Quicksand Page 15

  When he came out, he was shaking. He was late for lunch and had to gobble his food to avoid being overdue at the clinic. Nonetheless he was triumphant. Not one further word had been breathed about his "errors."

  However, talking wasn't enough. He was under no illusions about the price he'd paid for facing Holinshed down. So far, Holinshed's dislike had been on principle; he liked his juniors to be subservient, and had even less affection for Mirza than for Paul.

  All that was changed. Within the past half-hour Paul had staked his claim in the arena of hospital politics, and the side he had chosen to come down on was his own.

  At the cost of probable indigestion, he reached the clinic five minutes early, gloomily preoccupied.

  Alsop was refreshing his memory with the notes of last week's session; glancing up on Paul's entry, he exclaimed, "Hullo! What's happened to your sunny disposition since I left you?"

  "To be candid," Paul said wryly, "Dr Holinshed has."

  "Need I have asked? Tell me the worst, then."

  He heard Paul out with a judicious air. "You're going to have to watch yourself," he opined. "Cede a little ground in Riley's case, for example, because being dead right all the time is a sure way to aggravate the situation. Tactics, young fellow, with the emphasis on the tact. Your overall strategy, though, is sound, and if you stick to it you'll make him wish he'd never opened his mouth to you. Okay?"

  Without waiting for a reply, he went on, "There's one thing I should have thought of this morning, incidentally, which didn't strike me until I was driving out of the gate. After Urchin attacked the nurse here, how was it she was allowed to join the other patients at the dance? I'd have expected her to be safely shut away."

  A chilly sensation, like a cold wet hand, passed down Paul's spine.

  -- What does my life hang on? A hair, a thread, a strand of cobweb?

  "Do you know, that went completely out of my mind? I must have suppressed it. She was supposed to be locked in her cell, and we couldn't discover how she got out."

  "Papa Freud he say," Alsop grunted, "don't let a lucky outcome make you overlook potentially significant facts." He chuckled unexpectedly. "And don't let it lead you down blind alleys like to one which this moment occurs to me."

  "What?"

  "Well, to what profession would you assign a rather attractive young woman who is (a) skilled in unarmed combat and (b) able to pick an unpickable lock? According to what I learn from television and the cinema, she ought to be a secret agent, oughtn't she? Come on, time's wasting. Get the nurse to show the first customer in."

  *23*

  Across the room the TV set uttered murmuring noises and the greyish light of its screen played on Iris's face. Practice had taught Paul to shut out its distractions while he was working. Shoulders hunched, he leaned on the gate-legged oak table and consolidated Urchin's dossier with the latest crop of improbable observations.

  Following up every last one of those anomalies would take months; each seemed to point to a separate conclusion, and logic said that all bar one would be dead-ends. Urchin's blood, for example, was group AB -- already the least common of the major groups -- and rhesus negative into the bargain, suggesting that her genetic endowment was quite as odd as he'd expected on seeing that her face united the Asiatic trait of the epicanthic fold with features otherwise wholly European.

  But there was no known connection between the two.

  He was so preoccupied that when Iris abruptly spoke he at first mistook the words for a line of dialogue from the television. Realising the error, he turned.

  "I'm sorry?"

  "I said the programmes are terrible tonight." Iris shrugged. And, after a pause: "What are you doing? Something for the diploma course?"

  "No. Notes on the patient who was found wandering in the woods on the road near Yemble."

  -- Lying by omission: is that going to trap me one day? I judge somehow it would be offensive to Iris if I told her this is the same woman patient who saved me from Ridley's attack. I'm building such a stock of semi-secrets. . . .

  "I think it's a disgrace, the way they keep piling extra work on you," Iris said.

  "This is something I volunteered for."

  "Goodness, haven't you got enough on your plate with the diploma course?"

  "This is equally useful in a different way. It's a project I've started with the help of Dr Alsop, my consultant."

  -- Magic word.

  "Oh!" Interest sparked. "I remember you saying he'd been after you to write a paper. Is this . . .?"

  "Quite likely."

  -- If I ever make enough sense of it.

  "Is there something special about this patient?"

  "Well, it's a bit technical, I'm afraid."

  "You're always telling me that," Iris pouted. "In fact sometimes I get the feeling you're refusing to talk to me about your work. Maybe I haven't had the training to understand all the fine points, but I'm not so stupid that you have to shut me out of that half of your life."

