Facial Justice (9 page)

seemed to be yes; she noticed that the faces which had undergone the ordeal, and presumably received the kiss, looked as carefree as she supposed hers did; whereas those, rapidly growing fewer now, which had not, looked tense and strained. Of course you couldn't always tell with Betas; their features didn't change much. But their eyes betrayed them, and their voices too, or rather their lack of voice. Ever since the Visitor appeared at the door, a hush had fallen; but those who had been visited were now talking a little, although with some constraint; while not a sound was heard from those whose turn was still to come. Jael was too happy to want to talk. But idly she asked herself how it was that she, and apparently the others, set so much store by what was said to them by an elderly civil servant, a State employee like themselves, whose word could have no more weight than theirs had? What reason had she, Jael, to believe that she had been punished and was now in the clear, just because an old welfare worker, who went about trying to be nice to people, had said so? None; and for a moment a doubt crept into her mind, but the current of suggestion, to which she was so susceptible, flowing through the ward, soon banished it. An hour had passed. Now the last delinquent was receiving absolution, had received it, was sitting up and stretching herself and rubbing her eyes; the hut had been folded up and whisked away; and the Visitor and the Sister were coming back down the central aisle, the Sister's tall figure bending protectively toward the Visitor's short one, her face wearing a smile which was affectionate but also amused and patronizing. As they passed Jael's bed she heard the Visitor say, "Very satisfactory, I must congratulate you." And the Sister answered, "They're a good crowd on the whole, very little trouble." But when she came back into the ward her demeanor was very different; the starchiness had gone out of her bearing and she seemed as relieved as anyone. Discipline was relaxed, and she went chatting among the patients. When she got to Jael's bed she heaved a sigh and said: "Well, that's over for a month at any rate. Not a bad old thing, is she? One of the best of them. How did you get an?" "Quite all right, I think," said Jael. "She didn't spot the flower, did she?" "Well, as a matter of fact, she did." "Gracious Dictator! (no, don't bother). What did she say?" "She seemed a bit taken aback. She said it must have been a miracle. But she didn't really seem to mind. She told me I could keep it and take it away with me." "What cheek. It isn't for her to say, but I suppose you can. As long as she doesn't report it to anyone who matters! If she does, we might have the whole place closed down. What else did she say?" "She said I'd been punished enough." "Punished enough--I like that! Poor old thing, she's obviouslv losing her grip. I should sav you'd got off very lightly." "I think so, too," said Jael, happily.

Chapter Fourteen

As the date of Jael's discharge drew nearer, her visitors began to fall off. "Be seeing you outside next time," they said, "good-by for now." Outside. The word had lost its terrors for Jael; since the Visitor had reassured her, she began to feel she would be welcomed as a heroine. The regime was not so popular that no one could give it little digs; she might find herself the center of a cult for poking fun at the Dictator. She devised the choreography of a ballet in which the finale would represent the Dictator, on bended knee, offering her, Jael, a flower far more beautiful than the blue cineraria by her bed. At first Jael would not accept it; she waved it away with negligent gestures and raised eyebrows. Ultimately, of course, she would be prevailed on to accept the proffered flower, after which the Dictator would salaam three times. (Ballets satirizing the Dictator were not uncommon: generally they were held in secrecy or semisecrecy; sometimes they were rather improper.) Nobody knew what the Dictator looked like or how old he was. The representations of him were many and various, but he could always be identified by a balloon coming out of his mouth enclosing the words, "Patients and Delinquents!" Sometimes he was represented as the Man in the Moon, with a gamut of expressions ranging from sickening benignity to appalling ferocity; sometimes as the Old Man of the Sea, an incubus, vast, shapeless, supported on the straining, sweating backs of as many citizens as could be got into the picture; on one occasion he has been presented as an androgynous, not to say, epicene figure, pointing vindictively to a crowd of women--suppliants who were stretching up their arms and outspread fingers, begging vainly for some boon. This was, of course, an allusion to the Dictator's often-remarked prejudice against women, and it received a severe punishment. The cartoonist, the editor, and the publisher were fined and sent to prison, and on their release were denied many civic privileges, obliged to go barefoot, and condemned to wear Permanent Sackcloth. On the whole this sentence was regarded as just; the community thought the joke had gone too far: "We must have law and order." Jael was of the same opinion; she had no clearer idea of the Dictator than anyone else had, he was beyond thought; she neither liked nor disliked