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I returned with it to Morgan’s office and hung about outside and shortly he emerged. He reached out a hand for the book and I surrendered it to him. He examined the title on the spine before flicking it open and regarding the list of contents, then he slammed it shut, releasing a little cloud of dust, and handed it back to me. ‘Shakespeare, eh? Never could understand what all the fuss was about.’
Well, I thought, that is no great surprise. It would be difficult for a lover of the bard to show so little sympathy for others. Still, I did not want to take him on over this, not after our earlier spat. Save your battles for the things worth fighting for has always been my motto, so I merely smiled, like someone appreciating the confession of a venial weakness by a superior being. This evidently put me back into Morgan’s good books and I realised he was a man who did not like to be challenged on anything. I’ve often observed this in those who are completely sure of everything they do. It’s as if the exposure of any small chink in their certainty would demolish the whole edifice.
Morgan pulled out his watch. ‘The boat will be in by now and we will have to review the new intake. They will be arriving directly at the examination room.’
We passed through the day room on our way there and, immediately Morgan opened the door, in contrast to the dead silence of the day before, were greeted by a great noise. I saw that at this early hour the inmates were not seated listlessly around the room as on the previous afternoon, but instead were on their hands and knees scrubbing the floor. I could have kicked myself for my naïveté in thinking it was thanks to the attendants that the place was spotless.
‘The patients do the housework?’ I asked, pausing to look at them.
‘Yes, they do some of the physical work around the place, mainly cleaning in the mornings. The physical exertion tires them and makes them less violent and more compliant. In the afternoons they are fatigued from the exercise and more likely to sit here quietly. And it kills two birds with one stone. The place would not be viable if we had to pay for staff to clean it on top of everything else.’ He began to walk away.
I looked at the women and was thinking how exhausting their chores must be on the meagre rations I had seen them consuming yesterday, when I noticed one of them had stopped her scrubbing and had sat back on her haunches and was staring at me. It was the young girl I had seen sharing her bread yesterday. Our eyes locked again and I began once more to feel uncomfortable but then, at the very moment I thought I should have to be the one to break the spell, her lips trembled into the suggestion of a smile, which I could not help returning. It was the first communication I had had with any of the lunatics.
I realised Morgan was nearly at the other end of the room by now and turned and hurried after him, but such was the impression made by those black eyes and that suspicion of a smile that they lingered in my mind the rest of the day.
4 (#ulink_6263b4f1-34ce-5d00-8622-17560909506b)
The daily morning boat had delivered us three new inmates, judged insane by the doctors at the city asylum. One was an old woman, with untidy straggly grey hair, who sat in a chair, muttering away to herself and carefully picking imaginary fleas from her clothes, imaginary because she had been thoroughly bathed and reclothed at the hospital. She was just the sort of woman one saw about the streets of big cities all the time, begging and sleeping in doorways. I said as much to Morgan.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but that does not mean she isn’t mad. A good percentage, if not all, of such creatures would not pass the test for sanity. It is their madness that has led them to their unfortunate situation. But the state cannot afford to treat every one of them.’
He asked the woman her name, to which she replied, ‘Mary, Mary quite contrary,’ and made herself laugh, a most hideous cackle that revealed she lacked a good few teeth; most of the survivors were blackened stumps. She stared at us a moment and then resumed her flea harvesting, giving it her full concentration as though we were not there. Morgan asked the attendant standing with us for the woman’s history.
The attendant consulted a paper file she was holding. ‘Persistent vagrant, well known to the city police. Her mind has been ailing for some time now, it seems, and it has finally got to the stage where she is a danger to others and to herself. She tried to take a lady’s purse, being quite convinced it was her own. The police judged it not a simple matter of theft as the woman herself did not consider it stealing but taking back what was rightfully hers.’
‘A diagnosis of senile dementia,’ said Morgan, studying the notes. ‘One that I agree with. And this one?’
The second woman was very young, perhaps twenty or so, and catatonic. Her eyes looked vacantly ahead of her. It was obvious nobody was home.
‘May have smothered her baby, sir, although that’s not certain,’ replied the attendant, passing him more notes.
Morgan stood reading them for several minutes, then handed them to me. There was a coroner’s report into the death of the baby that was inconclusive. The mother had been found in her lodging house sitting holding the body of the infant, which had been dead for several days. She had not spoken and was completely unresponsive to questions and so had been sent to the city asylum for an assessment, where she was judged insane and referred to the island.
