Stephanie (10 page)

‘And what have you seen?'

‘A number of sad people. As you predicted. Some of them – some of them …'

‘It probably isn't very different from visiting a hospice for people with cancer.'

‘Except that this is preventable.'

‘Yes. Very true.'

She said: ‘Those last rooms were – not nice. That woman screaming. She might have been being tortured.'

‘So she was in a way. Partly of her own choice … Of course, some of it was put on for our benefit.'

‘Those children were a more cheerful sight – though it's horrifying that they should be there at all. Out of range of the patients Dr Bridge was pretty downbeat.'

‘In a job like his you have to face the facts.'

‘That so many regress? He said a ten per cent cure rate was optimistic.'

‘Over the long term probably, yes. But short term the rate is over fifty per cent.'

Stephanie bit her lip. ‘I suppose short term is important.'

‘I think so. Dr Cranford – the other chief, who wasn't there today – puts it in perspective. Before the days of the wonder drugs sanatoria treating consumptives had a low rate of permanent success. But a good many patients benefited and were able to go out and live useful lives for a limited but extended time.'

‘I can see that point of view. The difference is that these people we've just seen – their illness has been self-inflicted.'

Peter Brune smiled at her. ‘It's all due to the old principle of free will. You have to realise that in a susceptible person morphine and its variants – of which heroin is the most powerful – produces one of the most subtle and enjoyable sensations known to man. It doesn't help people to be cleverer or more efficient, or to have greater stamina – even in the short run – but I understand it's a tremendously pleasant sensation of relaxation and warmth and comfort – and often it's accompanied by a tingling sensation in the personal regions which isn't altogether unlike a sexual orgasm. People choose to indulge in this sensation in the first place as an act of free will. Then eventually – like someone eating fatty food all his life – they have to take the consequences.' He made a disclaiming gesture. ‘But sometimes it doesn't go all the way and the consequences aren't so dire.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Well, for quite a few people a fixed dosage of, say, heroin or cocaine becomes a necessity of their daily life. But they never need to increase it. Of course they get withdrawal symptoms if they don't have it, but with it they can live pretty normal lives, work, marry, act like responsible citizens.'

‘I didn't know that.' She hesitated. Again the impulse to confide. Her father had been too close to her.

She said: ‘What's your attitude towards people who distribute the hard drugs?'

‘D'you mean the pushers?'

‘No, the bigger men. Those who supply the pushers.'

He looked at her again, blew out a breath. ‘I grew up to be tolerant of the way men make their money. I think of the “ judge not, that ye be not judged” business. But all the same …'

‘All the same?'

‘Yes, all the same. There are degrees of frightfulness, aren't there.'

The big car hummed through a still almost bare countryside. Stephanie was often surprised at the lateness of the trees, how they clung to their leaves so far into autumn and were loth to bud again until spring was half-over.

Peter Brune laughed. ‘Of course if my pet theory were followed it would do away with the drug barons.'

‘What is that?'

‘It's not an original idea, of course. Just take the ban off drugs. Allow them to be on sale in shops, like candy or fish fingers.'

She looked at him. ‘
All
drugs?'

‘Not all at once. Begin with marijuana and the amphetamines. If that achieves its object, then move on to what is called the hard stuff later.'

She stared at the chauffeur's head, wondered if he could hear. ‘ I know the argument. But I'm … surprised that …'

‘It should come from me? Well, look at it this way. A man on, say, heroin, which is the most addictive and the most expensive, he needs about a hundred pounds a day to buy his requirements from pushers. If he could buy it legitimately, even with a heavy government tax, it probably wouldn't amount to thirty-five pounds a week, so he wouldn't need to commit a crime to get that sort of money. The police today calculate that eighty per cent of crime is drug-related. Therefore if you allow the free sale of drugs, what will happen? You create – or greatly enlarge – a drug culture. You destroy – or greatly reduce – a crime culture. And you save vast amounts of money.'

