She paced the floor, dominating the room with her tallness and elegance.

‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘in view of your reluctance to discharge this man into our care, we could come to some other arrangement. How about leave? Six weeks or so? I could demand more if I wanted. Wouldn’t that suit you, Head Nurse? An empty bed for a while? Less work for your famously beleaguered staff?’

The Head Nurse, his lower lip protruding, avoided her look and made no reply.

‘All right, all right,’ Beckerminster said. ‘Have him. Trial period. We’ll say a month, shall we?’

The woman smiled, looked at me, and nodded.

The Head Nurse tapped on the window of the office door and beckoned the two boys who had dressed me that morning.

‘Bath for this one,’ he said, gesturing to me. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘and look lively. Then get his property together. He’s going out.’

The two boys looked at him, their expressions absorbing some small, certain disbelief I too detected in the tone of his voice.

‘Well?’ he said, his throat squeaking. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Nothing,’ they replied, seizing the chair and making off with me down the corridor.

FOUR

Sometimes I think I must be going mad. I had got it wrong, completely wrong. Certainly my presence beside the attempted suicide had irritated them that morning, and it is true that if they could have remedied the situation by taking their anger out on me in some way, they would have done just that. But I was not to blame, not really, and by the time they had bathed me, combed my hair, filched clothes for me from other patients’ lockers and sat me in the wheelchair with a box of incontinence pads in my lap, I could see that they genuinely did not want me to go in the company of this woman who clicked primly along the ward corridor, my history in a big brown envelope under her arm. Why, even the Head Nurse himself came to the woman’s small white car to help lift me into the passenger seat, standing by, picking hairs from his grey suit while one of the boys pulled the seat-belt tight across my ribs and middle. I had underestimated him and Beckerminster, and became filled with a vague, cloying emotion. My removal from the hospital was a totally separate incident, wholly unconnected with the business concerning the man in the next bed. I had it all wrong and once more was given to worrying about my sanity.