Five

If bacon had been cooked there was no sign of it at lunch, nor of the ducks which came to the dining-room window in the morning, nor of Greg, whom Bede sought in connection with a duty he had been given. A soup made by the boyish, crippled cook seemed wildly adulterate: an odour, sweet, not unpleasant in itself, and which Bede associated with hotel corridors, was present in it.

As Bede was making tea for himself in the lounge, the sun came out. A man Bede had seen arriving in the van that morning joined him, minutes later, where he stood at the lounge windows.

'Your view's magic.'

'Isn't it. I see down there someone's building a log cabin or house.'

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'I can see it too. Apple trees and some sort of old cart. He must be planning a tribe, he's making it big enough. My name's Michael Hart, by the way.'

Hart proffered his hand, frankly. It was done with a sort of skill. Bede shook it.

'No good skulking about friendless, place like this,' said Bede, obscurely pleased with himself.

Hart matched Bede in height. He was, too, of an average build. He was handsome in the long-lashed, dark-eyed way of the Black Irish. Perhaps to roughen his looks he wore his hair in an alarming, asymmetrical tangle.

At one o'clock the cook (known as Popeye because of his callipers and extreme emaciation) rang on a tumbler with a spoon, calling inside those patients who were taking advantage of the sunshine.

'The manager's away,' he called, 'and can't be with us this afternoon. He's left me with a list.' He had a clipboard from which he read chore details and names. 'Polly and Ann, no, Margaret: would you please round up all dessert plates. They seem to end up in the women's dorm.' Groans, laughter. 'Then come and see me and we'll have a look at the ovens now they're cool. Smith and Carlislewhere are you, men? . . .' and so on. Bede found him a bright enough character. At last he said, 'Ford, you've been fixed with the chapel I believe. Might pay you to go and have a word with Greg about cleaning materials. He's up with the pigs. Oh, and you can take Hart. Take heart and take . . . Never mind.'

Adjacent to the loading bay was a room in which Michael and Bede found gumboots of a passable fit. They trudged, though buoyant, up the long track to the piggery. The air was thin and chill and the sun still shone. The earth was a broken crust from which odours rose, refrigerated and dank.

The area in which Greg was working was cut into a knoll which kept it from the sun. Its concrete and wire construction seemed to cage a gloom. It was like a scene of sombre police discovery. This was a place of stoopings, of grim, forensic labellings. Bede imagined a string of cautionary bunting being hoisted ('All lift at once, now'), to allow the passage of some muddy, rigid mystery.

'You know anything about what needs doing in the chapel?' asked Bede.

Greg was laying dead rats in the bed of a wheelbarrow. He had a woolly, unsleek line of a dozen or so to transfer from a wall. They wore tiny, canine smiles.

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'The windows,' said Greg. 'Outside and in. Vacuum. Squirt some scent about. I keep some gear in a locker for the purpose.'

'This,' said Bede, 'is Michael.'

'Hi, Mike. I could do with a smoke. Let's walk down through the pines.'

Greg stopped his work, pulled off his Swanndri and laid it across the rats. He wheeled the barrow from the enclosure and shut a rickety door. Feeling at the pocket in which he kept his tobacco, he led them off down the hill through a copse of pine seedlings. Some female patients waved, wagged pruning saws from a distance. They climbed the other side of the shallow declivity in which the pines, feathery and uniform, were being nurtured. At the top was a track made by cattle, novel and quaint at this height, in this place.

'I wanted to show you this,' Greg grinned over his shoulder.

Michael and Bede followed him down onto a grassy plateau. Below was the valley floor, level and fertile, and here a river had imposed its bright design. 'Curly,' said Michael. And so the water was, and tined, threads of its fabric parted by bleached, sheep-like stones in places.

'Yes,' said Greg. 'It's out of the way of things. I sometimes do a joint here. Haven't got one at the moment. Anyway, it's tricky during the week.'

'Where I was working,' said Hart, 'we had a test for it. Sometimes with our paranoiacs it was useful.'

'Where you were working?' Greg scowled.

'I'm training as a psychiatric nurse. I was in psychopedics.'

'Heavy.'

'It depends. I liked the old people, the relationships.'

'You're kidding.'

'Really. There's a lot that's hidden, that keeps surfacing wonderfully, Alzheimer's or no.'

They sat in fragrance and warmth. Michael offered them each a Camel. Greg accepted with a big man's shyness.

'We'd better wander back in a while,' said Bede.

'Here,' said Greg, 'is the key to that locker.'

'And where's the locker?'

'Chapel itself.'

Bede put the key in a pocket and lay back in the grass for a moment. He blinked at the clouds, at the dazzle at their edges. When he shut his eyes against their brightness, their vividity was reversed as in a photographic negative. Soon he felt the cool shadow of the sun's exclusion move down the page 52 length of his body. At this he felt a simple, animal disappointment.

Night. Letting his car gather speed, letting the car rattle, Bede is driving down a hill. Ahead is a corner, sharp. In time, soon, he must turn it. Let the car plunge, he can see where he must brake, he can see where he must turn. The camber of the road, meanwhile, is his sure, unerring track. His ride is pneumatic and quick. The wheel he holds vibrates minutely. He must turn it now. He brakes. There is a sudden change in the degree of things. The wheel vibrates for an instant with too little fineness. He feels through his thighs and buttocks the evacuation, the sudden expulsion from the car's chassis of a bulk, of a shape, swiftly. His grip begins the motion of a turn. But out of the downward pitch of the car's deceleration he can make no lateral curve. He holds, has hold of, impotence, of airy disengagement. He conceives of himself as a missile with infinite mass. Before he can brake further, even as he prepares a giant stab with his leg at the pedal, his thigh and calf enormous, a locking, a jamming, a sudden and concrete invalidation of his steering apparatus takes place with a bang. He has hit an invisible barrier, nether and immovable, and is being sucked skyward, upward, as if from behind.

Emerging on the other side of a tunnel, a vacuity, a hole in time, Bede had realised he was unhurt. He had been thrown clear of the car. His knuckles stung, had been grazed somehow. In a frost of broken glass, inverted, lay his vehicle. Its doors were agape. In its tumble along the road, end over end, the car had also ejected a seat. Where he crouched against a garage Bede could see it, a token of safety and order, out in the street in the beery light of streetlamps, a seat, sitting.

In the present again, Bede opened his eyes. The afternoon was cooling. Greg and Michael dozed. Here in the company of these good and quiet men it was sprung on him profoundly; that with all the white noise of personal disquiet hushed, made almost inaudible, there still buzzed in himself the desire to drink. A prompting to sex could not have been more frank. As to the accident; while it had everything to do with his being here in this treatment centre it had little to do with his drinking, its modes or degrees. And of his wife, his feelings for his wife? A seat sitting. He pictured her blank face. Its emotionless pallor was accusatory enough, enough for a dozen bitter marriages. To his burden of thirst, of craving, was added the nicety of guilt. He could only guess that she must regard him as being a very deficient, a very unpleasantly flawed sort of man.