The Mind of Mr Soames (21 page)

‘I don’t think they will be. In any case, one would have to presume premeditation and intent.’

Bryce smiled sardonically. ‘That would be for the jury to decide.’

‘Yes, I suppose so, if it came to the point,’ Conway said wearily. ‘Fortunately things are not so bad as they might have been. Dr Wilson is alive, and Mr Soames is at this moment a poor frightened rabbit hiding in the undergrowth, probably wishing he was back in his comfortable room in the Psychiatric Division. He might even choose to surrender, if the depressive phase continues for any length of time.’

‘And if not?’

‘Well, then—I suppose anything could happen. Once he decides to take the law into his own hands, as it were...’

‘I think,’ Bryce said with considerable self-assurance, ‘that the point is purely academic. We expect to have Mr Soames behind bars long before he resorts to violence from necessity. If he chooses to stay under cover on a starvation diet then he may well preserve his liberty for a few days—but the moment he breaks cover we shall have him.’

‘Behind bars?’ Conway echoed.

Bryce smiled. ‘A mere technicality. Whether Soames ends up behind bars or not will depend largely on his behaviour until he is recaptured, and of course on Dr Wilson. Even Mr Soames is not above the law.’

The interview was over. Conway returned to his room to prepare for duty in the psychiatric wards.

❖

Later in the afternoon Conway met Dr Takaito in the canteen. Takaito was sitting by himself at a small table, drinking coffee and reading a bulky sheaf of papers type-written in Japanese characters. The remaining tables were empty, so Conway joined the Japanese surgeon, at which Takaito put the papers into a black zipped document case and smiled enigmatically at the newcomer.

‘What’s new?’ Conway inquired.

Takaito shrugged. ‘Things do not change so quickly. Mr Soames has the strength and resilience to remain in hiding for a week, if need be.’

‘I hope not. It would be a bad thing if he were forced into commiting further violence.’

‘There will be no further violence—at least, not until the threat of recapture, and by then it will be too late.’

Takaito sipped his coffee reflectively and went on: ‘It would be a good thing if Mr Soames could stay away and be left in peace for several weeks—if he could make friends with the people on, say, some lonely farm. It would give him time to readjust himself—to find his feet in the world of normal human relationships.’

‘I’m not at all sure that it isn’t too late for that kind of readjustment,’ Conway said, frowning. ‘It seems to me that Soames is terrified of men in white coats, of austere imprisonment in hospital or clinic. That fear is bound to colour his outlook.’

‘Up to a point, perhaps, but he is adaptable, as we all are—perhaps even more adaptable because of his immaturity. But I’m afraid there will be no peace for Mr Soames. Dr Wilson, although he is likely to recover, will never be the same man again. I was privileged to be allowed to examine him, presumably because I possess a certain specialised knowledge of the brain. There is a grave condition of cerebral haemorrhage which may produce paralysis and will certainly result in an impairment of his faculties.’

‘You are quite certain of that?’

‘Regretfully, yes.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Conway said quietly, ‘both for Dr Wilson and Mr Soames...’

‘And for all of us, perhaps. We shall be in a very harsh and ugly limelight. The question will be posed—who was really responsible? Mr Soames or those who trained him?’

‘That question has already been put by some of the less responsible newspapers.’

‘Agreed, but do we have a satisfactory answer?’

‘I doubt it,’ Conway said gloomily. ‘I doubt it very much.’

There
was a stark coldness in his body which might have been pain, but was less than pain. His flesh shivered occasionally when he moved, and the damp clothes stuck to his skin uncomfortably. But the sun breaking through the dark latticework of leaves and branches was warming, so that as time went by the chill evaporated. The ground remained wet, however, so presently he stood up and looked around him.

In the night it had been a place of dark security, and he had welcomed the chance to lie down and sleep among the dense shrubs, but daylight brought perspective and colour and distance to the scene so that he felt less reassured.

