Sleep and His Brother (4 page)

Dr. Silver led the way out, but paused in the doorway and looked down. Beyond him, crouched by the far wainscot, a man in a tweed cape was picking with his index nail at the sapphire paint. Cape and posture made him look like Sherlock Holmes poised over a clue, but before Pibble could make sense of him he exploded to his feet. Just as the toad, squat by the ear of Eve, exploded into the Demon King at the touch of Ithuriel's spear, so started up, in his own shape, Mr. Vivian Costain, firebrand president of the South London Preservation Society. Pibble had seen him on a lecture platform, and once or twice on television; no one could mistake the pink cheeks and the eyes permanently pop with aesthetic rapture or with public indignation and the meticulously wild wisps of silvery hair. In the flesh, and undaised, he was a dumpy little man, but he exploded to a considerable height because his hands shot, clenched, toward the ceiling. Then they came down and gripped Dr. Silver by the lapels of his dust-coat.

“Philistine!” hooted Mr. Costain.

Dr. Silver's olive fingers twitched the feverish grip away as if he had been picking fluff off the cloth.

“Any complaints must be made through the secretary,” he said. “Posey! A visitor for you!”

But Mrs. Dixon-Jones had already pushed past Pibble into the corridor. Her head was held at its horsewoman's angle, but her voice teetered on the edge of squawking.

“May I ask what you think you're doing?” she said. “And who you think you are?”

Costain, adept at squabbles, public or private, instantly became calm and introduced himself in a businesslike voice. Mrs. Dixon-Jones flushed, then went fainting white.

“What makes you think you can come barging in here without even the courtesy to make an appointment?” she said.

“Barging?” said Mr. Costain mildly. “Let me explain. I was asked down by the local Preservation Society to see how the external repairs were getting on. A great improvement, don't you think? You may not realize it, but they are affiliated to my society—in fact I negotiated with the Ministry for them over the public share of the repair costs. Naturally I thought it only polite to make myself known to you. I believe that there have been a number of differences of opinion between you and the local people, and I thought I might be able to smooth things out.”

For answer Mrs. Dixon-Jones pointed at the wall. Her attitude was that of the Queen of Hearts ordering a beheading. Mr. Costain's fingernail had bared a stamp-sized patch of seaweed green amid the virulent sapphire.

“But it's
tremendously
exciting,” said Mr. Costain boyishly. “Lady Sospice, you may know, has handed a lot of her papers to the local society, and among them the secretary found a receipt from the De Morgan factory for a sixty-foot run of tiles in a pattern entirely unique. Naturally when I came in I looked about me. Despite what you have done to it, this remains a gloriously typical example of High Domestic Grandiose.”

The lecturer's hoot was back in his voice. Perhaps Mrs. Dixon-Jones considered herself an even more glorious example of the genre, for she sniffed derisively.

“
Gloriously
typical,” insisted Mr. Costain. “Be that as it may, I arrived outside your room and heard voices, so I decided to wait a few minutes before making myself known. And down here, under this appalling gub, I spotted a checker pattern of corrugations. I could do nothing but investigate.

“It'll all have to come off, you know. I will see that a schedule of suitable contemporary colour schemes is prepared for you.”

“I won't stand for it!” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “I simply won't stand for it!”

“I'm afraid you will have no choice, dear lady.”

“Get out! Get out at once!”

“Please, Posey,” said Dr. Silver. While hoot and scream had reverberated under the arches, he had watched the two of them through his joke glasses as if they had been part of an experiment. Now he pitched his voice at a level of calm authority that seemed to still even the echoes.

“Mr. Costard,” he said. “We are here to run a home for an unfortunate group of children called cathypnics. Our responsibility is to them, and indirectly to the Ministry of Health. I say ‘indirectly' because we are an independent charity, though most of the children here are covered to some extent by grant from their local authorities; even so this leaves us with a lot of money still to find. This local society you speak of contrived to have a preservation order placed on this building, which we have accepted with a good grace. It is true that the Ministry of Works provided a substantial sum for repairs, but we had to find almost an equal sum, because (as I am sure you know) the money raised by the local society was derisory. Fortunately, we had a windfall. Now, we allowed all this to happen because we wish to be good citizens and to be left in peace to get on with our proper work, which is the care of the children. It is of medical importance that cathypnic children should be surrounded by bright, simple colours. The choice of these colours is a question of science, not of aesthetics or art history. We shall certainly not allow ourselves to be dictated to over a matter like this.”

