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inflamed tissue and pus was so less frightening than the imagination of what lay beneath the smooth gauze. Well, he had got used to blood. He had got used to death. In time he might even get used to being a doctor.
    They moved together into the small clinical room at the front of the building. He went to the basin and began methodically sluicing his hands and forearms as if his brief examination of young Georgie had been a messy surgical procedure requiring a thorough cleansing. Behind his back he could hear the clink of instruments. Helen was unnecessarily tidying the surgical cupboard yet once more. With a sinking heart he realized that they were going to have to talk. But not yet. Not yet. And he knew what she would say. He had heard it all before, the old insistent arguments spoken in that confident school prefect’s voice. “You’re wasted here. You’re a doctor, not a dispensing chemist. You’ve got to break free, free of Maggie and Wilfred. You can’t put loyalty to Wilfred before your vocation.” His vocation! That was the word his mother had always used. It made him want to break into hysterical laughter.
    He switched on the tap to full and the water came gushingout, swirling round the basin, filling his ears like the sound of the incoming tide. What had it been like for Victor, that hurtle into oblivion? Had the clumsy wheelchair, heavy with its own momentum, sailed into space like one of those ridiculous flying contraptions in a James Bond film, the little manikin secure among his gadgets, ready to pull the lever and sport wings? Or had it twisted and tumbled through the air, bouncing off the rock face, with Victor coffined in canvas and metal, flailing impotent arms, adding his screams to the cry of the gulls? Had his heavy body broken free of the strap in mid-air, or had the canvas held until that final annihilating crash against the flat iron rocks, the first sucking wave of the relentless unthinking sea? And what had been in his mind? Exaltation or despair, terror or a blessed nothingness? Had the clean air and the sea wiped it all away, the pain, the bitterness, the malice?
    It was only after his death that the full extent of Victor’s malice had been known, in the codicil to his will. He had taken trouble to let the other patients know that he had money, that he paid the full fee at Toynton Grange, modest though that was, and wasn’t, as were all the others except Henry Carwardine, dependent upon the benevolence of a local authority. He had never told them the source of his wealth—he had, after all, been a schoolmaster and they were hardly well paid—and they still didn’t know. He might have told Maggie of course. There were a number of things he might have told Maggie. But on this she had been unaccountably silent.
    Eric Hewson didn’t believe that Maggie had taken an interest in Victor simply because of the money. They had, after all, had something in common. They had both made no secret that they hated Toynton Grange, that they were there of necessity not of choice, that they despised their companions. Probably Maggie found Victor’s rebarbativemalice to her liking. They had certainly spent a great deal of time together. Wilfred had seemed almost to welcome it, almost as if he thought Maggie was at last finding her proper place at Toynton. She had taken her turn at wheeling Victor in his heavy chair to his favourite spot. He had found some kind of peace in sight of the sea. Maggie and he had spent hours together, out of sight of the house, high on the edge of the cliff. But it hadn’t worried him. He knew, none better, that Maggie could never love a man who couldn’t satisfy her physically. He welcomed the friendship. At least it gave her something to occupy her time, kept her quiet.
    He couldn’t remember exactly when she had begun to become excited about the money. Victor must have said something. Maggie had changed almost overnight.