The bushes were alive with large purple flowers and beyond them a tall tree leaned mournfully towards the rising sun. His world was suddenly a patchwork of blue, green and brown—glowing colours that intermingled and blended in a curiously satisfying way. The blue was the sky, he recognised, and the greens and the browns were the growing things that surrounded him. Globules of water glistened on the leaves of the shrub nearest to him. He reached out a hand to seize and shake a slender branch. The water on the leaves danced and quivered for an instant, then cascaded to the ground in a miniature rainfall.

His head ached a little, as it always ached when he was thoroughly cold. It ached in a tight circle around the puckered ridge of flesh beneath his black hair, as if in some strange way that odd semicircle of distorted skin was a point of entry to his brain, vulnerable to the groping fingers of chill. It had ached in the same way on the night he had embraced the lake, immersing his head in the cold numbing water. But the pain was dull and subdued now, a faint discomfort that made it difficult to think clearly and coherently.

The flowered shrubs surrounded him completely like a miniature woodland, and beyond them were scattered trees receding to the straight line that divided the blue sky from the green earth. But not to the rear. Here the clean pattern of blue and green was stained by a building, an immense grey shape with square corners and fussy, peering windows, and walls shaggy with ivy. For him it was a sinister building, like the Institute itself. It was a cold, aged fortress.

Now there was yellow in his pattern of blue, green and grey-a curving gravel path that started at the door of the building and swept away towards the sun. Patches of flowers bordered the path in red and white points of colour. At the remote end of the path, close by the building, a black car gleamed in shadow.

There was danger in the grey building and the black car, he knew. They symbolised men—the same kind of men who had watched him with cold, keen eyes at the Institute, who had examined him with shining instruments, who wore white coats and were detached and objective in their manner. They would be searching for him, as they had searched on that night until they had finally run him to earth among the parked cars.

He turned away from the house and scanned the open country. Not far away, beyond the trees, was a wire fence that stretched from left to right as far as the eye could see, and on the other side of the fence was undulating grassland, darkened here and there by patches of trees. In the remote distance something moved slowly like a beetle—perhaps another car on an unseen road. Further towards the sun the shape of a house formed a small rectangle of dull red against the fresh green of the grass.

Cautiously he left the shelter of the flowered bushes, advancing away from the building in the direction of the wire fence. Now that he was on the move again the fears that had been troubling his mind became quiet, and there was only the refreshing sense of progress through the cool morning air.

He climbed the fence with little difficulty and pushed on across the wet fields, keeping the sun on his left side but veering away from the red house and the unseen road along which tiny vehicles moved from time to time. After a time the sky began to cloud over, but the transient bursts of sunshine warmed him and dried his clothes, and he began to feel better in his mind, and more cheerful.

The world is much bigger than I thought, he told himself with a certain sense of wonder. It goes on and on, and it is quite empty. All those pictures and films they showed me were nothing like this. Why, there must be millions and millions of blades of grass in this field alone.

He came upon animals for the first time in his life. They were like those he had seen in pictures—sheep and cows and horses—but much bigger than he had ever imagined, and solid, too, with mass and weight and big blank frightening eyes. He avoided the animals, not from fear, but rather from uncertainty; they were neither friendly nor hostile, like impassive creatures of some alien world.

The sun rose high in the sky and began to descend, but the clouds were thickening and changing in colour from white to grey. The warmth began to fade from the air, and a cool wind blew across the fields, thrusting cold fingers through the thin, white material of his shirt. He quickened his pace.

At a railway cutting he halted, taking stock of the long steel tracks receding and converging across the open country towards the sky. As he watched a train appeared, tiny at first with a plume of smoke trailing behind it, then growing ever larger until suddenly it was upon him like some roaring, fire-breathing monster, and the coaches clattered by in endless procession until abruptly the thing had gone past and was shrinking towards a new vanishing point.

Warily he scrambled down the embankment and crossed the tracks, stepping over the shining rails as if afraid that physical contact hurt him in some way. On the other side of the cutting the fields condensed into a wood, and he made for this with a sure sense of imminent security.

