CHAPTER EIGHT

Ella showed her engagement ring to Dr Carter, Dr Endymion, Dr Mukerjee and the practice nurse, Martha Wilcox. Aware from the appearance of the ring that Ella's fiancé must be a rich man, Malina Mukerjee expressed the hope that this didn't mean she'd be giving up work, did it? Ella assured them all that she wouldn't. She was sitting behind the desk in her room, called a 'doctor's office', American fashion, preparing for the arrival of her first patient, a mother of four, all of whom she had brought with her, when her phone rang.

It was Joel Roseman. 'I do want to be your private patient,' he said without preamble, 'and I'd like to start today. What do I have to do?'

'Mr Roseman, I have patients waiting. May I call you back?'

He sounded disappointed, like a child whose mother is busy. Ella opened the office door and let in Mrs Khan, her two daughters and her twin sons, all of whom vied for the job of interpreter, their mother having not a word of English. It was almost midday before the departure of Ella's last patient, a woman with nothing wrong with her but complaining loudly about a rumour that all prescriptions in future were to cost a pound each.

Joel Roseman picked up his phone on the first ring. He sounded as if he had been sitting by it for the past three hours. 'I haven't been out yet,' he said. 'Could you come to me? Would you do that?'

All of them in the practice made house calls occasionally. Besides, if he was to be a private patient, Ella felt she could hardly refuse him. Moscow Road was at the other end of Notting Hill and she was about to say she couldn't manage it today when she realised she could. She easily could. The euphoria brought about by her engagement was enduring, filling her with energy and a desire to move about, be out in the fresh air, enjoy life. Sunshine had come back, if intermittently, and she would walk. Walking would help her reduce to the size 12 she hoped to be for her wedding dress.

'Two o'clock this afternoon, Mr Roseman?'

'That will be lovely.' Lovely, the little boy's word. 'Please call me Joel.'

A mansion block, red brick, with gables and turrets and things she thought were called cupolas. Ten stone steps up to glass doors with art nouveau panes and ironwork. A porter sitting at a desk behind glass directed her to the lift down a narrow green-painted passage but the lift itself was a rather luxurious carpet-lined box with gilt-framed mirrors on two walls. Joel Roseman opened his door before she got there. He looked frail, thinner than she remembered and, though he wore jeans and a sweater, he had a dressing gown over them. But no sunglasses today.

No doubt this was because the place was dark. Almost her first thought was that the flat, which seemed very large for one person, was the kind of place she would have expected an old lady to live in, not a young man. And that, he told her, as she tried not to show her incredulity at the stuffy darkness, the cumbersome Victorian furniture, the drab shabby covers and curtains, was exactly what it had been. Old Mrs Compton-Webb, ninety-six, had died there, her body discovered by a great-grandson a week later.

'Pa bought the place lock, stock and barrel. Isn't that what they say? All the furniture and those carpets, the lot. Everything dark red and dark brown and mud. I expect it was done on purpose, to punish me. He was wrong there because it suits me. I like the dark.'

Doors were open and she could see into darkened caverns where carved cabinets, marble-topped tables and thickly padded chairs all crowded together, loomed in the dimness.The curtains, of mud-coloured or ox blood-coloured plush, were thick enough to exclude all external light. Not even bright cracks of it showed round their borders. The atmosphere was stuffy and musty, and it seemed to Ella that the suffocating silence was unnatural in the heart of busy Notting Hill. It was a relief to be taken into a sitting room where there was a little more light, the fawn, red figured velvet curtains held back by loops of brown braid, and the blinds behind them raised perhaps six inches. For her benefit? The furniture here was brown velvet, the carpet the kind that is called a Turkey, not Turkish, crimson patterned with brown and black squares and triangles. On a console table, a bronze bust of one of the Caesars was reflected in the mirror behind it and again and again infinitely in another mirror hung opposite. Ella found herself staring in horrified fascination at these endlessly repeated gaunt profiles and bald heads.

