When she had cleaned the bathroom she came back and stood between Pangborn and the screens. He could smell his cologne on her wrists.
‘Time to switch off the life-support system,’ she said goodhumouredly. ‘Can you survive for five minutes on your own?’
Pangborn waited impatiently while she swung each of the television sets from the wall and tuned its controls. As he watched this young woman at work, kneeling in front of him on the carpet, he felt strangely vulnerable. Her breathing, her plump calves, the coarse vitality of her body, made him wish that it were possible to dispense with any need to maintain the solarium. He had been celibate for the past fifteen years, and his confused feelings unsettled him. He preferred the secure realities of the television screens to the endlessly bizarre fictions of ordinary life. At the same time Vera Tilley intrigued him. He thought again of the intruder.
‘See you next week,’ she told him as he signed the work schedule. While she packed her valise she watched him with some concern. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of looking at those old films? You ought to go out once in a while. My brother owns a taxi if you ever want one.’
Pangborn waved her away, his eyes on the magnified image of the bathroom floor and the strange contours of the film actress’s cheekbones. But when the door opened he called out: ‘Tell me, I meant to ask — when you arrived, was there anyone waiting outside?’
‘Only if he was invisible.’ Puzzled by Pangborn’s deliberately casual tone, she weighed the valise in her strong hand, as if about to take out her screwdriver and turn down his over-active image control. ‘You’re alone here, Mr Pangborn. Perhaps you saw a ghost…’
After she had gone Pangborn lay back in his chair and scanned through the afternoon’s public television programmes. With her slapdash manner, the girl had mistuned the master screen, dappling everything with an intermittent interference pattern, but for once Pangborn was able to ignore this. He turned off the sound and watched the dozens of programmes move past silently.
Once again, unmistakably, he was aware of the presence of someone nearby. The faint voice of another human being hung on the air, the spoor of an unfamiliar body. There was an odd but not unpleasant odour in the solarium. Pangborn left the screens and drove the wheelchair around the chamber, inspecting the kitchen, hail and bathroom. He could see that the solarium was empty, but at the same time he was convinced that someone was watching him.
The girl, Vera Tilley, had unsettled him in a way he had not expected. All his experience, his years spent in front of the television screens, had not prepared him for even the briefest encounter with an actual woman. What would once have been called the ‘real’ world, the quiet streets outside, the private estate of hundreds of similar solaria, made no effort to intrude itself into Pangborn’s private world and he had never felt any need to defend himself against it.
Looking down at himself, he realized that he had been naked during her visit. Bathed in the ceaseless light of the solarium, he had years ago given up wearing even his loin-slip. So distant and anonymous were the repair-women usually sent by the company that he felt no embarrassment as they moved around him.
However, Vera Tilley had made him aware of himself for the first time. No doubt she had noticed just how she had aroused him. Trying not to think of her, Pangborn stiffened the back of the chair and concentrated on the television screens in front of him. Calmed by the warm light flowing across his bronzed body, he switched off the public channels and returned to his analysis of Psycho. The geometry of the naked actress slumped across the floor of the shower stall provided an endless source of interest, like the most abstract possible of all music, and within a few minutes he was able to lower the back of the chair, Vera Tilley and the mysterious intruder forgotten.
During his twelve years in the solarium Pangborn had never left the light-filled chamber, and recently had hardly even left the chair. For the few minutes each day which he was forced to spend standing in the bathroom he felt strangely heavy and cumbersome, his body an uncouth mass of superfluous musculature suspended as if by a bad sculptor on the slender armature of his bones. Lying back on the chair, he found it hard to believe that the sleek, bronzed figure projected by the monitor camera on to the screens in front of him was that same shaky invalid who faced him in the bathroom mirror. As far as possible Pangborn remained in the chair, wheeling himself into the kitchen, preparing his meals sitting down, in a sense remaking a small second world within the private universe of the solarium.
