The Call-Girls Read Online Free PDF

and anxious not to miss a word the other was saying – an attitude of old-world courtesy which had the effect of driving his opponents hopping mad. Burch did not actually hop, but nearly. He spoke in a clipped voice:
    â€˜My answer is that physicists should stick to their observations and refrain from drawing specious metaphysical conclusions.’
    Solovief gently shook his bushy head. ‘Philosophy is too serious to be left to the philosophers.’
    â€˜As far as I am concerned,’ said Burch, ‘you can leave it to the theologians. I am concerned with the experimental study of the conditioning of lower mammals and the applications of these techniques to our educational system. That is social engineering, based on hard facts, not on nebulous speculation.’
    â€˜I am speculating,’ Claire broke in, ‘whether I should get you another sherry, or something more serious.’ But she was saved the trouble by Miss Carey approaching them with a tray of assorted drinks. There was something incongruous in Miss Carey carrying that tray – as if an elderly nun were handing round cocktails at a stag party. She wore her greyish hair stacked up in a bun, and the thin lips in the worn face became even thinner as she pressed them together in her concentrated effort to keep the tray under control.
    â€˜Have you met Miss Carey?’ Claire exclaimed brightly. ‘It is really very kind of you to help with the drinks, but you shouldn’t, really… Miss Carey,’ she went on to explain, ‘is Professor Valenti’s assistant and an expert with the tapes,as you will see tomorrow. But really you shouldn’t – let me…’
    She tried to get hold of the tray, but Miss Carey pulled it away from her with an angry jerk that made some glasses spill over, and her face went white. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she hissed. ‘It’s
my
tray…’
    Suddenly Dr Valenti was with them, smiling, hands in pockets. ‘Now, now, Eleanor,’ he said quietly. ‘Has something upset you? – Miss Carey has been working too hard this last month,’ he explained.
    But Miss Carey’s anger went away as abruptly as it had arisen, she was now all smiles, a benevolent nun, her face creased with the wrinkles of innocence, offering the tray round as if it bore Christmas crackers for good children.
    â€˜And now, Miss Carey, to complete the introductions,’ Claire chimed in, as if nothing had happened, ‘you have already met my husband, and this is Professor Burch, and this is Brother Tony Caspari…’
    â€˜Fancy that – a man of God,’ Miss Carey said with a girlish giggle, and graciously moved on with her tray.
4
    The noise had increased considerably in the course of the half hour since the get-together party had started. Two waitresses in dirndl costumes, a sulky brunette and a creamy blonde, both with unacademically sumptuous busts, had taken over from Miss Carey (who had disappeared unnoticed) and were going round with the drinks. They were permanent fixtures of the Kongresshaus, included in the rent, and it was said that Hansie and Mitzie knew more Nobel laureates, from Chemistry to Literature, than any other living women except members of the Swedish royal family. But they never dropped names, partly because they were well-behaved peasant daughters who had been taught that to gossip outside of one’s own family was dangerous, and partlybecause the names meant nothing to them except for the culinary preferences of their bearers for
Kalbsgulasch
or
Zwiebelrostbraten.
    The dinner gong sounded and they all drifted down a perilous-looking spiral staircase of polished pine with steel handrails towards the dining-room. They neither hurried nor tarried, but formed a compact troupe, rather like seminarists walking in pairs; on the staircase they had to walk singly, but at its bottom they re-formed into twosomes. The ritual saturnalia of the