The Call-Girls Read online

  ‘I hate green.’ Dr Harriet Epsom, who occupied the seat in front of Burch, had rotated her sturdy neck and shoulders at an angle of a hundred and thirty-five degrees to address this remark diagonally to the young friar. Her shoulders were freckled, burnt, and peeling in strips – which, Tony thought, should not happen to an ethologist, accustomed to the tropical sun. ‘What colour do you like, then?’ he asked politely.

  ‘Blue. Precisely the blue of your eyes.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Tony blurted out, blushing. Blushing was a terrible habit or rather, as he knew, a physiological reflex, which he could not get rid of, although he was fairly skilled in all sorts of mind-control experiments, from Yoga to auto-hypnosis.

  ‘Rot. What’s there to be sorry about?’ snapped Harriet Epsom, or H.E. to her familiars. One of them, sitting next to her and thus in front of Tony, was a Kleinian child psychologist from Los Angeles, who wore her black hair short-cropped, and shaved the back of her neck. Tony could not keep his eyes away. He wondered whether she did it with a cut-throat razor, and was reminded of Mary Queen of Scots.

  ‘It’s just a silly habit,’ he said, recovering. ‘Did you get that sunburn in Kenya, or wherever your baboons are domiciled?’

  ‘Rot. On the Serpentine in Hyde Park. They had a heatwave.’

  ‘What were you doing in London?’

  ‘What do you think I was doing? Yawning my head off at a symposium on Hierarchic Order in Primate Societies. I knew what each of them would say – Lorenz and that Schaller woman, and the Russells and the rest – and they all knew what I was going to say, but I had to go. Why? Because I am an academic call-girl. We are all call-girls in this bus. You are still green, but you might become one in due time.’

  ‘It’s the first time I have been invited to a symposium of this kind,’ confessed Tony. ‘I am madly thrilled.’

  ‘Rot. It becomes a habit, maybe an addiction. You get a long-distance telephone-call from some professional busybody at some foundation or university – “sincerely hope you can fit it into your schedule – it will be a privilege to have you with us – return fare economy-class and a modest honorarium of…” Or maybe no honorarium at all, and in the end you are out of pocket. I am telling you, it’s an addiction.’

  ‘You are pulling my leg,’ protested Tony.

  ‘Maybe this show will be a little less of a circus because it is Solovief’s idea, and I am a sucker for his ideas, though some say he’s finished. But he always has a surprise up his sleeve, you’ll see.’

  Dr Epsom rotated her head back into quarter-profile, to resume conversation with her neighbour. ‘I have always been mad about baby-blue eyes,’ she remarked audibly. The young woman with the shaven neck said something in a semi-whisper, and both their backs shook with mirth.

  After a final climb round two hairpin bends separated by an S curve, the bus suddenly emerged into the village. It stood on a high plateau surrounded by undulating grassland, wooded mountains, and in the distance some glaciers which were visible only on clear days. The village consisted essentially of a spacious square, formed by the white, Romanesque church, the town-hall-cum-post-office, and two massive old farmhouses converted into inns. From the square, three lanes radiated in three different directions. Each started hopefully with a couple of shops and boarding-houses, but after some fifty yards it petered out and became a dirt-track ambling along pastures and farms. The farmhouses were square, squat and solid, built of seasoned, highly inflammable timber, surrounded by balconies with elaborate carvings, and with a bell-tower to tell the men in the fields that dinner was ready, or to sound the alarm in case of fire. All over the wide open landscape, two or three farmhouses were always clustered together, but at a distance of several hundred yards from the next cluster.

  ‘Where is the cinema?’ Harriet Epsom shouted at the driver as they were crossing the church square – white, sundrenched and empty at this hour.

  ‘The Kino?’ the driver repeated, turning round. He had a ginger-coloured, Emperor Franz Josef moustache, twirled and waxed to screwdriver points on a level with his eyes, and spoke a guttural English that sounded like Arabic. ‘The Kino is down in the valley. Schneedorf is a backward village, Miss. We have no cinema, only colour television.’

  H.E. rotated her head towards Tony. ‘That stage mountaineer is trying to be funny.’

