Quicksand Read online

  He'd driven up from London on his own to be interviewed at Chent, and when that was over he was ninety per cent certain he'd got the job. He needed it; his original idea of sticking as close as possible to a London teaching hospital was foundering because -- to Iris -- progress was dismayingly slow in the fiercely competitive atmosphere of the capital. Yet he knew as soon as he set eyes on Yemble that she'd dislike living there with equal intensity.

  On the one hand: being appointed psychiatric registrar at Chent was going to save him a year on the promotion ladder and make up for that other year lost beyond recall, the one Iris had not so far learned about.

  -- Bloody fool. I really am a bloody fool.

  On the other hand: Yemble was being absorbed into the drab town of Blickham, whose single claim to distinction was an Elizabethan town-hall sandwiched between a garage and the public baths. Eight miles away, Cornminster -- charming, largely unspoiled, but offering what to a wealthy attractive girl used to London? A twice-weekly change of programme at the Lido Picture Palace and advertisements for the Cornminster Madrigal Fellowship painted in water-colours by the conductor's teenage daughter.

  Trying to pluck up the courage to tell Iris that he was going to take the post at Chent whether she liked it or not, he'd driven for what seemed like an eternity along each successive one of the roads leading out of Yemble. Then, the car had been a second-hand Ford; Iris's father was dead less than a month and though she was entitled to draw on the money he'd left her she had felt it somehow in bad taste.

  The moment he saw this house, with the estate agent's board outside offering it for sale, everything fell into place. At nine that night he parried Iris's anger with a bunch of flowers and a picture of the house, and next weekend they drove up to look at it.

  He was only marginally guilty about depicting the house as something exceptional. As he'd discovered during his tour of the district, Cornminster boasted twenty similar, and even depressing Blickham preserved a few. But he'd banked on her unfamiliarity with the west country, and the trap closed as expected.

  -- Darling, how clever of you! All these magnificent oak beams! And leaded windows! It's like walking back into history! And it's so cheap!

  While he kept silent about the drawbacks of windows that called for lights to be switched on in daytime and the kitchen doorway which bumped his head and the chimneys that poured half the heat of the fire straight up into nowhere.

  -- The television could go in that recess but we'd have to get a stand more in keeping with the room like an antique chest perhaps and we can sit and watch it and listen to the logs crackling. . . . Darling, you are sure about this job? I mean, I wouldn't want you to take it just to please me.

  Hanging up his clammy coat, Paul snorted at the memory.

  -- The jargon of status has rubbed off on her, all right. The word "consultant" has a kind of magic to her ears. How soon will I be one, how long O Lord how long? Better have something to eat before I turn in or I'll wake in the night and have to botch up a snack in a daze. Phil Kerans thinks I'm living out in luxury. He should have to stagger through this room at three in the morning in pyjamas with the wind howling down that bloody chimney.

  There was nothing to drink but some wine in a recorked bottle, probably meant for cooking. Iris was a cookery snob given to paella and souffles which didn't quite succeed, but half the time she couldn't be bothered and either opened cans or suggested going out. On a registrar's salary he preferred cans.

  Carving a doorstep off a brown loaf, pricking sausages, fetching an egg from the refrigerator, he had most of his mind spare to ramble on.

  -- Deceived by appearances, that's my wife. With me as much as the house. Slam down the money out of Dad's -- sorry: Daddy's estate, full of plans for a pink matched bathroom suite with shower; then when they ran the pipes and exposed the fabric, the smell of dry rot pungent as smoke. I'd rather she blamed me instead of rowing with the estate agent. Best of all herself: "Surveyor? But this is the only possible place for us to live while you're at Chent!"

  Despite his forking it, one of the sausages burst and began to ooze obscenely out of its skin.

  -- Bloody hell, Mirza's right, isn't he?

  He went to pour a large glass of the stale wine, hoping the beer and whisky had progressed far enough through his system not to wish a hangover on him from incautious mixing. He paused in the living-room and stared about him, remembering the awful evening when he'd brought the Pakistani home for drinks.

  -- Where do they acquire that art of making unwelcome visitors feel small without actually insulting them? Bred into them by their nannies. Must be. And afterwards: "Darling, I do appreciate that you have to be on good terms with your colleagues, but surely an immigrant like your friend won't be staying in England? He'll be going back to his own country?" Glossing it: "Steer clear of the wogs and butter up the bosses!"

  -- Keeps wondering why I don't invite the medical superintendent (hushed, awe). Because I can't stand the bastard, is all.

  He sent the egg to keep the sausages company in the pan.

  -- That girl tonight with her air of total disorientation . . . What in hell do I really know about women? "A marriage like yours is no basis for a proper understanding" -- damn Mirza for having more insight than I'll accumulate by ninety. But I do know why Iris married me and I'm lying to myself when I pretend I don't. Bright young medical student just that significant step below her on the social ladder which promised she could dictate the course of his career and see him grateful for it but not beyond hope because witness all those scholarships and ambitious parents aware of their place but pushing their boy from behind: hence, he's used to being pushed. I should have sheered off when she tried to argue me into general practice (Harley Street, a fortune from hypochondriacs dazzled by the chauffeured Rolls) instead of countering with persuasive statements about psychiatry the wide-open field and her first introduction to the idea of a CONSULTANT looked up to by hospital staff . . .

  The burst sausage had caught on the pan and was burning. Hastily he scooped the food on to a plate and turned off the stove. He checked his next motion and addressed the air.

  "God damn it, anyone else I can get away from, but myself I have to live with till I die! I did go crazy from overwork after two years' studying medicine and nothing can change that. I did have to waste twelve months drugged up to the eyeballs and staring at the garden and going twice a week to see that halfwitted dyed-in-the-wool Freudian bastard Schroff! And I bloody well ought to have been put in a bin like Chent so I'd remember I'm as fragile as they are!"

  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 to
day?" 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.