“My dear sir,” said Mr. Costain. “I do not believe, as I said, that you will have the option. You are sitting on an absolutely outstanding example of a type of architecture and décor which is becoming increasingly rare. You are also occupying several acres of open space in an area which is badly in need of elbow room. Public opinion is certain to go against you if the dispute is allowed to become public, and the funds you need for your work will consequently decline. Whereas—”

“Who let you in?” interrupted Dr. Silver, very gently but with a weight and timing that stopped Mr. Costain dead. He had seemed so sure of the upper ground that his finger had begun to wag under the olive nose and the old Bloomsbury emphasis to modulate his hoot, so that he had said, for instance, “absol
ooo
tly outst
ee
nding.” Now he blinked and changed gear.

“Two of the inmates,” he said.

“Ah. Interested as you must have been in the architecture, Mr. Costard, you may have failed to notice one of the curious side effects of the disease. Cathypnic children have an almost instant appeal. The staff here call them ‘dormice,' but visitors usually think of hamsters on first meeting them. Imagine their impact in a television documentary. Guess which side public opinion would then be on.”

“No!” cried Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

“I agree,” said Dr. Silver. “In the past, even when desperately short of money, we have refrained from using this appeal, for the children's own sake. But if we are forced, we will fight with what weapons we have, and we will win. Let me remind you that the Ministry of Health is not as eager to take on financial obligations as the Ministry of Works seems to be.”

Mr. Costain, though clearly unused either to being put so efficiently in the wrong or to being outblackmailed, yielded with surprising grace and charm.

“My dear sir,” he said, “the argument seems to have—I believe the word is ‘escalated'—quite unnecessarily. Surely we can achieve a compromise which will protect the interests of the children and at the same time …”

He completed the sentence by waving a vague hand at the blasphemous gub. Dr. Silver nodded.

“Of course,” he said. “And for the time being the compromise will be as follows. We will make no objection to having the house inspected by one knowledgeable expert, provided he makes a proper appointment with the secretary. He will be accompanied by one of our officials and must follow that official's instructions. He can prepare a list of matters of architectural interest and make suggestions for repair or renovation which we will then be prepared to discuss. We will take no responsibility for any expense involved in his visits. Anybody, of whatever standing, who comes without an appointment will be treated as a trespasser and physically ejected. So will any amateur enthusiasts from your societies who try to take advantage of this arrangement.”

There was a long pause, as though his hearers were expecting the soothing, world-ordering voice to flow on forever. Pibble found himself thinking what a merciful episode this was, a sop of gossip to feed to Mary so that he need not tell her about his time with Mrs. Dixon-Jones; then the dumpy enthusiast jerked himself awake and seemed to realise what a tough bargain had been agreed for him. He made a desperate gesture, like an innocent man about to start a speech from the scaffold, changed the movement into a hopping about turn, and strutted off under the offending arches. Dr. Silver smiled as he watched him go and rubbed lazily at the back of his neck.

“But what'll I do? What'll I do?” cried Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

“Poor Posey,” said Dr. Silver. “You'll have to see the little bastard sometimes.”

His voice was neutral, abstract—no longer the ordered and grammatical dominance of the judge, not yet the dislocated energy of the scientist. Pibble, who had cautiously assumed that the man was at least half charlatan—likely enough in that line of research, and nothing to stop the other half from producing real results—was now immensely impressed. Charlatan or not, he had weight, moral reserves—“bottom,” they used to call it. For the last few months Pibble had felt like a trivial and discarded object, an empty orange crate perhaps, chuntering back and forth in meaningless eddies as the tide sloshed in and out of the river, each tide imperceptibly sucking him a little nearer the final oblivion of the sea. Now he had bumped into something solid—rooted like a pierhead. He wanted to stay.

Mrs. Dixon-Jones, her face still batter-coloured with used fury, was starting to say something when a new figure appeared under the lilac arch where they'd last seen Mr. Costain. A cathypnic, by his silhouette, but younger than George or Fancy.

“Why, it's Tim,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

Her eyes softened, her thin lips broadened, and the jut of her nose grew miraculously less severe. A mild tinge, the ghost of a blush, coloured her cheeks. The boy drifted toward them very slowly, blinking. His bulk and the wavering, drifting motion made him seem to be somehow more kin to the world of fish than anything warm-blooded, a deep-beamed carp sliding along behind the plate glass of an aquarium. Pibble and Dr. Silver followed Mrs. Dixon-Jones along the passage and stopped when she knelt in the boy's path.

