Sleep and His Brother (5 page)

“Lady Sospice?” guessed Pibble, extrapolating from the scandal of the drunkard son.

“She's nicer than she looks.”

“I'm sure she is. I haven't met her, but my wife has once or twice.”

“Oh, she hates women. So do I.”

Pibble laughed.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “When I get old I'm going to buy a house on Capri or somewhere and fill it with gigolos. Granny can't, poor old cat, because she was brought up wrong to enjoy that sort of thing.”

“But I expect this Preservation Society has some dashing young architects in it.”

“No such luck. I think they're a lot of ignorant stuffpots who don't like things for what they are but because they want to keep the world just as it always was. Granny brought them in to tease poor Posey, but now they've run amok. She hates Posey more than anyone. This was our house, you see, and now Posey runs it. If you like I'll show you the room I would have been born in if we'd still been living here.”

She stopped at the far end of the gallery and gestured to the right.

“Rather a remote sort of fame,” said Pibble.

“Nonsense. I can get much remoter than that. The room above Posey's is called King Charles's Room because it once contained a bed in which King Charles was said to have slept in a different house. But I'll take you to Rue. He uses what we called the Picture Saloon, but it never had any pictures in it because Alma-Tadema refused to give Great-Granddad a reduction for quantity. Isn't it funny to think of all this once smelling of potpourri and furniture polish and eau de cologne?”

It smelled of hospitals now. She had stopped to finish her sentence outside a big pair of doors, mightily carved with swags of fruit, which stood where there should have been a long passage running to the back of the building if the plan had been totally symmetrical. The doors had been painted cream, and somebody had nailed a piece of packing case to one of the panels and stencilled it with the words
KELLY'S KINGDOM
. Mr. Costain would have cause to hoot if he came up here, Pibble thought.

One of the doors opened and a uniformed nurse glided out, weeping quietly. Doll made a face and bit her lip, then led the way in.

“I've brought a friend to see you, Rue,” she said.

Of course it had been built as a picture gallery, once you knew, but it would have needed several regiments of odalisques and vestal virgins to fill the vacant walls. It was a vast room, stretching the full width of this wing and nearly half its length, and here, too, nails had been driven callously into the panelling; from each dangled graphs and records, below which stood a white iron bedstead. There must have been over twenty beds in all, but a few were empty. Rue Kelly was bending over one of the patients. He had lifted the child's eyelid and was peering into the pupil through an ophthalmoscope. At length he stood up, rubbing his long chin. His green eyes glanced rapidly at Pibble, then flickered round the room before coming back to him.

“Be with you in a minute,” he said genially, speaking in a normal voice as though there were no danger of waking the sleepers. He bent to the other eyelid.

The outer windows were half obscured by scaffolding and hoists, though a great swathe of London rooftops could be glimpsed below the planks; so Pibble went and peered out over the courtyard. From here he could see how simple the design of the house was, beneath all its frills and flounces. A rectangle, two stories high, surrounded a cobbled courtyard; an arch led out at the back, flanked by round-topped coach house doors—so the ground-floor rooms must maintain their pompous height the whole way round. Yes, the passage on the other side had run to the back with no sign of stairs; presumably it continued from there over the coach house and the arch and joined up with the back of Kelly's Kingdom.

Pibble grinned to himself at the idea of how wickedly Rue must have enjoyed bashing those nails through the coarse timber and into the beautiful wood of the door behind the notice. Rue was the most violent antiaesthete he had ever met, clever and voluble, happiest in extreme positions. The garish corridor below, scientifically useful and aesthetically awful, was a perfect Rue production, a physical equivalent of his pub argument that Oscar Wilde should not have been jailed for his morals, but should have been shot for his philosophy.

For a moment, gazing blankly out of the window, Pibble could see the ugly interior of the Black Boot, hear the jostle at the bar, smell the steam from the vast shepherd's pie behind the snack bar. He'd found the place a couple of years ago, when the pub he'd used before became involved in a brewers “rationalization” and started to dispense a bitter he despised. He'd had a job then, so had gone there only on a few evenings or sometimes on weekends, and had merely noticed the thin-faced, green-eyed young man who was occasionally present; but his being sacked had changed that, bringing him there at weekday lunchtimes to prevent Mary's hydra-headed guilt feelings from forcing her to cook him yet another square meal. All of a sudden he and Rue Kelly were cronies.

