Dyson On The Box

It was an awfully good day for Dyson. He put the phone down and began to walk up and down the office, frowning furiously with pleasure.

"They want me to appear on television, Bob!" he cried.

"Oh," said Bob, looking up from a book review he was writing, and shifting the toffee from one side of his mouth to the other. "Good."

"They've just phoned. It's one of these BBC discussion programs."

Galley proofs of religious articles and crossword puzzles due to appear in future issues of the paper stirred on their hooks in the wind of Dyson's passage. Pieces of typescript about changing seasons in the countryside and memoranda saying, "Check w Straker on immac concep VM," "Ring Morley find out whre t hell copy for Fri is," detached themselves from the drifts of paper on his desk and floated down to the floor. Bob watched Dyson's progress with polite interest. The only other person in the paper's crossword/countryside/religious department was poor old Eddy Moulton. But he was long past retiring age, and not expected to pay attention to anything Dyson said or did. In any case, he was asleep.

"Bob!" said Dyson. "This is exactly what I've always wanted! Do you realize that? This is exactly what I've been waiting for!"

"I know," said Bob. "Congratulations, John."

"This has always been my idea, to break into television!"

"I know."

"A journalist's finished at forty, Bob. Of course, this probably won't lead to anything. One mustn't set too much store by it. I shall probably make a terrible cock of it."

"I'm sure you won't, John."

"Well, I have had a certain amount of experience in radio, doing talks for the West African service, and so on. That must count for something."

He gazed out of the window, his hands behind his back, clapping the palms together.

"What's the program about?" asked Bob.

"Oh, something about race. You know, the usual thing. Apparently they want someone with actual experience of living in a multiracial community."

Bob stared at him.

"I didn't know you'd lived in a multiracial community, John."

"Bob, you know we have West Indians living next door to us! We have four West Indian households in the road. You know that, Bob."

"Oh, I see. How did the television people find out?"

"Well, the program's being produced by a man called Jack de Sousa. Our wives were at Newnham together--we had the De Sousas out to tea one Sunday. Anyway, Jack wants me to take part in a discussion about the problems involved. Apparently the chairman's going to be Norman Ward Westerman. Have you seen him on television, Bob?"

"No."

"He's marvelous, Bob. He's someone I really do feel the most tremendous respect for. Oh, God, Bob! This is an awfully good day for me!"

Dyson's awfully good day got better and better. Just before lunch, one of De Sousa's assistants at the television company rang to say that Lord Boddy had agreed to take part in the program.

"Who's Lord Boddy, John?" asked Bob, when Dyson reported this to him, walking up and down the office once again.

"Oh, God, Bob, you're impossible! You must know who Lord Boddy is!"

"I'm sorry, John."

Dyson picked up the Who's Who and studied it in silence for some moments.

(continued on page 130)Dyson on the box(continued from page 125)

"His father was Edward Boddy, before he got the title," he announced. "The present Lord Boddy's Christian names are Frank Walter. Married, with two sons. Publications: The Case for Disarmament (1939); Let Victory Be Ours (1942); The Russians--Our Comrades! (1945); World Communism: a Study in Tyranny (1949); Race: the Challenge Within (1963)... oh, and (edited) The Man in the Tweed Plus-Fours (The Diaries and Letters of the First Lord Boddy)."

"I see," said Bob. "Why don't we go out and have some lunch before the phone rings again?"

"All right. But listen--this is interesting. His clubs are the National Liberal and the RAC."

"What's interesting about that, John?"

Dyson snapped Who's Who shut and tossed it on his desk. "You're a shit, Bob," he said, grinning. "Eddy, we'll be in the Gates."

• • •

That evening Bob had dinner with the Dysons, as he often did, and he and Jannie Dyson enjoyed irritating John.

"It's not just the money," Dyson said, stabbing at his gigot aux haricots and sending a scatter of beans across the table. "Though I may say that I shall be getting twenty-five guineas next Thursday for doing nothing but sit around in a television studio for half an hour, instead of beating my brains out all weekend to write a script for the BBC Overseas Service and getting ten guineas for it. That's of some passing interest to me, I must admit, even if it isn't to Jannie--though I dare say she'll help me spend the money."

"I thought you told me you'd be getting a hundred guineas a time if you were a television personality?" said Bob.

"So I shall," said Dyson irritably, "if I make a success of this and begin to make a name for myself. And that's the real point. It's not just the money..."

He stopped suddenly and took another mouthful of lamb.

"What is it, then?" said Jannie.

"Well," said Dyson, chewing hard, "I must admit that I should like to make a name for myself, just for its own sake."

"Oh, John!" said Jannie, laughing. Bob grinned silently.

"All right," said Dyson. "You may laugh if you like. But I'm thinking purely of the practical advantages."

Bob and Jannie laughed again.

