are one with Augustine in his cell and Montaigne in his tower. We are the chosen, the privileged. We have what the richest man on earth most covets and can never buy. We have what Henri Bergson saw as God’s chief instrument of torture and madness. Time. Oceans of time in which to be and to become.’
There were days when Ned, remembering this speech, endorsed it and praised Fate for his captivity and the freedom over time it gave him. At other moments, the more he knew, the more he balked and fretted.
‘Do you understand why you are here, Babe?’ he asked once.
‘Pooh, Ned, it’s so simple. I am here because I am mad. We are all here because we are mad. Was that not explained to you when you arrived?’
‘No, seriously. You’re not mad and I know that I am not, although that is entirely thanks to you. Don’t you trust me enough yet to tell me about yourself? You’ve never even told me your real name.’
They had been walking around the lawn and Babe stopped now and tugged at his beard. ‘I sprang from an impoverished branch of the grand and ancient Scottish family of Fraser and was christened Simon. As the youngest of six the nickname of Babe has always stayed with me. I was hired fresh from university because of this memory of mine,’ he said, staring out over the lawn and towards the bald and distant hills. ‘Things stick in the deep brain-pan with which God saw fit to curse me. In those days they stuck even faster and firmer. Intelligence and purpose had nothing to do with it. I remembered the time of every Derby winner as well as I remembered the postulates of Spinoza or the categorical imperatives of Kant. There was a cold war on and a man like me was a useful asset. But I had a conscience, Ned and the day came when I went to see a writer friend of mine. I told him I wanted to collaborate on a book. A great book, to be published in America, for they would never have let it see the light of day in Britain. A book that would blow the whistle on every dirty trick, every hypocritical evasion and every filthy lie that ever came out of the west in its squalid battle for supremacy over its perceived enemy. I’m not a traitor, Ned, nor never would be. I loved England. I loved it too well to let it sink lower than the level of a dung-beetle in its pursuit of lost grandeur. Well, it turned out that the writer friend was no friend at all and the long and the short of it is that I found myself here. This is a place they use if it suits them. When someone is a threat, you understand. The Soviets have their psychiatric prisons and so, as you have found, do we. Ours are a better kept secret, that is the only difference that I have ever been able to make out.’
Ned thought for a while. ‘I suppose I had imagined something like that,’ he said at length. ‘That’s why I wanted to hear it from you. If you are here for that reason then it follows that I must be here for that reason too. Only, you know why you are here and I do not. Some – I don’t know – some
‘We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, Ned, struck and banded which way please them.’
‘You don’t believe that. You believe in will. You told me so.
‘Like anyone with a sliver of honesty in them I believe what I find I believe when I wake up each morning. Sometimes I can only think we are determined by the writing in our genes, sometimes it seems to me that we are made or unmade by our upbringings. On better days, it is true that I hope with some conviction that we and we alone make ourselves everything that we are.
‘Nature, Nurture or Nietzsche in fact.’
‘Ha!’ Babe clapped Ned in the back. ‘It’s coming on, the creature is coming on,’ he boomed to the wide uncomprehending lawn. ‘Listen,’ he said, tucking his arm in Ned’s, ‘if you want to understand your own situation, can you not apply some of the logic it has cost me so much brain blood to teach you? Take out Occam’s Razor and cut away the irrelevant and the obfuscatory. Set down only what you know. Did I never tell you about Zeno?’
‘His paradox of how Achilles could never reach the winning line? Yes, you told me.’
‘Ah, but he had another lesson to teach us. I will show you.
Babe led Ned towards a tall pine that leaned away from the slope and towards the high fence at the bottom of the lawn.
‘We shall sit under the tree. Great thinkers have always sat under trees. It is an academic thing to do. The word itself derives from the Academia, the grove where Plato taught his pupils. Even the French
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Is that a heap?’
‘No, of course not.’
Babe added another. ‘How about that, do we have a heap now? Of course not, we have nothing more than two fir cones. Incidentally did it ever strike you as suspicious that fir cone is an anagram of conifer? More dirty work from God, you might think. Look at the arrangement too. A band of three, then five, then eight, then thirteen and so on. A Fibonacci series. Beyond coincidence, surely? Mr God giving himself away again. But that is a side issue. Here we have two cones. All right then, I add another. Is it now a heap?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll add another.’
Ned leant back against the soft warm bark of the pine tree and watched as Babe scrabbled about fetching fir cones, each time adding another.
‘Yes,’ he said at last, as much out of pity for Babe as because he thought so, ‘I’d say that is definitely a heap.’
