wall, the boy lay on his back under the drip bottle, his suffused face turned to one side, his arms stretched stiffly out beside him.
‘Tell him I’ll come back this evening,’ Paul said, as the staff nurse headed out of the kitchen again and through the ward door, twitching the curtain all the way across the glass to stop him looking.
Two
IT WAS A TOWN that had everything. Old, new middling architecture, pleasing to the eye, unremarkable, appalling. Shops, factories, seafront, slums, University. A satellite New Town full of disoriented families who would not think of it as home until the next generation. Floodable bungalows along the estuary where people pottered through the end of their lives. Esplanade hotels where ditto, but more lavishly.
Peter Wallace, Samaritan number 100, who was the Director of the branch in this town, lived at the unfashionable end of the seafront, disguised as the proprietor of a small, comfortable hotel where families came back year after year and found their odd lost sandal still at the back of the cupboard. They knew that he worked somewhere else, since his wife seemed to run the hotel and he was not much seen in the daytime. They knew that he had an attractive, reassuring way of making you feel that the hotel was for you, instead of you and your cash for it. They knew that he and their children enjoyed each other, that his wife sang in the kitchen and that they somehow kept staff year after year. They did not know that he had studied for the priesthood until he saw that his ministry must be larger than the church. They did not know about the Samaritans, unless they happened to ask.
Beyond the Wallaces’ Baytree Hotel, at the mouth of the small sluggish river was a pier, and a clutch of bothies where you could drink and dance and see a film with whips and snarling women, eat batter with a little acid fish inside, feed money into machines with flashing lights and belting music, and wander past bland wax figures ofPrincess Anne and Mao Tse-tung and Lyndon Johnson (Nixon not yet ready).
On the other side of the river was the New Town, name of Butterfields, not a cow in sight, spreading like a brick psoriasis over the downs and meadows. It boasted an elementary school, and a big comprehensive school where older children could learn anything from computer programming to fitting pipe-joints. In the comprehensive school, Paul Hammond, Samaritan number 401, was in the English department, not its head nor ever would be with that public-school-housemaster background, although the staff were willing to condone it, since he had had the sense to get out.
Most of the Butterfields children could walk or bicycle to school, as their parents could walk or bicycle to the factory estate where great names of industry were taking root, company flags flying, storm-driven sea-gulls beating round the plate glass towers and concrete chimneys. It was in one of these shining towers that Mrs Barbara Frost had cooked lunch for Paul and the directors of Unitech Electronics. It was in the vaunted Butterfields shopping centre, where you could stroll without getting yourself or your pram run over, and chill sea winds swept through the holes in the pseudo-Moore statuary, that Jackie’s parents plied their trade in leather and plastic and Jackie did his Wile-U-Wate heels in the back workroom.
Out to the west on the other side of this great conglomerate town, the richer people, who had moved away from its terraced streets as the town grew too crowded, had turned the outlying villages into suburbs. In the twenties and thirties, they had built timbered granges and brick mansions and stucco villas with red tiles in the back hall and a room with wicker furniture for the maids. They had set out lawns and borders and tennis courts and blue-grey conifers, and roses which they had to prune themselves now that all the old men of earthy aphorisms had been killed off by Welfare.
In one of the half-timbered manor houses, with
‘Tell him I’ll come back this evening,’ Paul said, as the staff nurse headed out of the kitchen again and through the ward door, twitching the curtain all the way across the glass to stop him looking.
Two
IT WAS A TOWN that had everything. Old, new middling architecture, pleasing to the eye, unremarkable, appalling. Shops, factories, seafront, slums, University. A satellite New Town full of disoriented families who would not think of it as home until the next generation. Floodable bungalows along the estuary where people pottered through the end of their lives. Esplanade hotels where ditto, but more lavishly.
Peter Wallace, Samaritan number 100, who was the Director of the branch in this town, lived at the unfashionable end of the seafront, disguised as the proprietor of a small, comfortable hotel where families came back year after year and found their odd lost sandal still at the back of the cupboard. They knew that he worked somewhere else, since his wife seemed to run the hotel and he was not much seen in the daytime. They knew that he had an attractive, reassuring way of making you feel that the hotel was for you, instead of you and your cash for it. They knew that he and their children enjoyed each other, that his wife sang in the kitchen and that they somehow kept staff year after year. They did not know that he had studied for the priesthood until he saw that his ministry must be larger than the church. They did not know about the Samaritans, unless they happened to ask.
Beyond the Wallaces’ Baytree Hotel, at the mouth of the small sluggish river was a pier, and a clutch of bothies where you could drink and dance and see a film with whips and snarling women, eat batter with a little acid fish inside, feed money into machines with flashing lights and belting music, and wander past bland wax figures ofPrincess Anne and Mao Tse-tung and Lyndon Johnson (Nixon not yet ready).
On the other side of the river was the New Town, name of Butterfields, not a cow in sight, spreading like a brick psoriasis over the downs and meadows. It boasted an elementary school, and a big comprehensive school where older children could learn anything from computer programming to fitting pipe-joints. In the comprehensive school, Paul Hammond, Samaritan number 401, was in the English department, not its head nor ever would be with that public-school-housemaster background, although the staff were willing to condone it, since he had had the sense to get out.
Most of the Butterfields children could walk or bicycle to school, as their parents could walk or bicycle to the factory estate where great names of industry were taking root, company flags flying, storm-driven sea-gulls beating round the plate glass towers and concrete chimneys. It was in one of these shining towers that Mrs Barbara Frost had cooked lunch for Paul and the directors of Unitech Electronics. It was in the vaunted Butterfields shopping centre, where you could stroll without getting yourself or your pram run over, and chill sea winds swept through the holes in the pseudo-Moore statuary, that Jackie’s parents plied their trade in leather and plastic and Jackie did his Wile-U-Wate heels in the back workroom.
Out to the west on the other side of this great conglomerate town, the richer people, who had moved away from its terraced streets as the town grew too crowded, had turned the outlying villages into suburbs. In the twenties and thirties, they had built timbered granges and brick mansions and stucco villas with red tiles in the back hall and a room with wicker furniture for the maids. They had set out lawns and borders and tennis courts and blue-grey conifers, and roses which they had to prune themselves now that all the old men of earthy aphorisms had been killed off by Welfare.
In one of the half-timbered manor houses, with
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