This time she worked more quickly. The result was a table of twenty-five
symbols arranged in a square. She pulled her chair around so that she
could sit up to the desk with him and point at each in turn with the pen.
"Beh!" she said, naming the first. "Veh. Peh. Feh. Weh." The pen flicked
along the top line.
-- Hang on, young lady. You're not supposed to be teaching me your
alphabet, which for all I know you made up in your spare time. But I
ought to know what sounds attach to the letters, I guess.
With a sigh, because this involved further expenditure of precious time,
he wrote transliterations for each sound she uttered. Studying them, he
frowned. There were two or three cases where he had had to approximate;
the sound didn't occur in English. In particular there was a harsh
aspirate akin to the Swedish "tj" which he couldn't even imitate.
Yet . . .
-- Odder than ever. No vowels. Nonetheless it's a more logical grouping
than the ordinary alphabet: that series at the top, for instance, voiced
and unvoiced plosives with their aspirated forms alongside . . . If you
did invent this, you're certainly not stupid.
He made to tear the sheet off so that he could send it to the university's
philology department, but she checked him with a hurt expression.
-- Damnation. You thought you were here for a language lesson, didn't
you? How can I explain that I simply haven't the time?
He pointed to all the papers stacked in his in-tray, and pantomimed
removing them, dealing with them and sending them away. She watched
with her usual triple reaction: incomprehension, understanding and
amusement. Eventually she interrupted him by catching at his hand to
save him repeating the whole routine, and for a moment her cool small
fingers linked with his.
With a sinking feeling Paul recognised the predicament he had drifted into.
-- Oh hell. . . . You like me and you trust me. I owe it to you to help you
more than this.
So, resignedly, he invested more irreplaceable time in what could too
easily prove to be pandering to a lunatic's fantasy. In exchange for the
table of symbols she had given him he wrote out the alphabet and added
where possible the values from hers, then pronounced the vowels for her.
In return she demonstrated that her system was a syllabary, not an alphabet,
provided with a series of dot-and-dash modifiers like Hebrew. To conclude,
she wrote two brief words at the foot of the page: her own name, and his.
-- Enough! Enough!
Paul set aside the notepad, to her dismay, and started the tape-recorder.
Picking up the microphone, he said, "I'm going to try and get a sample
of her own language from a patient here at Chent whom we've nicknamed
Urchin. There may be one or two false starts since she doesn't speak
any English."
He played back what he'd said. The sound of his voice emanating from
the machine didn't appear to surprise her. Add one to the list of
inconsistencies she displayed: she could have missed tape-recorders far
more easily than cars in the modern world.
He aimed the microphone at her.
"Woh" she said, pointing at the wall. "Flaw-er. Wind-daw. Daw-er.
Cil-ling . . .
He withdrew the mike with a sigh. As well as a good visual memory she
clearly had a keen facility for auditory learning, but while it was
reassuring to know she was progressing with her study of English it
didn't help much. Wiping the tape, he considered ways of explaining what
he wanted.
But he didn't have to. She figured it out almost at once and said
something rapid in her own tongue. He smiled broadly and restarted
the machine.
This time he taped about two minutes of totally unrecognisable speech.
It had a certain rhythmical quality, but he had no way of telling whether
that was because she was reciting a bit of poetry, as anyone might do at
a loss what else to say on a recording, or whether it was characteristic
of the language generally. Anyhow, it should suffice for the experts to
begin on. He shut the recorder off.
She caught his hand and gave him a pleading look.
-- Why can't I be as quick to work out your meaning as you are to deduce
mine? Hmmm . . . I get it, I think. You want to hear a voice, even if
it's your own, say something you understand.
He replayed the brief passage and discovered he was right. She put both
hands together between her knees and squeezed, lips trembling in echo
of herself. At the end she blinked, and a tear ran down her cheek.
-- Oh, lord. Why doesn't somebody come and rescue you from Chent? I don't
care what you were doing out in the woods the other night; you don't look
crazy.
And yet . . .
In imagination he heard the sound of a human arm-bone snapping. He winced
and recovered his professional detachment. Mechanically, very conscious
of her large dark eyes on him, he rang for a nurse to escort her back
to the ward.
When he put down the receiver she touched the notepad questioningly.
He waved her to go ahead. Taking the pen, she started to sketch. He
recognised the drawing before it was complete: a map of the world,
with a triangle and a lozenge for the Americas, a sprawling Eurasian
land-mass, a bulging-pear version of Africa and Australasia jammed into
the bottom corner more to show she knew it belonged than in any attempt
at accurate location.
-- This girl is a hell of a lot brighter than I am. It just never occured
to me to show her an atlas and get her to point out her homeland on it.
He jumped up and crossed to the shelf of reference books at the far side
of the office. Surely there must be a map of some sort among them. At random
he selected a tome on
Climatic and Other Environmental Factors in the
Aetiology of Disease
. The frontispiece obligingly proved to be a world map.
He showed it to her, and she pushed aside her crude sketch with an
exclamation of delight. Her finger stabbed down on the British Isles.
-- So she knows where she is, at any rate. How about where she comes from?
Convinced that scores of questions were about to be answered at a single
blow, he tapped his own chest, then the map, hoping she would see the
connection Paul-England. Then he pointed at her. She obediently imitated
him, but her finger landed on the same spot as his: the west of England.
Paul sighed. This girl's intelligence seemed to operate by fits and starts.
He made wiping gestures to convey a wrong response and once more pointed
at her.
