The Primal Urge

‘Why it suits you a treat, Mr Solent!’

‘I’m so glad you think so, Mrs Pidney,’ he said, putting his hand up self-consciously. ‘I see you’ve got yours.’

He had, in truth, the merest glimpse of it through her mop of hair.

‘Yes, I went straightaway at nine o’clock this morning,’ she told him. ‘I got there just before the trailers opened. I was second in the queue, I was. And it didn’t hurt a bit, did it, just like what they said?’

‘Not a bit, no.’

‘And I mean it is free, isn’t it!’ She laughed. ‘Henry’s been trying to make it work already. I ask you, at my age, Mr Solent. I can see I’m in for something now!’

He laughed with her without reservation.

‘I think these Emotion Registers are going to give a lot of people a new lease of life,’ he said.

‘You know what people are calling them,’ she said, grinning. ‘Nun Chasers or Normal Lights. Funny how these nicknames get round, isn’t it? I’d better get back to me sausages, quickish-like. Cheerio.’

As Jimmy let himself out of the front door, he thought, ‘She wasn’t coy. She has accepted it in the proper spirit. Three cheers for Mrs Pidney and the millions like her. They are the backbone, the backbone of England; such vertebrae, one dirty day, will rise and slay the pervertebrae.’

He strolled gently towards Park Lane, where he intended to capture a taxi, making himself enjoy the heat by contrasting it favourably with the cold, rain-bearing wind which had been blowing only a few days before. Everyone behaved much as usual in the streets. Considering that the grey trailers had been hard at work everywhere for four days, surprisingly few people had additions to their foreheads, but those few were attracting no interest. The man and woman in the bright red Austin-Healey, the cadaverous commissionaire, the two squaddies sunning themselves on the corner of South Audley Street, all wore their Emotion Registers as to the manner born. The cabby who answered Jimmy’s raised hand also bore the new token. Into every class, the ERs were finding their way.

The party to which Jimmy was going, Sir Richard Clunes’ party, was being held in one of the formidable blocks, Kensington way, which had been built at the end of the last decade. It was – with a few exceptions like Jimmy himself – a British Industrial Liasons party for BIL personnel, and therefore more in Aubrey Solent’s line than Jimmy’s, for Aubrey was a BIL man; Jimmy was entangled in literature. But Sir Richard, while promising to lend Jimmy a portrait for an exhibition he was organising, had genially invited him to the party at the same time, on the principle that younger brothers of promising executive material were worth suborning in this way, particularly as party material was always scarce at this season of year.

It was a small party: Jimmy could see that as soon as he arrived – much smarter than the literary parties to which he was more accustomed, which were generally toned down by provincial novelists with no style or reviewers with no figure. These were London people; more, BIL people! – BIL people living useful days and efficient nights. ‘They’re already at their primes, I’m sure they read The Times at breakfast,’ Jimmy told himself, glancing round as he shook hands with a beaming Sir Richard and Lady Clunes. Sir Richard had mobile eyebrows and a chin the shape of a goatee. His manner flowed with milk and honey, and he engaged Jimmy in pleasant talk for two minutes precisely.

‘Now let me see who you’ll know here, Solent,’ Sir Richard said, as that halcyon period drew to its scheduled close. ‘Ah, there’s Guy Leighton, one of our most promising young men. You’ll know him, of course – he has been working on the K. R. Shalu business with your brother. Guy! Can you spare us a moment, my dear boy?’

A dark young man who balanced perpetually on the balls of his feet was expertly prised from a nearby group and made to confront Jimmy. They bowed sadly to each other over their champagne glasses, with the polite dislike one partygoer so often feels for another. Guy and Jimmy were no more than acquaintances; their orbits only intersected when their invitation cards coincided.

‘Shall we dance?’ Jimmy said, and then, very seriously to counteract this facetiousness, ‘This looks a worthy gathering, Guy.’

‘Worthy of or for what, Solent?’ the dark young man parried. He could have been no more than four years older than Jimmy, but his habit of using surnames seemed to give him a good decade’s start. ‘The usual set of time-servers one finds at these bunfights: no more worthy than the next man, surely?’

‘Looking more worthy,’ Jimmy insisted. It was not a point he cared to labour, but he could think of nothing else to talk about. Gratefully, he accepted more champagne in his glass.