Not friends. That implied a wider knowledge. Not acquaintances, an altogether weaker relationship. Cronies. Pibble, in his new, disoriented life, was uncomfortably aware of how intense his reliance on Rue Kelly had become. Before, work and the abrasion of colleagues had kept him tuned, sharp,
alive
; now the rust and dust of retirement were settling on him. His garden kept his muscles in trim and he'd always been lucky with his digestion, but he needed the two-man debating club in the Black Boot much as a prisoner doing solitary needs his daily trudge round the yard.

Wondering, not for the first time, what the other member of the club got out of
his
company, he turned back to the ward in time to see Kelly straighten and stand humming. The sleeper's eyelid fell like treacle. Kelly ticked the chart on the wall, checked a tube which ran into the child's nostril, and spun round grinning.

“Pint of blood, mister?” he said.

“There jokes the eternal student,” said Pibble.

“Who's died, Rue?” said the girl.

“No one.”

“Angela was crying.”

“Was she? I told her Mickey Nicholas had six days.”

“You can't be sure.”

“Yes I can. Another brick is added to the house of knowledge. Rue Kelly sees the future! Let him foretell your fate!”

He clapped the ophthalmoscope to his eye, squinted at them across the room, and began singsong chant.

“I see through the clouds. I see the mists part. I see you, my pretty one. There is a man with you. I cannot see his face. But I can see what he is doing. He is cutting you up and putting you in a trunk. Now he is taking the trunk to the left luggage office. Aha! Now I see his face. He is old, he is ugly, he has just been fired from the police force—”

“Oh, shut up, Rue,” said the girl. “Can you really? That's marvellous.”

“What are you trying to do?” said Pibble.

“Find out what makes them stop ticking.”

“When will this one wake up?”

“Never.”

Pibble felt a chill, like the touch of the children, run through his veins; he must have paled.

“Nasty thought, isn't it?” said Kelly cheerfully. “And now I'll answer your next question, seeing that you aren't going to ask it as it's not in very good taste. We don't let 'em die, straight away, as soon as they fall into their everlasting doze, because it's not ethical. I belong to a very ethical profession, mister, and it just so happens that this hands me a unique collection of research material. They beat rats and rabbits into a cocked hat. They've got no feelings, no future, no individuality, so I can use 'em as I think fit—with the utmost respect, of course, the
utmost
respect.”

The last phrases were spoken in parody of some medical spokesman mouthing his obscene euphemisms.

“As a matter of fact,” said Pibble, “I was going to ask if you knew what they were dreaming about.”

Kelly snorted with amusement, then stilled. His eyes flickered and remained angry, though he laughed again.

“Ram's been getting at you,” he said. “You mustn't believe any of that cock.”

“Oh, Rue,” said the girl. “You
know
there's something in it. All the staff think so.”

“Darlint,” said Kelly, “if you'd be listening to me ould friend Father O'Freud, there's some knowledge of wish fulfilment you'd be having.”

“Begorra,” said the girl.

“Begorra indade
!” cried Kelly, doing a short wild jig in the aisle between the silent beds. “The raisin, I mean reason, why my admirable colleagues think the kids are telepathic is that without some asset like that they'd be spending their lives trying to cultivate an allotment of moving vegetables. They
want
the little bastards to be extraordinary, and therefore worthwhile.”

“But then we'd all choose different extraordinary things about them,” said the girl.

“Would you hell? You've got one ready-made myth, so any further superstitions accrete to that. Belief in the unreasonable is always collective—look at medical history.”

“When I arrived,” said Pibble, “two of the children opened the door. Before they saw me one of them said, ‘Copper come. Lost his hat.'”

“You never wear a hat,” said Kelly.

“I was thinking about the psychological effects of being sacked—or I just had been.”

“Very sophisticated metaphors you think in, by cathypnic standards.”

