by Patrick Gale
‘But your other daughter – sorry, I can’t remember – yes, Kamala. What about her?’
There was a brief flare of anger in her voice as she said, ‘Kamala has left us. She is not our child now.’
Feeling awkward, Hilary looked back at Dan. Once more suppliant, she continued, ‘Please Hilary. It would give me so much pleasure.’
‘Well certainly. If you really want to.’ It was hopeless to resist. ‘It’s just that it seems …’
‘Oh thank you,’ she exclaimed and, in a moment of uncharacteristic abandon, she seized and wrung his hand. ‘Thank you, Hilary!’
‘Not at all.’ He started towards the stairs to show her out. She followed him down to the hall then stopped with her hand on the door.
‘Do you have to go out this afternoon?’
‘Actually yes. I got off school this morning, but I have to be there by two and I won’t be back until four.’
‘That’s perfect. I shall fetch my sewing then come back. You are sure you do not mind?’
‘Not in the least. On the contrary, it’s sweet of you to be such a help,’ he assured her. ‘I’ll make up a bottle before I go,’ he continued, determined that she should not have all the fun to herself.
Chapter nine
The drift did not seem too deep, so she edged the Spitfire into its midst. Something protested loudly in the bodywork; she threw the gears into reverse and touched on the accelerator, but that only made the sound worse. Henry cut the engine, leaving the radio playing. She glanced behind her – this was how they set ambushes – but the slip road was deserted. She reached under the seat for her spade and climbed out. A catering-size can that had once held ‘Jam/Red/ZP794’ had wedged itself between the front bumper and the pile of boxes, chicken bones and discarded vegetable matter. She swung the spade at the offending can a few times and dislodged it. Then she shovelled and kicked the half-frozen heap of refuse to one side. If she mounted the verge she would get through.
Once clear, she accelerated, remembering that she was in a good mood. Irritated by the short story, she rejected the radio in favour of a reconditioned Glenn Gould recording of Bach. The Art of the Fugue.
It was worryingly simple to play Sandy Marsh. After the initial lies, the new persona had seemed to well from her inside. With the simple words came simple thoughts and from there on it was … well, simple. Insulting, really. Despite her satisfaction, Henry needed to remind herself that there were higher pleasures. Half the sweetness of mischief lay in its undertow of guilt.
Bach’s cool equations and the newly-washed lab coat folded on the passenger seat lent her a bogus detachment with which to survey her intoxicated joy. In little more than twelve hours she had stopped the car to pick up a young man whom she had never met professionally, let alone in a drawing room. She had encouraged him to abuse her body. She had degraded her status for his pleasure and had lied about her intellect for her own. Now that it seemed likely that his occupation had little to do with serving the common good or ennobling the well-informed spirit, and that she was helping him deceive his wife, she felt big. She felt big, street-wise, sassy and … she yawned … and worn to a smug ravelling.
‘I want to come back tonight’, said Andrew.
‘Good,’ said Sandy.
‘You’ll be in, then?’
‘Yes. What time can I expect you?’
‘I can’t say. But I’ll come.’
‘Eightish or much later?’
‘I said I’ll come. I’ll ring you.’
‘I’d better have your number too, in case I’m late.’
‘No.’
‘But then …’
‘Sorry. You can’t call me. I’ll come. OK?’
Sandy had sung in the bath. Henrietta Metcalfe never sang in the bath. Henrietta Metcalfe began to seem faintly drab.
Princess Marina’s was built on a hill. Prime real estate, given that it was the only half-habitable spot in the area. Already bulldozers were digging foundations where the playing fields had been. Fern Farm: a luxury development for first-time buyers. Young professional couples would be flocking here in search of homes. In one corner of the site, in the shade of an old cedar, thirty-five fibreglass Georgian porticos were stacked, their white, cleanly moulded forms visible beneath a sheet of mud-flecked plastic. It was said that, if squared off, and if the Italianate towers were laid on their sides, the hospital would cover four times the area of Buckingham Palace. A senior registrar at a sherry party had once told her the number of miles of corridor. Henry had forgotten the exact figure, but it was longer than the statistic for the V. and A. or Harrods. Aerial photographs showed a vast square around a central courtyard; a red brick fortress with a bulky outcrop of hall, gateway, and towers in each corner.
