Like a muezzin in his minaret, one of the talking birds began to shout from the tall palm beyond the mango trees, "Here and now, boys. Here and now, boys."
Will decided to take the plunge-but to take it indirectly, by talking first, not about his problems, but about hers. Without looking at Susila (for that, he felt, would be indecent), he began to speak.
"Dr. MacPhail told me something about. . . about what happened to your husband."
The words turned a sword in her heart; but that was to be expected, that was right and inevitable. "It'll be four months next Wednesday," she said. And then, meditatively, "Two people," she went on after a little silence, "two separate individuals-but they add up to something like a new creation. And then suddenly half of this new creature is amputated; but the other half doesn't die-can't die, mustn't die."
"Mustn't die?"
"For so many reasons-the children, oneself, the whole nature of things. But needless to say," she added, with a little smile that only accentuated the sadness in her eyes, "needless to say the reasons don't lessen the shock of the amputation or make the aftermath any more bearable. The only thing that helps is what we were talking about just now-Destiny Control. And even that..." She shook her head. "DC can give you a completely painless childbirth. But a completely painless bereavement-no. And of course that's as it should be. It wouldn't be right if you could take away all the pain of a bereavement; you'd be less than human."
"Less than human," he repeated. "Less than human ..." Three short words; but how completely they summed him up! "The really terrible thing," he said aloud, "is when you know it's your fault that the other person died."
"Were you married?" she asked.
"For twelve years. Until last spring ..."
"And now she's dead?"
"She died in an accident."
"In an accident? Then how was it your fault?"
"The accident happened because . . . well, because the evil t hat I didn't want to do, I did. And that day it came to a head. The hurt of it confused and distracted her, and I let her drive away in the car-let her drive away into a head-on collision."
"Did you love her?"
He hesitated for a moment, then slowly shook his head.
"Was there somebody else-somebody you cared for more?"
"Somebody I couldn't have cared for less." He made a grimace of sardonic self-mockery.
"And that was the evil you didn't want to do, but did?"
"Did and went on doing until I'd killed the woman I ought to have loved, but didn't. Went on doing it even after I'd killed her, even though I hated myself for doing it-yes, and really hated the person who made me do it."
"Made you do it, I suppose, by having the right kind of body?"
Will nodded, and there was a silence.
"Do you know what it's like," he asked at length, "to feel that nothing is quite real—including yourself?"
Susila nodded. "It sometimes happens when one's just on the point of discovering that everything, including oneself, is much more real than one ever imagined. It's like shifting gears: you have to go into neutral before you change into high."
"Or low," said Will. "In my case, the shift wasn't up, it was down. No, not even down; it was into reverse. The first time it happened I was waiting for a bus to take me home from Fleet Street. Thousands upon thousands of people, all on the move, and each of them unique, each of them the center of the universe. Then the sun came out from behind a cloud. Everything was extraordinarily bright and clear; and suddenly, with an almost audible click, they were all maggots."
"Maggots?"
"You know, those little pale worms with black heads that one sees on rotten meat. Nothing had changed, of course; people's faces were the same, their clothes were the same. And yet they were all maggots. Not even real maggots-just the ghosts of maggots, just the illusion of maggots. And I was the illusion of a spectator of maggots. I lived in that maggot world for months. Lived in it, worked in it, went out to lunch and dinner in it-all without the least interest in what I was doing. Without the least enjoyment or relish, completely desireless and, as I discovered when I tried to make love to a young woman I'd had occasional fun with in the past, completely impotent."
"What did you expect?"
"Precisely that."
"Then why on earth . . . ?"
Will gave her one of his flayed smiles and shrugged his shoulders. "As a matter of scientific interest. I was an entomologist investigating the sex life of the phantom maggot."
"After which, I suppose, everything seemed even more unreal."
"Even more," he agreed, "if that was possible."
"But what brought on the maggots in the first place?"
"Well, to begin with," he answered, "I was my parents' son. By Bully Boozer out of Christian Martyr. And on top of being my parents' son," he went on after a little pause, "I was my aunt Mary's nephew."
"What did your aunt Mary have to do with it?"
"She was the only person I ever loved, and when I was sixteen she got cancer. Off with the right breast; then, a year later, off with the left. And after that nine months of X rays and radiation sickness. Then it got into the liver, and that was the end. I was rhere from start to finish. For a boy in his teens it was a liberal education-but liberal."
"In what?" Susila asked.
"In Pure and Applied Pointlessness. And a few weeks after i he close of my private course in the subject came the grand opening of the public course. World War II. Followed by the nonstop refresher course of Cold War I. And all this time I'd been wanting to be a poet and finding out that I simply don't have what it takes. And then, after the war, I had to go into journalism to make money. What I wanted was to go hungry, if necessary, but try to write something decent-good prose at least, seeing that it couldn't be good poetry. But I'd reckoned without those darling parents of mine. By the time he died, in lanuary of 'forty-six, my father had got rid of all the little money our family had inherited and by the time she was blessedly a widow, my mother was crippled with arthritis and had to be supported. So there I was in Fleet Street, supporting her with an ease and a success that were completely humiliating."
"Why humiliating?"
"Wouldn't you be humiliated if you found yourself making money by turning out the cheapest, flashiest kind of literary forgery? I was a success because I was so irremediably second-rate."
"And the net result of it all was maggots?"
He nodded. "Not even real maggots: phantom maggots. And here's where Molly came into the picture. I met her at a high-class maggot party in Bloomsbury. We were introduced, we made some politely inane conversation about nonobjective painting. Not wanting to see any more maggots, I didn't look at her; but she must have been looking at me. Molly had very pale gray-blue eyes," he added parenthetically, "eyes that saw everything-she was incredibly observant, but observed without malice or censoriousness, seeing the evil, if it was there, but never condemning it, just feeling enormously sorry for the person who was under compulsion to think those thoughts and do that odious kind of thing. Well, as I say, she must have been looking at me while we talked; for suddenly she asked me why I was so sad. I'd had a couple of drinks and there was nothing impertinent or offensive about the way she asked the question; so I told her about the maggots. 'And you're one of them,' I finished up, and for the first time I looked at her. 'A blue-eyed maggot with a face like one of the holy women in attendance at a Flemish crucifixion.' "
"Was she flattered?"
"I think so. She'd stopped being a Catholic; but she still had a certain weakness for crucifixions and holy women. Anyhow, next morning she called me at breakfast time. Would I like to drive down into the country with her? It was Sunday and, by a miracle, fine. I accepted. We spent an hour in a hazel copse, picking primroses and looking at the little white windflowers. One doesn't pick the windflowers," he explained, "because in an hour they're withered. I did a lot of looking in that hazel copse- looking at flowers with the naked eye and then looking into them through the magnifying glass that Molly had brought with her. I don't know why, but it was extraordinarily therapeutic- just looking into the hearts of primroses and anemones. For the rest of the day I saw no maggots. But Fleet Street was still there, waiting for me, and by lunchtime on Monday the whole place was crawling with them as thickly as ever. Millions of maggots. But now I knew what to do about them. That evening I went to Molly's studio."