I did it when I was in physiotherapy, and he had come along to see how the exercises to strengthen the left side of my body were coming along. He was particularly interested in watching movements that called for integration between right and left. I swung Indian clubs for a while, then passed a rubber ball rapidly from hand to hand, behind my back. Sir Westcott looked quite pleased — until I started to tell him about what had happened at the Zoo, and about my experience in Soho .
When I got to the end of it (even I thought it came out sounding very odd) he walked out of the room without speaking. I went on with the exercises, and in a quarter of an hour he was back.
“Pack that in for a minute,” he said. “Come and sit your backside on the bench here.”
I followed him to the side of the gymnasium. It was filled with the products of Sir Westcott’s unique ideas for rapid physical recovery from nervous system injuries. The walls and floor were an obstacle course of mats, rubber tires, ropes, trestles, hoops, and bars, across and through which we unfortunate patients were supposed to hop, crawl, roll, swing, and stagger, under his unflinching eye.
He looked at me moodily as we sat down, rubbing at his fat jowls. It was late afternoon, and the gymnasium was deserted except for the two of us.
“I had three calls made down to Soho .” He sniffed. “There was no report of a fight there on Tuesday night — nobody saw or heard a scuffle near Charlotte Street — no reports from any hospital of two men coming in with hand and eye injuries like the ones you described. All right? I’ll take your word for it you had jugged hare at Bertorellis, we didn’t check that. But we did call the American Embassy. There’s no report of anybody called Valnora Warren in the U.S. State Department. No visitor with that name here on any sort of U.S. Government business, an’ nothing on the Passport List.”
“But suppose she was with one of the intelligence services?” My suspicions had blossomed further.
“Suppose she wasn’t there at all?”
“She was.”
“You think she was. I’ll admit that all right, but it’s not the same thing.”
He lifted one fat paw, a hand with manual skills that put mine to shame. “Hold on, before you start getting excited again. We’ve got to face something unpleasant, Lionel, an’ it’s something I’ve been putting off, and hoping would never come up.”
“She was there, and so were the men.” Despite his good advice, I could feel my pulse pumping harder. “I’m not inventing any of this.”
“Listen for a minute, then think again. Let’s have a go with Occam’s razor. You’ve had one hell of an operation, an’ there’s things going on inside your head that we can’t even guess at. The CAT scans look pretty good, but they don’t tell us anything about your thinking. Einstein has a brain that looks no different from your Aunt Matilda’s when it comes to X-rays and physiological tests.”
“I know all that. But don’t forget I’m looking at this from the inside — I know what I’m thinking.”
“You don’t — any more than the rest of us know what we’re thinking.” He snorted. “You’re underestimating the human brain, my lad. The only thing we know for certain is that you’ve got Madrill’s technique to stimulate nerve cell regeneration going on inside your head. There’s an electrical storm brewing when all those little cross-connections cuddle up to each other. It’s more than we can comprehend. You’re going to experience perceptual anomalies, sure as I’m sitting here.”
I stood up. “You’ve told me all that. I’m going to have synesthesia—”
“That’s an easy one.” He picked up an Indian club and sighted along it. “There’s things a lot harder to pick up. It’s easy to know there’s something off when you play Mozart and get rows of green beetles crawling up your nose. But what happens when you ‘see’ people” — his voice put quotes around the verb — “that Leo knew? Imagining a woman that he was fond of, or people he didn’t like — that’d be normal enough. But it’s hard to tell a data-sorting function like that from the real thing. That’s why I want you to take things easy. We don’t want to confuse internal and external realities.”
“Look, I saw a van. A grey van, with painted windows and rear doors with a black line along them. That’s not part of Leo’s past. I bet somebody saw it at the Zoo — it had to get into and out of the car park.”
“Fine. Feel free to go and look for it, if you want to.” He clumped the Indian club back hard on the floor. “If you can come back here with witnesses, and a license plate for that van, I’ll eat my Sunday boots with Branston Pickle. Haven’t you noticed that everything that happened to you was with no witnesses? An’ a broken thumb hurts like hell, but your man didn’t let out a peep. Yer see, you’ve no idea how cunning the human brain can be at protecting its constructs. If you talk to a man who thinks the earth is flat, or that he’s Napoleon or Hitler, he’ll give you a hundred good reasons why he has to be right.”
He shook his head sadly and stood up. “I was hoping we could move you to outpatient status, but I think we should wait a bit longer. Let me know if anything else happens. I’ve got to go an’ scrub.”
He was a hard man to argue with, yet I still felt like Galileo as he stood down from the witness box after facing the questioning. Subdued, but unpersuaded.
“… but she was there.”
Proving it might be another matter.
- 5 -
There had to be one more go-around with Sir Westcott before I could get out of Queen’s Hospital Annex. The day before my release I hung about the top floor all morning with Tess Thomson, waiting until there was a gap in his schedule. It took a long time and by eleven-thirty I was feeling more and more impatient.
Tess did her best to calm me down. “Remember that blood pressure. Keep it low, or he’ll want you to stay another month.”
“I’ll go mad first.” Apart from passes at Tess, my only satisfaction came from the daily sessions on the old piano down in the basement. I had tuned it myself and ground my way through hour after hour of left-hand exercises. The dexterity was coming back — but it was slow. And I had the terrible feeling that my playing had been drained of all its emotional content.
Tess was fidgeting by the door, trying to see through the frosted glass that led to Sir Westcott Shaw’s reception area.
“You’d get used to being here after a while,” she said. “Look at me, I’ve been in the place for four years. And I don’t get to use the fancy equipment, it’s the same old round of emptying bedpans.”
I went over to stand next to her, and put my hand on her arm. “Tess, be serious for a minute. You’ve done a fantastic job looking after me, bedpans and all. How about dinner tonight? I owe you at least that, as a farewell thank-you for everything. Look.” I held up my left hand and wiggled it. “See, it moves. If you hadn’t made me exercise, I’d be all lopsided.”
She turned around, smiling. I was always delighted when I could make her lose those frown lines on her forehead.
“Never give up, do you? What do you think my boyfriend would say?”
“Why tell him?” I had decided a month earlier that he didn’t exist — he was a useful invention to keep the patients in their places.
“I don’t keep secrets from him. Women are different from men; we don’t like to live a double life.”
“You know all my secrets — you’ve seen bits of me that I didn’t know I had. What do you say? Dinner and dalliance?”
She stuck her tongue out at me. “I’ll let you know. Later. All right?”
“When?”
“By three o’clock . I’ve got work to do on some of the records.”
I nodded. Before I could talk restaurants the door to the reception area opened. Sir Westcott’s secretary, a plump, middle-aged woman who was rumored to also be his mistress, appeared. As she gestured me in I heard a bellow from the inner office.