More tea, Miss Dearth? Busner asks. The old woman — lady? — has an erect bearing, sitting straight up in bed. She speaks with a peculiar accent as well — cockney elocuted to death? No, she says, I think not, Doctor Busner, but may I ask — they dangle on her every clipped vowel, brown suede and black leather kicking in the dense atmosphere of the summertime ward — why it is that you refer to me as Miss Dearth, when my given name is Death, D-e-a-t-h, precisely so. I can conceive that such a name may seem not fit for a hospital — not encouraging. . There’ve been times, I admit, when I’ve given ground to common superstition and styled myself De’Ath, but, so far as I’m aware, all my official documentation — at the Labour Exchange and suchlike, census forms and so forth — will have me registered as Death, Audrey. Busner and Mboya exchange looks — they hear what she says, they listen amazed to the way she is saying it: her small sharp chin is no longer digging into her sternum, her eyes are neither transfixed nor anomalously mobile in a masklike face — indeed, face and eyes synchronise together in the subtle interplay of normal expressiveness. Gone are the puckering, pursing and pouting of the Parkinsonian mouth, its compulsive grimacing, its incessant chewing. The presence of her dentures gives her jawline definition, plumps up her cheeks, and when she smiles — which she does — the prosthesis is perfectly charming. All this is, Busner thinks, still inadequate to the task of expressing the quality of her resipiscence — a return to good health of a miraculous nature. — I–I daresay Miss, ah, Death, that at least initially — upon your admission that is. . he desires to chafe the backs of her hands, hold them palm-down and strum with his thumbs vein, bone and tendon. . your details were taken down correctly, but that was a long time ago, you’ve been here at Friern Hospital. . Busner’s cadences are low and hesitant, the extreme oddness of it all is threatening to gum me up . .his thoughts have a jammy stickiness . .and he cannot drag his eyes up from below the bed, where a baby-blue plastic potty loiters with obscene intent: the chambermaid has long gone — it remains . .a very long time. Audrey’s face, scored into innumerable long-playing grooves scratches . . — I know that, Doctor Busner — I am not a fool and nor have I been in a complete swoon these past years. If you wish to form some idea of the constitution of my mind, it may well aid you to think of me as a sort of soldier but recently returned from the Front, and afflicted with a very peculiar case of shell shock. Busner is caught and held, he realises, by the selenian serenity of her features. It’s a shocker: she is a beautiful woman, and presumably always has been. Turned at last from the darkness, she shines with self-possessed awareness of her own sex-appeal. — Can I ask you, then, Miss Death — and please, I hope this doesn’t offend you — what year this is? A cosmic anxiety disrupts the ancient’s face — her fingers travel to her throat, her face. — I. . I. . Well, you can hardly expect — she ironises herself with mock-gentility — me to bother with such commonplaces. Busner, wishing to let her off the hook, pulls the sphygmomanometer from his coat pocket and Mboya rises to assist — but Audrey has pushed up the cuff of her nightie automatically, it’s a conditioned reflex. While they make the routine observations — Pulse one-twenty, BP one-seventy over one hundred and. . one-thirty over seventy-five — she attempts her own arithmetic: Is it nineteen-twen—, no, nineteen-thir—? She struggles to articulate the never-uttered decades, until her physician, despairing impulsively of making this in any way bearable, spots a copy of the Daily Mail left on a nearby bed and says, Grab that paper would you, Enoch. Taking it from him Audrey, unfolds its rattling skirting. She looks to her hands and stumbles, Wh-Whose are these. . old hands, is — is this my morbid affliction? Then a photograph of the Lunar Roving Vehicle on the front page catches her eye. — What an otherworldly motor car, she says, the chauffeur appears to be wearing a diving apparatus — and the brolly they’ve mounted behind the dickey is. . is upside down! She laughs, a jollily ascending lark the psychiatrist foresees shattering its skull on the transparent hardness of Now — but, recovering herself, Audrey becomes attentive to the paper’s masthead and soundlessly shapes the syllables of the date. Slowly she refolds the paper and, passing it back to Mboya, says to Busner, Will you ask the blackie to fetch me my dressing gown? He looks to see how Mboya is taking it, but the charge nurse, whose long legs are casually crossed, only smiles sardonically and jiggles one foot so that it throws back its flared cowl. You do understand, Busner says, the situation — what year it is, how long you’ve been here? She composes herself before she replies, interleaving her fingers and arranging her laced-up hands on the turned-back sheet. He watches this intently, alive to her tremor — is it increasing in amplitude, in frequency? She folds her Crimplene throat and says, Er-hem, the situation — as you term it, Doctor Busner — is indeed quite extraordinary, but bear in mind that for me it has been quite, quite extraordinary for a very long time. If this specific or paregoric, or whatever it is you’ve dosed me with — what d’you call it by the by? He says: L-DOPA. She says, Eldoughpa, eh, — well, if this eldoughpa stuff continues to do its bit, then perhaps I will have the opportunity to tell you quite how extraordinary it has been for me. However, now is not the time, nor can we sit here all day twiddling our thumbs. . The post-encephalitic is doing just that, the digits twirling with exceptional speed and suppleness. Busner gulps, riveted by the spinning thing, until along comes Enoch, stately enough and bearing a lime-green Terylene robe, its shapelessness emphasised by his modest headway. The garment is ugly, far too big for her and with a horrid fake-lacy collar — he expects her to reject it, and perhaps for the unaccountable resurrection to end right here,