"Something wrong, Urchin?" he demanded, nervous for fear his calming and persuasion was about to collapse before the impact of her blind terror.
"I wish . . ."
"What?"
"I wish I could go out and see," she said, and responded to Nurse Davis's impatience, walking quietly beside her into the building to keep the time of the appointment: a pathetic sagging doll in a plain rather ugly cotton dress and clumsy heavy shoes.
-- It's beginning to tell on her. To look through bars at the summer sky: isn't that enough to wear down anyone?
The same young houseman was on duty as last time, and he was equally harassed. He was no less apologetic, moreover. Today the schedule had been shot to hell by a horse that had kicked two men, trampled another, and had to be destroyed -- but the only weapon available had been a shotgun, and an innocent bystander had been peppered in the leg.
It would mean a wait of at least half an hour.
For a long moment Paul thought about barred windows and Llanraw. His eyes were on Nurse Davis's face, hating the way her ever-smiling mouth now set in a disappointed line, and hearing in imagination the cry of a child promised a trip in the country but growing fractious with delay.
He said, "Go and tell the driver to run you home, Nurse. I'll bring Urchin back to Chent in my car."
-- I said it. I must have been preparing to say it while I was on the way here. That was why my mind seemed to hold nothing at all. There's no law, for heaven's sake! She's not certified, she isn't even legally a voluntary patient, just someone stuck in Chent because it came handy. Watch the brown face; does it look "ah-hah!"?
But all it did was smile dazzlingly.
"Are you sure, Doctor? I mean, is that all right?"
"Go on," he said gruffly. "Before I change my mind."
For a moment he thought she was going to hug him; instead, she poured out thanks and spun on her heel.
The houseman was regarding Urchin dubiously. "Is it all right?" he murmured to Paul. "Last time, you know, she -- "
"There's been all the improvement in the world," Paul snapped.
"I'll have a male nurse standing by anyway," the houseman said. "Just in case. That is, if you don't mind!"
-- Don't let me down, girl. Don't let me down.
She didn't. Wary, they let her look the equipment over first, which she did with something more than curiosity; then she shrugged and settled into the correct position for the pictures to be taken. She seemed relaxed; Paul thought that perhaps only he could detect the effort she was making to appear so.
By the time everything was concluded and arrangements had been made for the delivery of the plates to Chent, the hospital's morning routine was at an end. Nurses going off duty crowded the corridor which they followed to the exit, gaudy in fashionable summer dresses, wispy translucent garments sleeveless and high above the knee, two or three of them accompanied by boy-friends in open shirts and brilliant chokers. They crossed the yard among the parked cars to join a flow of shoppers short-cutting down the street towards the bus station a hundred yards away.
Urchin stopped in the doorway, and Paul, sensing her mood, halted beside her.
After a while, having stared long and long at the passing crowd: "Paul, I have been here months and all I have seen of your world is on the television. I have not even seen one of your towns."
"I'm afraid . . ."
The words died.
-- No, whatever the consequences, it Isn't right that she should think there's nothing better than squalid Chent and war and prison in this world of mine. There are scraps of happiness. Other patients have relatives to call and take them out at weekends. She has no one. I have no one.
He took her arm and led her past the car, feeling drunk with defiance.
-- If a patient can't safely go out in the charge of her doctor, it's not worth being a doctor. The hell with you, Holy Joe. The fiddler is taking his bitch for a walk.
*35*
At first he was on guard, alert for any attempt she might make to dart away from him. But very shortly he relaxed and began to enjoy himself. She was so delighted that she almost skipped along the pavement, like a girl on holiday from a detested school. It was the literal childishness of her behaviour that touched him: staring without self-consciousness at the passers-by, stopping every few yards to peer into a shop window and demand explanations of what she saw there.
Blickham was never an attractive town, but today the weather made it less than ugly. He took her down the most inoffensive streets, showing her the Elizabethan town hall and two or three other special sights, but after a while gave up wondering what else to head for. Her uncritical fascination with everything in the town was giving her sufficient reward.
An hour or so later, he began to feel hungry. There was the problem of her rigid vegetarianism to bear in mind, he realised, and thought about that for a minute or two before recalling a Chinese restaurant where he had occasionally lunched with Alsop prior to a Monday afternoon clinic. It was not far from where they had come to now.
Turning to suggest they should eat, he became aware of Urchin at his side, despondent in sharp contrast to her earlier elation.
