He was blankly contradicting himself. But, after all, why not?
Illidge wanted to go home and to bed; but Spandrell had insisted that he should spend at least an hour or two at Tantamount House.
“You must get yourself seen,” he said. “For the sake of the alibi. I’m going on to Sbisa’s. There’ll be a dozen people to vouch for me.”
Illidge agreed only under the threat of violence. He dreaded the ordeal of talking with anyone—even with someone so incurious, preoccupied, and absent as Lord Edward. “I shan’t be able to stand it,” he kept repeating, almost in tears. They had had to carry the body, trussed into the posture of a child in the womb—carry it amorously pressed in a close and staggering embrace—out of the door, down the steps into the roadway. A single greenish gas lamp under the archway threw but a feeble light up the mews; enough, however, to have betrayed them, if anyone had happened to be passing the entrance as they carried their burden out and lifted it into the car. They had begun by dumping the thing on its back on the floor; but the up-drawn knees projected above the level of the carriage work. Spandrell had to climb into the car and push and lug the heavy body onto its side, so that the knees rested on the edge of the back seat. They shut the doors, pulled the cover over, and fastened it tautly into place. “Perfect,” said Spandrell. He took his companion by the elbow. “You need a little more brandy,” he added. But in spite of the brandy Illidge was still faint and tremulous when they drove away. Nor was Spandrell’s bungling with the mechanism of the unfamiliar car at all calculated to soothe his nerves. They had begun by backing violently into the wall at the end of the mews; and before he discovered the secret of the gears, Spandrell twice inadvertently stopped the engine. He relieved his irritation by a few curses and laughed. But to Illidge these little mishaps, entailing as they did a minute’s delay in escaping from that horrible and accursed place, were catastrophes. His terror, his anxious impatience became almost hysterical.
“No, I can’t, I really can’t,” he protested when Spandrell had told him that he must spend the evening at Tantamount House.
“All the same,” said the other, “you’re damned well going to,” and he headed the car into the Mall. “I’ll drop you at the door.”
“No, really!”
“And if necessary kick you in.”
“But I couldn’t stand being there, I couldn’t stand it.”
“This is an extremely nice car,” said Spandrell, pointedly changing the subject. “Delightful to drive.”
“I couldn’t stand it,” Illidge whimperingly repeated.
“I believe the makers guarantee a hundred miles an hour on the track.”
They turned up past St. James’s Palace into Pall Mall.
“Here you are,” said Spandrell, drawing up at the curb. Obediently, Illidge got out, crossed the pavement, climbed the steps, and rang the bell. Spandrell waited till the door had closed behind him, then drove on into St. James’s Square. Twenty or thirty cars were parked round the central gardens. He backed in among them, stopped the engine, got out and walked up to Piccadilly Circus. A penny bus ride took him to the top of the Charing Cross Road. The trees of Soho Square shone green in the lamplight at the end of the narrow lane between the factory buildings. Two minutes later he was at Sbisa’s, apologizing to Burlap and Rampion for being so late.
“Ah, here you are,” said Lord Edward. “So glad you’ve come.”
Illidge mumbled vague apologies for not having come sooner. An appointment with a man. About business. But suppose, he wondered in terror while he spoke, suppose Lord Edward should ask what man, what business? He wouldn’t know what to answer; he would utterly break down. But the Old Man seemed not even to have heard his excuses.
“Afraid I must ask you to do a little arithmetic for me,” he said in his deep blurred voice. Lord Edward had made himself a tolerably good mathematician; but “sums” had always been beyond his powers. He had never been able to multiply correctly. And as for long division—it was fifty years since he had even attempted it. “I’ve got the figures here.” He tapped the notebook that lay open in front of him on the desk. “It’s for the chapter on phosphorus. Human interference with the cycle. How much P2O5 did we find out was dispersed into the sea in sewage?” He turned a page. “Four hundred thousand tons. That was it. Practically irrecoverable. Just thrown away. Then there’s the stupid way we deal with cadavers. Three quarters of a kilo of phosphorus pentoxide in everybody. Restored to the earth, you may say.” Lord Edward was ready to admit every excuse, to anticipate, that he might rebut, every shift of advocacy. “But how inadequately!” He swept the excuses away, he blew the special pleaders to bits. “Huddling bodies together in cemeteries! How can you expect the phosphorus to get distributed? It finds its way back to the life cycle in time, no doubt. But for our purposes it’s lost. Taken out of currency. Now, given three quarters of a kilo of P2O5 for every cadaver and a world population of eighteen hundred millions and an average death rate of twenty per thousand, what’s the total quantity restored every year to the earth? You can do sums, my dear Illidge. I leave it to you.” Illidge sat in silence, shielding his face with his hand.
“But then, one has to remember,” the Old Man continued, “that there are a lot of people who dispose of the dead more sensibly than we do. It’s really only among the white races that the phosphorus is taken out of circulation. Other people don’t have necropolises and watertight coffins and brick vaults. The only people more wasteful than we are the
