IV

Perhaps the most cogent reason for our habit of walking down the corridor into the embalming studio was that we wished to compare what we were building with what they were preserving with such care.  There was not much trade in their business - somehow embalming had not really caught on, even among publishers.  Nevertheless that mere trickle of corpses provided Cyrus P. Goytz with a theatre of operations in which he could train staff.  He was an endearing man with a face like a spade and a swarthy skin which occasionally flushed in a dull way when a pupil made a mistake.  He was clad in black to lecture, which he did with his hands clasped in front of his stomach.  A big smooth minatory-looking man, dressed in such heavy materials that he looked not unlike one of his own products - drained of all blood, like a kosher dish, and not as if he had just been warmly sacrificed on the altars of gluttony.  He wore a very obviously short-cut wig which gave his face a curious expression of transience - again like his subjects, who apparently began to melt after about a month.  But he was a pet Goytz, the soul of patience, and (so they said) the best embalmer in the universe.  On New Year's Eve, at staff parties, he had been known to take out a glass eye and show it to everyone on the palm of his hand.  In the evenings he played the violin to timid little Mrs. Goytz (who looked like a taxidermic waterfowl) in a semi-detached at Sidcup.  He was spearheading the firm's embalming attack on the Middle East.

      But this was not all; it was really his homely philosophy which gave us so much pleasure; he was so full of a benign desire to spread light and goodwill, dispel the clouds of gloom - or whatever misgivings his students might have about an avocation so, well ... unusual.  "Contrary to what many might assume," he might say, taking up his penguin-like stance with hands joined in front "a corpse can prove a friendly, even a companionable thing - while it is relatively fresh, I mean."  This sort of thing Marchant used to treasure, and whisper it into Iolanthe's ear as we knelt beside her, working on the eyes.  The embalmers, by the way, worked to music - mostly the strains of In a Monastery Garden played in a reverent sort of way by a Palm Court Orchestra.  Goytz kept it low so that the sound of his voice was not drowned as he instructed his students in the use of the trocar or the siphon pump which drained the bodies on the slabs.  He was such a kindly man that he could even pretend to take a mild teasing from Marchant - as when the latter suggested that the appropriate motto for his little parlour should be "The More the Messier or the Nausea the Better".

      His specimens, though, had rather a different feeling about them; they were vulnerable, you see, the decay could be contained but only for a while.  They had not that noble abstract quality of Iolanthe, lying there asleep under her silk sheet.  You could smash her, but she wouldn't rot away, or melt under the coating of resin poured over her in a coffin - I am thinking of Egyptian kings and queens.  All this of course Goytz knew and perhaps at times he smelt a little condescension in our tones, in our way of questioning him about our work which might have seemed barbed - as when he said: "And when she wakes up and asks you imploringly: 'Is there any hope for a little happiness for me?' what will you reply?"  Marchant chuckled.  "Nothing, of course; for she knows the answer, just like every human being knows the answer to the questions he or she poses.  The question contains the answer in capsule form."

      Mr. Goytz smiled briefly and said: "You see I have no such problem with my children; they have entered into the Great Silence, borne on the wings of their nearest and dearest.  For theme there are no problems.  But for us, of course, they are numerous; we must dress them as if for a fancy-dress ball.  And darned quick.  Come in by the way, we have a few most unusual specimens this week."  He turned on his heel and led us through a curtain into the main studio where three or four corpses were laid out on trestles - the "cooling-boards" where they are trimmed and coiffed before the make-up goes on.  And but one were covered, or half covered, in sheets so that there was a superficial resemblance to the other studio across the way where we ourselves worked.  But the resemblance was a very superficial one; and ended when we saw the venous system  being pumped out into a bucket.  The pump hisses, the pink blood tinkled.  (Rather like having the oil changed on your car I suppose.)  A young man devoutly pumped and pumped.  The body was much mutilated by a street accident, and a second youth kept the wounds free with a sponge.  Goytz touched the cheeks with a quick white hand, as if to judge their springiness, and seemed satisfied with the rate of progress.  He consulted a watch.  "You got an hour I guess" he told his acolytes who did not so much as look up from their work.  They had expressionless faces and square Jewish heads.  Goytz inspected with some care the bucket which was half-full of the pumped blood of the subject and said, in his lecture-room voice: "One of the characteristic features of carbon monoxide poisoning is the bright cherry-red colour of the blood, and a greatly delayed coagulation time.  One must not, of course, confuse it with the similar blood-coloration in drowned subjects."

      So we moved from slab to slab while Goytz talked pleasantly and discursively about corpses and their habits, of the different ways of embalming them through the ages, of the methods used to secure anatomical subjects for study - and a hundred other fascinating sidelights on his art, which showed us plainly that we were in the presence of a master of the trade; but more, an enthusiast.  He knew all the names and dates of embalming history off by heart.  And he spoke of his own particular hero, William Hunter, the Scot, with a reverence that was almost tearful. "It was this great man" he said "who not only gave the world a method of embalming which advanced the whole technique a hundredfold, but also listed the chemicals he used in so doing.  He was the first to use the femoral artery as his point of penetration for his mixture of oil of turpentine, oil of lavender, rosemary and vermilion; this he allowed to diffuse through the body tissues for several hours before he started to open the cavities and remove the viscera for cleaning and soaking in essential oils and wines.  These were then of course replaced and covered with preservative powders like camphor and resin and magnesium sulphate as well as potassium compounds.  The powder was also packed tight in the cavities like mouth, nose, ears, anus; and finally the whole body was placed on a bed of plaster of Paris and allowed to remain there for about four years.  In this way he dehydrated the subject and prevented the decomposition which comes about with bacterial growth."  All this seemed to move Goytz very much.

      "And here" he said "is the Eastern Potentate who died of an embolism on his arrival in this country as an Ambassador to your Queen.  He is quite fresh and will come up very nicely indeed, yes very nicely indeed.  He will give them all a thrill by his naturalness back there in Abyssinia."

      The sheet turned back revealed a dark hairy man with enormous clenched hands which Goytz soothed out flat at once, tenderly elongating the crude fingers.  He was anxious that no trace of an apparent arthritis deformans should remain when he had completed what he was pleased to call his final "composition" of the subject.  I thought, as I saw him, how the fingers of our Io did not need to be kneaded into softness; her hand lay in yours like a snowflake of softness.  Goytz was forced to knead and rub at his subjects, to massage them, rub them down with rollers - all to squeeze the blood out of them before he could start work on the outside.  In this case the corpse was a huge dark simian brute of a man, part Negro, but whose face strongly suggested that of Jocas Pehlevi, the half-brother or whatever of Julian.  Something about the swarthiness contrasting with the bright blushing warmth of the skin in which the beard grew, black as the bristles of a wart-hog.  The same tips of gold in the teeth which were very slightly revealed by a retracted lip.  But of course no ear-ring.  The abundant hair and nails would outlast the great part of the final decay of this "potentate".  He was clad only in a blue underpant.  His toenails were huge, broken, and very dirty, as if he had always shovelled coal with them.  Goytz again gave the flesh of the corpse a quick almost affectionate run-over, patting it here and there with some of the complacence of a woman rubbing cold cream into her face.  In a sense I could see that his subjects had become a sort of extension of himself; it was his own flesh that he patted, smoothed, stroked, like some great painter his canvas.  "He'll be no trouble" he asserted.  "We shall compose him something lovely.  Eosin" he added somewhat cryptically.

      I remembered.  Of course: one of the interesting properties of eosin is its capacity to fluoresce when exposed to ultra-violet light; to some extent even in bright sunlight it can do the same.  But the best is when a shaded ultra-violet bulb is used - the so-called "black light".  It was the use of eosin which enabled Goytz to obtain what he called his "internal cosmetic effect"; his subjects looked lit from within, they glowed with an illusion of warmth and life.  We were also taking advantage of it, but our skins were finer, more supple, and at least a thousand times more durable than his.  But I could see his weakness for swarthy subjects because of this luminous dye which removed the residual greyness caused by the kosher treatment of the body, the draining out of its blood.  At points then our preoccupations chimed; at others they diverged.  For example he had always been far more preoccupied by the question of odour than we had been, though in an opposite sense: we had to invent smells which were indistinguishable from the real animal smells of the human body.  But he had had to disguise, first of all the smell of decay, and then the smells of all the powerful agents he was using in order to preserve the illusion of life, or the quasi-life of his subject; an abbreviated life in time?  No, but heavens!  Surely both were dead in the technical sense?  Well, Iolanthe was a little less dead because of a perfect memory which she could use: it was her radar.  So that dying ... was a case of loss of memory, both mental and physical?  "The first thing" said Goytz with the air of a hunter giving a colleague a tip "is to select your drainage points with the full knowledge that here and there you may discover a clot or other blockage to free movement which will have to be sucked out by the trocar syringe.  But it's not very hard.

