Persimmon was a youngish man, thin, gawky, severe in appearance, who did everything in annoying moderation. He never ate too much or drank too much. He never laughed, and smiling sometimes seemed painful to him. His thin lips had trouble parting far enough to let words out, or food in. For the most part he would sit through dinners silently, eyes flickering over colleagues, and, even if he did speak, it was so quietly that only the grim precision of his enunciation made anything he said comprehensible. His colleagues put up with him but no one thought he was the greatest asset to the place and some wondered why on earth they had ever elected him. Since when was politics a subject anyway? The new generation of serious folk seemed to have an inferiority complex about never having been in a war and so made up for it with radical politics, reluctant to accept that their parents had made the world a better place. Maybe not; maybe that was just Lytten feeling old and jaded.
Letting him join the Saturday group had been a mistake. Previously it had been a group of like-minded, easy-going men who would drink their beer and smoke their pipes, comfortable in their common experiences and outlook. Persimmon changed it all. He wanted to introduce rules, set the agenda in advance, ensure everyone had an equal chance of speaking. He wanted a chairman to run what had been a random conversation and turn it into a meeting. Soon he would want a secretary and minutes written up, no doubt. Persimmon had started coming on Saturdays, clutching ever more pages fresh from the typewriter. Lytten didn’t really know why; it was not as if he could abide any criticism. He was there to teach them, not to learn something from their responses. It was pure cowardice on their part — cowardice masquerading as politeness — that they did not tell him to go away and leave them in peace.
Occasionally Lytten’s dutiful politeness created such inner tension that he could not avoid taking revenge. When he was feeling impishly malicious, it was irresistibly easy to goad Persimmon.
‘How is the science fiction?’ he might ask innocently.
‘We do not say that. We say speculative fiction.’
Off he would go, bathing Lytten in a sea of censorious severity, lecturing him about fiction at the service of education, exploring human potential. Think of satellites, first dreamt of in a short story...
‘Why write a novel then?’
‘It is a way of educating the masses,’ Persimmon would reply.
‘To make great thought available in ways they can understand. Fiction does not interest me. As a didactic vehicle, however, it has its uses.’
‘You are not afraid your readers might see what you are doing and prefer something which doesn’t want to teach them a lesson?’
‘No. Eventually it will be required reading in schools.’
‘Will there not always be rebels and outlaws, poets and dreamers?’
‘I intend to put such people in so the contrast between antisocial disruptivism and constructive behaviour is clear. They will come to a nasty end. We have tamed the outside world through science. Why cannot we tame the inner one as well?’
‘Then what of beauty and madness? Would you eliminate them as well?’
‘Most certainly. Madness will be eliminated in our lifetime by drugs.’
‘I suppose Plato would agree with you. I always thought his world sounded quite dreadful. I will just have to hope that we blow ourselves up before we get to your state of perfection.’
Persimmon permitted himself a smile. ‘That is why the control of technology must rest with those who understand it.’
‘Not politicians, then?’
‘They will be swept aside and replaced by a meritocracy, chosen for ability and dedicated to achieving the best for society.’
He slept a little on the boat train, lulled to sleep by Persimmon’s prose. In some ways it was flattering, although annoyingly so. Persimmon had listened to Lytten’s careful exposition about creating Anterwold from the ground up and had decided to do the same. But, through an extraordinary feat of imagination, he had taken the very worst of communism and the very worst of capitalism and fused them together into a monstrous whole. Lytten plodded through, hoping for even the faintest glimmer of a story, a joke, a bit of whimsy, but there was nothing. How he pitied the man’s students.
This occupied him until the bed in the sleeping compartment of the train was prepared and he lay down on the fresh linen sheets and drifted off to sleep. In the morning he took the Métro to the centre of the city, having his ticket clipped by the old lady who had been in the same position the last time he had come to Paris. Then onto the ancient wooden train, thick with the pungent smells of garlic, sweat and Gitanes.
Considering the circumstances, it was strange that he thought neither of his purpose nor his surroundings. Paris was a grimy place; the buildings crumbling and black from neglect, the streets dirty. Sometimes you could see the skeleton of a once fine building, a glimpse of a splendid vista, but by and large it was sad and neglected, somewhat like London, which also showed the signs of decrepitude on every soot-covered wall.
The meeting place was a dingy room in the Hotel du Paradis in another bedraggled part of the city near the place des Vosges, its former grandeur now ruined and derelict. Lytten approached it carefully, old habits coming back to him reluctantly and without pleasure. He was not happy to remember how to avoid being noticed, how to check the way ahead and the path behind. He took no pride in his skill, rather as one takes no pride in the ability to breathe or to walk. It was just a way of life and a way of staying alive.
Why had he introduced an apparition into his story, and why did that continue to bother him? He must be getting old, and lazy. The thought was even in his mind as he walked, quietly and with ears alert for any unusual sound, up the two flights of cold, damp stairs to the room. No sound of footsteps in another room, nothing obviously out of place or strange. The concierge had given no look that was out of the ordinary.
Lytten knew who he was meeting, of course; it was going to be the man who had told tales of wolves and forests, and who had listened intently as he had spun his yarns in turn. Why? Because a dreaminess in his eyes made him a good choice, that was all. The others had been too steadfast, too rooted in the ground. Only the man known as Volkov would have conceived of calling a meeting with the Storyteller. Once Lytten had talked to him of Paris, of magnificence and decay, of grand hotels like the Ritz, and seedy, squalid ones, like the Paradis. The name had appealed to him. He had chuckled appreciatively at the idea of Paradise being filled with prostitutes. If only, he had said with a laugh. If only.
Volkov opened the door not with hesitation, but normally and calmly. Foolish; he should be more careful. What if it had not been Lytten? What if instead of a book in his hand he had had something more dangerous?
He stood there, a cautious smile on his face, very different from the man Lytten remembered with his fair, cropped hair, the short stocky stature, the sad eyes that would fix you intently, then dart away. His face was unlined, almost fresh, as though he had led a life without concern. Lytten remembered also the impish grin, the other Volkov, jolly and exuberant, the caricature Russian. He gestured for Lytten to come in, throwing the door wide to show there was no one else there.
It is an important Russian who can go out alone in a western city. A trusted one; the only other people around — apart from the raddled women smoking away their loneliness in every arch of the crumbling square — were those shadows Lytten had sensed as he walked from his hotel; sensed but never seen or heard. There were no Russian minders, but...