The Mind of Mr Soames (5 page)

‘You are correct, of course,’ Takaito conceded with oriental deference. ‘One must indeed wait and see, but not wait too long to see too much. One trains a baby from the start, before one has time to ascertain whether it is a potential genius or an unfortunate moron. That is practical, is it not?’

‘Yes,’ Conway agreed reluctantly. ‘It is certainly practical.’ Takaito finished his drink, glanced briefly at his watch, and held out his glass. ‘Time for one more before I depart for the airport,’ he announced solemnly. ‘If you would be so kind, Dr Conway...’

‘Of course,’ Conway said, taking the empty glass and refilling it with whisky at the long cloth-covered table which served as a cocktail bar. Takaito received the replenished glass with formal gratitude, bowing slightly and impassively.

‘When I return, Dr Conway,’ he said, ‘we must discuss Mr Soames further. I think we may yet reach agreement on certain issues.’

‘Dr Mortimer is really your man,’ Conway pointed out. ‘As Head of Psychiatry he will be responsible for therapeutic policy.’

‘Yes, but you and your immediate colleagues will be responsible for
applying
that policy to Mr Soames, and that is a far more important thing.’

‘You mean, in effect, that Mr Soames will be my baby.’ Takaito smiled, and swallowed half of his drink. ‘Precisely so. Your
baby
, Dr Conway.’

He scanned the room slowly through his concave glasses. ‘Somewhere here,’ he said, ‘is the Under-Secretary of State for the Ministry of Health who is to accompany me to London Airport. If you’ll excuse me...’

‘Of course,’ Conway said. He shook hands with Dr Takaito, and watched him for a few seconds as he plunged into the crowded assembly.

Strange character, he thought. Fundamentally reasonable and logical, but probably thinking all the time in terms of dogs and Pavlovian paradoxical syndromes. But he may be right, just the same. He may well be right.

He finished his beer and went in search of another glass.

❖

Later in the evening, around eleven o’clock, after Dr Takaito and the Under-Secretary had departed, he saw Andy McCabe and Ann Henderson enter the room. The party was thinning out, and there were, perhaps, some thirty to forty people still present holding half-empty glasses and talking together in small groups. Dr Mortimer had left, and so had Dr Breuer, and he himself was on the point of retiring.

He hesitated, half determined to leave anyway, but realising that in order to do so he would have to pass close to the newcomers. He made a snap decision and poured himself another drink, selecting a small brandy on the grounds that it would serve as a nightcap. Standing by the bar, alone in the crowd, he watched Ann and McCabe talking together for a few moments, and then, as if in tacit agreement, they separated and mixed with the assembly.

Ann, he observed, gravitated immediately towards Pauline Stanton, who herself arrived only half an hour earlier. Surrounded now by three very serious elderly men, she was determinedly putting herself on the outside of a large glass of what looked like gin and tonic. The group of four became a group of five.

McCabe was engaged in a jovial tour, bouncing from acquaintance to acquaintance like a free electron in search of a positive atom. His itinerary brought him nearer and nearer to Conway, until inevitably they met. McCabe’s face was flushed and his eyes were tired, but there was a brittle alertness in his movements which suggested drugs, Conway thought. He remembered that McCabe was due on duty at midnight, and after Morry’s party that was likely to be tough going.

‘You’re back early,’ Conway said.

McCabe attempted a wry grin. ‘The call of duty, I’m sorry to say.’

‘A telephone call would have got you a stand-in for a few hours. You know that, Andy. Even I...’

‘Even you? Don’t be so bloody patronising, Dave.’

Conway sipped his brandy thoughtfully. ‘You sound as if you didn’t exactly have a good time.’

McCabe’s apparent irritation increased. ‘That’s between me and Ann.’

‘You mean, the fascinating bitch in the EEG room?’

‘None other-and if you’re thinking of offering a consultant service, forget it. You can get me a drink instead, before the bar dries up.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Something long and cool.’

Conway poured a lager, which McCabe downed rapidly and gratefully.

‘In fact,’ McCabe conceded, ‘we didn’t have a particularly good time. I discovered that Ann doesn’t much like musicals, anyway, and neither do I. It wasn’t even a good musical, as musicals go. We tried for dinner afterwards, found a bum place in Soho with slow service, had to leave in a hurry to get back in time, and had a bit of a row about Morry. So it wasn’t a terrific success.’