‘You, if I may say so,’ Guy said, cocking a sardonic eyebrow at Jimmy’s forehead, ‘look positively futuristic.’

‘Oh … the ER. Everyone’ll be wearing them in time, Laddie, yew mark moi words,’ Jimmy said, with that abrupt descent into dialect with which some of us cover our inadequacies.

‘Possibly,’ Guy said darkly. ‘Some of us have other ideas; some of us, I don’t mind telling you confidentially, are waiting to see which way the cat will jump. You realise, don’t you, you are the only person here wearing one of the ghastly things.’

He could not, announcing Armageddon, have shattered Jimmy more thoroughly.

‘You’re all living in the past, you scientific fellows. These are the nineteen sixties, the Era of the ER,’ he replied, but he was already looking round the large room to check on Guy’s statement. Every brow, high or low – some of them were the really interestingly low brows of genius – was unimproved by science. The wish to conform hit Jimmy so hard that he scarcely heard Guy’s remark about oppressed minorities.

‘The Solent pioneering spirit …’ he said.

‘And another thing I ought to tell you,’ Guy said. ‘I’m sure you will not mind my mentioning it. People in the swim refer to these discs as Norman Lights; after the firm of Norman which invented them, you know. I rather think it’s only the lesser breeds without the law who refer to them as ERs – or nun chasers, which being pure music hall might just possibly catch on. Of course it’s too early for any convention to have crystallised yet, but take it from me that’s the way the wind’s blowing at the BIL.’

‘I’ll be terribly careful about it,’ Jimmy said earnestly. He concealed his earnestness by a parody of earnestness; Guy, the born Insider, had just the sort of information one listened to if one hoped to get Inside oneself.

And then the group of men and women from which Guy had been separated flowed about the two young men, and a welter of introductions followed. Everybody looked well, cheerful and in good humour; that they were also interested in Jimmy lessened his interest in them. As if they had been waiting for a signal, they began talking about the registers; they were the topic of conversation at present. After a long burst of animation, a pause set in, during which all eyes turned on Jimmy, awaiting, as it were, a sign from the fountainhead.

‘As the only fox with a tail,’ he said, ‘I feel I ought not to give away any secrets.’

‘Has it lit up yet, that’s what I want to know?’ a commanding man in heavy glasses said, amid laughter.

‘Only once, so far,’ Jimmy said, ‘but I haven’t had it more than three hours.’

More laughter, during which someone made a crushing remark about fancy dress parties, and a sandy woman said, ‘It really is appalling to think that everyone will know what we’re thinking when we have ours installed.’

A man, evidently her husband by the laboured courtesy with which he addressed her, took her up instantly on this remark. ‘My dear Bridget, will you not remember that these Norman Lights go deeper than the thought centres. They register purely on the sensation level. They represent, in fact, the spontaneous as against the calculated. Therein lies the whole beauty of them.’

‘I absolutely couldn’t agree more,’ the heavy glasses said. ‘The whole notion of submitting ourselves to this process would be intolerable were it not that it gives us back a precious spontaneity, a freedom, lost for generations. It is analogous to the inconvenience of contraceptives: submit to a minor irk and you inherit a major liberty.’

‘But don’t you see, Merrick,’ Guy said, perching himself on tiptoe to address the heavy glasses, ‘—goodness knows how often I’ve pointed this out to people – the Norman Lights don’t solve anything. Such an infringement of personal dignity is only justifiable if it solves something.’

‘Personal dignity is an antique imperialist slogan, Leighton,’ a smart grey woman said, giving Guy some of his own medicine.

‘And what do you expect them to solve?’ Merrick of the heavy glasses asked, addressing the whole group.

‘Abolishing the death penalty entirely last year didn’t solve the problem of crime, any more than contraceptives have done away with bastards, but at least we are taking another step in the right direction. You must realise there are no solutions in life – life is not a Euclidean problem – only arrangements.’

The smart grey woman laughed briefly. ‘Come, Merrick,’ she said, ‘We can’t let you get away with that; there are no “directions” in the socio-ethical meaning you attribute to right.’

