Somewhere East of Life

One sign of his lack of the tyrannical gene was that he could not beat Dr Kepepwe at tennis.

After they had played in the echoing court, they drank lemonade together in a deserted canteen. She said she must get along home, but seemed in no hurry to go. On the contrary, she tried to discover how much he knew of recent history, exclaiming with a mixture of delight and dismay when he did not know who was Britain’s Prime Minister, or what had happened recently to the royal family.

Her view of England was that it had now become like Ireland, a country with so much unemployment and such a lack of manufacturing base that many people were forced to go abroad for a living. Blacks and Asiatics, in consequence, claimed a greater role in running the country; it was they, by and large, who were fighting a Muslim insurrection in the Midlands. Dr Kepepwe portrayed the Midlands as an alien land; she was, she explained, a Southerner.

When she asked Burnell what he could remember, he told her of a boyhood trekking holiday in Iceland on which his father had taken him and his brother. It remained as a landmark in misery and humiliation.

She asked him how he enjoyed working in Germany. She had a fear of Germany. Did he not think continually of Hitler’s Final Solution and the terrible crime of murdering six million Jews, gipsies, blacks, and other harmless people?

‘I used to think about it, I suppose,’ Burnell told her. ‘But your question is part of a wider question. Watch the TV news. Terrible slaughter is taking place today in the Crimea, the Caucasus, Bosnia, and elsewhere. The wider question is why humanity is so appallingly cruel – man against man, man against woman, individually and en masse. If there were a God, he would have thrown up his hands in despair by now.’

‘No, no,’ said Dr Kepepwe, shaking her head and much of her body. ‘God never gives up.’

As she was leaving, the doctor said, ‘I’m alone at present while my husband David is away. How I miss him.’ She represented him as the best husband a woman could have, saying proudly that he had won the Isle of Wight Sea-Fishing Trophy two years in succession. He was a brain surgeon and everyone respected him.

David Kepepwe had volunteered to serve under General Stalinbrass in Russia, where surgeons and doctors were badly needed; he was in the Crimea at present. She hoped he was still alive.

‘Well, maybe I’ve talked too much to my prize patient. Tell me honestly how you feel in yourself.’

Without thinking, he said, ‘An ocean, Doctor. A wide ocean with only a small island here and there. No continents. The continents have sunk into the depths …’

That quizzical regard again. ‘FOAM, that’s what they call it. “Free Of All Memory”. You were lucky the villains didn’t steal everything. And there are advantages. I have bad things I’d like to forget. Think of the foam on that private ocean of yours. Remember, “oceanic” has good connotations, so don’t worry. I’ll see you in the morning.’

In her office, Dr Kepepwe kept a well-behaved dog which waited patiently for her throughout her spells of duty. It was at least in part a long-haired terrier. Burnell learnt later its name was Barker. He saw the doctor collect Barker as she picked up her things to go home. The dog needed no lead. It was a dignified little animal, and gave Burnell a hard sidelong look to indicate that any patting would be regarded as condescending: also somewhat animalist.

As Dr Kepepwe left with a wave of the hand, Barker followed at unhurried pace, walking stiffly, looking terribly English. Burnell could imagine it with a copy of The Times tucked under one arm. It and its mistress vanished into the dark to her car and a little unknown nook somewhere.

‘Whatever crimes and errors I committed over the past ten years, they’ve been wiped cleaner than if I’d been in a confessional. The Catholics should rig up EMV in all their confessionals. The forgiveness of sins could then be followed by the forgetfulness of sins … Which might make human life easier …’

Once the doctor and her dog had left, loneliness overcame him. He knew no one, not even himself.

Switching on his TV set, he found the movie channel was about to show a fantasy film of ancient vintage. Obispo Artists presented Brute of Kerinth, which he began indolently to watch. The film had immediate appeal in his anomic condition since the action was set on a planet and its moon far from Earth. The special effects pleased him, but the happenings, centring on a lost heir and a throne, were those of an historic costume drama. He lost interest, switched off, and gazed at the ceiling instead.

When a half-hour had dragged by, he got himself on the move.

