The Weight of Numbers (24 page)

Anthony directs John along the southern edge of Regent's Park and into a series of dull, unforgiving streets.

They park up at the entrance to a road closed off by sawhorses. ‘Is this it?'

Anthony Burden's whole head is blushing. ‘I – I think so.'

‘Well, is it the place or not?' John fairly shouts at him – and immediately regrets it. There is no point baiting the man. What's done is done. He is here, as usual, to contain the damage Anthony Burden has done himself. Shouting isn't going to help. ‘Come on,' he says. He takes Anthony by the arm in a grip he means to be friendly, but which is probably too tight, and leads him through the ruined street. ‘Now, do you remember where you took them off?'

His kindness and patience do what his bad temper couldn't, and Anthony Burden bursts into tears. They sit together, companionably enough, on a stub of wall, and John offers Anthony his handkerchief. ‘Why don't you phone Rachel?'

Anthony shakes his head.

‘She was out of her mind with worry when I phoned her from the station.'

Anthony looks up at John, aghast. ‘You did say I was in a hospital, didn't you? Not a…' He cannot say the words.

‘A police station, Anthony.' Acidulated tones break through John's veneer of patience. ‘You have spent the night in a police station. Yes, I lied for you. But I want you to understand something.'

Anthony looks up at him, puppy-eyed.

‘I am never going to lie for you again, especially not to your wife.'

Anthony is suitably humble. ‘Yes, Sage. I quite understand.'

‘If I were you I would tell Rachel everything. Everything. Things are bad enough without you acting a lie to the one person who is supposed to stick by you.'

‘Well,' says Anthony, without conviction, ‘I will try…'

‘There is another thing.'

‘Yes, Sage?'

‘I want you to see a psychiatrist.'

Anthony dares a little laugh. ‘Oh, now, Sage—'

‘Find one yourself this week, or I will find one for you. I promise you, Anthony, I will walk you into the nearest hospital if you do not agree to this.'

Anthony swallows against a fresh flood of tears. ‘All right, Sage,' he says, in a little voice. ‘I don't really know about such matters but I suppose I can make some enquiries.'

‘You do that.'

‘Though in days like these—'

‘There are plenty of good medical men sitting on their hands, Anthony. I want you to find one, this week – or it's off to the Maudsley with you.'

The air here is yellow with dust and, though dry, the plaster shivered off all the ruined buildings has given it an odour of mould and rot. John thinks: he might have got up to anything in a place like this. Anything. Afraid of what he might find, John draws Anthony to his feet, and together they set about combing the ruins.

‘They are a kind of twill,' Anthony tells him, trying to be helpful.

‘How many pairs of trousers are we expecting to find?' says John. The joke's on him: there are whole wardrobes strewn across the rubble, scattered by multiple blasts.

‘Are these them?'

Anthony peers. ‘I don't think so. No. No, I'm afraid not.'

Well, won't they do? John wonders, irritated. What can be so special about a pair of trousers? In fact, why are we hunting for them at all? If Anthony wants to spin a lie about last night to his wife, all he has to do is invent the sort of accident that would damage a pair of trousers. He could fake a sprained ankle and say that the nurses, fearing to disturb bones that might be broken, cut the damn things off his leg.

Come to think of it, what story does he have it in mind to spin? Does he even have the guile to act a lie?

‘I say, Sage,' says Anthony, a little later, as they teeter on the edge of a pile of masonry – any moment now a policeman is going to spot them and blow his whistle – ‘you know, I am terribly grateful for these things you've lent me.'

As well he might be. John is all out of rags now. These trousers Anthony's wearing are the bottoms to a perfectly serviceable suit. ‘I want them back,' John says, brusquely. He is not in the mood to mend fences – not today and not tomorrow.

‘Of course,' says Anthony.

‘
Pressed
.'

Silence.

‘There is one thing,' says Anthony.

John clenches his fists and drives them into the pockets of his trousers. ‘Yes?'

‘About Rachel…'

‘Yes?'

Anthony lays a hand delicately on John's arm. ‘Today, before I go home. Do you think…? I mean, could you…'

‘You mean, could I go round there first and smooth the waters?'

‘Yes.'

‘Make some excuses for you.'

