Umbrella

by Will Self

  Well, Audrey persists once Rosalind has left the room, did you – did you ever speak of him to your well-bred wife? Can you so much as bear to think of him, remember him? You may be a great computer, Bert, but there’re some things that can never be accounted for. Albert simply regards her, his pregnant eyes full of . . . hatred, no, that’s too passionate for him – he never hates, only kills all insane persons in fact? Yes, in mercy and in justice to themselves . . . At length he says, There is the matter of Collins and the Free State, some might consider it a war – a civil war indeed. Audrey says: Is that your view, Bert? Do you think the poor bloody Irish a sufficient cause of your coldness? Is it this that makes you such a white man? Albert blanches, his tone dulls and flattens still more lead flushing. I am not, he says, at the office this morning because this afternoon I shall be taking the boat train from Waterloo – there are cemeteries to be surveyed, sites for the monument and so forth –. He stops, seeing not his sister – her fiery auburn hair constrained, he has noted, to a fashionable bob – but the churned Flanders mud, sutured by white wooden crosses – and he hears not her but the silly ass of an architect he has to deal with, a dishevelled fellow who makes puns both excruciating and dishonourable – the Gate of Messiness is what he calls his own design! What’s in the mug? Audrey asks. Mug? he queries. Yes, the mug you had in your hand when I came in. He’s losing his hair, the brassy nob of his head shines through – losing his hair and gaining the weight of influence . . . but he’s still tough . . . still dangerous . . . Albert picks up the tankard from the table where he’d placed it among a slew of his tools: metal rulers, propelling pencils, slide rules, dividers . . . Audrey thinks: She hasn’t got the measure of him, he does as he pleases – always has. He’s taken this lovely house and started to clutter it up – she’ll go first, then he’ll fill it to the rafters with his jumble. Not that it’s confusing to him: he knows where ev-ery-thing is . . . Am I right, sir? It’s a sort of tonic, Albert says gingerly, of my own, ah, devising. Audrey laughs. – Give over, Bert, what d’you mean by that? He peers into the tankard, then tilts it towards her so she can see the thick brown liquid it contains. It’s the black drop! she cries delightedly, and Albert says, Hardly, it’s a mixture of Bemax, molasses and some extracts of these new vit-a-mines together with my own, ah, solvent. She cackles again. – Solvent! Whass that when it’s at ’ome? Before answering her, he takes a long draught from the tankard – it leaves a sewerage mark around his shaved-beige lips: mercurochrome-brown with a cream foam rim. Milk stout, he says, wiping this off with his handkerchief, Huggins’ for preference – but Guinness if it isn’t to be had. Audrey splutters: You – You, you’re turnin’ inter the old man after all! For a time both are silent in contemplation of the Cheriton Bishop Deers, Samuel’s decline has been precipitate . . . a downhill stampede – brakes on the ’bus failed, the heavy vehicle running down its own team . . . shafts, then legs shattered . . . rabbit-skin coat all torn and bloody . . . horses squealereaming . . . Only terminus likely: the knackers. Whatever else you may be, Bert, Audrey says presently, I never pegged you for a crank — and that word alone, crank, springs the lever from the cog, so that the balls of the horizontal pendulum begin to rotate beneath the glass dome of the clock on the mantel. A melodious chiming, d’ding-ding-ding, d’ding-ding-dong, summons Audrey to her feet – it had been growing within her these past few weeks, seizing at first a single hand or foot, clenching, then releasing it with the viciousness of an old . . . enemy. To the model lighthouse, given to Albert De’Ath in his capacity as a Fellow of Trinity House, she charlestons, her legs propellering, and grasps the top of the tinplate tower. Aha! as she suspected: another cigarette case. She nips one from the hole directly into her mouth, then a second, then a third – fourth – fifth – sixth – all flung and lip-caught unerringly, Sorta fing the Brothers Luck did at Karno’s Fun Factory – there was six of ’em inall! She turns to show off her white fangs to her big brother, who backs towards the door so’s to give me more room – space that allows her to windmill her arms as well as her legs, to pluck up cushions from the sofas and chairs so that she may juggle with them, to take up handfuls of Albert’s pointed implements so that she may drum with them – such a turn! he ain’t about to stop me – and I can’t help meself! This wilfulness has been growing alongside the t-t-t-t-ticcing of her hands and the j-j-j-j-jerking of her neck – and now it occurs to her that this trip to Blackheath – unanticipated by her quite as much as by them – may