Sleep and His Brother Read online

  Mrs. Dixon-Jones had been writing in a quick, neat, sloping hand on a duplicate pad. Now she added her initials, tore off the top copy and thrust it onto a vertical spike, and handed the duplicate to Dr. Silver.

  “Remind Doll to tell me the exact figures when you’ve got them,” she said. “This is going to cost the earth, Ram.”

  “Mr. T. can stand it. That part’s easy. Now we’ve got to dream up a method of attracting a series of random callers to that door, in such a way that we can prove that not even you or I knew who was coming next. To think I’ve been sitting here four months without spotting what a unique research tool my own front door was! End of breakthrough one. Breakthrough two: meet Mr. Pibble!”

  “Me?” The dozing soldier in the sentry box between Pibble’s­ ears snapped to attention, late and guilty. He’d hardly been listening­ to the rattle of orders. Most of his mind had been puzzling­ about Dr. Silver’s language. The man’s accent was a very neutral­, run-of-the-mill English, without lilt or distortion; not the Lebanese-­American one might have expected. But he used a manic assortment of words and phrases, don and half-hip and gangster and journalese and babu—what sort of scientist talks, literally, about “brain waves” one sentence after addressing an ex-detective­ superintendent as “copper”?

  “Yes, you, Mr. Pibble. What paranormal experiences have you had, sir?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “Ah, cock! No hunches in your job? No intuitions? How long were you a bluebottle?”

  “Thirty-four years. I wouldn’t call that sort of thing a paranormal experience, though. Of course I’ve sometimes felt a pull about a case without tangible evidence to back my instincts up; but I was probably wrong half the time, and the other half I’d noticed things subconsciously which would have been evidence if I’d noticed them consciously. I never liked hunches; if they work once, you start to look for them after that, and then the wildest fancy becomes an article of faith. That type of policeman doesn’t last long. What’s up, beyond my having figured by accident in the episode at the door?”

  Dr. Silver picked up the little globe from the desk and held it between finger and thumb, like a conjuror about to perform some legerdemain with an egg. His fingers were very short and stubby.

  “See,” he said softly, “my right hand sends a signal.” He tossed the toy spinning toward the ceiling.

  “And my left hand receives it!” he cried. The globe fell with a slap into the olive palm. The shock of its fall must have released the catch, for the lid shot up, loosing the spark that set the small wick flaming.

  “Bravo!” called Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “I can’t even get it to light.”

  Dr. Silver stared at the flame in a smiling trance. Pibble could see the light of it glisten off his spectacles: they were as eccentric an affectation as his language, for the glass was quite flat.

  “Do it again, Ram,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

  “Have you figured the odds, Posey?” said Dr. Silver in an accent of awe. “This surely is my day, when things go right for me. So let’s get on. My hand cannot catch this little jigger, Mr. Pibble, unless my other hand has thrown it. Same with a signal. You need a transmitter, one; and a receiver, two. Now we believe our kids here to be highly sensitive receivers. They also transmit, but we can’t control their transmissions. They won’t receive freely from adults—”

  “They always know when I’m tired or sad or angry,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

  “So do I, Posey. So do I. But when have you seen them work a trick like this—a copper who’s lost his hat? When?”

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “And you’ve been here how long?”

  “Seventeen years.”

  “Hallelujah! Mr. Pibble, there’s a rational chance that you’re the transmitter we’ve been looking for.”

  “Well, of course I’d be glad to help, but …” Pibble let his doubt hang in the air. He foresaw desert days of sitting behind cheat-proof screens, under the eyes of independent witnesses of the highest probity, while he tried to transmit a mental image of a teddy bear to a child with an IQ of sixty-five. Dr. Silver slapped him jauntily on the shoulder.

  “Hell, man,” he boomed. “Mr. T. will make it worth your while. On, on! What mood were you in when you approached the door?”

  “No particular mood. What do you mean?”

  “Excited, man! Stimulated! Happy! Angry! Depressed!”

  “None of those, really. My wife had asked me to come and talk to Mrs. Dixon-Jones about an idea that had come up at one of these fund-raising affairs. I suppose I was a little reluctant to meet the children, because I expected them to be much less, well, fetching than they are. Otherwise I was rather low-keyed—almost apathetic. I wanted to spray my roses.”

  “Stupendous!” sighed Dr. Silver in three long syllables of ecstasy. “Apathy! Boredom! They’re the key. How often have I said so, Posey?”

  “Often enough for me to know what you mean by apathy and boredom. For heaven’s sake take the man away and get his little adventure down on paper. If you’re going to put him on the payroll, let me have a note—I refuse to be hounded by auditors and tax hounds in twelve months’ time, when I’ve forgotten all about him. Good-bye, Mr. Pibble. You’ll give my love to dear Mary, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Pibble, wincing at this sudden salvo after the armistice appeared to have been signed. Dr. Silver blew her a kiss, and she frowned at him—a not-in-front-of-the servants frown. The big man gathered his notes together, and Pibble waited for him, dazed. He felt as if he were embarking on a mysterious safari, and not being allowed to take with him even the bare necessities of reason. Or were once more at the start of that unbanishable recurring dream in which he received the Police Medal from the Queen Mother with his shirttails twitching around bare thighs. That nightmare shyness was echoed by the reality, for the convulsive gusts of Dr. Silver’s enthusiasm seemed to insist that other men ought to strip off their safe, tweedy responses and prance naked. No wonder his signals did not penetrate to the cathypnics, if apathy was the key.

  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 do
wn 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, “absoloootly outsteending.” 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 mil
d 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?”