Report on Probability A (6 page)

Eagerly, he read on.

The woman turned from the window with a quick movement. She moved across the kitchen, keeping parallel with the sink. She held her head high, so that its details were lost in the poor light, but it appeared that her mouth was still opening and closing by the movement of the muscles in her neck and the bobbing of her chin, though these details too were uncertain since the woman was progressing erratically, taking certain rhythmic steps that made her shoulders rise and sink. At the same time, she spread her arms to shoulder height and waved them while keeping them level; in her right hand she still retained the white towel. She rotated once through three hundred and sixty degrees in a clockwise direction, waving her hands as she did this. When she was again proceeding across the kitchen in her previously determined direction parallel with the sink, she crossed behind the third of the window that was open and disappeared from sight.

S lowered the telescope. He looked through the dusty window that was divided into nine sections, several of them draped with small webs from which spiders had gone, and stared at the house some thirty-five metres away. He could see the lower left-hand window that belonged to the kitchen with its right-hand section open. He blinked his eyes and nipped the bridge of his nose with the thumb and index finger of the left hand. He saw a movement in the kitchen.

Lifting the telescope to his right eye, S closed his left eye. He held the instrument near to the eyepiece with his right hand, gripping it with his left hand at the other extremity, where the barrel was bound in leather; doing this necessitated bending both elbows; he rested the left elbow on the lower extremity of the brick ledge that surrounded the round window. Even with this support, the circle of vision trembled slightly as it moved with its encompassing darkness over the asparagus bed, not focusing on the earth, and up across a confused patch of lavender and shrub and path and grass, and swam up the brickwork with its pattern of horizontal and vertical lines, until it settled on the open third of the kitchen window.

The woman was dimly visible, standing away from the window with her back to it. She had rid herself of the white towel. Her hands were behind her back, and consequently visible to the spectator. They appeared more pink at the extremities than were the arms. The hands were busy with the strings of the apron; they undid them, dropped the strings, and moved up to the woman's shoulders; there they took hold of the apron string that ran behind the woman's neck, lifted it over the woman's head, and carried the apron by it out of sight.

The circle of vision lingered over the open portion of window. All that could clearly be seen through the open window was a corner of a table; shadows lay behind the table. The circle trembled. Once it moved away from the window, travelled towards the right, inspected the back door with its square pane of green bottle glass, moved right again, looked into the window of the room on the right of the back door, which was the dining-room, slid upwards over the pattern of the brickwork with its horizontal and vertical lines, and then worked left again, peering over the sills of the three windows on the first floor as it went: the window of the bathroom, the central window, belonging to a spare bedroom, and another window belonging to a second spare bedroom; in all of these windows, no movement could be sighted. The circle of vision slanted away across the house as S removed the telescope from his eye.

He blinked and pinched his nose at the bridge with the index finger and thumb of his left hand. Using both hands, he pressed both ends of the telescope so that the three brass sections slid one into the other and all slid into the outer barrel, which measured some fifteen centimetres; it was bound in worn leather.

6

S stood upright, put his hands into his pockets, removed them almost at once, brushed the knees of his trousers, and returned his hands to the pockets. He yawned and blinked his eyes.

The floor of the room was built of thick wooden planks running from side to side in which two colours predominated, a darker brown tone in the hollows, where the timber was rough and splintery, and yellow on the raised parts, which had been smoothed by tread; the effect was approximately of tawny hair. S crossed the length of this flooring in ten paces until he stood by the top of the rough hewn structure of wooden steps that led up from the floor below.

A square trapdoor also made of wood leant against the back wall of the room. S grasped it with his right hand and brought it over, first pulling and then lowering it, until the trapdoor fitted into a groove and the structure of wooden steps was concealed from view.