      "The intercapillary pressure of the blood during life is very low, and movement of the blood itself can be accomplished only by the squeeze-action of the muscles against the veins.  This squeeze we imitate when it comes to voiding the body of blood.  But the first really important thing is to select your drainage points and then raise and open the veins you have chosen.  In them you place the largest possible drainage tube to facilitate the movement of the blood."  He illustrated this for us with the unerring skill of a seasoned darts player scoring an "outer".  The harmless simian arms of the "potentate" lay there; Goytz drew on rubber globes ("always guard against infection" he said under his breath) and made a couple of magisterial incisions on the inside of the forearm, some way below the elbow; then, with an experience obviously born of long practice, he took an elevator and raised a dark vein, passing the instrument through it, so that it was indeed raised above the surface and ready to be tapped.  This he repeated with a kindly absorption on the other arm, saying to Marchant in abstracted tones, "You see, all we know is thanks to the great anatomists; you may laugh, but Leonardo prepared specimens this way."  But something went wrong, the wounds began to bleed.  "It's nothing" he said.  "You will see."  He called over some students and with them proceeded to tug the arms of his subject above his head, pulling them as far as they would go, and in such a fashion as to squeeze the maximum amount of blood out of them; meanwhile the arms were being sponged from fingertip to shoulder by the students.  It was in a sense a kind of Japanese massage that the "potentate" was receiving.  "Poor drainage" said Goytz "has been universally recognised as the cause of embalming failure.  We use surface manipulation, vibration, even a roller-stretcher - anything to get the blood moving.  After all, in terms of quantity, you can calculate that there is about seven pounds of liquid blood per hundred of body-weight; now with the best will in the world and the most up-to-date equipment (taking one gallon of blood per one single hundred and fifty pound body) we should expect to remove perhaps one half of the total quantity, certainly not more: that is to say, two quarts of blood from this hundred and fifty pound fellow here."  He tapped the potentate lightly on the forehead, demonstrating with kindliness; now he was like some champion fisherman, standing beside a huge white shark almost taller than himself, and talking modesty about the means he had employed to take it.

      "But" he went on in cautionary vein "continuous and uncontrolled drainage is one of the common causes for the situation in which the body is firm and clear and, on the face of it, well preserved when embalmed ... yet" he raised a finger to the ceiling and paused dramatically "becomes soft and begins to decompose a few hours later.  That is the tragedy!  In other words, the embalmer's work is really an art based on a calculated judgement of a given situation.  Both under-embalming and over-embalming result from inaccurately judged drainage-control.  With over-embalming you get wrinkling, leatherising and dehydration in low-resistance areas; with under-embalming you risk premature decomposition in areas of high resistance.  Scylla and Charybdis, my friends, that is what you might call it!  Ah!"  He sighed again.

      When he was in this vein - which Marchant called his "Sermon on the Mount" vein - he was irresistible, and we did everything we could to encourage him to continue.  Indeed the subject was so dear to him that his features took on a rosy tinge, almost eosin-tinted with the enthusiasm he felt for "composing" his subjects.  But he was also a modest man and feared to bore a non-professional audience, and so from time to time he paused, smiled vaguely and self-deprecatingly round, and gave a little sigh of apology.  "Don't stop, man" said Marchant.  "This is fascinating; we are learning from you Goytz.  Don't stop now!"  The Complete Embalmer simpered and said: "Very well.  Let me then just run over the main points in regard to this Eastern Potentate.  I think we will have to consider some of the main factors of cavity-embalming with him - attacking the main points of putrefaction with a trocar."

      He snapped a finger and one of his acolytes held up for our inspection a heavy metal syringe with a sharp nozzle, looking for all the world like some article of gardening equipment; Goytz smiled.  "I know" he said.  "It has been often said.  Yet it is the most invaluable piece of embalming equipment there is."  (The sort of thing one sees old ladies using to spray soapy water on their roses.)  Goytz took it in a cherishing fashion and presented it at his subject in a manner obviously perfected by long practice.  "I will just outline what must be done!" he said.  "First we must penetrate at the intersection of the fifth intercostal space and the mid-axillary line; press down until with a slight puff you enter the stomach.  Next we must tackle the caecum which is slightly more complicated.  Direct the point one-fourth the distance from the right anterior-superior iliac spine to the public symphysis; a tiny bit tricky here, you must keep the point well up near the abdominal wall until within about four inches of the right anterior-superior iliac spine, then dip the point two inches and press softly forward and ... with a puff you are in the colon."  His smile was beatific, his audience rapt.  He paused to blow his nose in a tissue.

      "Now" he said "there remains the urinary bladder and, most difficult of all, the right atrium of the heart."  He issued his instruction for these two delicate operations with burning enthusiasm, though his voice was modulated and serene.  He took a pencil from one of his students and marked the places as he spoke on the skin of his subject.  The "potentate" said nothing, though he also appeared to be listening attentively to Goytz.  "Onwards until it touches the pubic bone; you will feel the slight jolt.  Withdraw about half an inch and dip the point slightly and you will find yourself in the bladder.  Now as for the atrium, the target is a small one; you must imagine a line drawn from the left anterior-superior iliac spine to the lobe of the right ear; keep your point firmly up against the anterior wall of the cavity until you pierce the diaphragm.  Then dip down and you are in the heart."  He sighed again and looked around him benignly, apologetically.

      "You see, Marchant" he went on.  "And you also have had to take such simple matters into consideration: the combined weight of the viscera in the average adult is around fifteen or twenty pounds, and since this material is so highly putrefactive a considerable amount of fluid is required to disinfect and preserve it.  We generally reckon upon between twenty-four and thirty-two ounces of concentrated cavity-fluid as a mean dose.  But of course cases vary.  Sometimes you get blow-back from intestinal gases, specially if the subject is not too fresh, or if it has succumbed to a disease which has filled a member with some putrefactive fluid.  But one can judge usually after a bit of experience."  At this moment the "potentate" gave out a noise, a strange rumbling of the stomach, for all the world as if he were hungry.  Goytz smiled and raised a finger, saying: "Hark at that!  The formation of gases.  You must learn how to interpret the sound."  There was a slight hiss from the anus of the "potentate", like the noise made by a torn balloon at an Xmas party.  "That is normal!" said Goytz.  "But if things have gone too far we are frequently obliged to make an incision and snip the gut here and there with scissors in order to avoid it.  It is a messy system and is better avoided if possible.  But in this craft one is always up against unknown factors like freshness or serious illness; and sometimes we have to take emergency steps and use aspiration to void the chief cavities.  A six-inch incision, for example, through the ventral wall, along the median lines of the abdomen between the umbilicus and xiphoid process of the sternum.... Then clip-clip and void by aspiration; then the viscera are quickly covered with fluid, embalming powder or hardening compound.  But of course the trouble with the holes you make is that they have to be sealed.  Yet here we may take courage; to stitch up an embalming subject is less delicate than the stitching up of somebody alive who has been operated on.  A simple sailmaker's stitch will draw the lips together; and then you may coat it with a wax sealer as a final operation."  He paused in order to give emphasis to what must have been a staple lecture-room joke.  Then he said benignly, "Your body is as good as new."  There was a slight ripple of sycophantic laughter from his little group.  One of them made an involuntary gesture of the hands as if he were about to applaud, as one does at the end of a concert.  Goytz nodded his thanks at the youth and went on to demonstrate the various types of suture he would use according to nature and size of the incisions made.  It was of course fascinating for Marchant, who had been laying life-lines so to speak, made of almost invisible threat, through the photoelectric body of Iolanthe.  How crude, compared with our work, it all seemed.  Nevertheless there was an affinity of attitude.  It lay in our attitude to Beauty!

      There was a long pause for breath, during which Goytz paused, as if hovering on the edge of a final peroration: but in fact he was drawing strength to deal with the trickiest part of his art, gazing down with quiet attention at the face of the "potentate".  He placed a finger reflectively on the mouth of the personage and gently eased the lip back to reveal a white wolf's tooth before replacing it with care.  Then he turned back to us and continued.

