Dominion (8 page)

‘She doesn’t mind now and then.’ Hubbold had met Sarah at a couple of office social functions. He had been there with his own wife, a brash, tactless woman who had hogged the
conversation, to her husband’s obvious annoyance.

‘Spending time together is
de bene esse
of a good marriage, you know.’ Hubbold, like so many in the Civil Service, loved peppering his conversation with Latin tags.

‘Yes, sir,’ David answered, an unintended coldness coming into his voice.

Hubbold said, in a more formal tone, ‘There’s a meeting we’ve been asked to arrange. A bit delicate. Some of the SS officials at the German embassy want to meet with
appropriate staff from South Africa House, to look at whether aspects of apartheid might be useful in organizing the Russian population. I wonder if you could arrange that tomorrow. It’s just
bilateral liaison, low-level at this stage. Keep it quiet, would you?’

David thought he saw a flicker of distaste cross Hubbold’s face when he mentioned the SS. But he had no idea where Hubbold stood politically, if anywhere; anybody politically suspect had
been weeded out of the Civil Service years ago, along with the Jews. Civil servants had always discussed politics between themselves in a detached, superior way but these days they tended to avoid
even the hint of commitment to anything at all unless speaking with friends they trusted.

‘I’ll speak to the South Africans tomorrow.’ He left, his hands shaking slightly as he walked down the corridor.

He arrived home just before six. Sarah was sitting knitting in front of the fire. He held out a large bunch of Michaelmas daisies he had bought from a stall on the way home.
‘Peace offering,’ he said. ‘For last Sunday. I was a pig.’

She got up and kissed him. ‘Thanks. Good afternoon’s tennis?’

‘Not bad. I left my kit to be washed there.’

‘How’s Geoff?’

‘All right.’

‘You look tired.’

‘Just the exercise. What was the film like?’

‘Very good.’

‘It’s getting foggy out.’ He hesitated. ‘How was Irene?’

‘She’s all right.’ Sarah smiled. ‘We saw some Jive Boys in Piccadilly, and that got her going a bit.’

‘I can imagine.’ The two of us speak so stiffly now, he thought. On an impulse, he said, ‘Look, why don’t we re-wallpaper those stairs?’

Her body seemed to relax with relief. ‘Oh, David, I wish we could.’

He hesitated, then said, ‘Somehow I’ve felt – if we did it then we might come to forget him.’

She came across and hugged him. ‘We won’t ever forget. You know that. Never.’

‘Perhaps everything’s forgotten, in time.’

‘No. Even if one day we managed to have another baby, we’d never forget Charlie.’

David said, ‘I wish I believed in God, could believe Charlie still existed, in some afterlife.’

‘I wish that too.’

‘But there’s only this life, isn’t there?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She smiled bravely. ‘Only one. And we have to do the best we can with it.’

F
RANK SAT LOOKING THROUGH
the window at the grounds of the mental hospital, the sodden lawn and empty flowerbeds. It had been raining since early
morning, hard and steady. The drug they gave him, the Largactil, made him feel calm and sleepy most of the time. In the Admissions Block he had been on a large dose, but after he was stabilized and
had moved to a main ward, they reduced the dose and in his mind now the periods of dull calmness were sometimes broken by violent flashes of memory: the school; Mrs Baker and her spirit guide; how
his hand had become crippled. He suspected he was getting used to the drug, lessening its effect, but he did not want to go back on a larger dose because he needed his mind to be clear enough to
keep his secret.

He had come into a little side room off the main ward that Monday morning, the quiet room as it was called, partly because the other patients frightened him, and also to get away from the
overwhelming smell of cigarettes. Frank had never smoked. At school he knew he couldn’t dare join the other boys smoking behind the boiler room; tobacco had passed him by like so much else.
The patients were constantly wheedling the staff for tobacco, a Woodbine or just a dog-end. The hospital ceilings were all brown with it. He sat in an armchair, which, like all the hospital
furniture, was huge, old and heavy. His right hand hurt, as it often did when it rained, pain coursing through the two damaged fingers, shrunken and claw-like.