be another instance of an action beyond her control that will be repeated again and again annagain. That she will find herself walking up Montpelier Row from the station, skirting the grassy edge of the heath, trotting up the stairs of the imposing house over and over anover, until the spring winds down and the penny peepshow snaps shut – except that this cannot happen, because, in the midst of all the fluttering, clawing and pecking of the intrepid birdwoman, other more sinister rhythms have begun to be imposed: the rotation of an historic flywheel, the pulling of an eternal lever, the lowering of that perspicacious thinker, the headstock. And this is no fun at all, these long-buried motions tearing through my skin. Audrey hears machine guns roaring and sees Rosalind coming back into the room, silly moo, judging from her expression, she’s never seen a good old-fashioned cockney clog dance before! – while as for the creature in her arms: thass no baby! ’e oughta be in trousies . . . Oh, says Rosalind, Oh, Albert! She lays her hand across the little boy’s eyes to hide this sight: not a woman – a puppet heaving rocks, and then, when the thing begins to scream, Don’t av any more, Missus Moore, Don’t av any more, Missus Moore, Rosalind presses his tousled head to her breast and claps her hand to his other ear. Oh, Albert! resonates into the child’s mind followed by Poor Peterkins! – which is him, or some other little boy with the same name who sits inside his mother’s soft bits more closely held, more deeply loved.

  Tactically, the De’Aths withdraw to the hallway, where Rose the parlour maid stands with handfuls of apron and jaw dropping – others of the domestics have, equally tactically, made themselves scarce. Alone in the tumult of her thoughts and limbs, as she turns this, the most vital fuse cap of the entire never-ending war, Audrey hears these sounds above the screeching of her lathe: a man crying Fre-esh fi-ish! again and again from the road outside, the gentle whinny of his horse, the lifting of the earpiece, the sinisterly abrasive return of the sprung dial, the menacing conformity of her brother’s voice saying, Hello, would you kindly connect me to the R Division station at Blackheath Road? I think you’ll find that the number is two-one-six-nought availeth me, Busner thinks, and then: Misunderstood visions and the faces of clocks. He had left the car at the park gates, intending to take a walk to clear my mind. In August the city emptied out a little – but the drive all the way from Friern Barnet through the tail-end of the rush hour was still gruelling – all those mental patients sitting silently howling in their foam-padded cells. He had locked his own a practitioner’s privilege and, pocketing the keys, escorted its discharged inmate down the avenue that leads to the Observatory, while rolling his head around on his neck, loosening his shoulders and swinging his arms – all of which was what passed for exercise, now that his liaisons with Mimi had been abruptly terminated. Mi-mi! Mi-mi! Mi-miiii . . .! The siren of an ambulance whipping across the heath behind him is, he realises, what has called this car crash to mind: It wasn’t only her engagement to the squaddy she had wrenched away from, she was cutting herself free from all bodywork . . . At the Observatory, Busner stands, letting his eyeballs shoot down the green slope to the Naval College, volley through the Cutty Sark’s rigging, spin through the tightly packed terraces of Millwall and Cubitt Town – swerving around the pegs of three newish multi-storey council blocks – before cannoning away across Mile End, Hackney, Highbury, Finsbury Park and Crouch End back to whence I came . . . In the mid-distance the dust of demolition lies in filthy rags on the broken bones of dead houses in Limehouse and Poplar. He wonders if the Observatory is still in use – did sta
r-struck boffins sit beneath its cloven copper dome firing their eyes at the distant past of other worlds? The city, Busner realises, tires him – already he has no patience with its affectations, its attitudinising, which take on such permanent and concrete forms. He sees Mimi blown thistledown, rising up from the embankment beside the Isle of Dogs foot tunnel, her body gently clapping inside the gleaming bell of her transparent plastic umbrella. She is, he thinks, a child of the future, not a miserably authoritarian nanny of the past, her bare legs reaching out . . . It is precisely at this moment that he crosses his own prime meridian and understands: My youth is over – and with it any blame that attaches to . . . who, the Luftwaffe? Or to them for trusting to the Anderson and not bothering to take the three hundred and twenty-nine steps down into the underground? His youth is over, and, while he may go on turning Ronnie’s whirligogs, repeating the same mistakes while expecting different results, because that’s