Sleep and His Brother (13 page)

Pibble picked an envelope out of her wastepaper basket, tore it open, and began to write his news on it. It would be a mercy not to have to talk it over, but simply land the responsibility in her lap. He sensed a stir in the room and saw that Sandra had woken and was drifting toward the door; as she went she watched him out of the edge of her eyes. Mrs. Dixon-Jones said, “Wait a moment, Mrs. Abrahams,” and ran to the door.

“Ivan!” she called. “Ivan!”

The echo fluted along the corridors.

“Look, Sandra,” she said, “there's Melody. Melody, come here, darling. Good girl. This is Sandra—she's new. Will you take her and find her somewhere warm to curl up?”

“Lovely,” whined the two cold voices together, and the children vanished hand in hand. Mrs. Dixon-Jones scurried back to the telephone and Pibble carried on with his message, but she dealt with the mother much more brusquely now that Sandra was out of the room, and had finished before he had. He looked up to see her wrenching the cords out of the switchboard as if she had been hoicking groundsel out of a neglected bed.

“It's about that horrible man again, isn't it?” she said.

“How did you know?”

“Sandra. Well, what about him?”

Pibble told her. Her pen tapped steadily at the silver globe—no wonder its lighting was erratic; when he finished it continued its impatient pinging.

“I'm going to be rude,” she said at last. “But I've been here a long time and I've seen people behaving like you before. It wasn't really their fault, but I did expect you to be more sensible than serving maids and nurses. Anyway, you're making most of this up. I don't mean lying, but deceiving yourself. It doesn't usually matter, and the people who come to work here grow out of it, but you're doing it in a way that upsets the children. Look at Sandra just now. Of course it's very exciting to come into contact with a group of children who can talk to each other's minds, and it's only natural to persuade yourself that you can do it too, but it isn't true. Very occasionally something slips through to them, like that silly business about your hat in the hall, and your game with Marilyn if you're not making that up. But you can't control it. Ram's got his own reasons for taking you seriously, and I daresay that's helped to mislead you, but as for this man coming here, you've got absolutely no evidence except three words of Marilyn's that might mean absolutely anything. All the rest's your own imagination.”

“Marilyn's been very frightened today,” said Pibble.

“She has on other days, too.”

“She told us just now that she wasn't frightened of me, but of another man.”

“Would she call her stepfather that?”

“I don't know. You may be right. You heard me tell Doctor Silver that I distrust hunches and intuitions, and I still do. After I left you this morning I rang up a friend who looks after the records at Scotland Yard, and he told me that Gorton did talk about some living creature as though it were a sort of familiar, which confirms a little bit of my guess. And the officer who's in charge of the hunt for him, who isn't a friend of mine, thinks it a serious possibility that he'll come here. You've got to remember that I was in the police force for a long time, and—”

“You were asked to resign,” interrupted Mrs. Dixon-Jones, putting an emphasis on the verb that showed she knew how peremptory the asking had been. Mary must have let that out, in the course of a loyal defence.

“Yes,” he said, “but for a different sort of reason. Another, thing: if, simply by writing a note to you in your room, I can unintentionally produce an effect like that on Sandra, you can't say that I'm not ‘getting through' to them, at least some of the time. I'm not making that up. You saw it happen.”

“I expect we could all do something of the sort if we were prepared to think about horrors the whole time. Sandra had never met Marilyn.”

“Oh, well. Put it this way. Gorton has escaped; he had no friends, and the rest of his family are in Australia. If she showed any signs of telepathic powers when they lived together he would certainly have been interested. After his arrest he talked about somebody or something which had supernatural knowledge. I'm not making any of that up, am I?”

“I suppose not.”

“So there is at least an outside chance that he'll come here and look for Marilyn. Even if it's a hundred to one, it's worth taking a few precautions. Perhaps Ivan could keep an eye on Marilyn the whole time—you could tell him it was to see that she wasn't pestered by hopeful journalists, as she's the only relative.”

“They'd have to come through me,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones stiffly.