‘Oh, yes, there are, Susan,’ Merrick contradicted imperturbably. ‘Don’t reactivate that old nihilist mousetrap. There are evolutionary directions, and in relation to them the Normal Lights are an advance. Why are they an advance? Because they enable the id for the first time to communicate direct, without the intervention of the ego. The human ego for generations has been growing swollen at the expense of the id, from which all true drives spring; now—’

‘Then surely these Norman Lights are causing a reversion,’ Bridget interrupted. ‘A return to the primitive—’

‘Not primitive: primal. You see, you’ve got to differentiate between two entirely separate but quite similar—’

‘I can’t help thinking Merrick’s right off the beam. However it comes wrapped, an increased subservience to the machine is something to reject out of hand. I mean, in the future—’

‘No, wait a moment, though, Norman Lights aren’t machines; that is to say, they aren’t instruments for the conversion of motion, but for the conversion of emotion. They’re merely registers – like a raised eyebrow.’

‘Well, I’m still capable of raising my own eyebrows.’

‘And other people’s, I hope.’

‘Anyhow, that’s not the point. The point is—’

‘Surely a return to the primitive—’

‘The point is, to wear them voluntarily is one thing; to have this law passed by our so-called government is quite—

‘And who elected this government, Susan? You, Susan.’

‘Don’t let’s go into all that again!’

‘After all, why drag evolution into this? How can a mere mechanical—’

‘My dear man, mechanisation is a natural step – natural, mark you – in man’s evolution. Really, some people’s world pictures are so antiquated. Darwin might as well never have sailed in the Beagle at all!’

‘I cannot honestly see how anyone could expect anybody—’

‘All I’m trying to say is—’

‘—in the nation’s best interests. Everyone bogged down by inhibition, and then like a clean slash of a scalpel—’

‘If you’ve ever observed an operation in progress, Merrick, you will know surgeons do not slash.’

‘—comes this glorious invention to set us free from all the accumulation of five thousand years of petty convention. Here at last is hope handed to us on a plate, and you worry—’

‘Last week he was attacking and I was defending.’

It was at this point in the argument spluttering around him that Jimmy, listening in interested silence, found that a man he had heard addressed as Bertie was tipping rum into his – Jimmy’s – champagne from a pocket flask.

‘Give it a bit of body,’ Bertie said, winking conspiratorially and gripping Jimmy’s arm.

‘Thanks. No more,’ Jimmy said.

‘Pleasure,’ Bertie said. ‘All intellectuals here. I’m a cyberneticist myself. What are you?’

‘I sort of give exhibitions.’

‘You do? Before invited audiences? You’d better count me in on that. I tell you, when I get my red light, it’s going to wink in some funny places.’ He laughed joyously.

‘I’m afraid these are only book exhibitions,’ Jimmy said, adding, for safety, ‘Clean books.’

‘Who’s talking about books? They’re full of antique imperialist slogans,’ Guy said, butting in and making a face at Susan. ‘Don’t change the subject, Jimmy. There’s only one subject in England at the moment – it’s even ousted the weather. You, presumably, are more pro NLs than anyone else here. Why are you pro?’

‘For practical reasons,’ Jimmy said airily. The champagne was already making him feel a little detached from the group; they were only talkers – he was a pioneer. ‘You see, entirely through my own stupidity, Penny Tanner-Smith, my fiancée, broke off our engagement last week. I hoped that if she could see how steadily my ER glowed for her, she would agree to begin again.’

There was much sympathetic laughter at this. Susan said, ‘What a horribly trite reason!’ But Merrick said ‘Bloody good. Excellent. That’s what I mean – cuts through formality and misunderstanding. Our friend here has inherited a major liberty: the ability to prove to his fiancée exactly how he feels about her; try and estimate what that is worth in terms of mental security. I’m going to get my Norman Light stuck on tomorrow.’

‘Then you disappoint me, Merrick,’ Guy Leighton said.

‘I cannot wait on fashion, Guy; I have an aim in life as well as a role in society,’ Merrick said amiably. It sounded as if he knew Guy fairly closely.

Gazing beyond them, Jimmy could see Sir Richard still welcoming an occasional late arrival, his eyebrows astir with hospitality. A tall, silver man had just come in escorting a tall girl with a hatchet face who, in her survey of the company, seemed to ‘unsee the traffic with mid-ocean eye’, to borrow a phrase from a contemporary poet Jimmy disliked. The man smiled and smiled; the girl seemed barely to raise a grin. She wore the silver disc on her brow.

