III

But you'd have thought that Hitler himself had sent for me if you'd seen the four huge black limousines coming to a halt in the drive of the Paulhaus; Julian travelled like a Black Prince with numerous secretaries, perhaps even gunmen for all I knew.  He himself was in the back of the leading car holding the door open for me.  He wore an immaculate dark suit and soft black hat turned well down over his eyes - and, of course, characteristically enough, dark glasses.  Chauffeurs bustled about with my luggage.  "Come into my floating office and admire it" he said, indicating a shallow panel full of switches.  With childish pride he showed me the radio and telex arrangements, a secretary's folding desk; and there was even a telephone which worked externally.  A cocktail cabinet.  Everything in fact except a lavatory and a chapel to worship Mammon in.  "What splendour" I said to humour him.  "Could we call London and give them Benedicta's flight number?"  He was delighted to show his mysteries off and in next to no time was talking to Baum over the water.  Then he sat back in the comfortable seat of the mammoth and lit a cigar.  I watched him with curiosity, still consumed by a feeling of unreality; as much as I could see of him, that is, for the glasses shielded his eyes.  "Always the passion for disguise, Julian" I said, somewhat rudely I suppose.  "It has always puzzled me."  He looked round at me and quickly looked away again.  "It shouldn't really" he said.  I have always been terribly ... shy; but apart from that I have a thing, I suppose Nash would regard it as a complex, about faces.  They seem to be quite private things.  I do not see why we have to walk about with them sticking out of a hole in the top of our clothes, simply because convention decrees it.  I have perhaps over-compensated in one direction; you know that I have had my face made over twice by plastic surgery in order to get it the way I wanted it.  It's better than it was but I'm still not completely happy.  It is very boring, for example, always to have the same face - and nowadays thank goodness it's no longer necessary.  Here, I shall be quite honest with you and show you my dossier."  He groped in a shallow leather wallet and produced some passport photographs which he handed to me one by one, saying "That is how nature made me, this is where art stepped in, and this is the way I look now."  I gasped and stared incredulously at him.  "But it's three quite different men" I said.  "Not really.  Look more closely.   There is much that cannot be changed."  Yes, he was there in each if one peered into the eyes, but in each case the change had been accompanied by a different hairstyle.  But the differences were more marked than the resemblances.  "But of course" he said coolly "this may not be the end of the affair if I begin to get bored with the way I look at present.  It's a marvellous feeling of liberty to know that you can change when you wish, even though very superficially."

      He put the photographs away carefully and pocketed the wallet.  "Now you know all" he said, and lapsed into an indifferent silence as he watched the countryside rolling past us.  His hands seemed fatter and coarser than I remembered them to be, and he wore a seal ring.  But having disposed of the subject of his disguises he seemed to have nothing more to say.  In fact he seemed to doze off, to hibernate inside the dark wings of his overcoat.

      We lunched in high mountains on smoked salmon and white wine; Julian had a long talk on his pet telephone to a branch in Holland which manufactured paperclips.  "We have two lazy men there I shall have to deal with; one sits all day in a bubble bath of self-esteem, and the other is too scared to move: Jaeger, you perhaps know?  A Jewish banker like a very very old very sharp scythe."

      I had expected him to make some reference to the sort of work he was expecting of me but he said nothing at all about the Iron Maide, so I contented myself with dipping into unreality again - reading a newspaper I mean.  Dear old London!  At it again - reading a party pamphlet which would offer wholesome sex instruction to the under-fours and most probably begin: "Children, did you know that mummy was fully of eggs and that daddy had to hatch them, and that is how you are here?"  Life, as Koepgen never tired of reminding us, is only being let out on parole for a brief while.  Tous les excès sont bons.  Well, let Julian sleep.  But I myself was half asleep when late that night we slanted into Paris in a foul grey rain.  "I want" said Julian "to go first to the café where you met her, then to the hotel.  I want to see the room you took her to."  I protested feebly, but there was nothing for it; a note of such passionate urgency and hunger came into his voice that out of sheer sympathy I felt I had to give in.  Sordid rum-whiffing terrasse where we sat for a while at the chipped table; strong local colour was supplied by a little whore, a veritable midget, who uncrossed her legs and let loose an effluvium which could be smelt tables away, stables away, could almost be heard.... Then to that room where she had told me this and that, and her breasts and so on.  Then Henniker with her face flushed with rage, all red and bruised from the crying, protesting about Graphos and the whip.  "He taught her to enjoy it, but he couldn't make her love him.  No, if she loved anyone sexually it was me.  ME.  I seduced her, I calmed her, I loved her and was faithful right to the end."  What pitiful wounded stuff we carry around inside us; wounds that gush blood at the slightest touch of memory's lancet.  He sat in a chair looking dazed, like some very old tame monkey, gazing round him and yawning; but when I told him about the breasts he put his face in his hands and went very still for a moment.  Then he cleared his throat softly and said: "About death there is something curious - a sort of shrinking; if you copy the exact dimensions the effect of your statue or dummy always looks smaller than the remembered original.  In the waxworks, for example, everyone seems to have become reduced in size.  Just over life size is the best recipe for copies.  Let us go, I have heard enough."

      He did not appear for dinner that night and I amused myself by reading Koepgen, ringing up Benedicta and leafing through Figaro.  Much literary prize-giving and distribution of honorary titles; why don't we?  The Epicurus of Letchworth, the great Aubergine of Clermont-Ferrand.  Hum!

      Next morning Julian decided that he must go to Holland and as I was impatient to see this new-old wife of mine I took a plane, full of vertiginous excitement and shyness.  My impatience led to indiscreet arguments with everyone, officials, porters and lastly with an insolent cabby who had clearly never seen a man in love before, and made no allowances for this desperate illness.  (One should be put in an ambulance with a bell; or someone should walk in front of one with a red flag crying: "Enceinte.  Enceinte.")  But at last I arrived to find Benedicta in bed with a  cold, so pretty and so woeful that I as tempted to ring up the whole of Harley Street.  "You see what happens now when you leave me?  I get ill."

      "O thank you, thank you."

*    *    *    *    *

But nevertheless, in spite of the infantile euphoria, I had the most dreadful dreams.  "Dreams are but the prose of quotidian life with the poetic quantum added."  All right.  All right.  Cut it out now.  They were horrible, and of course they made me wonder if perhaps I had been seduced once more upon the bitter path of.... I interrogated her silent form, sleeping so calmly beside me, one hand on her breast: the rise and fall so reassuring, like the spring swell of a marvellous free sea - a Greek sea.  And I felt suddenly terribly old and went into the bathroom to examine my old carcass with attention all over again.  Bits were falling out - a tooth would have to go: O not another!  The hair was coming back quite strong.  But an extra magnification of the bloody glasses.

      It was amazing that my balls hadn't dropped off after all I'd been through - like Vibart's champion novelist.  It seemed to me that I had a very false cringing sort of smile, so I decided to change it all along and because of.... But smiling from left to right instead of right to left set the wrong groups of muscles moving.  Also the old knowing friendly kindly expression in the eyes looked just bleary to me.  What despair!  I knew exactly how I should look in order to rivet her attention forever.  But suppose it got stuck, that smile, from being artificial?  Suppose nobody could move it?  I would have to go every morning to Harley Street and accept facial massage from some torpid Japanese.  Perhaps acupuncture in the dorsal region, huge coloured pins being driven into my inventor's dogged bum?  O hell, please not that.

*    *    *    *    *

Marchant rang me the following day and at last I began to think that things were moving along as planned.  He asked me to meet him at Poggio's which I duly did, enchanted to see my old stablemate again.  But he had changed a good deal; his hair had gone very fine and quite silver and you could see pink scalp through it.  He sported a set of new false teeth of fantastic brilliance.  His clothes were much the same - the stage uniform of the absentminded professor: baggy grey trousers and a torn tweed coat (acid-stained here and there) with leather patches on the elbows.  And a huge college scarf of garish design, bearing his college colours I don't doubt.  But he was full of energy and excitement, gesticulating and twitching his face as he spoke like a lively earwig.  And yet somehow tired and highly strung; and I noticed that he was drinking rather heavily for such an abstemious man.  Anyway "How" he said, giving me the benefit of a Red Indian salute.  "How" I replied gravely.

      "I had all your news from Julian.  Imagine my delight.  To hear you were coming to work at Toybrook with me.  I have been bored stiff among all those corpses."

      "Wait a minute" I said.  "First Toybrook.  Isn't that a hush-hush plant of some sort?"  Marchant nodded and said: "It's where we work on anything which might be on a secret list for the forces; it's a security A factory.  I brought you a pass, all neatly made out for you.  When will you begin?  It's only a very few miles from the country house, if you have your car.  You could drive over every day.  Why the grimace, Felix?"  I sighed.  "Bad memories, painful memories.  I wonder.  I'll ask Benedicta."

      "Do.  It would be convenient."

      "Not what about corpses?"