The wood was dark and friendly, like the small wood at the Institute, but it was much bigger and there were areas of tall ferns and bracken reaching almost to his shoulders. Beneath his feet the ground was resilient and carpetlike where the leaves had settled and died over may autumns. The branches overhead whispered and rustled in the wind but down below, among the trees and ferns, the air was still and quiet. There was a chill in the shadowy gloom, however, and he began to wish he had remembered to bring his jacket with him.

Deep in the heart of the wood he chose to rest for a time in the centre of an immense patch of tall ferns that extended as far as he could see among the crowded trees. On hands and knees he crawled into a new kind of forest of slender green stems and waving fronds that almost shut off completely the last traces of daylight. The ground was soft as a blanket, though moist, and there was a pleasing scent of sweet decay around him.

He lay back, fully stretched out as he had been for so many years in the cold tank, and presently fell asleep.

❖

Voices woke him—intimate, half-whispered voices punctuated by a shrill excited laugh. For a moment he could not remember where he was: the quickly imagined walls of the room at the Institute crowded in on him like a packing case, then abruptly fell away into pallid stalks that swayed and hissed as he moved. Memory returned a moment later.

Alert and cautious once more, he propped himself on one elbow and remained quite still, listening to the distant voices but unable to distinguish any words that made sense. There were two voices, he decided. One was low pitched like those of the doctors at the Institute, while the other was higher in tone, reminding him of the strangely dressed people who had been presented to him as his mother and sister. At the recollection something invisible seemed to twist like a knife in his stomach, but there was no pain, only a strange sense of compulsion, of anticipation—a kind of unborn excitement.

He rolled over on to his hands and knees and began to move in the direction of the voices. Although he knew he could not be seen, the ferns swayed above and about him, so he moved slowly and stealthily. The voices stopped as he drew close, and for a while he crouched, holding his breath, until it seemed certain that he had not been discovered.

The voices came again, breathlessly, then faded into heavy breathing. Reassured, he inched forward until he came upon what appeared to be a clearing among the ferns, and immediately in front of him, beyond the protective fringe of ferns that still separated him from the clearing, was a man’s grey coat thrown carelessly on the ground.

He stared at it for a long time, trying to fit it into the pattern of voices and breathing, then began to look around, without advancing further. At that point he saw the others.

There were two of them, as he had guessed, lying together in a small area of trampled fern and bracken, but the broken undergrowth was by no means level and they were partly obscured by the fronds of dangling ferns. If his arm had been twice as long he could have touched their heads.

There was a coloured rug beneath them, rucked and rumpled over the ferns, and he could not see them individually, so closely were they locked together. It seemed to him that they were engaged in a violent struggle and their clothing was greatly disarranged exposing areas of naked skin, but there was a curious rhythm in their movements, a mutual thrusting of bodies, which seemed inconsistent with violence. He watched in fascination, unable to attach any meaning to what was happening.

But if there was no meaning, at least there was reaction—a strange tenseness deep inside him and an awareness of difference—a difference that was more than just the difference between the word ‘man’ and the word ‘woman’. It was the same awareness that he had experienced when he had held his sister close to him in the embrace that had triggered the fight—the startled groping of some buried urge struggling for recognition, the feeling of possession by a blind power. He could not see the woman’s face, her head was turned away from him, but her hair was long and brown and her blue dress had been swept back to expose the cream colour of her legs and hips. And, for a reason he could not fathom, it was the woman that interested him, and not the man.

He glanced upwards at the sky glimmering in grey mosaic beyond the ferns and the trees. Already the daylight was fading, which meant that he had slept for most of the afternoon. Night was approaching, with its cold damp darkness, and he did not welcome the long hours of discomfort.

The couple were still engrossed in their strange exercise, becoming if anything even more violent. He shook his head to disperse the hypnosis that seemed to have taken possession of him, and dismissed the inarticulate questions that crowded his brain. It was all part of the tortuous way people behaved; they did things that made no sense for reasons he could not begin to understand, and for the present here was no point in pursuing the mystery.