“Tim,” she cooed, “have your bowels worked today, darling?”

The child noticed her for the first time and smiled the remote smile of the cathypnics.

“Your bowels?” repeated Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

“Forgot,” said the boy.

With mysterious ease, like a slow-motion film of a rugger genius jinking round a tackler, he evaded her embrace and drifted on. She rose sighing.

“It's marvellous how different they all are,” she said. “Tim likes to be just a weeny bit secretive.”

“So do I,” said Pibble.

Dr. Silver chuckled.

“Bully for you,” he said. “You and your normal metabolism. Our kids, we have to fight to make their metabolism work even at half cock. See you later, Posey.”

Mrs. Dixon-Jones smiled really quite warmly at Pibble and went back to her office.

“She seems to have a lot on her plate,” said Pibble as they walked into the hail.

“Right,” said Dr. Silver, stopping in midstride to switch off the tape by the now empty sofa, silence listening to silence. “You reckon we could afford some staff for her, like we can afford these jiggers?” He tapped the machine with his toe. “Good point, but Posey won't have it. She wants to do every damned thing for them herself, from tying their shoes to typing their death certificates. It's her way of living them. And who knows? Cut off that love, and maybe they'd feel it, lose one of the strings that tie them to their waking life, snuff out sooner. Where'll we put this camera?”

2

W
hile Dr. Silver fretted across the garish carpet, checking distances and angles, Pibble stood halfway up the stairs and studied the tops of the pillars. Many of them appeared to support the ceiling in places where it needed no such help; every capital was different, so that the place looked like a pillarmaker's showroom—you could imagine silent Victorian families peering worriedly up while Father pointed with his umbrella, and eventually settling for six of the gargoyle pattern.

Silver peered out of a window, then pranced across and spoke to the doorkeepers—new ones, sitting back to back on the carpet, as Mrs. Dixon-Jones had said. Both heads swung sideways to blink at Pibble; one set of lips moved; he could see the sleepy smiles and feel the tepid wash of sentiment which the cathypnics engendered—they would indeed be formidable on TV.

What was he to do? Copper come. Lost his hat. Not much to build a career on. No doubt he did still retain elements of the approved police gait, solemn, confident, official. No doubt the cathypnics' upbringing had made them sensitive to the appearance of their natural enemy—as broiler chickens which have never seen daylight will cower if a hawk-shaped object is held above them. But the policemen they'd have seen would have been in uniform, of which the most striking element is the helmet. How would a child with a vocabulary of three hundred words explain that a policeman was at the door but he was not wearing his uniform? Copper come. Lost his hat. They must have seen him.

But the money would be useful, thought Pibble as Dr. Silver took a final scratch at his nape and crossed the hall toward the stairs, pausing to reactivate the tape recorder he had switched off. He wondered who Mr. T. was, and whether Mary mightn't get her Cretan holiday again after all.

“You got a big family, Mr. Pibble?” said Silver, coming up the stairs two at a time.

“No. Just a wife. Why?”

“I asked the dormice about you, and one of 'em said quote lot of kids unquote. Mush. No use, even if you were father of twenty. Too many kids in the building anyway.”

“Oh,” said Pibble, and then, “I see.”

No point in mentioning the father with the umbrella—it was unprovable and would make him seem too eager. Anyway, Dr. Silver's was the better explanation.

“By the way,” he said as they started up the second flight of stairs, “the children who let me in said that no one else was coming, but Mr. Costain turned up. I'm quite sure that that's what they meant.”

Dr. Silver, with his eager pace, was already ahead of him and seemed not to have heard. But when he reached the landing, or gallery, which ran round three sides of the hall, he halted and took up the stance of the president of a banana republic receiving birthday plaudits on the palace balcony.

“There's just one comfort about this damned job,” he said. “The kids don't understand the trick they do, either.
If
they do it. Let's keep an open mind on that one. But except for Rue Kelly, the folk who've worked here long—and most of 'em stick around once they've come—are quite sure they do
something
. The kids, too, natch. Then you've got to remember that cathypnics are dumb, dumber than the dumbest doll in Dublin. They see their trick work once, twice, so they reckon it always will. And you're making the same mistake. Parapsychic phenomena aren't made that way. Listen. Say I set up an experiment with my assistant turning over a pack of twenty-five cards—we mostly use special packs, five sets of five symbols shuffled together—while a sensitive sits out of sight and hearing and tries to guess which card has been turned. Normal expectation of correct guesses is just under four for each run of the pack. Odds against eight correct guesses are high enough to be significant. Get frequently into double figures and the odds are astronomical. As-tro-nomical. You just don't bother with hundred percent correct. It happens. Oh, yes, it happens—but then even I start looking for the way the experiment was rigged. I reckon you could say, Mr. Pibble, that George and Fancy, who let you in, are statistically naïve—and yourself only a mite less.”