      "A literal fact; working on these models which I must say are beginning to look quite frighteningly like the real thing, we found we knew next to nothing about anatomy.  We could have called in great surgeons and all that, but they work on living bodies; we were only imitating and where possible simplifying in glass, wool, nylon, jute and so on.  In other words the inside of the Iron Maide did not have to be copied provided we mocked out a musculature and a nervous system and allowed her to imitate human behaviour, speech, gesture, mnemonic response.  Of course Abel has been invaluable with his memory bank which we have now reduced spectroscopically to the size of a pea virtually - talk about writing the Lord's Prayer on the point of a pin!  It's only a matter of detail.  She'll have twice the vocabulary of Shakespeare, and all the souplesse of a mummy trained for a ballet.  Gosh, it is really amazing.  Julian is incredible.  Do you know when they moved a model of her into Madame Tussaud's he used to go there day after day to watch the crowds filing by her.  One day I saw in the paper that this wax model had been damaged and I wondered if he had ... well, I don't know ... started kissing it or doing something even more drastic.  He hasn't dared as yet to see what they've got.  He says he will only come when you authorise him to.  You know he is scared, Felix, very scared by this nylon Iolanthe; and she is coming along so well that I'm rather scared too.  Suppose we get within three decimal places of a perfect copy?  What are we going to do with her?  Could she live an independent life as a free dummy, in a three-dimensional world?  Eh?"

      "What about the sexual stuff - is she designed to poke the other one?  Will they be monogamous?"

      "All that is feasible; but they will never to able to produce - the whole pelvic oracle is sketched in I'm afraid.  But the vagina will please you.  And incidentally, another chance remark of yours has borne fruit in a marvellous way.  You've probably forgotten.  Ejax!"

      "Ejax?" I said vaguely.  It meant nothing to me.  Marchant chuckled and said: "One day when you were drunk you said that for real sexual pleasure the quantity of sperm was important.  The heavier the discharge the greater the excitement of the female."

      "I said that?"

      "Yes, you did."

      "Good god!  Is it true?"

      "Our new sperm-thickening pill called Ejax is having a wild success - surely you've seen the advertising in all the Tube stations?  No?  'Have you taken your Ejax today?  If not what will the wifey say?'  It's swept the board.  And it was so easy chemically to work it out.  A very slight provocation of the prostate with an irritant does the trick.  So far no side-effects, but by the time these come along we'll have a counterblast to them."

      "Marchant," I said "are you happy?"  I don't suppose it was the question to put at this time and place.  He stared at me angrily for a long moment and then said indignantly:

      "Yes."

      We went on looking at each other, critically and carefully.  "Yes" he said, and again, "Yes, Felix."  But it was stagy; he didn't want to be probed on this topic and I realised with a pang of regret the full measure of my tactlessness.  Whose happiness is whose business after all?  It was also a bit alarming to find that so much of my own was ultimately bound up with Benedicta - surely this was a fearful weakness?

      "Go on," I said "go on, Marchant boy, and stop me from thinking.  I have never heard of such a beautiful project with all the problems it raises.  Why it's like having a baby!"

      "Exactly" he said, resuming the flush of enthusiasm which I had cut short by my ill-judged intervention. "While society is happily creating a slave-class of analphabetics, 'les visuels', who have forgotten how to read and who depend on a set of Pavlovian signals for their daily bread and other psychic needs - surely we have the right to build a model which will be at least as 'human' as these so-called human beings?  Eh?  Whether her limitations of freedom in action will have to be circumscribed for her I cannot get Julian to discuss.  He turns a blind eye to the whole matter.

      "But if we get what we might - why, we could turn Iolanthe loose one day, kiss her warmly, and say, now you are free - just as if she were being released from Holloway.  There is no reason that I can see why she shouldn't hold her own in the world as it is today.  Just release her, as a soap-bubble is flicked off a child's soap-pipe.  'Go, my child.'  It's not an unfair analogy - babies are born this way; but they arrive helpless and have to be passed through the cultural mincer.  Suppose ours arrived at the age of thirty - mentally mature; with all her experience digested?  What is to prevent her taking her place with all the other dummies and pushing a lever for her living, her Pavolvian living.  A trap door opens and the soup comes in."  He was very drunk indeed in a cold and rational sort of way.  His cheeks had a hectic flush.  But he wasn't slurring and when he got up to go to the lavatory his walk was quite steady.  "Will she have opinions?" I asked, and he replied "That's up to us; we are building the library of her conditioned responses upon the old graph you drew for Abel.  Yes, she will feel certain things.  But it's for us to decide to a certain extent."  He absented himself and I reflected upon this weird assignment with a certain lustful satisfaction.  Iolanthe!

      "Faustus!"

      Marchant, reappearing, said: "On the one hand it might seem complicated, but in fact it's only terribly detailed and intricate.  Our responses are not infinite, from a muscular point of view, though of course they are various and numerous.  Speech and so on - again it's not infinite; your sound analysis was most useful and adapts perfectly in the new materials.  The voice is particularly successful in my view; here, I will play you a test strip."  He crossed to where his coat hung and eased out a small tape-recorder with a set of fine earphones.  Through them, and clear above the breathing silence of the machine, I heard the real voice of Iolanthe saying softly, dreamily: "Worlds of memory, worlds of desire, echo will set them both on fire.  Three two four, three two four.  Answer me.  Is there anyone in the room who has seen my, has anyone seen my, seen my ...? - no, I'll go further.  The reproduction was so beautiful that I was a bit bloodcurdled by it.  On the one hand it was all so remote, Athens, the Nube and all that.  But I suddenly felt the wild pang of the Acropolis at dawn with that warm scented little body lying tangled in mine in a sort of holy shipwreck; tasted those pious kisses.  "Iolanthe!"

      "Isn't it her to life?"

      "It's a funny way to put it, but it's true.  I suppose you built up the vocal thing direct from Abel - I had quite a lot to work on."

      "Yes, and her films, for example."

      "The damnedest thing" I said and for no known reason felt a disposition to laugh out loud.  "Muscles powered by tiny photoelectric mnemonic cells."

      "That's it, my boy."  Marchant produced sheaves of boring-looking paper and drew out the circuits in very rough specification.  "She has five zones of response; her power storage is a new kind of dry cell with a longish life, and is replaceable.  We are weaving her from a selection of guts and nylons finer than any fisherman dreamed of, or any violinist for that matter.  The hands are extraordinary - utterly beautiful; probably more so than the originals.  She travels by the power of light, boyo, light-sensitised cells; becomes a trifle languid at twilight; and fades into sleep at any time you care to name.  But of course she isn't done.  It'll be weeks before it's all sowed into place and ready to walk down Regent Street."

      "Soliciting I suppose?"

      "That is for you to decide."

      "Why me?"

      "Julian seems to think your word is law in these matters.  Myself I think he is playing a dangerous game - with your so-called sense of humour.  But it's not my affair.  I'm playing my part as best I can.  But I realise now that I'm a mere interpreter of other men's ideas; you are the real scientist."  It sounded pretty strange to me, put that way.  I had always believed the direct opposite to be true.  "But Julian" I said "is the real brains.  None of us would be doing what we are doing had it not been for him."  Marchant agreed, wiped his teeth in a napkin and replaced them tenderly.  "We've photocopied the daily life of about twenty women to work out the range of situation-responses for Iolanthe.  It's really amazing how monotonous the ordinary range of movements, conversations, stock responses, can be.  Even with the total range of thought we can conceivably stock her up with it's perfectly adequate for most things that happen to most people.  Response-provoking through sound and light.  She will move about like some huge abstract dolly playing a perfect part in the world of our time."

      "I'm getting to love her already" I said.

      "Beware of Julian" said Marchant jokingly.  "We've built her a set of sexual organs which ... but I haven't done the detailed planning yet.  Waiting for you to come in with new ideas.  But the site of the temple is all there and the foundations of the thing are all sound."

      "What temple?"

      "Temple of pleasure.  I'm too much of a puritan, I avert my face a bit from all that; and Julian supplies no sort of guidance as yet.  But if we are to get her as perfect as a real person we can't deprive her entirely of her sexual response, even if it's battery-driven."

      It was all very well to joke, but inside I felt rather solemn and indeed a little uneasy.  Marchant added an afterthought.  "You'll find several old friends down at Toybrook - among them Said, the little one-eyed Christian Arab of your salad days who has been doing the most imaginative and intricate work on the light-sensation and the sound.  The man who built your ear-trumpet, remember?"  Of course I did.  An absolutely marvellous artisan in little; the firm was lucky to have such a master craftsman on hand.