The same thing happened, accompanied this time by an expression of
infinite sadness.
He shrugged and gave up. But the recognition of her intelligence, even
though it was patchy, reminded him that he wanted to give her some
non-verbal tests. Waiting for the nurse to come and fetch her, he put
through a call to Barrie Tumbelow as Mirza had recommended.
Tumbelow was at his Friday afternoon clinic and couldn't be reached. Paul
left a message for him to ring back, and cradled the phone just as the
nurse arrived.
Unwilling to leave, Urchin rose reluctantly to her feet. She seemed
trying to make her mind up about something. Paul gestured for the nurse
to stand back, wondering what was coming now.
Abruptly Urchin touched the notepad with a questioning tilt of her head.
Paul snapped his fingers, and exclaimed aloud, "Of course you can!"
He handed her the pad and a pen, and she clasped his hand with gratitude
before turning docilely to the nurse and following her away.
*16*
Half past nine clang-clinked from the clock-tower as Paul dumped his
overnight bag on a spare chair at the side of the committee-room.
Hollinshed's secretary, a stiff-mannered fortyish woman named Miss Laxham
-- about whom Mirza had once posed the question of what it was she lacked
and concluded that it was gonads -- was distributing duplicated copies
of the minutes of the previous month's meeting; they exchanged a cool
good morning.
Paul leafed through the documents laid before his place. Relieved,
he saw that the agenda was straightforward and the meeting would be a
short one. He pushed it aside and unfolded his copy of the local weekly
paper. Published on Fridays, it had been waiting for him when he got
home yesterday, but he hadn't bothered to read it. Only this morning,
gulping down a hasty breakfast, had he wondered whether the affair of
Urchin and Faberdown was reported in it.
-- Nothing on the front page. Good. But it might be on the middle spread.
. . . Oh my God. Here it is by the shovelful.
He flapped the paper over centre to fold it back and read with a sinking
heart: MADWOMAN ATTACKS SALESMAN NEAR YEMBLE. About ten inches of it,
with a blurred photo of the copse where it happened. a quote from Mrs
Weddenhall in which she appealed irrelevantly to people to keep their
children from talking to strange men, and a statement that Dr Holinshed
of Chent Hospital had no comment to make.
-- At least they left me out of it by name. I'm just "a psychiatrist from
Chent."
He glanced up as another committee-member entered: Dr Jewell, a local
GP who served as medical consultant for the hospital.
"Morning, Fidler," he grunted as he settled his portly body into a chair.
"See you're reading up on our local sensation. What do you think of the
editorial comment, hm?"
Paul turned back to the preceding page, dismayed. What he found there
was worse yet.
"While no one can fail to sympathise with the plight of the mentally
afflicted . . . The complexity of the human mind is such that its
breakdown defeats the best efforts of psychologists. . . . Our primary
duty is to society . . . We must act in full knowledge of the fact that
the Beast in Man can and all too often does break loose. . . .
-- So what do they want us to do? Keep the inmates in chains on dirty straw?
Wait till it's a member of your family who goes crazy. Though maybe you'd
just pretend it hadn't happened. After all, when I myself . . .
"Morning!" And here was Holinshed, with Matron Thoroday, Ferdie Silva,
Nurse Foden on behalf of the nursing staff, Mr Chapcheek from the Hospital
Group -- about whom Mirza had a very Mirzan theory regarding which of
his cheeks were chapped and why -- and finally the hospital secretary,
Pratt-Rhys, a greying man who had clawed his way up the promotional
ladder in lay admin posts through sheer determination and was never
tired of reminding his colleagues that he had left school at sixteen
and had no university degree.
"Dr Roshman sends his apologies," Holinshed announced. "But everyone
else appears to be here . . .? Yes! Let's get straight down to business,
then. Ready, Miss Laxham?"
She poised her pencil and Holinshed rattled his copy of the minutes.
"Minutes of the meeting of Chent Hospital Operating Committee held on
blah-blah, present the following blah-blah. Dr Bakshad deputising for
Dr Silva indisposed, apologies from Mr Chapcheek unavoidably detained
until after start of business, Item One the minutes of the previous
meeting were read by the chairman and agreed by all present as a true
and correct record . . ."
Letting the drone of words pass him by, Paul recalled Mirza's comment
on that meeting, which he had attended because Ferdie Silva was laid up
with a temperature of a hundred.
"Why not draft a set of permanent all-purpose minutes for that committee,
like a perpetual calendar? Think of the time it would save -- especially
time spent listening to Holinshed!"
He hid the smile which the idea brought to his lips. Holinshed didn't
approve of people smiling while he was talking.
His own situation on this committee, as indeed at the hospital, was
anomalous. In a larger hospital he would have been working under a senior
registrar. Chent, with its average of less than three hundred patients,
was torn between Holinshed's desire to have it treated as a "large"
hospital and the determination of the Hospital Group to regard it as a
"small" one. The staff structure exhibited the consequences.
In passing, Paul remembered suddenly a phrase from a letter Iris had
received, years ago, from an official at the Ministry. During their
engagement, as though having second thoughts after learning how determined
he was to work in mental hospitals rather than go into general practice,
she had written to inquire about prospects for promotion and salary if
he stuck to his plan.
"This Ministry," the official told her frostily, "does not lay down
a rigid staffing pattern or establishment of ranks for individual
hospitals."
-- You can say that again!
His discovery of the letter had precipitated a row that almost terminated
the engagement.
-- Suppose it had broken up? Would I be here now?