Morgan approached her. He waved his hand up and down across her line of vision. There was no reaction. She did not even blink. He turned to me. ‘Some pathology of the brain means it has failed to function properly. In all likelihood she killed her baby without realising what she was doing. Do you agree?’
I tried to read those lifeless eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said, slowly, ‘but do you not think, sir, that it’s possible the baby died by some accident or illness and that the woman fell into this state through grief at losing her child?’
‘There you go again!’ It was said wearily. He shook his head. ‘People do not go mad because they are upset, man. We all get upset but few of us become mad. Science shows madness has a pathological cause. There is some physical malfunction in the brain. You can require no better proof than this woman here. She shows none of the normal signs of grief, no weeping, no tearing of the hair. As you can clearly see, she is completely unemotional.’
I did not know what to say. I could not argue with his science. I had only the evidence of my own eyes and my knowledge of human nature. I thought of Lady Macduff and her frenzy after the murder of her children. I thought of Ophelia with her flowers, unable to be reached after the death of her father at the hand of her lover. And I remembered too the suggestion in the Scottish Play that the somnambulant queen has lost a child or is unable to have children. Does she murder Duncan because she is mad or does she go mad only because of the guilt of murdering him? I could not help thinking that Shakespeare understood what makes us humans tick better than modern science as related to me by Dr Morgan.
I was tempted to say all this but then, remembering my earlier diagnosis of Morgan’s character, decided discretion was the wiser part. There was nothing to be gained by taking him on over this. He was not about to release the woman, and anyway, what was Hecuba to me?
We moved on to the third woman who, in contrast to the others, had an intelligent, alert expression. Before the attendant could say anything, she herself spoke. ‘I have been sent here by mistake, sir. There is nothing wrong with my mind, I assure you.’
Morgan turned to the attendant and raised an eyebrow, saying to me in a whisper, ‘They nearly all say that.’
The attendant looked at the notes. ‘She caused a disturbance at the restaurant where she had previously been employed as a waitress. She’d been dismissed for being absent from work two days in a row.’
Morgan took the notes and looked them over. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Quite an impressive disturbance, I see. Smashed the place up, threw a plate through the window, broke crockery, swore at the manager and screamed at the customers.’ He lifted his eyes from the notes to the woman.
She coloured. ‘I was not myself, sir. You see, my little girl – she’s only two, sir – was sick, sir, and I was too worried about her to leave her and go to work. I sent word to explain but they wouldn’t hear of it, sir. And so I lost my job and then I couldn’t pay the doctor’s bills.’
Morgan looked again at the notes. ‘I see you assaulted the doctor, too.’ There was a stern gravity about the way he said this, as though he named the worst of all possible crimes.
The woman looked down. ‘I did, sir. I don’t know what came over me. He wouldn’t take my promise for payment for the medicine. He wouldn’t give me anything for my daughter. My head was in a spin, sir. I lost control. But my daughter is better. She’s being looked after by a relative now. And I’m all right, sir. I’m not crazy, really I’m not.’
‘We don’t like to use words like “crazy” here,’ Morgan said kindly. ‘What you are is mentally ill.’
The woman began to protest but he held up a hand to silence her and you had to admire the natural authority the man possessed, because she immediately fell quiet. She was smart enough to know that arguing might reinforce the diagnosis against her.
‘You’re mentally ill. It is not something to be ashamed of; it is a physical illness, no different from heart disease or diabetes. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in this great city who suffer setbacks and difficulties daily in their lives. They do not go smashing up restaurants. They do not attack doctors.’
‘It wasn’t really what you would call an attack, sir. I slapped his face, and then only the once, sir.’
‘They do not attack doctors. The fact that you did these things, which mentally healthy people do not do, no matter how much pressure they are under, indicates there is something faulty in your brain. This is the best place for you.’
‘But, sir, I cannot stay here. I must go home and look after my daughter.’
‘Madam, stay here you must. You have been committed. Believe me, this is the right home for you at present. Here you will get the treatment you need.’
Tears ran down the woman’s cheeks and she began wringing her hands. ‘But sir, I – I—’
‘There, there, calm yourself. Everything will be all right. It’s a great shock to find yourself in a place like this, I know. But it is your best chance of becoming well again.’ He smiled, handed the notes back to the attendant, turned to me and said, ‘Right, let’s be getting along now,’ and made for the door.
‘How long will it take?’ I said, as I struggled as usual to keep up with him.
‘How long will what take?’
‘For that woman to recover her health and get back to her child. She seemed perfectly sane and sensible to me.’