      "Now the great painter Sargent once said that the hardest thing to get right in portraiture was the mouth of his sitters.  One would have thought that it was the eyes, which are so mobile and so full of variety and expression.  But in fact he was right.  The position of the mouth is absolutely the thing which must be right or else the whole expression goes wrong.  The eyes may smile, the eyes may blaze, but if the mouth is wrong, everything is wrong, and your subject will instantly be criticised by his beloved ones as unnatural.  Now if  this was true for one of the greatest portraitists the world has ever known it is much truer still for the embalmer.

      "The mouth position is the most delicate of all, and is also the weakest part of the physical structure - for in death the jaw often falls, the musculature tenses or yields, the lips shrink.  Here some swift action has to be taken.  We must rub in our embalming cream and massage well before proceeding to the 'set' of the mouth.  But in very many cases one has to do what we have called an 'invisible mend'; technically speaking there are two sutures of great importance, that of the musculature and that of the mandible itself.  The first is really a septum suture.  A full curved needle is passed through the muscle tissue at the base of the lower gum, at the septum.  The needle is kept as close to the jawbone as possible and the stitch should be quite wide.  The needle is then directed upward between the upper lip and gum and brought out through the left nostril.  It is then pushed through the septum of the nose into the right nostril and back down between the upper lip and gum.  The loose ends are then softly pulled together to coax the jaw into position.  When the operator stands at the head of the table he can hold the mandible in position with the little finger and tie the knot with the remaining fingers.  But a bow knot is advisable here, as it leaves a little play for any future adjustments one might be called upon to make.

      "Of course in this domain, too, the rule of chance obtains, and very small factors play a large role; dentures, for example, or heavily retracted gums which death will shrink out of shape all too quickly; decomposition, ulceration ... many imponderables with which only the skilled embalmer can cope and still remain true to his vision of reality - if I may be so bold as to call it that, for he tries to get as near to life as possible.  He is an artist trying to reform the effects of death in a subject, particularly those of the rigor mortis and associated conditions.  But sometimes too, in subjects which have suffered a long illness, his kind of beauty treatment is up against many of the problems faced by beauticians who have to compensate for a lifetime of sadness or selfishness or stupidity showing upon the faces of their patients.

      "I'm thinking, for example, of the facies hippocratica, so called because first described by the greatest little doctor of All Time, Hippocrates.  All literatures both before and after have drawn attention to the fact that the faces of those about to pass on tend to have a sort of stamp of death about them.  Of course it is almost infinitely variably according to the causes of the death, but sufficiently consistent to have been noted down.  It is not just folklore, my friends, though each embalmer may cite you different characteristics of the condition.  I myself would cite a sharp pinched quality of the nostrils, and a general semblance of skin-shrinkage around the temples.  But of course each case is modified by circumstances; those who die in peace will not show the same signs as those who die in high emotion, shrieking, or suicides who have blown their brains out.  It takes all kinds to make a world."

      He smiled round at us in kindly and abstracted fashion, and then turned back to reflect upon the problems which his "potentate" would pose to the class.  "In his case," he said "we can congratulate ourselves on his freshness but on little else - for there is a problem or two connected with his mouth.  I have asked for some photographs of him in life.  His lower jaw must have protruded a good deal and I think we will have to consider a mandible suture - inserting the needle straight down between the lower lip and gum and bringing it out at the point of the chin; then reinserting the needle into the same hole but pushing it upwards behind the mandible, in order to bring it through the floor of the mouth just beneath the tip of the tongue.  The actual decision of course depends on our documentation.

      "By that," he went on "I mean that if he has no friends and relations to mourn him here and to complain about the likeness; if he simply has to be casketed and package-shipped to Abyssinia: why then I might in the interest of pure speed resort to a more primitive method known as 'tack-and-thread'.  This is much swifter.  You take a long slim carpet-tack and a tack-hammer such as picture-framers use; you drive the tack into the mandible, between the roots of the teeth.  Then you drive a second into the maxilla.  Then a strong piece of cord attached to the two tacks will draw the mandible into position and hold it.  But the method is not foolproof, and often not professionally attractive.  On the other hand I have to take into consideration other factors.  For example, his own folks back home may want him gilded from head to foot, not just painted like a photographic likeness hand-tinted by however expert a hand.  We must first secure the cavities while we are waiting for a word from his Embassy."  He smiled, pulling off his gloves, and prepared the air for yet another lecture-room jest.  "You see," he said "often the dead are just as choosy as the living."  This too was acknowledged with rapturous respect.

      "And now it's past my work time" said Goytz.  "So I will invite you into my study for a cup of tea."  He led us as he always did into his smart white office, the walls of which were covered with charts and graphs showing the progress of the embalming campaign.  There were advertising leaflets everywhere.  A trolley with freshly made tea on it stood by the desk, and this he dispensed with care.  "At the moment it may seem very slack," he said "but the build-up is impressive.  I reckon within ten years everyone in this country will have taken to the idea of embalming; already the advance sales to the young with our special bonus have soared into millions.  It's become a bit of a fad, if you like, specially since that pop group launched that song 'My mummy is a mummy', but nevertheless the advances have been paid for on these policies, and they will have to be honoured.  There is no time to be lost.  We shall soon need hundreds of embalmers working through the length and breadth of the land.  I have warned Julian that a special effort will be needed.  Of course in my case I am concentrating on Turkey and the Middle East where totally different methods both publicitywise and sciencewise will be necessary; we can do a cheaper job, use cheaper fluids and cruder methods.  More bright colours and less representational art if you follow.

      "But that too is virtually pre-sold, thanks to the brilliant campaign that the firm organised with the clergy.  We offered free embalming to the Byzantine church, and after our second Greek Archbishop there was a stampede.  The lying-in-state of the Archbishop of Belgrade was for the first time prolonged for weeks thanks to our up-to-date methods.  Normally in those lands of the Noonday Sun the decomposition sets in all too swiftly and after three days or less even ... why you can't get near enough to show your reverence.  Then came the Catholics; they don't like to be left behind, and they smelt the political power behind the drive.  At once they issued a special Bull authorising the embalming of everyone.  It averted dangerous riots.  But the last and most positive victory of all was over the Communists when we pointed out that Lenin had used our own patented cavity-fluid!  Fancy!  After the first suspicious hesitation Toto the dictator of Bulgaria signed a full policy, and he is next on our list.

      "So you see by the time I send our four or five fully trained embalmers to the Middle East we shall have captured the whole market to a point where it only remains to sweep up Mecca and we're home.  Then ... gazing even further away to the Lands of the Lotus we might envisage Persia and India playing their little part...."  Goytz was in a sort of dream as he sipped his tea and waved vaguely at these vast horizons.  Marchant rubbed his hands in high delight.  "Yes," he said "you are right.  Nothing will stop the march of science."  And he gave forth a characteristic titter; Goytz, still in his creative muse, smiled upon us from behind his desk.  "How long," he said "before the reign of Real Beauty begins?"  This was rather a harpoon for Marchant who put on a somewhat schoolmistress' expression and said with a touch of tartness, "Our own Iolanthe won't be long now, Goytz.  Another month or two at the most."  The embalmer raised a hand in kindly benediction, and then a faint cloud passed over his serene countenance.  "For me" he said "the only trouble is that Julian's brother is not pulling his weight; something is wrong.  He is ill perhaps.  But at any rate he has disappointed us rather, because he won't play any part in our scheme, or so it appears.  And Julian is vexed with him.  That's all I know of the matter."  Suddenly I recalled with a start Julian saying something about Caradoc building Jocas a tomb ... when was it?  But the tea party went on with decorum until the duty cars arrived and we all went home for the night.  Goytz shook hands with both of us and charitably invited us to come back whenever we wished.

      That evening I was sitting by the fire reading a book when the telephone rang and the quiet voice of Julian sounded - a voice which was perhaps just a shade less languid than usual, yet nevertheless controlled and modulated.  He was phoning from Paris, he said, and added: "And particularly to thank you my dear Felix, for thinking up so charming a gesture; you will have guessed how much it meant to me to hear her voice...."

      "Whose voice?"

      "Why Iolanthe's" he said in a puzzled tone.  "It was only a few words, of course.  But what a thrill for me after so long.  Thank you."

