Umbrella (55 page)

There are a number of rigid paper bags standing on the desks, plan chests and the model’s table – regal purple bags decorated with the development’s logo: the elongated dome of the former hospital and its two flanking campaniles . . .
fake, sucking the stench of madness into the suburban skies, what do they suck up now, potpourri, freshly ground coffee?
Athena Dukakis says, We’ve got a sort of presentation-thingy on tomorrow, if you’re wondering about the bags – they’re goodie ones, give-aways, a CD-ROM with a virtual tour of the development, a scented candle, bath salts . . . that sort of thing . . . She falls silent, then,
perking up again
, says, Look, to be frank, it’s pretty quiet just now – what with the credit crunch and all that our sales aren’t exactly . . . booming. Would you like me to show you round? This is said impulsively,
but with
a
decided warmth
. . .
As he follows her down the drive towards the roundabout with its ornamental flowerbed – which is far more refulgent than he remembers it, a blaze of pink, mauve and scarlet – Busner wonders
why has she warmed to me?
For he’s altogether conscious of his gracelessness, stumbling along, footsore in his training shoes
Addenough
. . .
and topped off by his dosser’s hat, the very image of a returning patient in search of security –
or an Unknown Pauper Lunatic, what happened to him?
And, more to the point, Busner thinks, what happened to the old alienist, Marcus, whom I deceived – as if he needed protecting! – about the statue? If he were alive now, he’d be – what? over a hundred – still, it was quite possible to imagine him hanging on in his St John’s Wood flat, and persecuting
the little wife who comes crackling across the plastic with her liverish offerings
. . .
They reach the main doors, and as Busner turns to trudge obediently past, he’s shocked to see that they have swung soundlessly open of their own accord, while behind them a further set of glass doors schuss apart:
the magical entrance to Sleeping Beauty’s castle . . . The mountainside, the flower grows, The riverside where the water flows for-èver
. . .
Athena Dukakis laughs. – I see you’re confused by the doors – it was the second thing my dad did: open them up, after all, you could hardly have the keep-fit crew skulking round the side, now could you? Where the cantilevered landing once reared above the dead theatrical space – and he remembers now, a hyperactive Cordelia babbled,
N-N-N-Nothing c-c-c-comes of n-n-nothing
– there are instead
lots of things
, the high hall having been sliced in three, horizontally, these compartments to be viewed through a rood screen of blond wood and glassy panels. At their feet these windows disclose the sunken swimming pool, through the azure fluid of which a swimmer stretches photo-opportunistically – while at their chest-height a broad floor of quarry tiling supports seating areas of round-backed armchairs, a zinc-fronted bar, and all the other silent clamour of a coffee bar in full afternoon swing:
one or two muffin-heads eating sweetbreads the same shape.
And up above this, a further platform hovers under the old beams and trusses of the original roof, a platform upon which, behind a glass balustrade, can be seen thronging the shiny racks of running machines. Busner sees several pairs of legs going back and forth, back and forth . . .
but going nowhere.
Festination
. . .
comes to him, and then he spots the shiny steer-horns of rowing machines, and of other lifting, stretching and yanking devices, some of which are being repetitively hauled up and down, up and down, to raise no other masses than . . .
bigger triceps, biceps and deltoids
. . .
From the same mental recess comes . . .
a mobile spasm
of athetosis
and myoclonic jerking
. . .
Busner looks up at the eyes of one of the runners-on-the-spot above his head, and notes that these are fixed unwaveringly on a mid-distance towards which her festinating feet will
never carry her
and he thinks: She’s having an oculogyric crisis. Next he concentrates hard and can separate from the gargling of the espresso machine and the wind-chiming of the Muzak the mounting chuffer-chuff-chuff of her breathing, and so diagnoses the onset of . . .
a respiratory crisis!
The young man in the photograph on the hoarding by the main gates,
or his twin
, brushes past the gawping Busner, who looks down at his sports bag and is gone from the fitness centre back into
a hot hangover . . . which has to be the worst kind there is
. . .
— How long, he wonders despairingly, will I have to stand in this fucking queue? What makes it worse is that there’s nothing to look at but the stone floor scattered with the crumpled-up results of scores of tiny financial transactions, the window
which hurts my eyes
, or the thing he wishes to avoid: the man who’s at the counter in front of him, and who bends to address the cashier through the metal grille, speaking so croakily that it’s altogether impossible for Busner to decide what language he’s using.
He is me
. . .
the fifty-peseta clipper-cut intended to impose respectability – this being a representative monarchy in which, should they choose to, the shaven-headed, shiny-origami-hat-wearing agents loyal to the Caudillo might well
shear you in public
. . .
– the filthy-blue BOAC flight bag full of empty wine bottles, and
that tremor
, the insistent shaking of a nervous system habituated to
regular sedation with ethyl alcohol
. . .