him, she accepted him. In her old carefree days she scarcely thought of him at all. Now she felt she had definitely scored off him, and meant to cash in on her success, but in the friendliest way, without _lèse majesté__, for she had to admit that, as the Sister said, he had let her off quite lightly: she had only to remember her haunted, miserable state of mind before the Visitor calmed her fears, to realize that. Just a little fun at the Dictator's expense! So her friends had given up coming to see her, all but one, the doctor. She counted him as a friend, because he had always been especially nice to her. She fancied that he gave her more time and attention than he gave the others--and the others thought so too, and teased her about it. "Yes, 97!" (Where there was no ambiguity it was becoming fashionable to address someone by number rather than by name or name and number: to do so was a sign of familiarity, affection, and facetiousness; and it was encouraged by the authorities as leading to depersonalization.) "Yes, 97! we all watched the clock, and do you know how long he stayed with you this morning? Five and a half minutes, and the most he gave anybody else was four! And he went so close to you! He has to come close to some of us, because we were injured in our legs and arms and so on! But all he needs to see of you he could see quite well from the end of the bed, and farther off than that! We don't come crowding around your bed, do we? But he goes right up to her, and takes her pulse for much longer than necessary, and pats her hair and strokes her face and--is she blushing? She damned well ought to be!" Jael was surprised: couldn't they see the blood rushing to her cheeks? "Yes, and the look that comes into his eyes when he knows it's her turn! Just like an animal, it isn't decent! And when at last he drags himself away he shakes his head and looks so disappointed, just like a--just like a--" Jael stopped her ears, and the next time Dr. Wainewright came to see her she could hardly look him in the face. All the same she did look at him, as she had never looked before. He was a square-built man, just over middle height, and under middle age, with a square-cut face, dark hair, and steady, gray-blue eyes, which were his best feature. His nose was Roman and a little askew (surely, being a plastic surgeon, he could have had it straightened?), his mouth was wide and his teeth were irregular. A Beta-plus appearance, or just Beta, though, of course, men's looks weren't reckoned that way. He had a confident bedside manner, or so she had always thought; but today he seemed a little jumpy; or was it that she herself was ill at ease? She couldn't help watching the clock while he took her pulse; he was certainly a full minute over it, and he looked at it as fixedly as a dog looks at a bone. When he parted her hair to find the scar on her head, he couldn't find it at first; his fingers groped about; were the other women all looking? "It's healed up nicely," he said, a little breathlessly, "and your hair's grown over it, no one will be the wiser, unless you tell them." "Oh, I shan't do that," said Jael, mechanically. "Now for the face," he said, so seriously that Jael had to restrain a nervous giggle. He passed his finger over it. "Can you feel that?" he asked. "Well, only just," said Jael. He stroked the other cheek. "Can you feel that?" "Well, only just," repeated Jael. "Now the forehead and the chin, to make sure... Any soreness there?" "None," said Jael, and couldn't help adding, "Your finger feels as light as a feather." "Splendid, splendid," he said, giving her a nervous smile. "You've made an excellent recovery, and from what Sister... er... Electra 63 tells me, you've been an exemplary patient. Exemplary--good word, that," he said, half catching her eye in an experimental manner. "It's been a pleasure, a pleasure to..." His voice died away. "Well, anyhow it's been a pleasure," he concluded. "And to me, too," said Jael. "I'm very grateful to you." "Well, yes. We do our best, of course, but in some cases it's more... more rewarding than in others. I oughtn't to say that, ought I?" he added, "it's highly unprofessional, and besides we're all alike, or we're supposed to be." He raised a questioning eyebrow. "I'm very glad to have you as my doctor," Jael said, feeling his eyes trained like machine guns on her. "Yes, well, nice of you to say so. This will be my last visit, I'm--I was going to say 'I'm afraid,' but really it's a good thing, isn't it?" "I... I suppose it is," said Jael. "Yes, of course it is. You're going out tomorrow, aren't you?" Jael said she was. "Well, the best of luck. You'll be all right, you know, only take it easy, don't get tired or... or overexcited." "No fear of that," smiled Jael. "And no more Country Expeditions," he said, forcing a laugh. "At least I don't advise them, not as part of the cure. But if you do go, and come back here, we'll do our best to look after you." Jael thanked him. "I think that the Dictator--no, my dear, don't bother, remember we're still in hospital--should have suppressed them. They'll give us so much work! But in this case... There was something I wanted to say--what was it?" Jael's eyes searched his face in sympathy, trying to draw the question out of him. "Oh, I know," he said, as if suddenly remembering. "If