‘Well, ye—'

‘Tell her that she must not question you too closely. That you remember very little. That you have had a nasty shock.'

‘Why, yes!'

It is hopeless. Simply hopeless. Anthony hasn't listened to a single word he's said.

This, it turns out, is not strictly true.

The following week, Anthony calls in sick and retires to the little
philosophical society he frequents whenever he is passing Gower Street. There, in the library, he falls into conversation with one of that strange breed of somatic therapist who have taken up lodgings in the society's rooms. This way, Anthony can keep his promise to his dear friend John Arven, without at the same time having to admit that anything is actually wrong. John wants him to see a psychiatrist? Well then, he will see a psychiatrist. They will have a pleasant little chat about philosophy. Anthony's promise will be discharged. And that will be that.

He has not counted upon the zeal and perspicacity of Dr Loránt Pál.

Two years earlier: 15 June 1940.

The British Expeditionary Force is being evacuated from France, and in the foc'sle of the cruiser
Arethusa
, tied up at the mouth of the Gironde, Dr Loránt Pál tunes a borrowed fiddle.

Its owner, first violinist and
prima
of the Budapest Municipal Orchestra, lights a Turkish cigar and lies back on his pallet. ‘Come along, then.'

Pál plucks and frowns, frowns and plucks. Shaving off that sharp high E does nothing for the pounding in his head, but he is determined to prove his mettle among his countrymen.

Dr Loránt Pál, psychiatrist and medical pioneer, is coming to Britain at the invitation of a small, well-connected philosophical society, to practise a new form of somatic therapy: a treatment for melancholia and schizophrenia that involves the careful application of electricity. Undaunted by the worsening international situation, Pál has managed to finesse his way across Axis Europe with a medicine bag full of apricot brandy. But who would have thought – after running the gamut of so many greasy
fascisti
– that his heaviest binge and his hardest persuasion would be expended trying to get a berth on this miserable tub? The quartermaster shielding the British Naval Attaché had insides of lead and a brain of pure tin.

‘Read the
letter
,' Pál demanded, exasperated. ‘The letter, it
says—
'

‘What's this?' The quartermaster held the paper at arm's length and squinted. ‘Ah, now, you see, here's your problem, this isn't a
chit.
It isn't any use if it isn't a
chit
. (Ooh, ta, don't mind if I do.)'

The final irony came when Pál, several bottles the poorer, was finally able to present his
chit
to the guards officer and climb on board. He couldn't believe his eyes, seeing who had got here before him. How often, blinking from the cheaper seats of the Pesti Vigadó, has he yawned away through evenings of their Mahler? Or, in the early hours, tripped over their sprawled, sausage-stuffed corpses in the Fészek Club or the Café Japan? The Budapest Municipal Orchestra! It really is too rich, a cosmic joke, that he should be entering Britain on this boat full of musical Jews!

Cue a rollicking
csarda
that has even the fussily intellectual
prima
puffing syncopations upon his cigar. What gypsy folk memory must Pál be drawing from that he stirs, electrifies and finally breaks this violin's humble heart? A favourite encampment among wooded hills? Dark tresses in the night-time? Tracing the cool gold chain around a hot fourteen-year-old Romany ankle? A reading of grubby cards, with their intimations of fortune and tragedy?

No, just professional annoyance. Pál, in talking about his work and his plans, has once again allowed himself to be eaten up by the knowledge that the bloody Italians got there first.

Electricity.

Of course.

Why did von Meduna never pursue electricity? Ladislas von Meduna, Hungarian innovator and Pál's first and best teacher, is the true father of convulsive therapy, but a really reliable means of triggering seizures eluded him. Why did he waste so many years casting about for something chemical? Strychnine, caffeine, nikethamide. Even wormwood. (The
csarda
collapses, swooping, outrageous, atonal, as Pál recalls how the great von Meduna returned unexpectedly one night from
the
kávéház
, soaked to the skin, a bottle of absinthe under his arm and a dangerous light in his eyes.)

Still, does it really matter that it was the Italians who put the ‘e' in ECT? Using electricity to induce the seizures is, when all is said and done, an operational detail. No matter what the trigger, it's the seizure that's the thing: the brain stem's primal
I Am
, ringing through the addled cortex like a bell, setting everything in harmony again.

