"It's not stated anywhere here that you've proved she's amnesiac."
"Good lord, half these sessions have been language lessons, not therapy! Until I was certain we both meant the same thing by any given word, I couldn't make my mind up. But now I'm satisfied. She is suffering from amnesia, the cause of which I haven't completely determined, but she's now capable of fluent communication about her recent experiences and in my judgment the best thing is to grant her gradually increasing liberty, keeping a watchful eye out in case of a recurrence of that unforeseen outburst at Blickham General, in the hope that exposure to a less rigid environment than Chent will encourage her to relax and come to terms with the repressed material."
The words poured out glibly enough, but Alsop's face remained set in a dubious frown. "You haven't even established her nationality?" he suggested.
"Uh . . . well, no. Beyond a comment from the philologists that the language she speaks is an eastern one."
"There's something funny about her," Alsop said with decision. "Her amnesia, if that's what it is, is too . . . too all-embracing. If it related to some isolated subject, that would make sense. But . . . Well, never mind." He rose and moved to the side of the room. "Call her in and go through a normal day's session with her. Just ignore me and pretend I'm not here."
Palms sweating, Paul complied. He mentioned Alsop to Urchin as she sat down, and she gave him a mechanical smile; then he performed the induction as he had done earlier, and spent about ten minutes racking his brains for questions to ask her that would both satisfy Alsop and evade the subject of her origins.
Dismayed, he suddenly noticed that Alsop was gesturing for his attention. There was nothing else he could do except instruct Urchin to relax and sit still while he turned to the consultant.
"This isn't getting you anywhere, young fellow," Alsop told him briskly. "You want to hammer away at the key areas -- sensitive subjects like sex and violence, background material like the family she comes from. Let me ask her a few things and show you what I mean."
Trembling, Paul had to counteract the standard order in the induction -- "You will hear no voice but mine" -- which he normally dispensed with but had included today because of Alsop's intrusion.
-- She's so used to talking about it in this room at this time of day. Will my spur-of-the-moment command to keep her mouth shut hold good?
He caught himself biting his thumb-nail as Alsop launched into his interrogation, and thrust the hand into his pocket; it would be fatal to betray signs of agitation.
Relief welled up as he listened. Determinedly, Urchin was evading every attempt Alsop made to get her to discuss her home and family, although whenever he switched to some more recent event she gave ready answers.
-- Bless you, Urchin. This is . . . this is loyal of you. I do my best for you, and you certainly show how much you appreciate it.
Next, however, Alsop swung away on a new tack, and Paul's burgeoning relief -- dissipated.
"You remember in the woods where you first met Dr Fidler," Alsop said, "there was another man just before that. You do remember?"
She gave a vigorous nod.
"What happened when he saw you, Urchin?"
-- Jesus God. I've never talked to her about Faberdown. What was I thinking of? That ought to have been in all my case-notes. No wonder Alsop isn't satisfied! "Papa Freud he say . . . !"
"I . . . I came to say hello, and he said something I didn't understand and took hold of my arm and wanted to . . . I don't know the word in English. Push me on the ground and have pleasure from me."
"So what did you do?"
"I was first very surprised, not understanding what he said. Then he hurt me, push me over -- pushed -- so I realised I must fight him. He was heavy. I did this," pantomiming clawed nails raking his cheek. "Then I hit him. He moved back, but when he started again I knew I must stopping him."
"How?"
"Hit him on a tree," she muttered, almost inaudibly as if ashamed of the violence she had used.
"And before you saw him," Alsop continued, "what happened then?"
Silence.
"Were you walking in the woods, or in the fields?"
Silence.
Alsop pressed her for a little longer. Eventually he sighed and relinquished control to Paul, who ended the trance and sent Urchin away, glad to have got it over with.
"I see your difficulty," Alsop admitted after the door had closed behind her. "Nonetheless, that's a line you should have been pursuing a bit more intensively -- working back from the earliest time she remembers clearly. But the sharp cut-off, contrasted with the accuracy of her memory of what one might expect to be a highly charged incident immediately following, makes me wonder about brain damage. We never did get those skull X-rays, did we?"
Paul shook his head.
"Do you think you could persuade her to lie down quietly and let them X-ray her now?"
"Yes, I'm sure I could."
"Right, better make the arrangements as soon as you can. The whole thing is very puzzling, but there are definite signs that she's co-operating, I suppose, which is encouraging. . . . You'll bear in mind what I said about your scrappy casenotes, though, won't you?"
"Yes. I'm very sorry. But it is losing Iris which has upset me so much."
