Quicksand (19 page)

 

 

 

 

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.