      "And the corpses will intrigue you, the real ones; it's funny how things tend to call up other things.  Involuntarily, so to speak.  Just when we were having the first troubles over anatomy and invoking the aid of the Royal College of Surgeons and so on, Julian was faced with another opening for the firm in Turkey: embalming!  I know it sounds strange and of course at first we laughed very much in an exasperated sort of way because really we should have thought of it.  It is the most ancient of all cultus ploys and we could have launched it years ago.  Now, with the help of the two holy churches, East and West, we got everyone into a huddle and, basing ourselves on a profit-sharing scheme, with Rome and Byzantium we launched the whole thing with éclat.  It was of course preceded with a bombardment of clerical propaganda from the pulpit, specially prepared sermons, telling you that it was wicked for you to leave your nearest and dearest to rot when you could embalm them and stick them on the hall hat-stand as we used to stick wild boars or stags or what not.  Also a very nice decoration to very old-fashioned pubs might be Mine Host resurrected in this fashion (if ever so slightly glazed).

      "Combined with this we got the avant-garde in Paris interested in it as a sort of beatnik curio with fascinating responses from all.  They don't really want to live, the young.  They want to be embalmed so that they can impress their friends.  Moreover they are prepared to pay for automatic posthumous embalming as one pays for life insurance.  The cult went off with a bang; we couldn't meet the demand.  It seems to them, I suppose, the only future guarantee that they had actually been alive.  And there's always the chance of lending out your mummy for that perfect party where everyone was so 'stoned'.  In short we were in business.  But ... on the technological side we ran into trouble with the quality of the embalming.

      "In Turkey they were using methods unchanged for hundreds of years.  The result was a very friable effort which, if removed from the dry astringent desert air and moved into a more humid climate, deteriorated dreadfully.  In fact rotted.  Of course we moved 'Chemicals A' over on the job and we are still in the process of wrestling with the formulae for preservatives - it's more difficult than you can imagine.  But while the embalmers were using our brains we were using their dead bodies which can be played about with at will, in order to learn what we needed to know for Iolanthe.  So you will find a rather strange Embalming Studio (so called) chez nous.  It's very useful to us for checking; but they are training to conquer the whole Middle and Far East.  Nature, beautiful are thy ways!"

      "Do you mean to tell me you have been poking about in corpses with a notebook in one hand, Marchant?"  By this time he was extremely drunk but not at all shaky; I mean one would have had to know him quite well to divine that he wasn't sober.  Also he gave me a funny feeling of being a bit scared.  Anyway he gave a great earwig chirp of laughter and said: "My dear chap, all that I know of the human anatomy is based on the dead.  I could not play around with the living, and I'm no surgeon, as you know.  But the dead have been of enormous help, specially while they are still fresh, while the motor responses are still working.  The rigor mortis buggers them up from my point of view - at least on the suppleness and response factor.  But it is most instructive and delightful to see them taken apart as clockwork is, bit by bit, and then pieced together into the sort of doll we are contemplating.

      "In fact one has to stop and ask oneself from time to time 'Who is doing what, exactly?'  I'm damned if I know.  But anyway right next to us we have this vast embalming studio run by the Americans which provides us with models galore.  Of course the American market was already very advanced when all this happened; Europe is terribly backward in some ways."  We both cackled with the old-fashioned laughter which nowadays would merit a pistol fired through the skull.  "But the Middle East" he said "is going in for this with a vengeance, and Julian has already financed a couple of films based on the subject to orient public opinion towards the notion."  He paused.  "Always Julian" I said.

      "I must go" he said, but he still sat on for a while cupping his brandy in a warming hand and staring at me.  Then he continued with remorse, "My God, I've done nothing but talk; I haven't asked you a thing, how you feel, how you are, whether you are keen to take this business on or not.... Forgive."

      "I'm glad.  I would have been incapable of answering any of your questions.  I'm newly convalescent and very newly wed, if I dare to believe it, to a re-upholstered ghost called Benedicta.  I am just feeling my feet, as they say, but very uncertainly.  But whatever the state of things I'll come to Toybrook and look over the set-up with you.  Would you like Monday?  I'll be there betimes if you think that it would suit?"

      Marchant drank of his glass and rose.  "Yes" he said.  "Monday.  I must let you hear a lecture by the top embalmer.  You will hardly credit your senses.  All good sense mind you.  Ahem!"

      I took the tube back, crushed in among my fellow-countrymen who looked on the whole rather nice, after such a long absence from them.  But it was like travelling in a parrot's cage, I was all but deafened when I finally crawled up the steps of Claridge's.  I walked into the room and said: "Mark, Benedicta, Mark!"  She jumped up, radiant.  "Thank goodness you said that; I was thinking it.  It's the sorest place of our many.  So many thorns to be taken out of each other's paws, but Mark...."  I sat down: "What brought it on was the discovery that the place where I am working is very near...."

      "Yes.  I see."

      She lit a cigarette and marched up and down for a moment.  "We must try and incorporate him, relive him a little bit inside ourselves.  It's very selfish in a way, but I fear that if he goes on inside us like a suppurating thing, the memory of a bad act, then things will not grow right between us as they might.  Mark still stands at the cross-roads between you are me."  She sat down thump in a chair and still smoking furiously gave a gulp which was a much rage and frustration as just tears of regret.  I, too, could have beaten my head against a wall and yelled, but not being of that sort of minting I did damn all.  I tried as hard as I could to yawn, look natural, that sort of thing.  Tried to light a cigarette, burnt my finger, got a fit of coughing.  Went off to the lavatory to do a pee and swear quietly at the way things are arranged.

      When I came back she was standing in the centre of the room, very composed and with a fine haughty kind of determination in her eye.  "We must go back to every place where we have been hurt, or where we have inflicted hurt on each other, and systematically exorcise the memory - what do you think of that?"  I jumped at it.  "But now" I said.  "This very night."  And she nodded.  "Otherwise it will be no good."

      It did not take long to raise a car and alert the housekeeper - nor truth to tell to drive down through the roads which were horribly empuddled and the countryside looking devilish sad.  We didn't exchange a single word.  I had organised a thermos of coffee and some repellent ham sandwiches.  The night was cold.  It blew.  I suppose the same sort of thing was going on in her - I mean for my part I was rehearsing the whole past of this period in that horrid garish manner; it was less like a bad dream than an old abandoned tunnel into which one had fallen and been rescued.  But now one had to go back and clear it of fallen debris.  I thought too with a pang of Iolanthe's island cottage.  Ghosts, they need meat too!

      Benedicta drove while I fed her with cigarettes; drove in her brilliant fast vein as if anxious to reach the end of the journey as soon as possible.  Long white headlight-ribbons winding away over the hills, melting down long avenues littered with a detritus of autumn.  Beauty and melancholy of the night country softening away towards winter and the white transforming snow.  At last we came slowly cracking down the long winding drive up to the house with its steely lake and horrid toffee-rose towers.  O Coleridge where wert thou?  A little bit slowed down perhaps by a temporary misgiving; every thing hereabouts spelt Mark, spelt sickness, hag-drawn nights of sleeplessness, Nash, Julian, Abel, Bang.... I put my hand inside her velvet coat and touched her breast.  "So," she said "here we are, gentlemen of the jury, here we are."

      I hammered on the door and rang the interminable bloody bell-rope, while she turned the car and backed it up for shelter under an eave.  For a long time nobody.  Then the little old gnomish housekeeper came tottering down and tuttering about unaired beds and blown fuses.  There was no electric light in the place, and despite all her telephoning she had not been able to get a man in to do the repair.  Candles, then, a couple of big silver branches on the great marble table; perhaps more suitable in a way for visiting this great mausoleum of wasted hopes - in the sense of atrophy, I mean.  Attrition.  I saw her face rosy in the rosy light, so very grave and precious.  (Julian had said: "Open your legs, I am going to kiss you," but instead he had shaken the candlesticks and the burning wax sprayed her unmercifully.)

      The long desolate galleries grew awake and attentive as they watched us come walk, walking in this warm bubble of candleshine; watched us pass and then slipped back into the anonymity of darkness behind us.  We went solemnly and without speaking, spending a moment at each of the stations of the cross in meditation.  Like visiting the picture gallery of a lost life.  Here we had married, here lain down in each other's arms in helpless silence, here quarrelled, here shouted deafly at each other, here smoked and mused.  Mark had slept here, woken there, played further on.  This death newly felt and revived vibrated on the heart like the concussion of some fearful drum.

      Abel had gone - there was just a gaping hole in the musician's gallery; my toy of a pet of a monster of a brainstorm of a Thing.  I was  glad; it had integrated itself elsewhere, been melted down.  Here for some reason she kissed me and wept a small tear.  And so on through the tower bedrooms and thence down the great staircase to the larger of the two ballrooms.  The mirrors had not been replaced though the gunshot-splashed glass had been picked out to leave just the far gilded frames like so many reproaching frowns.  Here the silence was immensely real silence, the air stagnant; there was no other resonance except ours in this place.  Nobody had ever had a ball here, for a wedding or a birthday.  Just she and I and a shot gun and the Lord's Prayer written on the mirrors with number three shot.  The gun-room too was now empty except for a few twelves such as cottagers might need to chase rooks out of a tree.  But in the little fridge in the buttery the thoughtful gnome had placed a bottle of champagne and two goblets as green as Venice.  This too was appropriate.