‘Yes, but –'

He smiled at her again. ‘Dear Henry Gaveston, I know, does not agree with me at all. Probably your father would not. But I have come to take a rather jaundiced view of human nature, my dear. If people want something they will generally get it. If it is such a need as a drug need they will go to any lengths to get it. Also in considering these things there is the awful lure of the forbidden. What Poe calls “ The Imp of the Perverse”. Many people wouldn't bother to try drugs – to persist with drugs, for you do have rather to persist at the beginning – if there wasn't this challenge to them. Yes, if you legalised drugs there would be a huge increase of junkies lying in the street. But old people would be able to go out at night without fear of being mugged.'

Almost home. From this altitude you could see many of the gleaming spires.

She said: ‘And d'you think if that happened your clinic would be more or less full as a result?'

‘It isn't my clinic, by the way … Well, it's anybody's guess, but I'd expect the need of ten times as many clinics – and ten times less work for jails. Addicts are irresponsible but they're seldom violent. Analgesic drugs tend to make people sleepily contented, not aggressive as an alcoholic would be.'

‘Not even when suffering withdrawal symptoms?'

‘They'll feel extremely unwell, I agree – until they get the next fix. But it varies enormously from person to person.'

After a moment she said: ‘ It would be a funny world. May I ask how you came to take an interest in drugs in the first place?'

His big mouth moved into the half-smile it was always promising. ‘Guilt, I suppose.'

‘Guilt?'

‘Of a sort. I suppose it's behind a lot of my so-called philanthropic ventures. My father began life humbly enough. He inherited a firm from
his
father making machine tools; but between the wars he turned to small arms; he patented one of the first automatic weapons. Ever heard of the Brune Repeater? No, it has long since gone. But he expanded rapidly and made a fortune selling his weapons abroad. When the Second World War came along he simply quadrupled his fortune by being patriotic!'

‘But does that mean –'

‘It doesn't mean I have any special emotional tie-in with drugs. Any more than I have with paraplegics at the Gladstone Centre or cancer patients at the Royal Marsden – though the last may have some relevance … But I'm convinced from the firm's records that, in the thirties particularly, my father was fairly unscrupulous whom he sold arms to; so I like to make up a bit of leeway on his behalf in the Heavenly Register. Actually I met Lord Worsley when he was still alive, and he interested me in the project. But as you know, it's only one of my interests …'

‘Of course. Which include large gifts to the university and to St Martin's.'

‘Oh, those. But those are special. In memory of 1951–53. When I was up, I mean. I still think of them as among the best years of my life, if you'll forgive the cliché.'

They were in Oxford now. In a few minutes they would be turning into Broomfield Road.

‘Mind you,' he said, ‘I don't talk as freely as this to everyone.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Do you often provoke confidences?'

She laughed. ‘I don't know.' And then: ‘ Do you know Errol well?'

‘Is it the next on the right, or the one after?'

‘No, three more.'

‘Three more, Parsons,' Brune said in a louder voice. ‘Then it's to the right.'

‘Very good, sir.'

He leaned back. ‘Do I know Errol well? No, not well. But I've known him – oh, ten or fifteen years. I met him first in Corfu. I have a house there, you know.'

‘No, I didn't know.'

‘You must come and spend a holiday with us. Have you been to the island?'

‘No.'

‘Most of it is ruined, but it has great natural beauty, and there are a few secluded spots. My house is about three miles from the sea.'

‘Thank you. I'd love to come sometime.'

Peter Brune's eyes narrowed as if coming into the sun. ‘I knew Errol's first wife, Elena. They ran a hotel on a popular beach. He's very good company … But who am I to tell you that?'

Stephanie laughed again. ‘Well, yes, I agree.'

‘I used to go to the island twice a year, in May and September, so I saw quite a lot of them. Then he left Elena – who doesn't accept divorce, so according to her he is still her husband. I believe he and Suzanne went through some sort of a ceremony in England. Have you met Polly?'

‘His daughter? No.'

‘Quite the Greek beauty. Or will be in a few years. But why d'you ask?'

‘I wondered. He seems very well off now.'