Walking about the echoing hospital in his white gown, calm, savouring his own ghostliness, he imagined himself in an empty fishtank. Active steps were being taken to trace anyone who had known him during those ten lost years. Colleagues, parents. The confusions of war, the tight security now covering Britain, made ordinary communication difficult. But all would be well. He would be reunited with Stephanie in due course.

In the long antiseptic corridors, green LCDs winked, often accompanied by hums and growls. The entrails of a glacier received him.

Under cover of his ghostliness, he invaded Rosemary Kepepwe’s office. All there was neat and anonymous, conventional down to the stained coffee mug on the filing cabinet. On the desk beside a monitor screen stood a framed photograph of husband David. Shining black, he smiled into the camera, standing beside a large fish on a weighing-scale. Burnell recognized an Isle of Wight Sea-Fishing Trophy when he saw one. Another photograph showed two smiling boys in their early teens, with Barker standing meditatively beside them. He wondered about their lives. There was small ground on which to speculate. Dr Kepepwe was little more than an embodiment of kindness and a fast backhand.

Burnell’s steps were solitary on the antiseptic tiled stairs. No use to question who had lived, survived, faded away under pain-killers, within these walls. The quota of patients had been cleared out. He was almost alone.

The news was bad. The hospital awaited a new intake: dying and wounded from a fatal engagement in the Crimea. Military men from all the armies involved were being flown here for treatment. Together with the soldiers heading for the Radioactivity Unit would be sick scientists – scientists, Burnell had been told, who had flown out to Bulgaria to deal with a nuclear plant going critical, and had suffered high doses of radiation. The emergency militarization of the hospital was being carried out under a cloak of secrecy, as all Swindon knew.

Taking a service lift up to the roof, he reflected that at any day now the wards would be filled with men harpooned by their wounds, poised on the brink of final white-out. What of the dead Larry? Had something in his cannonball head been moved to imitate the wider carnage taking place across the Crimea, Georgia and elsewhere? Had poor Larry mistaken Bishops Linctus for Stavropol, and died believing in his own gallantry?

On the roof of the hospital stood air-conditioning plants, breathing out their stale breath. The grimy air of Swindon had painted them black. Burnell went to the parapet and looked over. In the darkness, evidence for the town was mainly electric; lines of street lights, glows from houses, beams of car headlights. By such tokens, the presence of humanity could be hypothesized.

A cat approached him, daintily balancing along the parapet. It came without fear, to manoeuvre under one of his arms. As soon as he stroked it, the cat began to purr. Burnell put a cheek against the neat little head and addressed it affectionately.

Overhead the stars shone, remotely promising something better than the brief rush of biological existence. Engines sounded somewhere below them. Three heavy transport planes passed over Swindon, heading from the West towards the eastern stars. Burnell kept an arm protectively round the cat in case it was scared.

When he returned to his ward, to his nest in the glacier, the cat followed. In clear light, the animal was seen to be a bundle of long black fur. From its forward extremity, like glowworms in a thicket, the odd eye or two winked out now and again. Burnell stroked its more accessible parts, and it spent that night on his bed. He slept badly, harassed by thoughts of Larry and his mother.

In a fit of loneliness in the small hours, he held the warm body of the cat to his chest, comforted by it. He consoled himself by telling himself that the days would pass.

And so they did. And they brought Stephanie to him.

5

Some Expensive Bullets

By the time Stephanie arrived, Burnell was acclimatized to hospital routine. He exercised early in the morning before visiting the psychotherapist and underwent tests in the afternoon. In the evenings he read. To awaken and find the stray cat had gone was the least of Burnell’s worries. Yet the animal’s absence reinforced a sense of emptiness. The humble creature, unable to bear his company, he supposed, had disappeared into the warren of the building.

After much hesitation, he phoned his father in Norfolk. It was Laura, his stepmother, who answered the call.

‘Your father is somewhere in the garden, dear, talking to the gardener, showing him what’s what. He had to sack the last man. They’re so unreliable. The new man seems rather promising. He comes with wide experience, although he’s lame. I suppose that doesn’t matter. I’ve spoken to his wife.

‘The garden’s not at its best, though the iris bed looks splendid. Irises don’t mind the drought so much. We need rain badly.’

He listened to that precise theatrical voice. It conjured up the distant world of Diddisham Abbey, and the life lived by his father and Laura. When he had the chance, he explained to Laura what had happened to him.