"Look, Jannie," said Dyson seriously. "Do you remember when we wanted to get Gawain into Almeira Road school, and we couldn't, because all the middle-class parents in S. W. 23 were trying to get their kids into Almeira Road, and we lived just over the zoning boundary? Well, do you honestly think the answer would have been the same if I'd been Norman Ward Westerman or Lord Boddy?"

"You mean you'd have been able to pull strings?" said Bob.

"I shouldn't have pulled strings--other people would have pulled them for me! 'If we had Lord Boddy in the parent-teacher association,' they'd think, 'we might have a little influence at County Hall.' Or they'd realize that it might be rather agreeable to say to visiting parents,'That's Noel Westerman--you know, Norman Ward Westerman's son. He's a scamp--aren't you, Noel?' Pat-pat on Noel's well-connected head."

Bob and Jannie gazed at him.

"Listen, if I wasn't just John Dyson, but The John Dyson, people wouldn't waste their time asking me to do tenguinea talks for the Overseas Service. They'd know I'd be fully occupied doing pieces for Life or Esquire at a thousand dollars a time--or going on television for a hundred guineas."

"You sound very impassioned, John," said Bob.

"Well, I am, Bob. I am very impassioned. Look, I don't want to be so famous that I have to write autographs all over the place and can't travel by bus for fear of being mobbed. But do you think that, if I was The John Dyson, crowded restaurants wouldn't be able to find a place for me? Don't you think The John Dyson would have a better chance of getting theater seats?"

"Eat up your meat, John," said Jannie. "You haven't put a mouthful in for the last ten minutes."

"I have a serious point," said Dyson. "Nowadays it's not excellence that leads to celebrity, but celebrity that leads to excellence. One makes one's reputation, and that reputation enables one to achieve the conditions in which one can do good work."

"You do talk a lot of shit sometimes, John," said Bob mildly.

"It's not shit, Bob! Look, take me. Let's be honest with ourselves. I'm a small but vital link in the business of producing one of the most important daily newspapers in the world. But shouldn't I do better if I weren't driven from pillar to post to supplement my salary? Well, shouldn't I?"

"You'd bring the crossword stock up to strength?"

"Among other things."

"Aren't you going to have any more?" asked Jannie.

Dyson pushed his plate away. "It's too rich for me--it always gives me indigestion. I don't know why you keep serving it." He sat pouting and rubbing his hands together, looking at various parts of the table.

"Then shall we take our puddings into the next room and watch television?" she suggested.

"Load of shit," said Dyson.

"There might be a discussion of the color problem," said Bob.

"Oh, very sarcastic."

That night it was an old movie, and they all went in to watch.

• • •

Dyson made thorough preparations for his television appearance. All weekend he drove about the outer suburbs with Jannie and the boys, calling on relatives and letting fall the news in the course of conversation.

"The poor old souls like to know what one's doing," he explained to Jannie as they jerked along in the traffic stream between aunt and aunt.

At the office during the week he found that circumstances made it necessary for him to ring most of his influential friends and acquaintances--Sims, the paper's tame Q. C.; Sir William Paice; Brent-Williamson, the literary editor; Huysmanns at the French embassy. "I hope you'll be watching the box on Thursday night," he said to each of them in a humorous voice. "What? Well, I'm going to be on...Yes! Isn't it preposterous? Ten-forty-five on the commercial--some ghastly program called The Human Scene."

Bob's gaze disconcerted him. He would turn his back on him while he was talking, or look down smiling into the mouthpiece.

"It's naughty of me, I know," he would say as he put the phone down. Or: "I'm sorry, Bob. I'm behaving outrageously."

And he would dial another number.

He also gave some serious thought to how he should look. Should he lean forward passionately and denounce things? Or should he sit back in his chair and smile calmly at the idiocies of mankind? He rehearsed a calm smile in front of the mirror at home; it looked like an apologetic grin. He tried an expression of passionate commitment; it came out indistinguishable from defensive surliness. Either way, his finger tips became moist with sweat at the thought of producing the expression in front of the television cameras.

There was also the question of what he was going to say. He began to note down suitable thoughts and epigrams on pieces of office copy paper, not really with the intention of learning them off by heart, but with the idea that he might put them in his jacket pocket and touch them from time to time during the program to give himself reassurance, knowing that if the worst really came to the worst, he could take them out and refresh his memory.

"T prob of t multiracial soc," he wrote, "is in ess merely t mod versn of t time-hon prob of unitg tribes in nationhd."

(continued overleaf)

The real problem was to avoid the obvious. He was not being paid 25 guineas to tell people what they could manage to think out themselves for nothing.

"T troub is," he tried, "tt we aren't prej enough! Shd educ ourselves to be dply & bttrly prej--agnst prej!"

He tried it over uneasily in front of the mirror. If one of his deans or canons had written it in a meditation, he would have read it out to Bob in a mockclerical voice, and deleted it, snarling. However, this was a television program, not a newspaper article. Different criteria applied.

