‘Sorry?’
‘Sorry, is it?’ Who’s sorry now, that’s what I’d like to know. Did you hear that? Sorry, he says, the silly little idiot. And I know you’re only thinking “When can I stick it up all these pretty little nurses”. Shame on you! Don’t lie. Don’t lie. I can see it in your eyes!’
Martha, responding to my silent appeals for assistance, hurried over and squatted in front of her.
‘Come on now, Maggie, don’t go picking on the poor boy like that. He’s new to us here, and you know he can’t answer you back.’
‘He’s got a filthy mind, that one,’ said Maggie, confiding in the staff nurse.
Yes, there were more than a few reasons to be grateful for Martha’s presence in Outpatients during my time at the National. She had recently given someone the push, an interior decorator that didn’t want to get too involved. ‘So I let him get uninvolved,’ she said, not seeming in the least bit bothered.
‘So he’s got a dirty mind? Of course he has! Nothing wrong with him,’ she replied, laughing as she did. She looked at me. ‘Gran’s just this moment told me she needs you in the kitchen. You’d better go and see what she wants.’
It was Martha who later explained that Maggie the bag lady had been a patient at the National before the war. She’d got the worse of an early frontal lobotomy operation.
‘I like Maggie a lot,’ she said. ‘You see she just comes straight out with what most of us think all the time. Of course, she knows everyone here. When the operation went wrong they couldn’t get rid of her. She just kept coming back. Officially, we’re not supposed to let her in, but what can you do? She’s one of our failures, but I don’t think we should fail her twice. There’s no point sending her away, and Sister just turns a blind eye.’
It must have been about then I asked Martha why she didn’t seem bothered about dumping her interior decorator chap and discovered she had designs on a senior houseman in Neurosurgery.
‘Very very dishy,’ she told me, and either to boast or repay her trust, I naturally reciprocated with a little glimpse into my own love-life dilemma.
‘Well now,’ said Martha, ‘can’t say I ever had you down as a love ’em and leave ’em type.’
‘But I’m not, I’m not,’ I said—quite redundantly, as her face confirmed.
CHAPTER 5
Despite everything, you agreed we could meet up again on the Saturday after that party. We were to eat at an Italian restaurant behind the Gate in Notting Hill and, presumably, have the whole thing out.
The Tivoli’s tables were designed for lovers, each couple in a separate booth; but its rustic, carved wood screens would serve for a low-voiced argument too. It wouldn’t disturb the other diners. I was doing my best, being fussily attentive to start with, asking you about the menu, replenishing your water glass, overacting, as people often do when they’re about to betray themselves. You ordered the trout. For me it was going to be pollo sorpresa—which the waiter explained was a boned chicken leg filled with butter and olive oil then fried in a coating of breadcrumbs.
‘So where’s the surprise?’
‘Try one and see,’ said the waiter, his role assumed to perfection.
‘Well then?’ you were asking, as we waited for the starters to be taken away.
‘She and me, well, we’ve decided to spend a few days in Amsterdam together looking at paintings. So then you and I can meet up somewhere afterwards. And we can hitch-hike down to Italy together as we planned.’
‘You worm,’ you muttered. ‘You absolute worm.’
The waiter arrived with our main dishes. You were sitting with your back to the wall, eyes stinging above the untouched trout in its ring of cream sauce.
‘But what about the plans we made for Italy? We really can meet up in Holland after she’s left, why not? And then hitch down to Italy together.’
‘Tell me, what does she think about this particularly brilliant idea of yours?’
‘Don’t know. I haven’t told her yet.’
‘Oh really. I bet she’ll be overjoyed. Well, as far as I’m concerned, you can forget it,’ you said.
‘But why on earth should I? Why should we?’
‘Then go with her.’
Think how different all our lives might have been had I gone and done exactly what you appeared to be suggesting. Not that you were, of course, not really.
‘But we agreed to go together.’
At the next table, above the partition, a waiter was lowering an enormous pepper grinder, smiling obligingly and twisting the top, then shaking the contraption with a flourish.
‘I can’t bear it,’ you were saying. ‘Just chuck her … or chuck me.’
Neither of us seemed to be eating anything, so the waiter invited reassurance that the courses were to our satisfaction. I attempted to appease him with a couple of symbolic mouthfuls and mumbled insincerities.
‘You make it sound as if I were two-timing you,’ I went on. ‘But we’re not at school now, and we’re not living together because we couldn’t find anywhere, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘Not living together any more, is it? You bet we’re not!’
Then, as if on impulse, you simply stood up and walked away. Despite the booths, your sudden exit had disturbed some of the diners nearby. A few were turning their heads to see me leave some money on the table and abandon my pollo sorpresa with the hot butter and olive oil still leaking from its wounded side.
‘Don’t be so upset,’ I gasped, managing to catch you up on the pavement. ‘You know I want us to stay together.’
It wasn’t untrue. After all, I didn’t really know what I wanted or thought. You had stopped at the head of the steps down to the Notting Hill Tube.