Busner has no doubt that the old remittance man is a Brit – even if he can’t tell what language he’s speaking, the loud mangling of it remains indisputably
YouKay
. . .
There seems to be some sort of dispute going on concerning the dirty little scrap of paper the remittance man keeps thrusting under the grille, and with a sickening jolt Busner realises that this is a Thomas Cook traveller’s cheque exactly like the ones he needs to cash. The Spanish holiday, he thinks, has been broadly a success: they have looked, eaten, talked, driven, done it all over again. There has been no great intimacy between him and Miriam, but that’s
only to be expected
. . .
it’s exhausting enough keeping the baby cool, making sure all the children are hydrated with expensive bottled water. No, the holiday has been a success, and there are only a few more days before they fly home – it’s not exactly been
The jungle life of mystery
. . .
but, arguably, it’s been a perfectly acceptable chapter of . . .
The wide and graceful history of life
. . .
He probably shouldn’t have drunk quite so much last night, but that too
is only to be expected
. . .
If only it weren’t so hot in this pestilential bank – if only the restive queue behind him didn’t twitch so – each time Busner looks back at them, he sees an upsetting agitation of hands, flicking hair, brushing lips, licking tongues. And the old remittance man
with his dreadful palsy!
The confrontation has reached some sort of climax, because here into the bank comes a jack-booted Guardia Civil who must have been summoned by
some ulterior buzzer
. . .
Despairingly, Busner watches as the old remittance man is hauled off by the strap of his bag, his empties clinking, his eyes
blinking with tears . . . I ought to do something, help him
. . .
but all Busner does is to take his place at the grille, and begin the laborious signing once, twice, flicking to the next, signing once, twice, flicking to the next – a
thumbah
, or possibly a
handango
, that recalls to his mind the repetitive ticcing of Helene Yudkin — and all at once he knows what a foul and irretrievable mistake he has made:
I should never have left them – never!
For the last four days of the holiday Busner is present in body only, he can barely rouse himself to speak
to my three waif-like kiddies and my poor drab of a wife
. When the cab drops them at the Grove, he goes into the flat only to dig out the keys to the Austin, and then he pushes past Miriam, who’s struggling in with the suitcases. She says nothing: there is nothing to be said –
nothing comes of nothing, but neglect is something – and divorce came of that
. . .
— When he reached Ward 20, it was late afternoon, and the sunbeams struck down through the lancet windows at precise forty-five degree angles,
I thought of castles then – specifically their dungeons, the stone-flagged cells housing Medieval inmates, their matted and filthy hair poking from between the struts and ribs of complicated fetters and cages . . . something out of Grimmelshausen
. . .
He could see none of the medical staff in the day-room and the nurses’ station was empty but for . . .
smoke, the acrid ghost of all our concern
. When Busner had left for Spain, Audrey Death had still been the most stable of the post-encephalitics – her stuporous state when her older brother had made his once-in-a-century visit had been: Partly shock, Doctor Busner, she told him. It would, I think, have been courteous to’ve at least told me that you had been to see him, as it was I was quite severely shocked – and besides, I’ve nothing to say to Albert De’Ath, we don’t so much as share a given name – the only thing we have in common is the accident of our parentage. If you’ve spent any time with him you have, I daresay, been exposed to his formidable powers of reasoning – capabilities sadly unmatched by any real compassion, let alone warmth. He is the most fearful reactionary. Too much messery, Busner had muttered, and Audrey said: Speak up, young fellow, and Busner said again: I expect he’s had too much of his messery – whereupon the elderly lady
laughed, she laughed – a delightful laugh: warm and seductive
. . .
This was the memory he took away with him: of a very thin, hunched and frail patient – that was true – but one in full possession of her senses, perfectly lucid . . .
and engaged
. I do so enjoy, she had said to him, going up to see the musical woman – Missus Down, is it? – she plays, quite coincidentally, an air I remember from girlhood, Brahms’s intermezzo, in A, d’you know it? Busner said, Not off the top of –. And she hummed
she hummed
, Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo, triplets of notes lilting up and down, and he had left her there –
a little twitchy, un peu rackety, true, but that was only to be expected
. . .
—
He returned to find the most complete disharmony.
In the first cell I came to, on the men’s dormitory
. . .
The three old men, Messrs Voss, Ostereich and McNeil, were as inert as when Busner had first seen them: they seemed no longer men at all but . . .
derelict houses, burnt out and decaying
. . .
their faces rigidly masked, their heads lolling on their necks, their entire musculatures eroding from their frames,
so that every part of them slid away
. He had attempted, futilely, to arouse them – pulling up an eyelid, calling into the dark and sadly unwashed cavern of an ear. Nothing. Worse than nothing: a sense of a profound absence – not only that there was no sentience in any of the three,