Over the past five years the number of working wards had decreased steadily. Within the echoing, often precarious shell of the building, the territory of hospital functions had retreated to one side of the square, itself the stature of a sizable grammar school. Two of the other sides stood empty, windows smashed, paint peeling in broad scabs, awaiting demolition. The third housed a police dog training centre. The beasts were kennelled in the upper storey and by day the halls below resounded to savage barking and the patter and thud of paws as they climbed ladders and leaped over walls. Henry had filed a complaint that the baying upset many patients and kept them awake at night, but her letter had ricocheted around police and medical departments until a ministerial thrust in Whitehall had sent it back to her desk, resealed, unanswered and laced over by rubber stamps.
‘Dr Metcalfe, thank goodness! We didn’t think that you could come up till this afternoon.’
‘Well, Bateman said it was urgent. Is it?’
‘Rather. Yes. It’s Percy – Mr Fleischmann.’ Staff Nurse Sadler’s face was pretty and tense. Henry was amused by encounters with Staff Nurse Sadler, as she spoke like one half of a dialogue in a doctors-and-nurses romance. ‘There was some trouble last night. He seems to have nagged some of the others into attacking him. We found him in an awful state in one of the bathrooms this morning.’
‘You don’t know who it was?’
‘No. He won’t say and they’re all playing innocent. He was getting on so well that Dr Jonas had him taken off trifluoperazeine.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday was his first day without it.’
‘Dr Jonas was wrong. Put Percy right back on it.’
‘Oh. But …’
‘Mr Fleischmann is registered as my patient, not Dr Jonas’s. Put Percy back on, but lower the dosage by two hundred. It was too high, which was why we weren’t getting through. I’ll go and see him. Is he on his own?’
‘Yes. Room D. The second on the left at the end.’
Henry walked the length of the ward. The cold sun through the high windows had striped the floor and walls. The peace was astonishing. At a table by the last bed on the left, Mrs Lewin was completing a jigsaw of Mrs Siddons’ Lady Macbeth by Fuseli, her free hand tapping busily on an ample knee. She looked up briefly, to stare at Henry without recognition.
‘Who is it?’
‘Hello, Mr Fleischmann. It’s Dr Metcalfe. Can I come in?’
‘Wipe your feet.’
‘Will do.’ She let herself into the small yellow room. Percy Fleischmann was sitting on his bed in dressing-gown and slippers. There was a bandage around his head and he had a black eye. ‘You look the worse for wear,’ she said, pulling up a stool and sitting down.
‘Lick my bum,’ said Percy Fleischmann. Henry consulted his file.
‘It says here you used to work in the post office at Bethnal Green, Percy. Were you happy there?’
‘All lies,’ sang Percy. ‘The stupid slut put that down when I’d expressly told her that I held a very prominent position in Whitehall which I am not at liberty to disclose.’
‘Really? Whitehall?’
‘That is correct.’
‘Splendid. Then perhaps you could tell me why the hospital is be
ing closed down when there’s nowhere else for you all to go?’
‘Don’t be absurd, girl. I said first class and stop writing when I’m talking to you.’
‘Whoever hurt you last night was obviously very cross about something. Did you start threatening them with your blacklist again? Because you talked all about that with Dr Jonas and you had promised him you took no more interest in reprisals and had handed the entire affair over to someone less important.’
‘Dr Jonas knows nothing of my affairs.’ Mr Fleischmann who, though strongly built gave an abiding impression of impotence, looked over glasses that were not there. ‘It’s becoming rapidly clear that you know even less than Dr Jonas.’ He had arrived three months ago after attacking a fellow clerk and breaking her nose while trying to post her through the sorting office window. Four days before this his wife had left him for another man and taken their only child.
‘Who hurt you, Percy?’