‘He's in the leisure business, and travel, I think – and that sort of thing has rocketed in the last few years.'

They had turned into Broomfield Road, and the car stopped at number 17.

‘I'm really very grateful,' Stephanie said. ‘Will you come in and have a drink before you go on?'

Peter glanced at his watch. ‘Well, I think probably …'

‘There are one or two questions I still want to ask you.'

He looked quizzically at her. ‘Put like that, how could I refuse?'

After Peter Brune had gone, Stephanie took a second much-needed drink and got out her books: Schools loomed like a thunderstorm rumbling in the middle distance. She had not so far actually skipped a tutorial but she had recently admitted to Bruce Masters that she had simply not been working. They both knew this wouldn't do if she were to make a decent showing at the end of May. How be concerned with an academic life when real life clutched at you, red in tooth and claw?

Yet she felt in a way relieved for having partly shared her problem with somebody else. Was Peter Brune's sardonic solution either credible or remotely acceptable? Surely not in a civilised country. Yet the converse, the situation as it was developing now, was scarcely less acceptable. And the drug importers were making millions out of the situation. No wonder Errol was rich! What did one do about it? What
could
one do about it? It was perfectly plain that she had at least to break with him. His money was evil money. The flowers he had sent her, the theatres he had taken her to, the luxurious first-class trip to India, all bought with evil money.

She pulled across an old exercise book and saw a quotation from Seneca she had scribbled down last year:
Actio recta non erit, nisi recta fuerit voluntas
…
An action will not be right unless the will be right; for from there is the action derived. Again, the will will not be right unless the disposition of the mind be right; for from thence comes the will.
Would her action, if she took action, be right, and for those reasons? She threw the book across the desk and picked up Cervantes. She read for a while, and then the bell rang.

She swore under her breath and went to the door, half fearing it might be Anne Vincent. And it was.

‘Darling, I'm not stopping,' Anne said. ‘I've brought you some fresh strawberries. They were in the market, flown in from somewhere, and I couldn't resist them.'

‘Oh thanks. Thanks a lot.'

‘And a carton of cream. Regale yourself while you wage war on the books.'

Saying all the time that she wouldn't come in, she came in, and saying anyway she mustn't stop, she perched on a corner of the desk and chattered away.

‘What's wrong with your leg?' Stephanie asked.

‘What? Oh that. Didn't I tell you?' Anne stared at the bandage above her knee. She affected the prevailing fashion for sweeping skirts, so this part of her anatomy was seldom seen. ‘I fell off my bike in the High. Some bloody fool with a car squeezed me into too small a space, and I was so concerned to tell him what I thought of him that I didn't look where I was going. I thought it would need stitches but Dr Hillsborough said it would be okay.'

‘Bad luck.' Stephanie put the water on for coffee; there was no way now of avoiding a session, and if it was brief it did not so much matter. ‘That the old man or Jeremy Hillsborough?'

‘Jeremy. He's quite dishy now, isn't he, now he's wearing contact lenses.'

‘Is that what it is? I didn't know.' In fact Stephanie, who had been three times to the Hillsborough surgery for minor ailments, didn't really find Jeremy Hillsborough dishy at all. She supposed there was always a special appeal to a susceptible girl like Anne in a moderately good-looking unmarried doctor of thirty-odd. To Stephanie there was an air of extra confidentiality about the lanky Jeremy that jarred. If you went to him with a sore throat you felt he expected you to confess you had missed two periods and what would he advise?

‘Do you know Jeremy's friend, Dr Aran Jiva?' Anne asked.

‘Oh yes. Reasonably well. Chiefly he's a friend of Tony Maidment's. Why?'

‘Nothing really. He's no looker, is he. People laugh at him with that pince-nez. Is he a Paki?'

‘No, Indian. At least – I don't know whether he's a Muslim or a Hindu. I'm surprised you haven't met him before.'

‘Oh, I've seen him about often enough, but I went to one of Anthony Barr's breakfasts this week, and he was there. Holds himself aloof.'