The Thinktank That Leaked Read online

  To my surprise, he started talking about Pottersman, Spender’s former assistant. “Spender claimed he was ill when he took him on, you know.”

  I said, “How do we know he wasn’t? He started off as Spender’s patient.”

  “Yes. But Dr. Spender has rather an odd way of diagnosing mental illness.”

  I said, “Spender said Pottersman attempted suicide when he failed his degree.”

  Mike said, “A lot of students sound off about ‘ending it all’. It’s like a fashion. Next evening you see them at the disco.”

  “Are you saying that Spender sort of caught Pottersman during a brief, histrionic fling before Pottersman had a chance of getting back to the disco?”

  “I don’t know how it was worked.”

  “How do you mean? — worked?”

  “Spender wanted a bright boy to fix up all that gear in his Flying Saucer. Pottersman went to pieces for about five minutes and Spender came rushing to the rescue so that he could get a cut-rate employee.”

  “How do you know all this?” — I didn’t trust it entirely because it was evident that Mike had so recently lied to Nesta about what happened mid air.

  Mike sensed what I was thinking. “I don’t usually tell lies. What the controller said really scared me … I thought I might be banned from soloing. Spender has hinted at it before now.”

  I said carefully, “From the way he was talking about you to me, I frankly felt that it was unwise for you to be flying solo just at present.”

  “An impression,” said Mike bitingly, “that must have been reinforced, somewhat, by the near-collision I had with you.”

  “To be absolutely honest, yes.”

  “Did it occur to you, Mr. Kepter, that people like Spender can systematically undermine someone’s confidence?”

  “It did indeed. That’s why I’m not making any judgements.”

  “You’re better sighted that I thought then, Mr. Kepter.” He added, in rather a different tone: “Or has the sight of Nesta improved your vision?”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Meaning that if you’re too hard on me, she might lose interest in you.”

  “I’m not as pushed as all that. And I don’t think your sister would be all that impressed by someone who dodged the issue merely to grease her romantic palm. Additionally, we’ve only met for a fraction of a second.”

  He looked at me. “I saw a lot happen to your metabolism in a fraction of a second. When you drive this MG back to Elstree you’ll be hitting ninety.”

  “Any objection?”

  “None. Interesting,” he said chattily, “to compare you with Spender.”

  “In what way?”

  “He’s not much older than you, Mr. Kepter. But if he found himself in close contact with Nesta he’d sort of slope away. Have you noticed he’s got a funny sort of hunch? — I mean a mental one? He’s a psychological hunchback … afraid of what he’s doing, yet not able to stop doing it. What do you do about people who are absolutely certain they’re good with a capital G?”

  “Some of them are.”

  “Some of them,” said Mike Crabtree, “are round the bend.”

  “I must admit I’d noticed the same thing, Mike.”

  “Which?”

  “He’s one of the Twelve. I suspect he thinks he could walk across that reservoir like Jesus Christ.”

  Mike said, “Be very careful when you break bread with him. Mildew is bad for you.”

  I said, “You have quite a turn of phrase.”

  “It leaps to mind,” he said. “I couldn’t help that one.”

  “Yes; but what’s it mean?”

  “I don’t know yet. Will you do a bit of a dual with me, Mr. Kepter? I’d like you to check me out.”

  “I’d regard it as a compliment.”

  “And a way of making a chess move in Nesta’s direction.”

  I grinned at him. “You seem to think everyone’s corrupt.”

  “It would be refreshing,” he said, “to find someone who wasn’t.”

  “Your error is that you underestimate your sister.”

  “How can you possibly know her enough at this stage to leap to that conclusion?”

  “Because I have a higher opinion of the female than of the male.”

  “That’s unfashionable,” he said. “Nowadays there’s not supposed to be any such discrimination. Soon there’ll be a sort of Race Relations Board with the power to prosecute people like you.”

  “Until there is,” I said, “I shall stick to my guns on the issue that no worthwhile female was ever impressed by walking frauds. My object in agreeing to fly dual with you is that I’m quite sure I can help you get your confidence back. You don’t have to say thank you; but equally you don’t have to assume that it’s a neat way of twisting your sister’s arm. Women have a disconcerting knack of seeing straight through manoeuvres like that — which is the only reason why I don’t indulge them.”

  He said, “You’re quite smart, for a lecturer.”

  “That may be because I’m chucking in university life altogether.”

  “That’s a pity, Mr. Kepter.”

  “My name is Roger. Why is it a pity?”

  “Because there ought to be someone there to keep an eye on Dr. Spender.”

  I said, “Don’t worry. I intend to make a few more trips in his Flying Saucer.”

  “Good.”

  *

  She was bringing my Grumman in just as I drove through the gates. The landing was a mess. Nesta didn’t break anything but I preferred to look the other way until she’d got the brakes on in time. What happened was that she found herself too high. Instead of going round and doing it again, she made rather a risk decision and landed much too far down the runway. Also she was going at quite a lick, which meant the aircraft wouldn’t settle. Finally it did — audibly, with an awful lot of runway used up and precious little ahead. Fortunately Bravo-Delta had good brakes. She needed them.

