The Mind of Mr Soames Read Free Page A

thirty, surrounded by solicitous if impersonal doctors, psychoneurologists and psychiatrists, with all the parameters of one’s new and unimaginable life proscribed (and, indeed, prescribed) in accordance with the best and most authoritative scientific principles of the day. In a way it was a chance in a billion, an opportunity which no newly born baby had ever been offered in history—and that, of course, was precisely what John Soames would be, if Dr Takaito’s operation proved successful; a baby with a blank mind in an adult body, starting with a clean sheet in terms of education and environment.
    Suddenly, feeling in need of a cigarette, he left the cool green and white geometry of the operating theatre, and made his way to the main entrance of the clinic and the fresher informality of the outside world. The sun was shining on the lawns and flower beds, and a fresh breeze stirred the line of plane trees near the high brick wall which screened the arterial road beyond. For north-west London the atmosphere was unusually pastoral, and the grounds surrounding the building were spacious enough to suggest open parkland. The clinic itself—or the Osborne Psychoneural Institute, to give it its full name—was a curious blend of old and new. The main administrative section was accommodated in an old dark-grey Georgian-style house, rather large and stately, but faintly anachronistic in this day and age. It was probably a converted mansion, a relic of a more affluent and gracious era. On either side, and to the rear, modern red-brick buildings with metal framed windows spread out in cross formation, containing the various wards and laboratories. The Institute possessed a vaguely somnolent air of stillness and seclusion, as if civilisation were more than a thousand miles away; only occasionally could the rumble of heavy traffic be heard beyond the high perimeter wall which sealed off suburbia.
    Idly he walked round to the rear of the building, to the edge of the small lake which glistened and quivered under the trees, smoking and thinking irrelevant thoughts. About the shape of the lake itself, for instance—ovoid with indentations, like an amoeba; and the trees with their underground roots forming a sombre inverted mirror image of the soaring overhead network of branches and twigs, balanced in a symmetry never observed and rarely visualised; two faces curiously blended, one round and smooth, adorned by the almost platinum blonde hair of Penelope, and the other rather lean with intense brown eyes and hair that was dark enough to be regarded as black, the face of Ann Henderson; the sheer ingenuity of Messiter’s new matrix computer with fifteen million transistorised memory units which could stimulate human thinking and learn by experience, but could never create even a simple concept or display the quality of imagination; Penelope’s shrill drunken laugh, always mildly hysterical in tone, and Ann’s low-pitched mellow voice, invariably quiet and sincere; Patterson’s clinical experiments with a derivative of mescalin in the treatment of schizophrenia, and the detailed work of Erlich Vosch in investigating the brain chemistry of dreams. Young men, Patterson and Vosch, still in their thirties and just a little older than himself—or Soames for that matter. Strange thing about the human brain, that in one man it should exhibit incredible powers of analysis and integration in the realm of ideas, while in another it simply refused to work at all.
    With a faint sense of irony he noted the trend of his thoughts, curving inwards as always from the generalised external world to the particularised orbit of the mind, with the phantom overtones of women occasionally intruding irrelevantly. The psychiatrist’s syndrome—well, some psychiatrists, anyway.
    He walked slowly and pensively round the lake and returned to the administrative block. The west wing of the mansion comprised living quarters for the resident staff, with kitchen and