(“In a minute,” Colin says. The color has returned to Liam’s face. “Not even normal,” he scolds. “All right, Liam, what was that all about then?”
(“The poses,” Liam says, “the poses!”
(“All right, the poses. What about the poses?”
(“Not in a hospital bed! Sitting up in a chair, maybe, but not in a hospital bed! When you said that about the poses—”
(“Was that all that was? Sure,” Colin says, “I’ll tell Colin. He’ll have you in a chair. Reading, perhaps, or watching the telly. Looking out the window, seeing things far away or counting the Humbers. Don’t worry, Liam. It will be as grand as any effigy there. Colin’s a good friend. He’ll do all of us proud.”
(And these are almost his son’s last words, the ones Bale had held back from the journalists when they’d turned out on the wet and nasty evening of Liam’s last day, the words he’d hardly heard, could barely make out, when Liam pulled his father close, speaking from the fearful, terrible ecstasy of his dread: “Mamtooshawfsh.”
(“What, Liam? I’m sorry, son. I don’t understand.” Carefully, silently, signaling Ginny beside him, almost as if she is some Chief Inspector asked in a soft gesture to pick up an extension to hear a message from the kidnappers. “I’m sorry, Liam. Calmly. Calmly.”
(The boy shakes his head, breathes deeply, seeks for mastery of himself, finds it, starts again slowly, as slowly, as patiently as if his parents are the ones in peril. “They,” he says, “want,” he says, “to put,” he says, “my—” he says, and pauses, trying to recall the word, “—effigy, my effigy,” he says, “in Madame Tussaud’s,” he says.
(“Never!” his father reassures him.
(“Of course not, sweetheart,” his mother agrees.
(“No,” Liam pleads with them, bewildered, “you have to let them. Please,” he says. “I want…I want it there. Promise me!” he says, and dies.)
The ex-casualty ward physician is Mr. Moorhead. He is not, as Eddy Bale vaguely wishes, a ship’s doctor, someone ruined, a hardened stray from the China trade, the belowdecks, palmetto-fanned heats and ruthlessnesses of tubs and packets, the steamy African river routes, or the pack-ice Murmansk and Greenland ones — some drummed-out being, some tainted, weary wiz. (Why do I insist on this stuff? Bale wonders. Who will have young lives in his charge. Not even the just ordinary Boy Scouts and Girl Guides of summer’s hold-hand organized wayfare but the real thing, some from-the-start-doomed-and-threatened expedition itself. So why do I insist on this stuff? My wife walked out on me. I lost a son. Ain’t my life full enough already?) But far from being in disgrace, he is, despite Eddy Bale’s garish dreams for him, an eminent man. (In less than the four years since Bale first met him, Moorhead had left the National Health, set up in private practice, and was now Senior Registrar in Internal Medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street, an excellent, highly regarded doctor with a service at Sick Children’s which was one of the most distinguished in Britain.) Secretly he wishes to be awarded an O.B.E. Editorial leaders in Lancet have favorably mentioned his name, and even respected colleagues, to whom he’s never disclosed his ambitions, can’t understand why he’s overlooked while, year after year, rock stars, actors, TV journalists, designers, and others, less deserving and perhaps even less famous, are included. The omission has been noted and actually occasioned several letters to the Times, usually followed and sometimes accompanied by delicately worded, clearly embarrassed disclaimers from Moorhead himself. Who knows well enough, but will not of course state, the real reason he’s been passed over. Just as he knows why he’s chosen to go off with Bale and the children on their futile flying circus to Florida. Almost certainly, though he loves the sun, the heat, and regularly goes on holiday to Spain’s Balearic Islands or Africa’s west coast or even out on the banana boats, those fuming tubs and packets of Eddy Bale’s imagination, it’s a place he would never, as a tourist, enter on his own. It is the Jews. He is going to see the Jews. He has heard that there is an even higher concentration of them in Florida than there is in Israel. It is the Jews who have kept him off the Queen’s Honors List, who for three years now have permitted him to attend the Queen’s Garden Party but drawn the line when it came to sharing real privilege and power. All those Jews. It is for Moorhead alone the dream holiday.
They were in Eddy Bale’s council flat in Putney. “Doct—” Bale, offering refreshment, started to say, then, correcting himself, named instead the inverted, oddly up-ante’d title of certain physicians. “Mister Moorhead?”
Eddy, fussing tea, opening in front of his guest, who had followed him into his small kitchen, the all-in selection from Sainsbury’s dairy case, murmuring, apologizing for his surviving father’s and bachelor’s ready-to-wear arrangements, popping the tiny crustless sandwiches and little cakes into the gas range to take the chill off.
“It all looks quite delicious, Bale,” Mr. Moorhead said.
“I know it isn’t what you’re accustomed to.”
“It looks quite delicious.”
“Well,” Eddy said, “it’s hardly what they serve at the Queen’s Garden Party.”
“You know the Queen’s Garden Party?”
“I’ve been this fund raiser, this special pleader, for years now. I have the guest lists by heart. Well, I’d have to, wouldn’t I? For the leads. Like an assurance broker or a customer’s man in the City. I know my nobs. I know my hons.”
“My dear Bale,” the doctor said, “I don’t think you know me. It’s true I federate with the nobs and hons at Her Majesty’s company picnic. I’ve even an eye out for the chain and collar. Which makes me as much customer’s man as yourself, as anyone in bourse or bucket shop, but it all goes for the children in Great Ormond Street. If I climb it’s for them I climb, more Sherpa than Hillary. Which could explain my presence on this long march of yours. Now,” he said, “about these terminal kiddies, these goner spawn.” And indicated an immense pile of folders on the sofa in Eddy’s lounge.
And Mary Cottle, neither nanny nor nurse, a woman in her early thirties who’d lost neither husband nor child but fiancé, not to death, not even to a rival, and who would herself bear no children, who could conceive them readily enough and even carry them to term, but who wore a poisoned womb, a terrible necklace of tainted genes that could destroy any child, boy or girl, to whom she might give birth. Healthy herself, and quite beautiful, she suffered from the strangest disease of all. She was a carrier. Twice, once in her teens and again in her twenties, she had delivered ruined, stillborn babes. Two other times amniocentesis had revealed awful birth defect, chromosomes suffused with broad and latent deformity like too-bitter tea.
“There’s something wrong,” the doctor said. “Your children will be born blind. With cancer, measles, swollen glands. With canes in their little fists.”
“We shall have to throw out the baby with the bathwater,” the surgeon said who performed her second abortion.
“It’s all bathwater,” Mary said and broke off her engagement.
“It’s crazy,” her fiancé had said. “We don’t have to have kids.”
“No,” Mary Cottle said.
“We could adopt.”
“You don’t understand,” Mary Cottle said. “I could never sleep with you.”
“That’s ridiculous. What is it you’re supposed to have?”