Curiously, hearing his own voice took the poison out of the idea.
He was quite calm while he was eating his scratch meal, and when he went
to bed he dozed off quickly into a deep exhausted sleep.
Later, though, he woke moaning from a dreamworld in which, like Alice in
the woods, he stood helpless before a roomful of the commonest objects
and heard cruel laughter taunting him because he could not remember any
of their English names.
*9*
"Quite a poppet, this Urchin you brought in last night," Mirza said,
crossing Paul's path in the entrance hall of the hospital.
"What?" For a moment Paul, preoccupied didn't get the reference;
then he said, bantering to cover the effects of his disturbed night,
"Oh! I might have known
you'd
want to size her up."
"Natalie told me about her during breakfast," Mirza said, unruffled.
"I thought I should look her over before this dump wipes out what vestige
of animation she may have."
"What's happened to your insurance against breach of ethics?"
"It's wholly adequate, thank you. But patients are people and so are
doctors -- with some few possible exceptions," he concluded softly,
eyes refocusing over Paul's shoulder. "Morning, Dr Holinshed!"
"Morning," the medical superintendent said curtly. "Oh, Fidler! Come in
for a word, will you?" He brushed past into his office, leaving the door
wide on the assumption that Paul was instantly at his heels.
"Expecting trouble today?" Mirza inquired.
"I am now," Paul muttered, and moved towards the door.
Holinshed was a lean Yorkshireman of middle height, with hair the
colour of tobacco juice receding all around his pate. Mirza's favourite
allegation about him was that he had had to be forced into administration
because an hour closeted with him reduced most patients to tears.
"Close the door, please, Fidler," he said now. "I have no wish that
anyone but ourselves should hear what I have to say. Sit down."
An abridged gesture towards the padded Victorian dining-chair placed
for visitors in front of the ornate leather-topped desk.
-- No doubt this room impresses outsiders: antique furniture,
mock-Chippendale bookcases stuffed with textbooks, photographs of Freud,
Ernest Jones, Krafft-Ebing. . . . But I think his mind is like the room,
furnished with antiques.
"I had a telephone call yesterday evening, voicing rather a serious
complaint about your conduct," Holinshed went on. "I don't imagine I
need identify its source?"
-- Oh.
But Paul was in control of himself this morning in spite of everything.
He said, "What sort of complaint, sir?"
"Are you now aware of having grossly offended a distinguished local
resident last evening?"
"Not that I noticed," Paul said, straight-faced.
"Then either you're singularly insensitive or I've been given a false
account of what you said. The latter I find hard to credit." Holinshed
leaned back, fingertips together. "Mrs Barbara Weddenhall rang me up at
home to say that you'd insulted her in public and furthermore that you
were drunk at the time. Any comments?"
"Well, the second point isn't true at all. And I must add, sir, that
I'd hoped you knew me better than to believe it."
-- Good shot. Holinshed prides himself on "how well I know my staff."
"As to the so-called 'insults': did she tell you what they were?"
Holinshed hesitated. "Actually," he admitted, "Mrs Weddenhall described
them as unrepeatable."
"I think 'nonexistent' would be more precise," Paul murmured. "Have you
looked over the emergency admission report from last night yet?"
"Of course not! You saw me arrive just now."
"Did Mrs Weddenhall happen to mention an offer of help which she made to
Inspector Hofford of the county police?"
"I was just about to come to that. I had to reassure her that if one
of our patients had escaped I would certainly have been notified. But
there was, was there not, some violently disturbed person who attacked
a passer-by?"
"I can hardly imagine that
you
, sir, would approve of hunting down a
mentally deranged person with guns and wolfhounds! Inspector Hofford was
as horrified as I was, and if I did speak sharply to Mrs Weddenhall
I know I was expressing views which he and probably yourself would agree
with. The alleged maniac, by the way, proved to be a girl five feet
tall and weighing seventy-nine pounds who came away with me without the
least resistance."
-- I think I'm getting the measure of my boss: plenty of "sir" and an
imitation of his own stilted diction!
Paul cheered up; the morning seemed brighter suddenly. Studying him
with eyebrows drawn tightly together, Holinshed said eventually, "Did
you ask Mrs Weddenhall if she had ever been criminally assaulted?"
-- This will call for a little more weaseling out of.
"There were nail-marks on the injured man's face like those often found
on rapists. In fact, one of the constables on the spot mentioned having
seen similar ones on a man he'd helped to arrest. Since Mrs Weddenhall
is a JP I did ask her -- yes, I remember clearly now -- if she'd had
any experience of cases of rape. If I phrased my question badly, I'm
sorry. But I was extremely agitated at the prospect of a posse with guns
turning out to search the area.
He waited. At length Holinshed gave a grunt and reached towards his
in-tray.
"Very well, Fidler. We'll say no more about it. Just bear in mind that
our relations with the public are absolutely crucial, and you mustn't
let your professional zeal overcome your tact. Understood?"
"Of course." Repressing the desire to grin, Paul rose.
"Thank you. That's all."
Paul entered his own office with a sigh of relief. He went to the window
instead of sitting down to tackle the morning's heap of paper-work,
and lit a cigarette while watching the outside working-parties disperse
towards their jobs.
-- One consolation about Chent: they don't keep the poor devils sitting
around on their backsides in the wards all day. I wonder who broke the
dam in that area. Can't have been Holinshed. The one before, the one
before that?