‘There’s someone—,’ Jimmy said, and then stopped, foreseeing an awkward situation. But Guy had also noticed the newcomer; he became tense and his manner underwent a change.

‘Oh, she’s here, is she!’ he muttered, turning his back on that quarter of the room and shuddering as if he had witnessed a breach of etiquette. ‘I say, Solent, here’s a chance for us all to try out your gadget.’

‘Include me out,’ Jimmy said hastily. ‘I don’t like public demonstrations. Besides, I can tell from here that she would have no attraction for me; she doesn’t look as if she could make a firefly glow.’

‘You haven’t met her yet,’ Guy said, with surprising fierceness.

‘You never know what’s in your id,’ Bertie said, appearing again with his pocket flask. ‘Or in hers, Freud save us.’ He crossed himself and nudged Merrick, who did not smile.

The inevitable, as it inevitably does, happened. Guy, with unexpected delicacy, did not go over to the newcomers. Instead, Sir Richard and Lady Clunes ushered them over to Jimmy’s group in a frothy tide of introductions, among which two waiters sported like dolphins, dispensing drink.

‘Martini for me this time,’ Jimmy said and, turning, was introduced to Felix Garside and his niece, the hatchet-faced girl, Rose English.

Seen close to, she was no longer hatchet-faced, though her countenance was long and her features sharply moulded; indeed she could be considered attractive, if we remembered that attraction is also a challenge. As Rose English glanced round the company, she was making no attempt, as most of the others present would have done upon introduction, to conceal the engagement of her mind and feelings in her surroundings. In consequence the unconventional face, less a mask than an instrument, drew to itself the regard of all men and most of the women. Her countenance was at once intelligent and naked; invulnerable perhaps, but highly impressionable.

Her clothes, although good, seemed to fit her badly, for the jacket of her suit, in the new over-elaborate style, did her disservice, making her look to some extent top heavy. She was tall; ‘rangy’ was the word which occurred to Jimmy. She might have been thirty-five, perhaps ten years his senior. Under her cheekbones faint and by no means unattractive hollows showed, ironing themselves out by her mouth, which, together with her eyes, belied the hint of melancholy determination in her attitude.

Her eyes rested momentarily on Jimmy’s brow. She smiled, and the smile was good.

‘Et tu, Brute,’ she said and then turned with a suspicion of haste to talk to Guy, who showed little inclination to talk back; though he remained on the balls of his feet, his poise had deserted him. This at once disappointed and relieved Jimmy, for he discovered he was flushing slightly; Merrick and several of the others were watching his Norman Light with eagerness.

‘It is just turning faintly pink, I think,’ the sandy woman said. ‘It’s rather difficult to tell in this lighting.’

‘The maximum intensity is a burning cerise,’ a clerical-looking man informed them all.

‘Then cerise will be the fashionable colour next season,’ Lady Clunes said. ‘I’m so glad. I’m so tired of black, so very tired of it.’

‘I should have thought it ought to have registered a little more than that,’ Merrick said, with a hint of irritation, staring at Jimmy’s forehead. ‘Between any normal man and woman, there’s a certain sexual flux.’

‘That’s what it’ll be so interesting to find out,’ Lady Clunes said. ‘I am just longing for everyone to get theirs.’

‘Oh yes, it’ll be O.K. for those who’re exempt: a damn good sideshow, I’d say,’ Bertie remarked, precipitating a frosty little silence. The new ER bill just passed through Parliament, which specified that everyone should have a Norman Light fitted by September 1, exempted those under fourteen or over sixty; it was generally agreed that this upper age limit would preserve the status quo for Maude Clunes. Her friends were waiting, hawk-like, to see if she would have a disc installed.

Guy, to fill the gap in the conversation, brought Rose back into it with a general remark. Seizing his chance, Merrick bunched heavy eyebrows over his heavy spectacles and said, ‘Miss English, your having your Norman Light installed so promptly shows you to be a forward-looking young lady. Would you cooperate in a little experiment, a scientific experiment, for the benefit of those of us who have still to, er, see the light?’

‘What do you wish me to do?’ she asked.

He was as direct as she.

‘We would like to observe the amount of sexual attraction between you and Mr Solent,’ he told her.