The trouble was that they would all agree with one another. They would all sit round deploring racial prejudice and suggesting how to avoid it. Perhaps he should try to play the devil's advocate? He noted down one or two cautiously controversial points. "Mst try to undrstnd att of man whse hse val falls.--Ind ckng delightfl but hly fragrnt.--Mst admit tt I pers h diff in undrstndg next-dr neighbr's Eng."

He would keep the liberal thoughts in his left-hand pocket, he decided, and the provocative ones in his right-hand pocket. Then he would be able to put his hand immediately on whatever he required. And jokes, of course--he'd need jokes. He could keep a list of jokes in his inside breast pocket. The idea of race opened up a few humorous possibilities. Something about the three-legged race, perhaps, or the egg-and-spoon race? Bn estab by scientists tt all races are of eql intell, except prhps egg-&-spn race. Something along those lines. Professionalism, that was what counted--thorough, serious preparation for even the most informal and evanescent of undertakings.

Whenever Dyson's phone rang that week, it was the television company. Could he give them a few facts about himself for the company's press release? They hoped that he would be able to join the other participants for dinner at the studios beforehand. A car would be sent for him at 7:30. The final members of the team had now been settled--Miss Ruth Drax, a social worker, and Mr. Lewis Williamson, a barrister from Trinidad. The car would be coming at eight. A list of likely topics of discussion was on its way to him by post.

"Would you like to go round and hold Jannie's hand on Thursday night, Bob?" said Dyson at the office one morning. "I'd be awfully obliged if you would. She's in a terrible state about the whole thing, poor poppet."

"I'm in rather a state about it myself, John," said Bob.

"You can hold each other's hand, then. I'm in a frightful state about it, too, and there's no one to hold my hand. It's funny--I never get in a state about doing radio programs. Do you, Bob?"

"I don't do radio programs, John."

"Of course you don't. I get a few qualms just before the green light comes on. Nothing to worry about, though. But I must admit, when I think about Thursday night I feel absolutely sick with nerves. Do you do any television, Bob? I can't remember."

"You know I don't, John."

"You're very sensible, Bob. Take my advice--stick to good old steam radio."

• • •

Dyson had expected to find the television studios a blaze of activity in the middle of the evening viewing hours, and humbly anticipated that he would himself be treated as a completely unimportant part of the machine--jostled indifferently in the corridors by actors, musicians and cameramen, sighed at offensively in the studio by the technicians and professionals. But when he stepped out of the Humber Snipe that had been sent to pick him up, he found that the building was in darkness and apparently deserted. The only light he could see was in the lobby, and the only person in the lobby was an anxious girl with a clipboard who was waiting to greet him personally, and who seemed personally grateful for his skill in getting himself found and driven there by the company's chauffeur. She led him along deserted, echoing corridors; nothing was happening in the whole enormous building, he realized, but the tiny preparations for this one tiny program. All the rest of the evening's television was prefilmed, pretaped or provided by other companies.

The preparations for The Human Scene, Dyson discovered, were going forward in a room on the first floor furnished with a sea-blue fitted carpet, a number of discreetly abstract paintings and a walnut sideboard. A dozen or so well-bred men in dark suits--some of them, noted Dyson with interest, wearing brigade ties--were standing about drinking gin and smiling agreeably at one another's jokes. A selection of them pressed forward upon Dyson deferentially, introducing themselves, fetching him drinks and salted peanuts. Like the girl with the clipboard, they seemed consumed with gratitude and admiration for his skill in getting there. "You got here all right, then?" they asked anxiously. "The driver found you all right? You found your way upstairs without any difficulty?"

The only person in the room Dyson recognized was De Sousa, the producer, and he seemed to be the least important of them all. There was a woman--presumably Miss Drax, the social worker, and a man with rather dark skin--clearly Williamson, the Trinidadian barrister. Dyson never caught the names of any of the others, or found out what they did, apart from drinking the company's gin with a reassuring deftness. Dyson assumed they were the company's directors, bankers and financial advisors; they all had an air of unassuming integrity and human dignity that, in Dyson's experience, was acquired only by daily contact with very large sums of other people's money. He liked them, he discovered. He liked their deference and he liked their gin, and within ten minutes he was explaining to them exactly how the daily supply of crosswords in a newspaper was maintained. They were fascinated. "Really?" they said. "How extraordinarily interesting!" Dyson began to feel that everything was going to be all right. His pockets were full of remarks to make, and a bottle of bismuth in case he got nervous indigestion. He began to feel that he would not need either.

Lord Boddy arrived. He was a large, slow-moving man with bushy gray eyebrows and dandruff on his shoulders.

"I must tell you, Lord Boddy," said Dyson deferentially, "how very much I enjoyed that collection you did of your father's papers. Of course, I'm a great admirer of all your books."

