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.