The Complete Short Stories

The Impossible Man

At low tide, their eggs buried at last in the broken sand below the dunes, the turtles began their return journey to the sea. To Conrad Foster, watching beside his uncle from the balustrade along the beach road, there seemed little more than fifty yards to the safety of the slack water. The turtles laboured on, their dark humps hidden among the orange crates and the drifts of kelp washed up from the sea. Conrad pointed to the flock of gulls resting on the submerged sandbank in the mouth of the estuary. The birds had been staring out to sea, as if uninterested in the deserted shoreline where the old man and the boy waited by the rail, but at this small movement of Conrad’s a dozen white heads turned together.

‘They’ve seen them…’ Conrad let his arm fall to the rail. ‘Uncle Theodore, do you think—?’

His uncle gestured with the stick at a car moving along the road a quarter of a mile away. ‘It could have been the car.’ He took his pipe from his mouth as a cry came from the sandbank. The first flight of gulls rose into the air and began to turn like a scythe towards the shore. ‘Here they come.’

The turtles had emerged from the shelter of the debris by the tideline. They advanced across the sheet of damp sand that sloped down to the sea, the screams of the gulls tearing at the air over their heads.

Involuntarily Conrad moved away towards the row of chalets and the deserted tea garden on the outskirts of the town. His uncle held his arm. The turtles were being picked from the shallow water and dropped on the sand, then dismembered by a dozen beaks.

Within barely a minute of their arrival the birds began to rise from the beach. Conrad and his uncle had not been the only spectators of the gulls’ brief feast. A small party of some dozen men stepped down from their vantage point among the dunes and moved along the sand, driving the last of the birds away from the turtles. The men were all elderly, well into their sixties and seventies, and wore singlets and cotton trousers rolled to their knees. Each carried a canvas bag and a wooden gaff tipped by a steel blade. As they picked up the shells they cleaned them with swift, practised movements and dropped them into their bags. The wet sand was streaked with blood, and soon the old men’s bare feet and arms were covered with the bright stains.

‘I dare say you’re ready to move.’ Uncle Theodore looked up at the sky, following the gulls back to the estuary. ‘Your aunt will have something waiting for us.’

Conrad was watching the old men. As they passed, one of them raised his ruby-tipped gaff in greeting. ‘Who are they?’ he asked as his uncle acknowledged the salute.

‘Shell collectors — they come here in the season. These shells fetch a good price.’

They set off towards the town, Uncle Theodore moving at a slow pace with his stick. As he waited Conrad glanced back along the beach. For some reason the sight of the old men streaked with the blood of the slaughtered turtles was more disturbing than the viciousness of the seagulls. Then he remembered that he himself had probably set off the birds.

The sounds of a truck overlaid the fading cries of the gulls as they settled themselves on the sandbank. The old men had gone, and the incoming tide was beginning to wash the stained sand. They reached the crossing by the first of the chalets. Conrad steered his uncle to the traffic island in the centre of the road. As they waited for the truck to pass he said, ‘Uncle, did you notice the birds never touched the sand?’

The truck roared past them, its high pantechnicon blocking off the sky. Conrad took his uncle’s arm and moved forward. The old man plodded on, rooting his stick in the sandy tarmac. Then he flinched back, the pipe falling from his mouth as he shouted at the sports car swerving towards them out of the dust behind the truck. Conrad caught a glimpse of the driver’s white knuckles on the rim of the steering wheel, a frozen face behind the windshield as the car, running down its own brakes, began to slide sideways across the road. Conrad started to push the old man back but the car was on them, bursting across the traffic island in a roar of dust.

The hospital was almost empty. During the first days Conrad was glad to lie motionlessly in the deserted ward, watching the patterns of light reflected on to the ceiling from the flowers on the window-sill, listening to the few sounds from the orderly room beyond the swing doors. At intervals the nurse would come and look at him. Once, when she bent down to straighten the cradle over his legs, he noticed that she was not a young woman but even older than his aunt, despite her slim figure and the purple rinse in her hair. In fact, all the nurses and orderlies who tended him in the empty ward were elderly, and obviously regarded Conrad more as a child than a youth of seventeen, treating him to a mindless and amiable banter as they moved about the ward.