      We took it, tray and all, into the fake library with its tapestry of empty bookcovers; there was a fire laid in the grate which took no time at all to burst into bristling flame.  I scouted out cushions from everywhere I could and built a huge oriental divan reminiscent of Turkey in front of it.  Here we sat, thinking each other's thoughts and sipping the green champagne while the logs carved out their strange figures and strange faces.  Then of a sudden the telephone rang, which gave us both a tremendous start.  We looked at each other in curiosity touched with a certain consternation.  Who knew we were there?  Julian was in Divonne, gambling.  It rang, and rang, beseeching and beseeching.  I rose swearing, but she took my arm and said: "No.  Just for once let it ring.  Don't answer it Felix, I implore you."  I said: "Don't be superstitious B."  But she was adamant.  "I just know we must not answer it."  On it rang and on; I sat down again.  We couldn't talk or think any more for the noise of the damned instrument.  Then it choked off.  "Now we shall never know what it as, or who it was" I said with regret.  But she sighed a great sigh of relief and said: "Thank Goodness no.  Yet that one conversation might have made us change direction all over again - have put us back on a fatal course."

      So we lay down at last and fell asleep by the warm fire, like hibernating squirrels, too drowsy to make love even.  It must have been nearly dawn when I woke in the chill to revamp the fire and to scout out our coffee and sandwiches.  Benedicta was yawning and combing her hair, quite refreshed.  I went to test the water in a nearby bathroom but found no hot; boilers unstoked for ages, I suppose.  Benedicta was saying: "There's that old cottage in the grounds which was revamped, do you recall?  Why couldn't we live there for a while and acclimatise?  I would like to live more alone with you.  We could have a little boat on the lake.  Felix, answer."  But I was struck dumb by the brilliance of the idea.  It was a very pleasant little wooden chalet, not too small; I had once started to build a studio in it.  It had originally been built to keep a housekeeper in, but proved too far from the house.  So there it was, yet another place lying empty.  "If I remember right the sanitation and kitchen were done over."

      "Brilliant.  Let's go and see it."

      This we did cutting swathes of dew across the meadows.  A tiny brook, a meadow, an abandoned mill.  A small jetty for a boat.... How the devil had I never thought of it before?  "Darling, you are speaking directly to the romantic bourgeois in my soul.  The secret of a happy life is to reduce the scale of things, circumscribe them; a girl doesn't need to fill up more than the circumference of one's arms.  I have never liked big women anyway."  Yes, it was there, the cottage, but I had to force a kitchen window to get in.  It was quite dry and warm because of all the timber I suppose, and spotlessly clean.  A pleasant studio looking out through a weeping willow on to the misty waters of the lake.  "It's ideal."  Was it too much to hope for a few happy years here without the nagging frontal brain intervening to much everything up with its bloody hysterias?  One hardly dared to formulate the sort of hopes it offered, this queer scroggy chalet, looking in a vague sort of way as if it had been influenced by Caradoc's Parthenon of Celebes.

      "Don't you feel we should at least try here?" she said.  "It hasn't the terrible gloom of the big house with all its memories - the horrid backlash of the past.  But it's only across the meadow - we could go there from time to time like one goes to visit a friend in the cemetery."  I said "Yes."

      With a certain amount of awe, though.  What had poor Felix done to deserve all this?  Invent Ejax by mistake?

      "Yes.  Agreed!"

*    *    *    *    *

"You say you've never been to Toybrook" said Marchant with a certain happy condescension.  "I can hardly believe it."  No, I was sure I hadn't.  "They were working upon an obscure nerve-gas and documented me once when I was doing Abel, but that is all I know.  Central nervous system."  He chuckled in a specious professorial way, like a don who is delighted to take you to lunch at the Athenaeum because you aren't a member.  He settled the car rug round him and fiddled with the heating - I detected indications of old age and badly lagged pipes.  The afternoon was mild and clammy.  "As a matter of fact," he said "I opened this morning's paper and got quite a start.  I thought I was looking at Toybrook but in fact what I was looking at...."  He fumbled among his cases and bundles and produced a paper which he opened and spread before me, stabbing with a lean nicotined finger.  The caption was one word, a familiar one: Belsen!  We laughed very heartily about this - a long terrain of old-fashioned potting sheds with the two funnels, like a liner or a soap-factory.  All indistinct and furry.

      "Come," I said "didn't Caradoc build it?  It can't be less than a Parthenon of some sort in that case."

      "It's very beautiful," he admitted sitting back and settling the rug around him "really very beautiful.  And also marvellous from our own point of view.  There are no labs like it in Europe, nowhere.  The nearest comparison is Germany, but even then I think we have the edge on them.  No, Toybrook is quite something.  Sounds like an invention of Enid Blyton doesn't it?  Do you know those children's book of hers?"

      "Of course.  I read them in the Tube."

      "Then?"

      "Well, I'm curious to see what you've got and to find out where you want to go."  Marchant looked at me curiously, humorously.  He said: "We want to get as real as we can."  Silence.  "You mean fundamentally you want to give yourself the illusion of actually controlling reality?  How real can one conceive, I mean?"  Marchant gave a chuckle.  "Felix, Felix" he said reprovingly, putting his hand on my knee.  "The old weakness is peeping out.  You want to intrude metaphysical considerations into empirical science.  It's no go.  You are tapping on a door which does not exist.  The wall is solid."

      "It's quite a consideration if the things you make get up off the operating table and start being MORE real than you?  You will surely be forced to reassess your ... dirty word ... culture?"  Marchant shook his head vigorously.  "We must move step by step, not in your quanta-like jumps - you can do nothing scientifically if you get the typical clusters; it's like seizing up your engine by overheating, hence the Paulhaus."  I watched the wonderful socialist country rolling by with all its marvellous advertising.  "Ejax makes a man of you."  Why not a woman, I wondered?  It damn soon would.  Hair down to the waist and a costume from Napoleon's Grande Armée.  Perhaps there was a future for poor Felix in all this?

      "Bon" he said, with a growing sense of familiarity.  It was not simply the firm - it was the particular smell of self-satisfaction it unleashed.  "And Julian?" I said.  Once more Marchant gave a small earwig chuckle. "Gambling," he said "all the time.  But now he has started losing and this is not in nature - at least not in his.  I love Julian, you know, now that I have really got to know him.  He is humility itself - humble as the Pope.  Self-effacing.  Tender.  Felix, what a man!"

      "What a man" I echoed piously, and indeed the funny thing was that I felt it; I felt a strange sort of reverence for this ... mummy.  I don't know if that is the right word.  But to have so much understanding humanity as Julian had and to manage to live apart, to play no direct part in its strange or deformed operations - why really it was something to doff the hat to.  "All that Planck stuff is fruitful from a theoretically viable point of view; but from our point of view it is a matter of scale, in our empirical test-tube business the three dimensions are all one can cope with."  He was pursuing the argument like a sort of granny.  He cleared his throat while I lit a cigarette.  "Our only problem down in Toybrook is a simple one, namely does it work ninety-nine times out of a hundred?  If it does it is real."  I coughed slightly and scanned off the scenery a bit.  We were travelling mighty fast with a chauffeur who, for all I knew, might have been a dummy invented by Marchant.  Then I said: "And the hundredth?  Is there no room in your system for the miracle?  That trifling shift of temperature or wrong mixture of chemical salts ... it's so easy to go wrong.  What exactly would be the miracle for you, Marchant?"  Chuckle.  "Well," he said "something like Iolanthe.  She can for a moment be exactly controlled.  Or so we hope.  So we hope."

      But reassuringly enough Toybrook was not in the least like Belsen - quite the contrary; despite the two stout brick towers exuding a lick of white smoke from the ovens in the experimental section.  Toybrook was laid out with great dignity in two long complexes enfilading a piece of wild woodland, so that there was no laboratory or theatre without it fine green view.  Moreover in the woodland there were several families of wild stags which appeared and disappeared dramatically among the trees, mating and battling in full view of the scientists; sometimes even coming shyly down to put a wet muzzle on the plate glass of the aquarium-like laboratories.  It was both elegant and very peaceful - the chemists' studios with their long rows of microscopes glinting, their scales and pulleys and grapnels.  A long pendulum hung slowly swinging in the hall.  They had everything, these boys, even a wind tunnel and a cyclotron.  Marchant was in high good humour as he showed me round, stopping here or there to present me to a colleague.  Thence to the elegant theatre where the progress reports were read and recorded audio-visually for whatever posterity a scientist might believe in or hope for.