It had surprised Frank, when he arrived at the hospital three weeks before, that there were no bars on the windows. But as the police car that brought him drove through the gates he had glimpsed
beyond the high wall, on the inner side, a broad ditch full of water, screened from view from the hospital by privet hedges. One of the patients on the admissions ward, a middle-aged man with
lined, chalk-white features and wild hair, had told him he planned to escape, swim the ditch and climb the wall. The law said if you escaped from a loony bin and weren’t recaptured in
fourteen days you were free. Frank looked at the man in a grey wool hospital suit that was even more shapeless than Frank’s own. Even if escape were possible, which he doubted, there was
nowhere for him to go now. After what had happened at his flat his neighbours would alert the police as soon as they set eyes on him again. It had been like that at school, nowhere to run. The
gates were always open, but he knew if ever he ran away, got off that bleak Scottish hillside and somehow managed to get home to Esher, his mother would simply bring him back. The mental hospital
reminded him constantly of the horrors of school – the dormitory with its iron beds, the uniformed inmates who most of the time ignored him. And an all-male world; like all mental hospitals
this one was divided into a men’s side and women’s side, the sexes kept entirely apart. From the looks he sometimes got Frank could tell the patients knew what he had done, perhaps were
even afraid of him. The staff, too, reminded him of his teachers, with their sharp military manner and quick brutality if someone got difficult. Frank had tried to avoid thoughts of school for
years but now he was constantly reminded; though school had been worse than here.

That afternoon Frank had an appointment with Dr Wilson, the Medical Superintendent, in his office in the Admissions Building. He didn’t want to go, he just wanted to stay
in the quiet room. Sometimes other patients came in but he was alone today. He hoped he might be forgotten – patients’ appointments were forgotten now and then – but after an hour
the door opened and a young man in the peaked cap and brown serge uniform of a senior attendant came in. Frank hadn’t seen him before. He was short and stocky, with a thin face and a
prominent nose which at some time had been badly broken. His brown eyes were alert. He was carrying a big, rolled-up umbrella. He gave Frank a nod and a friendly smile. Frank was surprised; mostly
the attendants treated the patients like recalcitrant children.

‘Frank Muncaster?’ the attendant asked in a broad Scottish accent. ‘How’re ye daen?’ Frank’s face spasmed into a wide rictus, showing all his teeth, his chimp
grin. Hearing a Scottish accent could unnerve him, because it reminded him of the school. But the attendant’s accent was very different from the elongated vowels and rolling ‘R’s
of middle-class Edinburgh that had prevailed at Strangmans; he spoke quickly, the words running together, a more guttural but, to Frank, less threatening accent.

The attendant’s eyes widened a little; everyone’s did when they saw that grin of Frank’s for the first time. He said, ‘I’m Ben. I’ve come to take you to Dr
Wilson. They said in the day room you’d be here.’

Reluctantly Frank followed Ben out, through the day room, where several patients sat slumped in front of the television.
Children’s Hour
was on, a puppet in a striped uniform
dancing manically on the end of its strings.

They walked along the echoing corridors to the main door, then out into the rain. Ben raised his umbrella and motioned Frank to stand under it with him. They splashed along the path between the
lawns. Ben said, conversationally, ‘Expect you saw Dr Wilson on the admissions ward.’

‘Yes. I saw him last week, too. He said he wants me to have some treatment.’ Frank looked sidelong at Ben; he had said little to anyone since his admission but this attendant seemed
friendly.

‘What sort of treatment?’

Frank shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘He likes new treatments, Dr Wilson. I suppose some of his ideas aren’t bad – this new drug Largactil, it’s better than the old phenobarb and the paraldehyde –
Jesus, how that stuff used to stink.’

‘I told him I wanted to leave, go back to work, but he said I wasn’t nearly ready. He asked if I’d like to talk about my parents; I don’t know why.’

‘Aye, he does that.’ Ben’s voice was amused, half-contemptuous.

‘I said what was the point, my father died before I was born and Mother’s dead, too, now. He looked cross with me.’

‘You were a scientist afore you came here, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ A touch of pride entered Frank’s voice. ‘I’m a research associate at Birmingham University. Geology department.’

‘I would have thought you could have afforded the Private Villa then. Ye get yer own room there.’

Frank shook his head sadly. ‘Apparently as I’ve been certified I’ve lost the right to control my money. And there’s no-one to be a trustee.’

