He laid a small card on the table in front of the nurse saying, “Sorry to cut our interesting conversation short. Phone me some time if you would like to continue it more privately. I must leave pretty smartly because I’m running late. Excuse me please.”
The last three words were to the reader of The Financial Times, who carefully folded and pocketed it, then stood to let the younger man out. The entrepreneur took down a briefcase then hurried along the corridor past others taking things from overhead racks.
The nurse and older man avoided jostling by staying seated for a while. She looked at the card before her without touching it, remembering that the eyes of the man facing her had a hint of sexual appraisal. The older man startled her by suddenly saying, “There is no doubt that our talkative friend knows a lot about our National Health Service, probably because he is one of those working to privatise it. But I doubt if he knows many of the giants he referred to. Believe me my dear, the really big men never trust blabbermouths.”
THE OFFER
A BIOLOGIST AND A LAWYER, he Swedish, she Korean, wait to meet the world’s most famous living architect. Both are in their sixties but the lawyer’s calm unlined face appears younger. Resting on a sofa she watches her colleague who stands before a window, staring gloomily down a long slope of villas among pines and many spires of those cypress trees which, to northern eyes, seem improbably tall and thin. The slope ends in a bright sea with sails of yachts near the shore, and on the high horizon the silhouette of an island that might be Monte Cristo.
The biologist looks at his wristwatch and sighs. The lawyer says, “The maestro always keeps visitors waiting.” “He, at least, should have grown out of playing childish games.”
Their accents show both learned English in the U.S.A. The lawyer says, “Yes, he is playful — tricks journalists into thinking him an alcoholic invalid and recluse who has retired from business. Three months ago he accepted a commission to design a village in Sri Lanka, and personally surveyed the site while carefully avoiding publicity. Surely you read that in the psychological profile they gave us?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Psychology is too recent a branch of medicine to be an exact science. Only the master’s achievements interest me. Everything he has done has been surprising, has shown the fertility of Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier with the humane humorous detail of Gaudi and Mackintosh. His work convinces me that my work may at last do humanity good.”
“Your work?” she asks, with slightly mocking emphasis.
“Mine and Schoenenbacher’s,” he says impatiently, “and Hong Fu’s and Glaister’s. Yes, I am a dwarf standing on the shoulder of giants. Tomorrow I hand in my resignation and retire as soon as possible to my son’s farm in Uppsala.”
After two or three minutes the lawyer says carefully, “I advise you to stay on the Foundation’s payroll as a consultant.”
He turns and looks at her, saying, “Otherwise, despite all the confidentiality clauses I have signed, our employers may regard me as a loose wheel?”
She nods. He asks, “Which might shorten my life?”
She does not answer. He sits beside her, murmuring, “Then mine will be the sudden, unexpected death that Julius Caesar wanted, and got. But my post-mortem will attribute it to natural causes.”
They sit a long time in silence, then a little girl looks in and tells them, “He can see you now.”
The lawyer lifts a briefcase. They follow the child through a corridor and arrive in a big sunlit room with glass walls and a glass ceiling. Some dark blue panes ensure the noonday sun does not dazzle them. A little old man in pyjamas and dressing gown reclines in an invalid chair with a leg-rest exposing his thin legs and plump paunch. From a silky cloud of white hair and beard two sharp eyes look out above a potato-like blob of nose. The line of his mouth is shown by the lower edge of a moustache he seems sucking with tipsy relish. Waving to a couple of chairs he cries in a shrill falsetto, “Welcome! Be seated! What a pleasure, what a privilege to be visited by such eminences.”
His fluent English has an Italian accent. The visitors sit. The child leans affectionately against the arm of the old man’s chair. Placing an arm round her shoulders he tells them, “Yes, I am a paedophile. I love my grandchildren. Fourteen of them visit me in rotation. All are clever but Minnie is one of the cleverest. Minnie, give these nice people what they want to drink, and bring me a hock and seltzer in memory of dear Oscar Wilde.”
He points to an adjacent drinks cabinet. The scientist wants nothing, the lawyer accepts a glass of sherry. Before sipping she says, “Maestro, I regret that our talk must not be overheard.”
“Run away and play Minnie,” says their host. “We are about to discuss indecencies.”
The little girl curtsies to him and the visitors, and leaves.
The architect sips from his glass before saying in a surprising baritone, “You have asked for this interview without giving a reason. Let me save you the embarrassment of explanations. Your names were unknown to me before this morning when Minnie consulted the Internet. I now know that, in your very different professions, you are both internationally renowned, and work for the powerful but discreet Endon Foundation. After World War number two Endon absorbed the Blenkiron Trust, and twenty years ago took over some functions of the United Nations World Health Organization. I am right?”
The lawyer murmurs agreement. The old man nods twice, says, “So your immediate bosses are a clique I call the global employers’ federation, which officially does not exist. I am still right?”
The lawyer, startled, looks at the biologist who cries, “O yes!”
Nodding twice again the architect says, “Years ago an American millionaire told the press that with the help of modern medicine he intended to live for ever. Is he a member of that clique?”
After a short silence the lawyer says, “No. He recently died of natural causes.”
“Poor fellow! But I assume others as rich or richer need not now die of natural causes. As an old Communist I think this a disaster. A few families (mostly American) command more wealth than the world’s governments combined. Will the world from now on be ruled by a clique of plutocrats who will never let themselves be replaced?”
“No!” says the lawyer and “Yes indeed!” shouts the scientist with what seems hysterical merriment.
“Yes indeed,” says the architect. “I now carry my deductions further. The alchemists’ dream of eternal life has often been explored in fiction. The struldbrugs in Gulliver’s Travels, Tennyson’s Tiresias, the foetal ape wearing the Order of the Garter in Huxley’s After Many a Summer are horrific portraits of people who cannot die. Shaw’s Back to Methuselah and Wyndham Lewis’s Trouble with Lichen describe jollier immortals. These hide their good luck from the majority who would also want eternal life — not possible on this over-peopled planet where most still die of malnutrition before maturity. So your ruling clique of billionaires, trillionaires, zillionaires must keep their happy state hidden, while sharing the privilege with scientists and supportive politicians who make it possible. You, my dear visitors, are members of this jolly club?”
The visitors look at each other. The architect says, “Ignore that embarrassing question. I continue. So many people now share this secret that it cannot stay a secret for ever. How can eternal life be made acceptable to a majority who will never have it? Obviously, by creating something like the Académie Française, wherein folk made popular by their achievements in entertainment, science and medicine are made physically immortal too. The masters of our universe will start by admitting Nobel Prize winners like me — ” (he taps his chest) “ — and you!” He points to the scientist who says, “I am resigning from that club.”