  Ten minutes later she was with me in the clubroom and not in the best of moods once she’d discovered I’d seen what — for want of a better word — I’ll call a landing.

  “Don’t pretend,” she said angrily. “You saw.”

  “I also heard.”

  “Was it awful?”

  “It was unfair.”

  “On who? — Oh, you mean your aeroplane.”

  “I don’t. I mean me.”

  “Why you?”

  “Because you’re embarrassed about it and you don’t like me any more.”

  “I’m not too fond of myself at the moment.”

  “That’s what worries me. Let’s have a drink. A proper one, this time. A landing like that calls for a double scotch, at least.”

  “I’ll have a pink gin. Single.”

  I ordered the scotch for me and the gin for her.

  She said, “I don’t always land like that.”

  “I should hope not.”

  “You’re making it worse.”

  “I refuse to be patronizing. It spoils all sorts of things.”

  “What sort of things did you have in mind?”

  “Well, I find you very exciting, for one thing.”

  “But you do take a great deal for granted.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Lecturers don’t.”

  “As I’ve just explained to Mike, I’m no longer a lecturer.”

  “Except on landings.”

  “Here’s your drink.”

  “What did you talk to Mike about?”

  “Mostly Dr. Spender. Also his flying.”

  “As opposed to mine.”

  “He and I are going to do some dual together. In my opinion — Mike’s too — Spender’s forte seems to be to undermine people’s confidence. Mike thinks I’m only going to help him with his flying to get into your good books.”

  “Is he right?”

  “I denied the charge as outrageous.”

  Nesta said, “I don’t think you’re lik
e that.”

  I said, “If I am, the person I should be doing some dual with is you.”

  “Seems I could use it.”

  “Look, I’ve made messier landings than that, Nesta.”

  She said, “What annoys me is making the wrong decision. I should have done an overshoot. I was far too high.”

  “Why did you make the wrong decision?”

  She said, “I saw the MG and wasn’t going to admit defeat.”

  I said, “When I landed I was showing off for your benefit.”

  “Yes, but yours came off.”

  “You don’t need to pull off greasers, Nesta, to get me well and truly on your frequency. And, frankly, I don’t need to help Mike for you to get on mine. Either people do or people don’t.”

  “I like the way you talk. I’ll admit that.”

  “What’s good about the way I talk?”

  “You’ve got me out of a very bad temper in very quick time.”

  “So much depended on it.”

  She said, “My boyfriend would have a thing or two to say about that.”

  “But he doesn’t own you?”

  “No, he doesn’t own me.”

  I said, “Are you rich? You have a sports car and you fly — which is expensive — and you dedicate a lot of time towards looking after your brother.”

  “Why would it worry you if I’m rich?”

  “My wife was rich.”

  “Is she dead or are you divorced?”

  “Paula will never die. She’s always been exactly the same since the day I met her.”

  “What will give her perpetual life?”

  “Boredom. It totally engulfs her, like a sort of invisible electronic bubble. The bubble has supernatural qualities, one of them being that of providing her with perpetual boredom, and therefore eternal life. Sometimes she phones me and tries to make me go back inside her bubble.”

  “And you do?”

  “It’s become a single-seater-type bubble. Unlike my Grumman, where the right hand seat remains unoccupied.”

  “I noticed.” We had another drink. Nesta said, “And has Paula ever travelled in the other seat of your Grumman?”

  “Once. It was the only time she has ever escaped the boredom bubble. She was absolutely terrified. She wanted me to hedgehop at fifteen feet because she thought it was so much safer nearer the ground.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “She’s a sort of bar-stool pal — not a woman at all. I mean, certainly she has the requisite hormones and things, she’s not butch exactly, but to get at the hormones you have to really be quite excrutiatingly boring, otherwise it’s no good.”

  “Well, I don’t find you excrutiatingly boring, so it wouldn’t work with me either, if that was one of the conditions.”

  “With her it’s a prerequisite. And what’s boring you about your present boyfriend?”

  “I didn’t say anything was.”

  “I know you didn’t. I’m saying it.”

  “What makes you think it’s true, just because you’re saying it?”

  I said, “Because you’ve rocked me from head to foot.”

  “That doesn’t follow from your previous statement.”

  I said quietly, “It has to.”

  “I like your technique.”

  “It’s not a technique. I’ve never talked like this in my life.”

  She said, “As a matter of fact, I know.”

  Someone put a coin in the player. And I was up there flying. It was like that. I simply couldn’t wrong-foot myself. Even the music was right. We went to a table.

  At the table I said, “There are only two things in a man’s life: first solo is one.” I didn’t have to define the other.

  She shot me an astute look. “What bores me about my boyfriend,” she said, “is that he never says what he means.”

  I said, “I can’t normally. That’s why this is such a shock. I’m actually shaking. Look!”

  She said, “That’s the result of my nearly wrecking your Grumman.”

  “It could have something to do,” I said, “with your nearly wrecking yourself.”

  “So fast?”

  “Your brother spotted it. Are you trying to tell me you didn’t?”

