last carpeted this, that or however many other merely human subordinates, the old man still manages to confound him by offering up a single word: And? Busner, forgetting to be intimidated, shoots back: And what? A cappuccino machine froths in the region of Sir Albert’s larynx, and Busner realises with amazement that. . he’s sighing: Khhhherrr. . then he says with just a soupçon of warmth, And what d’you want me to do about any of it? Busner creaks forward to get a better view of this emotionality before he replies, Do? Um, well, I suppose I assumed you might like to see your sister, or, at the very least, offer assistance of some kind. The allowances for long-stay mental hospital patients are worse than paltry — in the region of forty pounds a week is spent to feed, house and clothe them, probably not much more — allowing for inflation — than was allocated during the Edwardian era. He had hoped that this appeal to the fiscal question would engage the old civil servant — instead Sir Albert indulges in another hiatus, during which Busner scrutinises the many, many degree certificates that he now sees framed on the walls — so many that they constitute a sort of wallpapering of autodidacticism. There are degrees in German, divinity, economics, philosophy, law, modern history, comparative religion, mathematics, several different languages, ancient history, physics, politics, geography, and so on ad tedium. Obviously, Busner thinks, he has suffered for his learning — and it’s now our turn. Sir Albert says: I only ever had forty-two minutes a day to study. Busner starts: I’m sorry —? Sir Albert has regained his colourless composure and continues: Twenty-one minutes each morning on the train from Blackheath to Charing Cross, then a second twenty-one minutes during the evening commute — this was all I had available to me for study — so you see, all of ’em are extramural degrees from London University. In my day it was, of course, quite unthinkable for a young man of my class background to read for an ordinary degree — I joined the civil service when I was eighteen, but you knew that. I was supporting both my parents and a younger imbecilic sister by the time I was twenty-two — I was in charge of Shell Production at the Arsenal eight years subsequent to that. After my notably feckless sister had her nervous collapse — in this very room, as it happens — I cannot say that I made any great moves to assist her. She blamed me, y’know, for the death of our brother, she took the — in my view doubly indefensible — position that, as the official responsible for manufacturing the ordnance used during the offensive in which he died, I should’ve both been aware of the high proportion of dud shells being sent to the Front, and moved to rectify this. As it was, many of them either exploded prematurely, inflicting casualties among the attacking British forces, or failed to detonate on impact and thus proved inutile when it came to the destruction of the German’s Drahtverhau —. Pardon? Busner interjects. Sir Albert sighs again: Khhhherrr. . their barbed-wire entanglements, young man, as a Jew of German extraction I’d’ve expected you to have at least a rudimentary vocabulary. Anyway, you haven’t interrupted my flow, that is all there is to say on the matter. Busner does some of his own cogitating before he speaks, then he adopts his most professionally conciliatory tone: Surely, Sir Albert, after so many years have passed, you can find it in you to forgive her? This was a young woman, who, whatever she may’ve said at the time, was almost certainly beginning to be affected by the pathological inflammation of her brain tissue — and besides. . after so very long. . He falters and then stops altogether, for Sir Albert’s colour is deepening to an angry choler, You’ll have an apoplexy, guv’nor . . rings down the decades into the old man’s ears, together with the tintinnabulation of his own self-improved hearing aid. You have not been listening to me, Doctor Busner! he barks, I said that I found my sister’s position doubly indefensible. It is not that I cannot forgive her for her outrageous slandering of my public service: on the contrary, I was perfectly well aware at the time of the defectiveness of much of the ordnance, aware also of its almost complete ineffectiveness when it was used in the bombardment of well-established and deeply entrenched positions. Doctor Busner, I did not study law, or philosophy, or indeed comparative religion for all those three hundred and seventy-two thousand, nine hundred and sixty minutes without coming to a fine understanding of the nature of moral responsibility and blame. I have made my peace with myself — and am prepared also to make it with my Maker — and when it comes to my conduct during those years I may be allowed many things: my obvious youth, the temper of the times, the war frenzy that gripped the general populace and that amounted to — an apposite expression from your own usually fuzzy professional terminology — group-think. Although, let me be clear: I do not forgive my younger self on the basis of any specious relativism — regardless of place or time, before God some acts will always be wrong — but there was much mitigation. Whether such mitigation can be applied to my sister’s own conduct, I very much doubt: a self-professed pacifist, she willingly became a vital component in the engine of war. A socialistic collectivist, she yet felt free to deliver the damning judgements that only behove an individual. A violent advocate of women’s rights and suffrage, she nonetheless chose, quixotically, to set aside her convictions in the belief that Omnia vincit amor. As to your argument that she was already suffering with encephalitis lethargica at the time of our brother’s death, this is simply not borne out by the facts. I have read Constantin von Economo’s original paper on the disease — something that you, with your limited capacity for languages, cannot have done — and while he first identified the pathology in Vienna in 1916, cases were not recognised in England until early 1918 — indeed, the paper published in the Lancet that first drew the attention of the authorities to the potential wastage of manpower implied by this epidemic appeared only in April — the twentieth, if my memory still serves me. No, when my sister was working at the Arsenal, turning the fuse caps of shells, then filling and packing those shells, she was as physically sound as any of her fellow workers, workers who, it may please you to learn, had significantly better occupational health than those in comparable peacetime industries — a matter on which the statistics, should you care to consult the relevant papers, will certainly bear me out. No, Audrey’s attitude was doubly indefensible, Doctor Busner, because if anyone could be said to be to blame for Lance-Corporal Stanley Death’s death — which, so far as we can judge, was indeed the result of a premature shell detonation, given the location in which his remains were eventually discovered, in 1928 — then it was she and her fellow munitions workers, whose lackadaisical and generally inefficient approach to their duties at times bordered on criminal negligence. So, you perceive the impasse, Doctor Busner: it is not that I cannot forgive her for blaming me — a resentment that, given her long period of mental inanition, I daresay has been significantly attenuated — but rather that it is I, remaining in complete and continuous possession of all my faculties, who have blamed her for every single one of the intervening twenty thousand and ninety-three days since our brother was killed — including this one. Therefore, whatever the circumstances under which she is currently detained, it is unthinkable that I should have any contact with her, while as to visiting her at the hospital, that is absolutely out of the question. And now, Doctor Busner, I believe what professional business we have with one another is concluded. I might, were yours a social visit, ask you remain a while and take another cup of tea. It is — he gestures towards the set — mine and Missus Haines’s usual practice to watch a television programme at this time — this evening we are both looking forward to the Two Ronnies. However, for reasons I’ve already made crystal clear, yours is not — nor could ever be — a social visit, and therefore you would oblige me by leaving post-haste.