"You don't think you ought to take a week or two off?" Alsop suggested.
"Thanks very much, but . . . no. I'd only mope by myself and probably end up worse rather than better. This way I at least have my work to occupy me."
"There are other things in life than work, you know," Alsop said. He got to his feet. "Still, I agree that solitary moping would be bad for you. When can you have the X-rays done?"
"It would be best if I went with her, I think, as a precaution." Paul flipped the leaves of his desk diary. "I'm not on duty this weekend. Perhaps I can arrange for it to be done on Saturday morning, like the first time we tried."
"Haven't you got one of your whatsit committee meetings this Saturday?"
"Blast -- so we have. I'd forgotten to put that down. Never mind, though; there'll be time afterwards. Dr Holinshed prefers to keep the meetings short."
*34*
-- I'm scared.
Paul sat silent, listening to the meaningless voices of the other members of the Operating Committee as they discussed a complaint from the union to which most of the maintenance staff belonged about patients undertaking too many repair jobs around the hospital. He was making little attempt to follow what was said. Wordless, the concept of being afraid was shaking his head as the maddening cracked bell of the hospital clock shook its tower.
-- I've told her, explained to her, repeated to her, that there's nothing to fear from the X-ray equipment; I've shown her plates of heads and hands. I think she understands. But if she breaks down again, they'll . . . No, I don't want to think of what they'll do. But what did she imagine the equipment was, when she panicked? She won't confess that.
Roshman was talking: a roly-poly man, very Jewish, horn-rimmed glasses seeming to rest as much on his chubby red cheeks as on his nose, his hair thinning over the scalp so that his comb drew it into parallel strips between which the skin was visible.
-- I've stood off Alsop for the moment, but I made a dreadful mistake not asking Urchin about Faberdown and putting all the details into my summary notes. He's after something neat and tidy and conventional which will give him everything he wants: the superior feeling that comes from telling one's juniors that father knew best all along, the relief of knowing that there isn't going to be any trail-blazing paper to make the junior's name more important than his.
A change of subject. This time Paul ignored it altogether.
-- I want . . . What do I want? I think, to put a little of Llanraw into this sick world. On this very spot where stupid droning voices buzz like flies hammering window-glass, flowers taller than a man breathing scent to the distant sea. I hope to bequeath them a whole person, lonely, but strong with an inner vision. What would Holinshed un
derstand about Llanraw, where the men in authority are those who are best loved, not those who most crave power?
Holinshed, about to announce the next item on the agenda, grew aware of Paul's gaze fixed on him and raised his head.
"You wanted to say something, Dr Fidler?"
"Ah . . . no. No thanks. It's not important after all."
Suspicious, the medical superintendent's hard eyes scanned his face at length before resuming their focus on the documents in his hand.
-- To be cut off from Llanraw: torment. But to have it to remember, at least: I envy that. I recall a sort of echoing tunnel, a house with a mile of like ones either side, schools that trained me to answer the questions of a stranger through the second-hand medium of ink, a woman who knew her son to be brighter than average and every spare second breathed on his shine and rubbed it new, another who perfectly understood how the former felt but would not give me the chance to undo the harm in another generation. Out there on the far fork of time's delta, is there a Paul Fidler like the myriads I've heard complaining on their dead ends of disaster, but happy? If he's there, he will think no thoughts with my brain. I'm unattuned to happiness.
He began to draw on the back of his agenda. He designed a sort of map of lines fissioning outward from a central stem. From the bottom upwards he labelled them; naming the first junction "Failed eleven-plus," he put a sketch of a road-sweeper's barrow against it, and at the second -- "Expelled" -- the broad arrow, sign of prison. There was no real system in the labels he attached to the forks; he could have included a hundred of them had there been room.
At the top, the present day, there were a score to deal with. Eventually, however, each last one was marked with some appropriate symbol of disaster; when his imagination ran dry, he fell back on conventions and drew a gallows and a skull. Thoughtfully he traced back the line, looking for any course he might have taken that promised better, not worse.
-- Here? Iris breaking our engagement? Yes, that's the only one as far as I can tell. I'd have been upset, but then . . . then I'd have met some sensible young nurse at the first or second hospital I worked at, and we'd have got married and she'd have gone on working until I was appointed to a fairly well-paid post and then we'd have started on our family and maybe this very moment I'd be looking forward to taking my wife and baby son out for tea in a little village somewhere, in a beat-up old Austin, and we'd be laughing and making plans and . . .
"Dr Fidler, are you proposing to continue the meeting by yourself?"