‘And anyway, the trip to Amsterdam will just round things off with her. Maybe it was a mistake, what happened; but it did, and you know I’ve always liked her. So, look, then we can go on to Italy like we planned, and everything will be just the way it was, you’ll see.’
‘But how can it ever be like it was? How could anything ever again?’
We descended into the bowels of the Underground following the direction of the rushing cooler wind and train noise.
‘Things have to change,’ I found myself quoting, ‘if they’re to stay the same.’
‘Bookworm!’ you said, and disappeared round the corner towards the westbound Central Line.
CHAPTER 6
Some days later a message came down from the private ward saying they were having difficulties with a very important patient who couldn’t be sedated. He needed constant attention. Steve had been sent up to keep an eye on him, and had already been there for more than two hours.
‘We’ve been asked to supply cover,’ Jack explained. ‘Go and stand in for your mate, Ginger, so the lad can have his lunch break.’
Off I went, bounding up the flight of steps that led into the main hospital building and on to the corridor past the well-stocked patients’ library. Jack was always telling us never, never, never except in the gravest emergencies, to run inside the hospital. It gave a bad impression. Still, I couldn’t help youthfully leaping up those two or three steps at a time, especially with the sense of release after struggling down from the wards with the deeply depressed patients who came to Outpatients for their ECT.
Most of these victims were middle-aged in-patients, but a few arrived each week for the preliminary talk with a doctor and then the electric-shock therapy. There was an old lady who came for her treatment every Thursday afternoon. Recovering, she would be seated in the outer curtained-off room. Then each week she would begin:
‘Where’s Denis?’
It fell to Martha, since she was so good at it, to sit beside the distracted lady, responding to her plaintive demand.
‘Where’s Denis?’
‘He’s coming as soon as he can,’ she�
��d say—Steve disappearing through the curtains into the main waiting area to hide his tears of laughter, heading towards the stairs and the labs for specimen results, back to the wards for another patient, or to X-ray for their dark transparencies.
‘But where’s Denis?’
Denis was the old lady’s middle-aged son. Dressed in a dark blue, pin-striped, three-piece suit, he brought her to Outpatients at exactly the same time each week, then collected her, regular as clockwork, just two hours later after trading in the City.
‘So where’s Denis?’
‘He’s been held up in traffic—but he’s on his way, he’s on his way.’
‘Where’s Denis now?’
‘He’s looking for somewhere to park the car,’ Martha ad-libbed. ‘Go on, have a biscuit, have some more of your tea.’
And so it continued, with her helpless litany compelling Martha to ever more elaborate stories.
‘Why isn’t Denis here yet?’
‘He’s talking to the doctors now about what to do for the best. He’ll be here in just a minute. Don’t forget your biscuit. Any minute now, any minute.’
Finally, as if summoned by Martha’s words, Denis himself, a balding, overweight businessman, suffering from the heat as his moist pate made evident, arrived through the screen curtains, and took his distracted mother away and off our hands for one more week.
Every Tuesday and Thursday the porters would be sent up onto the wards where the long-stay patients lived. Usually they were so heavily medicated they’d partially lost control of their legs. Steve and I helped them shuffle along. Some could barely lift feet off the ground. Painfully slowly down the main hospital corridor we would go, the ladies in their pastel shades and dusty pink slippers or mules clinging for dear life to the wooden rail that ran along the wall, Steve generously chatting them up as they went.
‘There you go now. Mind the gap. Stand clear of the doors,’ he’d say. ‘Just one more step, one step at a time. And keep your pecker up, sweetheart.’
Beyond the second set of screening curtains was a black leatherette couch, a sterilized trolley with short plastic airways to prevent patients from being choked, and the apparatus to induce artificial epileptic fits. The medical profession had been delivering electric shock therapy for almost two centuries. What good did they imagine it could do?
One Egyptian woman we helped down twice a week appeared entirely immune to it all. Martha told me she was once a doctoral student working on Proust at the University of Cairo. But everything had to be abandoned when her fiancé, in a maddened attempt to wound her, shot and killed her sister instead. This student of À la recherche du temps perdus had attempted suicide many times. Poor soul, she was nearly shapeless in her light middle-eastern robe, clinging to the corridor rail. Once in a while, as she crept along between one of the porters and the wall, Mr. Roger Bannister, the former four-minute-miler and consultant at the National, walked thoughtfully by on his way to a ward round or a meeting with hospital governors.
One unsteady step after another the Egyptian lady went, struggling down into Outpatients, a white-jacketed porter in attendance. We would help her to sit down in the screened-off outer treatment room, and there she waited for her artificial fit. It was believed to release a chemical in the brain that made real epileptics elated after their episodes. Lowered into an armchair, the one-time research student would be engaged in painfully stilted chat by the staff nurses.
‘And how are you doing today then?’ asked Martha. ‘You’re no better? Oh dear. So where are you planning to go for your holidays? I hear Lisbon’s nice. No? Well, what have you been reading?’
Brought down twice a week, each in their turn, the patients were put on a respirator and given a paralyzing drug. Jack and a nurse, one on each side, would then help to restrain the person on the couch while she, or occasionally he, shook violently. On one occasion, when a staff shortage took Jack elsewhere, I was called in to perform that task. There the patients lay, a doctor holding the heavy contacts that transmitted the shock against both temples of the papery-skinned, unconscious, violently shaking patients. As they came round, the doctor would encourage them with enthusiastic words about how they were feeling so much better now, remember?