Later, when the pain from his amputated leg roused him from this placid second sleep, Nurse Sadie at last began to look at his face. She told him that his aunt had come to visit him each day after the accident, and that she would return the following afternoon.

‘…Theodore — Uncle Theodore…?’ Conrad tried to sit up but an invisible leg, as dead and heavy as a mastodon’s, anchored him to the bed. ‘Mr Foster… my uncle. Did the car…?’

‘Missed him by yards, dear. Or let’s say inches.’ Nurse Sadie touched his forehead with a hand like a cool bird. ‘Only a scratch on his wrist where the windshield cut it. My, the glass we took out of you, though, you looked as if you’d jumped through a greenhouse!’

Conrad moved his head away from her fingers. He searched the rows of empty beds in the ward. ‘Where is he? Here…?’

‘At home. Your aunt’s looking after him, he’ll be right as rain.’

Conrad lay back, waiting for Nurse Sadie to go away so that he could be alone with the pain in his vanished leg. Above him the surgical cradle loomed like a white mountain. Strangely, the news that Uncle Theodore had escaped almost unscathed from the accident left Conrad without any sense of relief. Since the age of five, when the deaths of his parents in an air disaster had left him an orphan, his relationship with his aunt and uncle had been, if anything, even closer than that he would have had with his mother and father, their affection and loyalties more conscious and constant. Yet he found himself thinking not of his uncle, nor of himself, but of the approaching car. With its sharp fins and trim it had swerved towards them like the gulls swooping on the turtles, moving with the same rush of violence. Lying in the bed with the cradle over him Conrad remembered the turtles labouring across the wet sand under their heavy carapaces, and the old men waiting for them among the dunes.

Outside, the fountains played among the gardens of the empty hospital, and the elderly nurses walked in pairs to and fro along the shaded pathways.

The next day, before his aunt’s visit, two doctors came to see Conrad. The older of the two, Dr Nathan, was a slim grey-haired man with hands as gentle as Nurse Sadie’s. Conrad had seen him before, and remembered him from the first confused hours of his admission to the hospital. A faint half-smile always hung about Dr Nathan’s mouth, like the ghost of some forgotten pleasantry.

The other physician, Dr Knight, was considerably younger, and by comparison seemed almost the same age as Conrad. His strong, squarejawed face looked down at Conrad with a kind of jocular hostility. He reached for Conrad’s wrist as if about to jerk the youth from his bed on to the floor.

‘So this is young Foster?’ He peered into Conrad’s eyes. ‘Well, Conrad, I won’t ask how you’re feeling.’

‘No…’ Conrad nodded uncertainly.

‘No, what?’ Dr Knight smiled at Nathan, who was hovering at the foot of the bed like an aged flamingo in a dried-up pool. ‘I thought Dr Nathan was looking after you very well.’ When Conrad murmured something, shy of inviting another retort, Dr Knight sped on: ‘Isn’t he? Still, I’m more interested in your future, Conrad. This is where I take over from Dr Nathan, so from now on you can blame me for everything that goes wrong.’

He pulled up a metal chair and straddled it, flicking out the tails of his white coat with a flourish. ‘Not that anything will. Well?’

Conrad listened to Dr Nathan’s feet tapping the polished floor. He cleared his throat. ‘Where is everyone else?’

‘You’ve noticed?’ Dr Knight glanced across at his colleague. ‘Still, you could hardly fail to.’ He stared through the window at the empty grounds of the hospital. ‘It’s true, there is hardly anyone here.’

‘A compliment to us, Conrad, don’t you think?’ Dr Nathan approached the bed again. The smile that hovered around his lips seemed to belong to another face.

‘Yeesss…’ Dr Knight drawled. ‘Of course, no one will have explained to you, Conrad, but this isn’t a hospital in quite the usual sense.’

‘What—?’ Conrad began to sit up, dragging at the cradle over his leg. ‘What do you mean?’

Dr Knight raised his hands. ‘Don’t misinterpret me, Conrad. Of course this is a hospital, an advanced surgical unit, in fact, but it’s also something more than a hospital, as I intend to explain.’

Conrad watched Dr Nathan. The older physician was gazing out of the window, apparently at the fountains, but for once his face was blank, the smile absent.

