he had said little to anyone since his admission but this attendant seemed friendly.
‘What sort of treatment?’
Frank shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘He likes new treatments, Dr Wilson. I suppose some of his ideas aren’t bad – this new drug Largactil, it’s better than the old phenobarb and the paraldehyde – Jesus, how that stuff used to stink.’
‘I told him I wanted to leave, go back to work, but he said I wasn’t nearly ready. He asked if I’d like to talk about my parents; I don’t know why.’
‘Aye, he does that.’ Ben’s voice was amused, half-contemptuous.
‘I said what was the point, my father died before I was born and Mother’s dead, too, now. He looked cross with me.’
‘You were a scientist afore you came here, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ A touch of pride entered Frank’s voice. ‘I’m a research associate at Birmingham University. Geology department.’
‘I would have thought you could have afforded the Private Villa then. Ye get yer own room there.’
Frank shook his head sadly. ‘Apparently as I’ve been certified I’ve lost the right to control my money. And there’s no-one to be a trustee.’
Ben shook his head sympathetically. ‘The almoner should sort that out. You should ask Wilson.’
They reached the Admissions Block, a square, two-storey rectangle, redbrick like all the asylum buildings. In the doorway Ben shook out the umbrella. Frank glanced back at the enormous main building. It stood on a little hill; across the countryside, on a clear day, you could see the haze over Birmingham in the distance. From outside, the asylum, with its many-windowed front and neat grounds, looked like a country house; inside it was quite different, a thousand patients packed into cavernous wards with dilapidated furniture and peeling paint. Two nurses from the women’s wing, capes over their starched uniforms, came out of the block. ‘Good morning, Mr Hall,’ one said cheerfully to Ben. ‘Filthy day.’
‘Aye, it is.’
The nurses raised umbrellas and walked quickly down the drive to the locked gates. Frank watched them go. Ben touched his arm. ‘Come on, pal, wake up,’ he said gently.
‘I wish I could get out.’
‘Not after what you did, Frank,’ Ben said gravely. ‘Come on, let’s get ye inside.’
Frank’s mind shied away from the event that had led him here. But sometimes, when the effects of the Largactil were wearing off, he would think about it.
It had started with his mother’s death, a month before. She was past seventy, a little, bent, querulous old woman living alone in the house in Esher. Frank visited her a couple of times a year, out of duty. His older brother, Edgar, only saw her on his rare visits from California. When Frank went to see her, Mrs Muncaster would compare him unfavourably with his brother, as she had all her life. There Edgar was, married with children, a physicist in a great American university, while Frank had been stuck in the same boring job for ten years. She lived for Edgar’s letters, she said. Frank didn’t think his mother saw anyone apart from him these days, as her involvement with spiritualism had ended five years before when Mrs Baker, her spiritual guru, had died, and the weekly seances in the dining room had ended.
The police had phoned Frank at work to tell him his mother had had a stroke while out shopping, and died two hours later in hospital. Frank sent a telegram to Edgar, who replied, to Frank’s surprise, at once, saying he would come over for the funeral. Frank did not want to see Edgar, he loathed him; but even though he didn’t like train journeys, he had travelled from Birmingham to Esher to meet Edgar at the house where they had been brought up. On the journey he wondered what his brother would be like. He was an American citizen now. The letters their mother showed him were always full of his busy life at Berkeley, how he loved San Francisco, how his wife and three children were getting on.
But when he’d visited his mother at Easter he had found that Edgar, for the first time in his life, had upset her. He had written to her to say that he and his wife were getting a divorce. Mrs Muncaster had been shocked, wringing her gnarled hands and telling Frank she hadn’t liked Edgar’s wife the one time he’d brought her to England: she was brassy and full of herself, a typical American. His mother had cried then, saying she would never see her grandchildren, adding bitterly that Frank was hardly likely to give her any now. Frank wondered if all the shock and distress had led to her stroke.
The crowds on the train frightened him; he was glad to get off at Esher. He walked to the house. It was a cold, misty afternoon. A boy on one of the new Vespa scooters buzzed past him, making him jump. When he entered the house he was aware of an emptiness, a new silence. Mrs Baker would have said it was because a spirit had gone over. Frank shivered slightly. There was dust everywhere, peeling wallpaper, damp patches. Somehow he hadn’t noticed how badly his mother had let the house go.
Edgar arrived a few hours later. He’d put on weight since Frank had last seen him. He was forty now, bespectacled and red-faced, his hair receding, the youthful handsomeness Frank had envied just a memory. ‘Well, Frank,’ he said heavily. ‘So, she’s gone then.’ Just as Edgar’s voice had taken on a Scottish accent while he was at Strangmans, so now he spoke with an American twang.
Frank took Edgar round the house. ‘It’s in a bad state,’ Edgar said. ‘Some of these rooms don’t look like anyone’s been in them for years.’ They went into the dining room. There were mouse droppings on the floor. ‘Hell,’ Edgar said irritably. ‘I don’t know how she could’ve lived like this. Didn’t you try to get her to move?’
Frank didn’t answer. He was looking at the big dining table. The electric light above still had the cheesecloth shawl draped over it; Mrs Baker had needed muted light to commune with the spirit world.
Edgar pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘What are house prices like in England these days?’
‘Going down. The economy’s not doing well.’
‘Best thing we can do is get shot of this place as soon as we can. Sell to some developer.’
Frank touched the table. ‘Remember the seances?’
‘Lot of bloody nonsense.’ Edgar laughed scoffingly. ‘They were all nuts. Mum, too. Believing Dad came through to her every week, just for her to tell him off about going to war and leaving her in 1914.’
‘I don’t think she ever forgave him for going away to fight the war.’
Edgar looked at his brother, considering. ‘Maybe that’s why she didn’t like you much, cos you looked so much like him.’
That evening Edgar suggested they go out to eat so they walked to a restaurant a few streets away. It wasn’t much of a place. They had beef stew with potatoes and Brussels sprouts, all swimming in watery gravy. Edgar ordered a beer. Frank, as usual, drank little but he noticed Edgar was drinking fast, one beer after another.
‘The food in this country’s still bloody awful,’ Edgar said. ‘In California, you can get anything you want, well cooked and lots of it.’ He shook his head. ‘This country looks more miserable and downtrodden every time I come.’
‘Did you go to the San Francisco Olympics in the summer?’
‘No. It made getting around difficult, I can tell you. The next ones are in Rome, aren’t they? Old Mussolini will mess it up, the Wops can’t organize for toffee. By the way, I keep seeing the letters V and R painted on walls. What’s that all about?’
‘The Resistance signs. R for Resistance, Churchill’s V for Victory sign.’
‘I’d give him a V sign.’ Edgar laughed. ‘How’s Beaverbrook? Still licking the Germans’ arses?’
Frank said, ‘Yes, yes, he is.’
‘Thank God Britain lost the war and Roosevelt lost the election in 1940, and Taft did his deal with the Japs. Though if that do-gooding leftie Adlai Stevenson wins the election in November he could start sticking his nose into Europe again.’
‘Do you think so?’ Frank asked, perking up a little.
Edgar gave him a sharp look. ‘I hear these Resistance people are making trouble here. Stealing weapons from police stations, arming strikers, blowing things up, even killing people.’
Frank said, daringly, ‘Maybe Stevenson should stick his nose in here, sort it all out.’
‘America needs to mind its own business. Nobody’s going to make trouble for us,’ Edgar added complacently. ‘Not now we’ve got the atom bomb.’
Four years earlier, in 1948, the Americans claimed to have exploded an atomic bomb, and there was even a