‘Oh dear!’ she exclaimed. ‘What pickles people do get into. To have one’s memory stolen. Well, you’ll just have to try and get it back, dear. Do you want me to come over and visit you? I suppose I could do that. I suppose I should. You know your father isn’t able to come.’

‘That’s all right, Laura, thanks. I’ll manage.’

‘You do sound terribly depressed. I don’t wonder. Poor soul. Look, ring me again soon, is that a promise?’

The visits to Dr Rebecca Rosebottom were no more comforting. To maintain his morale, Burnell woke early and exercised in the empty gym for an hour. He showered, shaved, and breakfasted, to present himself in the Rosebottom clinic on the second floor at nine-thirty.

Burnell sat on one side of her cold hearth, Rosebottom on the other, in not particularly uncomfortable chairs.

Rebecca Rosebottom reeked of ancient wisdom and more recent things. She dressed, she mentioned in an aside, in astrological fashion. Old portions of embroidered curtain material were draped across her body in contradictory directions, presumably to indicate this in the ascendant and that in the descendant, and the other undecided over the bosom. She could have been in her fifties or sixties, her head being spare of flesh and of an apple-and-thyme jelly colour, above which rose a wreath of matted grey hair. Her disinclination for movement reinforced a mummified appearance.

She told Burnell on the second morning that she knew he was a Buddhist.

‘I don’t think so, Rebecca.’

She encouraged him to talk. Burnell had always regarded himself as a listener. His architectural pursuits had not been an encouragement to conversation. After his mother had died, he had never been able to get close to his father. He had thought his father always involved with international business affairs. Unexpectedly, he now found himself pouring out the troubles of those adolescent years: how his brother had been classified as schizophrenic, how his father had married again, how confused he was about the new wife.

‘You felt it was natural that you should feel antagonistic to Laura.’

He plunged into his complicated feeling for the beautiful actress his father had brought home unannounced. Laura was kind and amusing; yet to accept a replacement for his mother was disloyal. Then came his father’s accident in Rome, when he had broken his spine in a car crash and lost the use of both legs.

He had considered himself haunted by bad luck. He had tried to commit suicide. In some strange way, he felt an identification with Larry Foot, the killer of Bishops Linctus. He could only wonder if he had committed any crimes during the years for which memory was missing. He was sure Stephanie would know.

‘You’re dependent on her and what she says.’

‘How should I know?’

Through questioning, they established that it was an entire ten years which had been stolen. Rosebottom ventured the thought that the theft had taken place abroad, since EMV was strictly regulated in Britain.

‘From what you say, I gather you are sorry that your marriage has been wiped from memory.’

He became impatient. It was not the marriage alone. He did not know what kind of man he had been, how his professional reputation stood, or how much money he earned. Her mummified presence and occasional comments served merely to make him more aware of his predicament, while resolving nothing. It was bad enough facing life; facing Rebecca Rosebottom was worse.

Before going to the second floor for his third session, he found the little black cat again. He cradled it in his arms and took it into the clinic with him.

Once more, Larry Foot forced his way into the confessions. Rosebottom remarked on it.

‘I’ve suffered two traumatic shocks, Rebecca. Unconnected, but one after the other. I probably need proper counselling on both. Though counselling is not going to get my memory back.’ He looked hopelessly out of the window as silence fell between them. A convoy of three military vehicles was entering the car park, billowing out a blue haze of pollution as they lined themselves up.

Turning his attention back to the fine immobile Egyptian head, he said that he was troubled by a contradiction he could not resolve. Of course he understood the terrible nature of Larry’s crime, for which he had paid with his life; but there was also the factor of Larry’s innocence. Larry had said he liked to help people. He seemed not to have understood that even his mother was real. Burnell elaborated on this for some while without making himself clearer, only half aware that what had puzzled him was the nature of cruelty and of pain, the titbit that followed cruelty.

When Rosebottom indicated that Larry was just an incidental misfortune, with nothing to do with Burnell’s personal predicament, Burnell disagreed. Privately, he thought that whoever had stolen part of his memory was also no better than a murderer; the cruelty factor had operated.