‘In what way?’ Conrad asked guardedly. ‘Is it something to do with me?’

Dr Knight spread his hands in an ambiguous gesture. ‘In a sense, yes. But we’ll talk about this tomorrow. We’ve taxed you enough for the present.’

He stood up, his eyes still examining Conrad, and placed his hands on the cradle. ‘We’ve a lot of work to do on this leg, Conrad. In the end, when we’ve finished, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what we can achieve here. In return, perhaps you can help us — we hope so, don’t we, Dr Nathan?’

Dr Nathan’s smile, like a returning wraith, hovered once again about his thin lips. ‘I’m sure Conrad will be only too keen.’

As they reached the door Conrad called them back.

‘What is it, Conrad?’ Dr Knight waited by the next bed.

‘The driver — the man in the car. What happened to him? Is he here?’

‘As a matter of fact he is, but…’ Dr Knight hesitated, then seemed to change course. ‘To be honest, Conrad, you won’t be able to see him. I know the accident was almost certainly his fault—’

‘No!’ Conrad shook his head. ‘I don’t want to blame him… we stepped out behind the truck. Is he here?’

‘The car hit the steel pylon on the traffic island, then went on through the sea wall. The driver was killed on the beach. He wasn’t much older than you, Conrad, in a way he may have been trying to save you and your uncle.’

Conrad nodded, remembering the white face like a scream behind the windshield.

Dr Knight turned towards the door. Almost sotto voce he added: ‘And you’ll see, Conrad, he can still help you.’

At three o’clock that afternoon Conrad’s uncle appeared. Seated in a wheelchair, and pushed by his wife and Nurse Sadie, he waved cheerily to Conrad with his free hand as he entered the ward. For once, however, the sight of Uncle Theodore failed to raise Conrad’s spirits. He had been looking forward to the visit, but his uncle had aged ten years since the accident and the sight of these three elderly people, one of them partially crippled, coming towards him with their smiling faces only reminded him of his isolation in the hospital.

As he listened to his uncle, Conrad realized that this isolation was merely a more extreme version of his own position, and that of all young people, outside the walls of the hospital. As a child Conrad had known few friends of his own age, for the single reason that children were almost as rare as centenarians had been a hundred years earlier. He had been born into a middle-aged world, one moreover where middle age itself was for ever moving, like the horizons of a receding universe, farther and farther from its original starting point. His aunt and uncle, both of them nearly sixty, represented the median line. Beyond them was the immense super-annuated army of the elderly, filling the shops and streets of the seaside town, their slow rhythms and hesitant walk overlaying everything like a grey veil.

By contrast, Dr Knight’s self-confidence and casual air, however brusque and aggressive, quickened Conrad’s pulse.

Towards the end of the visit, when his aunt had strolled to the end of the ward with Nurse Sadie to view the fountains, Conrad said to his uncle, ‘Dr Knight told me he could do something for my leg.’

‘I’m sure he can, Conrad.’ Uncle Theodore smiled encouragingly, but his eyes watched Conrad without moving. ‘These surgeons are clever men; it’s amazing what they can do.’

‘And your hand, Uncle?’ Conrad pointed to the dressing that covered his uncle’s left forearm. The hint of irony in his uncle’s voice reminded him of Dr Knight’s studied ambiguities. Already he sensed that people were taking sides around him.

‘This hand?’ His uncle shrugged. ‘It’s done me for nearly sixty years, a missing finger won’t stop me filling my pipe.’ Before Conrad could speak he went on: ‘But that leg of yours is a different matter, you’ll have to decide for yourself what to have done with it.’

Just before he left he whispered to Conrad, ‘Rest yourself well, lad. You may have to run before you can walk.’

Two days later, promptly at nine o’clock, Dr Knight came to see Conrad. Brisk as ever, he came to the point immediately.

‘Now, Conrad,’ he began, replacing the cradle after his inspection, ‘it’s a month since your last stroll by the beach, time to get you out of here and back on your own feet again. What do you say?’

‘Feet?’ Conrad repeated. He managed a slight laugh. ‘Do you mean that as a figure of speech?’

‘No, I mean it literally.’ Dr Knight drew up a chair. ‘Tell me, Conrad, have you ever heard of restorative surgery? It may have been mentioned at school.’

