The Call-Girls (4 page)

‘Tony is trying to convert Professor Burch to Cartesian dualism.'

‘I would rather believe in little green men from Venus, travelling in flying teapots, than in a mind or soul which is not located in space and time and has no measurable temperature, or weight.' Burch spoke with some heat. To Tony he had been condescending; in Solovief's presence he became aggressive.

‘In our laboratories,' Solovief said, pointing an accusing finger at Burch, ‘we deal with the elementary particles of matter, electrons, positrons, neutrinos and what-have-you, some of which possess no weight, nor mass, nor any precise location in space.'

‘We have all heard about those wonders. There has been no lack of publicity. So what do they prove?'

‘They prove that materialism is
vieux jeux,
a century out of date. Only you psychologists still believe in it. It is a very funny situation. We know that the behaviour of an electron is not completely determined by the laws of physics. You believe that the behaviour of a human being is completely determined by the laws of physics. Electrons are unpredictable, people are predictable. And you call this psychology.'

He bent his head towards Burch as if hard of hearing and anxious not to miss a word the other was saying – an attitude of old-world courtesy which had the effect of driving his opponents hopping mad. Burch did not actually hop, but nearly. He spoke in a clipped voice:

‘My answer is that physicists should stick to their observations and refrain from drawing specious metaphysical conclusions.'

Solovief gently shook his bushy head. ‘Philosophy is too serious to be left to the philosophers.'

‘As far as I am concerned,' said Burch, ‘you can leave it to the theologians. I am concerned with the experimental study of the conditioning of lower mammals and the applications of these techniques to our educational system. That is social engineering, based on hard facts, not on nebulous speculation.'

‘I am speculating,' Claire broke in, ‘whether I should get you another sherry, or something more serious.' But she was saved the trouble by Miss Carey approaching them with a tray of assorted drinks. There was something incongruous in Miss Carey carrying that tray – as if an elderly nun were handing round cocktails at a stag party. She wore her greyish hair stacked up in a bun, and the thin lips in the worn face became even thinner as she pressed them together in her concentrated effort to keep the tray under control.

‘Have you met Miss Carey?' Claire exclaimed brightly. ‘It is really very kind of you to help with the drinks, but you shouldn't, really… Miss Carey,' she went on to explain, ‘is Professor Valenti's assistant and an expert with the tapes,
as you will see tomorrow. But really you shouldn't – let me…'

She tried to get hold of the tray, but Miss Carey pulled it away from her with an angry jerk that made some glasses spill over, and her face went white. ‘Don't you dare,' she hissed. ‘It's
my
tray…'

Suddenly Dr Valenti was with them, smiling, hands in pockets. ‘Now, now, Eleanor,' he said quietly. ‘Has something upset you? – Miss Carey has been working too hard this last month,' he explained.

But Miss Carey's anger went away as abruptly as it had arisen, she was now all smiles, a benevolent nun, her face creased with the wrinkles of innocence, offering the tray round as if it bore Christmas crackers for good children.

‘And now, Miss Carey, to complete the introductions,' Claire chimed in, as if nothing had happened, ‘you have already met my husband, and this is Professor Burch, and this is Brother Tony Caspari…'

‘Fancy that – a man of God,' Miss Carey said with a girlish giggle, and graciously moved on with her tray.

The noise had increased considerably in the course of the half hour since the get-together party had started. Two waitresses in dirndl costumes, a sulky brunette and a creamy blonde, both with unacademically sumptuous busts, had taken over from Miss Carey (who had disappeared unnoticed) and were going round with the drinks. They were permanent fixtures of the Kongresshaus, included in the rent, and it was said that Hansie and Mitzie knew more Nobel laureates, from Chemistry to Literature, than any other living women except members of the Swedish royal family. But they never dropped names, partly because they were well-behaved peasant daughters who had been taught that to gossip outside of one's own family was dangerous, and partly
because the names meant nothing to them except for the culinary preferences of their bearers for
Kalbsgulasch
or
Zwiebelrostbraten.

The dinner gong sounded and they all drifted down a perilous-looking spiral staircase of polished pine with steel handrails towards the dining-room. They neither hurried nor tarried, but formed a compact troupe, rather like seminarists walking in pairs; on the staircase they had to walk singly, but at its bottom they re-formed into twosomes. The ritual saturnalia of the cocktail hour was over.