what people do, he will not compound these errors any further by typing his patients. Henceforth there will be only me and you, never again the fraudulence of either us or them. He’d like to celebrate this by cutting a caper, picking a flower, embracing a child – instead he sinks his hands deeper in his pockets, smells the sticky sap of the limes, and listens as the first heavy drops of rain splatter on their foliage. If I was that dapper chap on the telly, he thinks, I’d’ve brought my umbrella with me. But he is none of these things: dapper, a chap, on the telly – and so arrives jogging back at the Austin, hunched over, his sports coat sodden, his grey flannel trousers greyer. — Standing on the pavement, looking up at the elegant curve of the grand development, with its beautifully four-square brick beads strung along colonnades, Busner notes that for every property that is well maintained there are two more that have tripped up into neglect: jigsaw chunks of stucco have dropped from their entablatures, and behind the elegant pillars are coal sacks and clothes-drying racks, pigeon-manured shrubs have taken root on ledges and in the crooks of walls, television aerials lurch from the chopped-off polyhedrons of their roofs. The address given for Sir Albert De’Ath, KG, KBE, in the 1955 edition of Who’s Who Busner had found in the hospital library – and subsequently confirmed as still being his residence in a current A–D phonebook – is the most rundown of all. No paragon . . . what with its curtained and shuttered windows, and its overgrown front garden wherein the weeds have sprung up around a feature that looks to be a crudely fashioned pair of . . . Indian clubs? He wonders if he’s made a mistake and the huge old pile is being squatted – the single bell push a nipple, inverted in its plaster aureole calls forth a disorderly chorus of chimes, buzzes, bongs and rings that sounds away into the distant recesses of the house, and, while Busner is puzzling over the nature of someone who could rig up such a fantastical system, presumably he’s deaf – he’s startled by the premature cracking open of the door and the emergence of a sagging and heavily powdered face surrounded by a shockingly luxuriant blue-rinsed perm . . . almost an Afro! Doctor Busner? the woman whistles through goofy teeth – and as he confirms this she swings the door right open and ushers him in. I’m Missus Haines, we spoke on the telephone yesterday morning, she says. There’s a hefty Birman cat stalking round and around between her stubby legs, its thick furry tail lashing up her tweed skirt – she pays this no attention. Sir Albert, she continues, is expecting you. Then she does nothing. They stand there facing each other in the hallway, and, as Busner’s eyes adjust to the gloom, he begins to see how very weird it all is: not one or two but seven coat trees all hung about with old mackintoshes, mufflers and even Edwardian duster coats are marching along the hallway towards the back of the house. The slope-shoulders of these headless giants brush against epidermal Anaglypta that’s sloughing off in strips and patches – the hall runner, of good quality, exhibits the same punctuation of time, dashes and commas of wear exposing its underlay. His eyes escape the Birman’s empty, narcissistic ones by rising to take in the hanks of wiring and the thin copper tubing of old gas pipes running along the picture rail, together with a thicker pipe . . . a speaking tube? There’s far less dust than Busner would’ve expected – whatever irregular things go on here, hoovering is daily – it’s only that nothing has ever been removed or replaced, simply added to or adapted. From the ceiling hang three different light fitments from three different eras – gas-brackets still crook from the walls, this must’ve been going on since – Nineteen eighteen, Missus Haines says, Mister and Missus De’Ath – as they were then – moved in here in the summer of nineteen eighteen, shortly after they were married. I joined the establishment in nineteen twenty, and one of my first tasks was the vacuum cleaning – they’d a machine already, you see, Sir Albert was always bang up to date with such things. At a loss as to where he should go with this information – a perfect synthesis of telepathy and the mundane – Busner asks: Have you always been employed by Sir Albert? She laughs, Oh, no, bless you – I went off, did all sorts . . . married a railway man – we were at Orpington up until the war . . . No, Sir Albert always kept in touch, and when Lady De’Ath passed away three years ago, he wrote asking me to come back and housekeep for him. Well, I’d not long lost my Rodney, so I jumped at the idea . . . It seems most unlikely to Busner that Missus Haines has been able to jump at much for decades, but her tongue leaps about enough . . . He stands there letting it all lap over me, while his own tongue circles the ice