'I'm always meaning to make some changes,' Joel said in the kind of hopeless voice people use when it is clear they will do nothing. 'I could afford it. Pa gives me loads of money but I never get around to it. Would you like something to drink?'

She thought he meant tea or coffee. He came back with two glasses of water. She noticed that he walked slowly and his hand trembled when he set her glass down. 'What do I have to do now?' he said.

'To be my private patient? Nothing. Or, rather, you've done it and here I am.'

'So now you ask me what seems to be the trouble?'

She smiled. 'Something like that.'

'Well,' he said, 'you will believe me, won't you? You won't say it's all in my head or I'm making it up, you won't say that?'

'Why don't you tell me what's wrong?'

He was silent. She looked at him properly for the first time, saw a pale fine-featured face, dull eyes, dark hair falling forward over his forehead. He drank some water, spoke in a low voice she had difficulty in hearing. 'When I was in hospital I had a near-death experience. That's what they call them, don't they? A near-death experience?'

How many times had she heard this before? It sometimes seemed to her impossible for one of her patients who had had an anaesthetic not to have dreamed while unconscious of that long tunnel and paradisal bower at the end of it. He seemed to expect an answer. 'Perhaps,' she said. 'Go on.'

'The surgeon told me afterwards. It was during the operation. I can tell you his words. He said, "We nearly lost you. Of course we got you back but it was a ticklish moment."'

Ella's immediate reaction was to disbelieve this. If it was true, she was sure Joel's surgeon wouldn't have been so indiscreet as to say so. A nervous patient could be seriously frightened by something there was no need to disclose. But she said nothing beyond asking him gently to speak up. She knew what he would tell her, it would be the long tunnel again, the golden river and the white city beyond meadows full of flowers. They always saw something like that. And he did tell her that, but not only that.

'Like I said, I went through the tunnel – I guess that was the bit where I was dead – and at the end I came out into these sort of fields with a river flowing through them. There was tall grass with tall flowers growing in it and the sun shining, and beyond that was this city, white marble it was but it looked very light, almost like it was made of very thin glass or even cloud. All the buildings had steps up to their doors and rows and rows of tall columns. Are you following all this?'

'Yes, of course,' Ella said.

He drank some water. 'There were walls round the city with sort of battlements and angels were sitting on them. It was warm there but not hot. I could see people in white robes – I could see them through the gates in the walls – they were walking on lawns under trees, talking and singing. One of them came out through an archway and he came up to me. He took me by the hand and he said something to me about it not yet being my time. I was just to take a look at the city so that I'd know what to expect when my time came. So I looked at the city and up at the angels on the battlements. They had wings like great white birds. I looked at them but they didn't look at me. Then this man led me back across the fields and along the river bank until we came to the tunnel. Going back through there was when I think the surgeon and the anaesthetist were bringing me back to life.'

'It was like a rather nice dream, then?' Ella said.

'It would have been.' Joel was silent for a moment, clutching his glass of water so tightly that she thought he must break it. Then, shaking himself, he relaxed his fingers and set the glass down on the table. 'It would have been,' he said again, 'except that I brought him back with me.'

In the dimly lit stuffy room, she felt a kind of chill, the small shiver people used to say meant someone was walking over where one's grave would be. 'I'm sorry. I don't understand.'

'I said to you before I started please to believe me, not to say I'm making it up. Because to do that I'd have to want to do it and I don't. I hate it.'

'I won't say you're making it up. But I do need you to explain.'

'The man who came up to me out of the city and through the archway – well, I suppose it was heaven, or hell maybe if hell can be beautiful and peaceful – that man came back with me, through the tunnel, into this life. Do you understand now, Dr Cotswold? When I was conscious – well, not then, but later – he was sitting by my bed. He wasn't anyone I've ever seen in this world.' Joel seemed to consider. 'Maybe he was, though, maybe he was a sort of friend I had when I was a child but grown up, of course.'