“It's very close, isn't it?” said the girl.

“What is?”

“The copper and the hat.”

Kelly snorted again.

“My cousin from County Clare,” he said, “dealt himself all thirteen spades once. They threw him in the Liffey for cheating, but we in the family knew he hadn't the wits.”

Pibble laughed and Kelly joined him, but the girl remained serious.

“Doctor Silver did bring two of the dormice in here,” she said. “He wanted to find out if they were all dreaming one communal dream.”

“What happened?” said Pibble.

“The kids said ‘Lovely' and tried to go to sleep too. I hustled them out.”

“How beautiful is sleep,” said the girl. “Sleep and his brother death.”

Kelly snarled at her like a wildcat.

“Haven't I told you that if you quoted once more from bloody English literature I'd never buy you another drink?”

Her hand flew to her mouth and the peachy softness of her face began to crumple as she bit at her knuckles.

“What
really
happened,” said Kelly, “was that Ram Silver queered my pitch with Posey Dixon-Jones. You met her, Jimmy?”

“This is what the children call ‘upstairs,' is it?” said Pibble. “I imagine she doesn't like the waking ones to know that it's here.”

“They all
know
,” insisted the girl, risking a glance at Kelly to see how he took this continued defiance.

“Course they do,” said Kelly. “It's a big house, but not that big. They're stupid, but not that stupid. Anyway Posey's mad. What did you make of her, Jimmy?”

“She seemed tough but sensible. I suppose she might have sudden emotional patches—like air pockets. You're flying along and without warning the bottom falls out of the sky.”

He explained about the meeting with Mr. Costain.

“Psychotic,” said Kelly. “Her own drives make the rules, and the hell with the rest of us. Of course she's never thought that she has any drives—that type never does. There's a reason for everything. I hope the bloody little pansy doesn't drive her too far. She might do anything, absolutely anything. She wouldn't worry about the consequences. She'd blow the whole place up, with us in it, rather than let him move one brick without her permission. Love has passed her by, poor old bitch, and—”

“May I enter your territory, dear colleague?” boomed Dr. Silver from the door.

Kelly smiled, sharp but charming.

“One for your notebooks, Ram,” he said. “I've been praying all morning you'd come, and you came. Telekinesis or telepathy? I've got something to show you.”

“You have? In fact I was looking for the good Mr. Pibble. Mr. T. has expressed a wish to see him.”

“Oho!” said Kelly. “Be a pal, Jimmy, and ask him when I'm going to get my scintillation counter.”

“Do no such thing,” said Dr. Silver. “Mr. T. needs very precise handling.”

“Only Ram knows how to pray to the rain god,” said Kelly.

“Perfectly expressed,” said Dr. Silver, beaming. “Show me this something, Rue. Your somethings are becoming most interesting.”

Like coequal hierarchs of a schismatic church, the two doctors paced down the aisle and turned up a side chapel between two beds; here they bowed their heads over a graph.

Athanasius Thanatos! said part of Pibble's mind. Crippen!

The rest of his mind told it, prissily but vainly, to shut up. A man is only a man, it said, even if his name sends shivers down the spines of gossip columnists. Think, it said, of that hotel at—where was it? Mary would remember—not that the Pibbles could afford to stay there, but they'd seen the thing, seen how its drab slab diminished the Aegean sky and its reflection polluted the blue bay. And now the man was manoeuvring to build something just as ugly, but five times bigger, on the South Bank.

Athanasius Thanatos! Him!

And what about the Thanatos Disposable Hotel, only a few weeks back so loudly deplored in every responsible paper? A pure despoiler's idea, a quick, cheap prefab shipped in to wherever he could find sun and a beach and cheap local booze, just to catch the ever-quickening eddies of the tourist mania. He'd boasted to Time magazine that any government who asked for a tourist resort one autumn could see it pullulating the next spring. And when the tourist tide receded, all the rooms and equipment could be shipped elsewhere, leaving only the scar tissue of dead cement where the hotel had stood, pocked with a few drain holes. He had publicly rejoiced in the fact that few of the ardent preservationists were likely to be citizens of the countries that actually needed the currency.