eighteenth-century gentleman. He sniffed quickly, then sighed with mild pleasure and looked at David. ‘You mustn’t make a habit of weekend work, Fitzgerald. What will your wife think of us, keeping your nose to the grindstone all the time?’
‘She doesn’t mind now and then.’ Hubbold had met Sarah at a couple of office social functions. He had been there with his own wife, a brash, tactless woman who had hogged the conversation, to her husband’s obvious annoyance.
‘Spending time together is
‘Yes, sir,’ David answered, an unintended coldness coming into his voice.
Hubbold said, in a more formal tone, ‘There’s a meeting we’ve been asked to arrange. A bit delicate. Some of the SS officials at the German embassy want to meet with appropriate staff from South Africa House, to look at whether aspects of apartheid might be useful in organizing the Russian population. I wonder if you could arrange that tomorrow. It’s just bilateral liaison, low-level at this stage. Keep it quiet, would you?’
David thought he saw a flicker of distaste cross Hubbold’s face when he mentioned the SS. But he had no idea where Hubbold stood politically, if anywhere; anybody politically suspect had been weeded out of the Civil Service years ago, along with the Jews. Civil servants had always discussed politics between themselves in a detached, superior way but these days they tended to avoid even the hint of commitment to anything at all unless speaking with friends they trusted.
‘I’ll speak to the South Africans tomorrow.’ He left, his hands shaking slightly as he walked down the corridor.
He arrived home just before six. Sarah was sitting knitting in front of the fire. He held out a large bunch of Michaelmas daisies he had bought from a stall on the way home. ‘Peace offering,’ he said. ‘For last Sunday. I was a pig.’
She got up and kissed him. ‘Thanks. Good afternoon’s tennis?’
‘Not bad. I left my kit to be washed there.’
‘How’s Geoff?’
‘All right.’
‘You look tired.’
‘Just the exercise. What was the film like?’
‘Very good.’
‘It’s getting foggy out.’ He hesitated. ‘How was Irene?’
‘She’s all right.’ Sarah smiled. ‘We saw some Jive Boys in Piccadilly, and that got her going a bit.’
‘I can imagine.’ The two of us speak so stiffly now, he thought. On an impulse, he said, ‘Look, why don’t we re-wallpaper those stairs?’
Her body seemed to relax with relief. ‘Oh, David, I wish we could.’
He hesitated, then said, ‘Somehow I’ve felt – if we did it then we might come to forget him.’
She came across and hugged him. ‘We won’t ever forget. You know that. Never.’
‘Perhaps everything’s forgotten, in time.’
‘No. Even if one day we managed to have another baby, we’d never forget Charlie.’
David said, ‘I wish I believed in God, could believe Charlie still existed, in some afterlife.’
‘I wish that too.’
‘But there’s only this life, isn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ she said. She smiled bravely. ‘Only one. And we have to do the best we can with it.’
FRANK SAT LOOKING THROUGH the window at the grounds of the mental hospital, the sodden lawn and empty flowerbeds. It had been raining since early morning, hard and steady. The drug they gave him, the Largactil, made him feel calm and sleepy most of the time. In the Admissions Block he had been on a large dose, but after he was stabilized and had moved to a main ward, they reduced the dose and in his mind now the periods of dull calmness were sometimes broken by violent flashes of memory: the school; Mrs Baker and her spirit guide; how his hand had become crippled. He suspected he was getting used to the drug, lessening its effect, but he did not want to go back on a larger dose because he needed his mind to be clear enough to keep his secret.
He had come into a little side room off the main ward that Monday morning, the quiet room as it was called, partly because the other patients frightened him, and also to get away from the overwhelming smell of cigarettes. Frank had never smoked. At school he knew he couldn’t dare join the other boys smoking behind the boiler room; tobacco had passed him by like so much else. The patients were constantly wheedling the staff for tobacco, a Woodbine or just a dog-end. The hospital ceilings were all brown with it. He sat in an armchair, which, like all the hospital furniture, was huge, old and heavy. His right hand hurt, as it often did when it rained, pain coursing through the two damaged fingers, shrunken and claw-like.
It had surprised Frank, when he arrived at the hospital three weeks before, that there were no bars on the windows. But as the police car that brought him drove through the gates he had glimpsed beyond the high wall, on the inner side, a broad ditch full of water, screened from view from the hospital by privet hedges. One of the patients on the admissions ward, a middle-aged man with lined, chalk-white features and wild hair, had told him he planned to escape, swim the ditch and climb the wall. The law said if you escaped from a loony bin and weren’t recaptured in fourteen days you were free. Frank looked at the man in a grey wool hospital suit that was even more shapeless than Frank’s own. Even if escape were possible, which he doubted, there was nowhere for him to go now. After what had happened at his flat his neighbours would alert the police as soon as they set eyes on him again. It had been like that at school, nowhere to run. The gates were always open, but he knew if ever he ran away, got off that bleak Scottish hillside and somehow managed to get home to Esher, his mother would simply bring him back. The mental hospital reminded him constantly of the horrors of school – the dormitory with its iron beds, the uniformed inmates who most of the time ignored him. And an all-male world; like all mental hospitals this one was divided into a men’s side and women’s side, the sexes kept entirely apart. From the looks he sometimes got Frank could tell the patients knew what he had done, perhaps were even afraid of him. The staff, too, reminded him of his teachers, with their sharp military manner and quick brutality if someone got difficult. Frank had tried to avoid thoughts of school for years but now he was constantly reminded; though school had been worse than here.
That afternoon Frank had an appointment with Dr Wilson, the Medical Superintendent, in his office in the Admissions Building. He didn’t want to go, he just wanted to stay in the quiet room. Sometimes other patients came in but he was alone today. He hoped he might be forgotten – patients’ appointments were forgotten now and then – but after an hour the door opened and a young man in the peaked cap and brown serge uniform of a senior attendant came in. Frank hadn’t seen him before. He was short and stocky, with a thin face and a prominent nose which at some time had been badly broken. His brown eyes were alert. He was carrying a big, rolled-up umbrella. He gave Frank a nod and a friendly smile. Frank was surprised; mostly the attendants treated the patients like recalcitrant children.
‘Frank Muncaster?’ the attendant asked in a broad Scottish accent. ‘How’re ye daen?’ Frank’s face spasmed into a wide rictus, showing all his teeth, his chimp grin. Hearing a Scottish accent could unnerve him, because it reminded him of the school. But the attendant’s accent was very different from the elongated vowels and rolling ‘R’s of middle-class Edinburgh that had prevailed at Strangmans; he spoke quickly, the words running together, a more guttural but, to Frank, less threatening accent.
The attendant’s eyes widened a little; everyone’s did when they saw that grin of Frank’s for the first time. He said, ‘I’m Ben. I’ve come to take you to Dr Wilson. They said in the day room you’d be here.’
Reluctantly Frank followed Ben out, through the day room, where several patients sat slumped in front of the television.
They walked along the echoing corridors to the main door, then out into the rain. Ben raised his umbrella and motioned Frank to stand under it with him. They splashed along the path between the lawns. Ben said, conversationally, ‘Expect you saw Dr Wilson on the admissions ward.’
‘Yes. I saw him last week, too. He said he wants me to have some treatment.’ Frank looked sidelong at Ben;