Guessing, Ella said, 'By "sort of" do you mean an imaginary friend?'

He nodded. 'That's what I mean. But I don't know if this man is my friend grown up. It's years and years, and he looks different. If he is he's changed his name. My – well, imaginary – friend was called Jasper. This one is Mithras.'

Tugged into this dream or nightmare, whatever it was, Ella had begun to feel disorientated. Naming the creature of Joel's fantasy and the fairly obvious transit of that name from a child's idea of what a boy might be called to a man's maturer concept of a denison of heaven or hell, brought her back to practicalities.

'Joel, you don't need me at all. Surely' – she must be tactful here – 'you need someone you can tell all this to who would be sympathetic. I don't mean I'm not but I'm a doctor of medicine, I'm really not qualified to help you over this.'

'You mean a psychiatrist?'

'I meant a therapist, yes.'

'You think I'm mad?'

'No, of course not. Of course I don't think you're mad because you have – well, a very active imagination.' She took her phone directory out of her bag. 'Look, why not let me phone this woman who's an excellent psychotherapist and make an appointment for you to see her?'

'She'll think I'm mad.'

'No, she won't. She's the last person to think like that. Are you well enough to go out now if you go in a taxi?'

He said lifelessly, 'Oh, yes, I've been out. I'm supposed to go out a bit, only I can't walk far. Mithras doesn't come with me.'

'So I can phone Dr Peacock?'

'Sure. Go ahead.'

He kept his eyes fixed on her while she made her phone call. It seemed to her that it was darker in the room than it had been when first she came. Not much sun could penetrate this place but what there had been had gone, the sky clouding over. She told Joel she had made an appointment for him two days ahead in the afternoon.

'I'd like to tell you about Jasper,' he said.

'Perhaps it would be best to save that for Dr Peacock.'

'And my pa. I'd like to tell you about him and why he hates me. You will come back, won't you? Just because I'm going to this Dr Peacock doesn't mean you won't be my doctor any more?'

'Of course it doesn't, Joel. But I think you should come to me now you're better.' Anyone overhearing this would assume she was speaking to a boy of ten. 'We'll fix a time for you to come after my usual surgery hours.'

She got up and he got up. Out in the gloomy hall, he said, 'Mithras is here. He didn't come in while you were with me. He's been waiting out here, over there in the corner by that thing, the thing like a tree where you hang coats.'

Ella said calmly, 'Would you please switch on a light?'

The sudden brightness made her blink. Joel covered his eyes with one hand. 'Dr Peacock will let me know how you get on,' she said. 'And you must let me know too.' She held out her hand. 'Goodbye for now, Joel.'

'Goodbye.' He wasn't looking at her but at the corner where the coatstand was.

He opened the front door for her, still looking away. The fresh air, the hazy sunshine, passing traffic, people, brought her back from something that was more than unease. Savouring her relief, she began the walk to Chepstow Villas. She had no patients this evening and Eugene had said he would be home early. It was a pity really that she couldn't tell him about her experience of the afternoon in that dreadful flat, hearing those dreadful things. But she couldn't, any more than a priest could disclose what was told him in the confessional.

Several replies came to Uncle Gib's advertisement. Applicants were attracted by the low rent but all but one of them were repelled by the condition of the house, the bare and dirty rooms and, above all, the absence of a bathroom. The one who wasn't belonged in that class of people Uncle Gib described as beggars who couldn't be choosers. He was a young man from eastern Europe and he had a job washing dishes in a tiny café in the Portobello Road, nearly as nasty as the house in Blagrove Road. At present, he told Uncle Gib, he was sleeping on the floor of his friend's bedsitter.

To him the top flat was a palace.

'I toilet in garden,' he said, 'and wash in kitchen.'

'Scullery,' said Uncle Gib, 'and only when I'm out, mind.'