He stopped and smiled at me patronisingly. ‘To you, yes, because you have no practical experience. Here the woman is under no pressure, but what would happen if she were let loose in the world again and some little thing in her life went wrong? How many restaurants would she destroy then, eh? How many doctors would she beat up – or worse?’
I said nothing. I could see he would only grow angry again if I took him on.
‘You and I would not behave so. At least I know I wouldn’t, and I hope you wouldn’t either. But she will do the same again because there is a pathological illness of the brain underlying her actions. It’s a physical thing and not something that can be altered by “kindness”. Now do you understand?’
This last question was rhetorical and he strode on. I stared after him. How easily I could imagine him smashing something or striking someone, there was the irony of the thing! I couldn’t help but smile at his assuming me to be so peaceable too. Seeming, seeming! How simple it is to judge a sane man mad and a mad man sane! What a combination Morgan and I made. The lunatics had taken over the asylum.
I had an hour to myself before dinner and, although the Shakespeare called invitingly from my bedside table, settled down to read Moral Treatment.
The introduction itself was sufficient to make me understand Morgan’s hostility. ‘In the past,’ wrote the Reverend Abrahams, ‘a cruel and inhuman regime was practised against those unfortunates judged to be suffering from mental illness. They were treated more like animals than humans with souls. They were imprisoned, beaten, put under restraint and subjected to all manner of indignities. They lost all their rights and were often committed to institutions for life with no recourse to appeal. In most cases this treatment had no therapeutic value.
‘In twenty years of dealing with the mentally ill, I have treated them according to my Christian principles, with the result that the vast majority have had their symptoms sufficiently alleviated to be able to take their places in society and lead a contented and useful life …’
This was so at odds with Morgan’s philosophy that I found myself utterly absorbed. In the opening chapters Abrahams, who acknowledged himself a Quaker, explained the day-to-day running of his small hospital. Patients were treated as fellow members of the human race. They were kept busy at simple tasks such as gardening, sewing, carpentry and the like according to their tastes and abilities. During their leisure times they were encouraged to read, to take walks around the grounds, to play games both indoor and outdoor, including card games, chess, croquet and tennis; they were offered entertainment in the form of lectures, plays and musical gatherings. They were not made to feel different from the rest of mankind but wore their own clothes and were spoken to with respect by the staff. They were rarely locked up and only then on occasions when they were thought to represent a physical threat to themselves or others, which were rare. They were given wholesome and nutritious food. Above all, the people who looked after them, who were not doctors but ministers and trained nurses, talked with them regularly and listened to their accounts of what troubled them.
Under this system, according to Abrahams, the vast majority of his patients recovered, usually in a matter of months, and were well enough to be restored to their families. It was his firm belief that for most people mental illness was not a permanent state of being but a temporary crisis, brought about by some misfortune, which might be anything from a family death to a financial collapse. When handled with sympathy and kindness, patients recovered and became, with only a few exceptions, their former selves.
All of this was so reasonably argued, and put down in such a matter-of-fact way, with many examples of individual cases, that by the time I closed the book, I was already well on the way to being convinced.
5 (#ulink_97c4adbd-5c4d-51da-8e72-9a0bf3c0bc3b)
Dinner found Morgan in affable mood. He discoursed upon his youth and his experiences as a doctor practising in an ordinary hospital, treating all manner of illnesses and injuries, and recounted anecdotes, some of which were genuinely amusing and others so concerned with the blood and gore often associated with doctoring that I didn’t consider them conducive to enjoying my dinner, although I made sure I ate my fill anyway.
At one stage he asked me about myself, saying he would like to know a little of my history beyond what he had seen in my application for employment, that he knew all about my education at medical school, but nothing personal about me. I improvised easily the rest of my background, cheerfully killing off my father, an attorney, when I was ten, when he was trampled to death by an unruly horse (‘You seem to have inherited his misfortune for accidents involving transportation,’ Morgan interposed at this point, a remark I could not help thinking would have been insensitive had either of the incidents he was referring to actually happened), and disposing of my mother by means of the scarlet fever, which carried her off when I was sixteen. The result of recounting my struggles as an orphan was to see Morgan look at me with something like admiration, seeing me in a new light, as I described the various vicissitudes I’d endured as I single-handedly worked my way through school. The whole was a mixture of truth and invention. It was a technique I’d used so many times before, it came easily to me – creating the background for a character, the bits in between the lines that aren’t written down.
