‘Please to keep quite still,’ said the nice doctor, ‘and you will be as new in twinkling of eye. If not, all my good work is gone for Burton.’

I kept still.

‘Nurse,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘patient is now on surface.’

The stern lady from Casualty Reception appeared, waving forms.

‘Just name, address and next of kin will do for now,’ she said, not too sternly. I lifted a pen weighing a hundredweight and wrote. She went away. A moment later she was back, whispering to the doctor.

‘Mr Mortdecai,’ he said to me,’ it seems we have just admitted a lady of the same name: is she with you? Mrs Johanna Mortdecai?’

I started to get up; they held me down. I fought them. Someone put a needle in my arm and told me gently that the doctor seeing to Johanna would come to see me presently. Unwillingly, I passed out.

When next I awoke I was in a warm, tight bed and a warm, scratchy nightshirt which was soaked with sweat. I felt like hell and a thousand hangovers: death seemed infinitely desirable. Then I remembered Johanna and started to get up but a little, thin nurse held me down without effort, as though she were smoothing a sheet. A new face appeared, a large, pale chap.

‘Mr Mortdecai?’ he said. ‘Good morning. I’m the doctor who has been attending to your wife. She’s going to be all right but she’s rather badly torn and has lost a good deal of blood.’

I made frantic writing gestures and he handed me a pen and a pad.

‘Raped?’ I wrote.

‘To tell the truth, we don’t know. There seems to be no damage down there, although there are extensive injuries elsewhere. We can’t ask her about the other thing because she is in deep shock: I’m afraid he hurt her rather badly.’

I took up the pen again. ‘Is her ear badly disfigured?’ I wrote.

He looked at the words for a long time, as though he couldn’t understand them. Slowly he met my eyes, with a look so compassionate that I was frightened.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Mortdecai, I thought you knew. Her injuries are not the same as yours at all.’

16

Let us rise up and part; she will not know.

Let us go seaward as the great winds go,

Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here?

There is no help, for all these things are so,

And all the world is bitter as a tear.

And how these things are, though ye strove to show,

She would not know.

A Leave-Taking