  “No, as a matter of fact. I’m not accusing you of being disingenuous about your offer to help Mike get his flying sense back; but you did rig that business of borrowing my MG rather neatly. After all, Mike could have waited for me here.”

  “It honestly wasn’t planned.”

  “You mean, you didn’t know you planned it.”

  “That’s about the score.”

  “Your car really is in dock?”

  “It really is! I came on the tube then took a taxi from Watford.”

  “I don’t know your first name.”

  “Roger.”

  “Roger, what do you make of this business of Spender’s destructive effect on people?”

  I was twiddling my glass and staring into it and she asked me not to, and I asked why, and she said her father always did it, so I stopped. I said, “Spender has some extremely odd theories. Superficially they seem to make sense when he first says them. Then you start wondering, Nesta. He asks things like: Where does hate go when you cure it? Where does misery go? Where does fear go? … as if they were tangible objects you have to somehow get rid of in some physical way. Are things like that? If I asked Paula ‘Where does Boredom go?’, surely, emotions change into each other, don’t they? They’re not commodities you have to chuck down the garbage disposal unit.”

  “What’s Spender’s garbage disposal unit?”

  “A computer network. He pours his patient’s unwanted emotions — hate, for instance — into a computer.”

  She said, “By his reckoning, it must therefore stay there.”

  I just stared at her.

  *

  In the MG she said, “At least I can drive a car.”

  “Who is it,” I asked, “who so persistently sabotages your confidence?”

  She didn’t take her eyes off the road. “What gives you the right to probe?”

  “You need it.”

  “Someone tried that.”

  “Who? — Your current boyfriend?”

  She was silent for a while, then said, “I have one of those fathers.”

  “What sort?”

  “Passionate about Success. So he treats me like one of his companies. Every time he criticizes the balance sheet he somehow makes it worse … My boyfriend does the same thing in a different way; his masculine image tells him that girls shouldn’t be able to do things like flying.”

  “He sounds a bit insecure.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  I said, “Too true. But not everybody uses their sense of insecurity for demolition purposes. Can’t you build him up?”

  “He senses when I’m trying to do it and sulks. Then we have a row about it.”

  “Rather a difficult thing to start a row about, surely? How is it done? … ‘Get off my pitch, I’m the man because I drive and drink and have an intellect and a mechanical mind; you’re the girl; therefore you mustn’t do anything’. Like that?”

  “More or less. When he gets heated he says I’m butch.”

  “But that’s … meaningless. It’s the he-man syndrome. I thought that went out with biplanes.”

  “That’s just the point,” she said. “It’s meaningless to you. Sex is a matter of subjective feelings, not objective qualifications.”

  “And that from a rich girl. What a concise statement.”

  She said, “I didn’t say I was rich. You did.”

  “You are though.”

  “Yes, I am. Daddy’s a big wheel in computers — and horrible with it. You don’t have to be horrible to be a millionaire, but he manages it. I tell you, sir, he manages it … One of the reasons I’ve stuck to … well, never mind my boyfriend’s name … One of the reasons I’ve stuck to him for so long is that my father dislikes him for all the wrong reasons. D
addy uses expressions like ‘common’. He calls my boyfriend common. Actually Daddy’s common, so I am common, only it isn’t so obvious because I’ve been all polished up, Swiss schools and all sorts of things, God those Swiss schools! — Anyway, I learned to think because I met a ‘common’ kind of character in Geneva — ”

  “— What kind of a character? — apart from being common?”

  “A pilot.”

  “Is that how you got interested in flying?”

  “He tried to teach me, at first anyway, but that wasn’t really what he was out to ‘teach’. I fell for him — or thought I did — and had an affair with him and he tore me to shreds, but to shreds!, you wouldn’t believe it, all my wonderful delusions of grandeur gone wrong, I thought I was privileged … my nanny had strict instructions, no doubt, to program me into being a ‘lady’, so that eventually I would aspire to the ultimate heights of knowing which fork to use for the prawns. But in Geneva I was emotionally and — let’s face it — sexually hooked to a fella who specialized in stripping off all the layers of veneer that had been so carefully put there. He did it brutally, without giving a damn.”

  “It sounds as if he gave more than a ‘damn’ to me, Nesta.”

  She swivelled around a corner angrily and demanded, “How the hell can you know?”

  “Because you don’t believe it yourself.”

  “You pry and then you don’t want to know the answers. Am I wasting my time? … I don’t know why I’m telling you all this anyway, I’m not exactly drunk. But his hangup was that you have to destroy before you create —”

  “— Nesta, sometimes you have to. After all, I’m talking to the end-product. It’s easy enough to tear apart the man who restores the painting … Your thing about veneer. Is it possible to peel off a veneer without hurting either a person or a thing?”

  She wouldn’t listen to me.

  “He reduced me to pulp; and the ironical part of it is that he thought he did a great job on me, improving me no end. I only survived because I still managed to be Me, not Him; and any good he did was not because of the way he went about his Pygmalion exercise but because — this is going to sound conceited — I had the courage which in fact he lacked. He set fire to a hoop and made me jump through it; but I only came out the other side intact because despite all the trimmings I found I was still a person, and he couldn’t demolish that.”