were
real.
He tossed back half the whisky to douse that idea. Somehow things had
worked out for him in the end. So far.
-- But this time, not. The next big event looks like being squalidly
commonplace: the collapse of a marriage.
He stared about him, vaguely searching for some jolting incongruity
in his surroundings to provide temporary distraction, but the Needle
in Haystack boasted nothing out of the ordinary except its peculiar
name. The only reason he came here was because it stood handy to the
hospital. Thirty years ago it must have been a village local and might
have been interesting; now the town of Blickham had linked itself to
Yemble with a pseudo-pod of straggling postwar houses and the latter
counted for a suburb rather than a village.
The best the pub could do by way of a surprise was to show him a smart
young executive type in a fleece-lined car-coat buying Nurse Davis another
sherry. Nurse Davis was from Trinidad, a cocoa-coloured girl with immense
dimples in her cheeks, and her escort's family would probably have a
fit if they got to know.
But this led him straight back to the proposition Mirza had made after
the tea-break, and there, as when following so many other trains of
thought today, he stopped at a blank wall.
-- In principle, damn it, why object? I know practically for sure about
Iris and that suave bastard Gellert. . . . But the desire isn't there.
We are the hollow men. Tap my chest: I boom with empty echoes.
The after-work clientele had dispersed to go home and eat and the ones
who would stay until closing time had not yet begun to arrive. Only
a few diehard regulars and himself remained. The staff were watching
television; from Paul's corner the screen was a narrow white blur and
the sound a mere irritating grumble. Nurse Davis and her companion left.
A wake survived from their passage.
-- Wake: a funeral ceremony. Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
Should I have another? Lunch was ghastly and I didn't even eat the biscuits
at teatime. The hell with it.
Hiding her annoyance at missing the next two minutes of the TV programme,
the landlord's wife pushed his glass up to the udder of the inverted
whisky bottle and replaced it next to the soda syphon. He had expected her
to take the money he'd laid down and say nothing, but she spoke after all.
"Had a bad day, have you, Doctor? You look a bit peaky."
"Hm? Oh . . . yes, I do feel rather tired."
-- She must have all the hospital gossip, since so many of the staff
drop in every day. Is there gossip about me too? What does it say?
Almost, he asked her point-blank, but she was gone to the till with his
jingling coins.
Sitting down again at his table, he fumbled out cigarettes and was about
to light one when the outside door slammed wide. Everyone froze. Everyone
stared. The man in the doorway was an apparition.
Hatless, his head was wrapped in a scarlet scarf of blood from a cut on
his scalp. One eye was vastly swollen into a black bruise. Three scratches
were crusting on his cheek. Mud fouled the legs of his trousers, his
shoes, the hem of his damp fawn raincoat. He held his left arm cradled
in his right, swaying at the threshold and seeming terrified that he
might brush the jamb with the hurt limb.
"Harry!" the landlord's wife said faintly, and her husband thrust up
the bar-flap and strode toward the intruder.
"My God, what happened to you? Been in an accident? Flo, get him some
brandy!"
Customers on their feet now included Paul, walking mechanically around
this table, those chairs, to get where he was going.
"Ambulance," the man said in a petulant high whine. "Oh Jesus, my arm."
Shaking, the landlord guided him to a padded settle and made him sit down.
He rapped at his wife for being slow with the brandy.
"Harry, there's Dr Fidler," she countered, glass in hand but making no move
to fill it.
Paul was trying to make sense of the man's condition. A car smash?
Presumably; perhaps he'd run off the road into a ditch and got muddy
climbing out. . . .
He found his voice and addressed the hurt man. "Yes, I'm a doctor.
Let's have a look at you." And to the landlord, aside: "Get me a bowl
of warm water and some disinfectant and anything you have in the way of
dressings. Hurry!"
The other customers had burst into excited chatter. Paul snapped at them
to stand clear, eased the man into a lying position with his head on a
cushion the landlord's wife gave him, and dropped on one knee.
-- Funny. Those marks on the cheek: from nails? The way the grooves are
arranged . . .
But those were the most superficial injuries. He tugged the clean
handkerchief from his breast pocket and lightly separated the hair
beginning to clot with blood. The man flinched and started to draw rapid
hissing breaths to distract himself from the pain. The cut looked worse
than it was; he must have an X-ray, naturally, but probably there was
no fracture. As to the black eye: one ordinary shiner, like the scalp
more spectacular than dangerous.
-- Which leaves that arm he's nursing.
The landlord produced the bowl of water and announced that his wife had
gone for plaster and cotton-wool. Paul leaned close to the hurt man.
"Can you straighten that arm?"
A headshake, breath gusting between clenched teeth.
"Have you any other pain except your head, face and arm?"
Another headshake. Good: the depth of his breathing certainly indicated
he could hardly have injured his rib-cage.
"Is the pain worse above or below the elbow?"
With his right forefinger the man pointed towards his shoulder.
-- So: presumably a fractured humerus. Just possibly a dislocated shoulder
. . . ? No, the joint feels normal enough.
Paul rose to his feet. "Get me some sharp scissors, please," he told
the landlord. "Or a razor blade would do."
"Here!" The injured man struggled to sit up. "What for?"
"Lie still," Paul soothed. "I shall have to cut the sleeve away and look at
that arm."
"But this is my best suit, and I only bought the raincoat last Thursday!"