      "But wait," I said.  "She couldn't possibly have talked to you Julian; the magazines aren't dated and placed yet.  She is still asleep, my dear.  Yes, she can say a few words all right but she couldn't get up or lift the phone as yet.  Has Marchant being playing you some recorded stuff to try it out?  I wonder."

      "I assure you," he said, almost pleading "there was no mistake.  She said: 'We have never met, have we Julian?  It is as if I had missed a vital part of my real life.'"  His voice shook a little.  "Then she went on: 'Now the doctors will remedy that together with a lot of other things, and when I am well I will ask you to come to me.'  It was terrifying in a way, but so very real...."

      I was on my feet by now, full of a very real perplexity.  "I'll check back," I said "and let you know."

      The thing was how, and in which order?  I rang Marchant and cleared him from suspicion.  He was as mystified as I was.  Then, on a sudden impulse, I phoned to the studio itself - though on the face of it this was an absurd thing to do; for I myself had locked up that evening after drawing the covers carefully over Iolanthe.  And here was a funny thing.  The phone returned an engaged signal, which clearly showed that the receiver was at least off.  I listened to the monotonous bleating tone and my thoughts began to race.  And then, even as I listened, there came the decisive click and silence which could come only from the replacing of the receiver.  Click, followed by the engaged tone again.

      "Now what the devil?" I said.  Benedicta looked up to see me rushing myself into an overcoat and scarf.  "I must just go to the studio and check" I said.  "Come with me, only hurry, darling; you can drive me if you wish."

*    *    *    *    *

Light powdery snow drifted across our headlights, a shadowy distracted moon wandered in the sky; B. drove at full tilt, a cigarette burning between her lips.  The car had been well christened when the makers chose the name "Spear" for it.  I chewed the inside of my lips, chewed my ragged thoughts.  I felt an extraordinary despondency arise in me.  It was too early for things to start going wrong, before we had even got our model on to its feet.  It was partly fear, I think, of finding some mechanical defect in our dolly which might cost us months' more intricate work - but also: fear of an unknown factor which hinted crudely at a sort of physical autonomy for which we had not yet made room in our minds.  How free was the final Iolanthe to be?  Freer than a chimp, one supposes ... yes, infinitely; but free enough to pick up a phone and charm Julian?  "You are looking scared" said Benedicta quietly.  "Is it my driving?  I'll slow down."  I shook my head.  "No.  No.  I was debating a little matter of freewill, of conditioned reflexes.... Drive faster in fact.  Much faster.  One is only scared when something happens which one can't explain to oneself.  She could not, for example, have done what Julian says she did, namely, lift the telephone and talk to him.  At this stage, at any rate."

      "I'm dying to see this dummy."

      "You have been very patient, Benedicta; why you have never even asked me,  darling.  Of course you shall.  Now."

      "I knew my voice would shake with jealous rage and you would suddenly look at me in astonished fashion.  To be deprived of the female right to be jealous by the logic of things - that is the unkindest thing that could happen to a woman."  She laughed.

      "Are we jealous of Iolanthe, then?" I said.

      Some hefty branches torn from a tree by the wind lay astride the main road and we swerved to a halt, nonplussed for a moment, for there seemed no alternative way forward.  Fortunately the wood was not quite so heavy as it looked and I was able to shift it enough to clear a fairway for the car.  Panting, I sat back at last beside her, revelling in the warm gushes of air from the heater as we raced on again towards our destination.  "Who could have done it then?" she asked.  "Could he have imagined it in his sleep?"  There was nothing to be said as yet, until I had seen Iolanthe with my own eyes.  Of course when she woke such an act would be part of her enormous repertoire of "autonomous" acts.  Ring anyone up and say anything, in fact.  "Did you say she could not eat or excrete?"  I placed another lighted cigarette between her teeth and explained.  "She won't know it.  We built her the reflex movement and the functional pattern which go with them; only she doesn't have to trundle a disagreeable bundle of faecal matter around with her.  She will feel the same punctual need as you do, and like you will sit down on the bidet and run the taps.  But unlike you she only imagines the act of defecation, though she has all the same enjoyment - why she even gives the little shudder that we men find so endearing.  But she is full of labour-saving devices like that.  O God, Benedicta, she is marvellous; you will have quite a surprise, truthfully you will.  Maybe feel a little scared as well - I confess that at first blush I was quite taken aback, awed."

      We swerved at long last into the driveway to find the whole complex of buildings in darkness, which of course was what we would have expected.  There was a bright green light in the lodge which housed the two security guards whose duty it was to make two late night patrols through the studios and labs.  The tagged keys to our studio hung on a nail behind the grizzled head of Naysmith who lumbered to his flat marine's feet to welcome me.  "Is there anything wrong?" he asked catching, I suppose, a touch of urgency from the expression on my face.  "Not exactly.  It may be me.  But I thought I'd come back and check over my section.  There's a little matter of a phone-call I have not cleared up as yet.  By the way, Naysmith, come with me and bring some fingerprint stuff would you?  I'd like to see if our inside phone has any prints on it.  The last lot should be mine or Marchant's."

      Benedicta was waiting for us in her lamb furred overcoat and boots; and together we cut across the main pathways and walked the hundred yards or so towards the studios.  We entered, turning up the white lights of the theatre of operations as we advanced; I was relieved to find everything as I had left it.  Though why I should have imagined or looked for a hypothetical disorder I know not.  "That phone over there, Naysmith.  Give it the gold dust treatment will you and see what you find?"  Obediently the security man dusted his goldish powder over the instrument, puffing it softly from an atomiser.  Then he took out a large magnifying glass from his professional kit and ran it over the suspect instrument, grunting as he did so.  "There's nothing at all on the damn thing" he said at last, stretching his back straight with relief and turning to me in a mild perplexity.  "It's been wiped clear by someone."  For a moment this too seemed strange, but then I was determined not to invent mysteries where none existed.  The air was kept at a specially moist heat to be kind to Iolanthe's skin, which had been woven from pure Mel, a derivative of nylon.  I explained briefly to Naysmith and he seemed satisfied enough with this explanation as indeed I was myself.  I could think of no other; an invisible skin of moisture particles formed upon the bakelite receiver and washed out any fingerprints.  And Iolanthe?  Well, she had not moved at all under her sheet; poor dear, she was still in pieces though nearing the final joining together.  There was quite a lot of juice roaming about inside her because we had plugged her in to a low-power induction current to keep her body at a satisfactory temperature.  And it was this factor which suddenly presented me with a solution - or the sketch of one.  Benedicta stood at the door, looking very pale and extraordinarily youthful all of a sudden.  She was afraid of what lay beneath the sheet!  I didn't want to unveil the head until Naysmith had taken himself off - a twinge of proprietorial jealousy I suppose?  But this the good man did in a few moments and now was my chance to show off my beauty to Benedicta.  I took her cold hand in mine and together we crossed the room to the operating table.

      "I mustn't forget to show you the weaver team that made the skin for her; you'd think you were in a Japanese watercolour in their studio - finer than the petals of any flower you might conceive."  I turned back the sheet and we gazed down upon the still serene features of the screen goddess.  I could feel that she was terrified, Benedicta.  And when, at this juncture, the telephone suddenly shrilled we both nearly jumped out of our skins and into each other's arms.  I picked it up with trembling fingers and was relieved to find that it was only Marchant.  "I've thought of an explanation" said he.  "She's still on the feeder isn't she?  Well there's a fairly big build-up of juice, enough to enable her to pass a thought or a phrase along a wire without using the phone.  It doesn't sound very plausible, but I think that must be it."

      "It will have to be" I said.  "There isn't any other solution."  Marchant sucked his teeth cheerfully and went on.  "If you switch on and pin her on to feedback she might even answer the question herself."  But I wasn't keen to start fooling round at this time of night.  "It'll keep" I said.  "Until she walks in beauty like the night."  There was a gasp and stirring sound; I turned to see Benedicta gazing fixedly at the face which had suddenly altered its expression.  And then, even as we looked, the two sapphire bright eyes opened and gazed fixedly, unwinkingly at Benedicta.  B. moved back a few paces with obvious fear.  "It wants to speak" she whispered.  "Poor thing.  Poor thing."  She was about to faint but I caught her.  In the little lavatory next door she was violently sick.

      "Leave me a moment" she said, between spasms of nausea.  "She wants to tell you something.  Please go back."  But I waited until she could accompany me back; I wanted her to get over her shock and come to accept Iolanthe for what she was - a modest enough copy of reality, not a creation.  I hung about obstinately, not saying a word, until she shook herself at last and said: "There!  It's done with."  She washed her face and dried it on the little white napkin behind the door; then slipped her arm through mine.  "What an experience!"

