He smiled painfully.
'But you wouldn't like it: mud and leeches,' she said, 'no electricity, no silk shirts.'
After a pause, she said: 'Anyway, they wouldn't understand you. They'd think you were a spy.'
She wrote down the address of the house where she was living and made him promise to memorize it. There was an air of emergency in everything and when Honey Barbara went to have a shower she was sure it was her last shower in a Hilton Hotel.
Doctors Hennessy and Cornelius called on Harry two weeks later at four o'clock in the afternoon, injected him swiftly and carried him off without the slightest struggle.
When Honey Barbara let herself in the next morning she found the suite as he'd left it, including a little piece of paper on which she'd written her address.
She did not have another shower at the Hilton.
Part Four. Some Unpleasant Facts
Alice Dalton had not been expecting Sea Scouts. She told Jim and Jimmy that she had no appointment marked but the Sea Scouts, it appeared, were insistent. She had imagined a bus load but when she discovered there were only two of them and that one of them was very small, she had them shown into her office and let them sit and stare at her vases while she brought the admission forms up to date. She wanted them to see what it was really like.
Mrs Dalton was a woman with a mission, which was to demystify the treatment of mental illness. It was her experi-ence that a lot of sentimental garbage was spoken on the subject and she herself had spent many unhappy years until she had finally realised that Mental Illness was a business, just like anything else.
Once this decision had been made, her life had become more satisfying. As for the treatment itself, her greatest axiom was derived from a psychiatrist who had explained it this way: the ones that are going to get better, get better; all the rest is psychiatrists being neurotic or self-important or anxious or guilty; effectively they cost a lot and achieve nothing.
'Now,' she said, 'what did they tell you about me?'
It was a question she would have liked to have asked many of her visitors – but one couldn't ask such questions of adults, more's the pity – because Alice Dalton was fascinated by her own notoriety. 'All I do,' she beamed at her questioners until her little round face was so tight it looked as if it might split, 'is what is obvious.' But she could never ask them what they really thought of her. What she thought of herself was simple: she was a pioneer in the Mental Health business, an opinion obviously shared by Mr da Silva who had recently purchased 30 per cent of the stock.
But the Sea Scouts were having some difficulty in remem-bering what, if anything, had been said to them on the subject of Alice Dalton. They looked at her pale blue eyes as they swam behind her bright pink spectacles and felt that they had probably done something wrong.
'They never told us,' the smaller boy said.
'Have you seen me on the Television?'
They shook their heads almost imperceptibly.
She felt irritated but smiled and nodded. The bigger boy took out a notebook and held a pencil in readiness. Somehow this cheered her up and she was thoughtful enough to speak slowly.
'This is a Mental Hospital,' she began with a bluntness that always gave her pleasure, 'where we lock up mad people.'
She folded her arms and leant forward: 'First unpleasant truth,' she said to the smaller boy because the first one was bent over his notebook. 'Second unpleasant truth: this is a business and I am doing it to make money, just like everybody else. What is the purpose of a business?' she asked the smaller boy who had a strange stunned quality about him. 'It's to make money,' she answered herself. 'At the end of the year,' she tapped her pencil on the pile of admission papers, 'we must declare a profit.'
She decided against her third unpleasant truth which went like this: 'It's a garbage disposal.' Pause. 'Do you find that shocking?' Terribly, almost always. 'Because that is what it is. Do you want to look after the old men? They're soaked in urine. They are garbage. Someone threw them out. Do you want me to love them as well?'
'Do you find that shocking?' She asked the Sea Scouts who seemed unsure.
'It's not shocking to me. It's life.'
The small Sea Scout put up his hand.
'Yes?'
'When do we get our ginger coffee?'
'I beg your pardon.'
'He means ginger
'There is no ginger toffee here,' said Mrs Dalton firmly, in the manner of an aunt impolitely asked for biscuits.
'Oh yes there is,' the small boy said, 'that's what we chose this project for. This is the one with the ginger toffee.'
There was something in Mrs Dalton's expression that frightened the smaller Sea Scout terribly. He had been frightened since they came into this room with its vases and flowers and funny smell. He looked at Mrs Dalton and began to cry.
The buzzer sounded and a big man in a white coat came into the room.
'Take them across to the Ginger Factory,' the woman said.
The small Sea Scout began to shriek hysterically and even his bigger friend let a tear roll down his ruddy cheeks.
'It's only the Ginger Factory,' Mrs Dalton tried to smile. 'He's taking you where you are meant to be.'
She was not believed and finally it took both Jim and Jimmy to pick up the two screaming Sea Scouts and deliver them bodily to the Ginger Factory across the road.
In Hell his sense of smell was the first to be truly awakened.
He was too giddy to stand up, but he could smell, and even though he had never been in a mental hospital in his life he knew without having to be told that this was the distinctive odour of a mental hospital. Floor polish, methylated spirits and chlorine seemed to dominate, but were given character and colour by the smallest concentration of stale orange peel, urine, and something very closely related to dead roses. There was no sympathy in the smell and every one of its components recalled, in different ways, in different degrees, fear (even if the fear was as petty as that summoned up by the methylated spirits with its associations of cotton swabs, cold skin, doctors' surgeries, steel needles, and chrome surfaces).
Without him knowing it, Honey Barbara had taught him to smell, and when he thought of her now it would not be in terms of how she looked but rather in relationship to the whole wonderful array of smells he associated with her: strong and salty as goats' cheese, rich and flowery as leatherwood honey.
He fought against the Pentothal but could not better it. For perhaps an hour he lay on his back, during which time, in giddy reconnaissances, he managed to gather that the room contained four beds, one of which was much larger than the others, that the walls were a yellow perhaps intended to be 'sunny,' that the fly-wire screens over the two small windows were torn, that the vinyl-tiled floor had a long black rubber skid-mark which ran from beneath the windows to the door on the opposite wall, and also: that he was wearing pyjamas which were not his.
He was not so much frightened as impatient to know what would happen next, and it was irritation with his drug-induced weakness which finally drove him, wobbly-legged, across the room to the window.
He had expected walls.
What he saw reminded him of a number of country railway stations all moored in a park of dwarf trees, covered walk-ways leading from one to the other. The red-brick buildings were long and thin and seemed to be only one room wide, with fading green doors opening out on to verandahs. Sometimes, he saw, the doors had signs such as 'Social Workers' instead of 'Station Master' or 'Waiting Room' but there was, amongst the people he saw, the