‘In biology — transplanting kidneys and that sort of thing. Older people have it done. Is that what you’re going to do to my leg?’

‘Whoa! Hold your horses. Let’s get a few things straight first. As you say, restorative surgery goes back about fifty years, when the first kidney grafts were made, though for years before that corneal grafting was commonplace. If you accept that blood is a tissue the principle is even older — you had a massive blood transfusion after the accident, and later when Dr Nathan amputated the crushed knee and shinbone. Nothing surprising about that, is there?’

Conrad waited before answering. For once Dr Knight’s tone had become defensive, as if he were already, by some sort of extrapolation, asking the questions to which he feared Conrad might subsequently object.

‘No,’ Conrad replied. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘Obviously, why should there be? Though it’s worth bearing in mind that many people have refused to accept blood transfusions, even though it meant certain death. Apart from their religious objections, many of them felt that the foreign blood polluted their own bodies.’ Dr Knight leaned back, scowling to himself. ‘One can see their point of view, but remember that our bodies are almost completely composed of alien materials. We don’t stop eating, do we, just to preserve our own absolute identity?’ Dr Knight laughed here. ‘That would be egotism run riot. Don’t you agree?’

When Dr Knight glanced at him, as if waiting for an answer, Conrad said, ‘More or less.’

‘Good. And, of course, in the past most people have taken your point of view. The substitution of a healthy kidney for a diseased one doesn’t in any way diminish your own integrity, particularly if your life is saved. What counts is your own continuing identity. By their very structure the individual parts of the body serve a larger physiological whole, and the human consciousness is great enough to provide any sense of unity.

‘Now, no one ever seriously disputed this, and fifty years ago a number of brave men and women, many of them physicians, voluntarily gave their healthy organs to others who needed them. Sadly, all these efforts failed after a few weeks as a result of the so-called immunity reaction. The host body, even though it was dying, still fought against the graft as it would against any alien organism.’

Conrad shook his head. ‘I thought they’d solved this immunity problem.’

‘In time, yes — it was a question of biochemistry rather than any fault in the surgical techniques used. Eventually the way became clear, and every year tens of thousands of lives were saved — people with degenerative diseases of the liver, kidneys, alimentary tract, even portions of the heart and nervous system, were given transplanted organs. The main problem was where to obtain them — you may be willing to donate a kidney, but you can’t give away your liver or the mitral valve in your heart. Luckily a great number of people willed their organs posthumously — in fact, it’s now a condition of admission to a public hospital that in the event of death any parts of one’s body may be used in restorative surgery. Originally the only organs that were banked were those of the thorax and abdomen, but today we have reserves of literally every tissue in the human body, so that whatever the surgeon requires is available, whether it’s a complete lung or a few square centimetres of some specialized epithelium.’

As Dr Knight sat back Conrad pointed at the ward around him. ‘This hospital… this is where it happens?’

‘Exactly, Conrad. This is one of the hundreds of institutes we have today devoted to restorative surgery. As you’ll understand, only a small percentage of the patients who come here are cases such as yours. The greatest application of restorative surgery has been for geriatric purposes, that is, for prolonging life in the aged.’

Dr Knight nodded deliberately as Conrad sat up. ‘Now you’ll understand, Conrad, why there have always been so many elderly people in the world around you. The reason is simple — by means of restorative surgery we’ve been able to give people who would normally die in their sixties and seventies a second span of life. The average life span has risen from sixty-five half a century ago to something close to ninety-five.’

‘Doctor… the driver of the car. I don’t know his name. You said he could still help me.’

‘I meant what I said, Conrad. One of the problems of restorative surgery is that of supply. In the case of the elderly it’s straightforward, if anything there’s an excess of replacement materials over the demand. Apart from a few generalized degenerative conditions, most elderly people are faced with the failure of perhaps no more than one organ, and every fatality provides a reserve of tissues that will keep twenty others alive for as many years. However, in the case of the young, particularly in your age group, the demand exceeds supply a hundred-fold. Tell me, Conrad, quite apart from the driver of the car, how do you feel in principle about undergoing restorative surgery?’