"Really?" said Lord Boddy, pushing up his eyebrows with no less deference in return. "It's very good of you to say so. Most kind, most kind."

Deference bred deference. Lord Boddy, grasping his gin and tonic in his right hand and talking about the greatness of Asquith, put his left hand in his trouser pocket. A moment later Dyson realized that all the men listening to Lord Boddy had their left hands in their trouser pockets, too. His own left hand, he discovered, was in his trouser pocket. He took it out hastily, lest Lord Boddy notice it and jump to the conclusion that Dyson was mimicking him, and transferred it to his jacket pocket. At once Lord Boddy did the same, and one by one, as they listened and nodded, everyone else followed suit. Embarrassed, now that he had noticed what was happening, Dyson removed his hand from his jacket pocket and slipped it inconspicuously behind his back. Boddy, describing very slowly and empatically how Asquith had died just before he could meet him, put his own hand through the same maneuver, and one by one all the other spare left hands disappeared behind their owners' backs, too. Mutual deference could scarcely be carried further.

And yet, when Norman Ward Westerman arrived, it was. Dyson could imagine Lord Boddy and the executives gathered around him putting deference aside from time to time in order to get on with the gardening, or to discipline some delinquent guardsman. But Norman Ward Westerman was deference made flesh. When he bent that famous (continued on page 178)Dyson On The Box(continued from page 132) craggy face and strong jaw down from its natural elevation to the level of ordinary human beings, it was not to advance any opinions or tell any anecdotes of his own. It was purely to bring his ear reverentially into line with the mouth of whoever was speaking. "Exactly," he murmured. "Exactly." And Dyson knew from the depth of humility and reverence in his inflection that he was getting a larger fee than even Lord Boddy. Dyson felt awed by him. He felt awed by Lord Boddy, for that matter, and by the company in general. He felt awed by himself. They were all gods, gathered in godly discourse.

They moved into the next room and sat down to dinner. White-jacketed waiters tiptoed reverently around them, pouring hock with the frozen scampi, a claret with a fruity, full-bodied label to go with the reheated roast lamb. "Thank you," murmured Dyson with heartfelt respect to a waiter at his elbow.

"Thank you, sir," said the waiter.

"Thank you," said Dyson.

"Or take Baldwin," Norman Ward Westerman was saying to Lord Boddy. "I find him...an enigmatic figure. Would you think that was a fair assessment, Frank?"

"Oh, indeed. Indeed, indeed, indeed. I think that's a very fair assessment of him. It's rather interesting you should mention Baldwin, as a matter of fact, because I never met him."

"Didn't you? That's extraordinarily interesting."

"No, I never met Baldwin."

"You interest me, Frank, because I didn't know that at all."

Dyson felt he had grasped enough of the general principles of the conversation between Boddy and Westerman to risk joining in himself.

"I find Halifax a curiously intriguing figure," he said when there was a pause. "I don't know whether you'd agree?"

Westerman swung round in his chair to give Dyson his full attention.

"I think that is an awfully good point," he said. "Halifax is a figure who intrigues me, too. Do you find Halifax at all intriguing, Frank? Or do you feel that there's nothing really interesting about him?"

"No, I think, as Mr. Dyson says, Halifax is an extraordinarily intriguing figure. Most extraordinarily intriguing. But do you know, Norman, in all the years that Halifax held office, I never met him once."

"Really?" said Westerman. "That is absolutely fascinating."

"Not once."

"That is most incredibly interesting," said Dyson.

The meal went by like a dream. Dyson felt as though that small room, surrounded by the dark emptiness of the studios, was the one speck of warmth and life in an unpeopled universe. Of course, there were other subsidiary settlements, if one stopped to think. Somewhere in the building was a room where a hired chef was unfreezing the scampi, reheating the meat and opening the giant-economy can of fruit salad. Somewhere there was a studio with five black-leather armchairs waiting. But the real richness of life was concentrated here--brilliant conversation, warm mutual esteem, a man who had not known Baldwin or Halifax, and good claret warmed by discreet waiters on some radiator well out of sight. This, realized Dyson with a sense of homecoming, was where he belonged; this was the way of life for which his character and education had fitted him.

"Norman," said De Sousa as the coffee and brandy were being poured, "I wonder if we onght perhaps to have just a tiny natter about the program."

"I think that would be an awfully good idea, Jack," said Westerman. He took some cyclostyled papers out of his pocket and looked at them. "Well, as I understand it, Jack--tell me if I'm wrong--we open with the credits. Right?"

"Right," said De Sousa, lighting a small cigar.

"Then we come up on me in the studio. I say, 'Good evening. The film you're about to see is the record of a remarkable experiment in blah blah blah...'"

"All on Autocue."

"All on Autocue. Then we have the film. Then we come back to me in the studio and I say, 'The film you have just seen was an attempt to blah blah blah. Now we have here in the studio tonight four people who are vitally and personally concerned with the problems of living in a multiracial community. On my right is Lord Boddy, who was a member of the Royal Commission on blah blah blah...'"

