The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

by Elspeth Davie

  As the days went by and our outings never varied I began to wonder if the likeness of the man she loved might not, after all, be found in one of these animals at which we stared so long and gloomily; depending on my ever-changing feelings towards him I would find him on certain days amongst the monkeys, on others amongst the brilliant and talkative birds, and occasionally, when the thought of him began to bore me, I found him in a tank of brown, wrinkle-headed fish, gaping coldly at us like some jaded business man sealed inside the plate-glass of his office. One day I caught a spark of interest in her eyes for the first time as she looked after a well-dressed man who was strolling by himself round a pond of black and green ducks – a spark instantly extinguished when he turned his head; but from that moment I quickly removed this man of hers, whoever he was, from any likeness to certain of the monkey race – those tousled ones, shamelessly unbuttoned, who wore frayed fur round wrists and neck or, worse, patches of bare, scarlet skin on their backs. There were other elegant species to which he might still belong: monkeys with silky chestnut hair parted in the middle and falling smoothly over cleanshaven cheeks, whose fingers were long and delicate, rosy-pink on the inside. But the most likely place for him was still amongst the stylish birds; even if he was fat and formal it was possible to find him amongst the penguins who could stand for great lengths of time, tilted backwards, presenting plump, snowy shirtfronts to the admiring crowds.

  One afternoon I was peering into a cage which had seemed empty, but hearing a rustling in the inner passage I had put my head against the cold bars with both hands grasping them on either side. For a long time I stared but nothing appeared except a mouse which darted across and disappeared into a pile of straw. A chill disappointment had been growing in me for the whole of that day and now it was a raging discontent. Long ago I had lost the early liberties and privileges of this zoo and now, coming back again, had found nothing to put in their place. It was becoming clear to me that I was not to be allotted any of the responsibilities of being a real companion to this woman who stood behind me at this moment. She might speak flippantly about herself, but she did not bother with any comments I might make. She asked questions without expecting an answer; and sometimes after sitting silently for a long time she would give a deep sigh which she cancelled out immediately by a loud burst of laughter, at the same time turning her head away as though any reaction which might come from me was the last thing she could endure. The holidays were nearly over. That particular afternoon the zoo was almost deserted and inside me and around me was emptiness, a feeling that everything was already falling from my grasp. I hung on grimly to the bars as I spoke:

  ‘Why don’t you do something about it? Go after him, if that’s how you feel – or find somebody else! Anything’s better than wandering about day after day! Why did you choose us anyway? We’re no use to you and you know it. You even show it – yes, that’s true – you don’t even bother to hide it – you’ve shown it all along!’

  I shouted these last words in such a desperate voice that somewhere nearby but out of sight, the steady raking of a gravel path which had been going on for some time in the background ceased for a few seconds. Indeed at that moment everything seemed dead silent over the whole zoo.

  She stepped forward quickly and put her hand round mine which was still holding the bar – grasping it so hard that the fingers were crushed about the iron in an instant’s bone-cracking pain. The ache of iron was in my wrist, in my arm; cold iron was moving towards my chest when she dropped her hand. Mine remained on the bar until slowly, with the greatest caution, I withdrew it and held it up before me, still painfully curled and shaking slightly from its rigid grip. Slowly I stretched it out, finger by finger, and finally brought it close and peered into the palm which still held a blurred white bar-mark. No sooner had I seen this mark than I clenched my hand again as though concealing a painfully won prize and thrust it deep down into the pocket of my raincoat. We walked on without a word.

  A few yards away was a signpost bristling with half-a-dozen white-painted arms pointing in all directions and on which were inscribed: Giraffe, Monkeys, Wolves, Gents, Reptiles, Elephant. Cautiously taking the middle path between the Reptiles and the Wolves I arrived at a small pavilion hidden behind bushes and here I sat down wearily on the short flight of wooden steps which led up to it. There was nobody about. I sat perhaps for ten minutes wondering if I would always be tired now, if perhaps this heaviness in the limbs and the slight giddiness which I felt as I bent to tie up a shoe-lace were the characteristic signs of maturity, and though I welcomed these, I wanted nothing better than to return for a few moments to my normal state. It was a relief to turn my eyes, hot with staring at fantastic birds, to the few dusty sparrows hopping about near my feet amongst leaves and stones which concealed only the common spiders and beetles which I could have found any day in my own back-garden. There was no mystery here and no glory. Not far away a gardener, clipping back a high hedge, kept the distant howlings at bay.

  I had imagined that when I went back to the main path I should find her sitting on some nearby bench, or perhaps walking slowly on ahead, waiting for me to catch up. But when I at last emerged I saw her far off in the distance, already at the entrance gates. She turned once and waved – a friendly but casual gesture which slowed me down immediately, so clearly did it indicate that our afternoon together was at an end. I decided there and then that from that day I would leave nothing to chance. She would see that it was no dumb schoolboy she had on her hands. I would break ruthlessly through silences. If need be, in the days ahead, I could shift the whole scene of action to some entirely new and less disturbing territory.

