Marcus’s address in 1941 had been given up grudgingly by Missus Jarvis of Records. There was still a Doctor A. Marcus listed in St John’s Wood, yet Busner hadn’t been convinced he had the right man until, upon apologising for calling on the evening of Good Friday, the pre-war voice on the end of the line said: We Jews also celebrate the death of Christ y’know — an outrageous statement, presumably intended to drive away callers, but which in this instance had the opposite effect. Busner had the unnerving sensation — so clearly did he hear the other man’s voice inside his head — that they were only two hemispheres of the same brain, yoked together by the citywide stretching of the corpus callosum phone line. He’s the one, Busner had thought, and now, having been buzzed in to the mansion block on Abbey Road, he climbs the wide and shallow treads of the stairs to see a Jew with a military bearing — he’s definitely the one. Of course I remember Miss Deerth, Marcus says before anything else. He stands: a tall, stooped figure Stravinsky ugly with a pot-belly and a large nose with a broad, flat tip duck-billed, his bifocals pushed up high on a balding cranium. I saw her at least monthly, if not more often, for getting on for ten years, why shouldn’t I remember her? There’re members of my immediate family I’ve seen less of — and found less, ah, congenial. In the twitch of the bill towards a mousy wife who stands in the tenebrous corridor, there is a nasty implication, one confirmed when Marcus ushers Busner on without making an introduction and she withdraws, presumably to a kitchen. They breast smelly vapours of chopped liver and frying potatoes, their feet crackling on a plastic strip laid over the carpet, before entering a
weird chamber. Can I offer you a sherry? Marcus asks, as he points to one of a pair of club chairs of thirties vintage with burled walnut sides like the dashboard of the Austin that face one another over a nest of red lacquered tables. The sherry is Cypriot — incredibly sweet. Marcus un-nests one table, a second and then a third to accommodate all of the case notes Busner withdraws from his briefcase. A frosted bulb of high wattage is exposed in a perverted way by the scalloped edge of its paper shade and the mean white light strikes Marcus’s face — a face that, as is so often the case with the ageing male, has been inefficiently shaved, leaving bristly crests on either cheekbone and along the line of the resolute jaw. You have to understand, he says, that it was all too common in the first wave of the epidemic to have one patient correctly diagnosed with encephalitis lethargica and sent to a fever hospital, but for his as it were twin in every symptomatic respect to be diagnosed with dementia praecox and sent to a mental one. This. . he dips for his sherry. . happened all the time — and it went on into the twenties, when the second wave of the epidemic felled many more of those who it’d been thought had fully recovered. Still, to be fair to the doctors of that era —. Marcus interrupts himself: But why? Why be fair to ’em! Sherry spittles on my precious notes! Some of ’em were outright bloody pervs — it’s a fact. Marcus shudders. Feelin’ up the patients — having intercourse with ’em if they were biddable, or sedated with opium, hyoscine — henbane even. They gave sex hormones to schizophrenics — I expect they were swallowing them as well! There were sadists too — but then I daresay there still are. Those who take sheer bloody delight in applying restraints — or ordering it done —. The outburst suddenly stops: Is he guilty himself — or sly? Of course, Marcus runs on dismissively: these were the exceptions, the bad apples. . Or simply touched? . .the vast majority of the staff were as responsible as they could be in the circumstances — if a trifle, um, unempathetic —. She creeps in from the soundlessly opened door, one shoulder raised, To ward off his blows? with an oblong blue Tupperware platter upon which are lined up shield bosses Ritz crackers, each meticulously coated with chopped liver. She un-nests a still littler red lacquered table, sets down the platter and retreats under the cover of her rigid perm’ is it a wig? At once there is an avalanche of crumbs that scatters between the cable-knit ridges of the old man’s cardigan as his lips purse about a cracker, his dentures fiddling in their skin bag. Help yourself, he says a little grudgingly — then: You cannot be so wet behind the ears that you don’t know that diagnostics were in their infancy. Besides, you can have no idea of the caseload and what a bloody caseload! Even in the early thirties there were still plenty of inmates at the Hatch with TB — and fresh cases coming in every week. They all had to wear a caution card on a ribbon round their necks — yellow for TB, red for diphtheria, green for. . something else, I forget. I said help yourself. Busner does mm . . crunchy, creamy, salty — surprisingly