"And you go right round the table."

"And I go right round the table. Then I'll turn to you, Frank, and say, 'Lord Boddy, what do you think of the experiment we have just seen? Do you think it holds out a ray of hope among the problems that perplex us all so sorely today?'"

"I say blah blah blah," said Lord Boddy.

"You say blah blah blah. Then we all join in blah blah blah. Then when I get the sign from the studio manager, I wind up and say, 'Well, then, the conclusions we seem to have reached tonight are blah blah blah.'"

"All on Autocue," said De Sousa.

"All on Autocue. I think that's all fairly well tied up, isn't it, Jack?"

"I think so. Is everybody happy?"

"Indeed, indeed, indeed," said Dyson. "I don't think I've ever enjoyed myself so much in my life."

They trooped down to the studio for the line-up, taking their glasses of brandy with them. A little of the festive warmth seemed to die out of the air as they took their places around the low coffee table in the corner of the great hangar. Williamson kept clearing his throat. Miss Drax smiled unhappily about her. Even Boddy, who had been telling Westerman as they came down the stairs how he had been at Bad Godesberg in 1938 just two days after Hitler and Chamberlain had left, trailed away into silence. Only Dyson lost none of his elation. When the studio manager asked him to say something to check the microphone levels, he recited the first few lines of The Wreck of the Deutschland with appropriate gestures. It seemed to amuse the studio crew. Really, he thought, this was his evening.

By the time they had been to makeup and tramped back up the stairs to have another drink, a definite uneasiness was beginning to settle over the whole company. The men with the brigade ties and their friends were running out of potential mutual acquaintances to describe. Miss Drax seemed to have caught the frog Williamson had had in his throat. Williamson, coming back from his second trip to the lavatory, passed Boddy on the way out for his third. Westerman, shuffling the cyclostyled papers about in his hands, dropped his glass and filled his shoes with brandy. Dyson watched them all with amazement. He himself was greatly excited, but not nervous in the least.

"The public just don't realize," said Williamson to him gloomily, "the terrific amount of work that goes into making one short half hour of television."

"Work?" said Dyson. "It's pure pleasure. I've never enjoyed anything so much in all my life. I'm absolutely bubbling over. I simply can't wait to get on."

"Good God," said Williamson.

One of the financial figures, still smiling deferentially, poured them both more brandy.

"I wonder if you could try and keep the bottle away from Lord Boddy," he said quietly. "I think perhaps he's had almost enough."

How interesting it was, thought Dyson, how extraordinarily intriguing, to find that out of the whole team the only one who was actually turning up trumps was himself.

"I think perhaps we might go down now," said De Sousa.

• • •

"I shan't be able to watch," said Jannie, as the film sequence in the first half of John's program unreeled meaninglessly in front of her. "Honestly, Bob, I shan't be able to watch. I know something awful will happen. Oh, Bob, supposing he's had too much to drink?"

"He'll be fine, Jannie," said Bob. "Stop fussing."

Jannie gripped the arms of her chair, trying to stop herself jumping out of it.

"What on earth's this stuff they're showing us now?" she demanded irritably.

"It's the film they're going to discuss."

"Oh, God, I know he's going to make a fool of himself. I know it, I know it, I know it!"

When the film ended and the face of the chairman appeared again, she put her hand over her eyes, unable to watch the screen. The chairman was introducing Lord Boddy. She had a vision of John sitting hunched up in his chair, as he did at home sometimes when things were going wrong, all dark and gaunt and unhappy. Oh, poor John! Poor John! But where was he? The chairman had been introducing people for an eternity, and still no sign of him. Perhaps he was ill. She imagined him standing in some white-tiled institutional lavatory, suffering from nervous nausea. Had he taken the bismuth with him? But better for him to be in a lavatory somewhere than for him to be sick on the program! Please God he wouldn't be sick on the program! Of course, they would turn the cameras...

"And on her left," said the chairman, "is Mr. John Dyson, a journalist and broadcaster who lives..."

And there he was! Involuntarily, she reached out and gripped Bob's hand. And what in the name of God was John up to? He was smiling and waving!

"What's he doing?" she cried, agonized, as the picture cut back to the chairman. "It's not that sort of program!"

"I don't know whether you noticed," said Bob, "but he was smoking."

"Smoking?"

"Didn't you see? He had a cigarette between his fingers."

"Don't be crazy, Bob. John hasn't smoked since he was an undergraduate."

"Well, he's smoking now, Jannie."

"Oh, God!" said Jannie, holding Bob's hand very tight. "I shan't be able to watch, Bob!"

"You're all right now, Jan. Lord Boddy's set for the night."