‘Bravo,’ he said, pouring us another glass of wine and then lifting his in a toast that I copied. ‘Your unfortunate past has been the making of you. It has provided you with grit and determination to work hard. It will serve you far better than being born with a silver spoon in your mouth and treading the primrose path.’
I beamed with pride, feeling very satisfied with my new self.
Back in my room I spent a long evening absorbed by more of Moral Treatment. It was not the sort of book I had been used to. Drama, novels and poetry had been my literary meat and drink, and I had some difficulty following all the arguments put forward in it, although my interest always picked up when I came across any case history the author included by way of example. It was always people that fascinated me. Facts are too malleable to make me have much respect for them.
I heard the clock strike midnight as I struggled through the second half of the book, yawning all the while. It was no wonder I was tired. There was the business of the wreck and the injuries I had suffered. Besides the blow to the head, I had sore ribs and an ache in my back that made it hard for me to sit comfortably, no matter how I tried to arrange myself. Then there had been all the stress to my nerves of arriving here, the pressure of being a new, untried employee, the battle within myself to keep in line, to overcome my obstreperous nature and not speak against the hard treatment of the poor wretches who were my fellow inhabitants of this place, separated from me by that most fragile of borders, chance. The wine at dinner had not helped either, so that at some point, notwithstanding my determination to plough through to the end of the book and prepare my arguments for the morrow, I must have fallen asleep.
I had the dream again, the one that always seems to return in times of trouble. I was back on my uncle’s chicken farm, where I’d arrived the day before following the death of my mother. I’d never had a father; he’d run off before I was even born. I was eleven years old and my uncle had just strapped me because he’d told me I had to earn my keep and I’d refused to kill a chicken.
I stood before him, my pants around my ankles, my bare backside sore from the blows. I put a tentative hand behind me and felt something wet. When I inspected it, I saw it was stained with blood. My uncle watched me, breathing heavily, his belt swinging from his right hand. ‘Well, boy, what’s it to be,’ he said, ‘you or the chicken?’
‘Does it have to be one or the other, sir?’ I said. ‘Is there not something else I may do to earn my keep?’
‘There are plenty of other things you will be doing. None of them can be instead of this. You have to learn the business. You know Martha can’t bear children. You can be like a son to us and then one day this farm will be yours. You have to be able to run it.’
I tried to look grateful. It was the first time I ever put on an act. I pretended to be a boy who wanted to spend his whole life on a chicken farm, with the scent of chicken shit clogging up his nostrils.
‘Come on now, let’s give it another try.’ He began threading the belt through the loops on his pants.
I pulled up my pants, which hurt as they slid over the wounds on my backside. I tried not to cry. I could tell my uncle was not someone who would approve of a boy crying.
He went inside the big barn where the chickens were and came out holding a bird in each hand. He held them by their feet and they dangled helplessly, flapping their wings and clucking their heads off. I wanted to put my hands over my ears to shut out the noise but I knew it would be a mistake.
‘Here, take this one.’ He held out one of the birds. Gingerly I put both my hands around its legs. This made the bird even more agitated and the movement of its wings more frenzied and instantly I let go, but my uncle still had it so it couldn’t get away. ‘Get hold of it!’ He was mad again now.
I bit my lip and took the bird, my head recoiling from it, but this time I had it firmly by the legs. I held it at arm’s length. I didn’t want it flapping against me.
‘Now pay attention. It don’t take but a second, so you need to watch nice and close, OK?’
I nodded. What I really wanted to do was close my eyes. This was the second demonstration. I had no wish to see another bird slaughtered.
He put his free hand around the hen’s neck and released the other from its feet. Then he put that around the neck too. The bird’s body was swinging, a crazy pendulum. ‘Now all you have to do is twist, like so.’ There was a soft crack and after a few seconds the bird stopped moving and hung lifeless from his hand. ‘See, ain’t nothing to it, son.’
I stared back at him. My chicken was going berserk, squawking its head off, and I felt sure it had seen the other’s fate and knew what was coming. I wondered idly whether a chicken was really smart enough to figure all that out.
‘Now you.’
I gritted my teeth. Bile rose up in my throat and I thought for a moment I was going to vomit over my feet but I managed to hold it down. I put one hand around the chicken’s neck, got a good hold of it and let the feet drop.
‘That’s it, perfect,’ said my uncle.
