‘Would you like a shower, Mr. Jefferies?’ Mary asked. I gestured to her to let Cang Hai rattle on for a moment.
‘And you see, Tom, I thought about the first ever restaurant – no doubt it was outdoors – which opened in China centuries ago. It was a cooperative act making for happiness. You had to trust strangers enough to eat with them. And you had to eat food cooked by a cook who maybe you couldn’t see, trusting that it was not poisoned … Wasn’t that restaurant a huge step forward in social evolution…?’
‘Really, thank you, I think we’ve had enough of your dreams, dear,’ said Mary Fangold.
‘Who’s this rude lady, Mumma?’ Alpha asked.
‘Nobody really, my chick,’ said Cang Hai and marched indignantly from the room.
I managed to say goodbye after she had gone. My head was clearing. Mary looked sternly down at me and said, ‘You’re delivered into my care again, Tom!’ She suppressed a joyous laugh, pressing her fingers to her lips. ‘I hope all this irrational chatter did not disturb you. Your adopted daughter seems to have the notion that she is in touch with someone in – where was it? Chengdu?’
‘I too have my doubts about her phantom friend. But it makes her rather lonely life happier.’
Wheeling me forward, she tapped my name into the registry. ‘Mmm, same ward as before…’
She gave me a winning smile. ‘There I have to disagree with you. We must try to banish the irrational from our lives. You have fallen victim to the irrational. We need so much to be governed by reason. Most of your gallant efforts are directed towards that end.’
She wagged her finger at me. ‘You really mustn’t make private exceptions. That’s not the right route to a perfect world.
‘But there, it’s not for me to lecture you!’
The attack on me had shattered a vertebra at the top of my spine. The nanobots replaced it with an artificially grown bone-substitute. But a nerve had been damaged that, it appeared, was beyond repair, at least within the limited resources of our hospital.
I stayed for ten days, in that ward I had so recently left, to enjoy once more Mary’s pleasant brand of physiotherapy. I lived for those hours when we were in bed together.
Perhaps all ideas of Utopia were based on that sort of closeness. In the dark I thought of George Orwell’s dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell set forth there his idea of Utopia: a shabby room, in which he could be alone with a girl…
Mary looked seriously at me. ‘When your assailants are captured, I have drugs in my pharmaceutical armoury that will ensure they never do anything thuggish again…’ She nodded reassuringly. ‘As we agree, we want no prisons here. As my captive, you naturally want me to keep you happy.’
‘Passionately I want it,’ I said. We kissed then, passionately.
I practised walking with my arm on a nurse’s arm. My balance was always to be uncertain; from then on, I found it convenient to walk with a stick.
I rested one further day in hospital. As I was leaving its doors, Mary bid me farewell. ‘Go and continue your excellent work, my dear Tom. Do not trouble your mind by seeking revenge on those who attacked you. Their reason failed them. They must fear a rational society; but their kind are already becoming obsolete.’
‘I’m not so sure of that, Mary. What kind are we?’
Laughing, she clucked in a motherly way and squeezed my arm. She was her professional self, and on duty.
Suddenly she embraced me. ‘I love you, Tom! Forgive me. You’re our prophet! We shall soon live,’ she said, ‘into an epoch of pure reason.’
I thought, as I hobbled back to Cang Hai with my stick, of that wonderful satire of Jonathan Swift’s, popularly known as Gulliver’s Travels, and of the fourth book where Gulliver journeys among the cold, uninteresting, indifferent children of reason, the Houyhnhnms.
If our carefully planned new way of life bred such a species, we would be entering on chilly and sunless territory.
Where would Mary’s love be in those days?