Quicksand Read online

  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.

  He found Natalie in the stairwell connecting the upper and lower floors of the Disturbed wing, at the end of the passage leading to the Female wards. She was talking to Matron Thoroday and Sister Wells; Paul waited till she had finished.

  -- Must be the "thorough" in her name Matron's trying to live up to, I suppose.

  This entire hospital was a sluggish battleground between interlocking zones of influence, all the way from the grand scale of medical superintendent versus hospital secretary where the support of outside forces like the hospital group or even the Ministry could be invoked, by way of Matron's unending series of arguments on points of principle -- this including such questions as what colour to repaint the drainpipes -- clear to the absurd manoeuvrings which centred on the patients themselves: silent but persistent jockeying for a majority of the cases that might be milked of a paper for an important medical journal. Paul had hoped that this last, which had shocked him when he first discovered it, might be confined to teaching hospitals, but Chent suffered from it too in a muted form.

  -- I wish Alsop hadn't said what he did when I first arrived, about my job being an ideal launch-base for getting my name into print. At twenty-eight what do I know that's new enough to warrant being printed? A paper on this strange girl we're starting to call Urchin? I could fit one in, I suppose; I don't have to break my neck on the diploma course yet. But I'm not involved. To me patients are still all strangers, all individuals. When they become simply "cases," maybe then . . .

  Matron bustled away. He moved towards Natalie and Sister Wells.

  "What was all that about?"

  Natalie grimaced. "It bothers Matron that we should have a patient with no clues to her identity. Hasn't she any scars? No deformities? Then how about having her fingerprints taken in case she's been arrested at some time?"

  Sister Wells, a gaunt brown-haired woman whom Paul had liked since their first meeting, exposed her big horsy teeth in a sympathetic grin and led the way towards the ward where Urchin was accommodated. Falling in alongside Natalie, Paul was struck by a point he'd overlooked last night.

  "I completely forgot to get in touch with Inspector Hofford!"

  "I remembered just after you'd gone. Not that I had any news for him."

  "What did he say about Faberdown -- the salesman?"

  "Still maintaining he did nothing to provoke an attack on him. Hofford was apologetic, but he said the matter would have to be taken further."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Sounds like a jargon phrase for making a nuisance of themselves." Natalie stopped outside one of the boxlike security cells running the whole length of the ward. "Damn. Sister, I said her door was to be left open."

  "It was," the sister countered.

  Paul looked around. Here, as on the men's side, those patients due for an interview with a consultant were hanging about in nightwear, and one caught his eye: a sly woman with a greasy tangle of grey hair. She put her hand to her mouth and giggled. Paul touched Natalie's arm, gesturing.

  "What? Oh, Madge Phelps interfering again! I might have guessed. Convinced she's in here to spy on the others, keeps coming to me and the nurses with harrowing tales about how they misbehave. Tell her off, will you Sister?"

  She jerked the cell's door open. There on the hard bed sat Urchin, tensed at the sudden intrusion.

  -- I've seen this cell before. HELP HELP scratched into the paint. Probably a mercy she can't read it.

  Recognising Paul, Urchin got to her feet and gave him a wan smile. He returned it as warmly as he could.

  -- Forget the trapped-animal look. Homicidals can wear it too.

  "What sort of night did she have?" he asked Natalie.

  "Kirk looked in on her a couple of times, and so did I. She spent a lot of the night sitting up in bed frowning, and Kirk says she was talking to herself at one stage."

  "Saying what?"

  "Foreign language. I quote Kirk."

  Paul rubbed his chin. "And this morning?"

  "Perfectly tractable apart from having to be shown how to do absolutely everything. Oh -- with one exception. She ate her porridge at breakfast, but then there was bacon and fried bread, and I gather she picked up the bacon in her fingers, smelt it, and left the table looking pale."

  "I was wondering if she might be Jewish," Sister Wells put in. "She's not what you'd call an English type, is she?"

  "No more a Jewish one." Paul shrugged. "Though that would account for her refusing bacon, of course. . . . I wonder. Perhaps she's vegetarian."

  "Health food and nudism?" Natalie suggested quizzically.

  "Picked a damned silly climate to do it in, then," Paul grunted. "Is she any the worse for her exposure, by the way?"

  "Not at all. In fact she found the bedding too hot for her; she removed the coverlid and folded it on the locker."

  "Feverish?"

  "Nope."

  "Well, I have no new ideas. You got any Natalie?"

  "The more that occur to me, the more they seem stupid." Natalie glanced at the clock on the wall of the ward.
"Blazes, I can't stand around here any longer. Roshman will be here any minute and he wants me to go to Birmingham with him after lunch, so it'll be a frantic morning. Let me know what Alsop says, won't you?"

  "Of course."

  She and Sister Wells moved away. Paul remained standing in the cell, staring at the girl and feeling a vast surge of pity for her plight. She seemed so tiny and helpless in the hospital dress of blue cotton, child-sized but even so too baggy around her waist, which she had been given. There was nothing childish, though, about the keen gaze of her large, dark eyes. And, despite the ugly garments put on her, she merited Mirza's approving description of her as a poppet: there was colour in her cheeks this morning instead of the cold pallor of yesterday, and that was a transfiguration.

  -- Damned shame you didn't give us some name we could twist into "Elfin" instead of Urchin! More suitable by far!

  "Pol?" she said suddenly.

  "Arrzheen," he agreed.

  Her small hand darted to her right, touching the bed, while she cocked her head at an inquiring angle. At first he didn't catch on; abruptly he realised her intention.

  -- She wants to know what it's called. What in the world have we stumbled into here?

  "Bed," he said carefully.

