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, square-jawed 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