‘We have a heap!’ Babe clapped his hands. ‘A heap of fir cones! Seventeen of the darlings. So Ned Maddstone is telling the world that seventeen is officially a heap?’
‘Well…’
‘Seventeen fir cones constitute a heap, but sixteen do not?’
‘No, I’m not saying that exactly…’
‘There we have the problem. The world is full of heaps like this, Ned. This is good, this is not good. This is bad luck, but this is a towering injustice. This is mass murder and this genocide. This is child-killing, this abortion. This is lawful intercourse, this statutory rape. There is nothing but a single fir cone’s difference between them, sometimes just the one lonely only little cone telling us that it represents the difference between heaven and hell.’
‘I don’t quite see the connection…'
‘You yourself, Ned, you say a conspiracy brought you here. That is like saying a heap brought you here. Who is a conspiracy? Why? How many exactly? For what purpose? Don’t tell me it was a heap, just a heap, no more no less. Tell me it was seventeen, or four, or five hundred. See the thing as it is in all its quiddity, all its whatness, all its particularity and deep nature. Otherwise you will never understand the blindest thing about what happened to you, not if you were here for a thousand years and spoke a thousand languages.'
It was deep midwinter and the whole island glowed crystalline white under its eternal shroud of winter darkness. The chairs had been moved from the sun room into a salon deeper inside the building. In one of the arches Babe and Ned sat playing backgammon over a formica table.
The stone arches that ran along the side of the salon were one of the few detectable remnants of the original monastery around which the hospital had been built and its Romanesque structure of blank arcading had once allowed for a rare practical lesson in architectural elements. Only the sun and clouds by day, the stars at night and the rounded hills visible through the windows in summer had offered like chances for Ned to use more than his mind’s eye when taking instruction.
The backgammon they played was of an unusual kind. Since the hospital did not have a set, they played using five paper dice and nothing else. The board and thirty men existed only in their minds. The eccentricity of their games amused the staff. Two of the patients had grown upset however and attempted to pull the imaginary board from the table and trample it – presumably, Ned had suggested, because it played hell with their own sense of the real and the invisible. Their pride, as lunatics, in being able to see what others could not was inflamed when they could not see what others apparently could. By reason of the strong effect their playing had on others, Ned and Babe were allowed to sit in that vaulted arch, away from the central area of tables where the others sat.
It was easy for Ned and Babe to see the pieces laid out in front of them. They played for a hundred pounds a point and at this time Babe owed Ned forty-two million pounds. They had no need for concentration to remember their positions and were able to carry on conversations of some complexity in languages of their choosing, without ever challenging the other’s sense of where the pieces were, or quibbling over how many men were left to be borne off in the ending. Sometimes, as on this evening, Ned flicked a- flat stone around the fingers of one hand. Babe had taught him coin and card magic and he liked to keep in practice, French dropping, palming, stealing and manipulating as he talked.
For the last week, Ned had been able to do a little teaching of his own on the subject of cricket, a game of which Babe was ignorant.
Babe was talking now of the writings of C. L. R. James, a historian and social commentator he greatly admired.
‘It’s a pity I shall never read him again, Thomas,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I always skipped those passages where he waxed lyrical about cricket. He connected it to West Indian life, to colonialism, Shakespeare, Hegel and every other bebuggered thing. I interpreted it as sentimental hogwash, such was the puritanical ignorance of my youth.’
‘I was a fine player, you know,’ Ned said. ‘I think I might have played for Oxford and maybe even for a county if things had turned out differently. God, it sounds absurd to talk about cricket in Italian. Can’t we switch?’
‘Certainly,’ said Babe in Dutch. ‘This is much more appropriate, don’t you think? They do play a little in Holland.’
‘I suppose so. My father’s hero was Prince Ranjitsinji. I told you about him, didn’t I? From the golden age of cricket. Men said that watching his leg-glide was like seeing the Taj Mahal by moonlight.’
‘I did see the Taj Mahal by moonlight once,’ said Babe. ‘Very disappointing it was too, the…
‘I know,’ said Ned, with a hint of impatience, ‘you told me. I couldn’t sleep last night, my father visited me in my dreams again.’
‘Your mind always harks on the past in the middle of these long winters,’ said Babe, accepting a double from Ned and placing the cube close by him. ’The bones in your shoulders ache and you fret. The spring is not so far away. You’ll be more cheerful then.’ Babe softly whistled a tune under his breath.
‘Ten out of ten. And this?’ Babe whistled again.
‘Never mind all that,’ Ned reverted to English. ‘I’m not in the mood for testing tonight. I still want to
‘What is there that you do not know?’
‘You must be aware by now, Babe, that I am not a fool.