  "Baid!" A hesitation; then a tap on the wall.

  "Wall."

  "Wol!"

  "Dr Fidler!" a voice interrupted from behind him. He swung around to find Nurse Foden at the door.

  "Dr Alsop is here, Dr Fidler, and he says will you please join him right away."

  -- Damn. Well, it can't be helped. Try apologising in gestures.

  He pointed at himself, at Nurse Foden, and pantomimed walking away. Urchin's face fell, but she had no words to object with; she merely sighed and resumed her seat on the edge of the bed as though resigned to letting the world do what it liked with her.

  *11*

  Dr E. Knox Alsop was a fine-looking man: over six feet, with a broad forehead, smooth dark hair and a tan meticulously maintained throughout the winter with an ultraviolet lamp. Paul considered himself fortunate to be working with him rather than, say, with Dr Roshman or any other of the hospital's regular consultants. He had an undoubted streak of vanity, which had given Mirza the excuse (if he needed any) for coining the nickname "Soppy Al," but it was chiefly confined to minor characteristics like his tan and secretiveness about what his initial E stood for. Mirza had a theory about that, too: in his view Alsop had been an exceptionally active baby before he was born, and the name was Enoch -- " 'E knock-knocks!"

  Nonetheless, this vanity was a foible that seldom reached the point of irritating the people he had to work with, whereas Roshman's perpetual air of harassment found expression in indecision; he would spend an hour with one of the resident MO's planning an exact course of therapy for a patient, then ring up from home the same evening with a full set of radically different second thoughts.

  On the other hand, Alsop did exhibit the attitude which had enabled Mirza to coin a spare and to Paul's mind far more apt nickname for him: "Opportunity Knox." He regarded himself as inhabiting a jungle in which behind masks of civiised behaviour and conventional politeness everybody, doctor or not, was out for what he could get. No means of enhancing his reputation, status and income escaped him.

  When he first cottoned on to the extent of Alsop's ambitions, Paul had been mystified as to why he was content to act as a consultant to a medium-sized provincial hospital like Chent, with its total of under three hundred beds, when the promotion ladder offered so many more rungs in big cities. The explanation had proved to be perfectly simple and absolutely typical. From correspondence in periodicals like the British Medical Journal he had progressed very early in his career to publishing papers, first with colleagues of greater standing, then on his own. The next step would have to be a book, and the subject he had settled on was a comparative study of the incidence of various psychoses among rural and urban populations. Chent's catchment area was eight per cent rural. Hence his presence.

  Whether directly from Paul, or -- as Paul suspected was more likely -- after meeting Iris, he had summed up the new registrar as a go-getter like himself. Paul had done nothing to disillusion him immediately. He had listened with attention to Alsop's well-meant advice, promised to act on it . . . and then somehow let it slide. Up until about Christmas of last year Alsop had continued to prompt him, going so far as to point out letters in medical journals which called for a reply from someone -- why not from Paul? And he'd likewise stressed the advantages of a registrar's post as a stepping-stone to eventual fame. Paul, slightly disheartened by the requirements of the course he'd just started on -- the two-year programme for a Diploma of Psychological Medicine -- had complied with one or two of the suggestions, but given up when no instant results followed, preferring to spend his free time in study.

  Now, a couple of months past Christmas, Alsop appeared to be ready to write Paul off as the white hope of Chent. Paul was still helping at his once-weekly clinic in Blickham, but the references Alsop had made to letting him tackle clinic sessions on his own during the consultant's absence had remained a vague idea without plans to implement it.

  -- I suppose I have disappointed him. But that doesn't make him unique. My parents, my wife, even myself are in there with him.

  At all events, the greeting he offered this morning was friendly enough. He waved Paul to the interview chair in the rather cheerless office.

  "Chuck me that stuff from the couch, would you?" he went on. Paul passed over a small stack of files that had been dumped on the grey blanket. "How are things, young fellow?"

  -- Should I tell him? It's already only half a secret. But he has small sympathy for failures, and failing in marriage is about as basic as failures come.

  "So-so." Paul shrugged. "The weather's been getting me down, I think. I'm coming to understand why the suicide peak starts in March."

  "Thought you'd have worked that out in your teens," Alsop grunted, scanning a succession of case-notes as he talked. "Your wife still away, is she?"

  "Yes."

  "That's probably a contributory factor. I wouldn't go so far as that chap in Sweden who advocates promiscuity as a treatment for delinquents, but there's no doubt whatever about the therapeutic effect of regular orgasm." Alsop gave a dry chuckle. "Your friend Bakshad seems to realise that okay. I ran into him in Blickliam last night with what must be his twentieth different girl since he got here."

  Paul, off guard, was overwhelmed with a pang of bitterness.

  -- Therapeutic effects of orgasm! I've half a mind to spew the truth in his lap and see how his face changes!

  But while the decision was still untaken Alsop had gone on.

  "You ran foul of some local bigwig, I gather -- hm?"

  Paul scowled. "Mrs Weddenhall, Jay Pee ! Who told you about that -- Dr Holinshed?"

  "Of course."

  "I thought I'd set him straight on the matter. But apparently I didn't shout loudly enough to make him listen."

  "Well, there's no need to shout at me," Alsop said, glancing up. "Candidly -- mind if I speak straight out?"

  "Of course not," Paul muttered.

  "I think you're letting things get on top of you. Bad. Mustn't do it. If you try and identify with these unfortunates all around us you're much too liable to wind up joining them. You had some psychotherapy once, didn't you?"

  "A course of analysis," Paul said. And repeated his habitual cover-story: "Thought it was the simplest way of getting a patient's-eye view of psychiatry."