Free Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess Page A

was the value of his work, wasn’t there? Roper, gently but firmly led by Professor Duckworth, was professionally absorbed in that, but there must have been great areas of his brain suffering from inanition. Brain? Perhaps heart or soul or something. Blame England, yes, for Brigitte’s defection, but – let it come slowly – blame also the whole of Western Europe, blame even Germany for not being a good father to her. But you can’t fill the irrational past with blame. You need something positive. We all need our irrational part to be busy with something harmless (the housewife’s hands knitting while her eyes take the television in), letting our rational part get on with what, perhaps stupidly, we suppose to be the important purpose of life. Here, in brief, is the peril of being a scientist brought up on a fierce and brain-filling religion. He starts, in his late teens, by thinking that his new sceptical rationalism (bliss was it in that dawn to be alive) makes nonsense of Adam and Eve and transubstantiation and the Day of Judgement. And then, too late, he discovers that the doctrines don’t really count; what counts is the willingness and ability to take evil seriously and to explain it. Supernature abhors a super-vacuum. When I returned from that Serbo-Croat refresher course you, sir, sent me on, I was pleased to find that Roper seemed to be living a nice, decent, normal, middle-class British life. I rang his home one evening to see how he wasgetting on, and I heard a voice somehow beer-flushed and, behind the voice, the noise of well-in-hand gaiety. A few people in, he said. Do come round, meet the boys and girls. News of Brigitte? News of who? Oh, her. No, no news. ‘Come round,’ he said, ‘I’ve joined the Labour Party.’
    â€˜You’ve joined the –’
    He rang off. He had joined the—Well, then, that was a relief. The NATO powers could breathe freely again. What could be safer than that he should be a member of the political party which provided either H. M. Government or Opposition? No more nasty guilt now, no more there-can-be-no-God-if-He-failed-to-strafe-England, breathed breathily as, each hand crammed with warm Brigitte, he dug his hot spoon into that delicious honey-pot. I went round. Lights and merriment in the bay-window. A dark-haired girl let me in. The hall-light was bright: she was slim and sallow, dressed for no nonsense in a tweed skirt and yellow jumper. ‘Oh, you must be –’ Roper came into the hall. ‘Ah, there you are!’ His hair, like that of some pioneer labour leader, was shaggy and tousled. The living-room and dining-room had only recently, he told me, been knocked into one: forgive the smell of size. These were his friends, he said: Brenda Canning, a merry ginger girl in flashing glasses and jingling trinket-bracelet; Shaw, shy, who worked with Roper; Peter, no, sorry, Paul Younghusband – a round man who smiled from striking a chord on a guitar; Jeremy Cavour, long, with a pipe, his ample grey hair parted on the left. Others. ‘Not really a party,’ said Roper. ‘More of a study-group meeting.’ There were cheese, bread, a carboy of pickles, bottles of light ale on the dining-table. ‘What are you studying?’ I asked. ‘Oh,’ said Roper, ‘there’s been a bit of talk about some of us scientists getting together to hammer out a sort of pamphlet. Socialism and Science. We hadn’t really got down to the title, had we, Lucy?’
    Lucy was the girl who had opened the door, unintroduced to me perhaps because we’d already made functional contact, introductionsperhaps being purely decorative or phatic. This Lucy was standing close to him and seemed to me, at that moment of being addressed, to touch him with a gentle thrust of the hip. Ah, I thought, they are friends. I looked at her with more attention, soon with something like favour – wide-mouthed