Quicksand (35 page)

 

 

With vast amusement at his own imagination, he wrote in a fair approximation
of the consultant's spiky hand: Certified to be of Iris Elaine Fidler --
Enoch Knox Alsop, M.D.

 

 

-- " 'E knock-knocks!"

 

 

For a second his vision blurred with tears.

 

 

-- All those things gone now, all wasted: scholarship and lies told to
Iris to make her marry me, hope of being a consultant psychiatrist with
status and prestige, a little bloody sketch for a human baby ground up
in Newton Swerd's garbage disposal unit, daddy daddy come and play with
me take me shopping for a lovely new yellow dress and white stockings
and a coat the colour of the green leaves on the tree . . .

 

 

But for once Paul Fidler in one of his myriad versions was going to
thumb his nose at the course of fate.

 

 

-- Stay, and: "This is Iris speaking, Paul. Maurice Dawkins told me about
your goings-on with the fiddler's bitch and I've just posted a letter to
your medical superintendent" -- lovely resounding mouthfilly title which
one day her husband should have enjoyed, sterile as a prepubescent boy
clinging to mama's skirts against the hostile complicated world -- "asking
him to report you to the General Medical Council." Finish.
Slut. Kaputt.
Moreover: "Dr Holinshed, this is Barbara Weddenhall. After seeing Dr Fidler
in Blickham cuddling a patient of his in the public street I asked the
police to keep watch on his home and they inform me the woman was seen
brazenly unclothed there in his presence." Following which: "Fidler,
you have been called here to answer charges concerning a patient of
yours at Chent Hospital, with whom you have carried on an adulterous
liaison seemingly without regard for your professional responsibilities
towards her."

 

 

Pathway after pathway into the future, each ending in a blind alley of
ruin, where the disaster he had eluded for so long finally closed the
trap on him and he was condemned as surely as Urchin was doomed to a
lifelong stay in Chent.

 

 

-- A weak personality has no business choosing psychiatry for a career
anyhow. I'm sick of reaching after stupid ambitions because at every turn
someone is ready to betray me and stop me achieving them: Holinshed hates
me, Alsop is jealous of me the younger rival, Ferdie distrusts what I said
about Urchin, Iris has left me, even Mirza whom I took for my best friend
is abandoning me and going away to another hospital. My bloody stinking
parents have pushed me this far, like the Yiddischer jokes "my boy's a
good boy he's going to be a doctor." . . . Enough. Stop now. Free. Break
loose. Out of Chent the prison. And some day our private secret version
of Llanraw.

 

 

 

 

To the woman in the passport office, blue-rinsed, her eyes cold behind
steel-framed glasses, he said, "I'm sure this is going to be difficult
for you, and I do apologise in advance, but you see I'm a doctor" --
important first point to get across, someone responsible like a doctor
or JP or minister of religion has to certify the likeness on a passport
photo and who would think of a doctor lying any more than a parson? --
"and my wife and I have the first chance we've had since we got married
to take a holiday abroad and what I'd like to do is have her included
on my passport so we can go off as soon as we possibly can."

 

 

"Your wife isn't with you," the woman said.

 

 

"I'm afraid not. You see, she's going to have a baby shortly -- that's
why we're extremely eager to get away at once so she can make the most of
the trip before she's too unwell to travel. But I have the right number
of pictures of her here, and I brought our marriage certificate too." He
laid documents on the desk in a tidy array.

 

 

"When do you want to go, then?" the woman said.

 

 

"As soon as humanly possible. Tomorrow, probably. Look, I do appreciate
that one ought to give plenty of notice for this sort of thing, but
hospitals are dreadfully understaffed and it's only the sheer coincidence
of somebody turning up who can take over my work for a couple of weeks
which has allowed us to think of taking a holiday at all this year. The
last four years, ever since we got married, I've been so desperately
busy we've had to make do with the odd weekend -- no chance at all to
go abroad, and she's terribly looking forward to it."