rink of silver amalgam that Missus Uren, the dentist in East Finchley, has implanted in his molar . . . We don’t, as it ’appens, get much in the way of callers, she’s saying when this vestibular interlude is abruptly terminated by the unmistakable sound of a saucepan boiling over – and, now he comes to think of it, the pong of fish cooking in milk has been steadily building all this while. – Oh, oh –! Missus Haines does indeed jump to it, the cat scats, and Busner is left alone to consider how it’s Albert De’Ath’s way, apparently, to always keep in touch – this, and how useful one of the tent-sized macs would’ve been when he was getting soaked in Greenwich Park. When she returns Missus Haines is wrapped up in an apron printed with photographs of the front doors and fanlights of Georgian houses. They’re all from Dublin, she says, pretty, ain’t they? I’ll see to some tea, she goes on, you’ll find Sir Albert in the front room to your left there, and mind –. She stops, and in her expression Busner sees mingled protectiveness and a sort of outrage? He waits for her to complete the sentence but she doesn’t, only leaves him to go through the door indicated with the admonition, mind, hanging in his own. It rapidly transpires that mind is spot on – as warning, as description, as mantra, motto and injunction. Emanating from the tall old man seated in the wing armchair in the red-velvet-curtained bay window of the large and fiendishly cluttered room is such a strong sensation of a brain churning through calculations, evaluations, judgements, deductions, inductions and assays, that Busner near-staggers under the impact of this furious concentration: mental activity that’s beamed through large, limpid, protuberant grey eyes either side of a Palaeolithic flint axe of a nose, and focused directly on him. It doesn’t help matters . . . that Sir Albert is Mekon bald, or that a number of pairs of wire-rimmed spectacles are pushed up on his soaring forehead, their oval lenses shining in the downlight of a standard lamp positioned by his chair. Busner thinks: A shaven and mummified big cat that yet lives! For Sir Albert is wound up to his armpits in a bright red-and-yellow tartan rug, above which rises the corpse-like skin of yet another mackintosh buttoned up high on his columnar neck. It doesn’t help matters . . . that there is nowhere Busner can look to for repose: every surface is piled with books, papers, leather-covered boxes, scientific instruments – he recognises a primitive centrifuge, gramme scales and an astrolabe – framed photographs of power stations and models of electricity generators, Gestetner machines and old upright typewriters, rubber-stamp stands and blotters cluttered with dipping-nib pens, clocks, vases and china figurines, silver trays and salvers piled with foxed visiting cards and golf-tees, presentation model aircraft cast in steel and mounted on wooden pl
inths – he identifies a Mosquito fighter-bomber – rococo golf trophies with miniature players immortalised on their lids in mid-swing. It doesn’t help matters . . . that all this stuff spreads across a terrain of heavy old Edwardian furniture – settees and tables, desks and revolving bookcases – so that, rather than appearing as inert, it seethes and undulates threateningly. The wall above the fireplace is tiled with framed certificates and photographs of a younger Sir Albert rearing over diminutive delegations of Japanese civil servants, or else intimidating political leaders with his already-bare cranium – registering some satisfaction, Busner spots one in which he’s bearing down on an uneasy-looking John Foster Dulles. However, this doesn’t help matters much . . . because there are further oddities, such as a globular rattan chair dangling from a chain attached to the ceiling, and a new-model colour television set plumped on a leather pouffe, which is switched on with the volume mercifully turned down, but displaying the Black and White Minstrels in lavender tailcoats and top hats hoofing it . . . All of these things, in their various ways, refer Busner back to the supervening factor of Sir Albert’s mind, and nor does it help matters . . . that on the tray-table set across the arms of the old man’s chair are ranged a number of hearing aids, the wires of which are belayed up the slopes of his eminence to where two or three disappear into the confusing outcroppings of his Gautama ears . . . And most of all, it doesn’t help matters . . . that the first words Sir Albert says are, Are you a Jew? then he rearranges the spectacles so as to align the lenses of three pairs, through which his eyes swell alarmingly. Yes, he says eventually, I see that you are one. Busner is at a loss – he thinks back to his first encounter with Marcus six months before. He had thought that a tricky encounter, and the St John’s Wood flat a bizarre habitation – but now this! Clearing his throat, he