All he brought himself to say was, ‘I was threatened with death, Rebecca. I was shit-scared.’

‘I sympathize, believe me. You can keep on telling me if it makes you happier. I’m no ordinary shrink. EMV cases always have attitudes.’

As often happened, silence fell between them. He felt he had never known such a conversation stopper as this lady who was supposed to promote the flow of talk.

And, as so often happened, he then began talking in an unpremeditated way, telling her that, as he had said, he had suffered two traumatic shocks. He woke in the middle of the night after a nightmare, wondering if he had become schizophrenic.

Rosebottom invited him to tell her what he meant by schizophrenic.

He said, ‘That’s what my brother’s got. I have a brother called Adrian. At present he’s under medication in Leeds.’

After a protracted silence, in which Rosebottom maintained an attitude almost beyond stillness, Burnell said he did not want to talk about it.

Her smile stretched her lips sideways to a great extent.

‘Time’s up, I’m afraid. Perhaps you will feel more like saying something tomorrow.’

‘Just tell me whether I am schizophrenic or not.’

She shook her head, slightly. ‘You have a long way to go yet.’

As he rose to leave, Rebecca Rosebottom said, ‘There’s just one thing.’

‘What?’

‘I am allergic. Also my star sign is against black animals of any kind. So just don’t bring that frigging creature in here next session. OK? You don’t need any kind of baby surrogate. OK?’

Burnell turned and stared at her. ‘Do you think there’s going to be a next session?’

Hurrying from the clinic, letting the little cat free in the corridor, he made his way back to the ward, taking a route that led him past Dr Kepepwe’s office.

He looked through her glass door. Rosemary Kepepwe was sprawled at the desk with her face buried in her arms. For an instant, he thought she was crying. Barker sat by her on the desk, regarding his mistress thoughtfully, wondering what action to take. Burnell went in.

‘Oh, these people!’ the doctor exclaimed, without being more specific. She ranted about them for some while before stating exactly what it was that had upset her. The military administration who would be taking over the hospital had just visited and left their orders. The first instalment of wounded from the Crimea was expected to arrive at first light on the following day. But before that – in just an hour or two – a squad of men from the RASC were going to arrive to repaint the interior of the hospital.

‘Does it need repainting?’

‘I always liked it blue and white. So fresh, you know.’ Dr Kepepwe mopped her eyes. ‘I like this hospital. I like working here. Barker likes it here, don’t you, Barker, my love? Blue and white create a cheerful healing atmosphere. These horrible army men are going to paint it all green today.’

‘Green! Why on earth?’

‘Dark green. Khaki green.’ She looked piteously at Burnell. ‘They say it’s for camouflage purposes.’

Barker looked extremely serious.

The corridors were already beginning to smell of paint when one of the small Asians showed Stephanie into Ward One.

He heard her footsteps before he saw her. She entered with the air of someone determined to perform a duty not to her taste, with a firm jut to her jaw. Stephanie was tall, fair-haired, walking with ease inside a fawn linen suit, with a handbag slung over one shoulder. She held out a hand to Burnell, stepping back when he had shaken it. The hand was slender and cool. He liked the feel of it. Stephanie was fine-boned, delicate of countenance and strikingly attractive, he saw, only a slightly heavy jaw detracting from full beauty.

He invited her to take the one chair in the room. Sitting on the end of the bed, he scrutinized her, trying to see behind the cautious smile.

Keeping the pain from his voice, he explained that sections of his memory had been stolen by persons unknown. He had no idea where this had happened. It felt as if his head had been bitten off.

‘So I was told when Laura called me,’ Stephanie said. ‘By chance I was in Britain, so I came along. That’s what Laura said to do …’ She chattered for a while, possibly to cover nervousness. Suddenly she said, ‘Do you remember that my home is in California?’

Burnell frowned. ‘We live in California? What for? Whereabouts? My work’s in Europe.’

She rose from her chair to walk about the room. She complained of the smell of paint. He stood up politely, half-afraid she was about to leave.

‘This is terribly embarrassing for me, Roy. If Laura called you, she should have explained.’ She looked at him, then down at the floor, then towards the door.

‘Well? Explained what?’

‘Our divorce came through over four years ago.’ With a burst of impatience, ‘You mean you’ve even forgotten that?’