‘What you mean is, Andy, that you made a pass and got slapped down.’

‘You talking from experience?’

‘Frankly, no. But I know enough about Ann and you to make a reasonable guess.’

‘Well, you’re wrong,’ McCabe stated incisively. ‘Ann and I are friends, and it doesn’t matter whether we have a good time or not, we stay friends. I’m not a poor girl’s Morry, and I’m not a man who’s been deserted by his wife. Funny thing, how women are attracted to the man with matrimonial problems. It must be some kind of masochistic streak.’

Conway acknowledged the point with a brief nod of his head. ‘Truculent, Andy,’ he murmured, ‘very truculent indeed. I didn’t think you had it in you at this time of night.’

‘I’ll tell you this,’ McCabe went on, stubbornly pursuing his point, ‘I’m free, single, unattached, same as Ann. Sometimes I make a pass at a girl in earnest, sometimes because it’s good for her morale. See what I mean?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Well, let me put it this way. I’m not in love with Ann, but I’m more eligible than you are, and I know a bit more about her background than you do, and believe me, she deserves a break.’

‘Noble of you, Andy,’ Conway said silkily. ‘Most of us need a break at some time or other. If it comes to the point, Ann and I are friends, too, on a slightly different level. So what are you trying to prove?’

‘Only this,’ McCabe said soberly, ‘that I wouldn’t like to see her get hurt, Dave. I really wouldn’t.’

‘She’s a big girl,’ Conway pointed out, ‘and we’re big boys. We’re all of us responsible for our own actions and behaviour. Suppose we leave it at that.’

‘All right,’ McCabe said slowly. ‘Let’s change the subject. How was the Takaito opera?’

‘Impressive. I never saw such delicate suture work in all my life. You’d think he had a permanent microscope screwed into his eye.’

‘What are the prospects—Soameswise, I mean?’

Conway shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Takaito located two neural blocks, so he said. He cut away some meningeal tissue, did a double graft, then sealed up the hole in Soames’s head. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hit the jackpot.’

‘Jackpot could be the understatement of the year,’ McCabe remarked. ‘I’ve got a feeling that Soames in the cold tank is going to be a great deal less trouble than Soames in the psychoneural ward.’

‘The real trouble will start if and when he gets to psychiatric,’ Conway predicted. ‘Whichever way it goes, I’d rather be me than Soames.’

‘Yes,’ McCabe said vaguely, glancing at his wristwatch. ‘Well, I’ve got to make a move. Sorry to have bitched at you, Conway.’

‘Dogged, I think.’

‘Well, dogged, then, if you’re so fastidious about sex. But don’t forget, the onlooker sees most of the game.’

‘I’ll remember.’

McCabe finished his lager and went off in the direction of the door, leaving Conway in a pensive and slightly dejected mood. He pondered the other man’s words for a while, then wandered round the room in search of Ann. He found her eventually in the centre of a new group of admiring males-enough members of the medical profession to staff a small clinic, almost. He caught her eye, and a few moments later she made a tactful and strategic withdrawal.

‘Hello Dave,’ she said. ‘What’s new?’

‘Nothing at all. You want to stay here?’

‘Candidly, no. Doctors depress me. They seem to know so much about anatomy.’

‘They frequently depress themselves for the same reason. Let’s go, anyway.’

They left the recreation room and walked slowly towards the residential quarters in the west wing.

‘I saw you having an intense heart-to-heart with Andy,’ Ann said.

‘Tête-à-tête would be more accurate. There wasn’t much heart involved.’

For a while she was lost in a dreamy silence. Presently she said: ‘I like Andy well enough. Superficially he’s what you might call the bachelor gay type, but deep down he’s quite a different person-sort of fatherly.’

‘I can just see Andy as a father image,’ Conway murmured sardonically.

‘He’s a serious individual, really, Dave. The kind of person one could rely on in an emergency.’

‘Could be. I think it might depend on the emergency.’

‘You’re being cynical,’ she accused.

‘If so, the cynicism is imposed from without, not from within,’ he explained.

‘I understand,’ she said quietly.