offers a shameful exculpation: Erhem, yes, well . . . but not at all an observant one. If Sir Albert had had any eyebrows he might have been raising them, but as it is his spectacles coruscate from the corrugating of his iron brow, then he continues blithely: People often claim that their friends are Jews, as if this were in some way meritorious . . . He pauses, giving Busner time to savour the accentless quality of his voice and its lack of resonance or timbre . . . None of my friends, he resumes, were ever Jews – to my knowledge, some members of your tribe can pass exceptionally well. However, I have had many Jewish colleagues, subordinates and some superiors throughout my career, and on the whole I’ve found them to be markedly more efficient than gentiles. If, Doctor Busner, we can maintain a professional demeanour in our dealings with one another, I see no reason why there should be any unpleasantness – d’you smoke? Wrong-footed, Busner blurts: Y-Yes, I’m afraid I do. Sir Albert smiles encouragingly – a worrying sight. If, he says, you lift the top of that model lighthouse you’ll find it is, in point of fact, a cigarette box – the lighter is beside it in the guise of a rickshaw. While Busner flips up the rickshaw-wallah’s head, the ancient Mandarin fiddles with one of the hearing aids on his tray-table, so that for the remainder of their interview a high-pitched electronic whistling ebbs and flows in unnerving accompaniment. Do you know much about the application of the transistor to the amplification of sound? Sir Albert asks once Busner’s cigarette – a bone-dry Senior Service – has been lit, and he stands puffing on it with what he hopes is a semblance of relaxation: one elbow propped on the mantelpiece in among its welter of knick-knacks – clearly, he is not going to be offered a seat. Um, no, he answers, I’m afraid I don’t know a great deal about deafness generally, it’s not my special –. No, the old man interrupts him, it isn’t necessary for you to raise your voice – I know a great deal about it, and these devices are the latest and most efficient models. As to your specialism, Missus Haines told me that you are a psychiatric practitioner, on the staff of the Colney Hatch asylum I believe? Yes, Busner agrees, unwilling to correct the Mind on a point of fact . . . Where, or so I’m informed, you are responsible for the supervision of various lunatics, among them my sister, Audrey Death. Again, Busner assents, although this was a flat statement – but then, full of acrid seniority, he at last finds the balls to cavil: Your sister, Sir Albert, is not remotely insane – indeed, she’s very possibly one of the sanest people I’ve ever met, especially considering the ordeal she’s been through these past fifty years. Stunned by his own bravado, he wonders distractedly whether the ashtray is in the guise of a pottery tortoise. Next, he ponders the grate, which is piled with neatly arranged coals. Don’t, Sir Albert says perfunctorily, the fire is coal-effect – far more efficient, there’ll scarcely be a coal-mining industry left in this country in twenty years’ time – not that this will affect the domestic-pricing structure . . . For a moment it appears that Mind may be exhibiting the very human vagaries of age, and wandering, but then: You’ll find that the tortoise you suspect is indeed – if you raise its shell – a viable receptacle. I’m surprised by what you tell me regarding my sister – the last time I saw her she attempted to assault my wife and young son, and had to be removed from this house by the police. She had suffered, it seemed, a complete mental collapse. I discovered soon after that that she’d been confined at Colney Hatch – as next of kin they sent me a questionnaire they wished me to fill out, it concerned her health, her habits, her moods, mode of life and so forth – I was ill-equipped to assist, having had virtually no contact with her for some years preceding this. It is scarcely any business of yours, Doctor Busner, but I suppose Alea iacta est, so I may as well tell you that her morals were loose and her politics, frankly, extreme. It seems to Busner that Sir Albert has timed this speech to coincide with Missus Haines’s entrance: she comes through the door bearing . . . a Teasmade? Busner moves to intercept and so help her, but she evades him by slipping behind the wooden cabinet of a twenties vintage foldaway bed. – I have . . . Sir Albert says as the elderly woman kneels to plug the Teasmade into a socket hidden by the skirts of the velvet curtains . . . a conviction that tea should be drunk as soon as possible after it has been made – both for reasons of taste and health. He flashes his compound eyes at Busner, clearly wishing to solicit a Why?, but Busner sticks to his own professional agenda: You did see her during the First War, though – I’ve read your entry in Who’s Who, sir, and I know from Miss Death that she