In the doorway behind Pereira, her silk dress lit by the TV monitors and their scientific films, Carmen was practising her English with one of the women simultaneous translators. Pereira saluted Dick, and she strode up and smilingly took the film critic’s arm. Together they stepped into a waiting car.

“Dick, I’ll see you in Shepperton. Carmen seems happy—I thought she loathed Pereira.”

“She did. But she feels her career is taking off—apparently she’s made some film with a dog. Pereira wanted to show me the rough cut. It’s been a big hit with the distribution people.”

“Lassie, come home, all is forgiven…”

“Is that the title? I’ll give it a miss.”

“I would, Dick.”

Dick gazed at the statue of Christ on Corcovado. He squared his shoulders, not unhopefully, measuring himself against the TV ratings of the ultimate media personality. Along Copacabana Beach the salesmen were flying their festival kites above the heads of the footballers, hawking their movie-star lapel badges and belt buckles. The beggar woman from the favelas and her crippled child were hiding among the limousines outside the Copacabana Palace Hotel, ready to startle an unwary film executive. In the air-conditioned corridors of the conference centre the scientific films filled the monitor screens with their close-ups of nose-wheel housings, nasal septums, and pain registers, a vast dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame.

The Casualty Station

13

THE CASUALTY STATION

Mental asylums, like the prisons they resemble, are so often burdened with the least appropriate names. As I drove through the gates of Summerfield Hospital I wondered who had christened this sombre Victorian pile. Immense red-brick walls like a perpetual headache rose to the shabby eaves, broken by barred windows that had never been cleaned, as if to protect the patients from the gloomy microclimate that hovered over this forgotten corner of south London. Faded lawns struggled in the shadows of the tall fir trees, but on my visits to David Hunter I had never seen even one of the two thousand patients taking the air.