Report on Probability A Read online

  “I’d say we’ve run into some kind of mental reflection-distortion effect—hitherto unknown, as they say in the Sunday supplements.”

  “Maybe so. Or maybe the key to it all lies in that report. Hey!—Suppose that report comes from the real world! Suppose the guys reading it, and the guys on the hillside watching them, and us watching THEM, are FALSE worlds, phase echoes.… Makes your flesh creep, doesn’t it?”

  The Congressman said, “All we are after is facts. We don’t have to decide what reality is, thank God!”

  Cloud began to thicken over the house. The sun was obscured. Leaves blew across the asparagus bed; some rolled over the tops of the three mounds. To the left of the asparagus bed, a fat pigeon flapped and clattered its wings and rose to perch on a low privet hedge that fringed a gravel walk. Further away from the watcher, a black and white cat rose from behind a stem of privet and stalked away towards the house. Its tail was black, with a white tip at the end of it. The tail was carried high; the white tip twitched gently as the cat walked away. The pigeon rose from the privet hedge to fly awkwardly into an apple tree.

  5

  The room above the old coach house had for its ceiling an inverted V of dark beams which supported old tiles of a mellow orange. Between the beams were spiders’ webs; many of the webs were grey with dust. At the far end of the room was a small square window only a few centimetres above the level of the floor. The room was divided into three by supporting cross-beams of dark wood. The light in the room was dim. Between the two crossbeams nearest to S hung a hammock, made of canvas and suspended by rope. Over the sides of this hammock hung some sacks stitched together with garden twine, the ends of one or more blankets, and part of the face of a toy bear. The bear’s nose was indicated with black wool stitched in a square over the beige material of the head. The bear had no mouth. It had one amber eye, which seemed to look down at S.

  S rose to his feet and laid the bear so that it did not protrude over the side of the hammock. To do this, he reached over the first of the low cross-beams from which the hammock was suspended. A picture hung on S’s side of the beam. His shirt caught the corner of the picture frame, setting it swinging. S stepped back and steadied it.

  The picture was in black and white, though behind the glass both the black of the print and the white of the paper were faded. The picture showed a man and a woman touching each other, the man dressed in the garb of a shepherd, the woman in some sort of smock, worn over a skirt; it was not certain that she was not partially undressed. The shepherd was clearly neglecting his sheep, which had begun to stray into a field of corn, to secure the attention of the girl. It was difficult to understand from the picture whether his efforts to interest her were meeting with success, for her look could be read either as scornful or as one of sly desire.

  The shepherd was holding out for her inspection a moth of a certain species which he had caught. The girl was looking away from this moth towards him. It was impossible to determine whether he would stand a better chance of winning the girl’s complaisance (if that was what he sought) by abandoning his attempt to interest her in the moth, perhaps by letting it fly away, and concentrating on less indirect attempts at persuasion, such as stroking her tawny hair and paying her compliments, or by continuing to exhibit the captive moth, offering at the same time a sort of lecture on natural history which might win the girl’s confidence and be turned later to good effect as it led to more intimate conversation.

  The situation was possibly as challenging for the shepherd to resolve as it was for the onlooker. If the girl was married to the shepherd’s employer, the situation might be even more difficult. For it was possible that under her heavy lids she was looking at him in a way which he was at liberty to misinterpret as encouraging; he might then run his hands through that tawny hair, so soft about the nape of the neck; he might even attempt—half succeed!—to kiss that plump underlip; and she might then go to her husband and reveal what had taken place, thus involving the shepherd in a number of troubles; or, once in that difficult position, he might be unsure whether it had been brought about because the girl had told her husband voluntarily, or whether, in his plodding way, the husband had forced a confession from her. He might be dismissed from his post, to hover for ever after like a troubled spirit about the scene and cause of the disaster.

  “This is another discussion of the painting of Holman Hunt’s!” exclaimed the Suppressor of the Archives, who was acting as the senior juryman of the ten.