“Of course they ought to, but I've known inexperienced local chaps have a go at cutting corners, thinking the scoop will bring them fame and fortune—but it doesn't matter, it's only an excuse. I think in fact that you'd be wise to keep all the children together and accounted for; if he can't get Marilyn, he might decide one of the others would do. The painters should lock up all their ladders. You can't do much about the scaffolding, but the local police are supposed to be sending some men out, and they can look after that. If he does come, he'll be coming for Marilyn, not you. He doesn't know about you.”

“I should think not.”

“I mean when I talked to Marilyn this morning, I thought that she had recognized a situation in which somebody was planning to hurt you, and had tied this up with her own memories of Gorton. Now I think that what she said meant that she knew Gorton had escaped and was thinking about her, and that she mentioned your name simply because you fitted in with the previous pattern of his victims.”

“If it meant anything.”

“Exactly.”

“All right,” snapped Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “I think you're mad and I know you're a nuisance, but I'll do it. Oh, my God, I'm sick of the whole place and everybody in it!”

“Can I do anything to help? For instance—”

“No! Go away! Go away!”

She turned to the switchboard and stabbed cords murderously into sockets.

As Pibble walked along the gaudy corridor the image of her furious face hung in his mind like the head in the poem, on a canvas sky depending from nothing. Love had not missed her, but it had come to her strangely, in the deathlike fondlings of the cathypnics and perhaps the occasional stately embrace of the mock-Arab upstairs. Ram Silver must once, among the tavernas and the junkshops, have conned some of her tourist pittance off her, and she did not have the look of a forgiving woman. He'd have paid her back her “loan,” of course, the moment he'd arrived at the McNair, and at once begun, almost casually, to defraud her of her power and control over the children. Every instant seemed to diminish her hold, every newcomer—Silver himself, Mr. Costain, and now old Pibble. So she sat there, poor good woman, raging, tapping the litter on her desk, flinging up ephemeral ramparts round herself, the children, and her outrageous autumn lover. It was another point in the con man's favour that he was able to inspire and feed such an improbable passion.

Several cathypnics were waiting in the hail, listless and solemn, but Pibble didn't feel armoured enough to endure another of their whining rebuffs, so he walked straight to the stairs, still thinking about the perils of Posey.

“Poor Posey,” said the nearest child.

“She'll be all right,” said Pibble. “We'll all look after her.”

“Poor Posey,” said another child. Their tone made the words quite emotionless, not an expression of pity but a statement of fact. The whole group drifted away from him with the casual wariness of deer in a public park. He met two more coming down the stairs—it looked as if there was going to be a mysterious gathering of the children, like the seasonal congregations of some animals which still puzzle zoologists.

Prickly with the distress of his interview, and then the curious foreboding omen which the children provided—though their actual language was scarcely more interpretable than the rustlings can have been among Dodona's magic oaks—he stopped on the gallery to look down at the slowly assembling cathypnics. Yes, the whole building was prickly, like the air over London before summer thunder. His shirt felt sticky, and not just with the greenhouse heat of the rooms. He longed for ease, contentment, relaxation, and there was only one place to go for that. As he pushed the door open into Kelly's Kingdom he wondered how much of his unease was hangover from Thanassi's champagne, suppressed by Thanassi's pink fizz but still grumbling subliminally away. These children would not be attending the meeting in the hall. They lay exactly as he had seen them before, except that the two nurses had stripped one set of blankets back, turned the child over, and were now rubbing the fat back under a sunlamp.

“Doctor Kelly wants to see me,” whispered Pibble.

“I'll take you,” said the plump one. “I won't be a minute, Angie.”

She wiped the pungent oil off her hands and led Pibble through the far door of the ward into a little laboratory—microscope, test tubes, something that looked like an X-ray apparatus, shelves of jars all ranked and dustless. Everything looked fanatically tidy, except where one bit of bench was half dismantled and a clutter of splinters and a few tools lay on the floor. If that was to accommodate the hoped-for scintillation counter, it meant that Rue was not yet ordering expensive toys as partner in a fraud with Ram Silver. The relief and relaxation he longed for were already settling on him as the nurse opened the door into a tiny office where Rue lolled, feet or his desk, reading the
Evening Standard
.