 

 

The woman looked at the photographs of Urchin. Her expression softened at
the childish worry she read on the image of the face. She said, "I'll have
to talk to my superior officer about this, Dr . . . ah . . . Dr Fidler,
but I suppose there is just a chance we might be able to help you out."

 

 

 

 

At five-thirty he marched into the entrance hall of the hospital, armed
with his deceitful proofs of identity. Natalie was just on the point of
going out.

 

 

"Paul! Where in the world have you been all day? Holinshed's been raising
the roof, Alsop was ringing up the whole afternoon to find out why you
weren't at the clinic with him, and -- "

 

 

He walked straight past her, leaving her gasping.

 

 

Ferdie Silva was the next person he encountered: "Holinshed is looking
for you, Paul -- where've you been?"

 

 

-- Keeping out of the way of you, you dirty-minded suspicious bastard.

 

 

But he judged it safer not to speak the thought aloud.

 

 

Afterwards, he never remembered clearly how he had carried it off --
by sheer effrontery, perhaps, the tone of authority in the voice with
which be instructed the nurses to do as he wanted overcoming their
lingering doubts due to the half-heard rumours that must have been
circulating through the hospital today. The car was a mile down the
road before anyone put two and two together, including Paul himself,
who dazedly glanced sideways and saw Urchin wriggling to draw her new
bright yellow dress down around her shoulders in place of the horrible
hospital bag in which she had come out.

 

 

He didn't believe it could be true; when for occasional instants it seemed
to him that it was, he felt a spasm of naked panic and relapsed into the
reassuring hope that it was an illusion, another of the vividly imagined
courses of action leading to disaster which had plagued him all his life.

 

 

But she sang at the top of her voice, an eldritch off-key melody belonging
to no school of music he had ever heard of, while the car streaked through
the gathering dusk, and that night he enjoyed her body in a shabby Dover
hotel which for the space of an hour or two seemed like an extension
into the everyday world of lovely, heartbreakingly lost Llanraw.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*40*

 

 

The town was called Louze. It sat at the end of a road to nowhere, some
twenty miles east of Marseilles: an overgrown and deformed fishing-port
with a native population of three or four thousand, doubled at the height
of the season and perhaps a little more than doubled on Saturday nights
when Marseillais came cut in their droves for a gambling session at the
sea-girt casino terminating the harbour mole.

 

 

One deformed quadrant of buildings faced the harbour, hotels at either
end, everything between a café, a restaurant or a souvenir shop. From
there, what were more alleys than streets staggered backwards into the
countryside behind, their curious random directions being dictated by
the lie of the ground. Crowning one of the two miniature promontories
that cut off further expansion, there was a caravan and camping site;
beyond that again, luxury villas were scattered wherever access could
be gained to a morsel of beach.

 

 

Today, abruptly, the mistral had risen to bring the first promise
of autumn to the Mediterranean coast; it was picking up the sand by
handfuls and chucking it at anyone who came within reach. The cars that
crept by in low gear had their tops up, their windows closed against the
wind. The sun-bathers had abandoned the shore to a few children playing
with a huge bright ball.

 

 

At a table outside a different café from the one where they had sat
the day before and the days before that, Paul and Urchin sipped slowly
at two glasses of
vin blanc cassis
. They had chosen -- or rather,
Paul had chosen -- the other café as the least frequented of the many
facing the harbour. When they had come out this morning, they had found
it shuttered, its season finished. The sight had hit Paul like a blow;
the strange new wind had seemed to speak to him, wheezing jeers that
each blended into a contemptuous laugh.

 

 

-- Tomorrow, this one closed up. The day after, all of them?

 

 

Their road had come to an end here not because he chose the spot --
be had never heard of Louze before signposts named it for him -- but
because it was in this town they had to start living off the car.

