Twenty-one
Mark Easterbrook’s Narrative¹
II doubt if I shall ever forget the next few days. It appears to me now as akind of bewildered kaleidoscope without sequence or form. Ginger² was re-moved from the flat to a private nursing home. I was allowed to see heronly at visiting hours.
Her own doctor, I gather, was inclined to stand on his high horse aboutthe whole business. He could not understand what the fuss was all about.
His own diagnosis³ was quite clear—bronchopneumonia following on in-fluenza, though complicated by certain slightly unusual symptoms, butthat, as he pointed⁴ out, “happens all the time. No case is ever ‘typical.’ Andsome people don’t respond to antibiotics⁵.”
And, of course, all that he said was true. Ginger had bronchopneumo-nia. There was nothing mysterious about the disease from which she wassuffering. She just had it—and had it badly.
I had one interview with the Home Office psychologist. He was a quaintlittle cock robin⁶ of a man, rising up and down on his toes, with eyes twink-ling through very thick lenses.
He asked me innumerable questions, half of which I could see no pointin whatever, but there must have been a point, for he nodded sapiently⁷ atmy answers. He entirely⁸ refused to commit himself, wherein he was prob-ably wise. He made occasional pronouncements in what I took to be thejargon of his trade. He tried, I think, various forms of hypnotism onGinger, but by what seemed to be universal consent, no one would tell mevery much. Possibly because there was nothing to tell.
I avoided my own friends and acquaintances, yet the loneliness of myexistence was insupportable.
Finally, in an excess of desperation, I rang up Poppy at her flower shop.
Would she come out and dine with me. Poppy would love to do so.

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