‘She was the daughter of Abashag the Shumanite.’
‘Please tell me, because I’d like to have a word with them.’
‘Lick my bum lick my bum lick my bum lick my bum,’ said Percy.
As Henry was handing back the file to Staff Nurse Sadler, Percy ran out of his room, yelled ‘bum’ at the top of his voice and upended the tray on which Mrs Lewin had so nearly completed her jigsaw. He cried and Mrs Lewin started to laugh. Staff Nurse Sadler clicked her tongue and, having excused herself prettily to Dr Metcalfe, ran to prevent an ugly scene.
Chapter ten
Hilary slung his briefcase over his handlebars, turned on his Walkman and set out. It was a selection from Carousel. The side began, ironically enough, with When the Children Are Asleep. Henry was always telling him how dangerous it was to ride with a headful of music. He couldn’t see that it was any worse than her driving with a carful and besides, even at a high volume setting he could still hear conversation on the pavements and the tooting of horns.
He wondered how Mrs Sharma had seen him with Dan. She must have been spying. The interest she showed was unnaturally keen in a mother of two. Surely the child wasn’t her own? Quite apart from the fact that she had shown no signs of being in a suitable condition over the past year, the Sharmas had only daughters; Hindus favoured any son that came their way, as cruelly as any other Eastern sect.
Half-closing his eyes in preparation for the customary handfuls of gravel, he gritted his teeth and charged across the area of broken bottles and brawling youth that rejoiced in the name of playground. Keats comprehension with the delinquents would be followed by Lady Macbeth with the partially disturbed.
He locked his bike up in the music block. When one of the pianos had been vandalized beyond recognition last year, the practice room which had been its home became a staff box room; a lockable haven of semi-security for large valuables. It was after chaining his bike to the radiator in there that Hil had first glimpsed Rufus.
As he came into the corridor he had seen him open wide a door to release little Sumitra Sharma from her piano lesson. Their eyes met for a brief almost smiling hello, then Rufus let in another pupil and shut the door once more. Later that morning, before Junior Drama Club, Hilary had returned to the music block on a quest for chime bars. He had been about to send one of his several pets to fetch them when he recalled that they were locked in the practice room containing the unfamiliar piano teacher. Only half-admitting this to himself, he had left the children doing warm-up exercises with Pat Casals.
He paused outside the door, waiting for a break in the childishly laboured arpeggios. When none proved forthcoming, he knocked. The music stopped and a stool was pushed back. The new teacher opened the door. He was alone.
‘Hello?’
‘Oh. Hi. Sorry to interrupt you …’
‘Not at all.’
‘It’s just that I need the chime bars for my class.’ The rather unkempt young man stood aside to let him enter and Hilary found himself unable to shut up as he edged into the tiny, overheated cell. ‘It’s the Junior Drama Group, you see, well more like Music and Mime really, and I get them to play co-ordination games and the chime bars make it more fun. Oh, sorry. I’m Hilary Metcalfe.’
‘Rufus Barbour,’ said Rufus, who had been unlocking the cupboard and now handed over an old cardboard box full of lurid blue chime bars. ‘I only teach here one day a week.’
‘I didn’t think we’d met,’ said Hilary, trying to stop the bottom from falling out of the box, ‘which is odd since I’ve been here several months now. I see you teach little Sumitra. I do too. Is she good at the piano?’
‘Not very. Her parents have nothing she can practise on.’
‘Oh. Knockers.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I need the knocker things. I think they’re in a plastic bag. Sorry.’
Rufus peered into the cupboard, pulled out the bag and carefully nestled it in the top of the box.
‘Your knockers,’ he said and smiled.
‘Thanks.’ Hilary started to go. The children would be practising some nameless horror upon poor Pat. He was also getting cramp in his hand and feeling exposed and foolish.
‘Any time,’ said Rufus. ‘We should have a drink one evening.’
Did he say that? Did he say evening?
‘But you only teach one day a week,’ Hilary blurted wildly, pain searing up his forearms.