  He walked softly across the darkened room and laid his hand on the shoulder of the tranced woman, who immediately ceased to deliver her report. As her sing-song voice died, the jurymen seemed to come alive. One of them, whose official role was Impaler of Distortions, touched his lamp and said, “Since, it seems to me, this Holman Hunt painting has fully as much substance as the world in which the Wandering Virgin now finds herself, I took the liberty to have my servant Imago bring us a facsimile of the work in question. Here it is now. Imago!”

  A man in ragged velvet advanced from the rear of the court bearing a large canvas, which he held before each of the jurymen in turn. The jurymen scrutinized it with varying degrees of absorpion.

  “As you will observe,” said the Impaler, “the Wandering Virgin has given us what in some respects we must regard as an accurate report on this minor and totally negligible work of art, though I myself would have placed more emphasis on the banal symbolism of the painting—that, for instance, the young shepherd carries a ram’s horn slung over one shoulder, possibly denoting cuckoldry, or that the girl is nursing, not only green apples, but a cloth-bound volume entitled ‘Low Point X,’ which may be taken as a reference to her mental state, or that—”

  The jurymen knew the length of the Impaler’s speeches. The Impersonator of Sorrows, interrupting, said, “While agreeing that it is certainly a coincidence that this … er, universe that the Virgin describes should contain a painting which clearly belongs in our own universe—a fairly well known painting by a minor Island English artist—I am surprised, Impaler, that you should therefore assume that this universe has the same degree of actuality as the painting. We know the painting exists, but do we know the universe exists? No! Quite clearly, the Virgin is describing some inner world of her own, which cannot be regarded as real or actual just because it contains external referents.”

  “How then do you account for Domoladossa and this fellow Growleth, Master Impersonator?” enquired the Suppressor.

  “Why sir, how, sir? By understanding that they are merely additional bulwarks of the dear Virgin’s imaginings: and clearly if we are to leave here alive, we must decide that they are merely imaginings and the ‘world’ containing G and S and the rest mere fancy.”

  The Image Motivator waved the painting aside and said, with a trace of impatience, “Let us not be too sophisticated, lest we miss the point. The Wandering Virgin has provided us with facts in her report on this universe which she could not have known in her own right. I will give you an instance.

  “Happily, the Impaler of Distortions is not the only dilettante in the arts. I have long known this canvas of the Hireling Shepherd and—unlike our friend apparently—rate it very highly in the social history of oil-painting. It embodies all the preoccupations of the Victorian Age, such as their attitude towards nature and the promptings of morality. It also embodies—demonstrates, perhaps I should say—their painful incarceration within time, with which they were unable to come to terms even upon a theoretical level. So their painters became masters of the Unresolved, of the What Next? instant: the dilemma, the unanswered question, the suspended gesture, the pause before destruction—or, on the other hand, the hour of disaster, nemesis, prompting a glance back at previous moments. Almost all the greatest Victorian pictures represent the imprisonment of beings in a temporal structure that seemed at the time to admit of no escape; so the paintings are cathartic in essence.

  “The Hireling Shepherd, in company with other masterpieces of its period, is
, in the last analysis, a psychodynamic drama of unresolved time, although executed in representational mode, as was then the fashion. And, incidentally, that S also sees it this way is confirmed by his identifying his own situation with the one depicted by Hunt.

  “Now, the Wandering Virgin’s report hints at just this understanding of Victorian painting, which I suggest is knowledge that does not normally belong to our fair traveller. Therefore, the report is being beamed to her by some entity, possibly Mr. Mary himself—or his wife, for in some ways she seems to be the crucial character—who actually lives in the universe reported on. Which is proof sufficient that it exists, gentlemen.”

  “That’s all nonsense!” said the Impersonator, but the Squire of Reason said, “I like the Motivator’s logic, sirs. I go along with that. Time is of the essence here. Is not the whole report an account of the failure of time in that particular universe, the Marian Universe, as we might conveniently term it, just as we are threatened with a temporaneous collapse here? Is it not a fact that these people we hear about are rendered immobile, powerless—no doubt by a time-failure? Suppressor, pray induce our wandering lady to proceed!”