It was hardly a fine day, but at least it was drier than yesterday. Around
a yawn he stared at the gardens detail waiting for issue of their safe
tools -- insofar as any implement was safe. But patients weren't given
anything more risky than a birch besom or a wheelbarrow unless they were
comparatively stabiised.
-- Hard to tell the difference between inmates on occupational therapy and
the employed maintenance staff if it weren't for the former always being
accompanied by nurses in white jackets. . . . Wonder if a mental hospital
should be run like a medieval monastery, a totally self-sufficient
community. Could be done. Except that too much enclosure of the patients
runs counter to the aim of giving them back to the outside world.
The first of the morning's knocks came on his door. The visitor was
Oliphant, remarkably fresh after what for him had probably been a
trouble-free night's duty.
"Morning, Doc. Charge's compliments and can you make sure Dr Alsop sees
Mr Charrington today? We had a hell of a job getting him out of bed and
at breakfast he drew pictures all over the table with his porridge."
"Damn." Paul reached for the hanging clipboard he privately referred to
as the stand-up-and-yell list. There were really no non-urgent cases in
the hospital except the chronic geriatrics.
-- All madmen are urgent but some are more urgent than others.
"Right. Anything else?"
"Well" -- Oliphant hesitated -- "Matron did say you wanted Jingler and Riley
moved out of Disturbed to make up for the two discharges. You couldn't leave
it a couple of days, could you?"
"I'm afraid not. It's not doing those two any good at all being among
chronic patients who are worse than they are."
"That's what we thought you'd say," Oliphant muttered.
"Come off it! Granted, old Jingler is probably going to be in and out
for the rest of his life, but Riley's only twenty-two and too bright to
be wasted."
"He beat up his own mother, didn't he?"
"In some ways she seems to have deserved it," Paul sighed. "And they sent
him here, remember, not to Rampton or Broadmoor. Never mind the arguments,
though. Just get on with it. Dr Alsop will be here in about half an hour;
I'll try and get him to see Charrington right away."
"Thanks," Oliphant muttered sourly, and went out.
-- Maybe I'd feel more the way he does if I had to move among patients
in the mass all day long . . . ?"
Paul shook his head and started on the contend of the in-tray.
The phone tinkled just as the clock clanged and clinked nine-thirty.
Dumping the most routine of his case-notes -- "no change no change
no changes" -- into their files, he picked it up.
"Natalie," the voice said. "I'm off to look round the wards. Want to call
on Urchin with me, or wait till Alsop gets here?"
"Hang on." One-handed, Paul riffled the remaining documents in his tray.
"Suppose I join you in Female in ten minutes, does that suit?"
"Okay."
And another knock: Nurse Davis with memos from Matron.
-- Ask her how it went last night? Tactless! But it's a sunny day
for one person at least. Let's see. . . . Nothing immediate, praise
be. Pharmacy appropriations list: must remember to sound Alsop on this
fluphenazine treatment; I think we could benefit from it. And that's
that for the moment.
He pushed back his chair, suddenly eager to see Urchin again.
-- That name's catching on all right. Hope she accepts it. . . .
Why should I want so much to call on her with Natalie -- why not wait
until Alsop gets here in another few minutes? I have more work that
must be done. Oh, because what I fear has happened to her: enclosure
in a private universe. Anyhow, her case is a far cry from the regular
rather dull admissions. Imaginary voices, delusions of persecution,
pathological lethargy, all the other stock symptoms indicate that complex
or not, human beings have a remarkably limited range of ways of going
wrong. Like fever stemming from so many different diseases. Wonder if
GP's get a bang out of rare conditions like undulant fever as a change
from flu and measles. Christ, this place is doing horrible things to my
sense of humour!
*10*
Since Chent hadn't been designed for use as a mental hospital its layout
was illogical and inconvenient. The centre block, now given over to
administration, the pharmacy, and quarters for the resident medical
officers, was adequately compact, but the wards for the less-disturbed
patients spilled over randomly into what had once been nurseries,
picture galleries, gun-rooms and lord knew what, while the nurses'
quarters were in a range of converted stables separated from the main
building by a paved yard. Only the Disturbed wing, being a later addition,
was halfway functional; even so, there was no easy route from his office
to the ward where he was to join Natalie unless he short-cut through
the male dormitories.
And doing that wiped away the transient elation derived from outfacing
Holinshed.
-- Perhaps I'm not cut out for this work. just seeing the poor devils
folds me up like a clenched fist.
The dormitories were briskly busy at the moment, noisy with heel taps,
raised voices and the squeaking wheels of big wicker laundry-baskets.
Among the hubbub a handful of patients circulated listlessly in their
nightwear, like children being punished by being sent to bed in daylight.
They did view it as a punishment, he knew, but it was meant as a precaution.
They were each to see a visiting consultant today, and it wasn't unknown
for a patient to be so scared of these august and distant figures that
he stole away from the wards and tried to kill himself.
-- But what use are explanations in face of the rumours bred here? They'll
think of it as punishment until the millennium arrives. . . . Experts write
on the folklore of schools: kids keep alive superstitions, traditions,
rituals. But lunatics invent their own.
At one window, gazing blankly out, a man one side of whose face convulsed
at intervals of about ten seconds: Charrington, numbly awaiting Alsop's
pleasure. He didn't respond to Paul's greeting.
-- Not worth the effort, hm? What is worth the effort in surroundings
like these: sloppily painted walls, patched floors, beds jammed in
everywhere? If you breed rats till they're this crowded they start to
kill their young. As a patient I'd misbehave until they locked me in
one of the cells. Eighty square feet of privacy I'd trade for anything.