Janet rang the doorbell, was admitted and directed along the hallway towards Lila’s ground-floor room. A few people wandered about, looking normal if a trifle abstracted. A tall young man came towards her, smiling cordially. Janet smiled graciously back, making it clear that she was not one to be prejudiced against the deranged. As he drew level with her he suddenly bared his teeth and snarled. Janet’s kindly smile disintegrated, her heart thumped. She hurried along the corridor, tightly clutching her parcel. She wished now that she had not worn her new petticoat; it seemed to alarm people; they recoiled and stared after her as she went crackling by. Lila occupied Room 24. In the middle of the corridor outside her door a mountainous and ancient woman was moored in an armchair. Her flesh lapped over the sides; her manifold chins bristled like St. Uncumba’s. One of her eyeballs was rolled upwards so that only the white showed; the other swivelled sharply towards Janet. “Fit like, hen?” she inquired. “I’m very well, thank you,” responded Janet, banging on Lila’s door and simultaneously opening it. Lila lay in bed staring at the ceiling. “Hallo, Lila, I’ve come to see you,” Janet announced. “Oh,” said Lila. “Hallo,” she added. There was silence, broken by a series of squawks from the corridor, beyond the closed door. Janet tried to think of something to say. “How are you, Lila? Do you like it here?” “It’s all right really,” said Lila, still looking at the ceiling. “I’m just very tired. In fact I must go to sleep now.” She closed her eyes. The room was very small and white, the bed was white, Lila wore a white garment like a grocer’s overall, but back to front. There was no furniture, apart from a chest of drawers. Beyond the uncurtained window a great stretch of bleached grass ran down to the cliff edge. At least the sea was out of sight. A clothesline festooned with dusters and dishcloths flapped and flopped at the empty sky. Janet felt silly, standing there with her parcel. She wondered whether she could sit on the chest of drawers. Lila looked strange and small, asleep in the white bed, as though nothing had ever happened to her, she had never been anywhere, as though all her existence had contracted to this point and would proceed no further. The door burst open. In rushed a beak-faced little woman with stubbly hair like a collaborateuse. She wore a child’s black velvet party frock, undone down the back and exposing a sweep of yellowed flesh. Janet looked at her with distaste, then was smitten with sudden pain by the innocent moulding of her spine. Her legs and feet were bare, and mottled with cold. “Gie us a fag,” she cried. “Come on, Lila, gie us a fag.” “I think she’s asleep,” ventured Janet. “Och, rubbish.” She shook open a drawer and seized a packet of Craven A. She stared at Janet; her eye fell on the parcel. “Fit’s in yon? Ye’ve brought us a giftie; awfy guid. Gie us.” She snatched the package and ripped it open. “Knickers, knickers, knickers. Knickers, knickers, knickers. These are for me; ye see I’ve nane.” She pirouetted, lifting her skirt. She spoke the truth. Janet averted her eyes, appalled. Nudity had no part to play in her life. “Please do have them, if they’re any use to you,” she began. “Oh, Lady Bountiful, oh, how too too kind.” Beakface was mimicking Janet’s voice; then she resumed her own. “I’ll have them whether you like it or no. Milksop!” she yelled and ran from the room. Janet heard her negotiate her way around the wheezing armchair woman. “And haud yer wheesht, ye muckle great sumph.”
Janet wondered what to do now. She wanted to go; she wanted very much to go. But if Lila woke and found her gone, she might be disappointed and hurt. She gazed gloomily out of the window. Someone had taken in the washing. Would Lila care if she went? She was distracted by voices outside the door. The mountainous sedentary woman, not unlike the manatee, now she thought of it, seemed to be engaged with a nurse. Said the nurse, brisk but kind, “Of course you’re not a snake.” Mountain: “And hoo dae ye ken, can ye say that for a fact?” Nurse: “I most certainly can. Snakes have scales. You have lovely soft skin.” Mountain: “I’m no a lass. Ye ken, I’m no a lass nae mair.” Nurse: “Well, you’re not a snake either.” Mountain: “Then wha’s the snake? Ye maun be the snake. Aye, it is yersel’.” A series of squawking gasps. Nurse: “For heaven’s sake, Mrs. Farquharson. I’m getting the doctor.” Then, meaningfully, “I think you’ll have to Go Downstairs.” There was a click of retreating heels. The squawks rose to a gruff choking climax, then subsided. They were replaced by sonorous mutterings. Janet looked again at Lila. She lay there like an effigy, the sheet scarcely rising as she breathed. She looked out at the blank sky. There was still one object hanging from the washing line. It was a tiny black velvet child’s party frock, pinned by its lace-trimmed sleeves, as though Beakface had shrunk like Alice in Wonderland, and evaporated into the bitter wind. For a moment Janet thought she had caught the madness or crossed into a realm where all was possible. She pulled her left pigtail hard. It hurt. She was Janet, and the thing on the line was a clothes-peg bag, made perforce in some heartless handicrafts session, by a person of tragic destiny. “Goodbye, Lila,” she said. There was no answer. Out in the corridor the woman in the chair was lying back, breathing heavily, eyes half closed. Now both eyeballs showed only white. As Janet warily skirted around her, she mumbled, “Rabbits.”
The bus toiled noisily into the twilit hills. Janet reflected on her expedition. Strategy apart, it could not be called a success. She had imagined Lila’s ravaged face softening into her rare sweet smile at her arrival. Her black eyes would glow with pleasure as Janet told her of the infant Heracleum which she had dug up and transplanted to adorn the grave of Mouflon. There would be talk of animals and trees, of fungi and the great draughty castle, but not of its inhabitants. Lila shared Janet’s distaste for the Teutonic and she had hoped to describe St. Uncumba’s German nativity play and reproduce the turgid gutturals of Gabriel’s message to Mary. It seemed curious to her that the Germans, who had murdered so many Jews, should be widely regarded as a people appropriate to proclaim, in folksy manner, the miraculous birth of the doomed and Jewish babe. Why not perform a Latin play about the slaughter of the Innocents? It would be more honourable and at least it would sound beautiful, apart, of course, from the yells of the Innocents. The hideous short “u” which occurred in so many English words of disparagement, insult or plain dreariness, she ascribed to the Teutonic influence. “Rut,” she thought. “Ugh. Lump.” And there were worse, far worse. Such sounds did not exist in Latin or Greek. Francis claimed to have found an especially satisfying and characteristic German word: Ein beutelrattengittenwettenhof. “In other, simpler words, a kangaroo shelter. Current among ex-Nazis, hiding their shame by farming kangaroos in the Australian outback. Their wives take the Joeys, or Johanns more properly — baby kangaroos to you — into the house and dress them in lederhosen. Sometimes they don’t notice as they bustle about attending to Kinder, Kirche, und Küchen that little Johann has grown up and is now nearly six feet tall. Sometimes Hausfrau and Johann meet in a rather unexpected manner in the corner of the kitchen. But this is not for your girlish ears, Janet.”