But someone was saying something at the same time as Lord Boddy, making him falter and finally stop in mid-stride. The cameras hunted round the team, trying to locate the intruder. They were all smoking, observed Jannie; but John, as she saw when the camera finally settled on him, was smoking more than most. He was smoking and talking simultaneously, taking little melodramatic puffs between phrases.

"If I might butt in here," he was saying (puff). "If I might possibly butt in a moment...(Puff, puff) I should just like to say that I find what Lord Boddy is saying extraordinarily interesting. Extraordinarily interesting."

He took another energetic puff and blew out a dense cloud of smoke at the camera as Lord Boddy resumed his discourse.

"Oh, God." said Jannie.

"Sh!" said Bob. Dyson was back in the conversation again.

"That is fascinating," he was saying. "Most fascinating. I find that absolutely fascinating."

Jannie squeezed Bob's hand so hard that he flinched.

"Poor John!" she said.

When Miss Drax' turn to speak came, Dyson was fascinated by her thesis, too.

"Indeed!" he kept murmuring. "Indeed, indeed!"

"Why is he behaving like this!" cried Jannie. "Why is he smoking and waving his arms about in that awful way?"

"He waves his arms about at the office sometimes," said Bob. "I don't object to that."

"But why does he keep saying things like 'Extraordinarily interesting' and 'Indeed, indeed'? I've never heard him say anything like that before."

"I've never heard him say 'Indeed, indeed,' I must admit."

Williamson was talking. Dyson turned out to be extraordinarily interested in his views, as well.

"Indeed," he murmured. "Indeed...indeed...Oh, God, indeed!"

Jannie sank down into her chair, trying to work out who would be watching the program. All John's family, of course. All her family. Her parents had invited the neighbors in to see it, too. Her friend Belinda Charles--she'd rung up to say she'd seen John's name in an article about the program in the paper.

"John Dyson," the chairman was saying, "as a journalist, do you agree with the suggestion that the press ought to take a firm moral lead and play down all news having to do with race relations?"

Dyson did not answer at once. He frowned, then leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette thoughtfully in the ashtray.

"He's got a sense of timing, anyway," said Bob.

"I can't bear it," said Jannie.

Dyson sat back and put his finger tips together, as if about to deliver his verdict. But at the last moment he changed his mind and, instead, leaned forward again and took another cigarette out of the box on the table.

"Oh, God, Bob!" said Jannie.

Dyson picked up the table lighter, and with an absolutely steady hand, lit the cigarette. Then he snapped the top of the lighter down, drew in a mouthful of smoke and let it out again slowly and meditatively.

"I think it's an extraordinarily interesting idea," he said.

Jannie put her spare hand over her eyes, as if shielding them from the sun, and closed out the sight of her husband.

"You're exaggerating, Jannie," said Bob.

Later he said: "People who don't know him wouldn't get the same impression at all."

Later still he said: "Honestly, Jannie, nobody watches this sort of program apart from the relatives of the performers."

It seemed to Jannie that the noise of John blowing cigarette smoke out almost drowned the conversation. She kept her hand over her eyes until at last Westerman halted the discussion and summed up. He paused before saying good night, and a voice from off screen cut in at once.

"That is absolutely fascinating, Norman," it said.

Jannie put her head on Bob's shoulder and wept.

• • •

Dyson walked up and down the bedroom in his overcoat, making large gestures and trailing in his wake the cozy smell of alcohol. Jannie lay in bed, looking at him over the edge of the covers. It was after midnight.

"Honestly, Jannie," said Dyson excitedly, "I astonished myself! I simply didn't know I had it in me! How did it look?"

"Very good, John."

"Really? You're not just saying that?"

"No, John."

"I actually enjoyed it, Jannie, that was the thing. I was amazed! The others were all shaking with nerves! Even hardened television performers like Norman and Frank. But, honestly, I could have gone on all night. I didn't use my notes at all."

"I thought you didn't."

"Didn't touch them--didn't even think about them. I was absolutely in my element! How did I come over, Jannie?"

"I told you--very well."

"I didn't cut in and argue too much?"

"I don't think so."

"I thought perhaps I was overdoing the controversy a bit?"

"No, no."

Dyson stopped and gazed at Jannie seriously.

"I feel I've at last found what I really want to do in life, Jannie," he said. "It's so much more alive and vital than journalism. Honestly, Jannie, I'm so exhilarated...!"

He began to stride up and down the room again, smiling at himself. He glanced in the mirror as he passed it and straightened his glasses.

"What did Bob think?" he asked. "Did he think I was all right?"

"He thought you were fine."

Dyson stopped again, smiling reflectively.

"Frank Boddy is an absolute poppet," he said warmly. "He really is. Oh, Jannie, I adore television! I can't tell you...! You really think I looked all right?"

Later, as he was crawling about the floor in his underclothes, looking under the bed for his slippers, Jannie asked:

"Why were you smoking, John?"