The dining-room looked more like a cafeteria, with a great number of small square tables distributed chessboard fashion, each table seating four. The tables and chairs were of metal covered with gaudy plastic. There was accommodation for two hundred people, but now there were only about thirty, huddled together at adjacent tables at one end of the room.

Claire, who had to give some instructions to Hansie and Mitzie, was the last to get into the dining-room. She saw that Nikolai was seated between Harriet Epsom and Helen Porter; the fourth chair at their table was empty. Although he had two women at his sides, one of them confoundedly attractive, Claire thought, he had an absent look. Helen Porter was talking with her usual intensity to Harriet, who interrupted her occasionally with a monosyllable which Claire lip-read as ‘rot'. Nikolai was moulding a piece of bread into a shrunken skull with his long, powerful fingers. He did it so expertly that one hardly noticed the black leather cap, like a thimble, which covered the stump of his missing left ring finger. She caught his eye and decided to join his table instead of playing hostess somewhere else.

‘Niko's harem,' Harriet uttered by way of comment as Claire sat down.

‘He needs it,' Claire said. ‘Without at least two adoring females around he feels depressed.'

‘What has he got to be depressed about?' Harriet said and wanted to bite her tongue off: she remembered that young Grisha Solovief had just been sent off to fight that nobody's
war in nobody's land somewhere far east. Abruptly, Nikolai turned to her:

‘Tell me what you think, H.E. Do you think this conference is a hare-brained idea?'

‘Rot. The call-girls in their finest hour are going to save humanity. Or at least have a jolly good discussion. Or just a discussion. Or climb up a mountain.' She thumped the stone floor with the heavy stick leaning against her chair. ‘I love climbing mountains. What did you make of that scene made by that Miss Carey?'

Solovief arranged the head-hunter's trophies he had made in a neat row. There were five of them. ‘I did not like it much. Valenti insisted on bringing her along. She is one of his assistants.'

‘She looks to me more like a patient,' said Helen.

Miss Carey could actually be seen sharing a table with Dr Cesare Valenti and Professor Otto von Halder. Halder was telling a story to which she listened with demure disapproval, while Valenti wore his unwavering smile over his immaculate bow-tie; both seemed to be permanent fixtures. Halder concluded the story with a leonine roar of laughter.

‘When men and mountains meet,' Claire remembered and giggled. ‘I thought he only quoted Goethe.'

‘What's wrong with Goethe?' Harriet protested. ‘He knew all about the unconscious and the split mind. “
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust
.” Two souls inside my bosom,
ach.
Isn't that the first scientific definition of schizophrenia?'

Claire thought that Harriet's bosom could accommodate at least four souls. She couldn't stop giggling, oh dear. Helen said:

‘Goethe suffered from premature ejaculation and was a bedwetter.'

Claire asked, as straightfaced as she could manage: ‘Who discovered that? A Kleinian at Yale?'

‘No, at Minnesota. But that isn't much of a joke, you know.'

They were off to a happy start.

Later in the evening – they had all gone to bed early, tired from the journey and the mountain air – Claire applied herself to the task of writing the first of the ‘long letters' she had foolishly promised to her
beau
back at Harvard.

‘The call-girls are getting more moth-eaten every year,' she complained. ‘Even the younger ones look as if they had spent the night on a shelf in the public library. I wonder why they are so dull, and the more they cultivate their eccentricities, the duller. Could it be the effect of over-specialization? It is unavoidable, but it may lead to a kind of stunted personality, because they feel more and more passionate about lesser and lesser fragments of the world?' (Claire took great liberties with the use of question-marks.) ‘And yet, even if it sounds as if I were boasting, Nikolai has got quite a remarkable team together. I only hope this galaxy won't turn into a spiral nebula, flying apart into the void?