I put my other hand around the hen’s neck. The feathers felt soft and warm, so warm. I could feel the bird’s blood beating fast through my fingertips. I swear its eyes widened in terror, although I later discovered that a chicken’s eyes couldn’t do that. I shut my own eyes and twisted exactly as my uncle had shown me. The bird’s wings were banging against me. I imagined my hands were huge and they were around my uncle’s neck and that I was about to snap the life out of him so I wouldn’t ever have to do this again. There was a click and after a last frantic flurry the bird stopped moving. Slowly I opened my eyes and saw its head was flopped over my wrist.
‘That’s my boy!’ cried my uncle. I looked up at him and smiled.
‘Come on, son,’ he said, turning back toward the barn. ‘We have another fifty to do today.’
As it always did, the dream jerked me awake. My fists were clenched around something soft and I opened my eyes and in the guttering light of my near burnt-out candle discovered my hands were squeezed around the pillow on which I’d fallen asleep. I was in a dreadful sweat. And then I heard the slightest sound and looked up from my fingers and saw a figure in the room, a woman in a white nightshift standing at the desk, her back to me.
I shot bolt upright. ‘What in God’s name—’ I began and at that very moment the candle went out and the room turned black. I leapt from the bed and lunged for the figure but she was too fast for me and I grabbed only air. I heard the slam of the door and the patter of feet fading away along the corridor outside.
I stumbled to the door and out into the corridor. Everything was dark. I looked this way and that, up and down the passage, but couldn’t see a thing, no glimpse of a person, no flicker of a light. I had no idea which direction the woman had taken. I stood still and held my breath and by some primitive animal instinct knew the intruder was there too and also holding her breath and immobile. And then, I guess when she knew she would have to breathe out and so give herself away, she was off, and the scamper of bare feet told me the way. I tried to follow but, unable to see even an inch in front of me, I was overwhelmed by the sensation that I was about to collide with something, even though as far as I could remember the corridor was clear of any furniture or other obstruction. My heart was beating fast and I had the constant fear of some harpy about to leap out at me and put her claws into my throat. I shuffled along, hands stretched in front of me to prevent collision with any unseen objects. I could hear nothing because of my own noise, so I paused, and there were a couple of footfalls ahead of me and then silence again. It was a cat-and-mouse game, with my prey waiting until I should move and the sound I made conceal her own movement. I felt my way along the corridor wall and eventually my hands met thin air as I came to a side passage.
I did not know which way to go and stood there shivering in the dark for what seemed like an age. If I chose wrong, she would escape me easily. I had the sense again that she was nearby, although she could surely have gotten far away by now while I had been fumbling around. I suddenly felt a fool because I realised she was playing with me, finding a macabre humour in the chase, letting me think I could catch her when she knew I could not. I strained my ears but everything was silent and then, just as I was about to decide at random and hope to pick the right direction, I heard the merest hint of another’s breath, not far away. Instantly I took off, shuffling along to avoid tripping on anything, because I’d never explored this side passage. I heard the soft touch of feet gliding over bare floorboards only a few yards ahead of me and tried to speed up, but somehow my body would not let me, its fear of a collision with my prey too great. The hair on my neck bristled against my collar. My forehead was clammy from the terror of it all. Then, of a sudden, how or why I could not explain, I sensed she was just in front of me, a stretch of the hand – hers or mine – away. I steeled myself, took another step and made a grab, expecting to grasp warm flesh, and met instead something solid and cold that I realised was a wall.
I explored it with the palms of my hands, up and down and from side to side, but found nothing. The corridor ended in a solid wall. I was baffled. I turned and began to creep back toward the main passage. I held my hands out and felt the walls either side of me. The corridor was too narrow for the woman to have slipped past me without our touching. Her disappearance defied all logic. Then, I guess about halfway along this tributary of the main corridor, my left hand felt something different. Further investigation revealed there was a door let into the wall. I fumbled around and eventually met the cold metal of a handle. I turned it and pushed the door, which did not yield. It was evidently locked.
Still, at least the puzzle was explained. The woman must have flattened herself into this doorway and stood there while I crept past. That would have been the moment when I paused, sensing her presence close to me. And then, once I had gone by, she had returned silently to the main corridor.
I made my way slowly back to it and had just reached the junction when I heard a sound that made my blood freeze. A terrible distant laugh, my opponent braying her triumph. I knew it was useless to pursue her now, even had I had the nerve and inclination; she was too far off. I experienced a moment of frustration at her having toyed with me so and gotten the better of me, but it was subsumed by relief from the responsibility of pursuing her further. I returned to my room, where I found and lit another candle. I was so jumpy that the hiss of the match and the shadows dancing on the walls startled me. I almost expected the light to reveal the woman standing right in front of me. I had no key with which to lock my door, so took the chair from my desk and set its back beneath the handle. I knew I would do this every night from now on, to prevent another intrusion.