He straightened up and gazed anxiously over the end of the bed at her.

"You thought it looked odd?" he said.

"No, no."

"You don't think it seemed rather mannered?"

"Of course not, John. I just wondered how you came to think of it."

Dyson smiled with pleasure as he remembered.

"It was sheer inspiration on the spur of the moment," he said. "I just saw the box of cigarettes lying there on the table, and everybody else smoking, and I just knew inside me with absolute certainty that I should smoke, too. I think it absolutely made my performance."

He fell asleep almost as soon as the light was out, and woke up again about an hour later, his mouth parching, his whole being troubled with a great sense of unease. What was occupying his mind, as vividly as if it were even now taking place, was the moment when he had said, "That is absolutely fascinating, Norman," and then realized it was supposed to be the end of the program. Had he really done that? How terrible. How absolutely terrible.

He sat up and drank some water. Still, one little slip in an otherwise faultless performance...Then with great clarity and anguish he remembered the moment when Westerman had put his question about the role of the press, and instead of answering at once, the idea had come to him of leaning forward and judiciously stubbing out his cigarette. It had been scarcely a quarter smoked! He lay down in bed again slowly and unhappily.

All the same, when he had finished stubbing the cigarette out, he had given a very shrewd and pertinent answer...No, he hadn't! He'd taken another cigarette! In absolute silence, in full view of the whole population of Britain, he had stubbed out a quarter-smoked cigarette and lit a fresh one!

He turned onto his right side, then he turned onto his left, wracked with the shamefulness of the memory. It was strange; everything he had done on the program had seemed at the time to be imbued with an exact sense of logic and purposiveness; but now that he looked back on it, all the logical connections had disappeared, like secret writing when the special lamp is taken away.

And what about the time he had interrupted Lord Boddy and then realized that all he had wanted to say was that it was interesting? Extraordinarily interesting...Had he really said that? He himself? The occupant of the tense body now lying obscurely and privately in the dark bedroom of a crumbling Victorian house in Spadina Road, S. W. 23? Was that slightly pooped gentleman with the waving arms who had (oh God!) told Lord Boddy that his views were absolutely fascinating, and (oh God oh God!) lit another of the television company's cigarettes with their silver butane table lighter every time he had seen the red light come up on the camera pointing at him--was that exuberantly shameful figure really identical with the anguished mortal man who now lay here stretched as taut as a piano string in the dark?

"Jannie," he groaned. "Are you awake, Jannie?"

There was no reply. He turned onto his right side. He turned back onto his left. He hurled himself onto his face. Still, Westerman and Boddy and Williamson and Miss Drax sat around in conversation with him. He went through his whole performance second by second, from the moment Westerman had introduced him and he had waved at the camera to the moment Westerman had summed up, and he had told him it was absolutely fascinating. He went through it again and again, trying to improve it slightly in his memory, in the face of an increasingly hostile reception from the other four. By the time morning came, he was convinced he had been wide awake the whole night, though by that time he had remembered with the utmost clarity that the whole performance had taken place not in a television studio at all but in an enormous public lavatory, with all his influential friends and acquaintances among the large crowd around the coffee table, and that his final humiliation was to discover at the end of the program that he had been sitting on one of the lavatory seats throughout, with his trousers down around his ankles.

• • •

The morning rain had almost stopped, but various projections over the pavement in Fleet Street dripped on Dyson as he passed, wetting the lenses of his spectacles and making it difficult for him to see where he was going. He had decided to show himself to the crowd and take the plunge into the humiliation that was awaiting him.

He walked with self-conscious haste up the south side of the street toward Temple Bar, staring into the face of everyone coming the opposite way, challenging them to give any sign of their pity and contempt. It was difficult to know whether they recognized him or not. Every time he removed his glasses to wipe the rain off them, he could see that everyone was taking advantage of his shortsightedness to stare at him and grin and point. But as soon as he got his glasses back on again, they had all smoothed the hazy, unfocused grins off their faces and seemed intent on their own affairs. Several times he swung round suddenly to see if people were turning to stare at him from behind. They seemed not to be, but it was difficult to be sure that they had not simply managed to turn away again in time. Outside the Lord's Day Observance Society, he caught the eye of a tall girl with a red face, who looked quickly away. He jerked his own head away almost as fast, galvanized by the shock of embarrassment. That had been recognition, all right! That had been a pointed enough comment, by God! Or had she thought he was staring at her? He stopped, confused, by the bus stop opposite the Protestant Truth Society, and gazed unseeingly at the list of routes. Suddenly he realized that everyone in the queue was staring at him with frank interest and uninhibited hostility. This was it, then! They hated him! He had tried to rise above them and had fallen back among them, there to be hated once for his attempt and twice for his failure! He hurried away, his heart beating fast, shocked but obscurely satisfied by this revelation. He was across the road and halfway back down Fleet Street before it occurred to him that they had been staring at him like that because they thought he was trying to push in at the head of the queue.