  ‘I think …’ Tony started, but did not get further because the moustachioed driver again turned his head and announced: ‘Gentlemen and ladies, we are now arrived at the Kongress-building.’

  And there it stood, improbably, behind another sudden turn, which at the same time was the end of the road. The native building style in Schneedorf had not appreciably altered for the last three or four hundred years, yet suddenly, without warning, they were confronted with this huge, sadistic-looking, glass-and-concrete thing which some Scandinavian architect must have dreamt up in a state of acute depression.

  ‘How do you like?’ the driver asked as the bus came to a standstill.

  There was silence in the bus. Then Dr Wyndham’s thin voice sounded from one of the back seats with a donnish titter:

  ‘It rather reminds one of a steel filing cabinet with plate-glass in front, doesn’t it?’

  The remark caused some mild hilarity which dispelled the after-effects of the spiky virgins and created an atmosphere of camaraderie among the call-girls, while they trooped up the steps to the concrete terrace in front of the austere building.

  ‘Here comes our very own Nikolai Borisovitch Solovief,’ Harriet shouted as a big bear of a man in a rumpled dark suit emerged from the building and came to meet them with unhurried steps. ‘Our Nikolai,’ she added, ‘in full melancholy bloom.’

  ‘He looks ill,’ Wyndham thought sadly, holding out his pudgy hand. ‘You do look flourishing,’ he said with enthusiasm.

  Solovief thrust his shaggy head forward and looked at Wyndham as if he were examining a specimen under the microscope. ‘He is telling lies as always,’ he said in a deep, cracked voice.

  ‘It is nearly two years since Stockholm, isn’t it?’ said Wyndham.

  ‘You have not changed.’

  ‘I can’t afford it any longer,’ Wyndham tittered coyly.

  2

  The Kongresshaus was the brainchild of an adventurous operator whose life and works remain shrouded in mystery. He was the son of a postman in a lonely Alpine valley destined to take over his father’s job, instead of which he ran away to South America and became a millionaire. One rumour asserted that he did it by smuggling arms, another that he ran a chain of brothels where the girls wore dirndls and had to yodel at the critical moment. However, after his first coronary episode, he underwent a spiritual conversion and made his money over to the Foundation for Promoting Love among Nations. The message was to radiate all over the world from the Kongresshaus, built in the Founder’s beloved native mountains; but he died before the building was completed. After his death, the Trustees discovered that the Foundation’s investments yielded just enough interest to pay their salaries, and that there was nothing left to promote the message. They accordingly decided that the building could be put to best use by renting it to congresses and symposia, and leaving the promoting of the message to them. Actually, the building was originally called La Maison des Nations’, but when somebody discovered that this had been the historic name of the most reputed and lamented brothel in the rue de Chabanais in Paris, a change was made. Although the Fräuleins during the skiing season were more lucrative, the villagers took a certain pride in being hosts to several galaxies of celebrities every year. But they had no standards of comparison, and thus did not realize that this particular bus-load was of exceptional quality, including three Nobel laureates and several likely candidates.

  Some of the participants had arrived on that Sunday afternoon by the bus; others drove up in hired cars. There were to be only twelve of them, an unusually small number for an interdisciplinary symposium, but Solovief had insisted that this was the optimal f
igure which still allowed for constructive discussion – much to the distress of the International Academy of Science and Ethics, which acted as sponsor.

  The Academy, financed by another repentant tycoon, was run by public relations experts who believed that the prestige of a symposium, and of the handsome volume in which its proceedings would subsequently be published, was proportionate to the number of illustrious speakers. They liked to cram forty to fifty papers into a five-day conference, which put the participants into a condition not unlike that of punch-drunk boxers, and left no time for discussions – although the discussions were the declared primary purpose of the whole enterprise. ‘I am afraid,’ the harassed chairman would say, ‘that the last three speakers have exceeded their allotted time, so we are running behind schedule. If we want to get some lunch before the next paper, we must postpone the discussion to the end of the afternoon session.’ But when the last paper of the afternoon session had at last been delivered, it was time for cocktails.

  ‘Twelve is my limit,’ Solovief had declared to the Director in Charge of Programmes of the Academy. ‘If you want a circus, you must get yourself a ringmaster.’