In my nervous state, sleep was out of the question. I picked up Moral Treatment and, without getting undressed, which I knew would make me feel more vulnerable, lay down on my bed and began to read. By the time the first light was stealing around the edges of the window blind, I had finished the book.
6 (#ulink_ab8482ff-b908-519b-96f4-397aaa6b7247)
Next day, fired up with enthusiasm, I went to breakfast to do battle with Morgan, so convinced by the good reverend’s arguments that I felt sure my employer could not fail to be impressed by them too. While he sat eating his breakfast in a leisurely manner, I used all my experience in making my case, presenting it as if it were the closing defence speech in some courtroom melodrama. From time to time I glanced at him and found him listening attentively, nodding his head now and then, which made me hope I was winning him over to my way of thinking. At last I had presented all my – that is to say Abrahams’s – case and, falling silent, looked at him expectantly.
He sat smiling, and I thought I had carried the day, until I recognised it as the kind of smile one puts on to indulge a small child. At last he spoke. ‘I have to admit I admire your enthusiasm,’ he began, and I felt a glow of pride, but then he added, ‘but I’m afraid it’s misplaced. The ideas you espouse are woefully out of date. These things were tried years ago and proved to be a dismal failure.’ I opened my mouth to protest but he held up a hand to silence me. ‘Oh, I dare say you’ve read some of the claims these people make and no doubt they had a good outcome once in a while, but generally these theories have long been discredited. You see, these people were priests and unqualified do-gooders; they were not medical men. It’s only comparatively recently that we doctors have become involved in the mental health problem. It’s now generally recognised that insanity is not to do with social pressures and personal misfortune, but is a pathological problem. It’s a physical disorder of the brain and, as such, must be managed. It cannot be cured so easily as you and the people who’ve influenced you think. Believe me, I’ve had years of experience and I assure you – who’ve had none – that I know what I’m talking about.’
I protested that surely he must agree that the way the staff at the hospital treated disturbed people could not be helping their condition. Did he not think, I asked, of trying a gentler method?
At that he began to grow angry and his face became red and choleric. ‘How many attendants would we have to have for there to be sufficient of them to spend time chattering with the patients? Who will be playing music for them? Who will be supervising their games? Where is the money to come from to pay for the sumptuous feasts you wish to provide them with?’
We batted the thing back and forth until finally I could see that I was getting nowhere. All I achieved was to increase his ire. Finally, at the end of one of his tirades I decided enough was enough. I hung my head and said nothing. There was an awkward silence. It was Morgan who broke it. He cleared his throat and said, ‘Look, I’m not an unreasonable man and I don’t want to discourage someone who’s just starting out in the profession. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll give you a chance to prove your ideas can work.’
I looked up. ‘How will you do that?’
‘I’ll indulge you this far: you may take one patient, any patient you like, so long as it’s not one of the violent ones. And you can treat her according to your notions. Separate her from the rest, give her different clothes, she can eat what the staff eat. She can have her own interests, although she’ll only have you to play cards with or else she’ll have to make do with solitaire.’
I was almost too stunned to speak. ‘Y-you’re serious?’ I said at last.
‘Completely.’
‘Then thank you, sir.’ I was grinning like a fool. ‘That’s incredibly generous of you. I truly appreciate the opportunity.’
‘I should think so,’ he said, picking up his coffee cup and taking a sip. He set it down and beamed at me. ‘It’s the chance to find out for yourself how wrong you are.’ He began to rise from the table, even though I’d been so busy talking I’d had no time to eat anything. ‘This afternoon you can select your guinea pig.’
Morgan strode along the day room, gesturing expansively with his arms at the wretches ringed around it. ‘There you are, take your pick. Select one on whom to practise your experiment. Anyone you like, it’s up to you.’ He stood still, fingers in his vest pockets, smiling broadly, rocking back and forth on his heels, a poker player smug with a winning hand and enjoying himself immensely.
I looked at the sea of faces; many were muttering to themselves, others gazed into space, or dozed with their eyes closed, or fiddled with their fingers, or picked invisible bugs from their clothes, regarding their actions with intense fascination. Here and there I would find a woman staring at me, sometimes eagerly, as if she required only the merest nod from me to engage me in conversation, or, more often, fearfully, as though she thought I was about to whisk her off for a long cold bath or an afternoon tied to a chair.
