so are some adults.”
The African chuckled. His laugh was splendid, booming and amoral, and from it Eleanor could picture this prankster as a boy—a plotter, a snitcher of sweets. “Name one.”
“Eleanor Merritt.”
She turned to Calvin, surprised. “From you,” she considered, “I wonder if that isn’t an insult.”
“Ray Bradbury, Louis,” Calvin commended. “All the kids in his stories are holy terrors. For Bradbury, the question isn’t whether children have the capacity for evil. It’s whether they have a special capacity.
“Yet if we concede that kids have roughly the same proportion of treachery, dishonesty and cussedness as the rancorous adults they become, why do the little nippers occupy an exalted moral position? Why in war is it especially appalling to kill women and children? Why is it so much more tragic when the roof falls in on a kindergarten than on a shoe factory?”
“Maybe it’s all that life unlived,” said Eleanor.
“Well, doesn’t that make them lucky? And won’t there be plenty more drooling, farting, upchucking runts to replace them? No, it’s this myth of innocence, which is maudlin tripe. Why, you have to kill ten adults to get the same size headline in the States that you can score with one dead toddler.”
“These days,” said Bunny, “you’ll earn far better coverage with cruelty to rats.”
“Mice!” cried Calvin. “She’s right! There’s a lab where I started my density experiments in DC. I had to move operations, because you would not believe the restrictions. The mice eat better than the staff. They have clean little beds made for them every night. They have their own vet, their own surgeon, and if you’re caught so much as pricking a paw without due cause, the approval of the Animal Care Committee or adequate anaesthesia, you’re out on your ear. Humidity and temperature control, vitamins—those mice are pampered brats. I began to detest them personally. Noses in the air, they swaggered across their gilded cages, pugnacious in their confidence that they couldn’t be made to suffer without your funding going to hell. I wasn’t a scientist. I was a mouse-sitter.
“However,” he continued, and no one would interrupt, “some of the Little Lord Fauntleroys have since escaped. I gather there’s a huge population of pests in the basement. The janitors kill them mercilessly by the dozen every night. None of the scuttling hoards in the basement is protected by the Animal Care Committee. They’re exactly the same species, but slaughtered with impunity and no one cares. No vitamins. No fluffed pillows. Just the usual desperate foraging and sticky traps.”
“Life is cheap in the under class,” said Louis.
Eleanor was struck that while Calvin spoke of people as vermin, he spoke of vermin as people—she had never heard him describe his relationship to any human population as personally as his relationship to those mice.
“These