  ‘But you have left out some of the most obvious people in their fields.’

  ‘Are we aiming at the obvious?’

  ‘Twelve papers in five days,’ the Director had mused. ‘That leaves eighteen to twenty hours for discussions, which have to be tape-recorded. Transcribing the tapes costs a lot of money.’

  ‘If you are not interested in discussion, there is no point in the meeting.’

  ‘Your logic is impeccable,’ the worried Director had said, ‘but I have learnt from fifteen years of experience that discussions tend to degenerate into games of blind man’s buff. That is why I prefer a well-organized circus, where everyone performs his act amidst polite applause.’

  ‘What is the point of it?’

  ‘Parkinson’s Law. Foundations have to spend their funds. Sponsors must find projects to sponsor. Programme directors must have programmes to direct. It’s a perpetuum mobile which circulates hot air. Hot air has a tendency to expand. For one of the most brilliant atomic physicists of our time, you are astonishingly naive.’

  Solovief let him go on without saying a word. His shaggy brows and the heavy bags under his eyes were in odd contrast with their incurably innocent expression. He was unable to explain to the Director – though Gerald Hoffman was not a bad sort as Foundation officials went – how he felt about this conference, the sense of desperation which impelled him to organize it, and his suspicion that it might be a harebrained project.

  ‘… However,’ Hoffman went on, ‘you win, as usual. Twelve you wanted, twelve it shall be, same number as the apostles. But for Chris’ sake change the title. We can’t call a symposium just “SOS”, full-stop. Or maybe you wanted even an exclamation mark. It’s undignified, sensationalistic, unacademic, apocalyptic, we might as well call it “The Last Trumpet”.’

  ‘Or “The Four Riders”. That would convey the idea of the circus.’

  ‘For Chris’ sake, be serious for a moment. How about “Strategies for Survival”?’

  ‘No. It sounds like computer-war-games about second strikes and overkill. Call it “Approaches to Survival”.’

  ‘Fine. Make it “Scientific Approaches”.’

  ‘I don’t know what “scientific” means. Do you? Just “Approaches”.’

  ‘All right then. APPROACHES TO SURVIVAL.’ Hoffman wrote it down with a sigh of resignation and relief.

  There was a pause. Hoffman noticed that Solovief’s thick athletic shoulders were beginning to show a stoop. And yet women used to be mad about him – including Mrs Hoffman, ha-ha. It was, she explained, because of that darkly rugged face which reminded her of the Don Cossacks (but what about those heavy eye-bags?) and because of that deep voice with its faint Russian accent (which, she said, reminded her of Chaliapin). Solovief squashed his cigar, messing up a whole ashtray, and rose to go. Then he changed his mind, sat down again and asked in a casual voice:

  ‘Do you think it is worth while?’

  The Director looked at him in surprise, then made a careful study of the condition of his own cigar.

  ‘You ought to know best,’ he said at last. ‘If anybody else had suggested assembling twelve wise guys – even the wisest guys in their fields – to work out a plan to save the world, I would have told him that he was a crackpot and to go and get lost.’

  Solovief played with a pencil on Hoffman’s desk.

  ‘Perhaps you would have done me a favour by saying that.’

  ‘Perhaps, but you are not a crackpot. So what’s at stake? At worst you will have wasted our money and your time.’

  ‘And at best?’

  ‘Don’t ask me to exert my imagination – I haven’t got one. That’s your department.’

  And so the project had got under way.

  3

  One of the approved rituals of all congresses, conferences, symposia and seminars is the get-acquainted cocktail party on the evening before the formal proceedings start. In this case getting acquainted was hardly necessary as most of those present knew each other from similar occasions in the past. Cocktails had been announced on the programme for 6 PM, and, with a few exceptions, the participants arrived on the dot. Including wives, secretarial staff and observers representing the Academy, there were about thirty people standing around uneasily in the recreation room, balancing their glasses of sherry or Scotch, and exchanging reminiscences of the last occasion they had met. Most of them seemed to be unaware of the magnificent Alpine panorama that beckoned through the plate glass of the French windows. At this early stage, the atmosphere was rather formal. But all knew that it would predictably and almost without transition become noisy and high.