      Iolanthe's head had hardly moved, but her features tenderly sketched in a shoal of transient feelings, impulses bathed in memory or desire, which flowed through the magazine of the coded mind on the wings of electricity.  For such low-voltage feeding it was remarkable to find her "live" at all.  Yet she was.  Her blue eyes gazed into the white glare of the theatre lamps with a sort of abstract curiosity; then, attracted perhaps by the glimpse of our shadows moving upon the general whiteness, lowered their gaze and came to rest at last, in troubled and loving confusion, upon my own face.  You could have sworn she recognised it - the little mischievous pucker of the mouth came, as if she were about to utter her sardonic greeting in Greek, "Xaire Felix mou".  And yet also timid, abashed, a gamine who fears she may be reproached.  But of course with a current so far below optimum the threads had got jumbled as they do in an ordinary delirium - in high fever for example - and what she said she uttered in the back of her throat and not too clearly at that.  The tone of course was low contralto, not very like her ordinary one because of the fallen levels.  "The deep inside wish to be level with the grave, Julian; you are worn out with the sin of wishing you had died in childbirth - how well we understand!  Now that I have come back from this great illness I shall bring you some comfort, you will see."

      "Christ!"  Benedicta vibrated with a mixture of fascination and horror.  "She's jumbling" I said; and I ran my hand softly and tenderly through the hair of Iolanthe in a gesture which I knew would elicit the response she must have so often made in life.  She arched her head slowly, flexing it on the lovely stem of her neck, and breathed in deeply, voluptuously; then she expelled her breath slowly, uxoriously through her mouth and gave me a sleepy smile.  "Kiss.  Kiss" she said.  "Felix."  And pursed her red smiling mouth for a kiss which I gave her while Benedicta looked on in a kind of scandalised amusement mixed with loathing.

      We kissed and she brushed my ear with her lips murmuring: "Precious.  But life could have been full of so much hope, only we're cripples, cripples.  I spoke to Julian."  Well, if there was enough juice for all this there might be enough for her to get back on to the mnemonic register without an additional charge, and actually answer a "real" question.  "How did you do it?" I asked.  She closed her eyes, appearing not to have heard, not to have understood; then she opened them again and the tiny dimple appeared in her cheek.  "The Arab doctor is kind; he got me Julian.  Just for a minute.  It's so tiring."  So that was the answer!  Said had obtained the call and placed the receiver to her ear and mouth.  Switched on the power.  Ah, my schizoid goddess, you are falling asleep again.  She couldn't help it; her long lashes declined softly and she subsided quietly once more into nescience pillowed on the sea-rhythms of the current.  Receding, receding into the tideless sleep of scientific time; her bloodstream was a wavelength only in her tissues, its force measured now upon a small dial with a face no larger than a lady's wristwatch.  A little nodding blue bulb of pilot-flame winked on all through the night.  Such silence and such beauty!

      "Well, we've solved the mystery" I said.  "Let's go home.  I am beginning to feel tired."

      "Kiss me just once" said Benedicta.  "I want to feel how it must have felt to her ... to it.  No, you don't kiss very well.  Inattentive.  Your mind's always elsewhere, you are woolgathering.  You should plunge it in like a spear."  But I was tucking back the white sheets round my dolly, drawing the transparent curtains once more.  It was very late, and for some reason I felt very excited and nervous - a relief-reaction I suppose to find everything as it should be.  Naysmith had left an evening paper and in this mood of slight disorientation, anxiety-powered I suppose, the most banal headlines took on a tinge of almost sinister ambiguity.  "Attendants steal fittings"  "Birds lodge in soil"  "Work-providers for landless".  Amen.  Amen.  I locked up with method, whistling under my breath.  Then with a sigh I clicked the studio door behind me.  "Now," I said, "when I tell you I am working late at the office, you'll know who I am kissing.  Would it be possible to become jealous of a model?  I suppose so; one can about a child or a dog, and in cases of great mental cruelty brought before the Californian courts you even find inanimate objects playing a perfectly satisfactory role.  A man who went to bed with his golf clubs for example.  Extreme mental cruelty.  Benedicta when you read cases like that and then think of me don't use bad language, will you promise?"  But Benedicta would not rise to my nervous banter; she remained pale and abstracted, her hand clasped hard in mine as we found our way across the grass to the asphalt carpark.  She sensed that it was mere diversionary babble, that all of a sudden this trifling incident had upset me, had made me feel hesitant, unsure of myself.  Yet I could not formulate any special reason why.  There was nothing really wrong, nothing at all.

      She drove slowly on the way back, and indeed took a longer way round, through Croley, Addhead and Byre, which must have added some forty miles on the clock.  I wondered why for a while.  Of course.  Then I remembered the road all but blocked with fallen branches.  I was glad anyway of the long detour; I always think better out of doors than in, and best of all when I am travelling as a passenger in a fast car.  But it was mighty late when at last we came back to the cottage, sharing the last puffs of the last cigarette.  It had stopped snowing.  A large limousine lay at the stile across the fields with its headlights blazing.  It was the office Rolls that Julian always used.  Indeed his chauffeur sat inside at the wheel.  We pulled in alongside him and he saluted when he recognised us.  "He is waiting up for you, sir.  Mr. Baynes let him in and made him a snack to eat.  I am to pick him up within the next hour or so, so I'm keeping the car warmed up to run him down to Southhampton."

      We docked the little Spear and cut a glittering path across the field to where the cottage stood, with its one warmly-lit window.  The latch was off the door and it opened with a slight touch to reveal a blazing fire and the figure of Julian sitting in a high-backed chair holding a dossier on his knee; the little silver pencil raised in his small neat hand was poised over some abstruse calculation.  He looked completely different once more - perhaps it was the clothes, for this time he was dressed in morning dress with a high stock, for all the world as if he had just come from a wedding or Ascot.  A grey topper and gloves lay in the window sill, together with a copy of the Finance World.  The man appeared to be eternally surprising, unpredictable.

      He had chosen, too, a highly dramatic point of vantage in the room - over against the old fireplace and directly under a brilliant lamp with a dull blood-coloured vellum shade.  The result was bright light upon the crown of his head and on his knee, but a subdued swarthy reflection upon the skin of his face making it seem deeply sunburnt.  With this great contrast of tone one could not but find his hair very white, or at least much whiter than usual.  Yet the warm tone shed by the vellum'd light gave him all the benefit of a whole skiwinter of snowburn.  "Ah," he said, and recrossed his legs in their polished shoes "I took the liberty of calling in on my way to Jamaica.  I hope it is all right?  Baynes has looked after me like a child."  He indicated with his chin a tray of sandwiches and some champagne in a pail.  But he did not stand up.  Benedicta slipped across the room to embrace him in perfunctory fashion while I busied myself in pulling off my stormcoat and slipping my feet back into my lined slippers.

      Baynes must long since have gone to bed; so while foraging for a cigarette I implored Benedicta to put some coffee on the hob.  "You were right, Julian" I said, and all of a sudden I recognised my own relief by the tone in which I uttered the words.  "But you gave me the devil of a start.  What you suggested was impossible at this stage without outside aid, and when I rang Marchant he swore that he hadn't taken a hand in it.  All kinds of gross scientific short-circuits flashed into my mind.  But of course we had both forgotten Said - he provided the number and arranged the call.  Phew!"  I sank down in front of the fire, and a silence fell - the deep rich silence of the countryside; I could feel him drinking it in with nostalgia, his head cocked like a gun-dog.  "How still it is here" he said, in a wondering sort of way.  "Somehow much stiller than the big house - there were always noises there.  It's the small rooms I expect."  Benedicta came with coffee on a tray; she had already changed into her pyjamas and combed out her hair.  We sat down before the fire, stirring it into flame, and pouring ourselves mugs of the steaming stuff.