Near to the spot where the trapdoor had rested when it was open was a small square window, hardly bigger than a man's hand and situated only half a metre above the floor. This small window occupied the centre of the back wall of the room. Although its glass was cracked and dirty, a view could be seen through it if one stooped down. It looked out across a small patch of ground filled by straggling elder bush and nettles to the privet hedge dividing the garden from a garden beyond it. Of the four sides of the square plot of land belonging to Mr. Mary, this boundary behind the old brick building was the only one not marked by a brick wall. The privet hedge was a metre and a quarter high. On the other side of it lay the property of a single man whose maternal grandfather had constructed a lighthouse in the southern hemisphere; it was said that this architectural achievement had been acknowledged by a knighthood. S glanced out of the small square window and then straightened his back. He began to walk up and down the room.

It was only possible to walk upright near the central axis of the room. Overhead sloped the bare beams that supported the roof of the old brick building; the curling orange tiles were visible between the beams, with chinks of light among them where they had become dislodged. Along the two long sides of the room, the roof sloped down to within a metre and a half of the floor. These side walls and the front and rear walls had at some date been whitewashed; at a later date, they had been papered with wallpaper of a light orange colour covered with bunches of flowers as big as dinner plates, each bunch divided from the next by a representation of brown trellis. Much of this paper had peeled away or had been pulled off. In the blank spaces where it had hung, the bricks showed through the old whitewash. When the whitewash was touched, it came off in a cloud of powder.

The rear or south-west wall of the room rose up to a central point to meet the long central roof tree. The corresponding central point on the front or north-east wall of the room was not visible, for, at a short distance below, a platform had been built out into the room. This platform was the floor of a small compartment designed for pigeons and entered from without by a pattern of eight holes let into the brickwork for that purpose. Only one pigeon, designated X, now used this pigeon loft, the rear of which was boarded across so that birds could not enter the attic.

The long central roof tree was supported in three places by beams and cross-beams, the latter coming down to within a metre and a half of the tawny floor. As he walked up and down, S avoided these three low cross-beams in a practised manner, ducking his head and shoulders without breaking his stride or removing his hands from the pockets of his trousers.

Near the middle one of these three cross-beams, and placed to one side so that its lid almost touched the tiles, was a black stove. The stove stood on an iron tray. Although cylindrical in shape, from top to bottom the stove was embellished by grills, traps, doors, lids, vents, slides, dampers, patent pokers, spinwheels, knobs, sliding panels, catches, bulges, decorations, flanges, and a mica eye no larger than the eyepiece of S's telescope. The lid on top was ornamented, while round the lid on the body of the stove, written there in florid and raised imitation of a person's handwriting, were the words Stentorian 1888. These two words almost surrounded the lid.

From a point at the back of the stove rose a pipe thicker than a man's upper arm. The upper end of it, which was protected from rain by a raised and jointed cap, protruded through the roof, thus enabling any smoke generated in the stove to be released outside.

Beside the stove, in the iron tray on which the stove stood, lay pieces of wood of various kinds, pithy lengths of elder wood, beech twigs, a stout piece of bamboo, broken and hairy strips of white wood off some kind of packing case—one or two with nails protruding from them—and dark fragments of wood that might have been chopped off old furniture. A hatchet lay beside the wood.

When S had walked up and down the room past the stove some two dozen times, thus avoiding the three low beams some six dozen times, and each time without pausing in his stride or removing his hands from the pockets of his flannel trousers, he retired to a log of wood close by the round window that gave a view of the back of the house, and sat down upon it. This log bore on its uppermost surface innumerable scars where it had been struck by a blade, possibly by a hatchet. Most of the cuts were less than five centimetres long. Where two or more intersected, the bark of the log had in some cases sprung away, revealing a triangle of the lighter wood underneath.

Apart from the log and the stove, the room contained only two pieces of furniture.

One of these pieces was hung between the first and the second of the low-cross-beams. It was a canvas hammock. From each end of this hammock, a converging series of ropes ran to a pair of thick metal rings; these rings were hung over two large nails driven deep, one into the first and one into the second of the beams. From the hammock hung the corners of two grey blankets and an arrangement of sacks stuffed with folded newspaper and strung together with garden twine to form a kind of bedspread.

