As they stood together by the rail, sipping their drinks and gazing at the silent bay, Forrester held his wife around her full waist. For weeks now he had barely been able to take his hands off her. Once Gould had gone it would be pleasant here. They would lie around for the rest of the summer, making love all the time and playing with the baby — a rare arrival now, the average for normal births was less than one in a thousand. Already he could visualize a few elderly peasants coming down from the hills and holding some sort of primitive earth festival on the beach.
Behind them the aircraft had reappeared over the town. For a moment he caught sight of the doctor’s silver helmet — one of Gould’s irritating affectations was to paint stripes on his helmet and flying-jacket, and on the fenders of his old Mercedes, a sophomore conceit rather out of character. Forrester had come across traces of the paint at various points around the town on the footbridge over the canal dividing the marina and airstrip at Ampuriabrava from the beach hotels in Rosas, at the corners of the streets leading to Gould’s hotel. These marks, apparently made at random, were elements of a cryptic private language. For some time now Forrester had been certain that Gould was up to some nefarious game in the mountains. He was probably pillaging the abandoned monasteries, looting their icons and gold plate. Forrester had a potent vision of this solitary doctor, piloting his light aircraft in a ceaseless search of the Mediterranean littoral, building up a stockpile of art treasures in case the world opened up for business again.
Forrester’s last meeting with Gould, in the Dali museum at Figueras, seemed to confirm these suspicions. He had dropped Judith off at the ante-natal clinic, where the amniotic scanning would, they hoped, confirm the absence of any abnormalities in the foetus, and by an error of judgement strolled into this museum dedicated by the town to its most illustrious native artist. As he walked quickly through the empty galleries he noticed Gould lounging back on the central divan, surveying with amiable composure the surrealist’s flaccid embryos and anatomical monstrosities. With his silverflecked jacket and long hair in a knot, Gould looked less like a doctor than a middle-aged Hell’s Angel. Beside him on the divan were three canvases he had selected from the walls, and which he later took back to decorate his hotel rooms.
‘They’re a little too close to the knuckle for me,’ Forrester commented. ‘A collection of newsreels from Hell.’
‘A sharp guess at the future, all right,’ Gould agreed. ‘The ultimate dystopia is the inside of one’s own head.’
As they left the museum Forrester said, ‘Judith’s baby is due in about three weeks. We wondered if you’d care to attend her?’
Gould made no reply. Shifting the canvases from one arm to the other, he scowled at the trees in the deserted rambla. His eyes seemed to be waiting for something. Not for the first time, Forrester realized how tired the man was, the nervousness underlying his bony features.
‘What about the practicante? He’s probably better qualified than I am.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of the birth, so much, as the…’
‘As the death?’
‘Well…’ Unsettled by Gould’s combative tone, Forrester searched through his stock of euphemisms. ‘We’re full of hope, of course, but we’ve had to learn to be realistic.’
‘That’s admirable of you both.’
‘Given one possible outcome, I think Judith would prefer someone like you to deal with it…’
Gould was nodding sagely at this. He looked sharply at Forrester. ‘Why not keep the child? Whatever the outcome.’
Forrester had been genuinely shocked by this. Surprised by the doctor’s aggression, he watched him swing away with an unpleasant gesture, the lurid paintings under his arm, and stride back to his Mercedes.
Judith was asleep in the bedroom. From her loose palm Forrester removed the Valiums she had been too tired to take. He replaced them in the capsule, and then sat unsteadily on the bed. For the last hour he had been drinking alone in the sun on the balcony, partly out of boredom the time-scale of the human pregnancy was a major evolutionary blunder, he decided — and partly out of confused fear and hope.