Holinshed, with maximum sarcasm, shuffling his papers into a file-cover while everyone else dispersed towards the door. Blushing, Paul made to do the same, but Holinshed snapped his fingers and gestured for him to wait. He complied nervously.
"You were scarcely paying attention, Dr Fidler," Holinshed reproached him directly the others had gone out of earshot, apart from Miss Laxham tidying up the table. "You might just as well not have attended the meeting, I feel."
Without waiting for Paul's reply, he stood up, his expression severe. "Indeed, your work in general has hardly been outstanding during the past few weeks. I have been reluctant to comment, but so many people are bound to notice if you display this casual attitude during our committee meetings that I feel I must tell you to pull yourself together."
-- Smug bastard.
"Have you ever been married?" Paul demanded.
"I know about your wife's . . . ah . . . departure. That's why I've been giving you the benefit of the doubt lately."
"Have you?"
"I don't see what that has to do with it."
"If you had, you'd understand a little better. Perhaps."
"If I follow your meaning correctly," Holinshed snapped, "then I should also request you to consider the consequences of having yourself closeted daily for long periods with a young and not unattractive female patient. And before you -- as I believe the current phrase goes -- blow your top, let me stress that while I would not for a moment credit you with improper intentions, patients in a mental hospital do find malicious gossip a favourite pastime. It would be advantageous to all concerned if Dr Rudge were to relieve you of Urchin's case."
"To all concerned?" Paul echoed, shaking. "To all except the patient, that's more like it. The patient comes first, to my way of thinking."
"Are you not aware," Holinshed murmured, "that the young woman is now generally referred to throughout this hospital by a . . . well . . . scandalous nickname? I don't mean a humorous name comparable with 'Soppy Al' for Dr Alsop or my own epithet of 'Holy Joe!'"
-- Good grief. I always thought he was sublimely ignorant of Mirza's inventions.
Aloud, Paul said, "What nickname? I've never heard of any."
"They call her . . ." Holinshed hesitated. "They call her the fiddler's bitch."
The appointment for the X-ray this morning was at half past eleven. An ambulance was waiting before the hospital, not far from where his own car was parked, to take Urchin into Blickham, but it would be another few minutes before it had to leave.
Paul stood beside it in brilliant sunshine, grateful for the excuse to slip dark glasses on and hide his eyes from the ambulance driver with whom he had to exchange casual chat for the sake of appearances. Since there was no need for him to return to Chent today, he intended to follow the ambulance in the car and drive straight home afterwards.
"Beautiful day," he half heard. "Taking the wife and kiddy out this afternoon. Go for a swim in the river, perhaps. If the weather holds." A critical squint at the sky. "Just my luck if they make me hang around in Blickham till the sun goes in."
-- Fidler's bitch. It couldn't be something Mirza coined. Please not. I could strangle whoever . . .
"They ought to be here any moment," he said mechanically. "Yes, I think that's Nurse Davis bringing her now."
-- None too pleased, though. Row with boy-friend? Saturday work when the sun's out?
"Good morning, Urchin!"
"Good morning, Dr Paul."
-- Has she been called that? Wouldn't hurt her. Wouldn't know the English overtones of "bitch."
There was a sense of pressure in his head, as though his skull were fragmenting into a pattern like dried clay under the heat of the day and would spill his secret thoughts naked for all the world to see when it ultimately spilt.
"You're coming with us, Doctor?" Nurse Davis asked, her voice uncharacteristically sharp. The driver was opening the rear doors to let Urchin climb in, which she did with a wistful glance at the gardens around.
"I'll join you there. I'm going in my car."
"I see." A bite on her lower lip, disappointed.
"What's the matter, Nurse?"
"Well . . . I just hope they don't keep us too long." She hesitated, then burst out in a fit of frankness. "I'm supposed to be off at lunch-time, see, so I arranged for a friend to meet me, and I thought maybe if you were riding in the ambulance . . . But it doesn't matter."
She climbed up after Urchin and the driver shut the doors with a thud. The sound made echoes in the emptiness of Paul's mind.
-- Eager for her date, the executive-type young man, maybe. And taking the wife and kiddy for a swim in the river. Me? The summer sun on textbooks making my head ache. This is the worst summer of my life. Mirza going away, Iris gone, the child . . . probably gone. I have nothing left but the vision of a non-existent world called Llanraw, and they will take even that from me.
He was scarcely aware that he had covered the distance between Client and Blickham General; his perceptions faded, and came back to him only when he was helping Urchin from the ambulance on their arrival. Then she looked up at the clear blue above and sighed.