The other piece of furniture was a long arrangement of shelves and partitions which stood along the south-east wall, on S's left hand as he sat on the log with his back to the round window that commanded a view of the house. This shelving had once been used to house various equipment appertaining to pigeons, nesting boxes, bags filled with round black pellets, perches, grit, small numbered rings made of a metal like pewter.

Some of this equipment still remained, though in the main the shelving was monopolized by articles belonging to or acquired by S.

Among these articles, the following could be distinguished: a storm lantern of antique design; a bowler hat; two empty jam jars; a patent inhaler made to fit the nostril; a streamlined pottery representation of a cart-horse, the head missing; a pair of nail clippers; a collection of nail clippings, gathered in an ash tray; a mousetrap; part of the skeleton of a long-eared bat, discovered during an expedition to the chamber below; a brief-case purchased on the day that S had been given the post of secretary to Mr. Mary; the leg of an upright chair, worm-eaten; a fountain pen constructed of a tartan plastic; a hot water bottle; a brass handle off a drawer; a cotton reel on which was wound brown thread, with a needle balanced on the top of it; a pigskin purse, lying open and empty; a chipped china candlestick on which had been printed a crude representation of the devil; a paperbound book with a curled-up cover entitled “The Penguin Handyman”; three walnuts; a coach lantern with its glass smashed; another empty jam jar; an umbrella, across which lay a straw hat with a red and blue band round it; an oval notice made of metal coated with enamel, on which was printed the legend Beware of the Dog; an oblong notice of the same materials bearing the same legend; a punched bus ticket; a comb with teeth missing; a hair brush with hair missing; an upright shaving mirror with the mirror missing; an elaborate iron key; a cigarette packet; a free luncheon voucher; another jam jar, this one containing purple runner bean seeds; a brass hinge; an oily rag; a small basin with a floral design containing a razor, a shaving brush, and a spoon; a rag; a slice of green soap; an enamel chamber pot without handle; a brass crocodile eight centimetres long; a small collection of groceries and eating utensils, among which a blue and white striped cup and a packet of tea were noticeable; a row of books, including a “Typist's Desk Book”; “Low Point X”; Victor Hugo's “Les Misérables”; “Pickwick Papers” without its cover; “Pregnancy—Conception to Childbirth”; Band I of Spengler's “Der Untergang des Abendlandes”; “Toys Through the Ages”; “Living for Jesus”; “First Steps in the Bible”; “First Steps in Chemistry”; “First Steps in Philosophy”; “Understanding God”; “A Shorter Shorthand Manual”; “Sex in Practice”; “Black's Picturesque Tourist of England”; “My Alps,” by Mrs. Meade; and the “Boy's Own Paper” for the second week in August, 19—.

None of these articles was free of dust. The dust was like a very fine powder, and sometimes noticeably white or orange in tone.

S selected the “Boy's Own Paper” and sat down on the scarred log with it. He began to read episode three of The Secret of The Grey Mill. When he had read the first two coumns, he put the magazine down, laying it on the planking open and face-upwards, and knelt to look out of the round window.

S, the watchful S, the ex-secretary—there was something predatory about him. A more menacing character than G, thought Domoladossa. But could events so be interpreted? Suppose this strange world, this Probability A, was so strange it knew no sin? Suppose God had a myriad worlds, all lying there like nursery beds, in which He tried out various combinations of sin or innocence?

As he conjectured, Domoladossa's eyes rested on the desk photograph of his wife. From beyond its convenient frame, the Distinguishers were watching him.

There were four Distinguishers on duty at present, all standing gravely in the open air, gazing at the tall manifestation, on which Domoladossa could be seen at his desk, leafing through the report.

“He looks much as we do.”

“Obviously a world of almost co-determinate synchronicity.”

“But we have no key to scale.”