      Julian stared hard into the fire over our shoulders.  He seemed very calm, very much at peace - and yet with the sort of peace which suggested the resignation of old age rather than the inner resolution of, say, conflicting anxieties.  "You said she would be ready next month, didn't you?  We must start of course insinuating her into our lives a little, no?  She is after all, from her own point of view, taking up a long life from the point at which she left it off.  Once wouldn't want her to have the cold comfort of being some scientific orphan."  I was very touched by a curious sort of plangency in his tone, rising and falling like the rosined note of a viol; it had an accent of rather naïf sympathy.  Even his face looked somehow juvenile and unlined in the firelight as he spoke.  "Wouldn't you say, I mean?" he ended a trifle lamely, but with the same unemphatic wistfulness which I found somehow touching.  "I only hope" I said "that you don't identify too closely with the model we've made, and mistake it for the actual subject!  It wouldn't be too difficult as a matter of fact - she's so damn true to life, if I may use such an expression.  Indeed Marchant and I have both found ourselves thinking of her as if she were real and not merely a man-made doll, however word-perfect."  He nodded once or twice as I spoke.  "I know," he said softly "I know."  And his lips moved as if he were whispering some sotto voce admonitions to his inner self.  I suddenly said impulsively: "Julian, how did it come to you to ... think of having her copied, made?"  He looked at me now with such a reproachful sadness, such a concentration of unanswering pain, that the superfluousness of my question became all too clear.  Damn!  "One does the obvious thing in given circumstances" he said at last.  "It never occurred to me that anything else was possible."  He was right.  What question was there to be answered which could not be so within the terms of the experience we had both undergone with Merlin's?  The apprenticeship I myself had served, for example.  No, the fantastic was also the real.  It was all as clear as daylight, as the saying goes.

      He lowered his head for a moment and hooded his dark eyes like some bird of prey, and watching him there in the reflection of the vellum shade I could not help reflecting that the whole power behind his mental drive, and indeed that for the firm itself (they had become co-equal) rested really upon impotence; the slowly spreading stain if a self-conscious ignominy, a shame, and all the spleen which flowed from it.  Nothing much more than that - as if that wasn't enough!  But it was something at least to be able to formulate it, to indicate the region in which it lay.  It threw into relief so much that I had wondered about, so much that I had been quite unable to explain to myself before.  Indeed the article of value about which we were all fighting, brandishing each his sterile and desexualised penis, was the eternal anal one - the big tepid biblical turd of our culture which lay under the vine-shoots of modern history, waiting to be.... ("The Moldavian penis is all back and no sides" writes Tinbergen, while Umlaut adds the rider, "And not seldom glazed like the common eggplant".  Where would we be without the studies of these northern savants?)  The enormous cupidity of impotence!

      "You have been lucky in a way," said Julian slowly while my attention had been wandering "in that you came to us fresh from the outside.  What you had to fight - or felt you had to fight - was something quite apart from yourself.  But if, as in my case, your adversary is more than half yourself...?  What then?  I found myself trying to do two different things at the same time which were mutually contradictory - trying to harness and direct the firm's drive, and at the same time to enlarge the limits of my own personal freedom within it.  I belonged to Merlin, you see; you never did.  And yet I feel a greater need for freedom than you ever could.  And then, other things which nail me down - family, race, environment ... all these things held me spellbound and still do.  Benedicta, don't cry."  Unaccountably Benedicta had given a brief sob before bowing her head upon her knees; but it was only the noise of a child troubled in sleep by some fugitive day-memory of a quarrel over a toy.

      "Her death halted Me" said Julian with a meek softness of tone which carried a sort of weird hidden intonation in it - the provisional hint perhaps of a madness which one had come increasingly to feel was no so far away?  No, this is too strong.  "This week" he went on wearily "has been a week of great misgivings, all due to Nash, who has suddenly appeared on the scene with all kinds of new questions to ask about her.  None of which I am able to answer, though I am quite as much up in the lingo, and anal-oral theology, as you are.  Nash, incidentally, wants to have her destroyed."

      "Destroyed!"

      "'She will do us no good' he says.  'Indeed she carries buried fatally in her construction the thumbprints - the Freudian thumbprints of her makers.'  So he says.  In other words, she can't as I suggested stand for an aesthetic object related to our culture because you have deprived her of the very organs upon which it is based.  I am repeating only what he said.  Where is the merde that sank a thousand ships?  That is what he asks.  In fact he has been trying in his clumsy way to analyse why I should have decided to have her created, and specially in the image of the only person...."  He broke off and stared into the fire, following with restless intentness the shifting flames as they patterned themselves upon the wall.  "They are satisfied with so little," he went on "these psychologists, and the most trifling analogy offers them an apparent explanation to something.  As when Nash analyses why I should choose her, above all women, as my prime symbol - the money goddess, the goddess of the many.  It smells too easy, doesn't it?  And analysis is often along a very shallow trench; it isn't very far down to the Palaeolithic levels either.  But on Nash plods, with his free association.  The screen itself is a sterile thing in essence - bed-sheet or winding-sheet, or both; but lightly dusted over with alchemical silver the better to capture the projected image so dear to the collective unconscious - the youthful mother-image with its incestuous emphasis.... On the one hand one would have the right to burst out laughing, no?  Yet on the other ... ah! Felix..

      "Yes, this week of misgiving has been chock full of questions about Iolanthe; it would have been better if you yourself had been there to answer them, however provisionally.  I tried my best to get Nash to see her as simply a small observation-post upon the field of automation - nothing much more.  But that does not quite satisfy him.  It was a mistake in the beginning to talk to him about culture or aesthetics - unconsciously we were all trying to disguise the base metal of our search in a number of pretty ways.  Yes.  to the psycho-analyst it is dirt.  By the way, have you ever seen a gold brick?  I happen to have one with me; I am taking if off to Jamaica.  Let me show you."

      It couldn't well have been more congruous the juxtaposition of tailcoat, top hat, and the small brown paper parcel which lay under them, tied up with string.  A middle-class enough looking parcel which he undid with an air of dogged, modest triumph and then set the little greenish loaf with its deeply indented seal squarely upon the carpet between us.  It sat there glinting saturninely in the firelight.

      Julian said: "Freud says that all happiness is the deferred fulfilment of a prehistoric wish, and then he adds: 'That is why wealth brings so little happiness; money is not an infantile wish.'"  He sat down, musing deeply for a moment; then he got down softly upon one knee and began to do up the little green loaf in its brown paper, tying the string carefully round it.  Having secured it he replaced it once more upon the window-sill, in the folds of his overcoat, under the topper.  "I have been studying the demonic of our capitalistic system through the eyes of Luther - a chastening experience in some ways.  He saw the final coming to power in this world of Satan as a capitalistic emblem.  For him the entire structure of the Kingdom of Satan is essentially capitalistic - we are the devil's own real property, he says: and his deepest condemnation of our system is in his phrase 'Money is the word of the Devil, through which he creates all things in exactly the way God once created the True Word.'  In his devastating theology capitalism manifests itself as the ape of God, the simia dei.  It is hard to look objectively at oneself in the shaving-mirror once one has adventured with this maniac through the 'Madensack' of the real shared world - this extended worm-bag of a place out of which squirm all our cultural and gnomic patterns, the stinking end-gut of a world whose convulsions are simply due to the putrefying explosions of faecal gas in the intestines of time."  He paused, musing and shaking his head.  "And then gold itself, as Spengler points out, is not really a colour, for colours are natural things.  No, that metallic greenish gleam is of a satanic unearthliness; yet it has an explicit mystical value in the iconography of our Churches."  He relit his cigar with a silver lighter.

      "And then from gold to money is only a very short jump, but a jump which spans the shallow trench of our whole culture and offers us some sort of rationale for the megalopolitan men we are and our ways; our ways!  For money is the beating heart of the New World, and the power of money to bear interest, its basic raison d'être, has created the big city around it.  Money is the dynamo, throwing out its waves of impulse in the interest principle.  And without this volatility principle of Satan's gold there would have been no cities.  The archaeologists will tell you that they have noted the completest rupture of the life-style of man once he had founded his first cities.  The intrusion of interest-bearing capital is the key to this almost total reorganisation of man, the transvaluation of all his rural values.  From the threshing-floor to the square of a cathedral city is but a small jump, but without interest-bearing capital it could never have been made.  The economy of the city is based wholly upon economic surplus - it is a settlement of men who for their sustenance depend on the production of agricultural labour which is not their own; it is the surplus produce of the country which constitutes the subsistence of the town.  But Nash will hasten to tell you that for the unconscious the sector of the surplus is also the sector of the sacred - hence the towering cathedral-city with its incrustation of precious gems and sculptures and rites; its whole economy becomes devoted to sacred ends.  It becomes the 'divine household', the house of God."