      In the darkness Marchant flicked a couple of switches and a bald man appeared on close-circuit image.  "That is old Hariot" he said while the celebrated man read haltingly against a blackboard upon which someone had written in violet chalk: "Does perhaps the rate of blood-sedimentation dictate the oxygen intake?"  A vexing question, I should have thought.  Anyway Hariot went on: "As you know, oxygen pushes carbon dioxide out of the blood and vice versa; as far as the circulation is concerned, about five litres of blood a minute are pumped by the heart of an ordinary resting adult.  The distribution is not uniform; I mean that brain and kidneys get disproportionately large amounts compared to their relative size.  As far as the brain is concerned, a decrease of ten per cent oxygen will give the first signs of confusion; decrease it by twenty per cent and you get the equivalent of four or five strong cocktails, say; around forty per cent you would expect to get coma.  If the total supply is cut you get unconsciousness in a few seconds; and after four to five minutes the damage to the brain may be irreversible."

      I said: "I suppose you had to mug all this stuff up for your dollies?"  And Marchant nodded as he faded down on Hariot and came up with an image of rubber hands occupying the whole screen, poking about in the entrails of something or someone.  However it was Hariot's flat voice again which continued the exposition with: "From the umbilical cord of twenty-five newborn children an appropriate test-length was clamped before first cry; blood samples were drawn anaerobically with special all-glass syringes from the umbilical vein and umbilical arteries.  Coagulation and glycolysis were inhibited by heparin and potassium oxalate and sodium fluoride...."  Marchant chuckled approvingly.  "You can call for any damn thing under the sun" he said, consulting a panel of data.  Other images wallowed up, once more of rubber fingers moving about in a uterus as if performing some obscure rite of divination.  "This particular demonstration monkey was merely anaesthetised, its abdomen opened and copious amounts of Bouin's fixative solution poured into it, over and around the uterus in situ.  At the end of three to seven minutes all uterine ligaments with their contained blood vessels were clamped and the specimen removed...."

      "Ugh" I said.  "I think I must be getting home to the wife and kids if this goes on."  He laughed and tried another lucky dip on the dial to produce this time a strange surrealist picture of three men in white coats gathered round a seal which had been lashed firmly to a board and suspended above a water tank.  The poor animal was terrified and struggled with all its might, rolling bloodshot eyes and moaning through its long silky moustaches.  One of the men was holding a stethoscope to its body and saying something grave about lactic acid levels.  Then the pulley swung and down the whole contraption fell out of sight.  Crank!

      "Enough" said Marchant.  "It was only to give you an idea of the data-processing side of the thing."

      In the mathematical section there were a hundred small hanging mobiles gyrating slowly in the sluggish air of the studios; a tiny planetarium, mock-earth, and God only knows what else.  To Marchant's annoyance however the experimental embalmers had taken the day off and locked up the studio.  "It's most vexatious" he said.  "They have probably gone up to town for more dead.  It isn't all that easy to get them, and one cannot run and Burke and Hare body-snatching organisation from such a respectable address as this."  Why not, I wondered, surely old Julian could provide?  (Cut out the flippancy, Charlock.)  At any rate there was nothing for it now but to proceed to business and visit his own section, which would later become mine as well.  It had no name as yet, just Experimental Studio B.

      He had doubtless been keeping this special treat for the last, deeming it the most exciting, which of course it was.  He unlocked two sets of doors and locked them again behind us with a stealthy gesture that reminded me of the Rackstraw ward in the Paulhaus.  A high, bright, airy studio almost as tall as a hangar for cub aircraft came to light; white silk curtains moved softly in the breeze.  Silence!

      The bed she lay in was a long white surgeon's operating table with gleaming leverage members in tubular steel.  She lay so still, like the experimental aircraft she was, so to speak, (still on the secret list): covered completely in a sheet of soft parachute silk, which stretched down to the floor on both sides.  But her silhouette gave the illusion of completeness - a whole, undisbembered body of a corpse, woman, doll or whatever.  "You said she was still in bits" I said and Marchant tittered with pleasure.  "They are not completely joined up as yet for action, but I want to give you the illusion of how she's going to be by showing her to you bit by bit, so you don't see the joins.  The power isn't in yet, but I get some traction off another unit which enables us the check the whole flexion patterns of our fine plastic musculature.  I plug her into a g-circuit."  He performed some obscure evolutions in the corner, switched on powerful theatre lights above the body, and beckoned me over with a shy grin, lifting as he did so the corner of the silk to reveal the face.  It was extraordinary to find myself gazing down upon the dead face of Iolanthe - so truthful a copy of the reality that I started with surprise even though I had been expecting something like this.  But what really took me away was the perfection of that fresh and dewy skin.  "Feel it" said Marchant.  I put my finger to her cheek; "She's warm."  Marchant laughed; "Of course she is, she's breathing, look now."  The lips parted softly and a tiny furrow of preoccupation appeared on the serene brow.  In her dream some small perplexity had surfaced here.  It was skin, though, it was human flesh.  Here she was, simply lying anaesthetised upon an operating table.  "Iolanthe!" I whispered and the lips parted as if to answer me, but she said nothing.  Marchant watched my confused excitement with a happy air of complacence.  "Whisper again and she will wake" he said, and in an incoherent uncomprehending sort of way I said: "Darling, wake up, it's Felix."  For a moment nothing, and then the whole face seemed to draw a waking breath.  The lids fluttered and very slowly opened.  "Damn" said Marchant. "Said has taken out the eyes again for restitching.  I forgot, sorry."  But I was staring entranced through the eyesockets of the model into her skull with its intricate nest of coils and wires in different-coloured threads, finer than the finest cotton.  Marchant passed his palm over the eyelids to close them, as one does with the dead; I felt rather sick in an elated sort of way.  "The eyes are over there" he said, indicating a small white glass bowl in which the eyes of the goddess floated is some sort of mucus - gum arabic?  They lay there like oysters - unrecognisable now as the most famous eyes in the world, simply because they were detached from context.

      Ah Osiris, we must gather up the loaves and fishes; O Humpty Dumpty we must put you together again.  But Marchant was irritated by this trifling misadventure and drew the sheet back over the face.  He went on to a demonstration of the thigh and ankle flexion - a perfect beautiful leg was revealed, of positively Botticellian elegance, and again warm, palpably real, a breathing leg so to speak.  "Of course most of the fun has been in playing with the surfaces, the decoration, since we were ordered to reproduce from a known model.  But her skin, boy, is just as beautiful as the real stuff and rather longer lasting.  I must say that nylon pencil you invented has been a godsend."  So I had invented a nylon pencil - what the devil can that have been?  "Once again you've forgotten" he said.  "It was just a hint you threw out once which we took up.  My dear boy, look."  He took a fine scalpel and cut a long incision in the thigh, spreading the wound with a clamp.  No blood, of course, nor sawdust as in an old-fashioned gollywog but a beautifully coiled nest of vivid plastic cones and wires, packed tight as caviar.  "Now look" he says and takes a thick metal pencil which he draws along the lips of the wound.  It closes instantly leaving no trace of the gash in the warm thigh.  "For running repairs - what would we have done without it?  So swift, so easy.  You can open it, her, up anywhere in an instant and reseal the wound.  Good old Felix" he added with an incandescent admiration.

      "Good old Felix" I echoed.  We know not what to do, Bolsover, we know not what to do.  I sank into an armchair and began to smoke like Vesuvius.  "Mother of God, Marchant, what a treat she is.  Will you give me the specifications please?"

      "Of course" he said, rubbing his hands.  "I don't think there will be much you don't understand; most of the data comes from your old scrying board - only of course very much reduced and in finer-web materials."  I shook my head doubtfully.  I had never worked on this scale before - through a jeweller's eyepiece or a microscope, so to speak.  I stared into the mental sky of science and muttered "E pur si muove."  That was the damnedest thing of all.  Marchant stared at me with schoolboy glee and said: "Yes, you can't put your telescope to your blind eye on this lot; we are getting as near as dammit to the target objective."

      He was acclimatised, I could see; but despite all he had told me about the project I found this experience to be quite a shock.  Nor was it all.  "Come and look" he said "at the vagina, the real treasure."  He made some artful disposition of the shroud and revealed the downy sex of Iolanthe.  "Stick your finger in there and feel - a self-lubricating mucous surface imitated to the life."  I felt an awful cringe of misgiving as I did so, albeit reluctantly.  He cackled happily and slapped my back.  "You don't like it, do you?  It seems an intolerable affront to her privacy and her beauty?  I know, I know.  I couldn't do it for weeks, she had become so real to me.  But I had to.  I had to take myself in hand and remind myself that I was a scientist after all - a man rather than a mouse."  I felt shaken by a sort of remorse; it was silly to feel like this about the private parts of a dummy.  Yet, so deeply buried are these motor complexes derived from the education of the tribe, that they come to the surface in quite involuntary fashion.  Poor Iolanthe, lying there asleep and in pieces, to be fingered over by mousemen!  I felt as if I had insulted her dignity.  Marchant knew perfectly well the feeling.  He had already felt that way himself, and steeled himself against it.  I mopped my brow and thanked him.  "But why does Julian want this sort of thing copied?" I asked in an outraged and aggrieved fashion.  "Does he expect them to reproduce?"  Marchant shrugged.  "I don't know; they won't ever be anything but simulacra of fertility.  Not only that, they can neither eat nor excrete.  But he won't say what he has in mind.  What will she do for an état civil my lad?  No good asking me."  He burst into a small cackle of helpless laughter and sat down in a chair to wipe his spectacles.  "Phew!" I said.

