Leila picked up a pencil and began making dots on a graph sheet. Redpath waited a moment before accepting the dismissal, then straightened up and walked out of the office. Peals of laughter followed as soon as he closed the door. He stood in the green dimness, humiliated, aware that Leila was now discussing him with an office acquaintance, and his hands clenched into bony clubs. That laughter and bitch-talk—a desperate notion came to him—could easily be silenced. Victory had been conceded to women in the war of the sexes, but being women they had not hampered themselves with anything as impractical as a victor’s code of chivalry. How would it be if he broke the rules of fair play for a change? Women knew themselves to be the equals of men in those areas where they narrowly failed to be superior, but none of them was any good with fists. Fists! Red-path looked down at the complex, involuted weapons attached to the ends of his arms. There was a painful prickling on his forehead. The spiteful laughter and the bitch-talk would stop on the instant if he burst the office door open and went in and used his fists on Leila. One punch would carry her right out of the chair and spread her on the floor; another would wreck that supercilious, Tanqueray’s-and-tonic, duvets and Bruckner’s Fourth smile of hers; another would put fear in her eyes, and fear meant respect…
The front door of the house swung open and admitted a flood of light to the hall, light which penetrated into the narrower corridor-like section at the rear where Redpath was standing, making him feel he was under observation. He strode towards the door, brushed past the two men who had entered and plunged out into the mould-scented air.
A jetliner was climbing high in the sunlight, its con trail widening and breaking into curved white flakes. He grabbed his bicycle and wheeled it away against the drag of the gravel. As soon as he reached tarmac he got astride the machine, cycled out through the gates of the institute and turned in the direction of the town centre. The mid-morning lull had descended on the traffic and he was able to travel fast in top gear, the bicycle tilting from side to side as he put all his weight into each thrust on the pedals.
Redpath had almost reached the business section of Calbridge before it dawned on him that he had no idea where he was going. He braked abruptly, barely avoiding a collision with a mud-spattered grey Ford transit which had been behind him, and swung into the forecourt of a mock-Tudor pub. The outer doors of the pub were being latched open by a tubby man who nodded curtly to Redpath, surveyed the sky and retired inside to begin his day’s work. Redpath got off the bicycle, sat down on the coping of the low brick wall surrounding the forecourt and tried to decide what to do next. The feeling was oddly similar to that which he had experienced on the one day he played truant from school—the places he was now free to go to no longer seemed worth the effort of getting there.
The classical refuge for a man in his position was the alehouse—and the shady interior of the pub beside him looked inviting—but a law he never broke was the one which decreed that alcohol and epilepsy did not mix. The alcohol itself could initiate an attack, the ingestion of large quantities of liquid was another potent trigger factor, and on top of all that there was the risk of a reaction from the anti-convulsant drugs in his system. He had learned to live with the constraints of his illness, telling himself that it was not being able to drink or drive which had kept him slim and fit, but on this particular morning it would have been good, very good, to be like other men. Everybody needed an escape door at some time or other, he concluded, rising to his feet, and it looked as though his would have to be an uplifting day of fresh air and solitude in the public park.
Ten minutes later he freewheeled into Calbridge’s Churchill Gardens, a forty-acre rectangle of greenery which owed its existence to a liberal seeding of the area with World War II incendiaries. The schools had not yet begun the summer break so the park was quiet and almost empty. Redpath chained his cycle to a railing and walked towards the middle of the park, looking for a place in which to relax. He found a long seat overlooking a geometric display of flowers and sat down at one end of it, suddenly feeling tired and anticlimactic. Since breakfast time life had been beating him over the head in a steady rhythm, like two men sledging a single spike into the ground, and now that peace had descended he found it rather unnerving. It was too much like a prelude to even greater disasters.
Think, he told himself. Draw up plans. This is the first day of the rest of your life.
It was difficult, though, to project his thoughts into the future when the present and immediate past were filled with so much pain and confusion. The big question was—what had gone wrong? Everything that had happened that morning seemed to stem from the first attack of the horrors in his flat, but what had brought it on?
He had been out of work and without employment prospects when, two years earlier, he had volunteered to take part in a series of telepathy experiments at the Jeavons. His card-guessing scores had been the highest obtained from some eight hundred participants, and he had been elated when Henry Nevison had approached him subsequently and offered what seemed to be the greatest sinecure of all time. He was to be paid a monthly salary just to continue with the telepathy tests a few hours a day, five days a week, and his luck had really seemed to be in when—for once—it turned out that a prospective employer was undeterred by the fact of his having the falling sickness.
Redpath s mother had expressed alarm on hearing that the test programme included assessing the effects of a new family of psychotropic drugs on the telepathic facility, but he had managed to allay her fears. She was a naturally reticent woman, who had been turned into a near-recluse by irrational guilt over his condition, and it had come as a great relief to her to find that her son could earn money like a “normal” young man. Redpath was almost certain she had told her friends he was taking up medical research, but he had not objected. All his thoughts had been focused on his new occupation, his new mission in life.
In the early days he had been buoyed up by expectations of dramatic test results, but after some months that mood had faded and had been replaced by one of boredom. It was established beyond doubt that he did have a vestigial telepathic ability, but in such attenuated form that mathematicians usually had to be employed to differentiate between his performance and the workings of blind chance. Then had come Compound 183, and with it the gradual change not only in the statistics of his test results, but in the nature of his subjective experience. Instead of having to visualise a test card he had, on occasion, begun to see it. The ability was sporadic and uncontrollable to a large extent, but he had begun to feel that significant things were happening, that he, John Redpath, had been granted the privilege of, to use an overworked phrase of Nevison’s, extending the boundaries of knowledge.
That had been the state of play when he had got out of bed less than three hours earlier, on what had promised to be a perfectly normal Tuesday morning…
Redpath’s brooding was interrupted when a black-haired woman of about forty, who had been approaching at a leisurely pace, sat down on the seat beside him. He promptly experienced two distinct kinds of wonderment. The first was concerned with the way in which his mind, which had been preoccupied with dark terrors and the machinations of fate, immediately abandoned such exotic abstracts and turned to matters of Calbridge etiquette; and the second wonderment was on that homely, circumscribed level. He had been brought up in the South Haver-side area and, although he had consciously shed his provincialism, its social conventions were second nature to him. In the protocol of the Four Towns, a woman who was alone in a park and wanted to rest would always choose an empty seat or bench, and if obliged to use a seat already occupied by a strange man would invariably position herself at the opposite end of it.