      He put back his head and gave a sudden short bark of a laugh, full of a sardonic sadness.  He looked so strange, Julian, bowed under the weight of these speculations; he looked at once ageless and very old.  "I've had difficulty in convincing Nash that our science is still so very backward that for comfort's sake we still feel the need to build ourselves working models of things - whether trains, turbines, or angels!  In aesthetics as against technics, of course, a whole new flock of ideas come chattering in like starlings.  We are at the very beginning of a phase - one can feel that; but one wishes that the bedrock were newer, fresher, contained fewer archaic features.  No?  The old death-figure is there side by side with creative Eros, longing to pull us back into the mire, to bury us in the stinking morasses of history where so many, innocent and guilty, have already foundered.  As far as Iolanthe is concerned I freely confess that I am at a disadvantage as compared with you; you knew her, you knew the original, you have something real to compare her with.  But I have only a set of data, like outworn microscope slides, with which to compare here; her films, her life - I have assembled the whole dossier.  But when I meet her it will be a momentously new experience - I feel so sure of that.  Yes."

      Suddenly he seemed to be almost pleading, like a schoolboy, his hands pressed between his knees, his eyes searching mine for a trace of reassurance.  I felt it was in some way unhealthy to become so intense about a dummy - the whole thing filled me with unease, though it would have been hard to explain to myself why.  Nothing could have been saner than his glance, nothing more unflinching than his grasp on language when it came to trying to disentangle all these interlocking concepts.  Julian sat for a long moment staring into the fire and then continued.  "I am probably ready for her in this new form.  I have always behaved as much like an immortal as I could - the negative capability, you might say, of deprivation.  Like a Jap prince or a Dalai Lama I have been forced to develop in captivity, all by myself.  But if I haven't been evil I have been a keen student of evil - in alchemical terms, if you like, I was prone to the white path by nature; but I trod the black in order to divine its secrets.  Some few I managed to appropriate for myself - but pitifully few.  I wanted like everyone else to assuage the aches and pains of humanity.  What an ambition."

      "I wonder, Julian" I said, gently caressing the nape of Benedicta's neck.  "I see you rather as enjoying it as pure experience, for its own pure sake."  He gave a soundless little chuckle and half admitted the truth of the charge.  "Perhaps.  But then that is the black path.  It admits of no compromise, one has to become it, to tread it; but there is no obligation to remain fixed there, like a joker in a pack.  One can extricate oneself - albeit after a long struggle against the prince of darkness, or whatever you might call the luciferian principle.  The struggle of course makes one unbelievably rich; if you keep your reason, you emerge from the encounter with a formidable body of psychic equipment at your disposal.  Not that that does much good to anyone in the long run...."  He yawned deftly, compactly, like a cat, before resuming.  "I must be on the high seas tomorrow.  Look, Felix, you do understand why I have been having these long sessions with Nash?  I wanted to plumb as far as possible the unconscious intentions behind my desire to make a neo-Aphrodite - one who cannot eat, excrete, or make love.  In terms of her own values - and I use the phrase because I know that you have endowed her with a built-in contemporary memory which can give an account of any contingency.  Total memory, seen of course from our own vantage point in time.  But suppose her to be free - suppose the world were in charge of a dozen models as perfect as she is - various other factors would obviously come into play.  What, for example, would be their attitude to money?  What sort of city could such creatures come to found and finally to symbolise?  Eh?  It's worth a thought.  Then, what would happiness represent for her since she is free from the whole Freudian weight of everything that makes us 'un'; could you arrange for her, ideally, to have the free play of a natural lubricity, an eroticised function which ideally need never rest?  No, because she isn't fertile - that's the answer isn't it?  And yet she is word-perfect, she walks in beauty like the night.  Felix ... could such a thing ... could Iolanthe in her dummy form love?  And what form would such an aberration take?  I suppose when we have Adam we will be able to see a little more clearly into this abyss.  I am so looking forward to seeing her, knowing her in natural surroundings - pardon the phrase.  This free woman, free from the suppurating weight of our human mother-fixation.  She can neither love nor hate.  What a marvellous consort she might make for someone.  Does she know good from evil?  There is no such question; does anyone?  We are impelled to act before we think.  No, let me finish....

      "Action, whatever they tell you, in almost every case precedes reflection; what we recognise as right and wrong action is almost always the fruit of a retrospective judgement.  God, what a host of ontological problems she could raise ... could she, for example, realise she is a dummy as much as, say, you realise that you are Felix?  We don't really know, do we, until we ask her?  And even then, one slip on the keyboard might give one totally unknown factors to consider.  At what point could she invent, could she be original, supposing she slipped among the mnemonic signatures?"

      He had begun to walk slowly up and down the room with a kind of burning, I could say "incandescent" concentration upon this conversation to which I myself did not wish to add a word.  I was an artificer, I was simply there to wait and see at which angle the thing went off; and then to correct its trajectory whenever possible like a good mathematical papa.  No, this isn't quite true; it would be truer to say that when one is dealing with inventions it is safer to go step by step, and not lose oneself among theoretical considerations before the actual model can start ticking over.

      "Julian" I said.  "Give yourself time; you will soon be able to call on her in her own snug villa, take tea with her, converse on any subject under the sun; listen to her as she plays jazz  to you, cherish her in every way.  We can promise you a degree of the real which you will find quite fascinating, quite disturbing.  I wouldn't myself have believed that our craftsmen at Merlin's could have been capable of such fine workmanship.  Indeed she's so damn near perfect that Marchant suggested that we built a small fleet of them - our 'love-machines' he called them; we could turn them out on the streets and live on their immoral earnings.  From the customer's point of view they would be virtually indistinguishable from the real article - better dressed and better bred, perhaps, that is all.  And from a legal point of view our position would be quite unassailable.  They would, after all, be dummies: nothing more."

      He smiled and shook his head: "I wish you wouldn't use that word" he said softly.  "It always suggests something old and primitive and creaking, studded with levers and buttons.  Not something sophisticated, something of our decade.  By the way, when she is launched will there be any way of controlling her?"  It was my turn to stretch my aching legs, and prop B.'s head with a pillow.  "That's the whole point, Julian.  Once launched there is no stop-go button or rewind or playback; she is as irrevocably launched as a baby when you hit it on the bottom and force it to utter the birth-cry.  I had to confer full human autonomy on Iolanthe, don't you see?  Otherwise our whole experiment would have been diminished; I could not have given her the mnemonic range if we had had to allow for cutting out the current every ten days, rewiring, recharging - as if she were a model train or yacht, run by remote control.  We simply leaped over all these considerations; and when she rises from her bed of sickness and roams abroad in the world there will be no calling her back!  We'll have to take her as she is, for better or for worse, in sickness or in health, in fair weather or foul.  But that is who you wanted her, isn't it?"

      "God, of course!" he cried softly but passionately.  "I wanted her absolute in every way."  I heard the words with a pang, so charged were they with love, with desolation, with hunger.  "She's breakable, of course, and ultimately wear-outable I suppose, but probably less than you or I.  She will outlive us all, I dare swear, if she isn't smashed or run over by a car.  The organisation is pretty delicate but the substitutes we've used for bone and cartilage and vein-paths is a hundred times more durable and dependable than what God gave us poor folk.  And of course she won't age, relatively speaking; her hair and skin will keep their gloss longer than yours or mine."

      Benedicta said suddenly, without opening her eyes, "Julian, I'm afraid of this thing."

      "Of course.  You must be" said Julian, his voice full of a vague reassurance.  "Nothing like it has ever been done."

      "What good can come of it?" said Benedicta.  "What will you do with her - she cannot breed, she's just a set of responses floating about like a box-kite, answering to every magnetic wind.  Will you just sit and watch her?"

      "In holy wonder," said Julian greedily "and with scientific care."

      "Benedicta, there hasn't ever been one" I said mildly.

      She lay there still, my wife, her head supported by the cushion, her eyes closed, but with an expression of intense concentration on her face - as if she were fighting off a painful migraine.

      "No" she said at last, almost below her breath, with a tone of firm decision.  "It won't do.  Something will certainly go wrong."

      Julian looked at his watch and whistled softly.  "My goodness it's getting late and I haven't yet come to the real subject of my visit to you two; of course I was worried about that phone-call but really there was something else on my mind.  It concerns my brother Jocas in Polis."

      "Jocas."