Speaking of which…

Loránt Pál works his bow across the strings as though he were weaving a rug. Smoke curls appreciatively from the
prima
's cigar. Racial purists like Kodaly and Bartók can brandish staves all they want at this ‘restaurant music'. Authenticity be damned; in a time of crisis and with a sea-crossing only hours away, Pál's gypsy fiddling is as poignant a taste of home as a plate of sausages and
lángosh.

It is morning, and after a night spent at anchor, the ship is under way. Unescorted, painfully vulnerable to U-boat attack, the SS
Arethusa
zigzags its way towards Devonport where the WVS are waiting with tea urns.

The hours pass.

Past noon: from her room in her parents' Edwardian terrace in Maida Vale – a room little changed from the one she played in as a child so that her feet dangle from the end of the bed at nights – Miriam Miller, Girton graduate, bluestocking factotum of a small philosophical society off Gower Street, looks up at a sky full of dirty air and ties a perfect blue bow at the neck of her starched white blouse.

The hours pass.

Evening: in a Devonport dock shed echoing with the ghosts of donkeymen and trimmers, Miriam Miller meets Hungarian medical genius Loránt Pál. ‘Extend every assistance' the telegram has instructed her.

Pál, true to form, ruins everything, slumping down the gangplank drunk, his clothes drenched in the miasma of apricots, and his mind,
what there is of it, stuck like a gramophone needle halfway through a story both incomprehensible and vulgar, something about electric shocks; about how he was gypped by a couple of Italian quacks, and how they ‘made a complete balls of everything'. Miriam leads the boy – he seems hardly old enough to drive, let alone offer medical treatment to another human being – to her borrowed car, brushes his hand angrily off her lap and starts the engine.

Miriam is a good driver. Had the Society not acquired an unexpected usefulness to the war effort, she might have spent the war travelling. (Pál is sawing his arms now as though he were playing a fiddle. He starts to sing.) Were it not for the Society, she might be seeing the world from behind the windscreen of a bullet-riddled ambulance. She might be undressing in a room with a bed long enough for her chaste, lanky body, watching a sunset unbloodied by Battersea smoke.

Pál, oblivious to her little tears, accompanies her: dreadful, cod-Verdi recicative, as he lovingly rehearses his Italian competitors' initial, unsuccessful trials…

‘Feerst, we feed theese wy-eer intoo thee
mawth
,

‘Then wee feed theese wy-eer intoo thee
arsehewl
,

‘Then wee FRY-UH THEE
HAART!'

One year later: 1941. In a pleasant upstairs room belonging to the Society, émigré medical practitioner Dr Loránt Pál assembles his new couch.

It is a robust, extremely heavy piece of engineering. Poor little Miss Miriam Miller: when she opened the door to all those delivery boys, the eyes nearly started out of her head.
More
equipment?
More
noise?
More
interruption? Is it not enough that the lights gutter whenever that nasty little Svengali charges up his self-built therapy unit?

Pál lays out the pieces of the couch over the Persian rug in the centre of the room. The daylight is fading fast. He enjoys the green-brown penumbra of evening – the way the shadows of trees dapple the dark,
scratched wood of his desk, and seem to animate the photographs he has hung about the room; photographs he brought with him, stuffed and crumpled in his doctor's bag, all the way from Budapest. Daimlers and horse-drawn
fiacres
. Society women with their little dogs. French and English nannies pushing their sailor-suited charges. Seeing these pictures dapple and shift in the light of evening, Pál fancies he can almost hear the hooves of a
fiacre
's tired horse on the soaked wooden boards of the pavements below the Corso; the obsequious whisper of the barrel-bellied
Fö-úr,
leading him to his table at the Fészek Club.

Pál shakes off his reverie and tears the brown paper from off a shaped headrest. Oh, but this is splendid. He moulds the handsome red leather block in his hands, and appreciates the neat, discreet stitching: acme of the farrier's art. He can't help a mischievous smile as he recalls poor little Miriam, stood there at the foot of the stairs while the delivery boys paraded up and down. Opening and closing her mouth like a fish. What did she imagine these parcels contained?
Exhibits
?