  ‘You would think a bunch of suburbanites just out of Sunday Chapel,’ Harriet Epsom remarked loudly to Tony. ‘It’s the fault of the wives. Keep away from academic wives. They are a species apart – dowdy, poisonous and always tired. What from – I ask you?’

  H.E. herself looked certainly neither dowdy nor tired. She was leaning on a heavy walking stick with a rubber end, and wore a mini-skirt of some exotic material, revealing a pair of formidable thighs, made more fascinating by the blue veins wending their way through valleys of gooseflesh.

  ‘Look at them – worn out and wilting. What wears them out so?’

  ‘Maybe their husbands?’ Tony suggested tentatively.

  ‘You have got a point there. But scientists fall for just this type of little martyr.’

  ‘Beware of generalizations,’ fluted a voice behind her. She gave a little jump. Claire Solovief, who had overheard her last remark, planted an affectionate kiss on Harriet’s ruddy cheek with too much powder on it. ‘I am not worn out and I don’t aspire to martyrdom,’ she declared. ‘How would you describe me, Tony?’

  ‘A – ravishing Southern belle,’ Tony, whose gallant vocabulary was limited, blurted out and blushed.

  ‘Silly boy.’ Claire was slightly taken aback, and at the same time pleased. She had just turned the corner of forty, and could still look ravishing on her fair days, but unfortunately she had become a grandmother just a fortnight before they had left Harvard. Why had she gone and married Nikolai when she was eighteen and he twice as old? And why had Clairette, their daughter, gone and married at eighteen a surgeon twice as old? It must be running in the family, she thought – all written in those little genes.

  ‘You are a snake in the grass – sneaking up on me like that,’ said Harriet with unexpected amiableness; she had a soft spot for Claire.

  ‘And now I am going to take Brother Tony away from you,’ Claire said. ‘He hasn’t met most of the people yet.’ This in fact had been the purpose of her butting in.

  ‘Take him and good riddance,’ snorted Harriet. ‘But I wish you could protect me from Halder.’

  There was, however, no known protection against Professor Otto von Halder. His wild white mane bobbing high above th
e madding crowd, every inch a King Lear, he was approaching them with his inimitable gait, a combination between goose-stepping and deer-stalking. One could not help glancing at his legs – moccasins, tartan stockings, hair, knobbly knees, more hair, khaki shorts, in that order. ‘Hallo, all and everybody,’ he bellowed. ‘When men and mountains meet, great things shall be done!’

  But in the meantime Claire, by an adroit manoeuvre, had managed to steer Tony away in the opposite direction, pretending not to have seen or heard von Halder’s approach. ‘Well done,’ said Tony when they were out of range. ‘I felt like a steamer being towed by a nimble tug.’

  ‘I learnt that technique from Daddy,’ said Claire. ‘He was in the Foreign Service, but his real job was to act as a diplomatic chucker-out at receptions when people stayed too long.… Anyway, you have met Halder before. He is an exhibitionist, but not as silly as he sounds, so don’t be taken in by his enfant terrible act.’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ said Tony. ‘But I have read his book on Homo Homicidus, and I don’t agree with him.’

  ‘Nor does Nikolai. Watch out, there is Valenti, so let’s head in the opposite direction. I wish Nikolai hadn’t invited Valenti. There is something sinister about his Valentino looks, if you will excuse the pun. And that silk handkerchief in his breast pocket.’

  ‘Isn’t he supposed to be a wizard among neuro-surgeons, with a Nobel prize to his name?’

  ‘I know. He is also the greatest Lolita-chaser alive. He gives me the creeps.’ She steered Tony towards short, dumpy Dr Wyndham with his large bald head and dimples in the cheek, who was listening patiently to whatever it was that the tall girl with the shaven neck was explaining to him. ‘This is Brother Tony, who will represent the Almighty at the Symposium,’ Claire broke in. ‘Tony, this is Dr Wyndham, who, as you know, will turn all our future grandchildren into geniuses. And Dr Helen Porter, who will save them from the horrors of early toilet-training.’