  -- I have been here before. Oh, never mind: it was a hell of a good homecoming. Let's keep the mood as long as we can.

  Oversimplifying to the point of irrelevance, he did his best to explain until Iris yawned pointedly and he broke off to suggest going to bed, whereupon she rose and gave him a warm smile.

  "I like hearing you talk about your work," she said. "I don't pretend to follow everything, but it sounds very impressive!"

  Paul hid his bitter reaction to the words.

  -- Incantations. That's all it is to you, and to how many other people? A set of magical phrases which will conjure the evil spirits out of the bodies of the possessed. But there's no magic about it. It's more . . . carpentry. Rule-of-thumb stuff. Taking the broken bits of a person and sticking them back all anyhow, provided they're stuck tight.

  But he didn't want to explain that; it was twenty to midnight. He let her words stand at face value and approached her with a smile, putting both arms around her and nuzzling her neck.

  She eased herself free with an arch whisper: "Just let me slip into the bathroom for a moment, darling!"

  And suddenly, bright as lightning: -- My God! The night of the dance, when thanks to Mirza I came home. The first time, the absolutely first time ever, when "the bathroom" didn't intervene!

  He clenched his fists as a wild exultation grew in him. At the far back of his mind a rational voice seemed to argue that the odds were enormously against it, but that was drowned by the thunder of blood in his ears.

  -- If only, if only . . . Christ, I hope it's true. I hope it's twins .

  And, drunk on the imagined triumph, he ran up the stairs after Iris two at a time.

  At the beginning of thier marriage, he had been as willing as Iris to avoid parenthood. Her father had still been alive, and although she could expect to inherit most of his money, and had some already which her grandparents had left her, this didn't justify bringing up children on a new doctor's salary. It made excellent sense to delay until he achieved, say, registrar status.

  Gradually, however, he had grown suspicious of the way Iris declined to discuss their eventual children, concluded that she bad a psychic block against motherhood, and awkwardly tried to suggest that talking about it might be therapeutic. That was a mistake. It led to the first and worst of a series of screaming matches in which she accused him of treating her as a resident patient instead of a wife. Once or twice he was tempted to wonder if she, like him, was hiding a breakdown experienced before they met each other, but he abandoned the idea.

  No: she was simply unwilling to face the hard work and inconvenience imposed by children on their parents.

  If she had been afraid of childbirth itself, Paul would have been perfectly content to adopt children; his training had convinced him that a personality is moulded more by influence than chromosomes. But this didn't appeal to Iris any more than bearing her own. At last he was compelled to recognise the truth which Mirza with his usual insight had expressed as "wanting to boss you
around." A tactful understatement.

  In effect, he was Iris's compensation for not having children. Through managing his career she was transmuting the urge that should have been channeled towards rearing a child.

  Curiously, that discovery -- belated because he was reluctant to admit the implied slight to his self-esteem -- was reassuring. Thanks to it, he genuinely could regard her as a resident patient with a problem to be cured. But for all his hinting, probing, teasing, he had made no dent in the barrier of her refusal.

  Now chance might have succeeded where scheming had failed. Honest appraisal predicted that the result would be shock, dismay, tears; optimism argued that he could persuade Iris to accept a fait accompli even if he hadn't been able to bring her to a conscious positive decision.

  That reminded him of Mirza's charming definition of an unwanted pregnancy: a fétus accompli .

  With luck, he'd got one. But he said nothing whatever about it to Iris.

  -- Christ. What sort of a gap in my personality has been mortared up by the idea of being a father? Suddenly I feel like Superman. Pile the work on me and I come back for more; heap the papers in my tray and I go through them like a whirlwind; show me a tough textbook and the facts and theories slam straight into my subconscious; challenge me with a difficult patient and I don't waste time worrying and second-guessing myself, I go to the root of the matter and nine times out of ten get it right on the first shot. Soppy Al is jubilant and even Holinshed is turning polite on me!

  Yet -- and this in its way was a silent admission that he didn't really expect the mood of elation to survive the transition from wishful thinking to an argument on practical terms -- he kept putting off and putting off the discussion he realised he must have with Iris, just as he had postponed confessing to her about his nervous breakdown until it was too late to mention it at all.

  *24*

  The phone rang.

  "Inspector Hofford for you, Doctor," the operator said. "One moment."