Conrad looked down at the bedclothes. Despite the cradle, the asymmetry of his limbs was too obvious to miss. ‘It’s hard to say. I suppose ‘The choice is yours, Conrad. Either you wear a prosthetic limb — a metal support that will give you endless discomfort for the rest of your life, and prevent you from running and swimming, from all the normal movements of a young man — or else you have a leg of flesh and blood and bone.’

Conrad hesitated. Everything Dr Knight had said tallied with all he had heard over the years about restorative surgery the subject was not taboo, but seldom discussed, particularly in the presence of children. Yet he was sure that this elaborate rsum was the prologue to some far more difficult decision he would have to take. ‘When do you do this tomorrow?’

‘Good God, no!’ Dr Knight laughed involuntarily, then let his voice roll on, dispelling the tension between them. ‘Not for about two months, it’s a tremendously complex piece of work. We’ve got to identify and tag all the nerve endings and tendons, then prepare an elaborate bone graft. For at least a month you’ll be wearing an artificial limb believe me, by the end you’ll be looking forward to getting back on a real leg. Now, Conrad, can I assume that in general you’re quite willing? We need both your permission and your uncle’s.’

‘I think so. I’d like to talk to Uncle Theodore. Still, I know I haven’t really got any choice.’

‘Sensible man.’ Dr Knight held out his hand. As Conrad reached to take it he realized that Dr Knight was deliberately showing him a faint hairline scar that ran around the base of his thumb and then disappeared inside the palm. The thumb seemed wholly part of the hand, and yet detached from it.

‘That’s right,’ Dr Knight told him. ‘A small example of restorative surgery. Done while I was a student. I lost the top joint after infecting it in the dissecting room. The entire thumb was replaced. It’s served me well; I couldn’t really have taken up surgery without it.’ Dr Knight traced the faint scar across his palm for Conrad. ‘There are slight differences of course, the articulation for one thing — this one is a little more dexterous than my own used to be, and the nail is a different shape, but otherwise it feels like me. There’s also a certain altruistic pleasure that one is keeping alive part of another human being.’

‘Dr Knight — the driver of the car. You want to give me his leg?’

‘That’s true, Conrad. I should have to tell you, anyway, the patient must agree to the donor — people are naturally hesitant about being grafted to part of a criminal or psychopath. As I explained, for someone of your age it’s not easy to find the appropriate donor…’

‘But, Doctor — ‘ For once Dr Knight’s reasoning bewildered Conrad. ‘There must be someone else. It’s not that I feel any grudge against him, but… There’s some other reason, isn’t there?’

Dr Knight nodded after a pause. He walked away from the bed, and for a moment Conrad wondered if he was about to abandon the entire case. Then he turned on his heel and pointed through the window.

‘Conrad, while you’ve been here has it occurred to you to wonder why this hospital is empty?’

Conrad gestured at the distant walls. ‘Perhaps it’s too large. How many patients can it take?’

‘Over two thousand. It is large, but fifteen years ago, before I came here, it was barely big enough to deal with the influx of patients. Most of them were geriatric cases — men and women in their seventies and eighties who were having one or more vital organs replaced. There were immense waiting lists, many of the patients were trying to pay hugely inflated fees — bribes, if you like — to get in.’

‘Where have they all gone?’

‘An interesting question — the answer in part explains why you’re here, Conrad, and why we’re taking a special interest in your case. You see, Conrad, about ten or twelve years ago hospital boards all over the country noticed that admission rates were starting to fall off. To begin with they were relieved, but the decline has gone on each year, until now the rate of admission is down to about one per cent of the previous intake. And most of these patients are surgeons and physicians, or members of the nursing staff.’

‘But, Doctor — if they’re not coming here…’ Conrad found himself thinking of his aunt and uncle. ‘If they won’t come here that means they’re choosing to…’

Dr Knight nodded. ‘Exactly, Conrad. They’re choosing to die.’

A week later, when his uncle came to see him again, Conrad explained to him Dr Knight’s proposition. They sat together on the terrace outside the ward, looking out over the fountains at the deserted hospital. His uncle still wore a surgical mitten over his hand, but otherwise had recovered from the accident. He listened silently to Conrad.

