Quicksand by John Brunner Page A

reputation that antique dealers from London brought him valuable

furniture to restore.
     
     
-- Funny how one thing leads to another. Suppose the man who made our

gate when he was an apprentice had dropped dead before becoming famous;

no prestige would attach to it and we could throw it away. . . . I wish

to God the events which culminated in Paul Fidler had followed another

course.
     
     
He ordered himself out of the car, mind buzzing with conflicting visions

of the way his life might have turned out: if he'd chosen another career

than medicine, if his breakdown had been permanent, if he'd failed to get

the job here at Chent.
     
     
-- Why can I never visualise things turning out better as clearly as

I can visualise the catastrophes I scraped past by a hair?

"Everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds!" Hah!
     
     
Key poised to let himself in, he hesitated and scanned the house's façade

by the light of the nearby street-lamp.
     
     
-- Façade is the right word and no mistake. How pleased I was when Iris

fell in love with it and decided a couple of years at Chent wouldn't

be as bad as all that. And it's much worse. Behind the façades -- the

house's and mine -- rot, woodworm, death-watch beetle.
     
     
He slammed the door and made the windows rattle.
     
     
There was nothing very special about the house in this part of England.

It was inarguably handsome to look at, with its black-and-white

half-timbering. On the inside, though . . .
     
     
He'd driven up from London on his own to be interviewed at Chent,

and when that was over he was ninety per cent certain he'd got the

job. He needed it; his original idea of sticking as close as possible

to a London teaching hospital was foundering because -- to Iris --

progress was dismayingly slow in the fiercely competitive atmosphere

of the capital. Yet he knew as soon as he set eyes on Yemble that she'd

dislike living there with equal intensity.
     
     
On the one hand: being appointed psychiatric registrar at Chent was

going to save him a year on the promotion ladder and make up for that

other year lost beyond recall, the one Iris had not so far learned about.
     
     
-- Bloody fool. I really am a bloody fool.
     
     
On the other hand: Yemble was being absorbed into the drab town of

Blickham, whose single claim to distinction was an Elizabethan town-hall

sandwiched between a garage and the public baths. Eight miles away,

Cornminster -- charming, largely unspoiled, but offering what to a wealthy

attractive girl used to London? A twice-weekly change of programme at

the Lido Picture Palace and advertisements for the Cornminster Madrigal

Fellowship painted in water-colours by the conductor's teenage daughter.
     
     
Trying to pluck up the courage to tell Iris that he was going to take

the post at Chent whether she liked it or not, he'd driven for what

seemed like an eternity along each successive one of the roads leading

out of Yemble. Then, the car had been a second-hand Ford; Iris's father

was dead less than a month and though she was entitled to draw on the

money he'd left her she had felt it somehow in bad taste.
     
     
The moment he saw this house, with the estate agent's board outside

offering it for sale, everything fell into place. At nine that night he

parried Iris's anger with a bunch of flowers and a picture of the house,

and next weekend they drove up to look at it.
     
     
He was only marginally guilty about depicting the house as something

exceptional. As he'd discovered during his tour of the district,

Cornminster boasted twenty similar, and even depressing Blickham preserved

a few. But he'd banked on her unfamiliarity with the west country,

and the trap closed as expected.
     
     
-- Darling, how clever of you! All these magnificent oak beams! And

leaded windows! It's like walking back into history! And it's so cheap!
     
     
While he kept silent about the drawbacks of windows that called for