‘I dare say you’re ready to move.’ Uncle Theodore looked up at the sky, following the gulls back to the estuary. ‘Your aunt will have something waiting for us.’

Conrad was watching the old men. As they passed, one of them raised his ruby-tipped gaff in greeting. ‘Who are they?’ he asked as his uncle acknowledged the salute.

‘Shell collectors — they come here in the season. These shells fetch a good price.’

They set off towards the town, Uncle Theodore moving at a slow pace with his stick. As he waited Conrad glanced back along the beach. For some reason the sight of the old men streaked with the blood of the slaughtered turtles was more disturbing than the viciousness of the seagulls. Then he remembered that he himself had probably set off the birds.

The sounds of a truck overlaid the fading cries of the gulls as they settled themselves on the sandbank. The old men had gone, and the incoming tide was beginning to wash the stained sand. They reached the crossing by the first of the chalets. Conrad steered his uncle to the traffic island in the centre of the road. As they waited for the truck to pass he said, ‘Uncle, did you notice the birds never touched the sand?’

The truck roared past them, its high pantechnicon blocking off the sky. Conrad took his uncle’s arm and moved forward. The old man plodded on, rooting his stick in the sandy tarmac. Then he flinched back, the pipe falling from his mouth as he shouted at the sports car swerving towards them out of the dust behind the truck. Conrad caught a glimpse of the driver’s white knuckles on the rim of the steering wheel, a frozen face behind the windshield as the car, running down its own brakes, began to slide sideways across the road. Conrad started to push the old man back but the car was on them, bursting across the traffic island in a roar of dust.

The hospital was almost empty. During the first days Conrad was glad to lie motionlessly in the deserted ward, watching the patterns of light reflected on to the ceiling from the flowers on the window-sill, listening to the few sounds from the orderly room beyond the swing doors. At intervals the nurse would come and look at him. Once, when she bent down to straighten the cradle over his legs, he noticed that she was not a young woman but even older than his aunt, despite her slim figure and the purple rinse in her hair. In fact, all the nurses and orderlies who tended him in the empty ward were elderly, and obviously regarded Conrad more as a child than a youth of seventeen, treating him to a mindless and amiable banter as they moved about the ward.

Later, when the pain from his amputated leg roused him from this placid second sleep, Nurse Sadie at last began to look at his face. She told him that his aunt had come to visit him each day after the accident, and that she would return the following afternoon.

‘…Theodore — Uncle Theodore…?’ Conrad tried to sit up but an invisible leg, as dead and heavy as a mastodon’s, anchored him to the bed. ‘Mr Foster… my uncle. Did the car…?’

‘Missed him by yards, dear. Or let’s say inches.’ Nurse Sadie touched his forehead with a hand like a cool bird. ‘Only a scratch on his wrist where the windshield cut it. My, the glass we took out of you, though, you looked as if you’d jumped through a greenhouse!’

Conrad moved his head away from her fingers. He searched the rows of empty beds in the ward. ‘Where is he? Here…?’

‘At home. Your aunt’s looking after him, he’ll be right as rain.’

Conrad lay back, waiting for Nurse Sadie to go away so that he could be alone with the pain in his vanished leg. Above him the surgical cradle loomed like a white mountain. Strangely, the news that Uncle Theodore had escaped almost unscathed from the accident left Conrad without any sense of relief. Since the age of five, when the deaths of his parents in an air disaster had left him an orphan, his relationship with his aunt and uncle had been, if anything, even closer than that he would have had with his mother and father, their affection and loyalties more conscious and constant. Yet he found himself thinking not of his uncle, nor of himself, but of the approaching car. With its sharp fins and trim it had swerved towards them like the gulls swooping on the turtles, moving with the same rush of violence. Lying in the bed with the cradle over him Conrad remembered the turtles labouring across the wet sand under their heavy carapaces, and the old men waiting for them among the dunes.

Outside, the fountains played among the gardens of the empty hospital, and the elderly nurses walked in pairs to and fro along the shaded pathways.

The next day, before his aunt’s visit, two doctors came to see Conrad. The older of the two, Dr Nathan, was a slim grey-haired man with hands as gentle as Nurse Sadie’s. Conrad had seen him before, and remembered him from the first confused hours of his admission to the hospital. A faint half-smile always hung about Dr Nathan’s mouth, like the ghost of some forgotten pleasantry.

The other physician, Dr Knight, was considerably younger, and by comparison seemed almost the same age as Conrad. His strong, squarejawed face looked down at Conrad with a kind of jocular hostility. He reached for Conrad’s wrist as if about to jerk the youth from his bed on to the floor.

‘So this is young Foster?’ He peered into Conrad’s eyes. ‘Well, Conrad, I won’t ask how you’re feeling.’

‘No…’ Conrad nodded uncertainly.

‘No, what?’ Dr Knight smiled at Nathan, who was hovering at the foot of the bed like an aged flamingo in a dried-up pool. ‘I thought Dr Nathan was looking after you very well.’ When Conrad murmured something, shy of inviting another retort, Dr Knight sped on: ‘Isn’t he? Still, I’m more interested in your future, Conrad. This is where I take over from Dr Nathan, so from now on you can blame me for everything that goes wrong.’

He pulled up a metal chair and straddled it, flicking out the tails of his white coat with a flourish. ‘Not that anything will. Well?’

Conrad listened to Dr Nathan’s feet tapping the polished floor. He cleared his throat. ‘Where is everyone else?’

‘You’ve noticed?’ Dr Knight glanced across at his colleague. ‘Still, you could hardly fail to.’ He stared through the window at the empty grounds of the hospital. ‘It’s true, there is hardly anyone here.’

‘A compliment to us, Conrad, don’t you think?’ Dr Nathan approached the bed again. The smile that hovered around his lips seemed to belong to another face.

‘Yeesss…’ Dr Knight drawled. ‘Of course, no one will have explained to you, Conrad, but this isn’t a hospital in quite the usual sense.’

‘What—?’ Conrad began to sit up, dragging at the cradle over his leg. ‘What do you mean?’

Dr Knight raised his hands. ‘Don’t misinterpret me, Conrad. Of course this is a hospital, an advanced surgical unit, in fact, but it’s also something more than a hospital, as I intend to explain.’

Conrad watched Dr Nathan. The older physician was gazing out of the window, apparently at the fountains, but for once his face was blank, the smile absent.

‘In what way?’ Conrad asked guardedly. ‘Is it something to do with me?’

Dr Knight spread his hands in an ambiguous gesture. ‘In a sense, yes. But we’ll talk about this tomorrow. We’ve taxed you enough for the present.’

He stood up, his eyes still examining Conrad, and placed his hands on the cradle. ‘We’ve a lot of work to do on this leg, Conrad. In the end, when we’ve finished, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what we can achieve here. In return, perhaps you can help us — we hope so, don’t we, Dr Nathan?’

Dr Nathan’s smile, like a returning wraith, hovered once again about his thin lips. ‘I’m sure Conrad will be only too keen.’

As they reached the door Conrad called them back.

‘What is it, Conrad?’ Dr Knight waited by the next bed.

‘The driver — the man in the car. What happened to him? Is he here?’