      The dossier on the figure was almost as thick as the Bible, though rather more intelligible for someone of my outlook.  I riffled it and put it in my briefcase abruptly.  I had a sudden feeling that I wanted to go away and be alone with myself, with my brief, with my dossier - and singularly enough with Benedicta.  Marchant seemed a little disappointed that I had nothing much more to say at this stage.  He eyed me keenly and said, "You are in on this thing Felix, aren't you?"  I smiled and nodded.  "You aren't" he went on "going to let theoretical considerations intrude on the work, are you?"  It was as if he were pleading for Iolanthe's life - the life of that marvellous mummy lying so silently under her silken shroud of grey.  "No" I said.  "I'm in it all right."

      He heaved a sigh of relief, as we went out to the car.  I was to be driven home and dropped - the great déménagement to the cottage from Claridge's was only a day or so old.  But I was glad when the chauffeur produced an afternoon paper for Marchant as it kept him busy, inveterate punter that he was.  A headline said MOBS SOB AS DALI LAYS EGG.  Good.  Good.  "I want to watch when you replace the eyes, remember."  But I was thinking to myself about memory - is everything recorded in it from the first birth-cry to the death-rattle?  Why not?  Or does it simply wear out like an old disc?  In Abel's system the sound unit, the pogon, gave you a clue to the basic predispositions of character which was then modified by experiences, environment, etc.... Yes, that side of the thing was all right.  "My God, it's begun to snow" said Marchant, and so it had; the sky fell out of its frame, turned into a great flocculent pane of melting confetti and came down over us locking up visibility; we nosed down the country roads between spectral hedges and sculptured gateposts - griffins in wigs on the front gates of Drue Manor.  Plastic elves in white cauls on the lawns of suburban houses.  Ah to be a quiet man, living sagely with a little plastic wife, following out the serpentine meanderings of my inner self ... why hasn't God made me a quietist?  Nigaud, va.

      I made them keep the headlights on to enable me to grope my way across the meadow and skirt the disappeared lake; it was all crackly underfoot.  When I looked round the snow had swallowed them up.  Like a blind man I clutched my way up the steps of the chalet and at last found the latch.  Ah, the warmth inside, the blazing fire of thorn and oak, the smells, and Benedicta pyjama-clad asleep before the fire with Osmosis the cat on her stomach.  "One side of your face is all burning, bottom as well" I said.  "Better turn over."  But she preferred to wake.  "Caradoc has been ringing you this afternoon.  He seemed to be rather drunk.  I told him to record himself and go to hell, which he duly did."  But either he had been more than just drunk or else his sound track had got itself mixed with other stuff for it was a mighty incoherent display of temperament beginning with a poem of which I could only make out the lines:

                                               Fornication's pedalled jam

                                               Which has brought me where I am

and ending with a request for a Christmas Box of fifty pounds.  "I am at the Metrofat Hotel in Brighton with a young lady who is all warm breast of Christmas Turkey; greetings of the Season to one and all.  Did you see my little thing in The Times?  'Grand génie, légèrement bombé mais valide, cherche organiste.'  Had no replies yet."

      "Well," I said "he sounds all right."  I poured a drink and resumed my inward brooding upon Iolanthe.  I told Benedicta a bit about the marvels of the dummy - it, her? -- and how it had given me quite a turn to see the faithfulness of her copy.  She looked at me curiously, seriously, and said nothing.  "I wonder if I could raise Julian!" I said.  "I would like to have a talk with him about her.  He hasn't seen her as yet himself.  I wonder if he knows what's in store if she really works down to the last rivet."

      "Try the Casino in Divonne.  Anyway he always leaves his number wherever he goes."

      The night switchboard at Merlin's took not much more than half an hour to trace him.  That characteristic voice, full of the illustrious melancholy of a dispossessed potentate.... "What is it Julian - you sound so sad?"  He sighed ruefully.  "Yes.  I am losing so heavily.  It gets more and more mysterious.  I wonder what I have done to shift the axis, so to speak, of my luck?  It was always in perfect working order.  I lost at Divonne and am continuing to lose down here in Nice, where it is snowing if you please."  He paused and in the background I could hear the yelping of croupiers.  "Consult Nash" I said and he sighed again.  "It would be useless.  He could tell me why I played but not why after always winning I have started losing - why the bung-hole has dropped out of my luck.  I have done everything, changed my game more than once.  Damn it all."

      There was another long pause; of course Julian had always been of a melancholy and introspective cast of mind, but he had never given himself, his views, so freely to anyone.  "It's your fault for taking Abel apart" I said.  "He might have suggested an answer."  You can't hear a smile on the telephone but I did - a world-weary sad smile.  "It was another gamble.  I had to try to suck you dry in case you never came back, to ensure the perpetuity of the firm!"  A fine light irony played about the phrase.  "Like Rackstraw" I said and he nodded invisibly.  "The vulture always waits" said Julian.  I heard the puff puff of his cigar.  I stayed silent, feeling that perhaps there was something he wanted to get off his chest before listening to whatever I myself wanted to say to him.  But he said nothing, and an operator asked if we were still talking: actually we were.  All his loneliness and despondency were leaking down the wire like a low-tension current: also a certain anxiety.  I felt he was glad to have even this mechanical contact with someone.

      "Felix" he said hesitantly, as if he were feeling slowly, blindly along the Ariadne-thread of an idea he wanted to express.  "How lucky you are not to be a gambler.  We constitute a different tribe, you know, belong to a different totem.  I realised tonight that I am only really at home in a casino; I really have no foyer, no hearth of my own, except here.  When I go from here I don't go anywhere in particular.  A hotel isn't a home; and my so-called home is only a hotel.  Now be a good boy, don't quote Freud.  The matter is much more fundamental than that."

      Pause for breath.  "When you see all these pale, exhausted faces in the light of dawn, after their fruitless love-affair with the wheel or the dice or the pack: this sterile love affair, because even the winners express a haggard lost feeling - why, you realise that masturbation isn't the real clue.  The gambler is really dicing with death, as the popular saying goes.  Just as  all dancers are simply persuaders to the act, so gambling is a sort of questioning, an act of divination.  How weary of it we all are, yet it is only situation which enables us to feel vicariously alive, this side of death."

      I said nothing; the sorrow in his voice was absolutely overwhelming.  He went on very slowly, like an exhausted climber reaching for handholds, languid for lack off oxygen.  "But then what is the question that the gambler put to himself by the act of gambling?  What does he hope that the dice will tell him?  Well, think of the strange symbolic pilgrimage he is forced to make to the casino when he can find one - as characteristic as that made by other men to a brothel.  He enters, reveals his identity by producing a passport or other document; he fills in a carte d'admission.  Then he passes in front of the 'physionomiste', a 'scanner' who subjects his face, hands and body to a close scrutiny.  This is as intensive as a police check though he does not touch you.  My various faces must be on record somewhere in somebody's mind.  A scar, a tattoo mark, a blemish - that is what they look for, this race of 'scanners'.

      "Once past this barrier he is admitted to the temple of the supreme Game which he craves; and here everything speaks to him of the past, a vanished epoch.  An old-fashioned anachronistic décor, whole surfaces of dusty unspringing carpets such as one would find only in abandoned Edwardian hotels or in late spa hotels at Vichy, Pau, Baden.  The fuzzy chandeliers, broken-down salon de luxe festering away in their desuetude.  Even the costumes of the croupiers and often the gambler's own partake of this strange out-of-dateness.  It is as if everything had become stuck fast like an atrophied limb - death in aspic.  The formulae too are all part of this strange marvellous stereotype, as superannuated as a half-forgotten liturgy.  It smells like a page or two of Huysmans.  Yes, but all this is deliberate; this atmosphere is anxiously preserved, conserved, watched over.  And the premises themselves should if possible smell airless and ever so slightly dusty.  You do not want fresh air in a casino.  The ritual forbids it.  The air must rest, tideless, scentless, and only just breathable.  The gambler feels at home then like a fish in water of the right temperature.  His nostrils breathe this warm welcoming balsam.  He knows what he must do, he simply must."

      In this slow near-soliloquy I felt once more all the rancour and despair of his inner loneliness welling up in him - though why for the first time he should choose to allow me to be a party to it I could not tell.  Somewhere a bell rang and voices buzzed to the tune of the big wheel.  Julian appeared to be listening to it all with half an ear even as he was talking to me.  So much of it I remembered myself, too, from my one brief flirtation with the law of probability - is there such a thing?  Poking the cat with my foot I shared Julian's curious muse in silence for a moment.