Ben shook his head sympathetically. ‘The almoner should sort that out. You should ask Wilson.’

They reached the Admissions Block, a square, two-storey rectangle, redbrick like all the asylum buildings. In the doorway Ben shook out the umbrella. Frank glanced back at the enormous main
building. It stood on a little hill; across the countryside, on a clear day, you could see the haze over Birmingham in the distance. From outside, the asylum, with its many-windowed front and neat
grounds, looked like a country house; inside it was quite different, a thousand patients packed into cavernous wards with dilapidated furniture and peeling paint. Two nurses from the women’s
wing, capes over their starched uniforms, came out of the block. ‘Good morning, Mr Hall,’ one said cheerfully to Ben. ‘Filthy day.’

‘Aye, it is.’

The nurses raised umbrellas and walked quickly down the drive to the locked gates. Frank watched them go. Ben touched his arm. ‘Come on, pal, wake up,’ he said gently.

‘I wish I could get out.’

‘Not after what you did, Frank,’ Ben said gravely. ‘Come on, let’s get ye inside.’

Frank’s mind shied away from the event that had led him here. But sometimes, when the effects of the Largactil were wearing off, he would think about it.

It had started with his mother’s death, a month before. She was past seventy, a little, bent, querulous old woman living alone in the house in Esher. Frank visited her a couple of times a
year, out of duty. His older brother, Edgar, only saw her on his rare visits from California. When Frank went to see her, Mrs Muncaster would compare him unfavourably with his brother, as she had
all her life. There Edgar was, married with children, a physicist in a great American university, while Frank had been stuck in the same boring job for ten years. She lived for Edgar’s
letters, she said. Frank didn’t think his mother saw anyone apart from him these days, as her involvement with spiritualism had ended five years before when Mrs Baker, her spiritual guru, had
died, and the weekly séances in the dining room had ended.

The police had phoned Frank at work to tell him his mother had had a stroke while out shopping, and died two hours later in hospital. Frank sent a telegram to Edgar, who replied, to
Frank’s surprise, at once, saying he would come over for the funeral. Frank did not want to see Edgar, he loathed him; but even though he didn’t like train journeys, he had travelled
from Birmingham to Esher to meet Edgar at the house where they had been brought up. On the journey he wondered what his brother would be like. He was an American citizen now. The letters their
mother showed him were always full of his busy life at Berkeley, how he loved San Francisco, how his wife and three children were getting on.

But when he’d visited his mother at Easter he had found that Edgar, for the first time in his life, had upset her. He had written to her to say that he and his wife were getting a divorce.
Mrs Muncaster had been shocked, wringing her gnarled hands and telling Frank she hadn’t liked Edgar’s wife the one time he’d brought her to England: she was brassy and full of
herself, a typical American. His mother had cried then, saying she would never see her grandchildren, adding bitterly that Frank was hardly likely to give her any now. Frank wondered if all the
shock and distress had led to her stroke.

The crowds on the train frightened him; he was glad to get off at Esher. He walked to the house. It was a cold, misty afternoon. A boy on one of the new Vespa scooters buzzed past him, making
him jump. When he entered the house he was aware of an emptiness, a new silence. Mrs Baker would have said it was because a spirit had gone over. Frank shivered slightly. There was dust everywhere,
peeling wallpaper, damp patches. Somehow he hadn’t noticed how badly his mother had let the house go.

Edgar arrived a few hours later. He’d put on weight since Frank had last seen him. He was forty now, bespectacled and red-faced, his hair receding, the youthful handsomeness Frank had
envied just a memory. ‘Well, Frank,’ he said heavily. ‘So, she’s gone then.’ Just as Edgar’s voice had taken on a Scottish accent while he was at Strangmans, so
now he spoke with an American twang.

Frank took Edgar round the house. ‘It’s in a bad state,’ Edgar said. ‘Some of these rooms don’t look like anyone’s been in them for years.’ They went
into the dining room. There were mouse droppings on the floor. ‘Hell,’ Edgar said irritably. ‘I don’t know how she could’ve lived like this. Didn’t you try to
get her to move?’

Frank didn’t answer. He was looking at the big dining table. The electric light above still had the cheesecloth shawl draped over it; Mrs Baker had needed muted light to commune with the
spirit world.