      The wind rose suddenly and skirled round the house.  I had not thought of Jocas for ages now; and the memory of him, and of Turkey, had faded like an old photograph.  Or perhaps it was simply that in this rain- and snow-swept countryside it was hard to evoke the bronze-stubbled headlands where the sturdy little countryman rode to his falcons, calling out in that high ululating muezzin's voice of his as he urged his favourite bird in to the stoop.  Jocas existed now like a sort of coloured illustration, an illuminated capital, say, in some yellow old Arabic text; yet he was after all in Merlin terms all of Africa, all of the Mediterranean.  "First of all Jocas believes he is dying, and perhaps he isn't wrong, although the information comes to him from his Armenian astrologer - a very acute man I must admit, who has seldom been at fault.  Well, anyway, there he is, for what it's worth.  He has several months ahead of him, he believes, in which to prepare himself, and is apparently doing it in customary Merlin style, in the high style, that is to say.  In my own case, this new turn of events has sort of blunted the edge of the lifetime of enmity I have borne him - I can confess it freely only now.  It had ebbed away now, the hate, leaving only respect and regret for the man."

      "Julian!" cried Benedicta sharply, opening her eyes and staring angrily at him.  "I don't like you in the mock-humble mood.  It is false.  You cannot stop being a demon now just because Jocas is dying, just because you will get your way at last.  You have been at each other's throats ever since you were born."

      Julian paled, his dark eyes flashed briefly like precious stones before hooding themselves once more under their heavy lids, to give his whole face an expression of massive and contemptuous repose - like an Inca mask, I thought.  He paused for a long moment and then went on in a quiet voice, ignoring her and addressing himself to me, as if he were seeking a sympathy or comprehension which I was more likely to accord him than she.  "I shall leave myself out of the picture, then, and simply sketch in the details of the matter for you, supposing that the business of his death is a fact, and actually takes place a few months from now.  It will raise of course the question of his replacement in the Eastern field; and I have no doubt, Felix, that the senior boardroom will be extremely keen to have you take over the responsibility from him.  It doesn't surprise you, does it?  Of course the decision is yours and hers, Benedicta's.  That is the first point."

      "My God" I said with a mixture of wonder and distaste, never having visualised myself as occupying any position of administrative power in this octopus of a firm.  "As I say," went on Julian, a trifle sardonically "all that is contingent upon the movement of a few planets across the natal chart of Jocas.  When and if it does happen you will have to think about it.  But for the moment all Jocas wants is to see you again; he wants you to visit him briefly.  I leave the question of timing to you.  Obviously you won't want to abandon our experiment before it is complete, I mean Iolanthe.  But once she breathes, once she walks, you might feel like taking Benedicta for a short visit to Turkey.  Or perhaps before.  It's how you feel."

      The thought itself was full of the meretricious dapple of unfamiliar sunlight - seen through the long grey corridors of an eternal English winter; one forgot the damp, one forgot the scorching winds on the uplands, the miasmic stenches of the great capital at evening.... No, all that remained was this travel-poster sunlight with its enticing glint.  Benedicta looked once more sunk in thought.  "The timing is up to you," said Julian again softly "but I shouldn't leave it too long.  As a matter of fact we are sending out a small party of people at the end of the month - we've chartered a plane.  You know some if not all of them: Caradoc, Vibart and Goytz, for example."

      "Caradoc!  Why?"

      "He's coming back to us again on the circular staircase.  Jocas has been on for some time about building himself, indeed all of us, a mausoleum - if that's the word.  He wants to unite the remains of my mother and ... father."  A funny little contortion travelled over his features as he uttered the word.  It was as if the word itself cost him something to bring out.  He repeated it in a whisper.  "My Father" as if to secure a firmer purchase on it; to possess it more thoroughly.  "I think perhaps Caradoc is the man to talk to him about it; I have no views one way or the other.  As far as parents are concerned I am hardly aware of having had any; my father was something quite different - he was simply Merlin.  I owe him everything good and bad that has happened to me in my life.  I am not a sentimentalist like Jocas - more particularly now he is growing old, and feeling, I suppose, his childishness.  Anyway, that is roughly the picture as he has sketched it for me.  O and by the way, according to the soothsayer I myself don't outlive him by very long.  As if I cared...."  His weariness, his sadness rang out clearly in the silence.  "When I was young, and could not sleep at night, Benedicta was sent to read or recite to me to calm my spirits.  I can still remember one of the poems you recited - perhaps you have forgotten?"  In his soft negligent tones, so fluent and at the same time so full of charm, he repeated the lines:

                               "Merlin, they say, an English prophet born,

                                 When he was young and govern'd by his mother,

                                 Took great delight to laugh such fools to scorn,

                                 As thought, by nature we might know a brother.

                                 His mother chid him oft, till on a day,

                                  They stood, and saw a corpse to burial carried,

                                  The father tears his beard, doth weep and prey;

                                  The mother was the woman he had married.

                                  Merlin laughs aloud instead of crying;

                                  His mother chides him for that childish fashion;

                                  Says, men must mourn the dead, themselves are  dying,

                                  Good manners doth make answer unto passion...."

      He hesitated for a moment, hunting in his memory for the next line; but Benedicta took up the strain and finished the poem in a voice which seemed charged with a queer mixture of pride and sorrow.

                                   "'This man no part hath in the child he sorrows,

                                     His father was the monk that sings before him:

                                    See then how nature of adoption borrows,

                                     Truth covets in me, that I should restore him.

                                    True fathers singing, supposed fathers crying,

                          I think make women laugh, that lie a-dying.' "

[Fulke Greville]    

      Julian smiled and said: "Thank you.  That's it.  And it's a fitting note on which to wish you an apologetic goodnight.  Felix, make your own decisions about Jocas.  I shall be away anyway if you decide to go now.  And another thing, could you give Rackstraw a glimpse of your handiwork - I fear he is really completely useless for my purposes, he's far too gone?  I would really like him out of the way before the others come into the picture.  And so good night to you.  My God, it's nearly morning."

      He had slipped into his coat and muffled himself up in his white scarf; the brown paper parcel with its trophy was tucked under his arm.  He hesitated at the door for a moment, as if he were hunting among all his available expressions for one which might seem perfectly suitable to this leavetaking.  "Don't worry" he said at last, lamely, to Benedicta, and to me, "Until very soon."

      Thus he outlined himself for a second upon the spectral snowscape and then was gone, softly closing the door behind him.  An effortless disappearance as always.

      There was a long silence; Benedicta stood drooping with fatigue and staring into the fire.  "He is no Greek" she said at last, grimly.  "Our Julian does not know the word hubris; he thinks you can give life as easily as you can take it - and you are following him blindly, perhaps into a trap, my poor foolish Felix."

      "Come" I said.  "He is transformed since we gave him back the hope of an Iolanthe.  He's a new person!"

      "You don't know him" she said.  "His form of ambition is so absolute that he could crush anyone in his path without a thought.  I have been his victim once.  I could tell you a strange enough tale of his alchemical experiments on me, his powers over matter - a long sad tale of false pregnancies, mock-miscarriages, even the birth of a changeling with the head of a ... thing!  Murder, too, if you wish.  But it was all sanctified by the fact that these were scientific experiments conducted not from evil motives but purely in the name of alchemical curiosity; rather like your scientific self-justifications for the torture and vivisection of animals and so on.  He has abandoned all that now - or so he says."

      "I don't know what you are getting at."

      "I am only saying that whatever his final intentions are he is masking them from us; he is using you as usual."

      "Of course.  What is wrong about it?  I am doing a job for him - but a job after my own heart as well."

      Suddenly she turned round and put her arms round me.  There were tears in her eyes as she said: "Well, I am so happy to have escaped him, to have freed myself.  I can't tell you the relief.  I should be the one to put red roses on Iolanthe's tomb every day as a thank-offering.  Free!"

      Nevertheless that night, for the first time for ages, I surprised her sleepwalking; rather, I woke to find her standing at the window, having drawn back the curtains.  I thought she was watching the wonderful snowfall of the early morning, but when I moved to her side and put my arm round her slender shoulders, I saw with surprise that her eyes were shut.  And yet, not entirely, for she felt my touch and turned her sleeping face to mine in order to say: "I think we must really go and see Jocas.  I think Julian is right.  We should go and see Jocas as soon as possible."

      "Wake" I said, shaking her.  She came to abruptly and shook herself.  "What have I been saying?"  I kissed her and said, "That we should go and visit Jocas.  It was exactly what I was thinking.  But you were sleepwalking, an ominous sign."

      "Fatigue," she said "nothing more.  Kiss me."