throttled by its multitude of tiny nooses. But no: Audrey takes the gown, holds it aloft, throws back the covers, slides her legs out, rises and twirls the cape around her shoulders. In profile: the reworking of Annigoni’s Queen for whom the wonky bedside locker, the filmy-plastic water jug, the chipped green paint of the wall — all is folded into a backdrop, a distant landscape of blue ruled-over hills. Hands clasping the gown together, she advances perfectly steadily, — Excuse me, and Busner jumps up and pulls his chair from her progress — they watch, the nylon curtains clinging to them, as she proceeds the length of the dormitory and on into the rest of the ward. Stately, yes, and also legato, her hidden legs supplying the rhythm upon which her melody of movement is sustained, Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo! The two men are seized by the akinesia of others of the others whom she passes by — one paralysed by a pillar, a second arrested half risen from a chair — and whom she nods to, acknowledging these frozen subjects of her icy realm. Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo! On she lilts in her own netherworld — the ill-lit tunnel system of her affliction. Audrey has a word to describe her condition: I am unmusicked, she would whisper to herself — un-mu-sicked, but now she’s musicked again. Another patient, not a post-encephalitic, sits at a table, a pencil in her hand its point inserted in a cogged Perspex disc that whirls in her fingers, throwing off graphite rings across the donated paper. Outside the windows it is early afternoon and a heavy summer downpour draws Spirograph patterns on the puddles spreading across the flat roof of Occupational Therapy. — What was it, Audrey reflects, that Gilbert had said — yes! A universe comesh when you shiver the mirror. . shiver the mirror of what may appear to be — on the shuperficial level — the leasht of individual mindsh. Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo . . I am the piano — my memory the roll, my thoughts Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo . .The pane she leans her forehead against is hard and cool — that it is transparent doesn’t mean it isn’t there. He had said that thing and she was furious — furious! — that she had come all the way from Woolwich after a twelve-hour shift, braving the crowds in Beresford Square to struggle dangerously over the steering gear and ascend to the top deck by way of the stairway’s rail, paid her ha’penny and then another tu’pence on the tube up from London Bridge — escaping the thunderbolts underground together with thousands of others who lay there in mounds on the platforms — only to have him smuggle her like a common trollop into his rooms above the colour shop on the Gray’s Inn Road so that she might hear this — this! the puffed-up little popinjay declaiming these lines to her from his latest infantile fantasy, which lay there in light tinged greenish by the desk lamp’s shade. Lay there, line below line of his girlishly rounded handwriting in green ink, in a quarto-sized manuscript book covered with green morocco that sat upon a similarly mounted blotter, handwriting that described — or so he had glossed it — his approbation of his own works, blinding him to the depredations exacted by hers — a society of the not too distant future in which the sprawling cities had been gathered up into pinnacles of glass, steel and concrete, of the sort lately found on Manhattan Island, leaving the countryside free not only for agricultural production — since, due to the chemistry of Herr Haber, this would require a fraction of the arable land employed heretofore — but a new Xanadu of pleasure gardens, and indeed entire tracts that could be allowed to revert to their autochthonous state, the greenwood providing for young men who would otherwise, perhaps, grow too softly effete — what with the ending of all wars through the institution of universal plenty — to practise the old chivalric arts of queshting, joushting and sho forth . .Audrey had been furious that she’d lent so much as an ear, let alone her intellect, to this lantern lecture, one that contradictorily diminished the magnitude of his pomposity and his conviction that it was his principles — rather than his weak lungs — that placed him on an upper storey of his own glassy moral pinnacle, one vastly elevated from the trenches where the Tommies choked to death on gas and blood, or the munitions factories where the Thomasinas lost their teeth and hair to quicksilver poisoning, or even yet the residents of a humble suburban villa near to Woking — three waif-like kiddies, a poor drab of a wife — who were lucky — according to Feydeau, whose general approval of his comrade’s freedom from all convention balked at this — if they clapped eyes on their father and husband more than once or twice a year. It had been cold outside — along by Mount Pleasant there were banks of refrozen snowmelt pitted with the city’s inexhaustible filth, and a special constable picking at the rime on his tin hat. At the hostel it would be colder still. Hating herself, Audrey had subsided on to the chaise-longue given to him by Venetia Stanley. Hating herself, she allowed him to unbutton, then undress her, in the smarting haze of his Logic smoke — and hating them both, she lay beneath him jerking not with pleasure provoked by his caresses but the repetitive motions of operating the lathe — twirling, cranking, pulling — that had been dinned into every nerve-fibre throughout the twelve-hour shift. Spent, in repose, there remained at least this charm clinging to Gilbert: his utter disregard of his pigeon chest or the scabrous pate that showed through his feathery hair in the steady illumination radiated by the large gas fire’s white-hot coralline elements. He lay back in her arms and used the cork tip of his Logic to link with smoky ribbons the surrender at Kut, the battle of the Four Courts, the routing of Villa’s desperadoes and Smuts’s Kilimanjaro escapade, pinning these to an immaterial map that showed the whole shtate of play, and how it was that — despite all contrary indications — the harmonioush reconshiliation of capital and labour under the leadership of the scientifically enlightened and philosophically minded was closhe at hand . .Audrey deprived him of his Logic and smoked to its bitter end . . His Dream, the postcard is captioned, the photograph is a montage: a Tommy stands beside a bit of fence fringed with sweet william and marguerites. His rifle dangles from his shoulder, lethal as a butterfly net, his cap tips back at a bank-holiday-boater angle, and a stubby pipe is tucked in his hand. It’s his wispy moustache and whimsical expression, as much as the ridiculous props and a painted backdrop of the setting sun cloudily encircled, that suggest the war is being fought near Epsom, and which make the peculiar womb that floats above and behind his head all the stranger: is the baby-face in the womb His Dream? Or does his sweetheart, in point of fact, bear no resemblance to this winsome thing — her hair pinned up, her lips pricked red — but is instead a fat baggage of a fishwife, her bosom sagging, her tongue coarse in her broken mouth? Gilbert snuggled further into Audrey, the featheriness polishing the side of her breast is this my mind child? He smelt of old flannel and fresh tobacco — she could scarcely contemplate the sordid business of rising, washing out her privy parts, then dressing for the fourth time that day: she had made ready in the dark at Plumstead, and when she arrived at the Arsenal changed into her rough ticken overall. At the end of the shift she had stripped it off, stuffed it in its bag and hung it on her hook in the shifting house before getting her incendiary hair down from its ugly net.