‘Certainly,’ she said. She looked around at each one of them, then added, ‘This is a particular moment in time when our – my – responses may seem to some of you improper, or immoral, or ‘not the thing’, or whatever phrase you use to cover something you faintly fear. In a few months, I sincerely hope, such moments will be gone for ever. Everyone will register spontaneously an attraction for everyone of the opposite sex and similar age; that I predict, for the ER’s function at gene level. And then the dingy mockery which our forebears, and we, have made of sex will vanish like dew. It will be revealed as something more radical and less of a cynosure than we have held it to be. And our lives will be much more honest on every level in consequence.’

She spoke very simply, very intensely, and then turned to look into Jimmy’s eyes. Listening to her, watching her moving mouth, seeing her tongue once briefly touch her lips, taking in that face a sculptor would have wept at, Jimmy knew his Norman Light was no longer an ambiguous silver. He caught a faint pink reflection from it on the end of his nose. When the rangy girl surveyed him, he saw her disc redden and his own increase output in sympathy. She was so without embarrassment that Jimmy, too, remained at ease, interested in the experiment. Everyone else maintained the surprised, respectful silence her words had created.

‘A rosy light!’ exclaimed the sandy woman and the momentary tension relaxed.

‘Not by Eastern casements only … !’ Jimmy murmured. It surprised him that, although he still glowed brightly, he consciously felt little or no attraction for Rose. That is to say, his fiancée, Penny Tanner-Smith (not to mention Alyson Youngfield), was still clear in his mind, and he felt no insane desire to go to bed with this strange, self-possessed woman.

‘The attraction is there and the ERs detect it,’ Rose said. ‘There lies their great and only virtue: they will force a nation of prudes to recognise an incontrovertible natural law. But, as I say, they work at gene – or what will no doubt be popularly termed ‘subconscious’ – level. This force lies like a chemical bond between Mr Solent and me; but I feel not the slightest desire to go to bed with him.’

Jimmy was amazed at how unpalatable he found this truth, this echo of what he had just been thinking; it was one thing silently to reject her; quite another for her openly to reject him. This absorbed him so completely he hardly listened to the discussion which flowed around him.

Merrick was shaking Rose’s long hand; she was admitting to being a ‘sort of brain specialist’. The wife of the clerical-looking man was squeaking something about ‘like a public erection …’ and urging her husband to take her home. Everyone was talking. Sir Richard and Felix Garside were laughing at a private joke. Bertie was signalling to a young waiter. Drink and olives circulated.

When Sir Richard excused himself to greet someone else, Jimmy also slipped away to another part of the room. He was disturbed and needed time for thought. From where he stood now, he could see Rose’s back, a rangy figure with a handbag swinging from her crooked arm. Then a heated discussion on the effects of colour TV on children rose on his left and broke like a wave over him. Jimmy joined in vigorously, talking automatically. He emerged some while later to find the subject held no interest for him, though he had been as partisan as anybody; muttering a word of excuse, snatching another drink, he went into the corridor to stand by an open window.

Here it was distinctly cooler and quieter. Jimmy leant out, looking down four stories to the untidy bottom of the building’s well. He lapsed into one of the untidy reveries which often overcame him when he was alone. His thoughts went back to Rose English, the woman with the unlikely name, and then faded from her again. Euphoria flooded over him. A waiter brought him a drink. He groaned at his own contentment. The world was in a hell of a state: the political tension in the Middle East was high, with war threatening; the United States was facing a worse recession than in 1958; the British political parties were bickering over a proposal to build a tunnel under the Severn; gold reserves were down; the whole unstable economic edifice of the country, if one believed the newspapers – but who did? – tottered on the brink of collapse; and of course the ERs would deliver a rabbit punch to the good old status quo of society.

But it was summer. It was summer in England, hot and sweet and sticky. Everyone was stripping off to mow a lawn or hold a picnic or dive into the nearest dirty stretch of river. Nobody gave a sod. Euphoria had its high tide willynilly, come death, come danger. The unexpected heat made morons of us all, quite as effectively as did the interminable wretchedness of winter.

He sighed and breathed the warm air, full of discontent and indifference, those hallmarks of the true-born Englishman. As Jimmy withdrew his head from the window, Rose English was approaching, coming self-assuredly down the corridor.

‘Hello,’ she said, without noticeably smiling. ‘I wanted some cool air too. People should not give parties on nights like this.’