worked at the Arsenal as well –. True enough, Sir Albert’s flat tone hacks in, but I assure you I didn’t see her more than once or twice – we were at polar opposites to one another, she a cog, so to speak, in the machine, while I was concerned with the administration of all shell production – and latterly the entire Arsenal –. He is interrupted by the alarm going off on the Teasmade, and they wait in silence while Missus Haines concocts two cups of tea, adding a large slop of milk to both together with one, two, three . . . four! lumps of sugar. Busner doesn’t object – he’s grateful to be getting any refreshment at all, and wonders if he’ll have her disinfect the cup when I’ve gone . . . The teas distributed, Missus Haines unplugs the device and retreats with it – both men suck on our tooth rot, Sir Albert noisily so. Once cup and saucer are reunited, he says, apropos of everything! I owe my longevity to my messery. Pardon? Busner says, nonplussed. Mind motors on serenely: My messsery, it’s an adjuvant of my own devising, a mixture of raw cane molasses, Bemax, vitamins and milk stout – although this last ingredient has become problematical, with only Mackeson’s to be had. Of course, when I first hit on it – during the Great War as it happens – I wasn’t yet aware of what is was an adjuvant for, I thought it simply an efficacious stimulant-cum-dietary supplement – but in recent years, prescribed really quite toxic compounds for my blood pressure and so forth, I’ve come to understand that it also functions to boost their therapeutic effects while also reducing their side ones. Sclerosis . . . he remarks sententiously . . . being endemic in the males of my line, I should’ve been dead long ago without it – and, if not dead, my mental capacities would undoubtedly be in decline. If, Doctor Busner, you had a more practically useful specialisation, you might find it profitable to rese
arch my messery’s pharmacological properties –. Well, Busner puts in, sensing a possible source of merit, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t run some preliminary tests on your, um, messery – we have a basic laboratory at Friern, and a . . . um, reasonably biddable pharmacist. Mind considers this from on top of his gabardine mountain, then he says: Yes, Friern Barnet Road to here, assuming you took the most direct route and came under the river via the Rotherhithe Tunnel – what motor car do you have? Busner replies bemusedly: An . . . Austin. Yes, yes, Mind raps back, but what model? Busner dutifully offers up: A Maxi, the new five-door hatchback. Mind pauses, and Busner braces himself for a swerve into the follies of government policy, the farrago of British Leyland . . . and who knows what else! But Mind takes an unforeseen turn: In that case your wheels are sixty-nine point eight inches in circumference, resulting in thirteen thousand, two hundred and eighty-nine point three six three nought five seven three two four eight four nought seven six four three three one two one nought one nine one six eight three revolutions of them throughout the journey – approximately. Marvelling at his own sangfroid, Busner says: Why only approximately? Mind ruffles: Well, obviously I can know neither your exact route, nor how conscientious you are regarding tyre pressures – they might be variable. If I knew how variable I could give you different results for each wheel – quite possibly to greater than twenty-seven places. It is markedly stuffy in the big room, so full is it of everything that Sir Albert retains, but where on earth could he have seen a technical-specifications manual for an Austin Maxi? Trapped behind the closed curtains, it’s impossible to tell if the rain has stopped – Busner wishes to believe it has, and that a summery evening will ensue, featuring wine poured on a damp, cooling terrace, and small but witty talk among good friends. These are not desiderata that he, personally, pursues – but in a voyeuristic fashion I want them to be going on . . . with the understanding that at some unspecified time in the future . . . I’ll make the effort needed to have them in my own life, rather than . . . this weirdness. His hand twitches to the row of Biros along his breast pocket, and the old man scythes in: Not much of a display handkerchief, eh, colour-coded according to subject matter, I assume? Green for poetical tropes, blue for reminiscences, black for your own insights – and the aperçus of others – red for observations picked up in the exercise of your medical duties, am I right? Busner says, You’re right – although I’m at a loss to understand how you knew –. Come, come, Mind chides him, you knew it, and it isn’t that complex a system. Busner says, The other thing – calculating the car-wheel revolutions, that’s not too unusual an example of eidetic memory, you being, Sir Albert, what’s termed in the literature, a savant –. So, the red