  -- Oh lord. Is this the end of the rearguard struggle I've been putting up, staving off a definite decision about Urchin? No, I won't sign the paper saying she's insane. I don't care how certain the experts are that her language doesn't exist; she's a hell of a sight better balanced than half the people I have to deal with on the staff of this bin! Somebody else can certify her. I won't.

  Paul's reflex anger almost prevented him from hearing what Hofford said when he came on the line; he was convinced he would be told the opposite.

  "Morning, Doctor. You were right about Faberdown!"

  "I . . . what? Oh, marvellous! How do you know?"

  "He's a bit too fond of his liquor, and last night he made the mistake of drinking in the local which my Constable Edwards uses. He'll make a detective yet, that chap. Faberdown was holding forth about how much commission he'd lost through his broken arm, and somebody asked how it happened, and he . . . well . . . started grumbling about the girl who'd done it to him. Said she looked so tiny and harmless and he thought he could easily hold on to her, so he decided to have a go."

  Paul hung excitedly on every word.

  "So Edwards sorted him out when the pub shut. Not exactly routine procedure, but saves a lot of trouble. He cornered Faberdown and told him if he didn't let the whole thing drop he'd be the one on a charge and not the girl. And this morning I've had a visit from him, all shifty-eyed and embarrassed. He wants to let things slide, because it's 'not fair on this poor girl who's a bit off her head.'"

  "Will you thank Edwards for me, very much indeed?"

  -- Blessed are they who expect the worst, for they shall get it!

  Humming, Paul cradled the phone. He was almost alarmed at the reversal of mood which had come over him since the day of Urchin's arrival, when even such a slight change as the movement of the sitting-room furniture wound him up to irrational panic. Now, by contrast, he could half-believe he had tapped some magical force that made things turn out right, even events he could have no control over like this careless admission of Faberdown's.

  The door of his office trembled to a ferocious bang, and one of the deputy porters entered, swinging a large cardboard package by its string.

  "Morning, Doc. Parcel just arrived for you!"

  A glance at the name of the dispatching firm showed that it was what he had been expecting: a kit of standard intelligence tests including most of those described in the article Tumbelow had loaned him.

  He opened it up. Surrounded by a welter of torn tissue paper, he studied the instructions and found them clear and concise. He was already familiar with many of the tests from the receiving end, and although he hadn't administered any since he finished training he anticipated no problems.

  -- Hell of a well-matched battery, this! Correlative tables, weighting factors, lists of common anomalous deviations . . . Yes, we can go places with this lot. When?

  He frowned over his day's timetable.

  -- Suppose I start at one-thirty. This lot, plus a man-drawing test, will take about an hour; that means postponing the two o'clock appointment to half past, and then . . .

  He made some rapid changes to the schedule, notified the appropriate departments, and asked the stores to send him up a stopwatch to time the tests with. Then he arranged for Urchin to be brought to his office at one-thirty sharp.

  After gulping down his lunch, he roped in Nurse Davis, willingly enough, to time the tests for him. She was quick on the uptake, and he completed his briefing of her comfortably ahead of time.

  Offering her a cigarette -- he wanted one himself because his nerves were unaccountably jangling -- he asked her on impulse, "Nurse, this girl Urchin has been here for some time now. What do you make of her?"

  Nurse Davis's dimples deepened enormously. "That's a queer one, Doctor. But queer in the wrong way."

  "How do you mean?"

  "The peculiar things she does are kind of consistent, get me?"

  Paul hesitated. "Do you think she's actually insane?"

  "That's a funny kind of question!"

  "So give me a funny answer," Paul snapped.

  "I don't have any answers, Doctor. But . . . All right, I'll go out on a limb. She strikes me as acting foreign. Not crazy -- foreign."

  A tap on the door, and Nurse Foden delivered Urchin at the very moment the clock above chimed and clinked the half-hour.

  Paul studied the mysterious girl as she settled in a chair facing him across the table he had pulled out to use for the tests, warily as ever.

  -- Wary, yes. But not terrified any more. Must have made up her mind she isn't going to be tortured. . . . So Nurse Davis thinks she "acts foreign." I wish to God I knew what kind of foreign!

  He had finally received a next-to-definite opinion from the philologists he had consulted about her language. They said they could find nobody who recognised it; the spoken form bore some relationship to the Finno-Ugrian language family, as the written form did to runic, but none of them would commit himself by giving it a name. In short, they had been as helpful as Dr Jewell when, in his capacity as the hospital's medical consultant, he made some vague remark about the epicanthic fold being a feature of Mongoloid idiocy.