They reached the corridor leading to her room, and paused for a minute.

‘Did you meet Dr Takaito?’ she enquired changing the subject.

He nodded reflectively. ‘A remarkable character. I can’t quite make up my mind whether he’s an odd crank or a self-effacing genius.’

‘Perhaps a bit of both.’

‘Maybe. Certainly he has some off-beat ideas about Mr Soames which cut across conventional psychotherapeutic methods. I don’t think either Dr Breuer or Dr Mortimer would approve, somehow. They don’t subscribe to the Pavlovian method-at least, not so far as human beings are concerned.’

‘Do you think, perhaps, that Takaito doesn’t really regard Mr Soames as a human being at all?’

‘Could be. At this stage I don’t really know enough about the man, or, for that matter, about Mr Soames.’

Abruptly she put her hands on his shoulders and said: ‘Dave, if you never knew before, I just want you to know now that I love you very much.’

He smiled ruefully. ‘We’ve been through this before, Ann. I love you, too, but there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it-for months, perhaps years...’

‘But so long as we both understand...’

‘I think we both understand only too well.’

They kissed gently, formally, in the subdued light of the grey corridor.

‘Goodnight,’ she whispered.

‘Goodnight,’ he echoed.

He watched her as she walked slowly along the corridor towards the door of her room.

❖

In the small annexe adjacent to the isolation ward in the psychoneural division the nurse was making her routine quarter-hourly check of pulse, breathing rate and temperature. The rhythm of the lungs was faster than usual, and the temperature was a little high, around one hundred, but Mr Soames seemed well enough in himself. He lay inert and passive on the narrow bed, pallid under the stark light of the pendant fluorescent lamp.

She looked him over in a perfunctory, professional manner. The swathed bandages round his head gave him a partially mummified appearance. His eyes were closed and his lips, dry and still tinged with blue from cyanosis, were slightly parted.

She fumbled in the pocket of her uniform for the cheap ball pen which she always carried with her and recorded the figures on the chart. The time was fifteen minutes past two—three and three-quarter hours to go before she was relieved from duty by the day nurse.

Funny business, she thought, as she hung the chart on the wall hook. Here’s a grown man who might just as well be dead. If it came to the point and he were to die, what would be the net difference? He would simply exchange one kind of blankness for another, and somehow it wouldn’t matter in the least. It was like never having been alive at all.

Before switching off the light she took a final glance at him. In fact he
was
alive, and doing better than might have been expected after that Japanese doctor’s long performance with scalpel and probe, and so long as he stayed that way her own personal responsibility was discharged. He would certainly survive for another fifteen minutes until the next check-up was due.

Then, as she was looking at his calm, impassive face, something terrifying happened. The eyes opened. Blank eyes suddenly staring straight into hers.

She screamed.

A policy
meeting was in progress in the small conference room adjacent to Dr Breuer’s office. Eight men sat around a long polished table in the centre of the cream and white room, seven of them listening intently to the formal tones of Breuer, who, at the head of the table, was outlining certain aspects of the situation. Looking around, Conway recognised Dr Mortimer and two of the doctors from the psychiatric division. Bennett was sitting next to Breuer, scribbling notes in pencil on a small pad. The other two men were visitors connected with the regional medical executive.

‘We are confronted with a situation which is unique and presents a number of difficulties,’ Breuer was saying in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘It is now three days since John Soames became conscious for the first time in his life after Dr Takaito’s remarkable operation. Naturally enough, at present he is in a condition of post-operation trauma—his reactions to sensory stimuli are largely of a reflex nature, and this will probably persist for some time, perhaps for a week, or even two weeks. But in due course the traumatic inhibition will begin to disperse and Mr Soames will begin to take an active interest in his environment. The moment that happens, the education of Mr Soames begins, if it has not begun in a sense already, and it is for us, acting in conjunction with the proper authorities, to determine what form that education must take. To assist us in planning we are fortunate in having with us today Mr Geoffrey Storey, representing the Ministry, and Mr Anthony Gillings from the Regional Board, acting on behalf of the Education Authority.’

The two men nodded to the assembly. Both looked curiously alike, Conway thought, with thin dehydrated faces surmounted by wispy grey hair, but Gillings wore rimless glasses which seemed to sharpen his features still more.