pen? Mind offers up. The psychiatrist laughs: No, I might use the red one if your messery were responsible for your calculating ability, but I don’t think you believe that any more than I do. No, the blue pen, Sir Albert, for my memories of a superior mnemonist – not the only one in your immediate family either – Miss Death, is, I’m convinced, similarly gifted, and perhaps has an advantage over you, given that for the past fifty years there has been scarcely any new data –. Explain, Mind utters, and if it will aid your concentration help yourself to another cigarette. Busner says, I’d rather sit down, Sir Albert, and as the old man raises no objection, he does, after removing a stiff-legged and mouldering stuffed dog from a wooden swivel office chair. Your sister . . . he begins, and then . . . lays it all out for him: the encephalitis lethargica epidemic, the characteristic form of Audrey Death’s collapse, her hospitalisation and long, long period of effective misdiagnosis and mistreatment. He glosses his own arrival at Friern, then moves swiftly on to the discovery that L-DOPA could have a therapeutic application for these long-since-abandoned patients. Busner has no idea what to expect from Sir Albert when he has finished speaking. Viciously erect in his wing armchair, his lenses shining forth from his oppressive cranium, his expression presumably unchanged from when he last carpeted this, that or however many other merely human subordinates, the old man still manages to confound him by offering up a single word: And? Busner, forgetting to be intimidated, shoots back: And what? A cappuccino machine froths in the region of Sir Albert’s larynx, and Busner realises with amazement that . . . he’s sighing: Khhhherrr . . . then he says with just a soupçon of warmth, And what d’you want me to do about any of it? Busner creaks forward to get a better view of this emotionality before he replies, Do? Um, well, I suppose I assumed you might like to see your sister, or, at the very least, offer assistance of some kind. The allowances for long-stay mental hospital patients are worse than paltry – in the region of forty pounds a week is spent to feed, house and clothe them, probably not much more – allowing for inflation – than was allocated during the Edwardian era. He had hoped that this appeal to the fiscal question would engage the old civil servant – instead Sir Albert indulges in another hiatus, during which Busner scrutinises the many, many degree certificates that he now sees framed on the walls – so many that they constitute a sort of wallpapering of autodidacticism. There are degrees in German, divinity, economics, philosophy, law, modern history, comparative religion, mathematics, several different languages, ancient history, physics, politics, geography, and so on ad tedium. Obviously, Busner thinks, he has suffered for his learning – and it’s now our turn. Sir Albert says: I only ever had forty-two minutes a day to study. Busner starts: I’m sorry –? Sir Albert has regained his colourless composure and continues: Twenty-one minutes each morning on the train from Blackheath to Charing Cross, then a second twenty-one minutes during the evening commute – this was all I had available to me for study – so you see, all of ’em are extramural degrees from London University. In my day it was, of course, quite unthinkable for a young man of my class background to read for an ordinary degree – I joined the civil service when I was eighteen, but you knew that. I was supporting both my parents and a younger imbecilic sister by the time I was twenty-two – I was in charge of Shell Production at the Arsenal eight years subsequent to that. After my notably feckless sister had her nervous collapse – in this very room, as it happens – I cannot say that I made any great moves to assist her. She blamed me, y’know, for the death of our brother, she took the – in my view doubly indefensible – position that, as the official responsible for manufacturing the ordnance used during the offensive in which he died, I should’ve both been aware of the high proportion of dud shells being sent to the Front, and moved to rectify this. As it was, many of them either exploded prematurely, inflicting casualties among the attacking British forces, or failed to detonate on impact and thus proved inutile when it came to the destruction of the German’s Drahtverhau –. Pardon? Busner interjects. Sir Albert sighs again: Khhhherrr . . . their barbed-wire entanglements, young man, as a Jew of German extraction I’d’ve expected you to have at least a rudimentary vocabulary. Anyway, you haven’t interrupted my flow, that is all there is to say on the matter. Busner does some of his own cogitating before he speaks, then he adopts his most professionally conciliatory tone: Surely, Sir Albert, after so many years have passed, you can find it in you to forgive her? This was a young