"Something wrong?" he demanded, alarmed.
"No, no. You were going to say something?"
"I thought we should have some lunch. I know a place where you can have a meal without meat."
Nodding, she walked where he led her, in silence. Eventually, when they had passed several more people, she said, "Paul!"
"Yes?"
"The people look at me in such a strange way. Why?"
Startled, he looked at her himself. Abruptly he snapped his fingers.
-- Good lord! In that oversized bag of a dress, those clumping great shoes, she must strike everyone as fresh out of jail or something.
He halted and stared around.
-- Mustn't let anything so ridiculous spoil the day for her. She won't know what sizes she takes in anything. What do I do, buy a tape-measure? No, the hell with it. I treat her like a kid. I feel like a father. I feel . . . God damn it, I feel proud.
"Right!" he said aloud. "The next person who looks at you on the street is going to think, 'Wow!'"
"What?"
"Never mind."
There was one large department store in Blickham which stayed open on Saturday afternoons for the convenience of office-workers and villagers who could only spare the time to come into the town at the weekend. In the women's department he confronted a stately assistant wearing a tape-measure as a girdle to her black uniform dress.
"The young lady here has been in hospital for some time and her . . . ah . . . her clothes are in storage," he lied cheerfully. "Can you fit her out with something suitable?"
The assistant looked doubtful. "Only from the Junior Misses' range," she said. "Over there we have . . ."
Paul turned to follow her gesture. He spotted racks of parrot-brilliant clothes in a corner of the department he had overlooked on entering. Briskly he strode over to them.
-- Now let's see if any of the fashionable taste of Iris's London friends has rubbed off on me. I might as well reap some profit from that bloody woman.
His eye was caught by a display of printed cotton underwear in bold black and white checks, lacy suspender-belts, and stockings in white lace, net, floral designs.
-- They're wearing that kind of thing nowadays, aren't they? She'll look about fourteen, but I probably look forty by now.
"A set of those," he said, pointing. "And . . . let's see. Blue? No. Yellow, that would be splendid. Show us some yellow dresses. And a summer coat. A nice leaf-green coat."
"Yes, sir," the assistant sighed docilely.
He lit a cigarette nervously while he waited for Urchin to return from the fitting-room. The department had filled up with teenage girls on a Saturday shopping spree. He was the only man in sight, and they all kept staring at him, except a few who apparently regarded him as part of the furniture and disconcertingly made no bone
s about peeling off their clothes if the fitting-rooms were all engaged and trying new dresses on within arm's reach of him. He tried to think of them as furniture too, but an instinct which had lain dormant in his mind since Iris left was rising up at the sight of so much smooth warm skin.
-- I wonder if Mirza knows any of them. Wouldn't be surprised. He must have worked through a fair cross-section of the local inhabitants by now.
"Paul?"
If it hadn't been for her addressing him by name, he literally would not have recognised her. She stood before him shyly, tiny and exquisite, in a skimpy yellow frock over lacy white stockings and a pair of flat tan sandals, eyes shining, hair -- grown out longer since her stay in Chent -- combed into sleek wings either side of her face. At her side the stately assistant was looking positively smug.
"I'm sorry to have kept you so long, sir, but it struck me the young lady would need shoes, too, and I took the liberty of brushing out her hair into a more stylish arrangement -- "
"Don't apologise," Paul said. "Just show me the bill."
The assistant, smirking, moved to the counter to add it up, and Urchin gave up trying to resist the impulse and threw her arms around him.
Two girls at the far side of the room, probably sisters, stared at them. Their expression said as clearly as words, "Sugar daddy!" And in perfect synchronicity both faces turned to a look of unashamed envy.
They were just in time for the restaurant; the next action of the waiter who admitted them was to turn around a sign on the door so that instead of reading OPEN it read CLOSED. But the service was unaffected by their being the last customers.
Inconspicuously, as he hoped, Paul checked the amount remaining in his wallet as he read down the menu.
-- Considering the exiguous quantity of material that goes into them, modern fashions are a bit pricy!
"Let me see?" Urchin murmured, holding out her hand.
"What? Oh, this?" He drew out the money. "Don't you have money in Llanraw?"
"Yes, but it's not used very much." She hesitated, eyes suddenly widening. "Ought I to have said that? We aren't alone here."