 

 

Somehow he had stretched his money through a summer pilgrimage.
Urchin's first pure delight at simply being free of Chent had quickly
been alloyed with dismay; discovering passports, frontier regulations,
hotel registration, all the invisible shackles the world of her adoption
used to bind its citizens, she was horrified, doubting her ability
ever to endure such interference with her right of choice. Ashamed
for his fellow creatures, Paul determined to show her another side of
the picture, and displayed for her the charm, the magnificence and the
luxury his own world had to offer: the cliff-hung gem of Rocamadour,
the medieval walls of Carcassonne, the fortified cathedral of Albi
fantastic in its rose-red sunset garb, the fashionable expensive coast
resorts where a single drink might wipe out their budget for the day,
the winding rocky corniches around the Estérel . . .

 

 

Eventually he would have to choose between crossing another frontier,
which so far he had been afraid of doing in case the deception he had
put over on the passport authorities had been reported, and taking steps
towards a permanent residence here -- equally dangerous. But not today.
Perhaps next week.

 

 

He had let his beard grow, and it suited him, giving a new strength to
the bones of his forehead and the deep-sunk pits of his eyes -- deeper
still now, for he had long lost the first contentment which had carried
him through the hottest summer days. Always, at the beginning, there had
been the force of passion to blot out the inevitability of the future;
they had made love more often than he had dreamed possible, nightly in
cheap
routiers
hotels, by day in the shade of trees or on the rocks of
river-banks, drawing on the free energy of the sunlight to restore them
when their spirits flagged.

 

 

Urchin exquisite in the skimpiest bikini she could find for him to buy,
the envy of men on the most fashionable beaches, wondered aloud with a
hint of sadness how anyone could be so foolish as not to swim naked --
so he found her a cove where there was no one to see and complain, but
she cut her foot on a sharp stone scrambling down to it. He had thought
of l'Ile du Levant, but the French Navy had claimed it for a base and
closed the camp-sites down. . . .

 

 

-- There is no perfection anywhere in this my world. In Llanraw there has
been no war for centuries; they would not know the purpose of a weapon.

 

 

There had been the four beatniks they met in a tiny resort as unrenowned
as Louze, pleased at having evaded the immigration authorities' ban
on visitors with no visible means of support by wearing presentable
clothing through the customs at Boulogne, then selling what they had
on and hitching south in torn jeans and sandals. They planned to sleep
that night on a beach outside the town boundary; Urchin, delighted at
meeting people not fettered to the law and by-law of this unfamiliar
world, had insisted on keeping company with them, and to please her he
had bought them food, wine and a bottle of rough brandy. So there had
been a night under warm stars when he had thought the girl who came
swimming fish-pale through the shallows to embrace him must be Urchin,
but was not, and the next time was again not, but the first's companion,
and in the morning Urchin was singing and glowing and he was afraid of
himself and the days to come.

 

 

"It was almost like Llanraw," she said to explain her satisfaction,
and, hearing her invoke the magic name, he had been unable to express
his own unease: this other world not being like Llanraw at all.

 

 

-- I brought her away from Chent at the cost of a life's ambition and
hard work because she is the only free person, free in the mind where
it counts, whom I have ever met. But in my world who is freest? The
rich man who can buy what he wants, up to and including immunity from
the law, as witness Newton Swerd and my child (son? daughter?) gone
down an impersonal drain. Perhaps the day will come when the free rich
irresponsible bastard with the Ferrari and the limitless horizons . . .

 

 

That was one of the thoughts the mistral brought chill from the sea, which
yesterday had smiled, now glowered at him grey with frills of white froth.

 

 

Another: -- In all these months, not once blood on the spear. I asked;
she evaded; I listed the technical words, lectured, gave a course in
female biology, and she evaded again. The virgin's breasts, so small my
hand engulfs them, the hips of a boy not a girl despite the narrowness of
the waist which makes them seem feminine in proportion, imply a freedom
Iris would envy her. I think . . .