woman, who, whatever she may’ve said at the time, was almost certainly beginning to be affected by the pathological inflammation of her brain tissue – and besides . . . after so very long . . . He falters and then stops altogether, for Sir Albert’s colour is deepening to an angry choler, You’ll have an apoplexy, guv’nor . . . rings down the decades into the old man’s ears, together with the tintinnabulation of his own self-improved hearing aid. You have not been listening to me, Doctor Busner! he barks, I said that I found my sister’s position doubly indefensible. It is not that I cannot forgive her for her outrageous slandering of my public service: on the contrary, I was perfectly well aware at the time of the defectiveness of much of the ordnance, aware also of its almost complete ineffectiveness when it was used in the bombardment of well-established and deeply entrenched positions. Doctor Busner, I did not study law, or philosophy, or ind
eed comparative religion for all those three hundred and seventy-two thousand, nine hundred and sixty minutes without coming to a fine understanding of the nature of moral responsibility and blame. I have made my peace with myself – and am prepared also to make it with my Maker – and when it comes to my conduct during those years I may be allowed many things: my obvious youth, the temper of the times, the war frenzy that gripped the general populace and that amounted to – an apposite expression from your own usually fuzzy professional terminology – group-think. Although, let me be clear: I do not forgive my younger self on the basis of any specious relativism – regardless of place or time, before God some acts will always be wrong – but there was much mitigation. Whether such mitigation can be applied to my sister’s own conduct, I very much doubt: a self-professed pacifist, she willingly became a vital component in the engine of war. A socialistic collectivist, she yet felt free to deliver the damning judgements that only behove an individual. A violent advocate of women’s rights and suffrage, she nonetheless chose, quixotically, to set aside her convictions in the belief that Omnia vincit amor. As to your argument that she was already suffering with encephalitis lethargica at the time of our brother’s death, this is simply not borne out by the facts. I have read Constantin von Economo’s original paper on the disease – something that you, with your limited capacity for languages, cannot have done – and while he first identified the pathology in Vienna in 1916, cases were not recognised in England until early 1918 – indeed, the paper published in the Lancet that first drew the attention of the authorities to the potential wastage of manpower implied by this epidemic appeared only in April – the twentieth, if my memory still serves me. No, when my sister was working at the Arsenal, turning the fuse caps of shells, then filling and packing those shells, she was as physically sound as any of her fellow workers, workers who, it may please you to learn, had significantly better occupational health than those in comparable peacetime industries – a matter on which the statistics, should you care to consult the relevant papers, will certainly bear me out. No, Audrey’s attitude was doubly indefensible, Doctor Busner, because if anyone could be said to be to blame for Lance-Corporal Stanley Death’s death – which, so far as we can judge, was indeed the result of a premature shell detonation, given the location in which his remains were eventually discovered, in 1928 – then it was she and her fellow munitions workers, whose lackadaisical and generally inefficient approach to their duties at times bordered on criminal negligence. So, you perceive the impasse, Doctor Busner: it is not that I cannot forgive her for blaming me – a resentment that, given her long period of mental inanition, I daresay has been significantly attenuated – but rather that it is I, remaining in complete and continuous possession of all my faculties, who have blamed her for every single one of the intervening twenty thousand and ninety-three days since our brother was killed – including this one. Therefore, whatever the circumstances under which she is currently detained, it is unthinkable that I should have any contact with her, while as to visiting her at the hospital, that is absolutely out of the question. And now, Doctor Busner, I believe what professional business we have with one another is concluded. I might, were yours a social visit, ask you remain a while and take another cup of tea. It is – he gestures towards the set – mine and Missus Haines’s usual practice to watch a television programme at this time – this evening we are both looking forward to the Two Ronnies. However, for reasons I’ve already made crystal clear, yours is not – nor could ever be – a social visit, and therefore you would oblige me by leaving post-haste.