Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess Page A

to the future.’
    â€˜It was in 1870. There were three men – Scholes, Glidden and Soule. It was in America. They were financed by a man named Densmore.’
    â€˜You’ve just been reading this up,’ said Hillier, uneasy now.
    â€˜Not recently,’ said Alan. ‘It was when I was interested in firearms. Technically, I mean. I’m still interested practically.’ The neighbour drinkers would have liked to ignore Alan, but the boy was, after all, a kind of monster. They listened, drinks poised, mouths open. ‘It was the Remington Company, you see, who first took it up. A typewriter is a kind of gun.’
    â€˜The Chicago typewriter,’ said a voice. ‘It ties up well enough.’ Hillier saw that the Indian girl, Miss Devi, had just joined the nearest group. She was holding a martini. She was very beautiful. She was dressed in a scarlet sari embossed with gold images of prancing, tongued, many-armed gods. A silver trinket embellished her nose. Her hair was traditionally arranged – middle parting, plaits on each side of it. But the remark about the Chicago typewriter had come from the man standing by her. This must be her boss, Mr Theodorescu. He was of a noble fatness; the fat of his face was part of its essential structure, not a mean gross accretion, and the vast shapely nose needed those cheek-pads and firm jowls for a proper balance. The chin was very firm. The eyes were not currants in dough but huge and lustrous lamps whose whites seemed to have been polished. He was totally bald, but the smooth scalp – from which a discreet odour of violets breathed – seemed less an affliction than an achievement, as though hair were a mere callow down to be shed in maturity. He was. Hillier thought, about fifty. His hands were richly ringed, but this did not seem vulgar: they were so big, strong and groomed that the crusting of winking stones was rather like adornment by transitory flowers of acknowledged God-given instruments of skill andpower and beauty. His body was so huge that the white dinner-jacket was like a moulded expanse of royal sailcloth. He was drinking what Hillier took to be neat vodka, a whole gill of it. Hillier feared him; he also feared Miss Devi, whom he had seen nearly naked. There had been a man who had inadvertently spied a goddess bathing. Actaeon, was it? Was he the one who had been punished by being turned into a stag and then devoured by fifty dogs? This boy here would know.
    This boy said: ‘It was Yost who was the real expert. He was an expert mechanic. But the Yost method of inking soon became obsolete. What,’ he coldly asked Hillier, ‘was the Yost method of inking?’
    â€˜I used to know,’ said Hillier. ‘I’ve been in this game a long time. One forgets. I look to the future.’ He’d said that already.
    â€˜Yost used an inked pad instead of a ribbon,’ said Alan sternly. Others looked sternly at Hillier too. ‘It’s my opinion,’ said Alan, ‘that you know nothing about typewriters. You’re an impostor.’
    â€˜Look here,’ bullied Hillier, ‘I’m not having this, you know.’ The god whom Hillier took to be Mr Theodorescu laughed in a gale that seemed to shake the bar. He said, in a voice like a sixteen-foot organ-stop: ‘Apologise to the gentleman, boy. Because he does not wish to disclose his knowledge to you does not mean that he has no knowledge. Ask him questions of less purely academic interest. About the development of Chinese typewriters, for instance.’
    â€˜Five thousand four hundred ideographic type faces,’ said Hillier with relief. ‘A three-grouped cylinder. Forty-three keys.’
    â€˜I say he knows nothing about typewriters,’ said Alan staunchly. ‘I says he’s an impostor. I shouldn’t be surprised if he was a spy.’
    Hillier, like a violinist confidently down-bowing in with the rest of the section,