Towards the end of August, our Egyptian scholar suddenly stopped coming down for treatments. Wondering why, Steve asked Martha if she’d got better or something. With relief at another’s prayers answered, Martha explained how she had been transferred to University College Hospital for yet more tests. Once there, she had managed to heave herself out of an eighth-floor window—and anywhere, anywhere out of the world.
Dressed in a loose green skirt, with an embroidered white cotton blouse, the young doctor from psychology, a little department in a wooden shack up on the roof, was paying her weekly visit to give our electric-shock patients their aptitude and memory tests. I asked what her questionnaires were intended to show.
‘That they don’t have much left of either,’ she said, and it was as if the ghost of those researches into lost time echoed a moment in the air around us.
One Friday in late August, Tina, the girl who shared that bed-sit near the Crystal Palace, gave Alice a nod and a wink: she wouldn’t be back till the following afternoon. Here was at least one more chance to be together before September.
Dusk was beginning to close in as we strolled back from a café across some unkempt parkland, behind tennis courts and a community hall. The sky was strewn with white cloud-tails above roofs of semis, the houses’ green paintwork glinting at a distance. On ahead, the parched grasses sloped away across a playing field to rows of small houses down in a hollow. There was some washing fluttering on an aluminium clothes dryer that looked like a large raised umbrella with its covering replaced by the waving white pieces of cloth—so many flags of surrender in the breeze.
Alice had bowed to the inevitable and would, if accepted, be starting a teacher-training course at Bristol in the autumn. She was back from a visit to see her old tutor up North, to talk over plans and pick his brains about the pros and cons of going into teaching. But he had been busy and evasive. Now she was confessing to me her infatuation as a means of distancing it—a little ashamed of having imagined that attachments formed in that strictly limited space of time might be such as to last beyond it, and expressing an unexpected disillusion with her undergraduate idol. He had, of course, agreed to write the reference, but the valve of his charisma and projective enthusiasm regularly employed on female students had now been abruptly turned off.
‘Made me feel like an unsold, end-of-line bargain,’ she said.
‘I suppose it’s bound to be like that. He can’t get off on the infatuation any more, so he has to move on to the next batch, and then the next, and so on, until he retires.’
‘I think we were all a bit in love with him,’ she said. ‘You know, he’s such an inspiring lecturer, and has done so many exciting, creative things with his anthologies. You know the cover of the most recent one, the Louise Nevelson sculpture-assemblage—did I mention I saw the original in New York?’
The sky was offering an unusual range of cloud forms that evening. Most peculiar was the fact that the different shapes appeared to be moving in contrary directions. So if a pink one was rising above the darkening trees and going approximately north, across the Thames, then those few trails of cirrus had to be heading west towards Heathrow and the sunset.
She must have picked up on my faintly jealous irritation, because she switched the direction of talk by wondering mildly what might happen when we were back from the five days in Amsterdam. After all, London to Bristol was not an especially difficult commute.
‘Well, I promised I’d go to Italy, but I can’t see it working out really. She’s bound to get bored with the galleries and stuff. Then that’ll be that.’
‘But why Italy?’
‘Always wanted to go,’ I said, not fully answeri
ng her question, ‘and now I’ve got to see the frescos at first hand if I’m going to be doing this MA at the Courtauld … and my dad was there during the war.’
‘Oh, your dad again, is it? You’re always on about him, but you never so much as mention your mother. Now why is that?’
We were standing on the slope of yellowed grass. The drift of her words had brought back once more a trace of the childish urge to run home, home to one of those houses, past that washing on the dryer, back across the road from scouts, back to mum with my sister Christine almost a teenager and just starting high school. How many years had it been since Dad had keeled over in front of his class with a heart attack? Just for a moment I couldn’t remember. The doctor who examined him said he couldn’t have felt a thing, dead before he hit the classroom floor. After that, Mum was obliged to go back to teaching herself, a career she’d never exactly chosen. Mum would get through periods of depression and the medication prescribed for it. There she would be, sitting in the lamplight of our living room, curtains not drawn, front garden shadows looming, feet on the coffee table, and a toppling pile of English essays for marking on the floor beside her.
All around now the dusk was deepening, the neon lights coming on as we strolled back to her flat above the sweetshop. There was just a trace of something like fear to be sensed in that thickening darkness—as if the street lamps had caused it, blinking on pale in the sunset.
‘What can I say? My mother … She’s a mystery to me.’
Then Alice turned and looked me square in the face. She seemed about to speak, but merely smiled instead. We walked on a few yards further.
‘I suppose you must feel terribly guilty,’ she began again. ‘You never said goodbye to your dear old dad, and you don’t think you loved him as much as you should have. Then again, you’re probably afraid you love your mother just a little bit too much—so you never talk about her, and generally give the impression of being completely un-filial. I shouldn’t worry about it, though, darling. It’s really quite normal.’
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