      Yes, he was right: the weight of the ritual, the entering, the form-filling.... Then he decision between les Salles Privées and the cuisine.... On which front to attack the demon of hazard, he whom Poincaré called "the real mathematician of genius"?  Ah, those long interior debates on the thirty-seven slots in the wheel (alchemy?), eighteen red and eighteen black with the somehow inevitable white zero.  A sort of Tarot of probability instead of a calculus ... (perhaps Abel?).  But behind the silence of Julian I heard a voice calling, as if from a cloud, "Vingt-et-un rouge, impair et passe."  And I saw the lean face of the arbiter, the chef de partie, sitting up there on his throne, his baby-chair, overlooking the celestial game, impervious to human feelings of gain or loss, a sort of God.  And then I thought, too, of all the gambler's fevers and follies.  In that expensive and beautifully cut suit of his, in the breast pocket, he carried a typical talisman, a rabbit's paw.

      "Change your talisman" I said.  "Why not get a fox's paw, or the dried paw of a great lizard, or a human hand?"

      "Fatal" he replied drily.  "You know it."

      Julian was a heavy staker in the Salle Privées and richly merited the French slang word for the breed, flambeur, inflamer: the flame of pure desire, the mathematical desire to know.  Not to be, but to know.  And of course he had always won.  The croupiers had always passed him hiss mound of golden ordure which for him symbolised so much more than a unit of value.  Negligently but voluptuously he must have fingered it always, before throwing it back into the melting-pot - for only with gold can one make gold, whatever the wizards may tell you.  I remembered too that when numbers run in a series they are said in gambler's slang to be en chaleur, on heat.

      "None of this can have anything to do with what you wanted to talk to me about," he said "and I apologise.  I was in rather a reflective mood this evening.  What did you want to tell me about, Felix?"

      "Iolanthe.  I went to see her with Marchant today, and I'm still a little groggy with surprise.  It is the most astonishingly life-like thing I've ever seen.  And if everything he tells me is true it will be rather unique.  But I haven't read the specifications in detail yet.  I'll do that this week.  But there were one or two things which struck me about her, it."

      "I'm delighted that you are excited" he said, and sounded almost moved himself.  "But" I went on "I felt that I wanted to go over some of the points with you in case we hadn't fully understood your idea - I suppose, for example, the male will be much the same?"

      "Same what?"

      "Fair without, false within.  I mean I found myself wondering why we were copying the outside with such fidelity when the inside is an artificially arranged thing with simply a stress, strain, flexion index."

      "It's not entirely true - what about the brainbox?"

      "But they will never eat, excrete or fornicate...."

      "We are perhaps asking for too much at this stage.  Let's go step by step.  I wasn't hoping for reality so much as for the perfect illusion which is probably more real than reality itself is for most people; hence my choice of the screen-star symbol..  As for fornicating, I suppose they can go through the motions, though it will be without result, sterile; but they will try to illustrate an aesthetic of Beauty, which is always in the eye of the beholder as 'The Duchess' tells us.  Eh?"

      "Eunochs!"

      "If you wish; but did Aphrodite eat and excrete?  I am not enough of a classical scholar to quibble about it.  After all these are only serious toys, Felix, serious toys."

      "But Marchant insists they are so perfectly adapted from the point of view of responses that they could, according to him, be turned loose in the real world without danger of being discovered for what they are."

      "Why not, Felix?  They will probably be more real than most of the people we know.  But of course I have no intention of setting them free; first of all, Iolanthe's face is world-famous.  We mustn't run the risk of their getting damaged.  No, I thought of them living in seclusion quietly somewhere where we could work-study them; they are far the most advanced things of their kind, after all?"

      "Hum.  And who will the male doll be based on; we only have legs and the outline of a pelvis as yet.  Eh?"

      He yawned briefly and then went on in the same even tone.  "You can guess how much I would have liked to aspire to the role myself - but it would bee too Pharaonic, a sort of embalmer's picnic.  So I have stepped down in favour of Rackstraw."

      "Rackstraw?"

      "We will confer a vicarious immortality on him; he will end as a museum piece in some colony of waxworks.  But of course I mean Rackstraw as he was once, not as he is now.  Once again, we have all the information we need about him.  Any objections?"

      "No.  But the whole thing seems bizarre."

      "In one sense I suppose it is; but then Felix, it's only a gambler's idea.  I remember you once insisting that habit grooves the sensibility, that even movements repeated endlessly generate comprehension, just as an engine generates traction, or sticks rubbed together, fire.  What I wonder is this: will perhaps this creature of human habits one day, simply by acting as a human being, REALISE she is a dummy?"  The capital words was practically hissed into the telephone.  "As much, I mean, as the original realised she was Iolanthe?  It's a gamble, and like all prototypes our models may prove too clumsy for us to practise divination on or by them.  But then if one does not live on hopes in this life what else is there to live on?"

      "I see."

      "Good night Felix" he said.  "Wish me a run of luck will you?  I am in mortal need of it."

      The line went dead.  I sat for a long moment before hanging up from my end.  Benedicta was laying out our dinner before the fire, ladling out soup into the bright earthenware pots which looked Italian.  I was in a state of unusual and rather violent excitement - though I honestly don't know why.  Of course in part it was all the implications of this extraordinary project; but I had seen others, far more theoretical, where the issues were much more in doubt.  And of course, with one half of my mind, I could not help thinking of it as a bit infantile.  Was it though?  At any rate, whatever the cause, I ate in very perfunctory fashion while I dipped here and there into my brief - the dossier.  It was all as beautifully and methodically laid out as the specifications for a new aircraft.  The only question was: would it fly, how would it handle etc. etc.?

      "Benedicta," I said "I must go out for a walk.  I simply must."  She looked at me with surprise.  "In this weather?  It would be foolhardy, Felix."  But I was already groping for a heavy sweater and the stout ski-gear I had acquired in Switzerland.  Seeing I was serious she sprang up at once and joined me.  "I'm coming with you; I am not going to risk letting you fall into the lake or break your head against a tree.  It's all too new this, Felix, to be risked."  I felt a bit of a swine, but was really extremely glad to have her beside me as a sort of thinking generator.  It had stopped snowing, everything was hushed back into whiteness - apocalyptic flocks of solid cumulus which had filled out the world and blotted out the edges of things.  No moon, but an infinity of white radiance which turned the sky into an upturned inkwell.  We found a stout storm lantern in the kitchen for want of a torch, and let ourselves off the dry balcony as gingerly as swimmers entering the sea splashlessly.  The forest had still some edges left which were a help in judging our general direction - as if someone had spilled Indian ink over a lace shawl.  Within a few yards we divined rather than felt that we were upon the ice of the frozen lake.  The snow was so dry it screeched underfoot.  Somewhere in the sky wild geese cranked out to one another.

      We made our way slowly across the lake to the little island in the centre, now piled up like a wedding-cake of whiteness.  At the far end of the lake itself a solitary figure, a gamekeeper, moved about in the greyness absorbed in a task which could only be gradually identified as we approached him.  With a crowbar and hammer he was knocking holes in the ice and pushing something down them - to feed fish perhaps?  We called out a greeting but he was completely absorbed and did not hear us.  We skirted the little islet - and gained the further shore, lengthening our stride at the feel of terra firma.  "Science is only half the apple," I told myself aloud "just as Eve is only half Adam."  Blundering along thus the mechanised philosopher could hardly help falling over the odd tree trunk, or banging his head on a branch or two.  But gradually we became accustomed to the light and were able to move about with as much certainty as one might have done by day.

      A distinct violet shimmer in the light where it caressed the shoulders of the little hills.  On a branch one old and perished-with-cold-looking owl, fluffed out in his mink like some run-down actor.  (The margin of error in the case of such a talking mummy was, of course, enormous.)  "There is little that I can guarantee about her once she is buttoned up and launched.  I can't even say for certain that she will be good, for example, or bad; only that she is more likely to be clever than stupid."  So we struggled on down the avenues of shrouded elms, along the firebrakes which once we used to ride down, and over the frozen gudgeon.  Gradually the warmth came to our bodies despite wet boots and wetter trouser-bottoms.  Sometimes she looked at me for a moment without speaking.  So we passed the little crooked pub called The Faun which was locked and barred at this hour; a bedroom window glowed like a jewel.  Our boots rang musically on the frozen tarmac of the road as we traversed the hamlet.  Then from one of the dark barn-like houses we were surprised to see a deep red flame spring up, and spit out a great gush of brilliant sparks; it spurted and subsided, spurted and subsided, and we heard the massy ring the blacksmith's hammer on the anvil, and the wheeze of his bellows.  In the shadow of the smithy, bobbing his shadow about on the roof, moved the huge creature, stripped to the waist and sweating profusely.  We stood to watch him for a moment but he worked on methodically without giving us a glance.  Perhaps he did not even know we were there.