  But there were to be no more days. The next afternoon was hot and thundery; I was outside the front door of the house, casually turning over the pages of a newspaper which lay on the steps and occasionally flicking away the flies which zigzagged erratically across the avenues of black print. Although seemingly absorbed, I was only awaiting the one cool look from her which was the usual signal that she was ready to go if I wished to join her. I waited a long time, and at last she came out. But the look was not casual. Instead, I saw with terror that her expression was kind. She paused, looked down at my paper in silence for a moment as though something of interest had caught her eye. Then she said, pointing, still with her head bent:

  ‘They’re absolutely wrong about that because I happen to know the town myself. A fishing river indeed! With paper mills along the banks! I suppose they’ll be making out it’s a holiday resort with freshwater bathing next. I’ll see it later. Save it for me till I get back.’

  She turned away and went quickly down the path to the gate. Usually she let it bang carelessly, not looking to see whether it was shut or not, but this time I heard her lift up the latch, then let it down carefully into its slot behind her, as though to emphasise that though such barriers between human beings might be absurd there was nothing to be done about them, so one might just as well learn to manipulate the various keys and latches and the cunning little iron bolts which had so thoughtfully been provided.

  A week or so later she was gone; the summer holidays were over and I was back at school. The duster flouncing out angrily across a density of figures on the blackboard released great clouds of spinning white chalk, silently exploding nebulae through which we stared in the direction of the window and out over the dark chimneys of the town. But all was grey dust now, dust in the air we breathed, dust in the air outside. All illumination had come to an end.

  The Snow Heart

  FOLLOWING THE FIRST heavy snowfall of the year, a huge heart appeared on the bowling-green next to the hospital grounds. It was deeply marked out in the snow, and for sheer size – as seen from the height of the new hospital buildings – it was an eye-opener. It was the biggest shape that could be put inside the green without running over onto the surrounding paths; and whoever made it had been careful not to spoil his line. He had walked narrowly backwards, foot behind foot, and let his stick s
wallow up most of his prints. There was a line of chunky footsteps leading up to it, a line leading away, and no other marks.

  The bowling-green was not connected with the hospital. High hedges made it private. Yet it was visible only from the hospital windows. All during summer and up till late autumn, when the green was closed, old men bent and swung their arms over a lawn smooth as a billiard table. Patients and visitors to the hospital were used to the sight of an endless turnover of players. There were bowlers strong as bulls down there as well as old men on their last legs. There were bossy bowlers and browbeaten bowlers. But whatever they were, domineering or defeated, the place was geared to age. Overnight the snow and the heart had changed all that. While the old men had been sleeping or sitting in their clubs or pubs their place had been smoothed out and engraved. A rejuvenation had taken place, and they were to know nothing of it.

  The hospital staff were too busy in the morning to do much more than glance at the bowling-green in passing. It was left to the afternoon visitors who were always in the high corridor on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and at week-ends, waiting to be beckoned into certain medical and surgical wards on the stroke of three. The place where they waited was at the top of the building – a wide corridor with a staircase and a line of lifts at one end. Opposite were the swing doors leading through to the wards. On the window side it was almost entirely glass divided up by strips of metal and it was here that visitors lined up while they waited. They varied from day to day but most of them were long-distance people who had arrived early. Amongst these were the few who came to visit long-term patients and who formed a small in-group amongst the random coming and going of the rest. They were a clique who had their own private and sometimes silent language. They recognized one another and formed bonds even though they might have no clue to the other end of the attachment – the man, woman or child in the beds beyond.

  On this particular afternoon half a dozen or so were waiting at the windows. They were glad, in a businesslike way, to see the snow. They were glad to see the heart. Any new thing at all on the way to the wards was something to be grateful for and visitors to long-term patients had to be particularly skilled collectors of news items, no matter how small or unimportant. Delivery of news was always a chancy affair. There was no knowing how long their patients might take over the bits they were given. Events which should have provided talk for an hour could be brushed aside in a matter of seconds. Patients had been known to listen lackadaisically to news packets containing a cease-fire and a new war, and grasp at the tale of a bad egg in a bowl. Today the early visitors at the window were too tired to go overboard for this heart. They had seen better last minute talking-points in their time. All the same they took it and filed it amongst other items where, with luck, it might fill a gap. While most of them collected it silently and turned to other things, one man remarked to the woman beside him that he would be telling his son about this.

  ‘He’ll be amused when I tell him,’ he said. ‘I mean the grotesque size of that thing will intrigue him.’ It was a grave mistake indeed to make any pronouncement on what would or would not amuse or please one’s patient. Few experienced visitors risked it. But there was a desperate streak in this man. The woman listened pleasantly to him and said that no doubt she too would be telling her daughter. But she knew it was a very different matter. The man’s son had been here a long time and he would not get better. Her daughter, in a surgical ward, was getting better every day. Occasionally the man talked about his son, though rarely about his illness.

  ‘He is rather difficult to please,’ he had said one afternoon a few weeks earlier. ‘He’s inclined to find fault.’ And some time after he had said: ‘You know, he is very, very difficult to please. He finds fault with everything and everyone.’