‘None of the old people are coming any more, they’re lying at home when they fall ill and… waiting for the end. Dr Knight says there’s no reason why in many cases restorative surgery shouldn’t prolong life more or less indefinitely.’

‘A sort of life. How does he think you can help them, Conrad?’

‘Well, he believes that they need an example to follow, a symbol if you like. Someone like myself who’s been badly hurt in an accident right at the start of his life might make them accept the real benefits of restorative surgery.’

‘The two cases are hardly similar,’ his uncle mused. ‘However… How do you feel about it?’

‘Dr Knight’s been completely frank. He’s told me about those early cases where people who’d had new organs and limbs literally fell apart when the seams failed. I suppose he’s right. Life should be preserved you’d help a dying man if you found him on the pavement, why not in some other case? Because cancer or bronchitis are less dramatic—’

‘I understand, Conrad.’ His uncle raised a hand. ‘But why does he think older people are refusing surgery?’

‘He admits he doesn’t know. He feels that as the average age of the population rises there’s a tendency for the old people to dominate society and set its mood. Instead of having a majority of younger people around them they see only the aged like themselves. The one way of escape is death.’

‘It’s a theory. One thing — he wants to give you the leg of the driver who hit us. That seems a strange touch. A little ghoulish.’

‘No, it’s the whole point — he’s trying to say that once the leg is grafted it becomes part of me.’ Conrad pointed to his uncle’s mitten. ‘Uncle Theodore, that hand. You lost two of the fingers. Dr Knight told me. Are you going to have them restored?’

His uncle laughed. ‘Are you trying to make me your first convert, Conrad?’

Two months later Conrad re-entered the hospital to undergo the restorative surgery for which he had been waiting during his convalescence. On the previous day he accompanied his uncle on a short visit to friends who lived in the retirement hostels to the north-west of the town. These pleasant single-storey buildings in the chalet style, built by the municipal authority and let out to their occupants at a low rent, constituted a considerable fraction of the town’s area. In the three weeks he had been ambulant Conrad seemed to have visited every one. The artificial limb with which he had been fitted was far from comfortable, but at Dr Knight’s request his uncle had taken Conrad to all the acquaintances he knew.

Although the purpose of these visits was to identify Conrad to as many of the elderly residents as possible before he returned to the hospital the main effort at conversion would come later, when the new limb was in place — Conrad had already begun to doubt whether Dr Knight’s plan would succeed. Far from arousing any hostility, Conrad’s presence elicited nothing but sympathy and goodwill from the aged occupants of the residential hostels and bungalows. Wherever he went the old people would come down to their gates and talk to him, wishing him well with his operation. At times, as he acknowledged the smiles and greetings of the grey-haired men and women watching on all sides from their balconies and gardens, it seemed to Conrad that he was the only young person in the entire town.

‘Uncle, how do you explain the paradox?’ he asked as they limped along together on their rounds, Conrad supporting his weight on two stout walking sticks. ‘They want me to have a new leg but they won’t go to the hospital themselves.’

‘But you’re young, Conrad, a mere child to them. You’re having returned to you something that is your right: the ability to walk and run and dance. Your life isn’t being prolonged beyond its natural span.’

‘Natural span?’ Conrad repeated the phrase wearily. He rubbed the harness of his leg beneath his trousers. ‘In some parts of the world the natural life span is still little more than forty. Isn’t it relative?’

‘Not entirely, Conrad. Not beyond a certain point.’ Although he had faithfully guided Conrad about the town, his uncle seemed reluctant to pursue the argument.

They reached the entrance to one of the residential estates. One of the town’s many undertakers had opened a new office, and in the shadows behind the leaded windows Conrad could see a prayer-book on a mahogany stand and discreet photographs of hearses and mausoleums. However veiled, the proximity of the office to the retirement homes disturbed Conrad as much as if a line of freshly primed coffins had been laid out along the pavement ready for inspection.

His uncle merely shrugged when Conrad mentioned this. ‘The old take a realistic view of things, Conrad. They don’t fear or sentimentalize death in quite the way the younger people do. In fact, they have a very lively interest in the matter.’

As they stopped outside one of the chalets he took Conrad’s arm. ‘A word of warning here, Conrad. I don’t want to shock you, but you’re about to meet a man who intends to put his opposition to Dr Knight into practice. Perhaps he’ll tell you more in a few minutes than I or Dr Knight could in ten years. His name is Matthews, by the way, Dr James Matthews.’