“Then what on earth can you hope to achieve?”

“Good question. ‘Ram Silver,' I say, three o'clock in the mornings, ‘what on earth can you hope to achieve?' Answer: at the lowest level I hope to prove to the meanest-minded sceptic that parapsychic phenomena exist. That's coming soon, here or somewhere else. Matter of fact, it's already
been
proved, several times, best by J. B. Rhine at Duke, but always using statistics. You produce consistent experiments with odds of a million to one turning up for you, and people don't want to think about it. Even professional scientists.

“Second, I hope to discover how parapsychic phenomena work. That's further off. It'll take a real breakthrough. But that's what Mr. T.'s paying me for. Once we know how, we'll be getting our hundred percents whenever we want them. We're like the Wright brothers, or maybe someone even further back—one of those guys who jumped off towers dolled up like a bat. We spend years, we spend fortunes, putting our machine together and it makes a noise and it stinks and then it trundles across the grass like a lead bird. And then, maybe, it gives a little hop. In that hop, in those eight yards when you can see daylight under the skids, lie supersonic airliners and the dominion of the skies. Only we don't know how yet. But perhaps you are that kind of hop, Mr. Pibble. Come and look at my lab.”

He led the way along a passage immediately above the one to Mrs. Dixon-Jones's room, turned right at the crossing, and at last opened a door some distance down the even longer passage.

The room whirred and clicked. It muttered to itself its bright inanities, the lingo of machines.

“Like to listen?” said Dr. Silver. He fiddled with a tape recorder and a slow, light voice spoke from it.

“Tain't fair,” it said.

Pibble looked at the machine and saw the tape whirling at rewind speed. All at once it slowed.

“Turned out nice,” it drawled.

“Lovely.”

The tape spun faster again.

“That's cunning,” said Pibble. “I wondered how you came to be listening to my entry so soon after. How's it done?”

“Easy,” said Dr. Silver. “Double pickup. The first discriminates between silence and noise and slows the tape down for the second head to rerecord onto a master tape. We've got twenty machines here, all running sixteen hours a day, but the sounds on them can usually be got onto one tape which my girl transcribes every day.”

“Green,” drawled the tape.

“Lovely,” it answered itself.

“Hiya, dormice,” it called. “You can't go sleep there. You'll be run over by my cart.”

“The exercise will do you good,” it whined.

It whirled again, and slowed.

“'ot,” it complained.

“No, darling, it isn't,” it cooed. “It's just right. But I'll take one of your sweaters off if you're quite sure.”

“I'm frightened.”

“There's nothing to be afraid of, darling. You come with Posey. You aren't hot, really you aren't. I can feel.”

“Cold 'and, warm 'eart.”

The next whirl was very short.

“Now for heaven's sake, Posey,” said the machine in the clipped, aggressive accent Pibble knew so well.

“But I can't just leave it like that.”

“Of course you can. Whether you're right or wrong it comes to the same—”

Dr. Silver pressed a button and the machine renounced vocables for its former clicks and whirs.

“I keep telling 'em,” he said angrily. “But will they stop filling my tapes with mush? Will they hell! That applies to you, too, Mr. Pibble. If you want to talk to anyone except one of the dormice, you make damned sure either that you're out of range of the mikes or that you switch off. And switch on when you've done.”

“I'll try to remember. Mrs. Dixon-Jones told me that cathypnics are very difficult to upset, but just now one of them said he was frightened. Or was it a girl?”

“Marilyn Goddard,” said Dr. Silver absently. “She dreams nightmares. She's aberrant. Mother was a clinging, sloppy, man-hungry moron—unmarried, of course. The guy she took up with when Marilyn was two was the one who did the Paperham jobs. He settled in with them, though you wouldn't have reckoned he was the type. There for three years, till he was copped.”

“Crippen!” said Pibble. His scalp had twitched involuntarily at the name of Paperham, as though horror for the dead women could be communicated directly to nerve and flesh without having to pass the censorship of thought.

“Do the other children say ‘Lovely' to her?” he asked.

“Yeah, but at a lower ratio than they say it to each other. I forget the figures. I've got them on file. ‘Lovely' doesn't mean a thing—it's an all-purpose reaction. Our dormice are damned efficiently insulated from the cold world. Now let's get this experience of yours down on tape. Come into my den.”