  The white below the picture was flecked with brown spots. The floor below the picture was uneven. The shoes were dusty. The trousers were dusty. S banged at the trousers with his right hand.

  Bowing his shoulders, he moved under the cross-beam towards a long arrangement of shelves and partitions that stood against the wall behind the hammock. On and in these shelves was a collection of articles belonging to or acquired by S, including three empty jam jars and a jar containing runner bean seeds; a bowler hat, in the rim of which lay a patent inhaler designed to fit up a nostril; a worm-eaten leg of an upright chair; a tartan plastic fountain pen; a perished hot water bottle; a brass handle off a drawer; a cotton reel containing brown thread; an empty pigskin purse; a china candlestick of an earlier age, on which was printed a representation of a devil breathing fire; a paperbound book entitled “Low Point X,” the cover of which curled upwards, exposing brown pages; a broken coach lantern lying cheek-by-jowl with a group of three walnuts; a straw hat of the kind called “boater,” bound round by a red and blue ribbon; an umbrella with a handle representing a fox’s head lying under the boater; two enamel notices bearing the legend Beware of the Dog in black letters; a small collection of groceries and eating utensils, including a cracked blue and white cup and an unopened tin of sardines; a small brass crocodile; a bundle of newspaper; an enamel chamber pot with no handle; some shaving things lying in a small basin with floral decorations on it; a brass hinge and an iron key; an ancient tennis ball with most of its knap missing; a brief-case; the skeleton of a long-eared bat with its left ear missing; a pottery cart-horse with its head missing; and a mousetrap still bearing a crumb of cheese on its single rusty tooth. Most of these articles were covered with a fine dust. S picked up the bundle of newspaper that lay next to the brass crocodile and climbed with it into the hammock.

  Over his body he arranged two grey woollen blankets and a sort of rug made out of sacks stuffed with newspaper. Opening the newspaper, he lifted from it half of a pork pie, which had been cut through the middle, so that half of a hard-boiled egg was revealed, yellow and white, embalmed in the middle of the meat. S held it in his right hand, biting into it, while with his left hand he smoothed out the newspaper against the sack covering his left leg.

  When he had smoothed the newspaper sufficiently, he brought it up so that it caught the light from the round window. He was regarding a page filled with reviews of books. He began to read the first review at the top of the left-hand column; it dealt with a volume entitled “The Ethics of Language,” and commenced with the sentence: With a seeming inevitability, every branch of knowledge develops its own specialized concepts. After he had stuffed the last chunk of pie into his mouth, S wiped his hands on the paper and dropped it onto the floor.

  He adjusted a dismembered bear more comfortably under his head and lay back on the hammock, his eyes gazing up at the tiles visible between the beams overhead. Occasionally he blinked his eyes.

  “Are you in there, because I’m going home now?”

  S sat up. He looked to the right side and to the left side. He slid out of the hammock and went to the window, crouching to the left of it and peering to the right. Outside, it was dull, and the sky was thick with cloud. His gaze met a dirt path, running parallel with an asparagus bed, with a stretch of lawn behind it. A plump woman stood on the dirt path, dresed in a voluminous kidney-coloured coat, and wearing on her head a hat on which artificial flowers gleamed. She carried a basket in her left hand. With her right hand she beckoned up at S.

  “I said I’m off home now. I’ve got my own work to do, you know, unlike some people. Here’s your lamp been standing here. Come and take it in before it starts to rain.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Never mind about them. I’ve done the washing up and they’re in the sitting-room over coffee. It’s going to pour with rain before I get home, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Has he got his gun?”

  “You talk so silly. Are you coming down to get this lamp? I filled it for you this morning.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Well, are you coming down or aren’t you?”

  “Why didn’t you put it beside the little door?”

  “Look, if he found I was pinching his paraffin, there’d be trouble. You know what Mr. Mary is. Are you coming down before I go?”