‘Doctor?’ Conrad repeated. ‘Do you mean a doctor of medicine?’

‘Exactly. One of the few. Still, let’s wait until you meet him.’

They approached the chalet, a modest two-roomed dwelling with a small untended garden dominated by a tall cypress. The door opened as soon as they touched the bell. An elderly nun in the uniform of a nursing order let them in with a brief greeting. A second nun, her sleeves rolled, crossed the passage to the kitchen with a porcelain pail. Despite their efforts, there was an unpleasant smell in the house which the lavish use of disinfectant failed to conceal.

‘Mr Foster, would you mind waiting a few minutes. Good morning, Conrad.’

They waited in the dingy sitting room. Conrad studied the framed photographs over the rolltop desk. One was of a birdlike, grey-haired woman, whom he took to be the deceased Mrs Matthews. The other was an old matriculation portrait of a group of students.

Eventually they were shown into the small rear bedroom. The second of the two nuns had covered the equipment on the bedside table with a sheet. She straightened the coverlet on the bed and then went out into the hall.

Resting on his sticks, Conrad stood behind his uncle as the latter peered down at the occupant of the bed. The acid odour was more pungent and seemed to emanate directly from the bed. When his uncle beckoned him forward, Conrad at first failed to find the shrunken face of the man in the bed. The grey cheeks and hair had already merged into the unstarched sheets covered by the shadows from the curtained windows.

‘James, this is Elizabeth’s boy, Conrad.’ His uncle pulled up a wooden chair. He motioned to Conrad to sit down. ‘Dr Matthews, Conrad.’

Conrad murmured something, aware of the blue eyes that had turned to look at him. What surprised him most about the dying occupant of the bed was his comparative youth. Although in his middle sixties, Dr Matthews was twenty years younger than the majority of the tenants in the estate.

‘He’s grown into quite a lad, don’t you think, James?’ Uncle Theodore remarked.

Dr Matthews nodded, as if only half interested in their visit. His eyes were on the dark cypress in the garden. ‘He has,’ he said at last.

Conrad waited uncomfortably. The walk had tired him, and his thigh seemed raw again. He wondered if they would be able to call for a taxi from the house.

Dr Matthews turned his head. He seemed to be able to look at Conrad and his uncle with a blue eye on each of them. ‘Who have you got for the boy?’ he asked in a sharper voice. ‘Nathan is still there, I believe ‘One of the younger men, James. You probably won’t know him, but he’s a good fellow. Knight.’

‘Knight?’ The name was repeated with only a faint hint of comment. ‘And when does the boy go in?’

‘Tomorrow. Don’t you, Conrad?’

Conrad was about to speak when he noticed that a faint simpering was coming from the man in the bed. Suddenly exhausted by this bizarre scene, and under the impression that the dying physician’s macabre humour was directed at himself, Conrad rose in his chair, rattling his sticks together. ‘Uncle, could I wait outside…?’

‘My boy — ‘ Dr Matthews had freed his right hand from the bed. ‘I was laughing at your uncle, not at you. He always had a great sense of humour. Or none at all. Which is it, Theo?’

‘I see nothing funny, James. Are you saying I shouldn’t have brought him here?’

Dr Matthews lay back. ‘Not at all — I was there at his beginning, let him be here for my end…’ He looked at Conrad again. ‘I wish you the best, Conrad. No doubt you wonder why I don’t accompany you to the hospital.’

‘Well, I…’ Conrad began, but his uncle held his shoulder.

‘James, it’s time for us to be leaving. I think we can take the matter as understood.’

‘Obviously we can’t.’ Dr Matthews raised a hand again, frowning at the slight noise. ‘I’ll only be a moment, Theo, but if I don’t tell him no one will, certainly not Dr Knight. Now, Conrad, you’re seventeen?’

When Conrad nodded Dr Matthews went on: ‘At that age, if I remember, life seems to stretch on for ever. One is probably living as close to eternity as is possible. As you get older, though, you find more and more that everything worthwhile has finite bounds, by and large those of time — from ordinary things to the most important ones, your marriage, children and so on, even life itself. The hard lines drawn around things give them their identity. Nothing is brighter than the diamond.’

