“Sorry,” he says. “I’m just coming. But you can actually see it all! That’s what gets me about it. You can really get hold of it all. And it all does work, that’s the amazing thing. It all does in fact make sense.”
“I suppose so. But doesn’t it get rather boring after a bit?”
He moves some more levers, thinking about this. The children come running home from school. The Kessels pick up the Chases, and drive into town to go to the theatre.
“I think perhaps that’s what I like most of all about it,” he says.
A great joke — Howard and Felicity are invited to a reception at the Palace!
Howard sits at the breakfast table with the card in his hand, giggling over it.
“You’ll have to buy a hat!” he says.
“What?” says Felicity, astonished. “You’re not thinking of going?”
“Of course!” says Howard. “Why not? We’re scarcely going to feel we’ve sold our souls for a plate of strawberries and cream, are we?”
“You’ll have to rent a morning suit. You realize that?”
“Sure. It’ll be an absolute riot. I’ll go in being about fifty, with grizzled hair and a rather lined face.”
“I don’t want to be fifty!”
“No, you be thirty-five, and rather sunburned. We’ll cut a real swathe through them. It’ll be a hoot.”
A hoot it is, too. Several thousand people standing about in a series of large rooms surrounded by mirrors, so that the entire world appears to be peopled with morning suits and ladies’ hats sipping champagne. A band plays selections from Fiddler on the Roof. Howard and Felicity move slowly about with their champagne, like everybody else, trying to look as if they are heading somewhere purposeful, and quietly making little humorous comments on the proceedings to each other as they go. “Hel-lo!” squeaks one of the ladies’ hats suddenly — and there are the Bernsteins.
“Thank heavens!” cries Felicity.
“It was worth coming just for the relief of finding you here,” says Jack Bernstein.
“Isn’t it ghastly?” murmurs Howard.
“Isn’t it just?” squeaks Miriam Bernstein.
“It’s exactly like a Jewish wedding,” says Jack, “except they’ve forgotten to invite Uncle Hymie and Auntie Rae, the ones who never made it.”
They gaze round over each other’s shoulders, very pleased with themselves.
“It’s fantastic when you think that a lot of people reckon this whole society’s evil from top to bottom,” says Jack.
Howard laughs.
“No, seriously,” says Jack.
Howard’s laughter fades uncomprehendingly away.
“How do you mean?” he says.
“Oh,” says Miriam, “Jack met some rather hairy young man at a party, that’s all.“
“He told me that half the bacteria I’m developing are lethal,” says Jack. “Going to kill people off like flies.”
“No!” cries Felicity.
“Yes!” squeaks Miriam. “He said Jack was just part of the system!”
“System?” demands Howard, looking from one to the other, not understanding any of this. “What system?”
“Don’t you know?” says Miriam dramatically. “We’re all together in a gigantic conspiracy to dominate the world!”
Howard looks round the room, half-believing for a moment that the game he and Phil used to play might be coming to life after all. But at the sight of all those senior conspirators standing uncomfortably around in rented tailcoats he can’t help laughing.
“The whole set-up’s a joke!” he whispers.
“It’s an awfully long joke,” says Miriam. “What I want to know is where God’s supposed to be.”
They thread their way among the morning suits, looking. There’s a crush over by the door in one of the rooms, with flashbulbs going off every few seconds, but it’s impossible to get near enough to see.
“I’ve half a mind to take off, and have a look from the ceiling,” whispers Howard.
“Go on, then,” urges Miriam.
“We ought to,” says Jack. “What’s the use of being able to fly if you never use it?”
“Up you go,” says Felicity.
They hesitate.
“Supposing everyone started doing it?” says Howard.
“I’d do it if I were younger,” says Jack.
“Oh, so would I. Like a shot.”
“I wouldn’t give a damn what anyone thought.”
“Jack’s put on ten years specially,” explains Miriam.
“So’s Howard,” says Felicity. “But they could be eighteen for a few moments. No one would notice.”
Howard and Jack look at each other.
“I’d feel a fool, frankly, being eighteen in a morning suit,” says Jack.
So they never see God at all.
“Well?” Bill Goody asks Howard at the Chases’ next day. “What was he like? Irresistible, was he? Called you Howard and knew all about the Matterhorn?”
“We never saw him,” says Howard.
The remark is a great success. Everyone laughs and bangs on the table.
“Only Howard Baker could manage to be in the same room as God and not to notice him!” cries Rayner Keat.
“The Bernsteins didn’t see him either!” protests Howard.
But on second thoughts he erases the remark, and replaces it with a slight smile.
“You didn’t see God?” cries Phil Schaffer in exasperation, when Howard smilingly repeats his successful remark to him. “Why are you messing around trying to see him? Why don’t you be God? You can do anything you like here! Don’t you understand that yet? You’re free! You control your own destiny!”
“No rush,” says Howard wisely. “There’s plenty of time to do everything. I’m going to take it steadily, step by step, and enjoy each step.”
But what’s Charles Aught up to? What strange discontent has gone into him? He seems to have been meeting extremists at parties, as well.
Howard’s always found him slightly unsettling, it’s true. It’s something about the contrast between his appearance and his manner. He looks like a rather reliable young man who remembers his aunts’ birthdays, with his thick turtle-neck sweaters and his glowing complexion and mild blue eyes. His eyes gaze steadfastly into yours as you talk. Too steadfastly, seeing too much of you. His voice is soothing. Too soothing, setting you too much at your ease. He knows slightly too many people who happen to be rich.
And there’s some nihilistic glint in the depths of those blue eyes.
He invites Howard to lunch one day (sandwiches, in the garden of a pub down by the river, at a battered green table with a hole in the middle for an umbrella). He wants to talk about getting some of his poets to work on the Alps — he’s looking after one or two of the Romantics for a few months, while a colleague of his is sitting on a commission of inquiry.
“They seem to have rather a thing about, I don’t know, nature,” he tells Howard. “I thought if we could get their nature thing together with your Alps thing, we might both do ourselves a bit of good. What’s the angle, do you think? [He said in his film producer’s voice.] What could I tempt them with?”
“Well,” says Howard, “I think they might be quite interested in the way we’re bringing up great sedimentary land masses from the south, and driving them up and over the geosynclinal rocks in their path.”
Charles makes a face.
“I don’t think most of these loves would know a sedimentary land mass from a steak-and-kidney pudding,” he says. “Cottages with roses round the door are more their line. And waterfalls. A little bit of sex slipped in somewhere, if at all possible. Could we get a little discreet sexual interest in, do you think? Chaste virgins of the snow, waiting to be ravished? Great icy tits sticking up into the sky? Or how about this? ‘O Jungfrau, hear my piteous cries /As I ascend thy snow-white thighs.’”