‘To continue our argument at the point we left off. You, my dear Guido, you do have an easier life. I don't mean that what you create is less important, but it does not demand this maddening, pedantic, frustrating, nerve-killing concentration on some infinitesimally small fraction of reality, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, sometimes for a lifetime? And all the glory that most of them get out of it are a few papers printed in technical journals, or maybe a book read by a few disapproving colleagues, and by nobody else. I know it because when I had the good fortune to marry Nikolai I was one of that legion of laboratory assistants, a pretty moth in a white coat, working for my degree, highly efficient and with no future at all, except that dusty dedication and heroic drudgery as per above … You, on the other hand,
caro Guido,
lead an enviable existence pampered by the gods, because you can convert your frustrations into music, your ideas into paint (regardless whether good or bad), and your perplexities into poetry (regardless). Already people are beginning to buy your barbaric abstracts, and to
listen to your beastly guitar, and even to read your illiterate poems? I admit that the three together are quite an achievement, so you fancy yourself a reincarnation of Renaissance Man, and despise us plodding, specialized pedants. What with your Condottiere profile and the Roman swagger of your narrow hips, you are sure to make your way to the top and become the idol of all hysterical teenagers. I don't know why I feel suddenly so bitter, but when I think how Niko worries whether this or that hypothesis of his will be proven right or wrong, it seems damned unfair that your compositions cannot be proven right or wrong – except perhaps by posterity, though even the dead are subject to fashion. To acquire fame in
our
kind of work you have to be a Darwin or Einstein. But
you
don't have to be a Leonardo to become a celebrity; a few red doodles made with a loo-brush will do. Of course I don't mean
you, caro Guido,
I only want to explain why the call-girls look so moth-eaten and why their wives are such bitches – of course I don't mean
me.

‘Goodnight for now,
caro Guido.
I am writing this on the balcony of our room,
by moonlight
if you please. (I almost started to explain that we have a full moon here, as if on your side it would be different because Boston, Mass, seems so far away)? The village is asleep, dreaming sweet incestuous dreams. There must be some calves out somewhere in a field, which I can hear but not see – each with a bell round its neck, each tinkling a monologue all for itself, to which no one listens. Exactly like having a symposium?'

Nikolai was pretending to be asleep, to give Claire the illusion of privacy. Through the open window he could see in the moonlight the intent curve of her back as she wrote her letter; he assumed that she was writing to Guido, and felt a twinge of jealousy. They had never seriously discussed Guido, nor Nikolai's or Claire's earlier episodic affairs; he had always maintained that strict monogamy was only for
saints. For ordinary humans it was demonstrably a pathogenic factor whose effects all advanced societies tried to attenuate by legalized tacit exemptions. Every culture, past and present, had tried to find a formula which would preserve the marital bond, but combine it with a certain amount of permissiveness, and none had failed so dismally as modern Christian society. The majority of the couples in Nikolai's own age group lived in a state of acute or chronic
misère en deux.
Their marriages were like parcels that had burst open in the mail-van and were precariously held together by bits of string. The Soloviefs were considered a scandalous exception. They had learnt to tolerate each other's occasional peccadilloes as a kind of protection money paid to Aphrodite, the devious bitch. Nikolai was not even sure whether Claire was having an affair with Guido, or just liked listening to his guitar. But uncertainty made that mosquito-bite of jealousy itch more. Reason told him he should be grateful that there was a Guido: he could perhaps fill at least a fraction of the void for Claire should Nikolai suddenly vanish from the scene. That possibility was clearly implied in the results of the last tests. But she did not know that; at least Nikolai hoped that she didn't. He had explained away that growing tiredness, which could not be hidden, as the unusually persistent after-effect of a severe bout of the 'flu. If she did not believe him, she did not show it.

He turned over and slid his hand between pillow and sheet. Both felt deliciously cool. He relished simple bodily sensations – the touch of the coarse fresh linen, the fierce burning of hot pimento down one's gullet, the smell of tar, the sound of rain, the curve of Claire's back out on the balcony. What an incurable sensualist one was – a ‘melancholy hedonist' Claire used to call him. And why not? Must one's obsession with the perils of mankind exclude the pleasure of being alive – of being still alive? If Cassandra had been endowed with a sunnier temperament, she might have succeeded in preventing the Trojan War. Perhaps the trouble was that the prophets of doom were also merchants of gloom, starting with those desert-parched Hebrews …
Anyway, if Claire wrote to Guido straight in front of his nose, she couldn't be having an affair with him.