“Stop following the nurses around,” he said. “At your age, Jimmy, your mind should be on less ephemeral delights.”

“The gentleman asked to see you, Doctor,” said the nurse in a parody of primness.

“Do you realize she's mine?” said Rue, rubbing his hands together. “All mine! But you can have her if you want her all that much, me old mate. Molly, you're to go home with this lecherous dotard and provide him with every comfort.”

The nurse flounced virtuously away, but the effect was spoiled by Rue reaching out a long arm to nip the neat buttock.

“You dare!” she hissed. She blushed easily and frowned convincingly, but her glance would have done credit to Brewer Street. Rue chortled as the door slammed.

“It's good to be alive in a permissive society,” he said, and tossed the paper to the floor.

The picture was a poor one, with that dead look which is all the police photographer ever elicits from his sullen sitter. Pibble doubted whether any but a trained eye would recognise Gorton from it.

“Interesting bod,” said Kelly. “Highly inventive in a very narrow discipline. Did you know we had one of the kids here?”

“Marilyn? I've met her.”

“You're a citizen of a mealy-mouthed stupid country, Jimmy, all hypnotized with liberal drivel. A man like that should have gone for research—poke about in him, find out what makes him bonkers, keep him alive as long as any bits of him are useful, then put him down. And in twenty years' time there wouldn't be any more like that—we'd know how to spot them in the ovum and abort them. And in a hundred years' time we'd be able to tinker with their genes and pow! another model citizen rolls off the assembly lines.”

“Don't give yourself nightmares.”

“Bloody sight more deterrent than hanging. Bloody sight more useful than locking him up for twenty years and letting him out in time for his old-age pension. But the way things are we'll still be squatting round jabbering about ethics when the hundred years are up.”

“Are you trying to tinker with genes?”

“Christ! With the kit I can buy in this job! Until Ram found us fairy godfather I was doing my research with a thermometer and a stethoscope and trotting down to Saint Ursula's with a little bag of samples once a week. If you want to know, Jimmy, my prime research tool has been a pencil and paper.”

“What can you achieve with that?”

“Write down two and two and notice that it makes four.”

“Do you need a scintillation counter for that?”

“I've got to check my sums, haven't I?”

“Mr. Thanatos says your part of the research is very important.”

“Ho! Does he just? What caused that flash of sanity?”

“You're researching on the physical side, and he doesn't want a life after death if it isn't physical.”

“Oh, Mary and all the Holy Angels! That a young man should have to finance his research on that kind of codswallop!”

“What does your research consist of?”

“You wouldn't understand if I told you.”

“Try.”

Rue laughed, the embodiment of professional scorn.

“When you get your Nobel Prize,” said Pibble, “you're going to keep popping up on the telly, explaining what you got it for to ten million viewers just as dim as me. You might as well get a bit of practice.”

Rue sneered at him, rubbed his chin, looked at him again, eased his crotch, and held up a bony finger for the class's attention.

“I am an endocrinologist. Glands to you. The endocrine system sends out signals to the rest of the body telling it how to react, how to function, how to grow, when to stop growing, how to repair itself and fight off disease and maintain its own inner balance. The signals take the form of a chemical code. Some of them stimulate activities and some inhibit them. Your endocrine glands are dotted hither and yon round your decrepit cadaver, but the little beggars all work together by signalling to each other—more this, less that—and affecting each other's output of hormones. Hormones, Jimmy. Remember the word, because that's what we cunning specialists call the juices which the glands shove out by way of signals. We give them a nifty name to show we understand 'em—we've got 'em taped. Only we don't and we haven't. We understand a bit here and a bit there. We've spotted fifty separate hormones, of which fifteen are major ones, but the overall picture remains a mess of guesses.