you shouldn't be quite well... though I'm sure you will be, or if you should find yourself at a loose end, which I'm sure you won't, here--here's my address." He thought a moment, and added, "In any case, I've got to drop in and have a look at you, to see you are following my instructions." Before she had time to answer he was gone. Why had what had been so clear to everyone else, Jael asked herself, been hidden from her? Before her mind had time to answer, her heart told her. She heard her rescuer's voice: "I'll get you out of here," felt herself soaring upward, the sense of time and place dissolving, her mental landscape disappearing, in the glory of his presence. So radiant was it that it eclipsed, for a brief moment, Dr. Wainewright's physical presence far more effectively than a cloud of darkness would have. Beside the other, brighter flame, his flicker didn't show. When she had regained her thinking self, it told her this: even had Dr. Wainewright gone down on his knees by her bedside and felt her pulse with his head buried in her breast, she might well have seen nothing odd in his behavior, so completely was her mind occupied by the vision of another man. Another man!--for she supposed he must have been one; he must have been the Inspector who had challenged her about the current epithet for--Alpha. Inspectors were more than men, of course, but they were men. He hadn't come to see her, and now she had only twenty-four hours left in hospital. Yet she was certain he would come; and strangely enough every moment that he didn't come increased her certainty. With a gambler's faulty logic she believed that luck would somehow be localized within a time limit; he was the winning number that must turn up because, so far, it hadn't. Every minute that was empty of him seemed to fill the next one with his presence. It hadn't always been so. Before the Visitor came her hope had burned so low that only by looking at the flower, that tangible token of his existence, could she keep it alive. Punishment was in store for her, a punishment was due; it was a black cloud blotting out the horizon, sometimes blotting out the sky; and always at the heart of it--a deeper shadow within the shadow--had been the fear that he, whoever he was, was lost to her. She never quite succumbed to it, the flower prevented that; but as a light to her life it was as unhelpful as a will-o'-the-wisp; and as a fire on her hearth, a focal center for her spirit, a vehicle of warmth, it counted as little as a candle in a church--the candles by whose meager light she sometimes listened to the Litany. The Visitor had changed all that--dispersed the cloud, banished the fear, restored the hope. Jael had been punished, and therefore she was absolved. As little did she know of what the future held for her as she had known before; she only knew that instead of dreading it she looked forward to it, that instead of a frost numbing her faculties, it was a soft spring morning, pregnant with promise. So indeed she thought of it, in metaphors drawn from long ago. Mental habit dies hard; the survivors of the Third World War helped out their thoughts with prewar images. In the New World there was no frost, no soft spring mornings--the war had swept them away, along with all the other changes of climate, temperature, and season; they had this uniform, perpetual March, with an east wind that did indeed grow keener toward evening and a gray sky which the sun never quite pierced. But the language hadn't adapted itself to the new meteorological conditions; it was still, as ours is now, a storehouse of dead metaphors, still retained phrases like "at daggers drawn," though no one in the New State had a dagger. How far could the past be said to have survived into the present? Some writers said that history had come to an end with the Second World War; how little they knew! She herself could not remember that time; but this was like another incarnation and needed a new language. Why, in those days a meal had courses. Nominally it still had; luncheon, which she was now having, consisted of three courses, the soup, the meat, the pudding; but they were contained in three capsules, of many flavors, true, and varying size to suit the taste and fancy of the eater; one was supposed to suck them (though no great harm came from swallowing them), and allow an interval of at least five minutes between each. But capsules they were, and round, and the metaphors drawn from eating in the old days, such as a square meal, were totally undescriptive of them. Jael was dutifully sucking her third course and wondering what _Pêche Melba__ really tasted like and looked like, when she was aware of a commotion at the end of the ward, as though someone had broken in. The Sister had gone to the door, and two of the nurses with her--apparently to bar the way; but there seemed to be more of them; someone else was there, and something like a lantern swinging in the doorway, streaking the air with gleams and flashes. Then the nurses fell back, and the stranger came forward, the tall Sister looking up at him with a dazzle in her eyes, and prancing a little as though she trod on air. Jael swallowed down the remains of her _Pêche Melba__; she knew who it was before the Sister, stopping at a respectful distance, announced: "The Inspector to see you, Jael 97."