Very pale from shock, the man nonetheless forced himself into a sitting
position, so swiftly that Paul could not prevent him.
"But you said your arm is too painful to straighten," Paul sighed.
"And anyway if you try to get your coat off you're liable to grind the
ends of the broken bone together, and that would be sheer agony."
"It's broken, is it? You sure?"
"I can't be completely sure till I get a proper look at it, but I think
it must be."
"But I only bought the coat last Thursday," the man protested again.
His eyes, rolling, fell on the landlord's outstretched hand proffering
a packet of razor blades, and he made a weak attempt to open his coat
with his good arm before Paul could intervene.
The fly of his trousers was undone, letting the white of underpants
show through.
Some of the bystanders giggled and exchanged nudges. Paul wanted to bark
at whoever thought this was funny, but he was too busy steadying the hurt
man, whom the pang from his arm had shaken severely.
"I warned you," Paul said. "You can always buy another coat; arms are a
bit harder to come by. I'll be as gentle as I can, but I'm afraid this
is going to be painful whatever I do."
Unwrapping the packet of blades the landlord gave him, he was struck by
a thought. "You did phone for an ambulance, didn't you?" he demanded.
The landlord blinked. "Well . . . no, actually I didn't."
"Why on earth not? Look at the state the fellow's in!"
"But I thought you could just take him across to your hospital," the
landlord countered. "It's only a few yards along the road."
"Hospital!" The hurt man reacted. "There's a hospital that close? Then why
are you fooling around in here?"
"I'm afraid it's no good to you," Paul answered. "You need proper surgical
facilities. We'll have to move you to Blickham General."
"I'll phone up right away," the landlord muttered in embarrassment,
and pushed his way to the back of the bar.
Dazed, the hurt man didn't seem to have heard Paul's last words.
He complained obstinately, "But if there's a hospital just down the road
. . . You come from there?"
"Yes."
"What's wrong with it, then? A hospital's a hospital!"
"Mine isn't equipped to handle emergencies like yours," Paul said,
his patience stretching to the limit. "You'll need that head X-rayed,
for one thing, and your arm splinted, and you may have other injuries
for all I can tell. We don't have the facilities."
"So why in hell do you call the place a hospital?"
"It's a mental hospital!"
"Then that explains it," the man said, opening his eyes as wide as the
bruising would permit.
"What?"
"How the hell do you think I got in this mess? I was attacked, damn it,
I was beaten up! One of your blasted loonies must have escaped!"
*4*
"The ambulance will be here in a few minutes," the landlord panted,
returning from the phone.
"Better get the police as well," said a sour-faced man from Paul's left.
"There's an escaped lunatic about."
-- Enter rumour, painted full of . . .
"Nonsense!" Paul snapped. "I came from the hospital directly I finished
work. Certainly none of our patients is missing!"
"Ah, but you'd say that anyhow, wouldn't you?" the sour man grunted.
"Besides which you've been in here two hours. Saw you come in. That's
plenty of time for a bloodthirsty maniac to break out." He rounded the
words with a horrid relish, and Paul's patience ended.
"You married? Got a family to look after you when you get old?"
-- Safe ground. Happy family men don't spend whole evenings in dreary
pubs like this one.
"What's it to you?" the man countered belligerently.
"Only that most of my patients aren't maniacs -- just lonely old people
who don't want to get out because nobody on the outside ever treated them
better than they get treated inside. Understood? Now shut up and let me
find out the truth behind all this!"
-- I should be ashamed. But people like him make me sick.
Working on the layers of cloth, coat, jacket, shirt, slashing each and
laying bare the broken arm, he questioned the hurt man and received
answers punctuated with gasps.
"I was driving back towards Blickham -- go easy there, damn it! Name's
Faberdown. I'm a rep, see? Fertilisers and cattle cake. Firm transferred
me here last month and I don't know my way about very well yet -- Christ,
I said go easy! Got behind schedule taking a wrong turning. And when I
came to those woods up there, half a mile back, I had to stop and get
out, follow me? It was dark, nobody to take offence. And while I was
stretching my legs a bit . . ."
He broke off, not from a pang of pain this time.
-- Curious.
Paul was lightly palpating the injured arm. As far as he could tell it
was a perfectly clean break and ought to heal without complications,
but it needed splinting before he was put in an ambulance. Separating the
three sleeves from the rest of the garments at the shoulder, he prompted:
"Yes, what happened?"
The man swallowed hard. "Someone rushed towards me. Just went for me,
like that. I didn't do anything, didn't say anything, no reason. Clawed
my face like you see, punched me in the eye, and when I tried to fight
back picked me up the way you see on telly and chucked me at a tree!"
The bystanders were hanging on every word.
-- Lapping it up, aren't they? If they saw the sort of things I see
every day of my life . . .
Paul stilled that reaction. He looked Faberdown over, trying to sum him
up. Thirties, a bit of a phony -- Irish thornproof suit for the "country
gentleman" air, a not-quite-genuine old school tie in case the gentleman
bit needed reinforcement. Running to fat. A load for anyone short of a
professional wrestler to "chuck" at a tree.
"Would you recognise your attacker again?"
"It was all over so quickly . . ." Once more the salesman swallowed
convulsively. Then the reason for his previous hesitation emerged with
the reluctant admission: "About all I could tell was that it was a woman."
"A woman? Did
this
?"