“Good morning, Mr Haldane,” Oliver said from his position behind the glass counter. “It is good to see you again.”

Thank you.” Hasson looked uncertainly around the laden shelves, breathed the mixture of heady aromas and felt lost for words, as though he had come to ask for a love philtre. “I . … I wonder if…”

“Yes, I meant what I said — I can help you.” Oliver gave Hasson a knowing, compassionate smile as he slid off his stool and moved along the counter. He was small and middle aged — of exactly the same size, build and coloration as millions of other Asians- and yet he had an individuality which impressed Hasson as being as durable as the bedrock of China itself. His eyes, by contrast, were as homely, accessible and humorous as Laurel and Hardy or Mark Twain.

“That’s a fairly sweeping statement,” Hasson said, testing his ground,

“Is it? Then let’s put it to the test.” Oliver took a pair of iodine- tinted glasses from his breast pocket and put them on. “I already know you’ve been seriously hurt in a driving accident, and you probably know that I know, so we can take all that as given. There’s no question of my using special powers or being able to see your aura the way some of those alternative medicine freaks claim to do. But — simply by looking at the way you walk and stand — I can tell that your back is giving you considerable pain. I would say that you also smashed up your left knee in the accident but that it is fairly well on the mend and that it’s your back that’s causing all the trouble. Am I right?”

Hasson nodded, refusing to be impressed.

“So far so good — but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? The physical injuries were bad, the spell in hospital was bad, the convalescence is long and painful and boring — but there was a time when you would have taken all that in your stride. Now you can’t. You feel you’re not the man you used to be. Am I right?”

“You’re bound to be right,” Hasson countered. “Is there any-. body the man he used to be? Are you?”

“Too general, eh? Too woolly? All right, you know your specific symptoms better than anybody, but I’ll go over some of them for you. There’s the depressions, the irrational fears, the inability to concentrate on simple things like reading, the poor memory, the pessimism about the future, the dozing like a lizard during the day followed by the inability to sleep properly at night unless you’ve had pills or booze. Am I right?”

“Well…”

“Is it difficult for you to meet strangers? Is it difficult for you to talk to me now?” Oliver took off his glasses as though to make confession easier, dismantling barriers.

Hasson wavered, tom between a cautious reserve and the urge to unburden himself to the stranger who seemed as though he could be more of a friend than any friend. “Supposing all those things were true, what could you do about it?”

Oliver appeared to relax a little. “The first thing to realise is that you and your body are a unity. You are one. There’s no such thing as a physical injury that doesn’t affect the mind, and there’s no such thing as a mental injury that doesn’t affect the body. If both aren’t right, both are wrong.”

Hasson felt a pang of disappointment — he had heard similar things from Dr Colebrook and a series of therapists, none of whom seemed to realise that he had lost the ability to deal in abstracts, that words which did not have a clear-cut, one-to-one correspondence with concrete realities were completely meaningless to him.

“What does it all boil down to?” he said. “You said you could help. What can you do to stop my mind feeling pains in my back?”

Oliver sighed and gave him a look of rueful apology. “I’m sorry, Mr Haldane — it looks as though I may have blown this one. I think I’ve let you down by saying the wrong things.”

“So there’s nothing you can do.”

“I can give you these.” Oliver took two cartons — one small and inscribed with Chinese characters in gold on a red background, the other large and plain — from the shelves behind him and placed them on the glass counter.

This is what it had to come down to, Hasson thought, his disillusionment complete. Doctor Dobson’s Famous Herbal Remedy And Spleen Rejuvenator. “What are they?”

“Ginseng root and ordinary brewer’s yeast in powder form.” “I see.” Hasson paused, wondering if he should buy the products just to compensate Oliver for his time, then he shook his head and moved to the door. “Look, perhaps I’ll come back an other time. I’m keeping somebody waiting.” He opened the door and began to hurry out of the store.

“Mr Haldane!” Oliver’s voice was urgent, but again there was no hint of annoyance over the loss of a sale.

Hasson looked back at him. “Yes?”

“How are your mouth ulcers today?”

“They hurt,” Hasson replied, sensing with amazement that Oliver had deliberately and clinically taken some kind of action on his behalf, had chosen words that were tied to an objective reality for no reason other than his need to hear them. “How did you know?”

“I may go in for mystery and inscrutability, after all.” Oliver gave him a wry smile. “It seems to get the best results.”

Hasson closed the door and retraced his steps to the counter. “How did you know I have mouth ulcers?”

“Old Oriental trade secret, Mr Haldane. The important thing is — would you like to get rid of them?”

“What would I have to do?” Hasson said.

Oliver handed him the two cartons he had left on the counter. “Just forget all those things I said about the unity of mind and body. This stuff, especially the yeast, will cure your mouth ulcers in a couple of days, and of you keep on taking it as directed you’ll never be troubled that way again. That’s something, isn’t it?”

“It would be. How much do I owe you?”

“Try the stuff out first, make sure it works. You can call back and pay for it any time.”

“Thanks.” Hasson gazed thoughtfully at the storekeeper for a moment. “I really would like to know how you knew about the ulcers.”

Oliver sighed, amiably exasperated. “Hospitals never learn. Even in this age, they never learn. They flood patients” bodies with broad-spectrum antibiotics and wipe out the intestinal bacteria which produce B-vitamins. A common symptom of B-vitamin deficiency is the appearance of mouth disorders, like those painful little ulcers, so what did the hospitals do? Would you believe that some of them are still painting them with potassium permanganate? It’s completely ineffective, of course. They send people out looking like they’ve been swigging the blushful Hippocrene — you know, with purple-stained mouth -hardly able to eat, hardly able to digest what they do eat. Lacking in energy. Depressed. That’s another symptom of B-vitamin deficiency, you know, and I’m getting back on to the kind of patter which nearly made you walk out of here in the first place.”

“No, I’m interested.” Hasson spent a few more minutes talking to Oliver about the relationship between diet and health, impressed and oddly comforted by his evangelistic fervour, then began to think about Al Werry waiting alone in the bar. He put his new purchases into the plastic bag on top of the TV cassettes and left the store after promising Oliver he would return early in the following week. In the bar he found Werry sitting in a comer booth with two full beer glasses and several empties on the table in front of him.

“I like drinking at lunchtime,” Werry said. “It has four times the effect.” His voice was slightly blurred and it dawned on Hasson that he had been personally responsible for emptying the half-litre glasses in a remarkably short time.

“You save money that way.” Hasson drank from the glass which Werry pushed over to him. The lager it contained did not impress him as a beer, but he was grateful for its cleansing and tingling coolness. He eyed Werry over the rim of his glass, wondering what he wanted to talk about and hoping that no marked response would be required on his part. It seemed that every conversational exchange he had made since arriving in Tripletree had added to his burden of stresses, and it was a process which could not go on indefinitely, or even for much longer.