  “I’ll come down presently. I was having a sleep.”

  “Having a sleep! Did you enjoy the pie? I’m off. I’ve got work of my own. I haven’t got all day. It’s coming on to rain.”

  “I’ll be down presently.”

  “I’m off then. I’ll see you tomorrow, I suppose.”

  “Vi—he saw me this morning.”

  “It is his garden, you know. Cheerio, then.”

  She turned her back on the old brick building and began walking up the dirt path beside the asparagus bed, carrying her basket in her left hand.

  When she reached the lawn at the back of the house, she turned right and went across to a garage built mainly of asbestos sheets and concrete pillars. In the back of this garage was a door, which she opened. She went into the garage.

  6

  At the back of the garage, there was a square hole in the ceiling where a ladder bolted to the wall gave access to the roof space. The plump woman directed her gaze up towards this space.

  “Just going to pick up my umbrella and I’m off. Here’s a bit of cake for you.”

  “Don’t know what I’d do without you, that’s a fact,”

  “Well, come and get it then, or shall I leave it on the bench here? Ooh, you men, you don’t half want looking after.”

  “You’re always in such a hurry, Violet. I’m coming down.”

  “I’ve got work of my own. It’s coming on to rain by the looks of things. I’ve just remembered I’ve forgotten my umbrella. I’ll forget my own head one of these days.”

  “How’d you forget a thing that size? Where’s the cake?”

  A man in stockinged feet climbed down the upright ladder that was bolted to the rear wall of the concrete and asbestos garage. He was small and hard. He grinned at the plump woman. He continued to grin till her face responded.

  “Where’s this bit of cake you brought me, then, Violet? Hand it over. I can’t stand here all day. Some of us have work to do.”

  “Yes, and I don’t want any of your lip! It’s only a small slice, so that they wouldn’t miss it.”

  “He wouldn’t come in here looking for it if he did miss it.”

  “Don’t you be so cocky. You men’ll try him too far one of these days. George will wonder where I’ve got to, standing here.”

  “And what about her?”

  “What about her?”

  “Don’t give me that. Did she talk about me this morning?”

  “I don’t tell tales, so it’s no good t
rying to get round me. She’ll be going out to see her friend in half an hour, if you must know.”

  “I’ll drive her there.”

  “Oh shut up! You make me sick, all three of you. I’m going.”

  “I would. I’d drive her there. I often get in the car and pretend to be driving. It helps pass the time. Here we go, I say. Where you will, Madam Jeanette. Just passing through Windsor, Guildford, Hindhead, Arundel, Chichester. Lovely day for a drive. Is madam comfortable?”

  “Honest, I think you’re mad.”

  “Jump in. I’ll give you a ride. You’re always in such a hurry.”

  “I’ve got some shopping to do before I get home. George will be wondering where I am. I must remember to pick up that umbrella as I go. A chap like you, pretending to drive a car! I’d better get on before it rains.”

  “See you tomorrow, then. Thanks for the cake.”

  “Why don’t you get out of here before something terrible happens?”

  “See you tomorrow, Violet.”

  Against the rear wall of the garage, an upright ladder had been bolted. Clutching his slice of cake in one hand, C climbed lightly up the ladder and through a square hole in the ceiling. He emerged in a narrow storage space under the roof.

  The Governor, Domoladossa, and Midlakemela stared at each other in surprise.

  “It’s an extrordinary situation,” the latter said. “I’d say this probability world, if that is what it is, is several degrees from ours. Even the names of the places we’ve been given are entirely foreign.”

  “And their behavior!” said the Governor. “Let’s get this clear. Here’s the house. There’s a café opposite, where apparently nobody pays for food. In the grounds of the house, there’s a wooden summerhouse on one side, an old stable at the back, and a garage on the other side. We know there’s an ex-gardener camping out more or less permanently in the summerhouse, and an ex-secretary camping out in the old stable. Now we’re given to understand there’s an ex-chauffeur hiding out over the garage! Quite unbelievable!”