‘James, you’ve had enough—’

‘Quiet, Theo.’ Dr Matthews raised his head, almost managing to sit up. ‘Perhaps, Conrad, you would explain to Dr Knight that it is just because we value our lives so much that we refuse to diminish them. There are a thousand hard lines drawn between you and me, Conrad, differences of age, character and experience, differences of time. You have to earn these distinctions for yourself. You can’t borrow them from anyone else, least of all from the dead.’

Conrad looked round as the door opened. The older of the nuns stood in the hall outside. She nodded to his uncle. Conrad settled his limb for the journey home, waiting for Uncle Theodore to make his goodbyes to Dr Matthews. As the nun stepped towards the bed he saw on the train of her starched gown a streak of blood.

Outside they plodded together past the undertakers, Conrad heaving himself along on his sticks. As the old people in the gardens waved to them Uncle Theodore said, ‘I’m sorry he seemed to laugh at you, Conrad. It wasn’t meant.’

‘Was he there when I was born?’

‘He attended your mother. I thought it only right that you should see him before he died. Why he thought it so funny I can’t understand.’

Almost six months later to the day, Conrad Foster walked down towards the beach road and the sea. In the sunlight he could see the high dunes above the beach, and beyond them the gulls sitting out on the submerged sandbank in the mouth’of the estuary. The traffic along the beach road was busier than he remembered from his previous visit, and the sand picked up by the wheels of the speeding cars and trucks drifted in clouds across the fields.

Conrad moved at a good pace along the road, testing his new leg to the full. During the past four months the bonds had consolidated themselves with the minimum of pain, and the leg was, if anything, stronger and more resilient than his own had ever been. At times, when he walked along without thinking, it seemed to stride ahead with a will of its own.

Yet despite its good service, and the fulfilment of all that Dr Knight had promised him for it, Conrad had failed to accept the leg. The thin hairline of the surgical scar that circled his thigh above the knee was a frontier that separated the two more absolutely than any physical barrier. As Dr Matthews had stated, its presence seemed to diminish him, in some way subtracting rather than adding to his own sense of identity. This feeling had grown with each week and month as the leg itself recovered its strength. At night they would lie together like silent partners in an uneasy marriage.

In the first month after his recovery Conrad had agreed to help Dr Knight and the hospital authorities in the second stage of their campaign to persuade the elderly to undergo restorative surgery rather than throw away their lives, but after Dr Matthew’s death Conrad decided to take no further part in the scheme. Unlike Dr Knight, he realized that there was no real means of persuasion, and that only those on their deathbeds, such as Dr Matthews, were prepared to argue the matter at all. The others simply smiled and waved from their quiet gardens.

In addition, Conrad knew that his own growing uncertainty over the new limb would soon be obvious to their sharp eyes. A large scar now disfigured the skin above the shin-bone, and the reasons were plain. Injuring it while using his uncle’s lawnmower, he had deliberately let the wound fester, as if this act of self-mutilation might symbolize the amputation of the limb. However, it seemed only to thrive on this blood letting.

A hundred yards away was the junction with the beach road, the fine sand lifting off the surface in the light breeze. A quarter of a mile away a line of vehicles approached at speed, the drivers of the cars at the rear trying to overtake two heavy trucks. Far away, in the estuary, there was a faint cry from the sea. Although tired, Conrad found himself breaking into a run. Somewhere a familiar conjunction of events was guiding him back towards the place of his accident.

As he reached the corner the first of the trucks was drawing close to him, the driver flashing his headlamps as Conrad hovered on the kerb, eager to get back to the pedestrian island with its freshly painted pylon.

Above the noise he saw the gulls rising into the air above the beach, and heard their harsh cries as the white sword drew itself across the sky. As it swept down over the beach the old men with their metal-tipped gaffs were moving from the road to their hiding-place among the dunes.

The truck thudded past him, the grey dust stinging his face as the slipstream whipped across it. A heavy saloon car rolled by, overtaking the truck and the other cars pressing behind it. The gulls began to dive and scream across the beach, and Conrad darted through the dust into the centre of the road and ran forward into the cars as they swerved towards him.