It would be hard, Pibble thought, to design anything less like a den. The avocado tree looked as though it had been loaned from a stand at the Ideal Home Exhibition, and the rest of the furniture—filing cabinets, half-acre desk, shin-level tables, black-leather-and-steel chairs—failed to declare any characteristic of the man who had chosen them beyond extravagance. Even the one touch of art—a bronze and bulbous paperweight, vaguely post-Brancusi—had the look of one of a large issue of multiples. Pibble found himself sweating with absurd nerves as the doctor leaned forward and made passes at him with the microphone. His voice emerged strained and textureless, as though he were lying, but Silver seemed not to mind; he twitched the microphone back to his own chin to ask the exact question needed to unravel a wooliness in Pibble's tale. He insisted on recording every drab and tiny detail, often repetitiously, but steadily clarifying the absurd incident until, by the time he clicked the recorder off, it contained a total account of two minutes in the life of James Willoughby Pibble, unique, unconfusable with anything else that had happened, or might have happened, to him, or anyone else, anywhere. He'd have made a good if tiresome lawyer, Pibble thought. But then he'd have made a good priest, a good mayor, a good surgeon. He possessed a kind of moral omnicompetence which persisted through his rapidly changing roles—and perhaps that was the reason for this neutral room: more character-defining furniture would have been grit in the smooth gear changes. Now it was the executive of a world-tentacled combine who spoke into a flashy intercom gadget on the desk.

“Doll,” he snapped.

“Yes, Doctor Silver.”

“I've got a tape here for you. I want it on paper, fast.”

“I'll come in.”

As the door opened, Pibble stood up. This was a happy surprise.

“You won't remember me, I expect,” he said.

Her yellow-brown eyes looked at him, puzzled.

“You know our honourable Doll?” said Dr. Silver. He sounded as though he disapproved of the acquaintanceship.

“We met in the Black Boot about a month ago,” said Pibble.

“Of course!” said the girl. “You're Rue's policeman friend.”

“Ex-,” said Pibble.

A curious silence engulfed the room, as though each were waiting for one of the others to make a betraying move. Wild Rue Kelly was the only subject they had in common, and Pibble was unsure of the girl's relationship with him. He could hear the rasp of those olive fingers raking at the stubble.

“Well,” said the girl at last, “I'd better—”

The telephone rang, and she picked it up.

“Doctor Silver's secretary.”

She listened, then put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Mister Thanatos wants to talk to you. I didn't know he was back.”

“Nor did I,” said Dr. Silver.

“There's a piece about him in the
Guardian
this morning,” said Pibble. “He's come to give evidence about this South Bank hotel site.”

So
that's
who Mr. T. was. No wonder.

“Fine, fine,” said Dr. Silver. “I've got a lot of news for him. Forget the tape, Doll. Just take Mr. Pibble and show him round.”

His hand was twitching for the telephone. Pibble followed the girl out, enjoying once again the strangely seductive way in which she held herself; her figure looked as if, from hemline to neckline of her plain orange dress, it was swathed in a single ultra-fine bandage, which held her taut, contained her, prevented her from flopping with luscious abandon into the nearest arms. Her manner and walk were prim and neat, but somehow implied the opposite.

“I thought you worked for Reuben,” said Pibble as he walked back toward the hall with her.

“I worked
with
him, for nothing, but he traded me to Ram, the bastard.”

“In exchange for what?”

“I don't know, but I get a salary now.”

“Are you taking me to see him?”

“Any excuse is better than none.”

Her wide mouth smiled with the shared secret. One day she would have jowls, but now her soft, flattish face seemed simple and scrumptious, like Elysian marshmallow.

“It's funny to think of Rue working in a place like this,” said Pibble with a gesture as they passed the grove of pillars. “You know, it took me several weeks to discover he was a doctor. Before that I thought he sold things.”

“He's got very strict rules against talking about doctoring to laymen. Or laywomen. What sort of things did you think he sold?”

“Fast cars, probably.”

She laughed. She seemed to have the secret of perpetual animation. Moses had struck the rock and high spirits welled out unstinted.

“He never told me you were an honourable, either,” he said. “Are you, in fact?”

“Last of the line,” she said smugly. “Rue says I'm England's most dishonourable hon. My grandfather bought the barony from Maundy Gregory, and my father died of drink when I was twelve, and that was the lot of us, not counting Granny.”