She put her hand to her head, a little dizzy. "I have a feeling you said I wasn't to talk about it."
Paul smiled reassuringly. "Away from the hospital it doesn't matter. Besides, I mentioned it first."
Examining the bank-notes curiously, she nodded.
"Why isn't it used very much?"
"Oh -- because there is enough of everything for everybody. Enough food, enough houses . . . You don't live at Chent, do you, Paul?"
"You know -- " She laughed lightly. "At first I thought everyone in this world lived in big buildings like the hospital, and men and women were forbidden to go together. I thought: tjachariva , do they not enjoy each other?"
-- Not much. Except for lucky bastards like Mirza.
"What was that you said just now?"
"What? Oh! Tjachariva ?" At the beginning was the sound he had tried and found impossible to imitate; his lips and tongue refused to work that way. "It means 'let it not happen,' I think you might say. We put it before saying something we do not mean to take seriously."
-- Urchin in Chent for the rest of her days: tjachariva! An idea struck him, and he tensed. "Waiter! Have you a phone I can use?"
-- If I don't come back with Urchin, they're liable to assume she attacked me and escaped!
Ferdie Silva was on duty today. Paul spun him a glib yarn about hoping to jog Urchin's memory with the sight of familiar things in the neighbourhood. To the demand when they would be back, he returned a non-committal answer.
"Paul," Urchin said when he rejoined her at the table, "will you show me the place where you live?"
"If you like." He felt giddy, careless of consequences. "And a lot more besides. I may not be able to offer you a balloon-ride, but you can cover much more ground in a car."
-- They told me when I was little that children came from heaven. This person is of another brighter world: not an angel, but at least a sprite, an elf, daughter of Llanraw and not of common flesh.
Walking back to where they had left the car outside the hospital, Paul kept his arm on Urchin's shoulder. She liked that, and every now and again reached up to give his fingers a squeeze. As he had predicted, there was nothing odd any longer about the glances she attracted from passers-by.
It was in this attitude, a few hundred yards before they reached the car, that they came face to face with Mrs Weddenhall.
Time stopped.
When it moved on again, Paul heard himself saying with idiotic gravity, "Good afternoon, madam. Have your hounds caught any good maniacs lately?"
She purpled, and when he began to laugh she snarled at him like one of her own dogs. Urchin was bewildered, but seeing that he was amused smiled likewise. Without a word Mrs Weddenhall marched on.
*36*
He kept laughing at the remembered spectacle of her discomfiture the whole of the rest of the afternoon. Everything was so perfect! The only flaw was a brief one; he forgot that Urchin's experience of travel was confined to the police-car and the sedate progress of ambulances, and when he let the little Spitfire race down the road at seventy with the top open, she was so alarmed she clung to the underside of the dashboard.
Soon enough, however, she learned to enjoy it, and he took her on a whirlwind tour of little charming villages he'd never seen since his first trip to this district, when he had driven around musing about Iris's reaction to the prospect of living in Yemble. He showed her the brawling Teme, rough on its rocks at Ludlow, the stiff-backed hills, the trees greener than her gay new coat in full summer rig, and once when he had stopped and backed up so that she could admire a traditional cottage garden, its roadside wall a riot of aubrietia, arabis, stonecrop and rambler rose, she murmured, "I thought it was all ugly here, Paul -- all, all ugly!"
His eyes stung. For an instant he thought he was going to cry.
-- I must be sensible, though. I must bring her back responsibly at the regular time for patients with same-day Saturday leave. But why didn't I think of this before? Why didn't I remember that she must envy the people with friends and relatives to call for them and take them out?
She ceased her contemplation of the garden and turned to him.
"Paul, do you live in a house like that one? You said you'd show me where you live."
He consulted a mental map. "We can be there in ten minutes, if you like," he promised, and accelerated down the road.
She was charmed and overjoyed at sight of his home, and struck dumb by the interior. She wandered about the living-room, touching the furniture as if she didn't believe it could be solid, while he stood watching and unable to keep a smug grin off his face. There was something so refreshing about her reaction compared to Iris's. Innocent of prejudices about quaintness and suitability to one's status, she could look at it with an unbiased eye, and she approved.
He toured the whole house with her, having to explain as he went: not the cookery utensils, but the electric stove; not the television, but the telephone, which she had seen in the hospital but never been allowed to use. He amused her by dialing for a time-check and letting her listen to it.