Six
Odd, odd, odd, was Lenina’s verdict on Bernard Marx. So odd, indeed, that in the course of the next few weeks she had wondered more than once whether she shouldn’t change her mind about the New Mexico holiday, and go instead to the North Pole with Benito Hoover. The trouble was that she knew the North Pole, had been there with George Edzel only last summer, and found it pretty grim. Added to that, she had only been to America once before. And even then, a cheap week-end in New York. The prospect of flying West again, and for a whole week, was very inviting. Moreover, for at least three days of that week they would be in the Savage Reservation. As an Alpha-Plus psychologist, Bernard was one of the few men she knew entitled to a permit. For Lenina, the opportunity was unique.
“Alcohol in his blood-surrogate,” was Fanny’s explanation of every eccentricity. But Henry, with whom Lenina had rather anxiously discussed her new lover, had compared poor Bernard to a rhinoceros.
“You can’t teach a rhinoceros tricks,” he had explained. “Some men are almost rhinoceroses; they don’t respond properly to conditioning. Poor Devils! Bernard’s one of them. Luckily for him, he’s pretty good at his job. Otherwise the Director would never have kept him. I think he’s pretty harmless.”
Pretty harmless, perhaps; but also pretty disquieting. That mania, to start with, for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could do in private. (Apart, of course, from going to bed: but one couldn’t do that all the time.) The first afternoon they went out together was particularly fine. Lenina had suggested a swim at Toquay Country Club followed by dinner at the Oxford Union. But Bernard thought there would be too much of a crowd. Then what about a round of Electro-magnetic Golf at St. Andrew’s? But again, no: Bernard considered that Electro-magnetic Golf was a waste of time.
“Then what’s time for?” asked Lenina in some astonishment.
Apparently, for going walks in the Lake District. “Alone with you, Lenina.”
“But, Bernard, we shall be alone all night.”
Bernard blushed and looked away. “I meant, alone for talking,” he mumbled.
“Talking? But what about?”
In the end she persuaded him, much against his will, to fly over to Amsterdam to see the Women’s Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.
“In a crowd,” he grumbled. “As usual.” He remained gloomy the whole afternoon; wouldn’t talk to Lenina’s friends and refused to take the half-gramme raspberry soma sundae. “I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
Lenina shrugged her shoulders. “A gramme is always better than a damn,” she concluded with dignity, and drank the sundae herself.
On their way back across the Channel, Bernard insisted on stopping his propeller and hovering within a hundred feet of the waves. The weather had taken a change for the worse; a south-westerly wind had sprung up, the sky was cloudy.
“Look,” he commanded.
“But it’s horrible,” said Lenina, shrinking back from the window. She was appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black water beneath them, by the pale face of the moon. “Let’s turn on the radio!”
“I want to look at the sea in peace,” he said. “One can’t even look with that beastly noise going on.”
“But I don’t want to look.”
“But I do,” he insisted. “It makes me feel as though I am… more. More on my own, not a part of something else.”
Lenina was crying. “It’s horrible, it’s horrible,” she kept repeating. “And how can you talk like that about not wanting to be a part of the social body? After all, everyone works for everyone else. We can’t do without anyone. Even Epsilons…”
“Yes, I know,” said Bernard. “‘Even Epsilons are useful’! So am I. And I damned well wish I weren’t!”
“Bernard, you’re saying the most awful things.”
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”
He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ Wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way; not in everybody else’s way.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated. “Oh, do let’s go back, Bernard. I do so hate it here.”
“Don’t you like being with me?”
“I do, Bernard. It’s this horrible place.”
“I thought we’d be more… more together here. More together than in that crowd, or even in my rooms. Don’t you understand that?”
“I don’t understand anything,” she said with decision. “Nothing. Least of all, why you don’t take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours.”
He looked at her in silence, his face unresponsive and very grave. After a few seconds Lenina’s eyes flinched away; she uttered a nervous little laugh, tried to think of something to say and couldn’t. The silence prolonged itself.
When Bernard spoke at last, it was in a small tired voice. “All right then,” he said, “we’ll go back.” And stepping hard on the accelerator, he sent the machine up into the sky. They flew in silence for a minute or two. Then, suddenly, Bernard began to laugh.
“Feeling better?” she asked.
For answer, he lifted one hand from the controls and, slipping his arm around her, began to fondle her breasts.
“Thank Ford,” she said to herself, “he’s all right again.”
Half an hour later they were back in his rooms. Bernard swallowed four tablets of soma, turned on the radio and television and began to undress.
“Well,” Lenina enquired, with when they met next afternoon on the roof, “did you think it was fun yesterday?”
Bernard nodded. They climbed into the plane. A little jolt, and they were off.
“Everyone says I’m awfully plump,” said Lenina, patting her own legs.
“Awfully.” But there was an expression of pain in Bernard’s eyes. “Like meat,” he was thinking.
She looked up with a certain anxiety. “But you don’t think I’m too plump, do you?”
He shook his head. Like so much meat.
“You think I’m all right.” Another nod. “In every way?”
“Perfect,” he said aloud. And inwardly. “She thinks of herself that way. She doesn’t mind being meat.”
“All the same,” he went on, after a little pause, “I still rather wish it had all ended differently. I didn’t want it to end with our going to bed. Not at once, not the first day.”
“But