  ‘Poor fellow,’ she had replied.

  ‘And I’m afraid I irritate him,’ said the father.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But of course it’s not really you.’

  ‘I don’t know whether it’s really me or not me. I just know I seem to irritate him more and more every day.’

  One way or another the woman had got to know a bit about this man. His wife was dead, and there were not many other people to share the visits with him. His son, who had just finished his architect’s training, had one good friend who wrote regularly from his new job in Canada. A few other friends took turns to visit him. Some had stopped for good. He’d had a girl friend once but she had disappeared early in his illness. ‘Naturally enough – or unnaturally, whichever way you want to look at it,’ said the man. There was this difficulty about hospitals and long-term visitors felt it most. As they went on it grew harder and harder to figure out what was natural and what was unnatural about the set-up. And it was not only the place which set them problems. They worried about themselves. Were they becoming less human or more human? And which was best under the circumstances? They sank and surfaced again, alternating in mood with those in the wards who sank and surfaced continually. The boy’s father had been depressed himself for some time. But this afternoon he seemed cheerful, as though the snow, by levelling cracks and ridges and smoothing all anomalies of building and landscape, had made it possible to start again from the beginning.

  The bowling-green was not the only thing visitors could look down at. The hospital was built round three sides of a large courtyard, and down there was a new fountain with two fish mouths which would one day blow water. There were a few newly-planted saplings, and three small flower beds sunk in the paving-stones, ready for planting. Triangles and oblongs of red, blue and yellow enamel had been set in a pattern along the side of the concrete wall which ran under the hedge on the bowling-green side. But the visitors, like ungrateful children, never looked at these things – or if they did it was only momentarily before staring above and beyond at scenes not intended for them. They looked across at the windows of the west-wing wards. There they could see distant figures in beds – spry figures sitting bolt upright, half-reclining figures with knees sharply angled under red and blue blankets, and flat-out figures. The corridor people never wearied of this spectacle. It seemed that the people in the distant beds were more interesting and more mysterious than their own relatives in the nearby wards. This afternoon they looked across and saw the scene transformed. Bits of the outside world had invaded the inside. Nurses were moving about over there with caps white as the snowcaps on the chimney-pots. They were bouncing up pillows which were smaller versions of the fat snow-pillows below. A few outgoing scarlet capes were moving along the path towards the gates. It was not only the boy’s father who was cheered. The others also felt hope in the air, though it was mixed with ice. They were anxious that it should not melt too quickly.

  On the stroke of three the swing doors burst open and were fastened against brass hinges on either side. They were being beckoned in by a familiar, smiling nurse. But the man stayed behind talking with the woman for a few minutes longer. He was telling her something and it was easy enough to guess what was happening. He was no more telling it to her than he was telling it to the fire extinguisher. He was simply rehearsing in detail what he would tell his son.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon,’ he was saying, ‘I’d no sooner got in than my neighbours came round for a chat, and to tell me about their latest bed-and-breakfast. They do it summer and winter – have done for years. And do you know who this latest man turns out to be? A first-class chef turned preacher. Imagine it. He’d been giving people a great deal of pleasure, no doubt, whipping up the soufflés and concocting recipes à la Robertson or whatever his name is. And now …! Not only that, but he can’t leave well alone. He’s got to go round condemning his former job. Condemning it! Oh, that some of our present preachers would turn Sunday chefs! Would that not give us a more digestible day?’

  They had now started to move through the swing doors but his voice came after her. ‘And so I see this architect on TV last night is proposing a floating city. I like the idea. Do you like the idea?’ Yes,
she said, she liked it very much indeed.

  ‘I’ve forgotten how it would work, but every window would have this magnificent changing view. How about that?’

  ‘Yes, wonderful,’ said the woman. But she kept moving on because they had to be rather strict about time here and the hour passed quickly.

  ‘But I’m not so sure,’ his voice pursued her, ‘about the sort of city that goes a mile up into the sky.’ This time she didn’t turn round and wasn’t meant to. His eyes were already fixed on the passage to the left and on a door at the far end of it. Her own route took her up a flight of stairs and along a corridor on the other side. They parted abruptly as they always did, he to the left and she to the right.

  It happened that they met again in the evening at the seven to eight visiting hour. For some time back they had come in on both afternoon and evening visits, though they did the double shift for different reasons – the man because his son was very ill, the woman because her daughter was almost well. It seemed the two extremes demanded most. For the second time that day they stood at the plate glass windows staring across. But the transformation from afternoon to evening was always spectacular. In place of solid buildings were row upon row of incandescent light cubes set in blackness, giving a vision which was almost clairvoyant into the rooms opposite. Here and there among the white cubes were a few dim rooms lit by blue, and visitors tended to stare at these with particular intensity as though the distant blue rooms held the secret of life and death – a secret being unaccountably withheld from themselves. Tonight, however, brightness came from the ground as well as the walls. Even the skimpy trees spiked with snow looked theatrical. On the bowling-green the line of the heart showed up thicker and clearer than before.