From throat to temple she was all one hot blush. The nurse glanced at him with startled, horrified eyes then quickly looked away. "She's my mother," he said in a scarcely audible voice. (Not that there were many visitors anyhow: or any reason why there should be many visitors.) "You're not feeling ill, are you?" She was not accustomed to this kind of thing in visitors. "Why, whatever is the matter?" she asked. When somebody's sent here, there's no …" Startled by the expression of distress on his pale face, she suddenly broke off. "You mean, of her not dying?" (He nodded.) "No, of course there isn't. "We try," explained the nurse, who had taken charge of the Savage at the door, "we try to create a thoroughly pleasant atmosphere here–something between a first-class hotel and a feely-palace, if you take my meaning." "Where is she?" asked the Savage, ignoring these polite explanations. Every quarter of an hour the prevailing perfume of the room was automatically changed. Television was left on, a running tap, from morning till night. At the foot of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was a television box. The air was continuously alive with gay synthetic melodies. Linda was dying in company–in company and with all the modern conveniences. It was a large room bright with sunshine and yellow paint, and containing twenty beds, all occupied. At the lift gates the presiding porter gave him the information he required, and he dropped down to Ward 81 (a Galloping Senility ward, the porter explained) on the seventeenth floor. As the Savage stepped out of his taxicopter a convoy of gaily-coloured aerial hearses rose whirring from the roof and darted away across the Park, westwards, bound for the Slough Crematorium. THE Park Lane Hospital for the Dying was a sixty-story tower of primrose tiles.
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