Miss Dearth. . Miss Dearth? She doesn’t respond but she hears, oh yes, she does. They go on and repeat the same procedure for the three male guinea pigs, who are to be found becalmed in their backwater of the men’s dormitory. Busner has charged Inglis with ensuring that all of them are got up every morning, cleaned, dressed and shaved. She was sarcasm itself: Ooh, par-don me, Doc-tor, but you want me to pre-tend dey goin’ onna journey? Her hands on her hips, her breasts proud, a reddy flush in her cheeks. Busner thought bitterly, Was her go-slow ever called off? but only repaid her with sincerity, saying, Yes, yes, I want you pretend that — because they are going on a very strange journey and they can’t very well do that smelling of urine — or with bed sores. This is, nurse, a hospital, not a concentration camp! Which is a conviction he simply doesn’t feeclass="underline" coercive institutions, he knows, only aggravate their inmates’ sickness. What was it Marcus had said of his time at the Hatch? mere trench warfare against mental disease . . Inglis is, Busner reflects, the sort who knows my type. . it is pointless to try . . And yet: sex begets more sex, and he is steeped in it, so it might be worth a try . . Her sex gapes darkly ahead of me. . a tunnel — a corridor —. Are we done here? Mboya says, and they go on with Busner’s head aching with the effort of containing the old booby hatch as it was in its heyday, with its six miles of corridors, and its rigid segregation of male and female, a notionally self-supporting community with its own farm and orchard, its water supply, sewage-treatment works, gasworks — gas! — burial ground, brewery, laundry, tailoring shop, cobbling workshop, upholsterer and — most crucially for the solution — railway spur . .He recovers his wits in the act of caressing Helene Yudkin’s plump neck same as when we had the labrador in Willesden and it needed worming. Despite Mboya’s skilled clamping of her jaws, Yudkin, who is at least seventy, has the vigour to grind her teeth in time with the flexing of her epiglottis. The noise drags him in its undertow back to. . Miriam and her ridiculous machine for polishing beach-garnered pebbles that sits slushscraping by the back door. Busner marvels that she complains of there being no washing machine yet tends happily enough to this tumbling drum, the shiny products of which end up scattered all over the flat — on tables, down the back of seat cushions, a small shingle beach drifting across the kneehole desk Maurice gave him when they married. When Busner challenged her over the handicrafts avalanche, Miriam said, The boys love them, don’t you boys? And Mark and Daniel chorused obediently, Yes, Mum, which was fast becoming a ritual — the way she expressed that One for me and another one for me, Pardon me — comes to three! Miss Yudkin’s foam rubber is fleshy to the touch, on the Formica side table sits a gelid dish of ying stewed rhubarb and yang custard that no one has troubled to feed her. On the arm of the chair her twisted hand dances fingertrot, handango, thumba, its digits saucily entwining and scissoring, the nails high-flicking the worn nap. It’s a choreography that he knows he could resolve into quite distinct movements, if he could find the time to analyse it, and that these could in turn be broken down into different sorts of action. But what were they? Did Helene Yudkin recapitulate her own workaday repetitions — those as seamstress, or bakery assistant? Both positions he’d found out that she once filled. Or were these domestic digitations: the turning on and the turning off, the sweeping up and the dusting down? Or, again, maybe she saw them — if at all, so sunk was she in her Parkinsonian netherworld — as simply divertimenti. It didn’t help him to hold this analogy at bay: that before the war the hospital received all the Jewish admissions in the London County Council region. . because? Convenience, he supposed, keeping kosher, maintaining access to the bearded weirdos and the dubious spiritual benefit of their legalistic mumbling . . Hergheraaaaghrrerrr, her nose — if it could only be abstracted from all the rest of her — was attractive, its wings dusted with powder, nostrils porcelain fine . .Moving them may also have been of a piece with the exodus from the East End to the north-western suburbs — a wilderness on the way. Whatever the reason, the end result was this: that over a thousand of them had been concentrated here when the Luftwaffe’s bombs fell on Poplar, Whitechapel, the Docks and my own randomly selected people . .But what might be said of the Jewish enkies in relation to the rest? Did they manifest the same divergence as the English Jews from the general population — being exactly the same, only much, much more so? Herrrerrrg’herrr —. For a moment Miss Yudkin hesitates, her throat bobs, the L-DOPA begins its hopefully fantastic journey, then she resumes Hergheraaaaghrrerrr, and Mboya says, Shall we? So they stalk with great trepidation into the next embayment of the female dormitory, where a manatee with a human face lies on her iron-framed catafalque. You’re worried, Mboya says as they stand regarding Leticia Gross, whose great flanks have quaked free of the covers. Naturally, Busner replies, look at her, she remains exactly the same: deafeningly inert. Mboya, as anxious as Busner and at least as exhausted — if not more — nevertheless gets it, understands the still greater mass that is packed into the woman-mountain, a violent compression — the stuff of her hammered mechanically into her casing — that necessarily implies its opposite: an equally violent explosion — great blubbery chunks of her flung in our faces, our whites hosed down by blood spouts, and this succeeded by a tidal wave of noise louder than an H-bomb . .We can’t go on like this, Busner goes on. It’s not that I think the L-DOPA is toxic even at these high doses — although he knows nothing of the sort, says it only for their mutual reassurance — rather, it’s that if Whitcomb does start poking his hooter in, without any results I’ll be unable to justify the expense. Mboya sighs and adds, Then there’s Inglis. . The fall forward of Busner’s chin is cushioned, I’m getting chubby . .You can’t, he laughs, get the staff nowadays. . but he knows the reverse is the case: the staff they have don’t get the patients — they resent the extra work involved in caring for the wholly incapacitated post-encephalitics, preferring more tractable neurotics, bullyable depressives and eager-to-please psychotics. The nurses also resent the reorganisation of the ward required by the increased number of male patients — and all the upset this brings. But most of all they resent Busner, who, unlike most of his predecessors, rather than being content to rely on their greater familiarity with the patients, insists on imposing his own rubric, one that involves regular feeding, grooming and toilet assistance. In fairness to them it is a tall order: their pay has been frozen, their children’s free milk has been taken away, the price of beer is rising so fast they’re obliged to brew their own . .and moreover there aren’t enough of them: heavy and recalcitrant patients cannot be levitated to the ward’s only WC, would that they could — he plunges into schoolboy reverie
.. a happy moment: the levitating game, fingers prised into the ticklish armpits and legcrooks of the one chosen for this signal honour while the rest of us chanted