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Doyle?’
    â€˜Yes. I didn’t dream, thank heavens.’
    A thermometer is stuck into his mouth. One of the nurses examines the chart at the end of his bed, looks at Doyle, looks back at the chart. Doyle, silenced by the thermometer, wants to compliment them on the quality of the new blood they have given him. He has been replenished with curiosity.
    The thermometer is taken out, held, shaken, replaced in a glass of disinfectant. Doyle awaits pills in a red beaker, but he’s given none and the nurses pass away from him, still whispering.
    When they leave the ward, Doyle gets out of bed and stands up. In the bed next to his, a bald man who has dreams of tap-dancing is inserting his morning teeth. Doyle walks quietly over the lino to the swing doors of his ward, then out into the wide hygenic corridor where an Indian woman is polishing the floor.
    â€˜Alexandra Ward?’ he asks.
    The Indian woman, with a jewel-pierced nose, is a stooped and slow person. She examines Doyle’s bandaged arm, his hospital nightshirt, his hirsute legs beneath.
    â€˜Left,’ she says blankly.
    Doyle nods, turns left into an identical corridor. No one sees him yet. He comes to a waiting area, where plastic chairs of the kind which creaked under the pelvis of Sergeant McCluskie are lined up in two rows. To his left, now, he sees a green and white sign saying Alexandra Ward, Princess Anne Ward, Edith Cavell Ward. He has come to the women’s territory.
    He hears footsteps approaching the reception area. Without hesitation, he opens the swing doors to Alexandra Ward and finds himself in a shadowy room, where the patients are still sleeping.
    But at the far end of the room, he recognises her – the only one awake and staring at the window. He knows the name, the voice, the profile. He has even read her book, with its preposterous title, The Salvation of Man. The minute he sees her, he feels excitement stir, shamefaced, under the ludicrous night garment. He moves gravely towards her. She is, he summarises, one of the stars of dissent.
    Still no one discovers him. The pink woman sleeps with her cherub mouth wide and her knitting folded on her feet. All the other Alexandrine women sleep, rasping through the discomforts of the short night. Only Charlotte sees him now, ridiculous in his gown, unshaven, pale and wild. She isn’t afraid. Charlotte is seldom afraid. She wants to laugh. He reminds her of a younger Jack Lemmon. Any minute, she knows, he will be carried off by the day-shift nurses beginning duty.
    But the day-shift nurses allotted to Alexandra Ward are busy elsewhere. Burn victims of a tenement fire are being wheeled, screaming, into the hospital. Nurses are running, surgeons are hauled from sleep, lights are going on in anterooms and operating rooms, vents hiss and blow, in the sluice rooms water gushes. And so it is because of a fire, in which two people will have died, because of Sergeant McCluskie’s need to open his bowels after his dreary, caffeinated night, that Franklin Doyle is able to walk out of his ward and into Charlotte’s ward and sit on her bed for four minutes before McCluskie returns, sees him and hauls him away.
    â€˜You’re Charlotte Browne . . .’ he whispers lamely.
    She nods, lazily. In this one, unfrightened gesture, she has accepted the stranger on her bed.
    â€˜Franklin Doyle,’ he states hurriedly, ‘scriptwriter, film-maker, bum . . .’
    She smiles. In the grey light, she is superb.
    â€˜I dare say that policeman will remove you.’
    Doyle ignores this, hurries on: ‘Why are the press interested this time?’
    â€˜Are they?’
    â€˜I heard the press are here.’
    â€˜They may be. They’re always interested.’
    â€˜What have you done, Charlotte?’
    â€˜Something. So I’ll do a stretch this time. Long.’
    â€˜Want to tell it to someone who gets it right?’
    â€˜To a