‘Yes, but I thought maybe …’ Rufus laid a hand on the door.
‘Well, yes. Put a note in my pigeon-hole or something.’
‘Great. Metcalfe, you said?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must hurry. Your bottom’s falling out.’
The door was shut and the arpeggios were resumed, not so very childishly. Safe again, Hilary press-ganged a passing oaf into carrying the box, muttering darkly about a squash injury and it being well past the end of the break period.
Built as an experiment in 1970, the school’s design was woefully optimistic. The staff common room, christened the Schloss, stood on concrete stilts in the middle of the main playground. The idea had been to place the pupils under constant protective surveillance; in practice it placed the staff under constant attack. The school functioned on a system of mutual respect in so far as the taught respected the teachers’ scholastic authority on the understanding that their own terrorist authority was respected outside the prescribed instruction periods. Having dodged the catapulted turds and oh-sorry-sir footballs, each teacher seeking refuge had to scale an iron spiral staircase that came up in the heart of the Schloss. Once inside, one huddled near this central entrance, partly because this was where the only working gas-stove stood, partly because to sit near one of the many-windowed walls was to lose all privacy and risk at least partial maiming. When, as happened frequently, a pane was smashed, it had to be entered in the works book, together with the time of the breakage and the name of a likely vandal. Only then would the glass be replaced. Since reprisals for any meting out of justice by the staff were swift and deadly, the Schloss’s windows were punily webbed with sticking tape and flapping polythene.
Hilary had staggered here after showing great restraint in sending Sumitra to return the chime bars to the music block. Rachel Tuckett, the secretary, brought him a cup of cocoa. Beyond the flimsiest typing assignments, her job entailed sitting in the Schloss to ring the electric bells and make announcements over the loudspeaker between periods. She had soothed a black eye Hilary received during his second week and had unfussily mothered him ever since.
‘Has Mr Barbour been a friend of yours for long?’ she asked as he thanked her for the cocoa and pulled up a chair.
‘Why do you ask?’ Hilary discreetly eyed his pigeon-hole as he spoke.
‘No reason, really. It’s just that he seemed such a dark horse, only teaching one day a week, and when he brought you a note just now I thought well, that’s nice; at least he’s got a friend in Hilary.’
‘Well, I …’ Hilary strolled casually to the pigeon-hole and snatched out the note. ‘I h
ardly know him.’ It was written on musical manuscript paper. ‘We’ve a few friends in common. That sort of thing.’
‘So you probably know Julie.’
‘Julie?’
‘His girl-friend, apparently. She’s Mamia Irvine’s best friend.’
‘No, not really,’ he bluffed, ‘but I’ve heard him speak of her.’
As Rachel excused herself to ring the next bell, Hilary pulled open the note and read that he was invited to supper on Thursday. There was an address and a telephone number.
The entire episode had been one of sweet humiliation. By the time he made his way to Spanish Place on Thursday, Hilary had been wildly over-excited. The girl, Julie, had been there to start with. Absurdly pretty, she had a train to catch but had lingered so as to meet ‘Rufus’s new friend’. They drank beer together, then she was put in a taxi and Rufus cooked his first and only meal for Hilary. They had talked long and hard about neutral yet reassuring topics – teaching, theatre, childhood, Europe. Helping to wash up, there had been a rather more tense snatching of intimate detail, and by the time they had sat down on opposite ends of the sofa for coffee and the late news, it was clear that Rufus was not only answered for but strictly unobtainable.
Too much coffee and blended whisky, and the suspicion that – with television nearing closedown – he had already stayed unnaturally late, led Hilary to make an awkward proposition along the lines of, ‘Would you ever even consider being unfaithful to Julie?’
This was rejected with a similar lack of poise and, after an interval long enough discreetly to show an incredulous host that that wasn’t all he had come for, that they could still become friends, etcetera etcetera, Hilary had mounted his bicycle. He had ridden home curiously elated. After four days of groundless romantic preoccupation, he felt a wild sense of emotional liberty. The fumbling little scene had been cathartic and now he was his own master once more.