      On we went, up into the white night, and it was only when we reached the old crown of Chorley with the famous "view" from its summit that Benedicta said: "By the way, I meant to tell you before I have completely surrendered, made away, all my share in the firm.  I now own nothing but what I stand up in, so to speak.  I am a public charge.  All that stands between me and starvation is your salary.  Do you mind?"

      We stood up there gazing at each other smiling - like a couple of explorers on an ice floe, oblivious of everything but the extraordinary pleasure we were deriving from the new sensation of harmony, of comprehension and trust.  "How marvellous" I said.  "Is that what Julian meant about you having betrayed him?"  Benedicta nodded: "Only partly, though.  He was also thinking of the young German Baron; I was supposed to make him sign on the firm's strength, but I did the opposite and the firm didn't get him.  It was the first time I had deliberately set my face against Julian - he didn't like it; but so long as he needs you he can do nothing."

*    *    *    *    *

"O!  O!  O!"  Marchant was humming under his breath as he worked on Iolanthe.  "You great big beautiful doll!  I'm so very glad I found you.  Let me get my arms around you."  A low current was discharging itself through her throat and she stirred slightly in her sleep, turning her head from side to side, then yawning and smiling.  Marchant still adhered to his superstitious convention of keeping her covered while she was in pieces; so that we were working of different sections at the same time.  We would see her whole, so to speak, only when she came to be launched; by that decisive stage it would be hard to make rectifications without totally dismantling the power box with all its hair-fine infratopes - it would be as if we were forced to begin again at the beginning.  God knows how long she had cost already, probably years of amazingly detailed work.  I had a great reunion with Said, who was very smart in hefty British tweeds and who had assumed the habits and the dignity of the uniform with his usual equanimity.  It was good to feel that all that infinite patience and delicacy was really making its mark on a world which could reward him as I had never been able to when I began work with him in the Greek capital.

      "Now" said Marchant "try her for kisses, Felix, just in case she ever needs one, or feels that way.  Eh?"  He gave her a scientific kiss on the lips and pronounced himself satisfied by their marvellous springiness, better than the real thing.  "And the mucus imitation is wonderful - like fresh dew.  And look!"  Iolanthe sighed and pouted like a child in her sleep, seeking another kiss.  Adorable!  "Your turn" he said, so I tried her out.  "I say, this is wildly exciting" I said.  "It's so damned ... well!"  Marchant burst out laughing.  "Art imitating nature" he said.  "But what about this? - come over here.  I just geared up Adam's penis yesterday for a simulated orgasm.  Man, it's perfect.  Shades of my prep school!"  On another table he uncovered, with a proprietorial air, the thigh and pelvis arrangement of the male dummy.  "Now watch" he said and began to rub the penis, which rose strongly, darkening as it became tumescent, to discharge its mock-semen.  "Talk about Ejax" said Marchant in high delight, wiping his hands on a towel.  "Once again, it's a much heavier orgasm than Dad was ever able to manage.  We could perhaps rent him out, Felix, and make a little dough.  Why shouldn't somebody love him a little, bring a little light into his male life, eh?  He should have as much chance as you or I?"  Gutta-percha, plastic, rubber, nylon....

      "And to have done away with these two time-wasting and boring activities, eating and excreting, surely they will be grateful to us for having done it."  I scratched my head.  "Suppose she becomes too inhibited by half - I mean what does she do at mealtimes?"  Marchant replied tartly: "Exactly what any other actress does - takes out a cigarette and says, 'Darling, I think I'll just have a glass of water.'  She will go through all the motions without actually eating.  She is not forbidden tobacco, by the way.  My dear chap, she is fully fashioned this girl.  Easy to be with, easy to love...."  He was humming again, in high good humour.  What a strange thing the human body is - I was feeling that warm hand with its lazy fingers moving slightly under mine.  Strange foliage of toes and fingers, elaborate patterning of muscle, striped and streaky.

      So the great work moved slowly forward towards launching day; it was arranged that Iolanthe should imagine herself to be waking in hospital after an operation, recovering from the anaesthetic.  Once dressed she would be moved into a small villa which had been furnished for he with her own possessions - Julian had acquired them all, furs, and ballgowns, and shoes and wigs.  In other words, to give her reaction-index and memory a chance to function normally, we would provide ideal test-conditions in ideal surroundings.  All around her would be the familiar furniture of her "real" life - her books and folios of film photos, her cherished watercolours by famous artists (careful investment: all film stars buy Braque).... There would, then, on the purely superficial plane, be very little to distinguish between Iolanthe dead and Iolanthe living.  Except of course.... The dummy would be living the "real" life of the screen goddess.

      But if we were working, so was Julian in his tortuous way; he had returned from his gambling bender both poorer and richer - for the fever had left him abruptly as it so often did for months at a time.  It was like an underground river this illness, appearing and disappearing, now above ground now below - never constant.  But he spent long evenings now in the little projection theatre he had built for himself, playing through the films of Iolanthe in a quiet deliberate muse; beside him sat Rackstraw mumbling and nodding with flickering attention, and on the other side the strange graven image which was Mrs. Henniker.  There they sat, the three of them, fixed by the silver dazzle into silhouettes of hungry attention.  Mrs. Henniker was going to take up her old post as companion-secretary to Iolanthe as soon as she "awoke".  As for Rackstraw, there was little enough to be squeezed out of him.  At times he seemed to have glimmers of recognition, but then his attention would slip, and he would mumble incoherently before subsiding into sleep, the softly nodding drowse of old age.  Yet in some way, and for some particular purpose, Julian held this little group together for a whole winter - though really I could not understand for what reason.  At least, Henniker had a role to play, but what about Rackstraw?  Julian must clearly have had something fairly clear in mind which prompted these sudden periods of self-dedication to what might have seemed a futile activity. There was also in the case of Julian a curious intermittent play, an alternating current, so to say, between intellectual boldness and cowardice.  Perhaps the word is too strong - but when you think that the Iolanthe we were building was his particular obsession: why did he never come and see her?  He used on the contrary to ring up Marchant and myself and discuss the various stages of our work with a kind of voluptuary's nostalgia.  But when I said: "Why not come and see tomorrow what you think of her?" he replied at once: "No, Felix.  Not until she is word-perfect, until she is complete."  I sensed a tremor of something like fear in the words; but of course it was always accompanied by that wonderful self-deprecating charm.  "You see I have never met her, I shall have to be introduced."

      As for Io, she was getting so real as almost to be a pet.  Machinery has this peculiar tug on the crude affections of the human race; why else do men christen their cars and sailing-boats?  I must confess that the first time we hooked up the memory-reproduction complex I had the most extraordinary thrill, almost sexual, in hearing that marvellous rather husky voice saying (as if she had a hangover): "And I told Henniker it wouldn't do, it simply wouldn't do; Felix, love is all in compartments, otherwise it wouldn't be a universal disease.  It's silly that we only have one word for it.  And the ones we have are very inadequate to deal with its variety - like esteem, affection, tenderness, sympathy.  It isn't classified as yet in any language."  I sat down with a bump on my chair and Marchant thrust a glistening sweaty face up against mine, exulting: "Do you think one could improve on her?  Now tell me honestly."  I could only shake my head wonderingly.  It really was quite devastating the extent of the dummy's habituation to the ordinary terms of what we might call the human condition - if you can just simply imagine an object called "self" operating with a frame of memory, habit, impulse, inhibition and so on.  It looked as if in another month or so she might be safely placed in the orbit of an ordinary life - held in harness as all of us are, purely by the routines of the daily round.  Feeding on the rarefied air of inner space, correcting by willpower the gravitational pull of the passions - which to so many modern scientists seem little better than a bundle of assorted death-wishes.  But of course inevitably the unlegislated-for quality made its appearance - for an example, we hadn't really thought of "charm" as an ingredient when we specified her; but her charm was devastating - and surely it is the one thing you would expect her makers to remember from the original actress?  So that, on the one hand, while we really knew all about her, she continued to surprise us during the long period which passed between her being in pieces, and being united.  The day I mean when she woke up completely, yawned, knuckled her eyes and said: "Where am I?  What time is it?"  And then as she gradually took in her surroundings and the men in white coats around her, added: "Is it all right - that old appendix?"

      At the moment she was still a set of intermittent responses; her eyes were in, but had to be left a week or more to "set" properly so that she might use them.  So that she still slept all day, and still kept her eyes closed when she spoke, the sound welling sleepily out of that beautifully formed humorous mouth.  We have even forgotten (how is this possible: please tell me?), we had forgotten that she would know all about us, even our names.  Or let me put it this way: we knew with one part of our minds, but not with such conviction that it didn't give us a tremendous start to hear her use them.  It was even stranger when, fetching back a memory from the very beginning of our Athens days, she spoke to me in Greek.  "They say I shall never have a child, but I am glad.  Would you like to have a child, Felix?"  And it was here that my memory was faulty while her artificial one worked perfectly; I had forgotten what my answer was on that particular occasion.  She was full of small surprises like these.  But we still had to select a date for an awakening.