Burnell sat down on the bed. ‘What are you telling me? You want to sit down or you want to walk about like a caged tiger?’

She began to walk about like a caged tiger. ‘We got married. We got unmarried. Surely to God you must remember that! I live in Santa Barbara now, with Humbert Stuckmann. It just so happened I was over here in the Orkneys and I called Laura. Laura’s remained a friend. She told me you were here.’

‘So you came to see me.’

‘That’s obvious, isn’t it? I called the hospital and spoke to someone or other. They suggested I might trigger off a missing memory.’

‘If it’s missing, how can it be triggered off?’ He spoke abstractedly. The ocean was stormy indeed; indeed there was not a continent in sight. The Atlantis of his marriage was gone. Somehow he had loved this lady, won her, and lost her. By what fatal flaws of character?

Stephanie had settled again in the chair and was talking in a formal way of crofters and dyes and looms far away. He was not hearing her. All he could find to say was ‘Humbert Stickmann? What kind of name is that?’

‘Don’t be superior. I hated it when you were superior. You used to treat me as if I was a child.’ She said he must have heard of Stuckmann Fabrics. Stuckmann fabrics and ceramics were famous world-wide. People worked for him in Scotland and even in Central Asia. Humbert, she did not mind saying it, was a genius. OK, so he was a bit older than her but he was a magical personality. Real genius. Loved colour. Always surrounded by admirers. Full to overflowing with occult knowledge which he beamed into his creations.

When her outpourings had ceased, he spoke again.

‘This guy’s rich, Steff? Is that what you’re saying?’

Stephanie brushed the envious question aside. She spoke of how a certain phase of the moon had led Humbert to design the pattern which crofters were now weaving for him in the Orkney islands.

He interrupted to pose the question which could no longer be postponed: as to whether he and Stephanie had children.

‘Of course not.’ Her tone was cold. ‘I have a son by Humbert. And you may recall I have fought all my life to be called by my proper name of Stephanie. Not “Steff”. No one calls my man “Humb”. He’d kill them if they did. And by the way I have reverted to my maiden name of Hillington. I’m Stephanie Hillington.’

And I don’t know you, Burnell thought. Nor do you wish to know me any more. He remarked on something else that must have changed: she had picked up an American accent. She gave him no answer.

Looking defiantly at him, she made him drop his gaze. With a mixture of compassion and spite, she said, ‘Poor old Roy! So much for the past. Maybe you’ll find you’re better without it, as I am. I never think of it. Life’s rewarding and I live right smack in the present day.’

She stood up as if to leave. In his confusion, he could think of no way to try to bridge the gulf between them.

‘This must be difficult for you, Stephanie. You must find this strange. Me, I mean. A crime has been committed against me. Apparently it happens. It’s a new sort of crime – people can always think up new ways to offend against decency … Tell me, when did we first meet?’

‘What a vile smell of paint. In the States, paint has no smell. What are they doing?’

‘When did we first meet?’

She spoke gently enough and gave him a kindly glance which transformed her face. ‘We met in your father’s offices, one day in April, nine years ago. I was being interviewed for a job I didn’t get. You took me out to lunch.’ She smiled. ‘You ordered champagne.’

‘And we were in love? We must have been. Please …’

The smile went. She was on her guard again. ‘Look, Roy, you’ve had other women since we split up. Laura tells me. You were a great chaser of women. But yes, if it satisfies your male pride, yes, we were in love. Quite a bit. It was fun while it lasted.’ Her laugh was uncertain. ‘I’ve got a car waiting outside.’

Keeping very still, he asked her how it had ended and what spoilt it. Even, more daringly, if the break had been his fault. She evaded the question, giving every impression of a woman about to take to her heels, saying it was foolish of her to have come. Perhaps she had been driven by … But she withheld the word ‘curiosity’. She should have mailed Burnell a photocopy of the divorce certificate. Her flight back to Los Angeles had been delayed. As he had probably heard, someone had put a bomb aboard one of the 777s flying on the LA–New York–London route and blown it clean out of the skies. No one had yet claimed responsibility, though a terrorist group in the Middle East was suspected. She regarded Europe as an unsafe place nowadays. It was terrible what was happening in the world.