He went into an espresso bar and drank some coffee. No one turned round to look at him. He was a failure, certainly. Failure, it occurred to him, was the secular equivalent of sin. Modern secular man was born into a world whose moral framework was composed not of laws and duties but of tests and comparisons. There were no absolute outside standards, so standards had to generate themselves from within, relativistically. One's natural sense of inadequacy could be kept at bay only by pious acts of repeated successfulness. And failure was more terrifying than sin. Sin could be repented of by an act of volition; failure could not be disposed of so easily. Sin could be avoided by everyone, if they chose, but failure could not. For there to be any who succeeded, there had to be some who failed; there was no better without worse. The worse had their function. Without himself, thought Dyson, or at any rate the possibility of himself, Norman Ward Westerman would be unadmired, unloved and unrewarded.

"Seen you somewhere before, haven't I, squire?" said a weary young man in a coffee-stained white jacket who was clearing the tables, without any great interest.

"Possibly," said Dyson, feeling himself flushing at once with apprehension and pleasure. The young man sank slowly into the seat opposite him and got out a cigarette.

"Yes, I seen you somewhere, all right," he said. "Not in here."

"No, I haven't been in here before."

"Where was it, then, captain? Up the Oasis, was it?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Down the club, was it?"

Dyson discovered that he wanted the young man to know where it was more than he wanted him not to know.

"I do a certain amount of television," he said offhandedly, with a slight disclaiming smile. The young man went on staring at him; the idea that he had seen Dyson on television seemed to be too farfetched even to penetrate his consciousness.

"No, I seen you somewhere, captain," he said.

Dyson's slight disclaiming smile vanished.

"Yes," he said rather irritably, "on television."

The young man rose slowly to his feet and took Dyson's empty coffee cup back to the counter. He gazed mournfully out of the window into Fleet Street for some minutes.

"Up the Streatham ice rink, was it?" he suggested.

Not to have achieved recognition as a failure, felt Dyson, was almost worse than the failing itself. It made him feel that he had failed even at failing.

• • •

When Dyson got back to the office, he sat down and plunged himself into his work. The item uppermost on his desk was a note in his own handwriting that said: "Straker hol-chck Daw 1st 2 pts Pelling's chchiness." What the hell was that supposed to mean? He looked up, frowning, and saw that Bob was gazing at him apprehensively.

"I've been walking up and down Fleet Street, if you want to know," he said, "to see whether I could still show my face in public."

"How about a bite of lunch, John?" Bob asked anxiously.

"I don't want any bloody lunch," said Dyson, thinking of the usual crowd standing round in the Gates. It didn't matter if you made a fool of yourself in front of strangers--he saw that now. It probably didn't matter much if you did it in front of your friends. The shameful thing was doing it in front of strangers and being seen by your friends in the process.

He was ill with overwork. He really was. He was suffering from insomnia and hypertension. And now his tlvsn apprnce (his mind sheered off identifying it more fully even to himself) had finally set the seal on it all. His health was breaking down.

"I couldn't eat any lunch if you paid me," he said.

"We could go to the Mucky Duck for a change," said Bob.

"Perhaps I ought to try and eat something," he said, "to give the stomach acid something to work on."

He jumped up hypertensely.

"The Mucky Duck?" said Bob, getting to his feet, too.

Dyson shook his head impatiently.

"The Gates, the Gates, the Gates," he said. "Let's get it over with."

• • •

"Aren't you on television tonight, John?" asked Gareth Holmroyd as they all stood around gazing into their beer, trying to think of something to say.

"It was last night," said Dyson.

"Last night? I wish you'd told us beforehand. I'd have stayed in and watched. Did you see John on the box last night, Andy?"

"I didn't know you were on, John," said Andy Royle.

"I knew he was going to be on," Gareth said, "but it was supposed to be tonight."

Everyone looked into his beer. "Anyway," Ralph Absalom said finally, "how did it go, John?"

"Terrible," said Dyson.

"He was very good," said Bill Waddy, arriving with more drinks for people. "He was very good, indeed."

"You saw him, did you, Bill?" said Andy Royle.

"No, I missed him, unfortunately," said Bill Waddy. "Old Harry Stearns told me."

"John was very good," said Bob, who had told old Harry Stearns in the first place.

"You saw him, did you, Bob?" said Ted Hurwitz.

"Yes. He was very good."

"Yes," said Bill Waddy, "old Harry Stearns said he was very good."

"Yes, he was," said Bob. "Very good."

"I was terrible," said Dyson.

"You were very good, John," said Bill Waddy. "Old Harry Stearns told me."

"Good for you, John," said Pat Selig.

"What was the program about?" asked Gareth Holmroyd.

"The color problem," said Dyson.

"Well, anyway," said Gareth Holmroyd, "I'm glad you made a good job of it."