Percy provoked compassion because he was imperfect. It could be left to Kendrick to admire perfect things. No doubt Kendrick would like what Rossini had made of the Countess, with her coloratura competence. Mozart’s Countess was flawed – by middle-age. Perhaps it was not because he had caught him talking to the monkeys but because he had caught him being middle-aged that Kendrick made light of the Professor: it might seem to him that people aged voluntarily, through pig-headed choice. It was not so. The Professor sighed. The Countess did not want to thrust herself as she was on the Count; she did not want to alter his taste; she would have loved to give him in her person the freshness he saw in Susanna’s. But she could not: and it was through this flaw that compassion made its insidious way in. It was her imperfection she lamented in notes almost too low for the soprano voice, almost desexed, troubling and philosophic like the notes of a bassoon.

The wonder of the world would be, to Kendrick, the fine adaptation of stuff to its function. He would think that the Countess, no longer young, ought to give up love. Kendrick liked men and machines for what they could do. The Professor liked men and monkeys for what they could not do.

It was still early and cool. Since it was a working day, the streets outside had been suddenly evacuated after the eight o’clock rush and had not yet filled up with crowds of children on what seemed everlasting holiday. Inside, the air was still fresh, full of fresh, lively sounds – the morning conversation of a hundred species.

Standing in the same place, the Professor acknowledged that it was indeed his voice which, petulant, spinsterish, defensive against Kendrick’s assault, had the day before uttered the betraying words: Why don’t you take the female?

Looking at Edwina now, he was shamed by her steadfastness, by the unremitting nature of her carnality, which was already fully set in train for the day.

‘Ungallant,’ he said aloud. ‘Unchivalrous.’

Percy snapped up the words, bewildered that new ones should appear while the old were still undigested, but perpetually willing. This pair of words he almost managed to associate with the Professor’s ideal of a Man. Edwina, unconcerned with ideals, and looking for something quite unlike gallantry or chivalry from the male of her own species, kept up her glare.

Hoping to salve himself with Edwina and so to have an untwisted conscience behind him in the day’s efforts, the Professor took an apple from his pocket. Before he could present it, Edwina’s arm struck between the bars. She grabbed the apple, and vaunted her quickness over Percy.

The Professor had come partly through habit and partly to give the animals a report on his progress. So far, however, it was more an apology he had to give. He had made a false start. He assured them, and himself, he would do better today.

He had taken the problem to his sister, knowing her to have been resourceful in a hundred hard cases. Moreover, as a romantic, he had it in his nature to admire all women as he admired Susanna and the Countess, and to perceive compassion and tenderness in them all.

He had not been totally mistaken, but in his sister compassion burned fiercer than he had supposed.

As he told the story, she interrupted:

‘Do eat up, Clem. Goodness knows you were late enough to start with.’

He thought her sympathy was even prompter than he had credited and had jumped ahead of his tale to the right conclusion. Finishing, he expected to find her full of practical suggestions. Instead, she sighed.

‘Honestly, Clem, I can’t make you out. All this for a monkey!’

‘I—’

‘Don’t you know,’ she asked, earnestly leaning across the table, ‘that people – human beings, Clem – are starving in India; that men are dying in Malaya; that we still haven’t cured cancer; that poor old women are sent to prison for a year for stealing a cake of soap; that we still practise the barbaric rite of Capital Punishment—’

‘All this is true,’ he began.

‘It’s fact. You ought to face it.’

‘I admit these are wrongs—’

‘Wrongs, and shameful injustices!’

‘But the fact,’ he concluded, ‘that these are bigger wrongs and injustices doesn’t make it right or just to sacrifice an innocent monkey. It doesn’t alter the case at all.’

‘It doesn’t alter the case. It alters you.’

‘That’s absurd,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t make the case right but it makes you wrong. Honestly, I think you must be a frivolous sort of person. Here you are with all your brain – far more than I ever had – and all this needing to be done in the world, and you spend your time and energy on an animal!’

He did not see why fighting for Percy should provoke the charge that he was uncharitable towards everyone else.

‘Surely you can see,’ she went on, ‘– you, with your clear mind! – that if the rocket has to go up, it’s far better to send the monkey than let some young man go risking his life.’

‘Ah, wait a minute!’ the Professor cried. ‘That’s it! There’s the sin of it! The monkey has no choice. If Kendrick went, he’d be risking his own life, of his own free will.’

‘And they were quite right to stop him,’ she replied. ‘Whoever forbade it was very wise. I dare say there are plenty of foolhardy young men who ought to be doing a serious job of work for Mankind, here on the ground, who would be only too pleased to go up in a rocket just to see what it felt like to travel through space.’

He protested wryly: ‘That’s my point. If men get giddy, or whatever you do get, they know it’s because they’re travelling in space. If they feel themselves dropping unconscious, they know it’s because of lack of pressure, or oxygen, or whatever it is. But the monkey doesn’t know what it’s all about.’

His protest died away as he saw her purse her lips.

‘I don’t see why we’re arguing,’ she said. ‘You admit the monkey won’t know what’s happening to it. You must see that’s why it’s better to send the monkey than a human being.’

The Professor had been, not fairly, he thought, but decisively, beaten: and now Percy, as if he had known in what low esteem the Professor’s sister held him, let his broad, sorrowful head fall forward, and huddled himself away, immobile, looking like a memorial, put up by the defeated side, to yesterday’s engagement.

Edwina’s stillness seemed more alive, the stillness of implacable hope. She was, of the two, the more animated, the more animal, the less attractive. Smaller, she had proved what Kendrick had prophesied: tougher. She had forgotten Africa and freedom. Adapted not only to being a monkey but to being a caged monkey, she could, if Percy had concurred, have made their cage into a comfortable marital domain.

If the Professor had himself been a monkey, her animality might have attracted him. As it was, he was impervious to her, and she could take no comfort from him.

He put his hand, thoughtlessly, into his pocket. Edwina sprang forward, demanding another apple, her eyes flashing white as she dared Percy to get there first.

Beyond doubt, Edwina was shrewish.

He could not escape the thought that it was Percy who had made her so, and all Percy’s progress was by way of Edwina’s shoulders, thrusting her down. He was almost glad to accuse the monkey, since that would make it less bitter if he was to be lost; but even as he looked at him with accusation he found that Percy had forestalled him and had turned his sweet, clownish face, expressive of deep emotion and elementary thought, upon Edwina, full of sorrow for her shrewishness and guilt because he was its cause.

How long, even if Kendrick had not interfered, could Percy hold out? On the one side, Edwina’s demands; on the other his self-erosion. How soon would he ease his conscience towards her by yielding to her, only to find he had a bad conscience towards his ideals? How long before he succumbed to whatever mindless state it might be that overtook a monkey that had gone mad?

A mad monkey. In the moment’s image, the Professor understood Percy’s dilemma. Percy was in love. It was not lack of desire, but desire too strong, too prickly, too fantastic. What the animal yearned after, when he gazed forlornly out of his cage, was the freedom to make love to Edwina of his own choice, to persuade and implore her; to aspire and range; to break into that domain which, in fact, he could not break out of.

‘Why,’ the Professor said, ‘Percy is a romantic, too.’

Edwina cared nothing for it. Lacking foresight, she could not imagine letting Percy go in order that he might come back. If the bars of the cage had been miraculously loosed, she would have resented Percy’s stepping...